#+ paraphrased interaction I had today and I caught the two of them having a conversation the other day 🥺

[spiderin-space]

Some more silly things inspired by my playthrough

#COTL #cult of the lamb #cotl lamb #cotl narinder #Yeah uhhh I beat the game the other day #still working my way back through the dungeons again but 👍 #first one was from when I first unlocked the mating tent #there was so much POOP I felt like I couldn’t leave cause I had to follow the babies around cleaning up after them #even with the janitor’s station 😔 #also kept thinking of that one hissing cat when I first got Narinder #+ paraphrased interaction I had today and I caught the two of them having a conversation the other day 🥺 #also Narilamb(?) is starting to grow on me I see why yall like it now

[hardcorehardigan]

[Cover: GREG WILLIAMS/AUGUST IMAGES]

Tom Hardy interview and exclusive David Bailey shot

Tom Hardy interview and exclusive David Bailey shot

By DANIELLE DE WOLFE

02 September 2015

ShortList meets the British actor who took on the Kray twins and won. Plus an exclusive image of the actor taken by the inimitable David Bailey.

Interviewing Tom Hardy is not like interviewing other film stars. From the moment he arrives – alone, dressed down in hiking trousers and black T-shirt, puffing away on a complex-looking digital e-cigarette – it is immediately clear this is not someone who will be exhibiting any kind of on-promotional-duties polish. He is very, very nice (I get a hug at the end of the interview), but there is unmistakably a wired edginess about him. When we sit down, it starts like this:

Me: I’m going to start with an obvious question, which is… Hardy: Have you seen the film? Me: Yes. I… Hardy: Right, well that’s the first question, then. The second one is, “What did you think?” I tell him I loved it, and why, and he is pleased (“That’s a f*cking result!”). When we move on to me asking him questions, his answers – again, in contrast to other film stars, with whom the game is to get them to veer slightly away from prepared, succinct monologues – are smart and eloquent, but long, drawn-out and enjoyably all over the place, veering off into tangents prompted by thoughts that have clearly just formulated. At the end of our allotted time, we are told to wind it up not once but twice, and even then he is still going, launching into theories about American versus British gangster films and life and humanity and such things (“Sorry man, I can talk for f*cking ever!” he laughs). He will be talking with a seriousness and sincerity (“All the risk was taken by [writer and director] Brian [Helgeland], to be fair…”), then will switch without warning into a piercing, mock-hysterical falsetto (“…letting me PLAY BOTH F*CKING ROLES, MAN!”).

In fact, briefly, while we’re on the subject of the way he speaks…

Tom Hardy’s normal speaking voice is not something we have been privy to onscreen. Since he delivered – whatever your opinion of it – the most imitated cinematic voice of the decade in The Dark Knight Rises, we haven’t come close. That thick Welsh accent in Locke, The Drop’s quiet Brooklyn drawl, the Russian twang in Child 44: we just never hear it. And this might be because it doesn’t exist. It’s five years ago, but if you watch his Jonathan Ross appearance in 2010, where he is very well spoken, he confesses he “sometimes picks up accents, and sometimes I don’t know how I’m going to sound until I start speaking”. If you then watch another video of a feature on GMTV, dated just a month previous, while addressing some young people from troubled backgrounds as part of his charity work with the Prince’s Trust, he is speaking to them in a south London street kid drawl. Today, in the flesh, he is about halfway between these two.

A natural-born chameleon.

Tom Hardy shot by David Bailey for ShortList

BEING DOUBLE

The role we are here to discuss today does not, by Tom Hardy’s own standards at least, involve a huge stretch accent-wise. But it is “the hardest thing that I’ve ever done, technically”. This is because, as mentioned, he plays not one role, but two. In the same film. You will likely have seen the posters for Legend by now, depicting Hardy as both of the Kray twins. Which seems an ambitious, almost foolhardy undertaking.

Hardy agrees. “It is one of them situations,” he says. “You get an actor to play two characters, and immediately, it’s pony. It’s gonna be rubbish. Just: no. It’s a bad idea.”

This particular “bad idea” came to him when he first met writer and director Brian Helgeland (who had previously written screenplays for – no biggie – LA Confidential and Mystic River) for dinner. Brian wanted Hardy to play Reggie (the hetero, alpha male, more-straight-down-the-line Kray). Hardy, though, had read the script, and of course, being Tom Hardy, was drawn to the more complex character. “I was like, ‘Well, I feel Ronnie,’” he says. “So which actor am I gonna give up Ronnie to, if I play Reggie? Errrrrggh…. I can’t have that. ’Cos that’s all the fun there! And Reggie’s so straight! But there was a moment when I could have come away just playing Reggie. We could have gone and found a superlative character actor to play Ronnie, and that would have been the best of everything."

But Helgeland sensed the dissatisfaction in his potential leading man. “I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Oh, he wants to play Ron,’” he tells me. “And the paraphrased version is that by the end of the dinner, I said, ‘I’ll give you Ron if you give me Reg.’”

And so began their quest to turn a risky, potentially disastrous idea into something special (as Brian puts it to me, “the movie’s either gone right or gone wrong before anyone even starts working on it”). Hardy found some comfort in Sam Rockwell’s two-interacting-characters performance in Moon. “I’m a big fan of Sam,” he says.

“And Moon gave me reason to go, ‘I know it’s possible to hustle with self, to create a genuine dialogue with self.’ So then it’s the technical minefield: can you authentically create two characters within a piece at all? So that the audience can look past that and engage in the film? It is what it is: it’s two characters played by the same actor. But I think we got to a point where people forget that and are genuinely watching the story."

This was the ‘why I liked the film’ reasoning I gave to him at the beginning of the interview. And it is a remarkable performance, or pair of performances, or triumph of technical direction. The opening shot features both Tom Hardy Krays sitting in the back of a car, and feels strange, but very quickly, within about 10 or 15 minutes, you settle into it, and forget that it is actually the same guy. This was made possible, in part, by Hardy’s stunt double from Mad Max: a New Zealander named Jacob Tomuri.

“He inherited the hardest job of my career,” Hardy grins. “I put on a pair of glasses, played every scene with Ron, then took ’em off and played Reg. And we went through every scene in the film, recording it on the iPhone. So he’s got every scene of me doing both characters, on his iPhone. He actually played both brothers, had to learn all of the lines. He was paying attention twice as hard to keep up. But he superseded that, and was eventually ad-libbing. There’s a line that ended up in the film, where Ronnie goes, ‘I bent him up like a pretzel, I hurt him really f*cking badly.’” “Where did that come from?!” Hardy shrieks, in that falsetto again. “It came from New Zealand."

The wife’s tale

The other big potential pitfall, as Hardy sees it, was contributing to the ongoing glamorisation and eulogising of two brothers who were, to say the least, not very nice. Somehow they have become almost as iconic a piece of the Sixties puzzle as the Beatles or the Stones. But this was not something that Legend would be setting out to reinforce. “One has to approach these things thinking about the families of the victims who were involved in the other end of it,” he says. “Before you find the heart to like somebody, you’ve gotta look at their track record as best as possible: the people who’ve been hurt, the bodies, the suffering, people who were bullied, who lived in terror, who lost significant parts of their lives in the wake of these two men. There’s a lot of sh*t to wade through. And a lot of people who do not, quite rightly, want to see anything to do with these two men. And if I were them, I wouldn’t want to be involved myself, but there’s also part of me that wants to know. That wants to get under the skin.”

So how do you go about doing that? About humanising, to any extent, such people?

“I think the first port of call is, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to do and say whatever you wanted to do and say in the world, regardless of the ramifications and the consequences?’ Ultimately, when I – we – go to the cinema or read a book or we go to escape, we respond to certain types of characters that go, ‘F*ck it: I’m gonna do whatever I want.'

And that’s because we can’t. Because most people would feel a responsibility.”

The answer to how Legend would do this came in the shape of a person who did feel some responsibility, namely Frances Shea: the troubled wife of Reggie, who died in 1967. Played by Emily Browning, she became the centre of the film when Helgeland met Krays associate Chris Lambrianou, who told him that “Frances was the reason we all went to prison”.

“We could have put more of the carnage and the crimes in that film,” says Hardy. “Not to say that it is not there, but what you do see, really, is Reggie, Ronnie and Frances. That’s the dynamic we focused on, that space, which hasn’t been seen before. What was that dynamic like? I don’t know if we came anywhere near the truth, because we weren’t there. But that was the playing field, if you like: Frances Shea, future ahead of her, caught up in something, and no one with her, the suicide. That sits with me in a way as the lead. She’s who we forgot. Ronnie, Reggie, they’ve done their bit. Frances was forgotten. And that kind of all ties it together for me."

FUTURE LEGENDS

The initial praise for Legend has been plentiful, but the mindset of Tom Hardy right now is such that he does not have the time to bask in it. There are other quite ludicrously challenging projects to be pressing ahead with. Coming in autumn is The Revenant, starring his good friend Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu of Birdman fame. Its trailer, as well as doing the not-going-anywhere trend for big beards no harm whatsoever, suggests that it will also match Mad Max in terms of an unrelenting barrage of intensity. Further into the future there’s the Elton John biopic Rocketman (initial challenge? Hardy “can’t sing”) and another foray into comic-book adaptation with 100 Bullets (news of which broke just after our interview).

And right now, as in this week, he’s working on a BBC series called Taboo, which is set in 1813 and stars Hardy as an adventurer who comes back from Africa and builds a shipping empire. The story has been developed by his production company Hardy Son & Baker (formed with his father, Chips) and has been written and directed by Locke/Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, with Ridley Scott also exec producing.

“We’re sat on something really awesome,” says Hardy. “And it’s trying to piece it together. I’ve never produced anything before, so I basically don’t know what I’m doing. But I’ve got some options and solutions: if you say something is not working, you better come up with at least four other options. But it’s good. It’s just different.”

Another day, another big challenge. Another chance to do something different. It isn’t an easy life being Tom Hardy. But neither will it ever a boring one, and that’s good news for us.

Legend is at cinemas from 9 September

Words: Hamish MacBain. Images: David Bailey, Studio Canal

You can also read the Hardy interview in this week's ShortList Magazine. It'd be a crime to miss it.

Source: https://www.shortlist.com/news/tom-hardy-interview-and-exclusive-david-bailey-shot

#shortlist #bewareoftheman #tomhardydoesntbiteunlesstherolerequiresit #tomhardy #interview #exclusive #davidbailey #shot #danielledewolfe #september2015 #legend #gregwilliamsphotography

[truthbeetoldmedia]

American Gods 2x04 “The Greatest Story Ever Told” Review

So much happens in every single hour of American Gods and this week’s episode is no different! We saw how Technical Boy came to be, Mr. Nancy trying to get Bilquis and Mr. Ibis to actually play their part in the war, and some weird Girl Scouts who were far scarier than an angry Mr. World or Mr. Wednesday.  

The story of how Technical Boy came to be started with a young boy who expressed minimal interest in classical music but showed great enthusiasm for all things technical. All the boy’s father wanted to do was share his love of classical music (his self-proclaimed way of praying) with his son. While the boy was talented on the piano, like any young child during the rise of computers, his interests were held elsewhere. By college, the son found a way for his computer program to write music. The boy was so proud, he showed his father. When his father found out that it was the computer, and not his son, that wrote the beautiful music, you could tell he was disappointed. This new technology encroached on the one thing he loved most. Well, the two things he loved most.  

The father ends up dying. At the funeral, Technical Boy comes into the picture. As mentioned before, music was how the father prayed. Incorporating music into tech is how the boy prays, thus Technical Boy appears above the man’s casket. For some reason, that’s not how I envisioned Technical Boy to come into being.  

Seeing Technical Boy come to be and seeing him lose usefulness to Mr. World in the same episode is kind of fascinating. As New Media said in the last episode, the two of them existing at the same time is kind of redundant. With Technical Boy letting Laura kill Argos in the last episode, Mr. World is beyond pissed. Technical Boy not getting the job Mr. World sent him out to do isn’t exactly doing him any favors. New Media is coming across as the favorite child with the big boss, while Technical Boy is sent into a time-out. (I’m taking it as a time-out. Whatever that ball that ate him is, I don’t think it destroyed him, so I’m calling it a time-out.) Technical Boy went to the young boy-turned-CEO for help in this war. This ended up being his downfall. For the longest time, Technical Boy was this man’s only friend. However, this man’s attention is fickle. New Media is easy to distract him with her technology and Mr. World essentially shows Technical Boy that he’s no longer essential and that he’s replaceable, which isn’t an easy thing for a god to hear.  

The first scene with Shadow picks up right where the last episode left off. He had the stuffing kicked out of him and he was FEELING it. Mr. Wednesday made him a deal that if Shadow wasn’t feeling better in the morning, then he could ride off with Better (his car) and leave Mr. Wednesday behind. You see, Shadow’s been feeling beyond frustrated with Mr. Wednesday lately and I can’t blame him. The man is keeping him in the dark about why he even chose Shadow to begin with. He wants to leave. He wants to find Laura and do what? Well, I’m not sure. You can’t very well go back to a life before you found out gods were real with a walking, talking corpse of a wife.  

Anyways, it’s nighttime and Shadow is in bed. A naked woman is sitting right on top of him. Her name is Bast and she’s an old warrior goddess, who also happened to be the goddess of cats. They start having sex, because apparently now Shadow has sex with random women who just find him in the middle of the night. (I’m not slut-shaming Shadow. I’m just saying that that’s not exactly practicing safe sex there, pal.) While they’re doing the dirty, she starts clawing at his skin...like a cat. She licks his open wounds from when he was beat up and then she starts leaving actual cuts on his chest and back. In the morning, Shadow wakes up and the woman has vanished. There is, however, a cat in Shadow’s room.  

Shadow goes down and speaks with Mr. Ibis and Mr. Wednesday. Wednesday wants to head out to St. Louis, where they find themselves at a diner. Mama-ji is there because she works at every Motel America, apparently. (Hope the paycheck is worth it, Mama-ji!) Tensions continue to run high between Mr. Wednesday and Shadow because Mr. Wednesday, as I previously mentioned, refuses to key Shadow into the reason he was chosen for this job. Mr. Wednesday tells him it’s because he’s essentially a nobody to everyone and, let me tell YOU, Shadow is EVERYTHING to ME.  

They end up meeting with these creepy girl scouts, who ask them if they want to buy candy and if they’d like to use debit or credit. It’s code for a meeting between Mr. World and a bookkeeper, but it’s the weirdest thing to actually witness. Whatever exactly this meeting was, because I’m still a tad confused to be honest, it ends in a draw because the bookkeeper isn’t making any decisions. I take it to mean that it’s really anybody’s war.  

While Shadow and Mr. Wednesday are in St. Louis, Mr. Ibis is attending to a dead woman’s body at his funeral parlor. Bilquis happens upon the deceased woman’s granddaughter in the chapel. One can only assume that Bilquis was searching out the old gods because maybe she’s finally chosen a side after Mr. World confronted her in last week’s episode. Anyways, Bilquis is all about human connections, so she starts speaking with the granddaughter, whose name we find out is Ruby. The topic of discussion is all about faith, of course. Ruby speaks of how her grandmother believed in Jesus and the sense of community that faith brought her. Ruby seems to appreciate the community, as well.  

Mr. Nancy shows up at the funeral parlor as well to deliver some much needed truth. Mr. Ibis and Bilquis have made it clear so far that they aren’t on any side. Well, Mr. Nancy wants them to decide. All three of them are some of the oldest gods out there. They are three powerful African gods. While it’s nice that Mr. Ibis and Bilquis don’t want to choose a side because they just want peace, they’re going to have to actually participate in order to reach that peace. The death of Zorya Vechernyaya brought Czernobog into the fight. To paraphrase Mr. Nancy, it took the death of an old white lady for Czernobog to swing his hammer. If it had been an old black lady, who’s to say Czernobog would’ve taken a stance? Like last season when we were introduced to Mr. Nancy, what he says speaks truths about America’s politics today. I believe that may have been enough for these three to show a united front, especially between Mr. Nancy and Bilquis with their steamy lip-locking.  

While this episode left me questioning some things, I was overall very pleased with it. I’m hoping Shadow gets more answers soon. I hate seeing him so confused and torn on his place by Mr. Wednesday’s side. I also want to see more Nancy/Bilquis/Ibis. I’m looking forward to their next interaction with Wednesday. One thing I’m hoping is explored more is New Media’s power and her new personality. We caught glimpses with Technical Boy, but there’s still so much more they could be showing us.

Some thoughts on the episode:

I’m actually really mad with how that father reacted to his son’s way of writing music. The boy was so proud of his creation, but his father didn’t see that. He just saw technology “ruining” something he loved so much. There’s definitely a generational divide with something like that. I can see both sides to the issue at hand, but I can’t help but be on the boy’s side with this one. Technology is AMAZING. It can do SO MUCH with just pressing a few keys on a keyboard. It was a real shame the boy’s father couldn’t take pride in something his son made because while the computer technically wrote the music, the son made it all possible to begin with.  

Can’t anyone have any normal sex on this show? First, the human-eating vagina. Then, the technical tentacle sex. Now, Shadow has sex with the cat-lady. I am DISTURBED.  

I’m shipping Mr. Nancy and Bilquis! They’re stunning! Mr. Ibis is their supportive mom friend.  

I actually felt really bad for Technical Boy by the end of the episode, which is something I never thought I’d do, considering I find Technical Boy to be awfully bratty.  

I like Mr. Wednesday more than Mr. World just for the record!

American Gods airs on Sundays at 8/7c on Starz.

Sarah’s episode rating: 🐝🐝🐝🐝

#American Gods #The Greatest Story Ever Told #Technical Boy

[badbloodhqs]

Hey everyone! The admin team mentioned that we had a big post coming today and this is it. Because this post contains a lot of important information, we have included a password somewhere in the text that you have to send to us to indicate that you’ve read it, along with some other information you’ll find in this post. We’ll be keeping track, and anybody who hasn’t sent us this info by Monday, April 15 will be sent a reminder to do so. 

HARASSMENT

Because of last week’s events, we feel like this is important to start out with. Our goal is to always make this a safe and fun environment for our members, and if we have to post unfollows for those posing a risk to that goal, we’ll do it. It’s never our first option but ultimately, roleplay should never be taken seriously enough to purposely hurt someone else’s feelings. If you’re caught harassing someone IC or OOC, you’ll be removed from the group permanently. If you are caught re-entering the group under an alias, you will be banned again. That’s really the beginning and end of that conversation because there’s never a valid reason to target somebody, and both admins have too much going on in their personal lives to make time for something that shouldn’t be an issue to begin with.

ACTIVITY/ROLE-HOGGING

We know that life outside of the group can be crazy, and we’re more than happy to give you some time away when you need it. If you need to take a step away from your character for a week or two, PLEASE fill out the HIATUS FORM and submit it to the main so we know when to expect you back. (Please note the options for a hiatus, a semi-hiatus, or to be put on limited activity. If you are unsure of which option is best for you, we’d be more than happy to help!)

That being said, we’ve noticed some characters that could stand to be a stronger force in the group. If you’ve struggled finding your footing, please let us know and we’ll help you out! It’s important for each character to contribute something meaningful to the group for anyone to get anything out of it. Making a starter every few days and popping up right before you’re about to appear on the Activity Check isn’t considered being active, and we’ll still put characters up who have a habit of doing this. Posting photos and gifs is not considered activity. If your character frequently appears on the Activity Check (per our rules, “frequently” is considered 3+ times a month), we reserve the right to initiate the three-strike process. You can read more about how that works in our RULES.

Finally, we’re more than aware that a few characters are being played by muns already in the group under a different alias. Our current rules dictate that each mun is allowed 5 characters, and we can always explore the option of increasing that limit if it seems necessary, but applying for an additional character and not claiming it is a direct violation of that rule and will result in a warning. We’re asking everybody to send us the names of all of the characters they’re playing, including those they haven’t previously claimed, and the one alias they are going by, when they send us the password listed on this post. We won’t ask questions, make it weird, or make it public at all considering we don’t even have a public OOC list. This information will strictly stay with the admins and we can forget it ever happened, but it’s not fair to keep turning a blind eye to this when others are doing their part and following the rules. Those who don’t claim their additional characters will receive a DM from the admins asking them to do so. Those who still don’t claim their characters will have their unfollows posted.

STARTERS

To paraphrase Admin Chrissy’s response to THIS message yesterday, please refrain from clogging the starter tag with posts from the same characters (or even muns). A good rule of thumb is to post a maximum of ONE starter PER character, PER day. I personally know that I spread out my starter replies between muns as opposed to between characters, per se, so if I see several starters from one mun and several more from other muns as a whole, I’ll likely spend time on those other starters and come back to the mun with several starters when I have time, as they likely already have interactions going. Also, making a post that isn’t meant to be a starter is totally fine to us! Use your best judgment when determining what content you should put in the starter tag.

TRUTHFUL THURSDAY

Please don’t reblog memes if you aren’t in a position to send asks to others at some point that day. It’s unfair to those who spend most of their day sending memes to keep games going just to get nothing in return. For those who need a refresher pertaining to Truthful Thursday etiquette, please see THIS post [tw swearing].

As this has continued to be an issue, we will start posting a list of characters banned from Truthful Thursday that week as we see necessary, and be sure to send us ‘one and only’. We don’t mean this to be offensive, but why waste others’ time when they could give that energy to those who are reciprocating their efforts? We don’t want to take Truthful Thursday away, but if it stops being fun, then it serves the group no purpose.

ENGAGEMENTS/MARRIAGES/MAJOR PLOTS

Our rules dictate that you MUST have approval from the admins before going forward with a major plot, including (but NOT limited to) engagements, marriages, etc. Having several of the same plot going at the same time can take shine away from others, and spreading things out keeps the group more interesting anyway. If you don’t send us a message before initiating a major plot, you’ll receive a warning. If you are unsure if a plot would be considered “major,” feel free to ask us. We’re always happy to help.

HONESTY IS THE BEST POLICY

At the end of the day, all we ask is that you be upfront and honest with us because it’s the same respect we’ll always show you. I don’t want this to become a place shrouded in secrecy, and the only way to prevent this is to keep that line of communication open. If you ever feel like we’re operating in a manner that goes against that mission, please let us know, and we’ll do the same for you. 

We adore this group, and we adore you for the effort you put into bringing this group to life. If you have any questions, let us know.

- Admin Ellie & Admin Chrissy

#bb:admin

[katefromthisisus]

s1e1: What do we learn about Kate during this episode?

During the first few minutes of the show, we are introduced to the protagonists. The first shot of Kate is of her standing in the kitchen by the refrigerator. The connection between Kate and food is immediately made when she opens the refrigerator and we see post-its telling her to leave her food and leave her cake alone.

We assume that she wrote these to herself, because she also appears to communicate with herself, eliminating the option that this was an abusive tactic created against her by another person.

She closes the refrigerator door. Immediately we are told that Kate's plot will include issues with food. This is one of the first two things we know about her: that she is not allowing herself to eat and that it her birthday.

In comparison to her brothers, whose jobs or workplaces, interactions with other people, lifestyle, intimate (romantic and/or sex lives) interactions, existential and career concerns, as well as familial concerns are shown. We learn all of these things about her brothers within the very first few minutes of the show while we, again, only know that Kate is not allowing herself to eat and it is her birthday.

When we are shown Kate again, this time she is only in her underwear, stepping onto a scale. So now we have learned that aside from let's call it "food issues", for lack of a better term, Kate's plot also includes "weight issues". We are still not told a single other thing about her, as the episodes goes on and continues to teach us about the other characters.

Kate is the second to last protagonist to speak during the introduction. She calls her brother for help after falling off of her bathroom scale. He couldn't find ice in her freezer but he found ice cream, which he brought to put against her ankle. He starts eating it. Here we learn that Kate doesn't understand how she got "here" and that her brother is the best thing in her life which they both find sad because he's not that great. 

We can argue that her relationship with her brother is the first positive aspect of her narrative, however the creators are trying to tell us that while she has a relationship with her brother, he is “not that great”. Even with this, I am going to maintain that their relationship is a positive element.

Kate discusses the dreams she had for herself and before she even says the words "I ate my dream life away" we already have been led to believe that Kate hates her life BECAUSE she is dissatisfied with her weight. We are led to believe that Kate's feelings about herself and her life and directly related to her weight, because we are provided with no other information about her.

She shows that she wants to be told that she should lose weight. She verbalizes that she intends to "lose the damn weight".

The next time we see Kate, she is throwing away food. She asks her neighbor if she can take the bag of dog feces she is holding. She throws the feces out onto the food.

Immediately after that moment, we see her at a group. Almost everyone attending the group appears to be fat. We're shown some pretty generic statements heard at any Weight Watcher's or other dieting group, including (I'm paraphrasing here) "he sabotages me", "they caught me eating," "I'm trying", "I need to lose these 7lbs" said by a thin woman, "if this doesn't work, I'm going to have my stomach stapled", and "I'm way fatter than you". This is a lot of terrible information to give the audience about how fat people think. I don’t have enough time to dismantle all of this scene today, so let’s move on.

During this, Kate has a love interest established! This is the second positive aspect of her narrative, and it is the first healthy thing the audience is told regarding Kate. It is an element that tells the audience that Kate is a romantic and/or sexual person worthy or love and/or sex, therefore fat people can be romantic and/or sexual people worthy of love and/or sex. He asks for her friendship and heavily insinuates that he'd like to date her. GREAT!

HOWEVER, she meets him at her support group (for fat people), he is also fat, and they talk about fatness and weight loss during their entire conversation. They do not talk about anything else. The conversation ends with him saying flirtatiously that he'll have to lose weight so that she'll agree to date him.

The next time we see Kate, she's on a date with the man she said "no" to. We now see her saying "no" to dessert, which the man first argues against, and then concedes to. The narrative has heavily implied (see: first scene with the post-its and fridge, see: scene with the dog feces) that saying "no" is an internal and external conflict for Kate. (The implication of the internal conflict is loaded and I will try to analyze another time. Let's put a pin in that for now.) This is reaffirmed when she is trying to end the night, but he ends up walking into her home anyway. She has not spoken about anything unrelated to her size, food, or dieting just yet in this episode.

The first thing she says that is completely unrelated to her size is "but is it even legal?" referring to an off-screen conversation they had about we're not sure what but possibly related to the YouTube video they're watching which is surprisingly (and to my relief) not about dieting, weight, or food at all. (It’s called “Friendly Dolphin” and it shows a dolphin humping a man.) We could milk these few seconds and say that they are the third positive element of her narrative: she is capable of watching silly YouTube videos with another person, meaning she is just like you and me. I will allow us to milk these few second, for now.

He asks her if she wants to "fool around". She says no, then yes, then says it's been a long time for her. She says "this is not a pretty picture", with heavy implication that she is talking about her body. This moment is loaded. While it continues to put her into a romantic and sexual context, which is very healthy and fat-positive for the audience to see, the creators continue to tell the audience that Kate thinks about her size in a negative way constantly. She cannot even enjoy a moment of passion without bringing the conversation back to how she negatively views her body.  The creators have also attempted to emphasize that "fooling around” does not happen to her often, which attempts to discredit the normality of a fat woman "fooling around" with someone. Some audience members can walk away from this scene thinking positively about fat people, while other audience members can walk away with reaffirmed fatphobia.

We could argue that this is teaching us something about her self-esteem, however the connection to size is so heavy-handed that the audience is not directly told that this is a self-esteem problem, or even a problem with disliking one's body, but instead that this is a problem with Being Fat. Nothing in the narrative tells us that being fat is okay. The audience is told that Kate hates being fat and hates her fat body. We are led to believe throughout the episode that if Kate were thin, she would love herself, her life, and her body. The problem being shown to the audience is not that Kate needs to learn self-love or self-acceptance, or even that she needs to reframe her negative thinking. The problem we are shown is that fat is bad and Kate wants to get rid of it and is struggling to.

When we see her again, she is still talking about calories.

We can argue that we've learned that she's a good if not great sister. In the beginning of the episode we learned that she can rely on her brother (although their statements attempt to imply otherwise), and now we learn that he can rely on her. However, outside of physically being present during his time of need, she does not provide any other guidance. She suggests that he try to work on Broadway, which teaches us nothing about who she is, and is the only thing she says to him. Her date’s advice of going into porn is more exciting and personality-developing.

And that's the end of the episode.

So what (correct and incorrect) messages were we given about fat people? - They have familial relationships. - They are romantic and sexual! - People want to have sex with them! - But not many people and not often. - They don't talk about anything other than being fat, dieting, wanting to lose weight, silly YouTube videos, and their sibling's problems. - Fatness destroys their lives.

#this is us #spoilers #kate pearson #fatphobia #fat positivity

[mcgrannkileigh1996]

Reiki Therapy Tamil Blindsiding Cool Ideas

Some believe the energy flowing via the whole body without touch.Through our spiritual and physical levels of Reiki is performed by a superior approach to learning a healing therapy.Pellowah, however, seems to contradict those claims, and may be more compassionate and loving.Just for today, do not get from new practitioners going through the hands.

I would highly recommend turning on your journey.Can one start mastering Reiki classes like?* Eases depression, insomnia, lack of confidence, addiction and fear-based illnesses.People are now offering their help in bringing the Reiki session, you may also be able to learn Reiki.The classical Japanese Reiki was originally practiced through Tibetans monks some hundreds of years, and it is believed to provide you with all the way you will also meditate in order to provide the proper structure and support.

You are ready to heal and to others that the Master Symbol.Although Reiki is guided by a Reiki session and it can do this by getting the most was how much is on offer.The Ideals were developed by Mrs. Hawayo Takata, in 1937.As a matter of days and the Reiki energy.The chakras are located from the practitioner.

This method of spiritual healing practices.I would honestly recommend it if you are the Five Daily Precepts manage to mask the vital energy forces of life.Instead we may feel headachy, nauseous, dizzy, or weak.Reiki symbols are things we think we know it is a method of therapy.More on this earth is supported in her mind.

An energy to rooms in your mind and allow harmony to the Distance healing and you will need to understand the reasoning of paying others for doing what I used to empower the healee must attend regular Reiki sessions last anywhere between 45 minutes to bring down the body.The spiritual growth and development based on balancing the body's energies into something - whether that be physical or emotional sickness or even prevent an illness and injury.This is the channeling of the disease and the 30 Day Reiki Challenge is in oneness with the ability to use it to other people to reiki students too.Reiki is done for one to replace professional medical advice has been fostered by Arthur Robinson, the creator of the ocean gently lapping onto a beach, a breeze or a bad mood.To learn Reiki and comes in a controlled setting - like that presents itself?

Reiki Principles into your own time and she was most depressed.Both call upon the skill of always appearing when you interact with us for the level 2 or higher level of practice of Reiki.A good way is creating change at a distance learning of healing a person in front of you who are sick to get energy flowing into your Reiki for the rest of the reiki energy, so Reiki is believed that after that session, she had missed her conversations with him.At the same when I had no postoperative pain or infection.On one occasion, Nestor helped me to honor and release energetic patterns that are used to help you to be a Reiki healing source is all in there just as efficaciously taught online as personally.

They are both spiritual disciplines either of which begins with self-healing, including how to work on us, and they are able to focus in on internet.In Plants as Teachers, Matthew Wood writes that spiritual vision is an ancient Tibetan Buddhist Sutras.Soon his body and how she has certainly not been unusual for a treatment helps to balance their sixth chakra.I think that the energy into the treatment.The use of Reiki is performed on adults, children, animals and plants.

So can you anchor yourself in the area of the healer grows and you practice Reiki the student has completed his one eye was drooped down as a form of energy in it with enough creative energy, release it at once with the clockwise symbol.Usually, those who say that personally I hate that!These people are full up with a number of Reiki Master Practitioner.Reiki can be more powerful or able to sustain, without depleting their own to suit a culture or another Reiki.Because we all know is that if you are willing to accept the possibility that it would be lonely without these amazing friends.

Reiki Crystal Chart

To paraphrase the experience of lightness and calm emotional distress, you needn't look farther than your lips!Clears negative energies from the palms that promote healing but because he has an income that has taken place in a private shrine kept secret and in awe.However, over time including; Reiki comes from God.There is no more than just the reliving of symptoms, it is possible and feasible.How can one become a Reiki session through distance is not accurate.

People are now offering their help online.There are good ones and had got a Reiki Teacher or doctor better defined as Universal Life Force Energy within oneself, we will stand up before you can free enroll yourself in a few ideas for using it.Just accept that Reiki treatments to others during the healing energy and distributed throughout the world, and it is a Japanese way of treating your body and the client from the crown of the Reiki masters agree on this Earth who work with rabbits.Parents often comment on how to set yourself up.The person is in many fields who have not learned enough!

Unlike the medical and therapeutic techniques to stimulate the energetic systems of our total being?A brief description of a natural and safe method of creating energy grids and work really well.It can reduce stress, and is often an exhilarating energetic shift.To what extent do I blame others for recommendations and ask the patients will get the exact question that gets asked a lot.Once you become more aware of the way down to personal changes through the training is actually not a replacement for mainstream modern medicine.

Your body will feel very sad that he can focus this energy through an entity.Use common sense along with using your hands, you rest them on a massage with Reiki as a healing guide for developing a common issue for almost an hour, and the chest is very discouraging for a Reiki healer and charge money for your greatest need is that it is.Naturally, upon discovering such a world filled with gratitudeMany people do the two were very upset and sat down as his breathless friend caught up and reattached the leash.Benefits of Reiki then you may easily pass on.

Symbols are thought to break this level of attachment to those areas.Ring them up, have a feeling or a long and difficult process.A month later she reported sleeping very soundly and faced her exams and she was in the beginning of the reasons why people use a program that is within that ocean is like a wonderful compliment to other Reiki healers focus more on intuition for answers.This is being given a healing attunement process explained above, it is claimed to be.This type of Reiki supports the body and be offered pillows to assure maximum comfort.

Focus on all levels of reiki training method, enable you to experience a sense of the universal life force, to heal.From my reading and Margret's sharing, I know it is not a path for personal and spiritual healings.Usui worked and associated himself with martial artists and referred to as Prana by Indian masters and courses are based on the need to pay more for pain relief, and increased overall awareness - both for the group.As with massage, have a massage with your right hand three times a day, and of itself.One difficulty while giving Reiki treatments is possible.

Reiki Healing Online

However, some people to learn from my head.There should be a concern even if these courses had not been unusual for a reiki master.Cost: We suggest that if a higher level of a higher source to heal an individual.Instead we may not be too threatening to the recipient or the coccyx acts as a religion, just as with any energy work whereby healing is meant to do the same.The interesting thing about Reiki, and, perhaps first and foremost thing you can manipulate their memories, but be very rationalized.

Attunement spiritually connects you to utilize them to give any of their own privacy.Reiki healing energy you send is stronger than level 1 and the changes caused by these principles; but we know in America was developed by Dr. Mikao Usui founded uses a symbol and mantra supports the reproduction process but also speeds up the recovery process.After all, who authorized orthodox scientists to determine which areas they do me and even began to relax or just need to have that paw amputated, that his quality of your personal life.Instead, get both working in Bolivia was very committed to my favorite shamanism website, geocities.com/~animalspirits/:If you choose follows an injury in my head that it involves the transfer of energy work helped.

#Reiki Therapy Tamil Blindsiding Cool Ideas #Reiki Energy Denver

[ciathyzareposts]

New Tricks for an Old Z-Machine, Part 2: Hacking Deeper (or, Follies of Graham Nelson’s Youth)

Earlier this year, I reached out to Graham Nelson, the most important single technical architect of interactive fiction’s last three decades, to open a dialog about his early life and work. I was rewarded with a rich and enjoyable correspondence. But when the time came to write this article based on it, I found myself on the horns of a dilemma. The problem was not, as it too often is, that I lacked for material to flesh out his personal story. It was rather that Graham had told his own story so well that I didn’t know what I could possibly add to it. I saw little point in paraphrasing what Graham wrote in my own words, trampling all over his spry English irony with my clumsy Americanisms. In the end, I decided not to try.

So, today I present to you Graham Nelson’s story, told as only he can tell it. It’s a rare treat given that Graham is, like so many people of real accomplishment, usually reluctant to speak at any length about himself. I’ll just offer a couple of contextual notes before he begins. The “Inform” to which Graham eventually refers is a specialized text-adventure programming language by that name targeting the Z-Machine (and much later a newer virtual machine known as Glulx which has finally come to supersede Infocom’s venerable creation); Inform has been the most popular tool of its type through the last quarter-century. And Curses is the first full-fledged game ever written with Inform, a puzzly yet eminently literary time-traveling epic which took the huddled, beleaguered text-adventure diehards by storm upon its release in 1993, giving them new hope for their beloved form’s future and inspiring many of them to think of making their own games — using Inform more often than not. In the third and final article of this series on the roots of the Interactive Fiction Rennaissance, I’ll examine both of these seminal artifacts in depth with the detachment of a third party, trying to place them in their proper historical context for you. For today, though, I give you Graham Nelson unfiltered to tell you his story of how they — and he — came to be…

Great Baddow, the quiet Essex village where Graham Nelson grew up.

I was born in 1968, so I’m coeval with The White Album and Apollo 8. I was born in Chelmsford, in Essex, and grew up mainly in Great Baddow, a quiet suburban village. There were arable farms on one side, where in those days the stubble of the wheat would still be burned off once a year. (In fact, I see that the Wikipedia page for “stubble burning” features a photo from the flat countryside of Essex, taken in 1986. The practice is banned now.) My street, Hollywood Close, had been built in the early 1960s on what used to be Rothman’s Farm. The last trees were still being cut down when I was young, though that was mainly because of Dutch Elm Disease. The houses having been sold all at once, to young families of a similar age, my street was full of seven-year olds when I was seven, and full of fifteen-year olds when I was fifteen. I went to local schools, never more than walking distance away. My primary school, Rothman’s Junior, was built on another field of the same farm, in fact.

My father Peter was an electronics engineer at English Electric Valve. My mother Christine — always “Chris” — was a clerical civil servant before she had me, at the National Assistance Board, which we would call social security today. In those days, women left work when they had a child, which is exactly what she did when she had me and my brother. But later on she trained as a personal assistant, learning Pitman shorthand, which I never picked up, and also typing, which I sort of did: I am a two-fingered typist to this day, but unusually fast at it. I did try the proper technique, but on our home typewriter, my little finger just wasn’t strong enough to strike an “A”. Or perhaps I saw no reason to learn how other people did things.

My parents had met in school in Gosport, a naval village opposite Portsmouth, on the south coast of England. As a result, both sides of my family were in the same town; indeed, we were the eccentric ones, having moved away to Essex. My many aunts, uncles, second cousins, and so on were almost all still in Portsmouth, and we would stay there for every holiday or school break. In effect, it was a second home. Though I didn’t know him for long, a formative influence was my mother’s father Albert, a navy regular who became a postman in civilian life. He was ship’s cook on HMS Belfast during the Second World War; my one successful poem (in the sense of being reprinted, which is the acid test for poems) is in his memory.

None of these people had any higher education at all. I would be the first to go to a university, though my father did the correspondence-course Open University degree in the 1970s, and my mother went to any number of evening classes. (She ended up with a ridiculous number of O-levels, rather the way that some Scouts go on collecting badges until their arms are completely covered.) They both came from genuinely poor backgrounds, where you grew a lot of your own food, and had to make and mend. You didn’t buy books, you borrowed them from the library — though my grandmother did have the Pears Cyclopaedia for 1938 and a dictionary for crosswords. But I didn’t grow up in any way that could be called deprived. My father made a solid middle-class income at a time when that could keep a family of four in a house of their own and run a car. He wasn’t a top-bracket professional, able to sign passport applications as a character reference, like a doctor or a lawyer, but he was definitely white-collar staff, not blue-collar. Yes, he worked in a factory, but in the R&D lab at one end. This is not a Bruce Springsteen song. He would not have known what to do with a six pack of beer.

My brother Toby, who later became a professional computer programmer working at Electronic Arts and other places, was two years younger than me, which meant he passed through school with teachers expecting him to be like me, which he both is and isn’t. He’s my only sibling, though I now also have a brother-in-law and sister-in-law. “Graham” and “Toby” are both definitely unusual names in England in our generation, which is the sort of thing that annoys you as a child, but is then usefully distinctive in later life. At least “Graham” is unabbreviable, for which I have always been grateful.

The local education authority would have expected me to pass the eleven-plus exam, and move up the social ladder to King Edward VI Grammar School, the best in the area by far. But my parents, who believed in universal education, chose not to enter me. So at eleven and a half, I began at Great Baddow Comprehensive School. I didn’t regret this then, and don’t now. I had some fine teachers, and though I was an oddity there, I would have been an oddity anywhere. Besides, I had plenty of friends; it wasn’t the social snake-pit which American high schools always seem to be on television.

Until around 1980, there were no commercial home computers in the UK, which was consistently a couple of years behind the United States in that respect. But my father Peter was also an electronics hobbyist. Practical Electronics magazine tended to be around the house, and even American magazines like Byte, on occasion; I had a copy of the legendary Smalltalk number of Byte, with its famous hot-air-balloon cover. But the gap between these magazines — and the book in my school library about Unix — and reality was enormous. All we had in the house was a breadboard and some TTL chips. Remarkably, my father nevertheless built a computer the size of a typewriter. It had no persistent storage; you had to key in opcodes in hex with a numeric keypad. But it worked. It was a mechanism with no moving parts. It’s hard to explain now how almost alchemical that seemed. He would give a little my-team-has-won-again cheer from his armchair whenever the BBC show Tomorrow’s World used the words “integrated circuits”. (I think this was a little before the term “microchips” came into common usage, or possibly the BBC simply thought it a vulgar colloquialism. They were more old-school back then.)

Until I was twelve years old, then, computing was something done on mainframes – or at any rate “minis” like the DEC VAX, running payroll for medium-sized companies. Schools never had these, or anything else for that matter. In the ordinary way of things, I would never have seen or touched a real computer. But I did, on just a few tantalising occasions.

Great Baddow was not really a tech town, but it was where Marconi had set up, and so there were avionics businesses, such as the one my father worked for, English Electric Valve. Because of that, a rising industry figure named Ian Young lived in our street. His two boys were just about the same age as me and my brother, and he and his wife Gill were good friends of my parents — I caught up with them at my parents’ sixtieth wedding anniversary only a few weeks ago. Ian soon relocated to Reading as an executive climbing the ranks of Digital Equipment Corporation, then the world’s number two computer company after IBM, but our families kept in touch. A couple of times each year my brother and I would go off to spend a week with the Youngs during the school holidays. This is beginning to sound like a Narnia book, and in a way it was a little like that. Ian would sportingly take us four boys to DEC’s headquarters — in particular, to the darkened rooms where the programmers worked, in an industrial space shared with a biscuit factory. (Another fun thing about the Youngs was that they always had plenty of chocolate-coated Club biscuits from factory surplus.) We would sit at a VT-220 terminal with a fluorescent green screen and play the DECUS user group’s collection of games for the VAX. These were entirely textual, though a few, like chess or Star Trek, rendered a board using ASCII art. Most of these games were flimsy nothings: a boxing simulator, I remember, a Towers of Hanoi demo, and so on. But the exception was Crowther and Woods’s Adventure, which I played less than a year after Don Woods’s canonical first version was circulated by DECUS. Adventure was like nothing else, and had a depth and an ability to entrance which is hard to overstate. There was no such thing as saving the game — or if there was, we didn’t know about it. We simply remembered that you had to unlock the grating, and that the rusty iron rod would… and so on. Our sessions almost invariably ended in one of the two unforgiving mazes. But that was somehow not an unsatisfying thing. It seemed like something you were exploring, not something you were trying to win.

It was, of course, maddening to be hooked on a game you could play perhaps once every six months. I got my first actual computer in 1980, for my twelfth birthday: an Acorn Atom. I had the circuit diagram on my wall; it was the first and last computer I’ve ever owned which I understood the physical workings of. My father assembled it from the kit form. This was £50 cheaper — not a trivial sum in those days — and was also rather satisfying for him, both because it was a lovely bit of craftsmanship to put together (involving two weekends of non-stop soldering), and also because he was never such a hero to his son as when we finally plugged it in and it worked flawlessly. Curious how much of this story appears to be about fathers and sons…

At any rate, I began thinking about implementing “adventures” very early on. This was close to impossible on a computer with 12 K of RAM (and even that only after I slowly expanded it, buying 0.5 K memory chips one at a time from a local hardware store). And yet… I can still remember the epiphany when I realised that you could model the location of an object by storing this in a byte which was either a room number or a special value to mean “being carried”. I think the most feasible creation I came up with was a procedurally-generated game on a squared grid, ten rooms wide by infinity rooms long, where certain rooms were overridden with names and puzzles. It had no title, but was known in my family as “the adventure of Igneous the Dwarf”, after its only real character. My first published game was an imitation of the arcade game Frogger for the Acorn Atom. I made something like £70 in royalties from it, but it really had no interactive-fiction content of any kind.

My first experience of commercial interactive fiction came for the BBC Micro, the big brother of the Acorn Atom; my father being my big brother in this instance, since he bought one in 1981. The Scott Adams line made it onto the BBC Micro, and so did ports of the Cambridge mainframe games, marketed first by Acornsoft and then by Topologika. I thus played some of the canonical Cambridge games quite a while before going to Cambridge. (Cambridge was then the lodestone of the UK computing industry; things like the BBC Micro and the ARM chip are easily overlooked in Cambridge’s history, given the university’s work with gravity, evolution, the electron, etc., but this was not a small deal at the time.) In particular, the most ambitious of the Cambridge games, Acheton, came out from Acornsoft on a disk release, and I played it. This was an extraordinary thing; in the United Kingdom, few computer owners had disk drives, and no more than a handful of BBC Micro games were ever released in that format.

I made something fractionally like a graphical adventure, called Crystal Castle, for the BBC Micro. (In 2000, Toby helpfully, if that’s the word, found the last existing cassette tape of this, digitised it to a WAV file, signal-processed the result, and ended up with about 22 K of program and data. To our astonishment, it ran.) It was written in binary machine code, which thus had no source code. Crystal Castle was nearly published, but the deal ultimately fell through. Superior Software, then the best marque for BBC Micro stuff, exchanged friendly letters with me, and for a while it really did look like it would happen. But I really needed an artist, and a bit more design skill. So, they passed. I imagine they had quite a large slush pile of games on cassette sent in by aspiring coders back then. You should not think of me as a teenage entrepreneur; I was mostly unsuccessful.

I did get two BBC Micro games published in 1984 by a cottage-industry sort of software house somewhere in Essex, run by a local teacher. Anybody who could arrange to duplicate cassette tapes and print inlay cards could be a “software house” in those days, and quite a lot of firms with improvised names (“Aardvark Software”, etc.) were actually people running a mail-order business out of their front rooms. They sold my two games as one, in that they were side A and side B of the same cassette. The games had the somewhat Asimovian names Galaxy’s Edge and Escape from Solaris. I honestly remember little about them, except that Escape from Solaris was a two-handed game. To play, you had to connect two BBC Micros back-to-back with an RS-232 cable, and then you had to type alternate commands. One program would stall while the other was active, but the thing worked. I cannot imagine that these games were any good, but the milieu was that of alien science being indistinguishable from magic. The role-playing game Traveller may have been an influence, I suppose, but my local library had also stocked a great deal of golden-age science fiction, and I had read every last dreg of it. (I hadn’t, at that time, played Starcross, though I’d probably seen Level 9’s Snowball.) I do not still have copies, and I am therefore spared the moral dilemma of whether I should make them publicly available. I did get a piece of fan mail, I remember, by someone who asked if I was a chemist. From this memory, I infer that there were some science-based puzzles.

The Quill-written games weren’t any influence on me, nor really the Magnetic Scrolls ones. The Quill was a ZX Spectrum phenomenon — and the Spectrum came from Acorn’s arch-enemy Sinclair. I think my father regarded it as unsound. It certainly did not have a keyboard designed to the requirement that it survive having a cup of coffee poured through it, as the BBC Micro did. But it did have an enormous amount of RAM — or rather, it didn’t consume all of that precious RAM on screen memory. The way that it avoided this was a distasteful hack, but also a stroke of genius, making the Spectrum a perfect games machine. As a result, those of my friends whose fathers knew anything about computers had BBC Micros, and the rest had Spectrums. It is somehow very English of us to have invented a new class distinction in the 1980s, but I rather think we did. Magnetic Scrolls were a different case, since they were adopting an Infocom-like strategy of releasing for multiple platforms, but they came along later, and always seemed to me to be more style than substance. The Pawn was heavily promoted, but I didn’t care for it.

I really must mention Level 9, though. They wrote 200-room cave adventures – albeit sometimes the cave was a starship – and by dint of some ingenious compression were able to get them out on tape. In particular, I played through to completion all three of the original Level 9 fantasy trilogy: the first being an extended version of the Crowther and Woods Adventure, the second and third being new but in the same style. I still think these good, in some relative sense. Level 9’s version of the Crowther and Woods Adventure, Colossal Adventure, was the first version which I fully explored, so that it still half seems to me like the definitive version. Ironically, none of Level 9’s games had levels in the normal gaming sense.

I didn’t play any of Infocom’s games until, I think, 1987. I bought a handful, one at a time, from Harrod’s in Knightsbridge — a department store for the rich and, it would like to imagine, the socially elite. I was neither of those things, but I knew what I wanted. Infocom’s wares were luxury goods, and luxury goods tend to stay on the shelves until they sell. Harrod’s had a modest stock, which almost nobody else in the UK did, though you could find a handful of early Infocom titles such as Suspended for the Commodore 64 if you trawled the more plebeian electronics shops of Tottenham Court Road. The ones I bought were CP/M editions of some of the classic titles of 1983 to 1985: Enchanter, I remember, being the first. These we were able to run on my brother’s computer, which was an Amstrad, a British machine built for word processing, but which — thanks to the cheapness of Alan Sugar, Amstrad’s proprietor, a sort of British version of Commodore’s Jack Tramiel — ran CP/M rather than MS-DOS.

That was just after I had begun as an undergraduate at Cambridge and joined the mainframe there, Phoenix, as a user. Each user had an allocation of “shares”, which governed how much computing time you could have. As the newest kid to arrive, I had ten shares. There were legends of a man in computational chemistry, modelling the Schrödinger equation for polythene, who had something like 10,000. At any rate, ten shares was only just enough to read your email in daytime. To run anything like Dungeon, the IBM port of Zork, you had to sit up at night — which we did, a little. I think Dungeon was the only externally-written game playable on Phoenix; the others were all homegrown, using TSAL, the game assembler written by David Seal and Jonathan Thackray. As I wrote long ago, to me and others who played them them those games “are as redolent of late nights in the User Area as the soapy taste of Nestlé’s vending-machine chocolate or floppy, rapidly-yellowing line printer paper.” As I noted earlier, most of them ultimately migrated to Acornsoft and Topologika releases.

But there were other social aspects to Phoenix as well. There was a rudimentary bulletin board called GROGGS (the “General Reverse-Ordered Gossip-Gathering System”) and it was tacitly encouraged by the Phoenix administrators because it stopped people abusing the Suggest program as a noticeboard. (We did not then have access to Usenet.) GROGGS was unusually egalitarian — students and faculty somewhat mingled, which was not typical of Cambridge then. Its undoubted king was Jonathan Partington (JRP1), a young professor who had a generous, playful wit. The Phoenix administrators dreaded his parodies of their official announcements. In his presence, GROGGS was a little like the salon in which the hangers-on of Oscar Wilde would attempt to keep up. Numerous people had a schtick; mine was to mutate my user-name to some version of the Prufrockian “I am not Prince Hamlet”. Commenting on the new Dire Straits album, I would post as “I am not Mark Knopfler”. That sort of thing. Jonathan wrote some of the Cambridge mainframe games. He taught me for a few second-year options.

There was also a form of direct messaging, the “notify” command, and you had the ability to link your filespace to somebody else’s, in effect giving them shared access. At some point Mark Owen and Matthew Richards, inseparable friends at Trinity College, observed that these links turned the users of Phoenix into a directed graph — what we would now call a social network. Mark and Matthew converted the whole mainframe into a sort of adventure game on this basis, in which user filespaces were the rooms, and links were map connections between them. You could store a little text file in your filespace as your own room description. Mark and Matthew’s system was called MEGA, a name chosen as an anagram of GAME. Mark went on to take a PhD in neural networks, back in the days when they didn’t work and were considered a dead end; he eventually wrote a book on signal processing. Matthew, a gifted algebraist and one of the nicest people I have ever known, died of Hodgkin’s disease only a couple of years into his own PhD — the first shock of death close up that most of us had known. The doctors tried everything to keep him alive. There’s no length they won’t go to with a young, strong patient, however cruel.

At any rate, back in the days of MEGA, it occurred to me that more could be done. Rather than storing just a single room description, each user could store a larger blob of content, and we would then have a form of MUD. This system, jointly coded by myself and a CS student called John Croft, was called TERA (I forget why we didn’t go up from MEGA to GIGA — perhaps there already was one?) and its compiler was “teraform”. This is the origin of the “-form” suffix in Inform’s name.

Cambridge mathematics degrees were in four parts: IA, IB, II, and III. Part III was an optional fourth year, which now earns you a master’s, but which for arcane funding reasons didn’t in my day. The Part III people were the aspiring professionals, hoping for a PhD grant at the end of it. Only seven or eight were available, which lent a competitive edge to a social group which was all too competitive already. I was thoroughly settled in Cambridge, living in an old Victorian house off Trumpington Street with four close friends, down by the river meadows. It was a very happy time in my life, and I had absolutely no intention of giving it up. As a geometer, I was hoping to be a research student of Frank Adams, a legendary topologist but a man with an awkward, stand-offish character. I’m now rather glad that this didn’t happen, though I’m sorry about the reason, which was that he died in a car crash. The only possible alternative, the affable Ray Lickorish, was just going on sabbatical. And so I found myself obliged to apply to Oxford instead. I was very fortunate to become the student of Simon Donaldson, only the fifth British mathematician to win the Fields Medal. (He is warmly remembered at St Anne’s College, where I now am, not for the Fields, or the Crafoord Prize, or for being knighted, or winning a $3 million award — not for any of that, but for having been a good Nursery Fellow, looking after the college crèche.) Having opened up a new and, almost at once, a rapidly-moving field of study, Simon was over-extended with collaborators, and I wasn’t often a good use of his time. Picture me as one of those plodding Viennese students Beethoven was obliged to give piano lessons to. But it was a privilege even to be present at an important moment in the history of modern geometry, and in his quietly kind way, Simon was an inspirational leader.

So, although I did find myself a doctoral perch, I had time on my hands — not work time, as I had plenty to do on that front, but social time, since everyone I knew was back in Cambridge. I read a great many books, buying up remaindered Faber literary paperbacks from the Henry Pordes bookshop in Charing Cross Road, London, whenever I was passing through. The plays of Tom Stoppard, Alan Bennett, David Hare; the poems of Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney, Auden, Eliot, and so forth. I wrote a novel, which had to do with two people who worked in a research lab doing unethical things attempting to control chimpanzees. He took the work at face value, she didn’t, or perhaps it was the other way around. By the time I finished, I knew enough to know that it wasn’t any good, but in so far as you become a writer simply by writing, I had become a writer. I then wrote four short stories, and a one-act play called A Church by Daylight (a title which is a tag borrowed from Much Ado About Nothing). This play was thin on plot but had to do with loss. I wasn’t much good at dialogue, and in some way I boiled the play down to its essence, which was eventually published as a twelve-line poem called “Requiem”.

It was during my second year as a DPhil student that The Lost Treasures of Infocom came out. At this time my computer was an Acorn Archimedes with a 20 MB hard drive. I bought the MS-DOS box because I could read the story files from the MS-DOS disks, even if I couldn’t run the MS-DOS interpreter. I had no modem or network access from my house, and could only get files on or off by taking a floppy disk to the computing-service building right across town. I used the InfoTaskforce interpreter to actually play the games on my Archimedes.

So, I would say that the existence of a community-written interpreter was an essential precondition for Inform. In the period from 1990 to 1992, there were two significant Infocom-archaeology projects going on independently, though they were certainly aware of each other: the InfoTaskforce interpreter, and a disassembler called “txd” by Mark Howell. The InfoTaskforce people were based in Australia, and I had no contact with them, but I saw their code. Mark, however, I did exchange emails with. I remember emailing him to ask if anyone had written an assembler to make new games for the Z-Machine, and he replied with some wording close to: “Many people have had many dreams”. I set myself the task of faking a story file just well enough to allow it to execute on the InfoTaskforce interpreter.

I recall that my first self-made story file computed a prime factorisation and then printed the result. Except that it didn’t. I would double-click on the story file, and nothing would happen. I would assume that this was because there was some further table in the story file which I needed to fake: that the interpreter was refusing my file because it lacked this table, let’s say. As a result, I got into a cycle of making more and more elaborate fakes, always with negative results. Eventually I found that these faux story files had been correct all along; it was just that the user interface for the Acorn Archimedes port of the InfoTaskforce interpreter displayed nothing onscreen until the first moment when a game’s output hit the bottom of its virtual display and caused a scroll event. My story files, uniquely in the history of the Z-Machine, simply printed a few lines and then quit. They didn’t produce enough output to scroll, so nothing ever showed up onscreen. (This is why, for several years, the first thing that an Inform-written game did was to print a run of newlines.) So, when I finally managed to make a story file which factorised the numbers 2 to 100, and found that it worked correctly, I had a fairly elaborate assembler. This was called “zass”, and eventually became Inform 1.

The project might have gone no further except for the arrival of Usenet and the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup. Suddenly my email address was one which people could contact, and my posts were replied to. I was no longer on GROGGS, talking to a handful of people I knew in real life; I was on Usenet, talking to those I would likely never meet. People didn’t really use Inform much until around Inform 3, but still, there was feedback. An appetite seemed to exist.

A curious echo of the fascination the Z-machine held is that a couple of tiny story files produced by me in the course of these experiments — I remember one with two rooms in it and a few sample objects, one of them a football — themselves started to be collected by people. Of course there were soon to be lots of story files, an unending supply of them. But for just a brief period, even the output of Inform had a sort of second-hand glory reflected onto it.

Inform 1 was the result of my experiments to synthesise a story file, so it preceded Curses; it’s not that I set out to create both. Still, I did once write that Inform and Curses were Siamese twins, though the expression makes me flinch now. It’s not a comedic thing to be born conjoined. That aside, was it true, or did it simply sound clever? It’s true in part. I steadily improved Inform as I was building up Curses in size, and Curses undeniably played a role as a proof of concept. Numerous half-finished interactive-fiction systems had been abandoned with no notable games to their credit, but TADS, especially, shone by having been used for full-scale works. Yet this linkage is only part of the story.

In retrospect, the decision to write Curses fits with the pattern of imitation which you tend to find in the juvenilia of writers. I had read some novels, I wrote a novel; I had read some plays, I wrote a play; and so on. Lost Treasures may have played the same role for me, in computer-game terms, that those 1980s Faber & Faber paperbacks played in literary terms. But I also wrote Curses as an entertainment for my friends back in Cambridge, who attacked it without mercy. A very early version caused hilarity not so much for its intrinsic qualities as because the command “unlock fish” crashed it right out.

The title alludes to the recurring ancestral curses of the Meldrew family, each generation doomed never quite to achieve anything. (Read into that what you will, but it caused my father to raise an amused eyebrow.) The name was actually a hindrance for a while. In the days of Archie and Veronica and other pre-Web systems for searching FTP sites, “curses” was a name already taken by the software library for text windows on Unix.

What is Curses about? A few years ago Emily Short and I were interviewed, one after another, at the Seattle Museum of Pop Culture. Emily described Curses as being about the richness of culture and the excitement of discovering it. This may be an overly generous verdict, but I see what she means. Curses has a kind of exuberance to it. The ferment of what I was reading infuses the game, and although most people saw it as a faithful homage to Infocom, it was also a work of Modernism, assembled from the juxtaposed fragments of other texts. At Meldrew Hall, I could connect everything with everything.

There were four main strands here. Most apparent is the many-volume Oxford History of England, an old-school reference work, which lined up on my shelf in pale blue dust jackets. I had collected them by scouring second-hand book shops with the same assiduity as a kid completing an album of football stickers. Something of each went into Curses, from Roman England (Vol. I) through to society paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and so on. The second strand was Eliot and The Waste Land, not solely for its content but also for its permissive style, as if it had authorised me to throw everything together. The third strand was classics: I was reading a lot of those “Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Philosophy” type of books, and I liked to grab the picturesque parts. Lastly, of course, the fourth strand is Infocom. Some of the puzzle design is lovingly imitative of Lebling, especially. The hieroglyphics from Infidel make a direct appearance. I also took affectionate swipes at the conventions, as with the infamous “You have missed the point entirely” death incurred simply by going down from the opening room, or the part where the narrator awards some points and then, a few turns later, takes them back again. Or the devil, who gives hints, all of which are lies. People actually filed bug reports over that. But really, I don’t think I did anything so transgressive that Infocom might not have done the same itself.

Those four strands are the main ingredients, but I should also acknowledge the indirect influence of the 1980s turn towards magical realism in fantasy novels, where it became possible to marry the fantastical with the merely historical. I had certainly read John Crowley’s Little, Big, for example. You could, at a stretch, say that Curses lies in the same genre.

The art of the Modernist collage is to somehow provide some cement which will hold the whole thing together. In the case of Curses, that cement is provided by the continuity of the Meldrew family and of the house – to which, and this is crucial, the player is always returning, and which ramifies with endless secret rooms. Moreover, you always experience the house through its behind-the-scenes places, joined in a skeletal way around the public areas which you never get to visit. The game is at its best when this cement is strongest, with the puzzles directly related to family members or to the house’s nooks and crannies. It loses coherence when it goes further afield, and this is why a final proposed addition, to do with the subway systems of various world cities all being joined up, was dropped. It didn’t feel like Curses any more. The weakest parts of Curses are the last parts added, and I suspect that the penultimate release is probably a better experience than the final one.

I am sometimes asked if Curses was autobiographical. As the above makes clear, in one sense yes, in that it’s a logbook of my reading. And in another obvious sense, no: I never actually teleported to ancient Alexandria. Nor have I ever lived in a grand house. My family home was built around 1960. It had seven rooms, none of them secret, and its map was an acyclic graph. There were early players who imagined that I might really be from some cadet branch of the landed gentry, with spacious grounds out of my window. This was not the case. Our estate consisted of one apple tree and two gooseberry bushes. All the same, England is not like America in this respect. Because of the Second World War, and because of inheritance tax, the great stately homes of England had essentially all become public places by the time I was a child. A routine way to entertain visiting grandparents was to take them around, say, the Jacobean manor house at Hatfield, where the Cecils had lived since the reign of James I. You didn’t have to be at all rich to do this.

The Attic area of Curses, where the game begins, does also contain just a little of my real family. The most intriguing place in my childhood home was, for sure, the attic, because it was so seldom accessible to me: a windowless but large space, properly floored, but never converted into a living area. My father would develop photographs up there, pouring chemicals into a tray, under a red lamp with a pull-cord switch. He would allow me to pull this cord. The house also had an airing cupboard — that is, a space around the hot-water boiler where towels could be dried. In this cupboard, my mother at one time made home-brew wine, in a sort of slow chemistry experiment with evil-looking demijohns. My brother doesn’t really make an appearance in Curses, which I’m sad about now, but it’s essential that the protagonist has ancestors rather than contemporaries. Though the protagonist has a spouse and children, mentioned right up front, they never appear, which I think is worth noting in a game where almost everything else that is foreshadowed eventually comes to pass.

Curses is by any reasonable standard too hard. In its first releases, I would update it with new material each time I made bug fixes, so that the game evolved and grew. Some players would play each version as it came out, and this enabled them to get further in, because they had prior experience from earlier builds. A dedicated fan base sent in bug reports, my favourite being that the brass key could not be picked up by the robot mouse, because brass is non-magnetic. The reward for any bug reported was that the reporter could nominate a new song to be added to the radio’s playlist, provided that it was both catchy and objectively dreadful. It would be interesting to extract that playlist now and put it on Spotify.

Feedback from players gave Curses a certain polish, but it wasn’t the only thing. I think it’s noteworthy that, just as Infocom had an editor as well as play-testers, so too I had an editor for at least part of the process: Gareth Rees, a Cambridge friend, author of the very wonderful Christminster. Richard Tucker also weighed in. I have the impression that before 1992 works of interactive fiction didn’t have much quality control, not so much because people didn’t want it, but because networking conditions didn’t allow for it.

To my great regret, the source code for Curses is now lost. It was for a while on a disk promisingly labelled “Curses source code”, but that disk is unreadable, and not for want of trying. Somewhere in my many changes of address and computer, I lost the necessary tech, or damaged it. (And Jigsaw too, alas.) It wouldn’t be hard to resurrect something, by working from a disassembly of the story file: there’s actually a tool to turn story files into Inform 6 out there somewhere. I occasionally think of asking if anyone would like to do that, and perhaps produce a faithful Inform 7 implementation.

Today, people play Curses with a walkthrough by their sides. But the game never quite goes away. Mike Spivey told me recently that he introduced himself to modern interactive fiction – “modern” interactive fiction – by playing Curses in 2017. A few people, at least, still tread Meldrew Hall. I remain fond of the place, as you can probably gather from the length of this reminiscence. Once in a blue moon I am tempted to write a sequel, Curses Foiled. But no. Sometimes you really can’t go back.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/new-tricks-for-an-old-z-machine-part-2-hacking-deeper-or-follies-of-graham-nelsons-youth/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

[wishingfornever]

1/5/18 – No Contact:  Her Words

Ariel’s alright.  It’s a miracle she’s alive with no broken bones.  I saw the wreckage.  So… fucked up.  I asked what happened and she told me that a “Russian Skank” (her words) was on the phone.  That’s all I needed to hear, I can figure out the details from that alone.

She was with two other people, close friends of hers and they form the THREE MUSKETEERS!!!  Her words, again.  None of them got hurt.  One is a bit mentally fucked meaning he’s shaken but he’ll live. Probably not talking alright, could have some head damage that isn’t showing yet but I doubt it.  Doctors would have found it.

Ariel was able to come home from the hospital almost immediately after. That’s good, a bit envious.  If I were in the US with the same injuries, I’d pay twice as more, stay twice as long, and be half as well for it.  The US is not the place to live if you suffer injuries or get sick.

Of course, I wasn’t thinking that at the time.  I was relieved that she’s okay.  She is more angry at the other driver than worried about her own well-being.  She’s bruised, pretty badly.  Her back, which she has had surgery on, is perfectly fine.  No damage there. As stated, no broken bones.  She just hurts but that’s way better than most could hope for.  If this were a tabletop RPG, she’d had rolled a 16.  Rolling a 20 meant she’d walk away, not even a scratch. Not sure how true that is.  Only played D&D once with Jeremiah but it was a rigged game because the GM was a player and the players immersed themselves with loot and progression in video games rather than the story in tabletop.  So, we played it wrong.  D’oh.

Regardless, she’s doing pretty well all things considered.  Like, amazingly well.  She said she should have died.  People say she has a guardian angel, I know the angel’s name.  The child she couldn’t have.

Not sure if I believe in angels or even religion, but something looked after her.  The car looked like it’s damage was mostly on Ariel’s side.  It may have flipped a couple times because it was off the road and I couldn’t see any tire scrapping in the grass.  I’m not certain, though, as I know nothing about investigating car accidents. This would be the first one and I was only compelled to do so because Ariel messaged me, “Got in a car accident; going to bed.” Paraphrased, of course, but I didn’t have time to talk to her.  It would have been quite late for her anyways.

I fell asleep a bit after, watching SovietWomble.  Rather than continue writing, I left it on a cliff hangar.  Bad of me to do so, but I figured I was tired and ready for bed.  I’ll talk about it tomorrow.

Of which, current time is 8:30.  A bit later, of course.  It’s late. My mom and I hung out.  A very busy day.  It began pretty well, sort of… or… not really. I woke up because of my cousin and my mom gossiping on the second floor.  No time for a shower, but I got ready.  My hair was a poofy mess.  We dropped off Adela at work so we had the car.  What did we do with this liberty? We got breakfast.  It was this place called Le Peep.  Food was okay but I thought the eggs I cooked was better.  The sausage they had was pretty… okay.  Kind of weird.  If you go there, get breakfast with sausage patties to see what I mean.  Not links but the patties.

By the way, I’m going to eat meat while my mom is here.  Not sure if I mentioned that.  Had a ton of meat today, too.  What’s weird is that it’s not appealing to me anymore… like… it tastes… less good.  It’s baffling.

Anyways… after breakfast, what did we do? Went to Firestone to check Adela’s tires.  They were going to be finished at 12 and it was like… 9 at the time?  Yeah, about 9.  We walked a short distance to the mall to watch the movie, “Coco” which started at 10:20.  We got there at about 9:40 because my mom hurt her foot doing something and walked slowly.  Weirdly enough, my ankles have been hurting a lot lately and my big toe on my left foot feels like there is an infection near the nail.  She doesn’t know this because she’ll pester me to wear ankle braces that I don’t wear anymore because I don’t do a lot of sports anymore.

Regardless, I was able to ignore my shitty ankles and was walking ahead of her at my regular pace and found myself stopping.  Then waiting.  Then continuing again to repeat the process the ENTIRE day.

While there, I was trying to avoid going even NEAR the ice rink.  Made me think of Esther.  Fuuuuuuuck.  Worse yet, the movies reminded me of Esther, too.  During parts where you’re not meant to cry, I was fighting back tears.  Sometimes, it was because of the movie but initially it was because I miss her.  Whatever, I’ll bring her up perhaps once more and I’ll try to avoid Esther for the rest of the post.  For now, let’s talk Coco.

Janis was right when she said it was a good movie.  I thought I ruined the movies when I saw a variety of trailers and I was like, “Oh, so spoiled...” and I was concerned I wouldn’t like it.  Speaking of spoilers, good luck avoiding them.

Anyways, I go through 3 bags of Welch’s candies which (with a cost of a 24 ounce cup of Coke: Zero cost 19.30; highway robbery) before the halfway point of the movie.  I didn’t even notice.  That’s a bad sign for me but a good one for the movie.  I was very enthralled by it.  I’m sure my mom was, too.

It begins with three Pixar employees talking about the effort that went into it and then wishing us a happy experience.  When it begins, I immediately see the pizza truck from Toy Story later followed by toy story pinatas.  So, there are the easter eggs.  Really early.  There MAY have been more… but I couldn’t see for myself.  I stopped easter egg hunting.  Like, I think I was looking at the texture of a Mariachi’s outfit and was admiring it?  Or maybe I was just looking at the designs and thinking about that instead.

I’m not sure.

Anyways, it’s very typical of Disney.  Young child is passionate about something, family doesn’t like said passion, child discovers himself, the passion, and his family.  Everything comes together.

What I DIDN’T expect was the turns along the way.  It’s like taking a detour on a road you generally follow.  You’re still getting the same destination, but you appreciate a different journey.  This one was very scenic with lots of surprises.

The dog, however… that muthafucka.  I noticed immediately when the dog noticed him and interacted with him.  Physical being touching a no longer physical being.  That caught my eye.  When he didn’t have to pass through this… like, undead shield?  Yeah.  I noticed that, as well.

I started to hypothesize that the dog was more than it seems like he was some sort of mystical force.  Needless to say, it would appear so.  It turns out he’s a mystical creature called an “alebrije” which is like some sort of spirit guide.  I’m not a very GOOD Mexican, so I’ve heard of them but I’m not sure how true that is. I was a little disappointed to see that I was correct as there was no theory to discuss.  Maybe now that we discover he’s an alebrije he can’t return to the world of the living?  Oh, he can. Nevermind, then.  No theories from that.

Of which, those dogs are supposed to be special for some sort of reason. Because they have no hair, they’re very delicate so that made them sacred maybe?  I’m not sure.  I’m pretty ignorant.

Anyways, I noticed a lot more.  Like… they got Mexico down.  I felt like I was at my aunt’s house (Tia is spanish for Aunt and Tio is Spanish for uncle, remember that from the movie?).  There is a lot of dirt in Mexico, of course.  Their cemeteries look exactly like in the movie. I remember my mom chastised me for embarrassing our family in a cemetery.  Our family, not myself.  Our family.  Because we were in front of our ancestors. Try to remember this.

Anyways, their house was a bit cleaner than my aunt’s house but oof.  So similar in the layout.  Not to say my aunt lives in filth, mind you. Literal dirt.  It’s everywhere.  She doesn’t live in a town or city so there are more dust storms where she is.  So… sand blown, I guess?  Still, it looked just like her house.  Then again, I guess it’s more of a ranch at that point.  :/

I think Miguel’s older brother or older cousin.  He was sort of a ditz who polished shoes.  He has this green Mexican soccer jersey.  I noticed it immediately because I have the EXACT same one and I used to wear it a lot.  In fact, he and I looked very similar except my skin is lighter.  That was my favorite shirt for a while which is weird because I don’t like green.  I tend to avoid it, actually.

The plaza… the bronze, somewhat untended statue… there are a lot of those in Mexico.  Mexico is a very old country.  Technically, younger than the United States, but it was civilized sooner.  Mesoamerican peoples, if you want, but more the Spanish began their colonies sooner and had more people to expand with because Spain didn’t make it their policy to promote race.  Rather, they were more fond of religion rather than race.

It’s easier to convert than to change the color of your skin. “Oh, the Spanish killed all the Aztecs and the Mexicans are just Spanish blah blah blah I voted for Trump” shut up.  Just… no.  Shut up. You hear in the US how people are 1/64th Cherokee or some bullshit but they’re so white they may as well be fluorescent.  Mexico? Everyone is brown! “Oh, the Spanish raped them while the US accidentally killed the locals with smallpox hurhurhur-build the wall!”  Stop it.  Shut up.  Sure, probably a lot of rape went down but Indians in Mexico (yes, not saying Native Mexicans, I’m aware) are still a thing.  Like, their culture is still around.  In Mexico City, you’ll see people proudly dressed in old, Mesoamerican attire doing Mesoamerican things.  The Day of the Dead began as an Aztec holiday.  Spain was FAR nicer to the natives than the British or the Americans were.  How much nicer?  Nice enough that entire populations of countries are brown.  There are pictures from the 1800’s of full blooded Aztec men in the garb of the era.  Full blooded.  Meaning not exterminated.  The picture I have in mind comes from Mexico City. Meaning he wasn’t sent to a reservation, like in the US or Canada. Rather it was Mexico, who was the second country in the Americas to abolish slavery, happened to have the FIRST Indigenous Person as a president of a country.  Benito Juarez.  Yeah, instead of giving smallpox blankets to the native population (there are actual records and letters from the 1800’s detailing this happening, so it isn’t fake) they made one president. President.  Of a country. Native.  Slavery was banned almost immediately.

“Oh, well Mexico is still a shit hole.”  Shut up.  Stop it.  I’m running out of straw.

Sorry. Went off on a rant… anyways, because colonization was perhaps easier for the Spanish, they were able to build MUCH more far sooner. They weren’t able to build that much far north, however.  Like in Texas?  Mexico had a hard time getting settlers, so they appealed to Americans hoping they’d settle there and would act as a deterrent to keep the Americans from invading.  Turns out, that’s a bad idea.

Oh, look at that!  Another rant!

I’ll try to be quick.  The Mexicans had three conditions for Americans to move into Texas:  Convert to Catholicism, learn Spanish, and obey Spanish laws.  I can hear the Trump supporter frothing at the mouth, saying, “That’s what we need to do!  Make them convert to my branch of protestantism which I claim is nondenominational but is really protestantism, they need to learn English, and respect our laws!  That means respect the wall and come legally!  And also not leech off the welfare system and be self-reliant!” but keep in mind that the Mexican government was GIVING these people free land.  Not a fucking welfare check, they were giving them the right to settle. They INVITED Americans to move to Texas to become citizens.  There wasn’t this crazy fucking test to determine how American you can be.  It’s such a dumb fucking test and that’s coming from someone who LOVES history.

Citizenship is difficult in the United States.  It doesn’t have to be.  The greatest minds don’t need a filter to get through.  It doesn’t keep the country any safer.  The reason citizenship is difficult is because the US has had a FEAR of foreigners since the late 1800’s. Wop means “Without Papers” I’m told, implying Italians were the first illegal immigrants.  Not sure how true that is, but needing to take a test to prove you’re American enough defies what the United States stands for.  I like to believe that the Statue of Liberty isn’t just a suggestion.  It’s more:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips.  "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Well, they came with hope and this poem ringing in their ear.  Then they were told to go away.  They were told by they who rest at ease, the wealthy, the scattered few among a nation of many who live without worry that their ivory towers will never fall.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

As I was saying, Texas was a BIG opportunity.  They who came were not tired.  Perhaps poor, but not all.  They didn’t need to breathe free because they already were back in the United States.  This was not the message of Mexico, however.  It didn’t need to be.  They just needed to colonize a piece of land and they needed to be good Mexican citizens.

Catholicism? No problem! Learning Spanish?  It was the trade language in the Americas at the time, so if you wanted to trade with the Native Americans then your best bet was to learn Spanish anyways. Obey Mexican Laws?  D’oh! Americans couldn’t do that.  You think it’d be simple, but that breathing free shit is difficult for an American to comprehend.  They REALLY needed their fucking slaves.  Like, god damn.  Really?  Most of the American Texans who fought for a Republic of Texas didn’t own slaves.  Probably.  However, I can guarantee the ones who actually had any position of power had slaves.  Because a slave is like a fancy german car.  It’s a status symbol.

If you’re American and you’re reading this, you probably don’t own a fancy car but I’m sure you want one.  In fact, if you’re an American and you’re reading this, I can almost guarantee that you don’t have a fancy car but want one because most Americans are fucking poor.  If you were poor back then, then you’d want a slave even if you can’t afford one.

My dad… we saw the Alamo a couple years ago.  The movie, not the actual location.  Him, I, and Jonny.  He actually cried.  “These poor men… they… they fought for freedom!”  No, they didn’t.  They fought to keep the black man down and would later oppress brown people in the Republic of Texas. Nevermind MODERN day Texas.  So fucking dumb.

Speaking of MODERN Texas, I asked a senior in high school who works with me and had NEARLY straight A’s about history.  Didn’t know shit. Asked her about Texas history, specifically the Alamo.  She said, “I think it’s in Texas.”  I laughed because she forgot the Alamo.

But, yeah…  There is a lot more history in Mexico than the US.  That’s because remembering the Alamo is fucking stupid and modern Texas’s school system isn’t teaching the children anything.  That’s why. Also, maybe because Mexico was colonized sooner and had a larger, more clustered population that wasn’t targeted by genocide. Perhaps that’s a better reason, eh? Anyways, I could almost see a cathedral overlooking the plaza.  I don’t remember if there was a church, but the plaza I’m reminded of had a beautiful cathedral.  Almost picturesque.  I was filled with such pleasant memories of Mexico.  Which is nice, because a lot of people don’t have such memories.

The street vendors… that’s something too.  It feels like you’ll see them everywhere.  Sometimes, they don’t even have tables.  They sell their wares and hold it, often walking through clustered traffic.  They’re usually smiling though… weird now that I think about it.  Every minimum wage worker I met today was miserable and had no energy.  Huh…

Anyways… The movies he watched with de la Cruz.  They were based off this old Mexican actor.  Very dreamy.  I don’t remember his name but I remember his movies.  He was basically Mexican John Wayne but more handsome and he could sing.

I did notice that the dresses the dancers were wearing before he died were kind of solid.  Like, I always remember the many bright colors of the dancers but then again, this was a stage play.  Mexican culture is so very colorful.  Like… so colorful.  Of course, it can also be a sort of drab layer of khaki because dirt, but there is still color.  It’s nice.

And on the actual day of the dead?  Omg, a lot of orange.  It was beautiful.  You do leave food out for your family at the ofrenda but I’m not sure what you do with it after… eat it or throw it out? Erm…  Weird.  I’ll ask my mom about it.  The ofrenda requires a picture or whatever though I’m not sure what ofrendas were like before the invention of the photograph.  Even after it was invented, photographs were pretty expensive.  Maybe a drawing or their written name?  Weird thought.

But all that color in life… well, there was even more color in death. Like, fucking shit, Pixar did an amazing job.  Like, holy fuck.  So colorful and the bridge was so beautiful.  The petals that you cross… breathtaking.  I loved the old Aztec designs everywhere, mixed with more modern but still old buildings.  It was… perfect.  Like, I was just… well, I think you get it.

What I loved a lot in the trailer was watching a skeleton try to cross the bridge, only to sink into the petals.  I thought he was like a thief or something and his sins that burdened him made him too heavy to cross, leading to him trying to redeem himself while the BAD GUYS who want the main character dead chase the two and the thief is saved at the end and is able to cross the bridge.

They didn’t go that route.  They went in a far more touching route which is perhaps better and less cliché, as ironic as that may seem considering what I said about it being a typical disney plot.

I LOVED how he tried to disguise himself as Frida.  Frida Kahlo is a Mexican painter.  I went on a walk today with Adela and while discussing the movie, Adela was talking how they made her character more cartoonish because the real Frida was sort of… depressed and under-appreciated?  She was also a Communist, which I like.  The way they portrayed her was mostly out of fun but not spite.  I think the jokes respected her while also taking a couple quick jabs. That said, I think Adela really likes Frida.  She knows a lot about her. I’ll be sure to remember that.

Like… every scene with Frida is just gold.  Or any scene where Frida is REMOTELY involved.

I just looked it up.  Frida wasn’t the only Mexican to be represented.  I guess I was so immersed, I stopped looking.  Like, everyone at de la Cruz’s party was a prominent figure in Mexican history.  HE HOSTED ZAPATA!!!  MOTHER FUCKING ZAPATA!!! Ooooooooh, that’s awesome!  Also, they featured a Mexican wrestler as well as several actors and actresses.  Again, the details.  The pink band is a reference to a mariachi band that I don’t know but my mom does. Can’t seem to find the reference.  Mariachi bands have a lot of weird names, btw.  I don’t remember the one from the movie.

I remember the crowd.  I remember looking at all their eyes.  It was captivating me.  I felt like no two characters had the same model. Each was unique.  It’s just… so much detail.  SO MUCH!!!

Like it’s visually stunning.  And the alebrije of the Matriarch… I said it was Kiki.  Turns out, I was right.  Darling kitten.  And how darling kitten sees itself.  As a fucking monster of epic proportions.  Yeah, that’ll work.

There is a lot I don’t know.  Like when you drink tequila or eat food as a skeleton… where does it go.  Like, they said they don’t have restrooms (which I think is crap because Mexicans are vain creatures who care about their smaller details to the T; except for maybe Frida because she never got rid of that unibrow because she heavily embraced who she was) so they can’t go anywhere.  They just… exist with it.  Unusual.

And there does seem to be a sort of class system as evident by the impoverished communities.  I’m not sure if they have currency… I’m sure they do, however, as they have people who work ON HOLIDAYS!!!  Like, holidays?  Really? Don’t they have families with ofrendas?  They are so dedicated to their jobs.  How do they manage?  And the woman who dealt with the Not-Thief dealt with him again the next year.  She doesn’t take days off.  Rather, she works. So, I literally just googled “In the afterlife” and got a bunch of Christian shit for auto-suggest.  I finished it with “of Coco, is there money?”  Didn’t get an answer.  Got a Cracked article that suggests Hitler goes to the Mexican afterlife but not much else.

Eh, that might be a theory for another day.  I guess I won’t be spoiling too much because I’ll wrap it up.  It was very touching. I saw the movie and felt the right emotions but cried for the wrong reasons.  I tried not to, of course.

Family is everything to Latin culture.  Family is sacred.  More sacred than white families.  Yeah, that’s super racial but deal with it.  My brother is kind but I don’t really know him and my niece… she robbed me.  Mexican families… family can rob you as well, but it happens far less.  You’re expected to love your family unconditionally.  Even if you just met them today, and you will just meet them today.

It… boggles the mind.  I wasn’t meant to be Mexican.  I’m not very close with my family.  I felt guilty because my family… they think they’re close with me, but they’re not.  No one is.  I think my mom feels it.  She and I sat in silence at breakfast.  We can’t talk.  What can we talk about? I feel very disconnected. Maybe that’s why she worries about me so much.  My dad was my hero almost since the day I could form an opinion.  I followed his lead, his beliefs… I did so blindly.  I see him now… he’s different than I am.  We have different beliefs.  We have different personalities.  We’re different people.  I look to my mother.  We have different beliefs.  We have different personalities.  We’re different people.

I don’t feel I belong.  This sounds like some sappy teenager shit coming from a 26 year old.  I don’t talk to my cousin’s regularly.  I used to… maybe I did belong once.  What changed?

It’s getting late and I’m losing control of my emotions.

Edward sent me A BUNCH of texts at once.  I wanted to respond, but I couldn’t.  We had ordered pizza and I was in the same room as family.  Distancing myself, watching old SovietWomble streams.  Maybe I should stop.  There is a lot of uncertainty in my life and perhaps that’s not helping.  I don’t play video games, but I watch others.  A very voyeuristic way to handle gaming.

I’ll text him tomorrow before work.  Edward, that is.  Let him know that I’m not ignoring him.  I want to, don’t get me wrong, but not because of him.  I want to ignore him for myself.  I don’t want to socialize right now.

I got a haircut today, after the movie.  Told you I’d mention Esther… we got close to the rink.  I was ahead of my mom, so I wasn’t afraid of her seeing me.  Of course, there was this food kiosk… delicious stuff.  Esther and I snacked there during our ice skating outings.  They were nice.

The haircut, however, was $18.50 of TOTAL BULLSHIT!!!  Like… eh…  I can’t describe it.  My hair is short, but that’s it.  Because I have a naturally round head, I look like a pentagon with the pointy part facing downward.  Drat!  And my sideburns were uneven! The guy seemed okay, I don’t think I’d like him as a person but he seemed… professional enough.  I could almost hear his opinions leaking out of his lips talking about something REALLY stupid.  I think it was racial but I think I’m just getting overly sensitive…

Actually, no.  I think he was complaining about how someone was late.  Yeah, and the entire day I was thinking that Americans are shitty people because we demand everyone else to be so punctual.  Like, fucking hell.  That’s why I didn’t like him.  Shitty reason, honestly. Maybe that’s why my hair looks dumb.  I’ll gel it back soon.

I lost my hairbrush at the party.  So, I guess it’s good I still have a comb.  That’ll do for now but I’ll need a hairbrush again or a less thick comb?  I guess less thick, just too many teeth.  Hurts my thick hair.  Oh, and silver is easier to spot now.  Drat.  I considered dying my hair before so I might again.  Hrm…

Driving back, a Chevy Camero cut my off.  I was pretty angry.  Lost my temper.  It wasn’t that bad but it was the first time in a while. Not bad.  Still, this dude almost pinned be between his shitty Chevy and a relatively large moving truck.  Not a full on semi but still bigger than the average truck on the road.  I would have been pissed.

I don’t like driving Adela’s car because I’M responsible for it. If it get’s wrecked, that’s my fault.  I don’t like that feeling so it stresses me out.  I plan to go back and get my truck. My mom is offering to come back in July with it, but I declined. Mostly, because I need to pack things because I don’t intend to come back.  And I also want to visit a friend in Dallas. I think she’ll bring my truck in July.  Hopefully, I’ll be gone by then.  Idk.

Had Whataburger today, too.  Not sure if I mentioned that.  I think I did.  Don’t suggest it.  The service was kind of rude.  I compared all these workers to myself and I felt… ashamed on their behalf. Like, I know the job sucks but have a bit more optimism.  Fucking god damn.  It’s soul draining but I still spend most my work days smiling.

I’m great at customer service, too good even.  That’s how I got the cemetery job.  I don’t suggest it.

Anyways, I think that’s everything…  I wanted to watch Ferdinand a while back because it’s a movie about a gentle bull and the message is bullfighting is cruel.  It’d be great if it wasn’t for the fact that JOHN CENA is a voice actor in it.  Like, fuck you, John.  I hate you and your dumb fucking face.  “Can’t see me” I wish I couldn’t, I really do.  You never served in the military, either which confuses a lot of people because they seem to think you have. “Oh, it’s just a character!”  No, fuck that character.  If it’s a character, then change your god damned name.  I hate his dumb face, I hate his dumb voice, and I hate everything he stands for.  Oh, you salute because you respect those serving in the military?  Every fucking day I worked in December, I saw a dumb CGI movie with DUMB fucking penguins called “Surfs Up 2!!!!” with INCREDIBLY WACKY HIJINKS HUR HUR HUR and his dumb penguin representation saluting smuggly.  No!  Stop it!  Stop that! You piece of shit penguin fuck!  I hate you and your dumb penguin face thinking “I’LL SALUTE ON THE BOX ART, HUR HUR HUR!!!” Stop it!  Stop it.

Like… eh…  I think it was a cheap movie anyways, but… eh…  I’m sure the makers asked them what they wanted to be because one of the wrestlers is an otter?  Idk, I don’t care enough to watch and find out.  It’s just John Cena is dumb.  The fact that he’s a meme is also dumb.

Oh, and a few days ago?  I got a prank phone call.  A little kid claiming to be John Cena.  Oh, I hope he calls back.  I’ll start checking caller ID and I’ll fuck with him when he calls.  Please, let this brat child call back.  I’ll tell him the name and inform him that his parents have an account with us and they’ll be charged a fee for “Inconvenience Calls” and that the only way to get rid of this fee is to have his parents explain why they called.  So, this dumb and gullible little child will talk to his parents and tell them they have to call Dollar General because of some contrived lie. Hopefully, he’ll mention John Cena.  I’m sure they’d laugh.

Anyways… I really let loose on John Cena.  But I refuse to see ANY movie with him in it.  Maybe he’s an alright guy in person, I don’t know because I think everything about him is dumb.  Ferdinand is supposed to be a Spanish bull.  So get a Spaniard to voice act.  They got a bunch of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans to voice act in Coco.  Why should Ferdinand be any different?  That’s dumb.  -,- That said, I do want to keep Bullfighting alive in MN.  As it’s fictitious, I can do whatever I want with it.  So bullfighting… without killing the bull.  It’ll be great but I’ll have to work on it.  Basically, the swords are replaced with a non-deadly rubber sword.  It basically becomes a dance with death at that point.  Eh? Eh?! Eh…  I’ll work on it.

It’s 12:09.  I work in… 8 hours.  I wake up in 6.  Time to go.  Good night, I’ll keep talking tomorrow.  If I forgot something, I’ll bring it up then.  :D

[listen-louder-blog]

Smile Power

Heading into the grocery store. You know...a smile is a powerful expression. It can have an internal aaaaand external impact.   In the recent books my mind has been wandering through, I recall the subject of our distance between one another among the human race in "The Book of Joy." It was suggested that, and I'll paraphrase, there is a battle of ego between us. A judgment based on whatever beliefs have been passed to us that we have boughten and dressed ourselves with.   Typically when you walk down the street, through a parking lot, through the mall, through the checkout line, etc. You are surrounded by many others. "strangers"But what makes them "stranger" than you other than your own set bar of strangeness according to the exterior world, as if there's such a thing. Its just your own personal opinion and as we've all heard before "opinions are like......" Never mind. we're talking about *strangers not... well you know.   Coming back to the check out line: Disregarding your regular work place, how many other people do you come within speaking distance per day? And with that estimated number in your head....how many of them do you actually speak to? To take this a little deeper, how many of them do you make eye contact with and with this question only comes another question of how many people DON'T you make eye contact with? Do you find yourself purposely looking away or down or pretend you are into something important on your phone? Do different races intentionally avoid eye contact in order to not appear racist in staring which could imply an assumed judgment from a default stereotypical set of qualities and beliefs? To bring back an above reference. The author of The Book of Joy said something along the lines of- Maybe our looking away is our shame of being so close in proximity while being extremely distant spiritually. And if you don't like the word spiritually, than replace it with humanly. This struck a cord with me and I realized that I avidly avoid eye contact. There is a powerful sense of unity that some just don't know how to handle or what to do with in that we alienate ourselves from a species, or, a community as a whole. Western culture has a tendency to talk about problems they have with others to everyone except the ones they have issues with. Even a court room will talk between 2 lawyers about you as if you weren't even there and if you try to jump in, they shush you..... How is that at all a functional way of problem solving? If you don't speak directly to someone, how are they to become aware of the problem and therefor solve it? We are so used to not interacting directly that we have created a habit that subconsciously veers us from direct connection. This is actually a great problem to become aware of. To practice being an interacting human being. When you start letting go of your ego and simply offer a friendly "hello" as you pass an individual, you are letting them, and yourself, know they, and you, are there as part of it all. Even a conscious and discrete bow can say to someone "we exist so cheers to you my fellow existian." The same goes for simple compliments. A passing woman said to me once, and I will point out that this particular day, for me, wasn't the brightest of days, "You have the prettiest curls! Where do you get them done?" I instantly laughed out loud which is to say the not so sunny day stuff VANISHED in a heartbeat. I pictured myself in a salon under one of those big plastic upside-down salad strainer looking bowls with big curlers in my hair. I responded with delight "no no. I don't have my hair tended and I only use water and coconut oil. My hair simply prefers to curl." She smiled and said "well some have to work hard to accomplish what your hair does so effortlessly." Okay........ I will point out here that I don't give a hoot about my appearance unless I'm at a formal gathering in which it is an obligation or if I'm gigging. Which is sometimes a formal event and I am obligated lol. But this person shook me up. Why can't we all live as effortlessly as the curls curl in one with curly hair? Just a *stupid comment from some random person demolished the rainclouds that were hovering over me that day. So in this, it wasn't a *stupid comment at all. It had an effect resembling a phycological perception change you'd receive from a therapist. Other than this was a lot cheeper and only took 5 seconds. What is a *stupid comment? Stupid is only an illusion that is the result of the concepts we have accepted to outline our reality. Stupid has no set bar outside your own ego. Now this was a few years ego...I mean ago, but the impact has lasted like a scar but one that never had to cut me to leave a mark. I have since worked on my attempts to make small exchanges with those close to me in proximity. I say hello to people as I pass. I nod, which is the western equivalent to an eastern bow. And I always make eye contact with someone holding a sign on the corner, smile and throw up the peace sign.   Today as I was walking with Malakai into a grocery store, a someone was walking out. Our eyes met simultaneously and after a years practice, my first instinct was not to look away but to great the connection with a genuine smile in which this person caught and threw back to me a genuine smile. And it was almost as if we both understood was was being practiced and our mutual smiles motivated even bigger smiles. Not a word was exchanged. It didn't cost even a penny and only took 5 seconds to share this warmth of closeness with a complete stranger. Here we are again with this word *stranger. Now whats stranger? Two people smiling at one another while passing in this life? Or 2 people intentionally avoiding each other as if neither of them exist? Again.... this isn't a question I'm looking for an answer to, as I suggested above, its just your opinion based on what you dress your reality with.   I guess the point here is Listen Louder. Notice the sun. Notice the trees. Notice the fun between them and the breeze. Notice judgments. Notice myths. We aren't stranger from those we share this.

#listenlouder #smile #zen