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killian-spey · 3 years

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Death Would Be Kinder [Ch. 2]

Prev. Ch.

[Drusilla/Spike/Calendar!Reader]

Words: 2276

Fic Concept: Jenny Calendar’s sister spends some “quality time” with the Season 2 Vampire Squad. This chapter takes place during [BtVS S2:E15]

TW/CW: violence, kidnapping, chains?

AN: Idea came from @prose-for-hire ‘s submission to the fic title game. Taglist is at the bottom, let me know if you want to be added!

You’d been sitting silently, watching Spike wheel himself back and forth across the factory. If you didn’t know better he looked like he was pacing. In reality, he was probably checking behind the pillars and corners of the factory for any sign of your friends. It seems the vampires were expecting Buffy to come looking for you. As the time dragged on, your suspicions became reality; Buffy had prioritized the threat of the Judge over saving you. You had to admit, it stung a little, but it was only logical.

Spike peeked his head into each doorway adjoining the main factory floor. You could tell he was getting restless. You contemplated your odds carefully before you decided on taking a calculated risk.

“You lose a sock?” you yelled.

“Did I what?” Spike wheeled back into the room, an odd expression on his face.

“I asked if you lost a sock.” You paused, his intense glare caught you off-guard. “You know… Because of all the pacing. And popping your head in and out of every room in the place. Somebody’s going to think you lost a sock.”

“Well, I didn’t.” He chuckled a bit before going quiet again and stalking around the factory in his wheelchair. You nodded to yourself, deciding to quit while you were ahead. After that, the only sounds left in the factory were the spinning of wheels and an occasional bumping of door frames and frustrated curses.

It had only been a couple hours of his pseudo-pacing before Angelus and Drusilla stumbled their way into the factory. Spike took one look at the state Angelus was in and hid a smirk under his hand by scratching his nose.

“Well, you’re home early. Slayer hasn’t even tried swiping the girl yet.”

Spike’s good mood vanished as he watched them come down the steps. Drusilla was beside herself, and for a moment you found yourself feeling bad for her. Then Angelus opened his big fat mouth and you remembered who these people were.

“Yeah, well things didn’t go exactly according to plan, Spikey.” He prowled the room, circling like a big cat before he gravitated towards you. Your nerves peaked and you swear you saw a glint of pride behind Angelus’ eyes as he heard your heart pick up. He stepped within arms’ reach of you and sneered.

“What I can’t figure out is, why would she abandon you like this?”

“Where’s your big blue friend?” You swallowed your anxiety and stared up at him in challenge, you weren’t going to tell him a goddamn thing. Might as well give yourself a fighting chance. If he figured it out, you were dead already. You were going to be careful, of course, but that didn’t mean you were going to let him win.

Angelus roared, grabbing your face by the jaw. He was suddenly wearing his game face front and center. ‘Buffy really rattled him, huh?’ You remained stoic, as statuesque as you could muster. If you had misjudged his mood, this might be one of your last moments alive.

Drusilla had floated her way over, leaning into Angelus and hugging his arm to her side. Your staring contest interrupted, Angelus pulled away from you. You took the free moment away from the spotlight to run your fingers against the grain of the armrests, trying to ground yourself in the feeling of the wood underneath you. Your panic was bubbling to the surface, tension and pressure building in your ribcage. You caught Spike’s knowing glance towards you as your eyes flickered between the vampires. You dropped your eyes to the floor, frozen as Drusilla subtly coaxed Angelus away from you. Before long, Angelus had stormed out of the factory again, mumbling about sending Buffy a message.

You were grateful and more than a little stunned. Drusilla saved your life. In her own, subtle way she’d dismantled Angelus’ rage and directed it somewhere else. She’d spun him out of the factory towards Buffy with little more than a subtle flirtatious gesture. You practically gawked at her as she made her way into Spike’s lap. She had these men wrapped around her finger and they didn’t even know it.

Well, maybe Spike knew, but he certainly didn’t mind. He was running his fingers through Drusilla’s hair, comforting her as he spoke.

“If you like the hostage so much, maybe you should have a little fun, Ducks.” He wrapped an arm around Drusilla’s waist to steady her as he wheeled towards you, continuing. “She was supposed to be the distraction for the Slayer, after all. That is what went wrong with the plan, wasn’t it?”

Drusilla lifted her head, gears turning as she looked between Spike and you. Your mind rushed with your fears of what she was contemplating. You didn’t put it past them for ‘playing’ to mean something rather unpleasant for you. Drusilla hummed under her breath excitedly, springing from Spike’s lap and practically skipping out of the room. Spike nodded at you, raising his eyebrows as if to say “Hey look, I fixed it!” and wheeled himself into a good position to watch from, a smug grin on his face.

Drusilla returned with two fistfuls of chains and your heart dropped. She fussed with them somewhere behind you and left the rest in a pile as she ducked off again to the other room. Spike flicked his eyes between the chains and his girl curiously, but said nothing as she flurried about the factory. When she returned, she was holding a long carrying case and a small over-the-shoulder bookbag. She dropped them beside the chains and left again without a word.

“Ducks, what is all this stuff?”

Spike called out to her and wheeled over to the bags. He unzipped one when she didn’t answer. You couldn’t see into the bag from your position and Spike’s exasperated reaction didn’t help you either.

Drusilla returned one final time, holding a large blank canvas in each hand. The left was maybe a 20”x24” and the right was maybe a 24” square. (50cmx60cm or 60cm square).

“Which one does the artist like best?”

You paused, unsure if there was a right answer. After a couple moments you pointed weakly to the left canvas. Drusilla smiled at you and put the square canvas down. Spike scoffed as Drusilla set up an easel from the carrying case and put the bookbag on a table beside it.

She dragged the chains over to your chair and kneeled, carefully untying the knots around your right leg. You studied her face; she bit her tongue lightly as she worked, pulling at the ropes with deft, perfectly manicured fingers. After she’d untied your legs and shackled them, she let your arms off the armrests.

She took your hands in hers and pulled you up to stand for the first time in almost a day. You scanned her expression and glanced backwards towards the easel, then back to her with trepidation. She glided you in front of the daunting white canvas and left you, sinking backwards and sitting in Spike’s lap.

You stood, dumbfounded at the prospect of Drusilla wanting you to paint, of all things. She seemed unimpressed by your inaction after a few moments, and had begun whispering into Spike's ear. He'd leaned into her, pulling her closer and snickered at what must have been a rather amusing comment. He flicked his eyes at you through his lashes, a predatory glint flashing behind his eyes as his smirk grew. He straightened in his seat with satisfaction, head held high.

“Paint for the lady or get eaten. Your choice.”

Drusilla’s eyes wandered back to you and provided no comfort, but then again, why should it? You turned back to the canvas, feeling both their eyes staring at you. A calming breath later, you assessed the materials on the table.

The canvas bag she'd brought had a full set of oil paints- far nicer than you'd ever been able to afford. You didn't dare think of the poor shopkeeper she'd probably killed for them. A person just like your Uncle. He was just another obstacle in these people’s way, and for that he was murdered. You shoved the paints to one side of the small table and began assessing the tools. A somewhat rudimentary selection of spatulas and brushes. You could make do just fine with these.

You set up a palette with some blue, red, white, and black to start. A color palette often was the first thought you gave to a painting. This painting would be mostly blues, purples, and grays. Without turning your head, your eyes flicked towards the vampires just off your left shoulder in the periphery. You had never really let anyone sit and watch you paint. It was hard enough showing a finished piece to someone other than family.

You mixed a deep lilac and raised a palette knife to the canvas. You paused, unsure where to place the landscape. The creeping feeling of being watched was throwing you. The white snow canvas was taunting you, paralyzing you. But you weren't about to let it win. Any of them. You closed your eyes and just swiped the palette knife confidently in a bold first stroke. Now you had a puzzle. How does this fit into a landscape? There was no going back now, it had to work.

It was a mountain slope. The hue you used was suitable for a distant fixture seen from a twilit glade. You could lean into that, thinking on how to keep the morbid whimsy of the piece consistent as a theme. You blocked out the clearing and plotted out the forest behind and around it. It fell silent in the factory as you worked, only the scraping of palette knives and brush strokes echoing in the room. Pieces fell in place as you added gnarled willows at the tree line, white ghost pipes and fungi crawling on the foliage, and sickly green fireflies in the weeping branches and crooked thorn bushes. You didn't like how the overall feel of the piece was so damp and dreary. It felt too muted, too blue for what you'd envisioned. You added nettles to the glade in a redder purple, almost magenta, to tie the piece back into the mystical tone you wanted. A few more touches, a ray of silver moonlight here or there, and you stepped back. You contemplated the piece, for some reason feeling unfinished. The glade felt completely untouched, too alone by itself.

You almost jumped when you heard Drusilla shift off Spike’s lap behind you. You froze, dropping your gaze to the floor, unsure of her intentions. With three clicks of her heels against the concrete flooring, she stopped just behind you. So close you would have felt her breath on your neck if she were human. She leaned forward and pulled your hair behind your ear. She placed one hand on your shoulder and raised your head with a finger under your chin, guiding your eyes back to your work.

“Don’t you like it?”

“It’s not bad, actually.” Spike wheeled forward a pace or so to take a closer look at it. Drusilla still seemed to be waiting for your own answer. You studied it again silently.

It did feel telling, in an odd sort of way. It was invisibly and indescribably alive, despite the darkness and isolation. Could be a good metaphor for vampires... Alive and free only after their own deaths. Sure, they may not exactly live up to society’s expectation of a good neighbor, but you couldn’t say they let being dead keep them from living.

Still, the painting felt unsatisfactory, felt incomplete. You shook your head and pondered. You drew up a couple new colors, a ghostly blue and a red-brown clay. You loaded a palette knife with the clay tone and hovered over the painting, indecisive. The central piece as of now was a large, twisting willow on a small inclined mound of earth. The whole painting felt like background to an invisible subject. Nothing tied the eye to the painting, there was nothing to follow. No movement in a living place.

Drusilla took the palette knife from your hand and set it down. She pulled you lightly to step away from the painting, lightly petting your hair.

“Let it rest, you’ll do more later. With a clear mind,”

You let a heavy sigh escape your lungs. She was right. If you kept going now, at the end of your rope, you’d risk doing something that detracted from the painting entirely. You jerked your head up at a loud scraping sound from above you. Angelus had swung the door open on the mezzanine of the factory. He had a vicious grin and a playful look in his eyes, leaning on the guardrail and looking down at the three of you.

“Did you have fun with the Slayer, then?” Spike called up to him.

“Oh, she makes it so easy!” Angelus threw himself at the spiral staircase and rushed down them with glee.

“I barely had to lift a finger to throw a wrench in her little puppy problem.”

Drusilla twitched her head and glided towards him. She was staring at his face, fixated on something you didn’t pick up on. She swiped her thumb across the corner of his mouth and brought it to her own lips.

“Did you bring any home, Angel? I taste a young one on you.”

“Not today, darlin’. Besides, you have that one.” Angelus gestured to you and sauntered off, calling back as he left. “She wasn’t really any use anyway.”

[Next Chapter Soon!]

Tags: @prose-for-hire @soggy-enchilada @misselsbells06

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bettsfic · 4 years

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Hello! Can I have a piece of advice regarding descriptions when it comes to writing? I think my paragraphs seem bland and lack powerful descriptions that pull the readers in. I can’t seem to describe well a certain place or figure since I’m having a hard time in incorporating the five senses when writing.

i’m sorry to say, anon, this is the eternal problem. (unless you are a poet writing prose, and then description is probably the only thing that isn’t a problem.)

here are some tips that are not necessarily “here’s how you should do it” but “here’s some stuff you could try.”

save it for another draft/layer it in

i almost never put imagery into my first two drafts. description gets woven in over time. think of it the way an artist begins a painting. usually they sketch it out on canvas before they begin painting. then, the first layer of paint is bold shapes, and after layer upon layer, you begin to see the finer details.

if you force yourself to think about description AND conflict AND character AND dialogue AND pacing AND voice AND style all at once, you’re going to exhaust yourself. when writing, you can only do so much at once. having a whole draft where the goal is to spot places to add exposition is very helpful in minimizing the pressure early on.

consider both relevance and familiarity

the sad difference between consciousness and prose, as much as consciousness sometimes wants to be prose and vice versa, is that consciousness is not linear, and only a single translation from Environment to Brain needs to occur.

prose, however, must be linear. you can only read one letter of one sentence at a time. moreover, it’s translated twice: Environment to Brain, then Brain to Squiggly Black Lines On A Page. it is an astronomical effort to turn consciousness into prose, and we do it all the time. i’m doing it right now.

i have a whole 2-hour Brief Intro to Semiotics (and how it relates to prose) lecture that i’ll skip in order to reach the conclusion: when you are writing, description can be narrowed down into 1) relevance and 2) unfamiliarity.

by relevance i mean, what does the POV character notice and attend to? what is necessary to know in order to move the plot forward?

by unfamiliarity i mean, it’s a waste of word count to have your character go into the bathroom and point out that there is a toilet. when you write “bathroom” (or lavatory, loo, washroom, etc.) your reader, regardless of who or where they are, will know a toilet is in that room.

however, let’s say it’s the very first scene in your story. your character goes into the bathroom, hands shaking as they topple a bottle of pills into their palm. describing the bathroom goes a long way in setting the scene. is the place dirty? small? does it smell? stalls or no? is the lock broken?

if you describe an opulent bathroom complete with velvet couch, underpaid attendant, and sensor-based faucets, that tells me a lot about the potential circumstance of this character. rich maybe? at a party? a banquet?

if you describe a dingy small gas station bathroom with graffiti on the walls, that tells me the character is traveling, maybe. or desperate somehow. what would lead somebody to take drugs in a gas station bathroom? it’s unexpected. unfamiliar. it leads to the conflict.

describe things using movement and active verbs

a narrative always exists in space and time, and possesses some kind of movement. stories always start somewhere and end somewhere. so it stands to reason that your description should move with the action. and to make description move, you often need to employ effective verbs.

“there was a green chair” is a still-life. nothing is really happening. it’s just a fact. “she sat in the green chair” gives us the image of an action. a character is sitting in a chair which is green. is it important the chair is green? i hope so. maybe there is also a red chair, and these colors are symbolic of something or whatever.

also consider the stacking of adjectives: “there was a green, plastic, small, wobbly chair” could maybe be “the green plastic chair wobbled as she sat. it was too small for her, and the sides dug uncomfortably into her ample backside.” that’s terrible, but you get my point. hopefully. you See far more in the latter than the former, in part because the description is moving along with the story.

make stuff move, or make people move stuff. let verbs do your heavy lifting.

read poetry

a lot of poetry is just images stacked on top of one another. poets are masters of description. if you want to learn how to craft an image with words, read poetry until your eyes bleed. whenever you read a line or stanza and it conjures a specific picture in your brain that your brain would otherwise not have conjured, take a closer look and figure out how they did that. teach yourself how the strings are pulled.

you probably need less description than you think you do

ever since a mentor once looked me dead in the eye and said of my work, “it’s pretty but i don’t see anything,” i’ve been busting my ass to drench all my prose with beautiful and loving imagery. (in his defense, the assignment he had given me was, in fact, to write a story full of description. i did not, because it turns out i could not.)

i’ve had mixed results. mostly i end up with a bloated word count and a lot of ways to envision sunlight falling onto a bed through half-closed blinds. i’m not proud.

in my most recent project, however, i finally (FINALLY) made a main character who doesn’t notice jack shit. as an observant and perceptive person, i find this abhorrent, but she is not me. she is an angry teenage girl who doesn’t give a fuck about anything that is not an immediate threat or prize.

so after years desperately flooding my narration with description, i leaned the opposite direction. i’m good at voice and style. i prioritized voice and style. and here’s what happened:

nothing.

i say my story is set in the suburbs, you don’t then need a whole extra paragraph about uniform houses and checker-cut lawns. you already know what a suburb looks like. if i say 70s style kitchen, you don’t need me to tell you the oven is burnt orange. you either made that leap yourself, or it doesn’t matter enough to know. if i say my characters are having a conversation in a diner, you can already see the vinyl booths and shit on the walls and tacky laminated menu. if i say my characters have landed on Omicron Persei 8, i might need to roll up my sleeves and tell you what that place is like.

the thing is, even if i didn’t, you’d still think up something.

the only reason i would describe something is if it’s particularly special to my narrator, insofar that she would go against her god-given right to be a total dumbass in order to Notice Something. does that make the story more difficult to read? no, it just means the reader either makes their own image, or uses no image at all. because that’s what description does: it specifies. absent of specifics, the human mind supplies.

#writing advice #description #imagery #Anonymous

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neworoldnews · 3 years

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If your attention was ever caught by a fascinating theme, you know the feeling of being sucked into a mental dialogue.

Your inner voice, usually wandering on its aimless distractions, suddenly clicks! Dropping through a vortex of questions that curiosity begs to scratch.

This synchronised state of mind is rarely triggered during our daily tasks. So when it kicks, you are pumped with a focus strong enough to keep you wondering for hours. The Perception-high.

You mostly navigate in a pre-digested world, seeing what you would expect to see. Conditioned by predispositions, past experiences or hurried backup-conclusions.

Imagine perception as a color. The full rainbow representing the Object and each color a possible Perspective:

This is the perfect metaphor. Just like color is a brain’s hack to help you navigate, and not a property of the object itself, so your conditionings keep you moving in an otherwise overwhelming environment.

This eases decision making and enables action in an otherwise infinity of ponderation.

The mind reinforces the lessons you’ve gathered and the natural tendencies you have. It then paints the world according to your position at the rainbow.

When you look at something, you are actually throwing your colours at it and gazing back at the reflection. Imprisoned by a bubble of your own echo, moulded by imperfect barriers that guide your way into practicality.

Often, not aware of this colourful spectrum, we keep confusing our simplistic representations with the things in itself. The world stretches through our eyes so widely that is hard to notice our frontiers within it.

Just like someone before Newton wouldn’t see gravity in a fallen apple, who has never fallen in love will be blind to the colours of Romeo & Juliet:

The book is open, the apple cracks against the ground. Yet the observer will place the respective color in front of the object, collecting no more than a monochromatic representation. “God wanted the apple to fall”, colorises the priest; “what a teenage angst thing to do, Romeo”, scribbles the unlovable.

Think about the most practical and material-oriented person you know. Now picture her/him starting to drive. Imagine them becoming aware of the noises in the engine. Is it possible that this thought crossed their mind?

“The little noises it makes, it’s telling me what to do. For my whole life those were just random noises, but turned out to be instructions all along!”

Observation highs vary hugely in degree. They can be subtle, adding a little nuance to an existing colour. Or drastic, adding a whole new pigment to the palette.

You’ve been excited about becoming aware of something you were previously blind to before. Now compare that feeling with a man getting his mind blown by seeing colors for the first time [here’s a video].

Now compare that with the moment Einstein saw Time as another dimension, changing the colour spectrum for humanity.

Sure, most of us will never dream of such an intense revelation. But no matter the gradient of these perceptions, pleasure and admiration will always be aroused.

It’s about freedom. Novelty! To escape the circle of seeing what you would expect to see is to stand above a new landscape. To contemplate old sights with a renewed eye. It’s being a tourists to everything.

If you want to better master observation, and fix a dose of that sweet Perception High, you must realize how much your conditionings affect the impressions you gather.

Understand your mind-mold

The framework in which your mind operates is a complex interplay of psychological representations and social conditionings. These are the things that compose your colour.

To become aware of your mindset its helpful to play with some questions first. Let’s start small, with an experiment:

Think about riding a bicycle to work tomorrow. Allow yourself to reflect on the way you reason while answering these questions:

Check my emotional pulse. Have I intuitively made up my mind before pondering?

How did I tackled it, “why not” or “why would I”? How can that be a byproduct of my education?

Can I attach a fear to my decision-making? What fear would that be?

Is my analysis based on hopes or dislikes? Can those hopes be achieved or those dislikes avoided by my present self?

Is there any stereotype or belief on my thought process? What is it?

This is important because it put you in a original position. Like stretching for your eyes, preparing you to see.

Henrique Pousão was a naturalistic painter who deeply understood the power of learning how to see. To patiently allow the eye to catch up with every side, to delay judgment and isolate the different impulses that suggest a conclusion.

For him observation was in itself an act of Creation.

TAKE A GOOD LOOK AT HIS PAINTING:

This young boy, joyfully staring at us with mellow eyes, resting from the stillness of posing, may be one of the most iconic, yet ignored, symbols regarding Observation-Creation.

It’s amazing how natural the pictured moment is.

The scene couldn’t be less pretentious, the studio is perfectly ordinary, the kid sits in a relaxed and childish way, even the working environment is somewhat mild.

It looks like you just walked in the middle of the action. Your presence caused an Interruption, so you are caught by a delightful smile and two proud eyes staring for approval.

In fact, this painting is all about Interruptions.

The boy stops posing to show you his own version of himself, drawn on a little piece of paper. Behind him, on the canvas, is the painter’s sketch for the child’s picture.

So, how many painting are here, and what can they teach us about Observation?

1 — The Child’s Sketch

The boy shows no respect for the ritual of painting.

Turning his back on the canvas while breaking his pose, the child interrupts the painter to show a rippled piece of paper. He doesn’t do it out of malice nor ignorance, but out of a light-hearted disregard for convention.

Why show reverence to something just because it’s drawn in a proper canvas? Why not be proud of a piece of paper if it’s saturated with the same matter as the masterpieces: Pure Creativity.

The Child doesn’t aspire to rebel against anything, there is no duty in his creation. But the force he is driven by shows no mercy to authority, it is empowered by the value of curiosity and excitement in itself.

All principles are new and noble, all approaches worth considering. “Truth” is but a toy to be played with, open to amusing construction, while ideas are molded, tossed, mixed and joint like pieces of LEGO.

Nothing is too absurd, nothing is too serious, nothing is too evident!

It there was not a child in our way to Perception High, then Galileo Galilei would never have dropped balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, disclaming the solemn Aristotelian theory of gravity.

Never would Hennig Brand boild his own piss to discover phosphorus, or would anyone conceive the idea of a cat being both alive and dead at the same time.

It’s all about the freedom, the innocence, to level all that was thought and seen to a common ground where new values and concepts can flourish.

Interrupting authority, fuelled by Pure Creativity.

2 — The Canvas Draft

The draft presents a perfected version of the boy, nobler and more beautiful.

His wide potato nose is portrayed as small and delicate. The hat on top of his ragged clothes even seem aristocratic. His meditative head rests upon a steady hand. There is an overall feeling of idealisation

Somewhere, right now, there’s some small group of people working in a garage, dreaming about, if every single thing goes smoothly, changing the world.

Some eventually will. If Apple, Google or Microsoft had never dreamed of the most positive possible scenario, then how could they have aspired to be what they’ve become?

While playing with an idea, feel free to extend it into it’s most extreme scenario. Elaborate a whole mental experiment, or invent completely new laws and models.

The painter interrupts the boundaries of reality to go beyond the limits of his physical theme.

This is when you don’t think about how things are, but question about how things could be.

That thought functions as an arrow, pointing to a distant bright destiny that you ought to follow. At the dawn of agriculture, a man envisioning a golden field of wheat. A revolting slave dreaming of equality. A deaf scientist wishing to hear…

Though the complete opposite is also relevant.To warning us about just how bad something can become.

These are the so-called Utopias and Dystopias, and they are both a great compass and magnifying glass, when operated by Idealization.

3 — Henrique Pousão’s Painting

There was a moment when Pousão understood he would not be satisfied with what he was portraying.

That he would be missing something if he kept on painting the initial, sketched, version of the child’s portrait. So he Interrupted it.

Seeking the noble beauty he had first envisioned would cost him authenticity. By pursuing the classic canon, the stylised portrait that is set to elevate Art from the mundane (with its picturesque backgrounds and romanticised beauty) Pousão would then be blind to the real boy.

Blind to a shy smile concealed by proud eyes. He would never notice the elegance with which the child’s ragged, old, shoes touch the ground like a ballerina. And the chance to capture a manner so subtle, so enriched with truth, would be lost.

Roar back at the loud command of expectations. Both your own and all others. Understand that you also take part in shaping the concepts that are so often taken as truth.

Doing so widens possibility. Look beyond present conventions and morals. Shape this structure, because it will eventually also change your own views in a loop. Society is an ever mutable cycle of transformation. Check any history book.

The ability to sacrifice one’s present vision and opinion is the great virtue of adaptability. To be always permeable, taking pride in once being wrong and honouring not being sure of anything.

Embracing reality in its full scope, even when contradictory or hurtful, is to be synchronised with its complexity.

Facing ugliness with a wholesome disposition is what got us using Viruses, infectious agents responsible for taking countless lives, to Cure such diseases as cancer.

4 — Your Observation as a Painter

Though the paint didn’t move, the painting has changed. It’s no longer the one you’ve first seen. It has been painted over.

For every new observation a pigment has been added. colours been deepened and shapes widen.

In any sport, game or activity, enjoyment consists in taking part, is being committed to imprint your individuality, feeling and being engaged.

You stood, facing the canvas, in the position of a Painter. Ready to pick up the brush Pousão so thoughtfully left within your reach at the left of the canvas. Reminding that it up to you to give colour to any observation.

Facing the fact that we are painters of our impressions is as empowering as liberating. It offers the world as a palette to explore, strengthening our ties with everything and setting observation as an act of creation.

In a strange way the freedom granted for painters, to enthusiastically and with imagination depict their views, don’t set them apart from reality.

Quite the contrary, it allows them a stronger connection and sensibility with it, as it promotes inquiry and critical sense. The absolute contrary of Apathy, the great responsible for neglecting one’s relation to knowledge.

If you weren’t a painter, then Pousão’s masterpiece would have a painting less: Yours, an ever-changing piece.

There is no such thing as empty things or people. Just elements filled with something you haven’t yet learned to see.

By keeping in check Pousão’s lessons things appear less solid and more like an interplay of invisible fabrics. A tissue of colours filled with nuance, waiting to be experienced from every angle.

If everyone is looked at as a painter, then discussions are more fluid, people more tolerant, observation more engaging, and things just a lot more interesting to look at.

Do you remember becoming aware of something you were blind to? What?

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neo-shitty · 2 years

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i shall bring up the formalities later but for now EXCUSE ME??? how could you break my heart like that and simply move on??? there aren’t enough words to describe how genuinely happy i am after reading ‘no longer human’ haha really though—there’s only been one occurrence before where i could actually envision every little detail in a story with such accuracy and vibrance in each scene! it legitimately felt like i was watching a high-quality picture in the best movie room mankind could ever create LOL i’m not even kidding like; i’ve never been more immersed in a story ever before, enough for me to completely dissociate from reality whilst i read it. the way you illustrated new seoul on their ride to the end of the dome in the beginning was so eloquently and beautifully done. i don’t know which film or was from but i think the description reminded me of a futuristic city i’ve seen somewhere before :D anyways, it was a refreshing picture to paint in the otherwise mostly blank canvas of my brain. also: the way there wasn’t direct angst but chil’s demise, hyuck’s sacrifice and jaemin’s end all slowly pricked at my heart until i was on the verge of tears… i assumed that the story would turn out in a way that either one among the two main characters would be bitten in one last fight before they all reached the sanctuary and a death cure 2.0 would take place but i feel like this ending was much better suited (?) to the overall plot? like; the shock factor + just imagining the slight sense of betrayal or, at the least, a sense of slight mistrust y/n would feel upon finding out jaemin’s character hid his suspicions from them even if he wasn’t a 100% convinced, or the realisation afterwards that it could’ve shaken their resolve to get to safely first/not go easy on any of the infected after finishing the story and thinking over it a bit made my read more enjoyable! and i adored the little ‘chil-yuk’ play on words, very suave of you indeed :3 as you could probably tell, i am a new reader so hello! thank you so much for taking the time and putting such effort into this, for writing something that reminded me of the joy i felt reading books when i was younger and for ripping my heart out by going with an ending i hadn’t anticipated! it really did feel like i was watching a dystopian movie with some of the best directors and writers behind it~ your brain is astonishing, i can’t wait to read all your other works as my schedule allows! have a lovely day ahead ♡

you're excused HAHA /j also bold of you to assume that i have moved on! i can still feel the burn out. anw, thank you so much for taking the time to both read and leave such lengthy feedback behind! 😭 i'm glad this was immersive for you (IM CRYIIING I READ THIS LAST NIGHT AND I STILL DON'T KNOW WHAT TO SAYYY) , also please let me know if you ever remember which futuristic city it was, i love me some sci-fi hoho

i wrote this in parts so i never got to read the whole thing until i was editing it last week and let me tell you i was just as weighed down by the angst as you were. there was this one line close to the end that made me stop and think damn isn't this too much ksjdls

like; the shock factor + just imagining the slight sense of betrayal or, at the least, a sense of slight mistrust y/n would feel upon finding out jaemin’s character hid his suspicions from them even if he wasn’t a 100% convinced, or the realisation afterwards that it could’ve shaken their resolve to get to safely first/not go easy on any of the infected after finishing the story and thinking over it a bit made my read more enjoyable!

i'm not really sure how to respond to this bc i'm just genuinely taken aback that it made you think this much !! it's making me think of what would've happened if they found out before they got back to the dome too. you're right, the story would've taken a different turn if anything happened between them and a dome 🤔 but that's a story to tell in another universe.

and also, AHHH thank you for noticing the chil-yuk thing :')

thank you so much for taking the time to read the whole thing as well and leaving lovely feedback. i'm sorry i responded hours late bc i really didn't know what to say last night. i'm so glad that it made you feel nostalgic in a way, i hope despite getting your heart ripped out you still enjoyed it somehow! 😭🖤 thank you so much, op! i can't promise the same quality with my other works but i do thank you for your interest :(( have a great day/night as well!

#brb crying #thank you thank you thank you #i feel emotional dude come on :(((((((#toff.feedbacks #toff.asks #anon

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hauntedbunkbeds · 6 years

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Day 1: Thin Walls

Writing Prompt: Day 1, Surreal and Mundane: In today’s work, take something mundane and make it surreal, just like it says on the box. Play around with something normal until you make it strange!

Thin Walls

The floor of my first apartment was covered in a dense, beige carpet that I wanted to hate, but I couldn’t. I loved the way I could slip silently from my room to the tiny hallway bathroom like a cat. I loved lowering my feet to the floor in the morning and scrunching up my toes in the shag. I had always dreaded getting out of bed in my dorm room, where the floors were an ancient grey tile that made me feel like I lived in a janitor’s closet. The tile was always frigidly cold in the winter, and weirdly moist in the summer months, a result of an overworked A/C window unit. I had come to college in the city expecting a more idyllic experience, surrounded by hardwood floors and tattered paperbacks, the sound of coffee brewing while I would sit writing, blowing cigarette smoke out the window of our eighth-floor dorm room. I don’t even smoke. I don’t know what I was thinking. The dorms were shit, of course. My roommate was a business major with a Disney obsession that bordered on fetish territory. Instead of the vintage maps and photos I would have gathered from thrift shops on lazy Saturdays, our room was covered in Moana and Finding Nemo posters. On the deadline to renew our space in the dorm, neither of us asked the other if were going to continue living together. I felt somewhat panicked about the prospect of finding an apartment in the city, but I knew the alternative was hating my life. I’m a nester, and I was trapped in a cage with nothing but torn up newspaper for bedding.

My first night in my new apartment was exhilarating. The blank walls, the vast expanse of beige carpet--it felt like a newly-stretched canvas begging for a Pollock-esque attack of color. I had spent my freshman year living like a monk, saving every penny from my job stacking books at the school library. Even still, the only apartment I found in my price range was, by any first-world definition, a complete dump. The carpet was, admittedly, hideous and filthy. The oven face was half-consumed with rust, the fridge howled like it was in its death throes, usually in the middle of the night, and as I set my last box of things down in the middle of the living room floor, I heard two voices through the thin walls. They were fighting.

Hey, I thought, That’s the city! This will be character building.

I don’t mention this as an excuse, but I am from a small town a couple hours out from the college I enrolled in. My father was a farmer, my mother sold MAC cosmetics, her eye on a pink Cadillac that would never materialize. I don’t feel like a country bumpkin, as a coworker would meanly (he thought endearingly) sometimes address me. But in retrospect, maybe in some aspects I was overly naive. I suppose the reason I’m writing all this is so you can be the judge. Are my experiences tainted by my inexperience? Or are they, as I suspect, a little...off?

I ask because I am biased, mostly due to the fact that I am terrified.

Too exhausted to put together the cheap IKEA bed frame I bought the weekend before, I slept on a mattress in the middle of my bedroom floor. “Middle” is literal but not what you think. On three sides of my mattress there was less than a foot of carpet before you reached the wall. At the foot of the bed, there was a generous yard of space before you reached the door. I could literally jump off the bed and into the bathroom across the small hallway, if I wanted to, which I did, but I was scared of scaring the people who lived below me. I was on the fourth floor of a building that reminded me of the Happiness Hotel from The Muppets Take Manhattan (if you haven’t seen the movie, it’s not what you think, i.e. “happy”). I saw a couple other students there, but none that would make eye contact with me, or return my polite, tight-lipped nods in the long cement hallway that led to the underground laundry room I was secretly terrified to use. Mostly, the building housed adults in their late twenties to early thirties who looked so beaten down by life it made you wonder if they were ever innocent, or if something happened when they were born that stole that from them. There were not many older residents, as the building had no elevator, but the people who lived there were ancient enough in their stone-faced weariness to feel as alien to me as an octogenarian. It does not help that I am also painfully shy.

As I fell asleep that first night, the voices on the other side of the wall were no longer fighting. They seeped through the plaster as a warm, muffled hum. I couldn’t make out the words, just the cadence of two voices in a rhythmic back-and-forth, speckled with occasional laughter. I enjoyed the seeming ease of their conversation, something I rarely enjoyed in my own social life. I just wasn’t good at talking to people. I got lost in my own head, and none of what I found in there felt good enough to say out loud. There were always awkward silences, and I felt boring.

That first night in the apartment, I was exhausted and happy, and drifting off to the sound of their muffled conversation was oddly comforting to me. I dreamt about throwing my first party. I would introduce everyone by their first and last names, everyone would dress up without being told to, and we would debate philosophy and drink martinis. Note to self: Take a philosophy class, figure out what a martini is.

The next morning, I made an entire pot of coffee. Not because I would drink an entire pot of coffee, but because I loved the sound of it hissing and bubbling, and I wanted it to go on for as long as possible. I had spent almost every penny in my bank account on the move from the dorm, and cheap thrills were all I had. When it was done, I poured myself a cup in a mug I had found at Goodwill (“#1 Grandpa”) and began unboxing what few things I owned. It wasn’t long before I heard the voices again.

The first voice that spoke was a man, the second was a woman. This made sense to me, as it seemed that the apartment building I had settled in acted as some kind of beacon for couples who looked more like cellmates than lovers. The men carried themselves like middle-aged coal miners trapped in the bodies of twenty-something weed dealers. The women squinted like they were trying to harness their telekinetic potential. I later learned that the squint was a warning: Look at my boyfriend and I will spit on you. I learned this the hard way.

I easily assumed the couple with whom I shared both a living room and bedroom wall with was one such couple. I felt an smug superiority to them. I was nineteen: A glowing, vibrating ball of potential. They were....some other age: Two gas station Bic lighters, burning the finger of whoever tried to keep the little flame alight for too long. In retrospect, I was grossly pretentious and judgmental, and while I blamed my shyness for the fact that I didn’t have a lot of friends, I can admit now that it was definitely also my own fault.

As I arranged my books in alphabetical order on the mismatched thrift store bookshelves I had acquired, the voices raised again. This time I could make out words, some phrases.

Your job.

Stupid.

Gone.

(or was it “Done?”)

Fucked.

You do it.

We do it together.

No, your job, you do it!

Fucked forever.

Back and forth, an endless game of tossing blame to each other. My superiority complex tingled as I envisioned the day I lived with my future (hypothetical) boyfriend. We’d be renovating an old Brownstone together, a herculean effort for two graduate students studying English and Egyptology, but we’d cobble together our resources and return the property to her former glory on a shoestring budget. A montage of playful paint fights and blanket forts played in my head as I arranged my books to the sound of my neighbors screaming at each other over something one of them had fucked up at their dead-end job.

Later that afternoon, I went for a walk. Down the street from my building there was a hospital, and I discovered on accident that behind the building there was a small courtyard where patients could smoke, but almost never did. It became my secret garden, this patch of grass with a smattering of benches marked with bronze plaques bearing the names of people who never made it out of the hospital. I would read there, the peaceful silence only broken by occasional wailing, which was something I had grown used to since I moved to the city.

I had been in the apartment for a month when classes started back up. I had settled in, a stack of unwashed dishes and a cleared path from the bedroom to the bathroom cut between mounds of unwashed laundry were the tedious reality of life on my own. The fantasy of living on my own unmasked for its true monotony.

It was nearly Christmas, and the frigid weather outside made my increasingly-sad little apartment feel finally, suddenly, precious to me, as it had been only in my fantasies, and only because winter had metamorphosed the world outside into something so ruthless and unpleasant that even the dingiest of apartments felt like a vacation retreat. When classes let out for Christmas break, I tried not to leave the house unless absolutely necessary. It was then that I heard the familiar sound of my neighbor’s voices through the walls again, yelling at each other as if this argument were the one to end them all (though I knew better than to think that, at this point). I wasn’t sure if the walls had grown thinner, or their voices had just grown louder, but for whatever reason, I could hear them more clearly than ever.

She: Worthless bum!

He: That’s not fair. I’m trying. I’m trying to help us! I want to (unintelligible).

She: You had a job to do and you didn’t do it.

He: I need more time!

She: Time? You’ve had time!

He: (Unintelligible)

She: (Laughing cruelly) You’ve had hundreds of years!

The voices stopped suddenly, as if they had been caught, and my bedroom fell silent. Alone in my bed, I swear to God I could feel them staring at me through the walls. I held my breath, willing them to keep arguing. I didn’t move for what felt like hours, and they remained silent. As I finally fell asleep, the only sound was the ticking of the radiator pipes.

The next day my mom picked me up to drive me home for Christmas break. I gave her a tour of my apartment, to which she responded with an enthusiasm that felt very sad and forced. I almost didn’t show her the bedroom, but she pushed the door open ahead of me and stepped inside. I had cleaned up in anticipation of her arrival, but the room still looked very sad. I was seeing it through the eyes of an outsider for the first time, and I felt embarrassed.

“Oh, honey,” she said. “What happened here? This doesn’t look good.”

She gestured towards the wall, in the direction of where the voices had come from last night. A dark, amorphous stain had formed on the wall around eye level. It was a sickly brown, the kind I had seen before, when I pipe burst in our bathroom at home and on our dining room ceiling the ring of water damage bloomed until my dad finally had to cut out a huge section of the plaster.

“Oh geeze,” I said. “I hadn’t noticed that before.”

She touched it.

“This is moist,” she said. “You better call the super ASAP or whatever burst could ruin this whole wall.”

I reached out toward the stain, but couldn’t bring myself to touch it.

“This is a shared wall,” I said. “I can hear my neighbors on the other side.”

“Well,” my mom said, turning to return to the living room. “You should tell them, too.”

Christmas break was perfect. I hadn’t realized what a relief it would be to fall asleep in my childhood bedroom again. The nights were so quiet it almost freaked me out. I joked with my dad that I needed an ambient sound machine that just playing ambulance sirens now. I helped him out with farm work (even the cold felt less oppressive out here, in the open air) and my mom and I got our nails done at the salon inside Wal-Mart. They let me drink wine with them at dinner. Mom bought me a trunk-full of groceries. She ordered Chinese food on New Years Eve. The smallest things felt so opulent to me. I hadn’t realized how completely broke I was, how adding cream to coffee had become a budgetary extravagance.

Returning to the city was like being sentenced to another year of hard labor. My mom helped me carry the groceries up to my apartment and tearfully hugged me goodbye. It was dark when I finally opened my bedroom door and saw it.

The water stain on my bedroom wall had grown to nearly triple its size. Now, it reached from eye-level to knee-level, its brown rings of soggy blotches drooping towards the floor. But it was not only larger. It had changed. Once just a shade or two darker than the yellowish paint, the spot had taken on the color of whatever it was that had begun seeping through the plaster surface--a dark brown, black in spots. I didn’t have to touch it (I wouldn’t touch it) to know it was wet. Parts had dripped onto the carpet, leaving dark stains on the beige shag.

God, I’m so fucked, I thought, remembering my mother’s warning to tell the building superintendent about the water stain, which I had immediately forgotten as soon as I locked the door behind me. I grabbed my pillows and blankets off the bed, thinking it was probably a good idea to sleep in the living room, and I was about to retreat to the safety of my couch when I heard it.

It was the woman’s voice, but she was alone.

She was alone, and she was laughing.

The next morning I called the superintendent, who took far more convincing than I had expected to agree to come look at the damage. I had imagined him rushing up with an old metal toolbox, sweaty and panicked, furious at me for my negligence of his precious building. Instead, I was met with a series of, Now you’re sure? I almost began to doubt myself, until I opened my bedroom door to peek in, just to remind myself that I wasn’t overreacting. I was almost knocked back by a scent I recognized from working on the farm--wet, decaying earth, alive with rich rot and mold.

The super was up in forty-five minutes, setting the record for slowest climb up four flights of stairs in recorded history. At the risk of becoming a lazy narrator, he was exactly what you might imagine the superintendent of the worst apartment building you’ve ever been in to look like. Instead of a toolbox, he held a bag of sunflower seeds.

When I opened the door to my bedroom, his face didn’t change, but he said “Mama Jama” and shook his head.

He reached out to touch it and without thinking I cried out, “Don’t touch it!”

“Why not?” he said, looking back at me with a squint that made me think I was going to be spit on soon.

“I don’t know,” I said, embarrassed. “Sorry.”

He shook his head and touched the wall. His fingers came away wet and stained with a black mucus-like substance.

“I thought maybe a pipe had burst,” I offered.

“No pipes in this wall,” he said, popping a couple sunflower seeds in his mouth thoughtfully.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, what about the people in the other apartment? Have you heard anything from them?”

“Which apartment?” he said, not looking at me, still eyeing the stain like it was a stand-off.

“The one that shares this wall with me,” I said. “Do you think something this big would affect them too?”

He shrugged.

“It could,” he said. “If there was an apartment on the other side of this wall.”

A wave of goosebumps made me involuntarily shiver.

“This wall,” I said, pointing in the direction of the massive brown mass that took up most of it.

“This wall,” he said, tapping the stain, his fingers making a soft squelching sound. “Why would you think that? The other side of this wall is just insulation, wiring, and brick.”

“I don’t know,” I lied.

“Anyway I’ll try to have someone out here tomorrow to get this...issue, taken care of,” he said. “In the meantime, don’t sleep in this room.”

“Okay,” I said.

As soon as he left, I packed my backpack and went to the hospital. I sat in the garden and read until my fingers were shaking so violently from the cold that I could no longer turn the pages of my book. In the hospital lobby, there was a vending machine that would spit out paper cups and fill them with hot coffee with that hissing, bubbling sound I had grown to love. I put in three quarters, got my coffee, and took my little paper cup to a chair in the corner. A nurse was typing away at a computer and hadn’t noticed me yet, as far as I could tell. I wondered how long I could feasibly stay there, sitting in that chair, sipping my watery coffee, before someone asked me to leave. Hours? Days? If I could just wait it out until the repairman came, I wouldn’t have to see, or smell, the stain again. Even still, that didn’t solve the larger issue, which I could not name.

I sat there, reading the same sentence of my book over and over again, tearing my now-empty paper cup into smaller and smaller shreds, until exhaustion finally took over.

If I go home, I reasoned, and I’ll be so tired at this point that I’ll fall straight asleep on the couch. I’ll be too tired to worry about whatever the fuck is going on with my neighbors. The super was wrong. He just got the floor plan confused. It’s a big building, and he seemed pretty out of it anyway.

I compiled a convincing list of explanations, convincing enough that I was able to return to my apartment, unlock the door, toss my backpack down, and flop down on the couch without realizing that there had been two voices yelling when I arrived, and that they had suddenly gone quiet. I had fallen asleep so fast I had not noticed when the two voices began whispering again, when they became frantic. In fact, it was not the voices that woke me at all. It was the tapping.

It was still dark when I woke, and I was in such a haze I did not recognize the sound that had done it. It was rhythmic, but not mechanical.

Tap tap tap.

Pause.

Tap tap tap.

Pause.

Tap. Tap tap.

I sat up on my couch, half wondering if the mechanic was already there, if I lost track of time and it was already morning. In my half-dream state, I tried to find the source of the sound. I wish I had not looked towards the wall. I wish I had not noticed the vintage map (that I had so sought after for so long) which hung above my couch, gently quivering. Quivering in time with a tap.

Tap.

Tap tap tap.

Coming from the behind the wall.

I stopped breathing.

And everything was quiet for a moment.

Until the whisper.

“She’s awake.”

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worlduniversityrp-blog · 7 years

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Posting my own form as an example for everyone joining! — Prof. Kota

OOC

Name: Dakota/Kota. Pronouns: she/her Contact URL: romanope

Character Wanted: South Italy / Romano Activity Level: 6-8 Timezone: PCT (Las Vegas) Password: accepted

Extra: My only big thing is I am uncomfortable rping the Italy Bros and will likely not be interacting with any N. Italy’s, I’m sorry!

Full Name: Lorenzo Riccio

Age / Year: 20, 2nd year/sophomore. Gender / Pronouns: Male, he/him.

Appearance: Lorenzo is of short stature and small/medium framed body, his overall appearance being more gender-neutral than it is overly feminine or masculine. He has brown-olive skin littered with moles and sunspots, cappuccino brown curls that reach about ear-jaw length, and dark hazel green-brown, almond-shaped eyes that have a judging glare to them.

He stands at only 5’5 and weighs around average, with no defined muscles and slight pudge around his stomach area. His facial structure isn’t too sharp or defined, but not very soft or round either; he has an oval shaped face with a Roman nose, slightly plump lips, and high cheekbones. The most notable thing about his appearance is the unruly, curled strand of hair that sticks out.to the left, his right.

Personality: Lorenzo is, without a doubt, not the most approachable person out there; he tends to be anti-social, though when he wants to be can be rather charismatic and friendly. It’s not his strongest suit, however. He’s a bit abrasive and frequently rude and foul-mouthed with most people, especially those he does not like. Though it’s mostly a defense mechanism, and if you’re close enough to him, he’ll feel comfortable enough around you to be his passionate, loving, and even often silly side of himself. Though to no one does he show the side of him where he’s crying, or feels helpless.

He has a great deal of insecurities that have guarded his personality so intensely, that it causes him to lash out when angered, and push people away very often. He has an awful inferiority complex, and little to no sense of self-worth. He’s very pessimistic, and his depression makes it harder for him to show positive, happy emotions, as to how easy it makes it for him to spit out insults and being stubborn, rude, and overall grumpy and unimpressed with everything.

The person who makes him happiest is Antonio; he actually manages to give him a spot of optimism, make him smile and laugh and just be himself.

Skills: Painting & drawing, cooking, napping??? Complaining? Nothing else

Painting/drawing: A given, Lorenzo is very skilled with artistic media, namely painting and drawing being his best too. He is a specifically traditional artist, but has been considering learning digital media.

Cooking: Growing up in an Italian family, it’s hard to not know how to cook. He learned when he was younger since he’d always help his mother cook. It’s relaxing to him.

Napping: Worldwide champion napper. Any chance he can nap, he takes.

Complaining: Honestly.

Flaws: Pessimism, low self-worth, abrasiveness.

Pessimism: Naturally, given he has depression, Lorenzo tends to see things in the worst way, to expect the worst, and accept it. He doesn’t have a lot of hope for himself, and usually relies on others to give him some sort of sense of optimism. This also goes for his bad mood, he has trouble showing positive emotions as opposed to how easy it is for him to be negative.

Low self-worth: He thinks incredibly lowly of himself due to a multitude of things in his past, and even in his present. And yet he still manages to be a narcissist. He is the definition of “hates himself, but believes he’s better than everybody”.

Abrasiveness: A lot of bottled up emotions tend to manifest themselves in him in forms of aggression, making it easy for him to lash out, or they way he insults people and acts so rude to someone he doesn’t like so nonchalantly. Also, he’s ultimately petty, so.

Backstory: ( TW: Abuse / Depression / Self harm + Suicidal thoughts )

Lorenzo was born to his family as a first gen Italian-American, his parents having moved from Italy for better opportunities. He was always closer to his mother growing up, as his father wasn’t exactly an incredible one to begin with. As he got older, he got more and more abusive towards him, mostly verbal but even sometimes physical with him the older he was; and the older he got, the more his parents fought. He used to blame it on himself, since his dad seemed to make it look that way.

When he was 13, his mother and father divorced, and his father walked out on them. School was already awful for him as he wasn’t rather popular, only had a few ‘friends’ (they weren’t that close, since he usually shut everyone out), and had been bullied since he was young. It got worse with this, his grades fell back, and it was practically a miracle that he wasn’t held back.

Any friends he had in middle school, he lost once he was in high school. High school felt infinitely worse, he was much more stressed, ridiculed far more, and he didn’t know how to cope with it. His mother was often busy and never home, trying to provide for them both without their father there anymore. So he turned to harming himself; cutting, sometimes, just to let something out. When he was 16, he started to get ahold of cigarettes and starting smoking, to de-stress himself. He didn’t care if it harmed him, he had little to no sense of self-worth, and figured he wouldn’t live long at that point anyways.

The more he bottled up, the more he lashed out, the more he shut himself off thereafter; peers viewed more and more horribly, hated him more, made fun of him more. He’d contemplated much worse than self-harm at times. He got a job at a local fast food place to help his mother, and also to have more of an excuse to avoid people he knew, ever. Smoking became a bad habit. It didn’t help him one bit that, despite having a loving and supportive mother, a lot of himself went hidden thanks to family values and religion.

Graduating high school felt like a weight had been yanked right off his shoulders. Going off to college in NYC, away from the upstate town he was born in, was a fucking blessing. Every from high school was gone and he felt a little less outcast at World U. But he still bottles stuff up, and could really use a therapist, honestly.

Headcanons:

Despite being 20, Lorenzo still hasn’t gotten his driver’s license, and if he can’t catch a ride from someone else, he takes public transport or walks most places. He’s not sure when he plans on getting it; he lives in NYC, after all.

While Lorenzo majors in Art, he’s often thought about opening his own restaurant in his future, and even works in the campus’s cafe (which isn’t that delightful, not that he thought it would be.)

While he has the ability to paint with a more modern style, he’s deeply inspired by barocco era paintings, and loves to paint to in such a style.

He still smokes sometimes, but he’s trying hard to quit. He’s been clean of any type of self-harming for a couple years now, but the urges still resurface.

Major(s): Visual / Studio Arts Major. Minors: Culinary Arts. Courses: Life Drawing II, Advanced Painting, Drawing II.

Ships:

OTP(s): Spamano ( I have others I like, but this is the one I’m gonna focus on ).

NOTP(s): Most of any other ships that spamano, but g/ermano + itace/st make me the most uncomfy.

Writing sample:

Every bone in his body ached, his limbs felt heavy, and his eyes were barely open; probably not the best conditions for him to be working on a stupid fucking charcoal piece on, but he had no choice. His movements were rushed, trying to piece together the painting as it came along. A man with his back to the viewer, messy, disheveled hair envisioned with dark and heavy strokes of charcoal on the canvas, an arm raised to the level of his head, and a hand cupping the back of his neck.

It wasn’t a mystery who it was meant to be a caricature of, but he’d do everything he could to deny it was anything other than just a random mystery man he’d come up with. No, he just wanted to finish it ― he needed to finish it, since it was due tomorrow, and he’d put off most chances to work on it over the past few days. A tired groan slipped from his lips, and he fumbled for his phone to turn on the screen. 1:16 am. Another groan; looks like this would be one of those days where he needed a smoke. Wishing he had weed right now, he smacked a cigarette out of the box and grabbed his lighter, too tired and frankly too lazy for something more than one of these right now, and dragged his ass outside. A brief break wouldn’t hurt.

Once he was outside, he let the cigarette hang from his lips and cupped his hand around it, shielding the flame in the lighter as he brought it to the tip. It felt comforting to take a long drag, breathing in the awful but somehow relaxing smoke, before letting it tumble from his lips and fill the air in front of him. He swatted his hand, clearing it away, but the stench would still linger. He frowned, looking around at the dark campus in the middle of the night, huffing.

After some time passed and he felt calmer, he made his way back inside and to his dorm, setting back on working on his piece, putting a little too much effort into the curve of his back, his backside, and the soft shading that emphasized his muscles. God, he was really gay. Eventually he figured – fuck it, that was good enough, he needed sleep, and dragged himself to his bed to do just that.

#application #1p #submission #aph romano

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imagine--drv3 · 7 years

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Can I have S/O teaching the girls how to dance? What kind of dancing would the teach them? (PS: Love you guys!)

Well…as soon as we got this the other mods screamed at me to take it, and if that doesn’t sum up my love for dance, I don’t know what does.

Maki Harukawa

You don’t know what to teach her at all.

She’s athletic, and her body is gorgeous, but you don’t know if she has the patience or willingness to listen to you instruct her how to move.

For the joke of it all, you decide to ask her to listen to you teach her flamenco, knowing that she would likely disagree .

Though, when you prompt her with the idea, she stares at you and to your utter disbelief, tells you that she is willing to do so .

You flush at the idea of her moving in such a hip, fluid way and agree, setting up a time to meet with her.

She picks up the arm and wrist movements quickly, and doesn’t seem to put much effort into it at first.

Once you get to the hip movements, she blushes and immediately excuses herself for a moment.

She eventually gets the hang of it, though she doesn’t seem that into it from what you’ve seen.

But when you turn your back on her, and discreetly watch her, you see that she’ll perform it full out, getting extremely into the movements when you are not watching.

You feel yourself heat up at this, and laugh before turning around, getting a kick out of her shocked expression and her denial that she was not just dancing.

You spend the rest of the day catching her in these little moments, before her finally opening up and doing the routine to the best of her ability.

Kirumi Toujou

Surely you would believe that such an elegant and mature woman would be suited with a style that would fit those tastes.

So, you decide on ballet as a good way to start, envisioning how beautiful she would be dancing in such a timeless, elevated form of movement.

Besides, you can just imagine those long legs extending into a développé and you guiding her foot into a dégagé.

Alright, so maybe you are just a tad bit envious of her figure, and just a little attracted to the beauty she possesses.

And so, you invite her to a studio, and set her up with a gloved hand resting daintily against the barre.

You go off in a small rant about the art, in which she listens to politely with a couple nods of her head, and a smile.

Though on the inside, she is likely freaking out, if only a tad.

Frappé, fouetté, coupé, cambré, cabriole, battement, adagio, assemblé, attitude?? Pas de chat?? Passé? Penché? What does all this terminology you’re saying mean?

You reassure her gently that you’ll go slow, and teach her how to do everything correctly.

Then, you need to warn her that it takes /forever/ to be able to master the /simplest/ of movements, which she assures you is alright if it makes you happy.

She flushes pink every time you have to grab her hips to center them, or run your hand along her spine to help her straighten her posture and tuck everything correctly.

She’s a smart and quick learner, and she seems to enjoy the entire experience, despite it being mostly barre and slow waltzes and such.

She asks you to teach her again sometime, which you are happy to agree to!

Angie Yonaga

You have a bit of difficulty deciding on what to teach her.

She could never stay still enough for tap or ballet with her boundless energy and happy, overbearing attitude.

It takes you a bit, but you decide that such a creative soul needs a canvas that can be twisted into any style she pleases, so you decide on a contemporary/modern mix.

Until it hits you

Contact improv

She’s fascinated by humanity has been gifted with such a fine body that can be used as a vessel for blessing and pure hope.

So why not let her appreciate it through movement with another person, and let her express God’s love and emotions with another person?

Plus, it’s an opportunity for you to directly dance with your cute girlfriend

You ask her to come dance with you and she is simply overjoyed, and won’t leave your side until you’ve gone outside to move in the warm, bright sun.

You warm her up, helping her stretch her limbs to the sky, before taking her hands in yours, beginning to explain exactly what you brought her out here for.

Her expression only lights up in delight before she wraps you in a bear hug, asking if that it sufficient enough for contact improv.

You chuckle and say yes as you pat her head, before swooping the lighter girl into a bridal carry and placing her softly on the ground.

The two of you continue to interact with one another and simply just dance with the other, using the other’s limbs to inspire movement in your own.

She has a fantastic time, and tells you that you should help her express her God’s will through pure, blissful movement again sometime.

Kaede Akamatsu

You decide that ballroom would be the best for her

As a bonus, you could try to teach a routine that goes along to one of her own songs!

When you tell her this, she blushes, and asks if she has to dress up in fancy garb, in which you laugh and insist that she doesn’t.

You ask her to meet up with you one evening, and takes her hands, beginning to walk her through the steps.

You think she has the basics of it, yet you find it amusing as her blush deepens whenever you take her by the waist.

When you turn on her music and start choreographing to it, her face is an unexplainable mixture of shock, excitement and joy, and she seems to have newfound energy in her movements.

You switch roles occasionally, and at one point, she tries to lead you in the waltz.

Her movements are clumsy, and when she dips you, she drops you on the floor.

She apologizes endlessly after that, nearly crying, and you laugh and constantly tell her that it’s alright.

You two have a good time, and the evening ends with her kissing you and giving you a crushing hug.

Miu Iruma

When you propose the idea, she snorts, saying that she could build a machine to teach herself choreography.

But as soon as she sees the look on your face after that, she begins to yet up and apologizes, and agrees to letting you teach her whatever you want

You begin to walk her through a warm-up, deciding to go through with some classic jazz, before she stops with with a delighted look on her face.

She asks you to teach her how to pole dance.

You’re caught off guard by her request, a blush already covering your face at the mere thought of it.

But she seems too happy, and she already promises that she has something set up for it.

You reluctantly agree, and she meets up with you, pole in place, and urges you to begin.

You walk her through a few legitimate movements, mustering enough abdominal strength to show her one flashy move.

She copies them, which makes you melt in a puddle of embarrassment, before she cracks you a cheeky grin and begins to take over herself.

She cackles as she places a hand on the pole and spins around, taking amusement in your embarrassment.

It is an eventful night, to say the least.

Himiko Yumeno

You find that tap dance may fit someone like her, for it can be quite extravagant, yet simple, at the same time.

You dig out an old, smaller pair of tap shoes and dust them off before inviting her to come with you.

You help her tie them before walking her through a couple steps, taking the basic, slow approach.

Brush steps, shuffles, buffalos, paradiddle.

They may sound simple, but she’s quite proud of herself for being able to catch on, even if her movements lack a bit of energy.

She likes making noise, and begins to wear the tap shoes you gifted her around the house.

She also tells you that she’s happy that you taught her, and that she’ll have to try these techniques in her next show

Tsumugi Shirogane

She’s super willing to do whatever you teach her!

She does have a request though.

She consults you with a tablet and shows you a bunch of videos of anime characters dancing, and completely begs you to teach her the movements that her idols perform.

You’re not sure on how to exactly do so, but who can say no to those puppy dog eyes?

You ask her to consult you later, and you try your best to learn the movements for her.

You meet up after a little while and she seems super stoked! You’re going to help her become like her idols!

She’s quite energetic, for she’s dedicated to learning, and surprisingly picks it up rather quickly.

She seems extremely happy when moving and dancing, and is always ready to show you that she can do it by herself with pride in her voice.

She also tries dancing with cosplay! It’s quite cute.

Just like the animes

Tenko Chabashira

She’s active, lively, and a good learner. The perfect candidate for teaching!

When you propose the idea of teaching her something, she flushes red, and bows to you, saying that she is honored that you would trust her with your teachings.

She grew up learning defensive movement from a master, and has shaped her whole entire life around being taught by those she held in high lights.

So the fact that you want to teach her something you love inspires joy in her, and excites her greatly.

You decide that capoeira would be right for her, for she would be familiar with some of the movements all ready.

After all, it is a mix between dance, martial arts and acrobatics, and is lively and fun!

Besides, she already has the strength required for it!

She invites you to her dojo, for it is safer, and waits, practically trembling with excitement.

You show her the first few steps of the routine, which she copies near-effortlessly, her mind already trained to picking up and repeating movement

You teach her a few movements, in which she takes in and adds little things to make them their own, and’ll proudly show you them each time you pause, eager for your approval.

The night ends with her thanking you endlessly for sharing something you love with her!

#mod tenko #drv3 #danganronpa #New Danganronpa V3 #drv3 imagine #maki harukawa #kirumi toujou #angie yonaga #kaede akamatsu #miu iruma #himiko yumeno #tsumugi shirogane #tenko chabashira

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resbang-bookclub · 7 years

Text

AMA Transcript: Nothing Compares 2 U

@makapedia joined the AMA party to talk with us about her 2016 Resbang, Nothing Compares 2 U! Here’s some of what went down!!

Q: You wrote a good chunk of your fic set in the nineties. Was there anything that was especially hard about that?

makapedia: Writing the fic in the 90s was hard, if just because I was six when the 90s ended, so I did not remember as much as I thought I would, so I had to research a little history.

Q: What inspired you to think of this premise/AU?

makapedia: I thiiink I was talking to Madi? And spitballing ideas, as I do, at her, and it just spiralled from there. She enabled me hard.

Q: I did love your 90s references though. You mentioned some stuff and I would have flashbacks. It was all good.

makapedia: I didn't even get to write the scene I had originally envisioned for the AU, that's so weird. I wanted more Tamagotchi scenes. I wanted Maka to leave her precious child Tamagotchi in Soul's hands and he was going to take his job as caretaker Very Seriously while she was homeworking.

Q: [This] fic was an emotional ride and so empathetically written and incredibly nuanced. What was the most emotional thing for you to write? What would you do to cheer yourself up after a difficult scene?

makapedia: The most emotional thing for me to write was definitely, um, towards the end of the first portion of the fic? I gave Soul and Maka both parts of myself in this fic, and Soul really got the raw, late teens anxiety and fear of the world and his future, and it was both easy? and hard? for me to write, especially since it was through Maka's eyes, and I could not come out and say "hey, he is depressed and unmedicated and on a downward spiral" because she just didn't understand it. I would listen to Spice Girls to cheer myself up, though.

Q: Your approach to sexuality and to mental illness is amazing and hit me in the feels. Pls discuss any extra commentary youve ever wanted to discuss on these elements of your writing.

makapedia: I don't think I even went into this thinking it was going to have such commentary on sexuality? Uh, and especially the drama/throne we put sexuality on as a culture. I think the fic really evolved that way? And I think definitely even adding as much asexual commentary in it was extra. The mental illness thing was definitely planned and I wanted to make a point of showing someone who does struggle with depression/anxiety/other taking his life into his hands and getting help and still being able, as an adult, to have relations and be happy, and be a good partner. I wish I could have shown more of that at the end, but it is what it is.

Q: What is your personal favorite scene to write, or just based on how it turned out, or whatever!

makapedia: My favorite scene to write?? Maybe was towards the end, I had a lot of fun writing spiteful angry Maka kicking in the men's bathroom door and scaring the shit out of Soul. But based on how the scene turned out, i think the smut smut scene was my favorite. It was a Long fic, longer than I anticipated or planned it being, so a lot of it just melts together in my head now.

Q: Smut scenes, how do those go?

makapedia: LOL. Are you asking me how to write smut?

Q: Yes.

makapedia: I love you so much. I am Disgustingly Demisexual and super vanilla about things, and a lot of my smut focuses more on the feeling and gross headspace than the physical part? It's easier for me that way. I am a tiny ace virgin I am terrible with smut, I have people Fooled.

Q: Pls elaborate on your Very Important Decision to give Soul Batman sheets.

makapedia: Every cool guy I have in my life really aggressively loves Batman. That was it. He seemed appropriately Edgy (or False Edgy, w/e) for Soul.

Q: I really loved your characterization of the parents in this story - both Soul's and Maka's. Did you find one set of parents easier to write and if so, why??

makapedia: Oh man. I mean, they were there but also weren't, yeah? Only Soul's dad and Maka's mom made the cut, and Maka's mom is always a mixed bag for me because we do know very little about her in canon, whereas Soul's parents are always an empty canvas, for the most part. All I know about Maka's mom is she dumped Spirit for cheating and she is "like a bear" according to Maka loool so I guess I just kind of made her a very opinionated force of nature, sort of looming over and leading Maka's future, but she's hard for me to write. I could do whatever with Soul's dad and no one could tell me I was wrong. Too much power for one girl.

Q: Was there a specific 90s artifact you wanted to include that didn't make the cut?

makapedia: Black*Star in JNCO jeans.

Q: Where did the inspiration for the Liz jealousy side plot come from? Because that KILLED me lmao.

makapedia: The Liz thing was planned but also not to the degree it ended up happening? Mostly I wanted to write about Maka's insecurity, and work through her misogyny and jealousy issues and I thought it'd be interesting to have it be a close friend, I guess? But then it evolved into Soul questioning his identity in the background and coming to terms with like, realizing he was ace? Also I wanted Maka to be weird and uncomfortable and maybe even a little jealous later, when Liz had invited him to her wedding, but some of that got lost in translation.

Q: The entire leadup to and all of the Halloween party was a gift, where did the inspiration from that come from? (Soul alone with weiner dogs, bless.)

makapedia: I really, really wanted to write Maka as baby spice and it just snowballed from there. SHE WANTED TO BE SPORTY SPICE SO BADLY. Soul is me. Hides in the back room at a party and chills with tiny dogs.

Q: Why the 90s?

makapedia: I think it was because of my own nostalgia? And also feeling like I missed out on all of the turn of the century weirdness, because I WAS so young when the 90s ended and the 2000s began. It was like a time period AU but not drastic enough for me to have to really change everything and research language and clothing and trends and culture. It was recent enough but also like... long enough ago for other people my age or a little older to be like oh, man, remember the 90s, why did we all part our hair like that? The fic really did start out very silly in my heart but then everything got dark and sad.

Q: I was gonna ask, where did this idea come from? Did something really spur it on, other than your 90s nostalgia? Was the time gap thing always there? Cause the way you entered in the future and had a good portion of the story in the past was excellent and gripped my attention.

makapedia: So, originally when I was blarging to Madi about a 90s au I think I realized it couldn't just be memes, it needed a plot? And I'd always really wanted to write like a post breakup fic where the ship Gets Back Together at a wedding and then bam kablam. The "outline" for the fic is just bare bones for the fic and then some jokes I wanted to get in. Originally I'd wanted the chapters to go back and forth, 98 to 08 and such, but I ended up settling with a big 98 portion so it felt more cohesive. Pluuus I kind of like how it sets you up to hurt and then you wade through the beginning cute with just, this sense of oh god, no, what goes wrong?

Q: I loved the character dynamics between everybody everything felt very fitting like 'yep that is so how they would be.'

makapedia: ;__; I'm so glad. Bro*Star's frosted tips.

Q: I wanted to kill him when he did the freaking card trade thing.

makapedia: LOL that boy has no tact. That cloyster joke was in the outline.

Q: Did you have any characters that you sat there going 'okay what to do with you' or were all the characters falling into place nicely from your perspective? Was Black*Star's gutter mind easy to fall into or not? XD

makapedia: hhhaaaAAA, Death the Kid was mysteriously Not There in the 90s. SORRY, KIDDO. Black*Star is so easy and fun to write, but I think I'd write 90s skater DTK.

Q: Oh well, [Kid] got to make the best reference of the whole fic lol.

makapedia: He did, he got my favorite line. I think he spoke one line and it was my favorite. 70k for an I Write Sins Not Tragedies reference. The slow realization that that album came out in 2006 and therefore Existed was the best.

Q: On a scale of one to 10, how excited were you when you realized this?

makapedia: 10. 11. That joke got me through writing the last chapter.

Q: Was there a scene in particular that went a really different direction than what you expected?

makapedia: So I don't plot ahead like... as often as i should, hhhhhhaaa. So for a lot of the middle I just hit cruise control and went wherever it took me. But a lot of the stuff about virginity and like, terrible sex ed and worrying that it would hurt a ton and she'd bleed definitely weren't things I thought I'd write. I did not intend for the First Time (tm) scene to happen then and there but then... surprise dongle! Dicks out for the ship's swan song.

Q: What song did you listen to the most while writing this?

Q: Linger by The Cranberries, I think. A big Mood. And You Oughta Know, for appropriate Anger. Aaand Nothing Compares 2 U, of course. Tho I do wonder how many younger fandom bebs don't.... know that is a song title reference.

Q: What was your favourite part of the fic?

makapedia: I think... maybe the Halloween party, because Maka is such an unreliable narrator in this fic and she is so Clueless (haaaaaa, jokes) and it was the moment she Finally realized what Liz was trying to do. Also the moment where Soul realizes too was fun.

Q: Did you intend to write Liz as the actual soma fandom or was that accidental? (Complete with our adoration of Tsubaki.)

makapedia: LOL It was a little intentional, I guess, because she was Soul's close friend in the fic. But like, Maka misunderstanding everything just kept getting worse so it was a bit accidental. God I love Tsubaki. Liz has good taste. I don't super ship it a whole lot but I still wanted to try my hand at it. I wanted them to be happy and cute.

Q: What about your LEAST favorite scene!

makapedia: The breakup scene was hard for me to write and I'm still not happy with how it came out. It still feels forced in my heart, but I had to move on.

Q: WHAT'S NEXT?

makapedia: Iiiiii already have an idea of what I'm gonna do for Resbang next year so I cannot share that, buuuut I think I'm going to continue writing Not Lovers, weird mermaid AU I started recently? and probably more AUs. This is the year I write Too Many SoMa AUs, mark my words.

Q: Okay so Soul and Liz doing the do sort of killed my heart. Was that always planned?

makapedia: Hhhhaaaa that was planned ahead of time, I guess? I wanted Maka's jealousy to have some sort of basis. This tiny demi thing who can't wrap her head around sleeping with someone like that.

Q: It broke my heart but I found it so... realistic? Like I totally know people who've experienced that, and lots of people don't have their first time with their soulmate or true love or whatev so like it HURT but also... so, so true.

makapedia: Exactly, that was what I was going for. <3 Aaaand pushing my ace agenda, lol.

Q: Correct me if I read the thing wrong, but crona got adopted by Sid and Nygus??

makapedia: Iiiii do not remember. LOL, HECK. PLEASE.... HOLD.... /FRANTICALLY GOOGLES OWN FIC. YES. OKAY. Good I was like, I think I wrote that??? But then I haven't read that part in so long. I feel like people so often just throw Stein and Marie into the role of Crona's parents and I think I wanted to mix it up.

Q: I just... Crona living with Black☆Star had me in tears.

makapedia: Also that, exactly. You can bet your butt that weenie was probably Crona's dog, but Black*Star is the one who dressed it in a costume. I also had fun writing Soul and Crona bonding over Pokemon. Nerd shit. Soul, excitedly: did you hear they're making a video game? Maka is not as well versed in Pokemon as these nerds. Soul's probably laying there in that room with the weenie playing Tetris.

Q: That visual is gold.

makapedia: I also wanted to write Black*Star taking out Soul's ankles with a Skip-It. But alas.

---

Thanks again to makapedia for stoppin’ in!! More transcripts to come, stay tuned ~

#AMA transcripts #resbang book club #rbbc #resbang

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63824peace · 5 years

Text

Tuesday, 25th of october 2005

I started by blog exactly one month ago. I'm doing fine so far... I think I can continue.

I toasted myself last night to celebrate my blog's one month anniversary.

My morning disappeared beneath employment interviews and other miscellaneous tasks ; all unrelated to game creation.

I went to the restaurant Kurosawa for lunch but it was closed. The place closes on Tuesdays. My only option was to go a little farther into Tokyo's Azabu district.

I ate Butaniku-to-ninniku-kuki at the Shanghai-style Chinese restaurant Nan Shan Sho Ron.

I saw Julien as I walked back to the office along Keyaki-zaka Street. He and I are scheduled to meet in the office this afternoon. How's that for a coincidence?

Julien flew all the way from France and has just arrived in Tokyo. It couldn't have been an accident that we just bumped into each other on the street. If you consider the odds against our accidental meeting, then it's nothing short of miraculous. It must be some kind of fate. I would not have gone to the Abazu district had Kurosawa been open today, and then I wouldn't have been here to run into him.

I felt a really strong sense of connectivity.

I bought the Japanese edition of New Order's album Singles in Tsutaya. I listened to it in the office.

I ripped into the CD's shrink wrap so hastily that I lost the triangular contest entry ticket inside. If a buyer sends the ticket back to the album publisher, then he stands a chance to win a special poster featuring all of the jackets of New Order's singles.

Well, it's not a big deal. I doubt I'd win anyway. I'm never very lucky in lotteries, and I've never won a prize through these types of games. Besides, I'm proud to say that I own all of the twelve-inch singles except for Progression and Temptation.

I have the sleeves for Fine Time and True Face Remix (my favorite singles) displayed in my personal hideout.

Some people might say, "Decorating a room with vinyl LP sleeves?! This over-the-hill grandpa is really uncool." It wasn't anything out of the ordinary in my younger days though. People even considered decorating a room using vinyl LP jackets (rather than posters or photographs) pretty trendy back then.

Records weren't just for playing. They were made for buyers to use and display. The record jacket was considered an aspect of the interior's decoration, which was also considered part of the total musical package.

Today the vinyl LP has been replaced by the Compact Disc. CDs are easier to carry around and they're more convenient; on the other hand, the jackets have become smaller. The package's size can't express the same visual texture or detail that the older albums could.

Then again, the old LPs were pretty big. The inside and outside of the album jackets were practically as large as a painter's canvas. The cover unfolded and revealed enough space for a picture or a landscape painting.

Listeners also couldn't easily manipulate older analog records to select a desired track like they can with CDs. We could only look at the art printed in the album jacket while we listened to the entire record from beginning to end. The jacket's visual materials practically served as a music video when we perused it while listening to the album.

People bought albums impulsively after looking at the jacket art. A lot of people therefore displayed the record jackets at home by putting them in picture frames.

I listened to a music genre filled with performers who were mostly art school graduates. They sought out sounds that would express the pictures that they envisioned. They pursued music to extend the breadth of their original visions. Pictures preceded their music. They introduced a new style to the world ; a new way of thinking about music as an art that should appeal to the eyes as well as to the ears. These were definitely the aesthetic decisions of art school graduates.

Of course the music could be pretty bad. They weren't trained to play their instruments. They hadn't even known how to read the musical notations on their own scores. They created their music with the aid of computers; they input certain data and the results made it possible to compose and play their music. Still, the audiences jeered and heckled them when they gave live concerts because the actual performance was so bad. Even the Japanese audiences gave them a rough reception.

Their musical ideals involved more than only sound. Other ideas attended the music, such as fashion and pictures. Their musical identity incorporated clothing, make up, album art, and music videos.

I'm referring to the New Wave movement of the 1980's.

The musical movement gave birth to the idea of creating a twelve-inch, LP-sized single album as distinct from regular EPs. The large jacket was a perfect canvas on which to express the album's art. It even spun at a faster speed than an EP, which created better quality playback.

Then twelve-inch singles boomed. Remixes became popular as a new musical style too.

Some time ago they made paper jackets for reissues that reproduced the most popular records. The paper jacket packaging once was in style but it simply wasn't big enough. The original album art had been designed for an LP-sized package; the necessary size reduction created a sense of incongruity. I might compare the change to a famous painting if it were shrunk to half its original dimensions.

The LP-sized CD jackets that current artists sometimes use resulted from all this. KojiPro has even adopted this design style for MGS3's press sheet at E3 2004.

The press sheet is essentially a digital CD packaged in an LP-sized jacket. The band Asia used this format for their first album.

We affixed a sticker to the jacket with a caution message printed on it: "This is a Compact Disc." We placed the warning on there to ensure that no one mistook the album for an actual vinyl LP.

I like the music of New Order and Joy Division, but I also like the jacket art designed by Peter Seville. An exhibition titled The Peter Seville Show was held during autumn a couple of years ago in the LaForet Museum Harajuku. I visited the exhibition on my way home. Seville fans in their thirties and forties like me were moved to tears before the authentic album jackets on display.

I would like to ask Seville to design a jacket for one of my games someday.

I gave an interview with the France2 television station this afternoon for a charity telethon. Julien-kun is seventeen years old. He came all the way from Normandy in France to meet me here in Roppongi Hills. He is a huge fan of Metal Gear. He told me that he is currently studying Japanese.

He greeted me in perfect Japanese. I would like to have answered him in French, but I couldn't. Teppei from the motion team was born and raised in Paris, so I asked him to interpret.

I walked Julien to KojiPro' development booth, where I invited him to play Metal Gear Online. We were in the process of checking MGO through its final phase.

Julien truly is a huge MGS fan; he's a really good player. He easily beat out the older members of my staff.

I had a private man-to-man talk with Mr. Sagami in the eveniing. He is the editor-in-chief of the comic magazine Koro Koro.

Gachinko fight!

I didn't feel like working on the blog when I arrived home. This is it for today.

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theliterateape · 5 years

Text

Hope Idiotic | Part I

By David Himmel

Hope Idiotic is a serialized novel. Catch each new part every week on Monday and Thursday.

SHORTLY AFTER THE HEIGHT OF AMERICA’S FLAGRANT PATRIOTISM FOLLOWING 9/11, and just before the dawn of The Great Recession, there existed a wonderful Italian restaurant called Bella’s Ristorante. It was built into the foothills of the Black Mountain Range just outside of Las Vegas in Henderson, Nevada, a few short and dusty miles from the Strip at the edge of a wealthy suburban subdivision. My best friends Chuck Keller and Lou Bergman adored the place.

During those few years that Bella’s was open, subdivided white people made the mealtime pilgrimage to take in the incredible view. The floor-to-ceiling windows showcased the entire valley — from Henderson on over to Paradise Springs, east to Nellis Air Force Base and west to Summerlin. On a night after a good rain, when the dust had been beaten down, you could see the lights of North Las Vegas and maybe even Tonopah — that little city off U.S. 95. In the daylight, it was a picture-perfect landscape of the desert, with Mount Charleston’s snowy white summit in the top left corner. At sunset, the surrounding mountains became a large canvas for layers of colors — a natural light show opposing the manufactured neon glimmer. The sight was gorgeous.

The food was good — better than most places, worse than some — and the service was friendly. Whenever anyone came in and asked a waitress, hostess or female bartender if she was the Bella — an obvious question asked far too often — the gal would smile and sweetly say, “There is no Bella. It’s just a name.” The owner was a middle-aged, fat, bald man who compensated for his bare scalp with a permanent patchy 5-o’ clock shadow, en vogue back then. He was an older generation of douchebag — less imposing and more tolerable than today’s models — and a far cry from the definition of bella. But, he ran a damn good restaurant, so the regulars rewarded him with their patronage.

Bella’s Ristorante was not designed to be anything but a place for locals. The regulars lived proudly in cinderblock-surrounded McMansions nestled safely inside gated communities. This sort of suburban planning was a subconscious exercise in social alienation. But at the epicenter of the Housing Bubble, these chicken-wire–framed stucco homes were the calling card of the triumphant. From the air, on the approach to McCarran Airport, these homes resembled the cement fortresses found in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan. The sorts of homes owned and inhabited by America’s latest sworn enemy — the Arabs. The difference was that the American fortresses in Henderson had swimming pools.

This irony was lost on all of the regulars except Chuck and Lou. Or so they liked to think. While the others came to Bella’s to connect to the humanity beyond the walls of their single-family homes, Chuck and Lou used Bella’s as an escape from everyone and everything. It was their Fortress of Public Solitude.

And after a day’s work, the two of them would often drive to their homes, strip off the neckties, trade in slacks for jeans and meet up at Bella’s. I would have joined them, but I had a wife and a newborn baby boy expecting me at home. My days of drinking at a bar several nights a week were regrettably behind me. But Chuck and Lou were still young and unattached enough to afford them the luxury of sitting at Bella’s bar facing the large windows for hours. And they’d spend those hours filing through their stresses, troubleshooting problems and anxieties, pissing and moaning about politics, career, family, love and friends. They’d relive adventures they had shared together from their near–decade-long friendship, and sometimes they’d just get hammered. Not uncommonly, Chuck would pass out midsentence or just as Lou was ranting his way into brilliance. When this happened, the bartender, usually a petite and pretty girl, would get the big fat owner to help Lou carry Chuck to his car.

The goal wasn’t to get completely tanked. All the talking and drinking was their way of relaxing the mind while keeping it from going dead, not unlike many of their midtwenty-something contemporaries who preferred reality television or news broadcasts on E! as a way to unwind. Booze calmed the nerves. The chats navigated them closer to figuring it out — whatever it was that night. The view put it all in perspective. These rendezvous allowed them to flex their intellect and cynicism. Bella’s Ristorante allowed them to come up for air because down on Earth, they were being strangled — their chests heavy with the weight of self-imposed responsibility and guilt. And they knew they would be crushed soon enough.

They just needed to do enough good before that happened.

✶

LOU’S CELL PHONE RANG, WAKING HIM UP AT SIX O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING. IT WAS CHUCK.

“Come get me?” Chuck said. His voice was playful and drunk. Calls like this between my two friends were familiar.

“Come get you where?” said Lou.

“Come get me?”

“Where are you?”

Chuck hung up. Lou laughed as he rolled over to fall back asleep. It was Saturday, and he wouldn’t get up for another two hours, when he would take on the ritual of cleaning his house, vacuuming and chemical-testing his pool, then get to working on his freelance magazine stories. Because Lou received calls like this from Chuck countless times before, he knew that as long as the guy could make a phone call, he’d be fine. Lou would pick him up later — if he ever found out exactly where Chuck was. Worst-case scenario? The cops had him. So he’d certainly be safe for another two hours.

The phone rang again. “Come get me?”

“Jesus Christ, Chuck. Where are you?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, what?”

“Come get me?”

“Are you with the police?”

“Gas station.”

“Okay. Good. Which one?”

Chuck hung up. Lou rolled over. The phone rang. Lou answered. “Which gas station are you at?”

“Yeah, a gas station.”

“Do you have your car with you?”

“Come get me?”

“Which gas station?” There was a long pause. Lou thought Chuck had hung up again.

“Boulder Highway and Lake Mead.”

What the hell are you doing out there?” Lou asked this question knowing there wasn’t a real answer. These two learned a long time ago not to question the other’s motives when drunk or when waking up somewhere strange after being drunk. The explanation didn’t matter. What mattered was getting back to civilization, avoiding detainment or violence and retrieving any personal effects lost along the way. So he didn’t mind when Chuck hung up again then called right back.

“Come get me?”

“Yeah, I’m on my way.” But it was only a quarter past six, and Lou still had some time to sleep. So he did.

Lou’s house wasn’t all that far from where Chuck was stranded, so the act itself of rescuing him was not a big deal. His house was located on a quiet street in Green Valley — a mostly affluent neighborhood in Henderson. Like most residents of the Las Vegas Valley, Lou was no more than three stoplights from a Walgreens, a Target, a Home Depot, an Albertson’s grocery store and a locals’ casino with movie screens, restaurants and a showroom for live concerts.

Lou bought his house in late 2003, just before the market skyrocketed. Only a year out of college, he worked on-air for the city’s largest radio company. It was a job he loved doing, though it paid horribly. However, despite his salary of only twenty-three grand a year, he paid for the house in cash after his father and grandfather, both real estate players back in Chicago, engineered a deal: Instead of Lou taking a loan from a bank — one of those loans that history would remember as predatory loans — he would borrow the money directly from his grandparents. He’d pay them back at a lower interest rate than he would pay a bank, but at a higher rate than what their bank was paying while the money sat in a savings account. It was a win-win.

If Lou had ten bucks for every time Chuck passed out in his car, he could have bought his house in cash himself.

And so, although he couldn’t really afford it, Lou found himself the owner of a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath, two-car-garage home with a pool and a yard. The mortgage to his grandparents was only six hundred dollars a month since he was only paying the interest, which fit well into his minuscule budget. It was a great setup for a single guy living on his own, and he recognized his situation as a wonderful perk coming from a family with money. And he did not take it for granted. He continually envisioned that one day his hard work would allow him to be independently wealthy like his grandfather and be able to provide for his family and friends with ease.

But on that Saturday morning in 2007, the best he could do for his friend was pick him up at a gas station on the outskirts of town.

Chuck’s preowned black BMW was the only car at the only station that hadn’t yet opened — the only place of service in southern Nevada that wasn’t open twenty-four hours. The car was parked with its gas tank facing away from the pump. When Lou last saw Chuck the night before, he was wearing jeans and a decent button-down shirt. He had had his wits about him. But now he was passed out cold in the driver’s seat, wearing basketball shorts, a torn Beatles T-shirt and his favorite white Indianapolis Colts baseball cap. A bottle of Miller Lite rested in his lap, the bottle cap in the palm of his open hand on his thigh.

If Lou had ten bucks for every time Chuck passed out in his car, he could have bought his house in cash himself. Las Vegas is a great town, but it encourages drinkers to drive themselves home, or to the next bar or to an ex-lover’s house. There is no public-transit system of any quality, and cabs cost a small fortune when, and even if, they leave the Strip. Luckily, Chuck had never been in a drunk-driving accident and had managed to maneuver his way out of countless DUIs when pulled over. Once, he was chased out of a casino for taking a piss at the Blackjack table where he was playing and nearly ran over a security guard as he sped out of the parking garage.

Getting home behind the wheel of a car when you’re drunk is no small feat. It takes concentration and cunning. And there is a relief when you arrive home without incident. Since their days together at Nevada State University, Chuck would pull into his apartment parking space or the driveway of the house he was renting and go to sleep right there in the car. Chuck figured, I’m home, I’m safe, I’m tired, I’ll deal with putting myself to bed in the morning. And it made perfect sense. Plenty of times before, when Chuck had been found asleep in the front seat, either by roommates, his girlfriend Lexi, or by me or Lou, the hardest part was waking him up. It often required a good fifteen minutes of punching him in the head, the chest and the crotch. Buckets of water, too.

Chuck had locked the car door, and Lou was sure he’d never wake him up without being able to get inside. He banged on the window. Nothing. He banged harder on the window and yelled until, amazingly, Chuck opened his eyes. He lifted his head and looked out of the window at Lou. There they were: two best friends staring at each other through a piece of glass. And recognizing the routine absurdity of the situation — and the luck that the glass was a car window and not a Clark County Detention Center partition — they both laughed. Then they laughed harder.

“I need gas,” Chuck said when they pulled themselves together. “I don’t have my wallet.”

“I really need to know how you ended up here. And your gas tank is on this side, idiot. Turn the car around.”

Chuck started the engine, took a long pull from the bottle of beer and said, “It’s warm,” then handed it to Lou through the window. Lou took a sip and tossed the bottle in a trash can. Chuck could only angle the car about 30 degrees before the engine died. The tank was empty.

“I’m not pushing your fat ass,” Lou said. They switched places, and Chuck, who had more toned muscle than fat and was certainly bigger than the slim and lanky Lou, pushed the Bimmer around to the other side of the pump. Lou paid for the gas and followed Chuck home.

Chuck’s roommate, who owned the house on the other side of Henderson, was rarely there, choosing to stay with his girlfriend rather than deal with Chuck’s all too frequent drunken antics. Chuck threw open the front door and turned the stereo on full blast — Euro-trash house music. He headed straight to the backyard and fired up the grill. Lou followed to maintain order by closing the front door and turning the stereo down so it didn’t wake the neighbors or encourage a noise-complaint citation from the police.

“Get me the pork chops from the freezer!” Chuck yelled from the grill out back.

“I normally don’t care, but this time, I’m just really confused. What happened to you last night? I thought you were going to come see my stand-up set.”

“These pork chops are going to taste like shit,” Chuck said, dusting them with seasoning salt.

“Chuck. Fill me in.”

“I went to meet a friend of mine from out of town. We had a few drinks at her hotel, and then she wanted to go to sleep. So I came home.”

“But how’d you end up wearing that, with no wallet and drinking a bottle of beer on the ass end of town?”

“I went to go do something, I guess. Who’s to say?”

“You owe me forty-six bucks for gas.”

“Yeah, yeah. Tomorrow.

#Novel #Fiction #Las Vegas #Las Vegas Fiction #Chicago Fiction #David Himmel Author

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