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aye-write · 3 years

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Summary: Research student Isla Reid has been fascinated with the legend of the Kildonian Chessmen - a trio of mythical Pokemon rumoured to have lived centuries ago on the remote region of Kildo - for as long as she can remember. So, when a museum exhibit on the Chessmen is set to open in Kildo’s Hydrogate City, coinciding with her independent research project, she packs herself and her trusty partner Furret onto the long ferry journey bound for this new region.

However, when she arrives in Kildo, thoughts of her research, new friends, and an entire Pokedex’s worth of new Pokemon, are quickly dashed. Kildo is a troubled place, beset by natural disasters and fierce rivalries among its people. Isla suddenly finds herself at the centre of a centuries-old plot to invoke the wrath of the Chessmen, and is set on a race against time to stop them, before it spells destruction for the entire region.

Other Links: Read it on Ao3!

Tags: OC Pokemon journey, OC region, Fakemon region, bisexual main character, found family, ace main character.

If you are not interested in these posts, especially as I know Pokemon journeyfic is fairly niche, please blacklist the tag #Checkmate. Most of the story will be put under a Readmore anyway!

Author’s Note: This is a mammoth chapter (over 5k!) but it wouldn't have felt right ending it at any other point. I hope you enjoy it nonetheless! I am hoping to keep up a bimonthly update schedule to give me plenty of time to focus on work and my other novels, so I'm aiming for February 7th as my next update date! Anyway, here we go with chapter one!

*****

Chapter One

Isla Reid stared down at the churning ocean and wondered what would happen if she fell overboard.

It could happen, she reasoned. The railings felt flimsy and only came up to her waist. With no ferry staff nearby and only a handful of other passengers too preoccupied with puffing on cigarettes, or watching their Pokemon, would anyone even notice if she did fall? Someone’s Snubbull careened past and Isla could have sworn she heard it cackle. That was another thought. A collision with a Snubbull could easily launch a full-grown person six or seven feet. At least. More than enough to send her over the railings and down into the roiling ocean below. It wouldn’t be pretty, no, but she would have taken anything over what was coming next.

Over my dead body, her mother declared when Isla gave her the news, will my daughter be going halfway around the world alone. As if she’d conveniently forgotten the past four years Isla had spent working and living independently the moment that inter-regional travel was more than a fragile possibility. Before she knew it, her mother had taken over, sitting at the telephone with the air of a military general and a dog-eared phonebook that hadn’t seen the light of day since Isla was a child. Banging the phone down ten minutes later, her mother announced that if she really must go all the way to Kildo (but you really should reconsider, darling, it’s ever so dangerous!), she would be collected from the ferry by her cousins. Cousins they’d had no contact with in years. Cousins that, if she was being honest, Isla had forgotten even existed.

Isla fixed her gaze forward. The ocean unspooled in every direction, slate-grey water in a haze of mist. The ferry ploughed on, swaying like the rocking of a newborn baby, kicking up fans of white foam. A man hanging over the railings made a funny burping noise as they cleared a large wave. Soba mewled and pushed her head into Isla’s clenched hands until she relaxed them enough to pet her. They were getting closer. And she definitely wasn’t in Johto anymore.

A stir of movement behind her and she was pulled back from her percolating thoughts. A group of men shifted through a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke towards the seats. The youngest, who couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen, had a Pidgey perched on his shoulder and a frown deepening his face.

“Shouldn’t we go inside?” he prompted the older men, glancing up at the leaded sky. “It looks like it’s going to rain. I saw on the news that another storm is coming.”

“Don’t be daft!” a man with a wiry beard laughed. His accent was thick, heavy on the vowels, and took Isla a moment to understand. “We’ll be docked well before any bad weather hits.”

“You hope,” the younger boy muttered, but it was drowned out by laughter. “Dad, I’m serious! Remember I was telling you about ADoomWithAView – that streamer? He said that all these storms and stuff are because the Vitalities are angry with— Dad? Dad! Dad, I’m trying to talk to you.”

“Son, you would do well to stop listening to that brainwashing drivel.”

“It’s not brainwashing! I’m serious! Humanity’s dependence on technology is what—”

The rest of the boy’s protests were drowned out by a prolonged blast of the ship’s horn. In the distance, something loomed out of the thinning mist. Land. They were approaching land. Soba squeaked as a ding-dong-ding rang out and a voice, in that same thick accent, crackled over the speakers.

“Good afternoon, passengers, we will soon be arriving in Port Glen. Passengers are reminded that all personal belongings and luggage must be removed from the baggage area, communal spaces, and all outer decks before disembarking. For those disembarking via the gangplank, a reminder that all Pokemon – with the exception of service Pokemon – must be safely stowed in Pokeballs and not released until you are safely onto the harbour. To repeat, we will soon be arriving in Port Glen. Passengers are reminded—”

Isla’s heart tightened in her chest. This was it. They were here.

She let her Furret bump against her hands, Soba’s soft fur instantly soothing. “I guess it’s time to face the unknown, eh?”

“Fur!” Soba squeaked.

Isla waited until nearly everyone else had disappeared down the gangplank before braving it herself. She’d travelled as light as possible, much to her mother’s disdain, but the backpack still felt she like she was hauling around a bag of rocks instead of a few changes of clothes and a laptop. Anxiety prickled over her skin – or was it just the cold? – as she faced her first tentative steps into Kildo.

She was almost disappointed when she looked out onto a perfectly ordinary little port town. Tucked into an alcove of beach, Port Glen’s harbour was filled with people and the dreamy hues of blue and green. The town lay ahead in a generous curve, bordered by a strip of sea that already looked darker, almost black, under the deepening sky. A thin wind roused the hair on the back of her neck.

Her mother had given her a reference photograph of Rhona, the cousin who was supposed to be meeting her. Related by marriage through some obscure aunt, Isla struggled to notice even one iota of family resemblance between them. The woman in the photograph had pale skin and a shock of red curls, but not much else in the way of distinguishing features.

At the bottom of the gangplank, Isla swept her gaze around, desperate for a sign of her chaperone. But there was no-one waiting. And as the last few passengers sidestepped her, heading towards the town, Isla suddenly felt very small and very alone. While she hadn’t been thrilled at the prospect of staying, even temporarily, with strangers, being alone in a new place hundreds of miles from home was an entirely different brand of anxiety.

Panicky thoughts looped through Isla’s head. Where was Rhona? Why wasn’t she here? Had she forgotten? Had she somehow missed her? Or maybe she just hadn’t seen her yet. But who was still here? She could see a sailor tying ropes, a child wailing at a dropped ice cream, a woman arguing with a… what even was that?

The Pokemon looked like an ordinary Wingull at first, so much so that she nearly skipped over it, but the longer she looked, the more she saw that was wrong with it. This Pokemon was much rounder, a body like it’d swallowed a bowling ball, and its wings were shorter and rimmed with black, rather than the traditional blue. Isla delved for her battered old Pokedex and lined it up with this new Pokemon.

“Wingull, the Seagull Pokemon. Facing competition from Chibber for natural resources, Wingull have resorted to stealing food from witless tourists instead. As such, it has gained weight over time, as well as a more deceiving nature.”

So it was a Kildonian Wingull! That made sense. Isla was the first to admit that her knowledge of native Kildo Pokemon was lacking – a poor decision in hindsight – but she really should have been able to work out it was a regional variant. A flush deepened her cheeks as she imagined her professor’s scowl.

With no guardian in sight, Isla watched the scene unfolding in front of her. The Kildonian Wingull screeched as it dove at the offending woman at the end of the docks, the sound rippling over the wind. There was something in the woman’s hands, something that the Wingull seemed intent on, certainly enough not to be deterred at the attempts to fend it off. Isla let her bag fall and released Soba from her Pokeball.

“Soba, go and help! Use Quick Attack to chase that Pokemon away!”

Soba bulleted towards the struggling woman, squashing herself flat against the ground like a snake, rising into a fierce, full-body strike when the unsuspecting Wingull’s back was turned. With another ear-splitting screech, the Wingull went down like a sack of potatoes.

By the time Isla caught up, the Wingull was gone, dropping into the water of the harbour with an indignant squawk. The woman it had accosted looked harassed as she tried to piece together a ripped plastic bag brimming with wrapped sandwiches.

“Are you alright?” Isla asked, patting her thigh to call Soba back to her side.

“Oh, I’m fine, chick, but I can’t say the same about my lunch! Those Wingull are a terrible nuisance. These tourists think it’s funny to feed them and then it’s us locals that have to live with them. Oh shoot,” she cursed as one of the sandwiches slipped out of her grasp.

Isla ducked down to retrieve it. “Here, let me help you.”

“Oh, thank you, chick,” the woman said. “I have a spare bag here. Gosh, I can’t thank you enough for stopping to help. Usually when a Wingull gets its sights on your food, it’s a foregone conclusion.”

“They definitely seem a lot more, uh, food-oriented than the ones we have back home!” Isla laughed as she helped drop the sandwiches into the new bag.

“Back home?” the woman’s eyes brightened. “Oh, I thought your accent wasn’t local. You’re Isla, right? I can’t believe I didn’t realise it straight away. You’re the spit of your mum, so you are.”

Isla tried very hard not to mind being compared to her mother, but she took a small comfort in the fact that her waif of a mother would be far more scandalised. Was this woman really her cousin? Rhona, if this was her, was pleasantly round, much bigger than she was in the photograph. And while she was still small compared to Isla, it felt like a comfort to finally see another woman in their family that looked like her. And Rhona was pretty, her red curls pulled into a modest bun and her plump skin pebbledashed with freckles. She met Rhona’s eyes and they filled with warmth. Instantly, Isla felt soothed.

“Yes!” she said, barely able to hide her relief. “I’m Isla. And you’re Mrs—”

“Now, chick, you’ll call me Rhona. We’re family after all.”

“Rhona,” Isla corrected herself shyly. “Thanks ever so for letting me stay.”

“Oh, it’s not a problem, dear. Always happy to have visitors! I’m just sorry I’m a bit late, I’d stopped to pick up lunch and that blasted Wingull got a sniff of it. Chased me all the way down from the road end! If it hadn’t been for you and your lovely, uh… what Pokemon is this, dear?”

“This is Soba,” Isla stroked Furret and she purred appreciatively. “She’s a Furret. I’m not sure if you have them here. We’ve been partners for years.”

“She’s gorgeous!” Rhona said. “Don’t leave her alone with my daughter, though, she’s obsessed with all things Pokemon. She might try and adopt her!”

“You have a daughter?” Isla asked, frantically wracking her brain to try and remember if her mother had ever mentioned that.

“Yes, my Skye. She’s thirteen and Pokemon daft. And there’s my son, Blair. He’s the same age as you, give or take. They’re both very much looking forward to meeting you.”

Isla felt like something had just severed her at the chest. Why hadn’t her mother mentioned Rhona had children? Living with one stranger had been a scary enough prospect, now there were two more cousins to contend with?

“Come on, chick, shall we head off?”

As the harbour decking melted into gravel path, Rhona’s questioning amplified – How’s your mum? How has she been getting on? Does she still see Great Aunt Florence? Does she enjoy working for herself? – as if she were trying to make up for ten years of missed conversation. Even though Isla could only give short answers, Rhona still nodded and responded as if she’d just given her the secrets of the universe.

“So, what about you, Isla?” Rhona eventually asked as they turned away from the streets and approached a dirt road, littered with pebbles. “Your Mum said you needed a place to stay for a while, but she was a bit hazy with the details. What brings you all the way to Kildo?”

By the time Isla finished explaining her final year thesis proposal, Rhona oohing and ahhing the whole way through, they were coming up on the Whispering Pines Croft. A weather-beaten cottage sat beneath the shade of a looming forest and sloping hills. Fencing laced through the land like thread through fabric, bordering off sections of patchwork ground in brown and green and the occasional flash of vibrant purple. If Isla squinted hard enough, she could make out a field full of Miltank grazing in the distance. Another field to its left was occupied with the puffy, cotton-wool silhouettes of Wooloo. The whole place smelled of earth and mud, with a tinge of salt, wafting in by the ocean-bound breeze.

Rhona paused to catch her breath. “The Whispering Pines Croft has been in our family for generations. Every generation, we seem to find something new to build.” Indeed, the cottage looked like a mishmash, a Frankenstein’s monster of building expansions. “We do all sorts here. Livestock, farming, everything. The soil isn’t as forgiving as it is in other regions, it’s full of salt from the ocean, but we manage.”

Rhona didn’t take her shoes off when they clomped inside, but Isla slipped hers off, conscious of the mud clinging to the bottom of her soles. She put Soba in her Pokeball for the same reason. Rhona led her through to a kitchen with a low ceiling, steamy with condensation, and thick with the smell of baked apples. Like the house itself, the kitchen had a hodgepodge feel, a cosy mismatch. A proper family place, a life centred around a kitchen table.

“You can throw your stuff anywhere,” Rhona said, but Isla, totally out of her depth and wishing very much she could shrink to half her size to accommodate herself in this tiny, bustling place, just slotted her backpack in the gap by the fridge.

“Can I help you with anything?” Isla asked, the pressure of standing there like a stubbed toe eclipsing every other feeling.

“No, chick, you sit yourself down. You must be tired,” Rhona said as she laid the sandwiches down on the table. “Here, you take first choice, but be warned, if there isn’t an egg and cress left for my mother, she’ll fall out with you.”

Isla’s hand froze. “Your mum lives with you?”

“Yes. She went with my Dad to assisted living for a while, but when he passed, well, it was easier on everyone to have her here. Does her the world of good to be around people and have a little independence,” Rhona said over the clatter of plates. “She’s got more hobbies than I do, in fact! She teaches classes in the old Kildonian language on the weekends too. Keeps her out of mischief.”

“Really?” Isla’s heart leapt to her throat. “The Kildonian language is something I wanted to look into for my report!”

“Well, that’s a happy coincidence then. I’m sure she’ll be happy to go over some of it with you. Oh, hang on a moment,” she said, reaching up to pull a Pokeball from an apron hanging on the kitchen door. “I’m just going to call everyone to the table.”

Isla’s mouthful of cheese salad sandwich almost ended up splattering the table as Rhona tossed the Pokeball to the ground, and the kitchen was invaded by a flurry of grey and red feathers. The Pokemon – whatever it was – came up to Rhona’s hip, had a squat body, long muscular legs, and powerful wings that it beat to great effect as it noticed the stranger. Isla yelped as the Pokemon cocked its head, its movements quick and jerky, like the ticking of a clock.

“Ruchter, calm your feathers,” Rhona said, tapping the Pokemon on its haunches. It clucked and crowed, shaking its head fiercely. “This is Isla. She’ll be staying with us for a bit.”

The Pokemon relaxed, but still fixed Isla with a withering glare. Isla consulted her Pokedex.

“Ruchter, the Farmer Pokemon. The evolved form of Chickter. Able to precisely work tough soil with their talons, Ruchter can cover a small field in minutes. Despite looking old and frail, they are tireless, and can work for hours without a break.”

Rhona ruffled the Pokemon’s tail feathers. “Ruchter, please go and fetch Blair and Skye from the fields.”

The Pokemon was off before Rhona could even finish her sentence, barrelling out the door with all the grace of a drunk Tauros.

Rhona poured tea into a flowery mug and arranged one of the sandwiches on a matching plate. “Isla, I’m just going to pop up with this for my Mum. I’ll be right back. There’s lemonades and sodas in the fridge, so help yourself.” Rhona was halfway up the stairs when she called back, “And if my two come in tracking mud everywhere, make sure they wash their hands before sitting down!”

The tightness in Isla’s chest squeezed harder. Any moment now she was going to be dropped into a meeting with two new mystery cousins. What would they be like? Would they like her? Would they think she was weird, as most people did? The memories of barbed stares resurfaced like a Sharpedo’s fin breaking the water. Strangers, her peers, her friends, even her own family, all of them silently judging her, as she tried to navigate life being both big and invisible.

No, she needed to calm down. Spiralling wouldn’t help. She repeated it like a mantra inside her head. She hadn’t even met them, and she’d already decided they wouldn’t like her. She had to get better at this.

All the same, her stomach stayed knotted and eating felt like the last thing she wanted to do. Though maybe she should wait until her cousins came in anyway, do the polite thing. She paused and went to the fridge instead, opening and draining half a can of fizzy lemonade. The bubbles pulsed through her twisty stomach, prickling like pins and needles.

She heard the voices before she saw their owners, one deep and droning, the other light and lilting. Then the door swung open, Ruchter scrambling inside in a skittering of talons on wooden floor, two people bringing up the rear.

“Skye, take off your shoes! Mam will go mad if you track mud in.”

He hadn’t seen her. Neither of them had. She didn’t know if that felt better or worse. As the two of them tromped towards the sink, she cleared her throat.

The oldest – a young man with long red hair tied in a ponytail – stopped in his tracks. “Oh, hey! You must be Isla? Nice to meet you,” he extended a hand covered in mud only to retract it when he saw Isla staring. “Maybe later, eh? Skye, make room at the sink please.”

“It’s nice to meet you too!” Isla said over the sound of running water. “Blair and Skye, right?”

“That’s us!” Blair shook his hands off at the sink. “Nice to have you here, cousin. It’s quite something having family coming from all the way in Johto, isn’t it, Skye?”

Skye moved like a ghost, silently staring under a canopy of brown fringe. “Do you have Johto Pokemon?”

Isla blinked. “Ah, yes. Just one though.”

“I want to see.”

“Oh,” Isla looked at Blair and then to Ruchter. “Is that okay?”

“Go ahead!” Blair took a savage bite out of a cheese and pickle sandwich. “Let me just put Ruchter out so the two don’t end up in a scrap.”

After Ruchter went haring out to the garden in pursuit of scattered pellets, Isla let Soba bounce out of her Pokeball. Her younger cousin’s eyes lit up.

“She’s so pretty! What is she?”

“She’s a Furret. They evolve from something called a Sentret. They’re kind of common around where I live, I’m afraid,” she added with a nervous chuckle, then wondered why on earth she was apologising.

“What type is she?”

“Normal.”

“Is she strong?”

“She’s not super strong, but we’ve been together for seven years. She knows how to handle herself.”

“What moves does she know?”

“Quick Attack, Fury Swipes, Rest, things like that.”

“What’s her nature?”

“The lady at the Pokemon Centre thinks she’s Bashful, if I remember right.”

“Does she have any TM moves?” And before Isla could answer, Skye kept going. “What’s her favourite Rock flavour? Where did you get her from? Does she—”

“Hey, easy up, Miss Missy,” Blair nudged his sister. “Come on, let Isla relax and eat her lunch. You need to get something in you too. Keep your strength up for the big day.”

Skye rolled her eyes but did as she was told.

“Big day?” Isla asked, desperate for something to fill the silence.

“Skye is going to Aberdrip City in a few days to get her very first Pokemon,” Blair said proudly.

Isla smiled encouragingly but the fact that her younger cousin was a year late in getting her first Pokemon didn’t escape her attention. She decided not to ask as Skye chattered on about Aberdrip City and how she still hadn’t decided which starter she wanted. By the time Rhona came back downstairs, Isla felt fuller and warmer than she had in days.

“I see you guys are getting acquainted,” Rhona smiled, collapsing into the chair next to her daughter and dropping a kiss on her head. “Here, what did you leave me? Ugh, cream cheese and cucumber. I don’t know why they keep it in the multibuy deal, no-one likes it.” She took a bite anyway. “How are you, Isla?”

“I’m good,” Isla said, and she meant it. “Thanks again for having me. It’s a real help.”

“So, what are your plans for Kildo?” Blair asked, nibbling on a crust. “Seeing anywhere nice?”

“I’m here for a research trip,” Isla said. “I’m doing a project on the legend of the Chessmen Pokemon, so really, what I want to do is visit the places that the Chessmen were rumoured to live, and then finish up with the exhibition in Hydrogate City.”

“Hydrogate is a long way to travel,” Blair said seriously. “Especially with all the… complications.”

Rhona shot Blair a fierce look. “Now, Blair, don’t go terrifying the poor lass! There’s nothing wrong, chick. Just a bit of funny weather.”

“And the rest, Mam! There was a landslip near Auchtermelty the other day. They reckon it could take days to clear. It’s totally stopped trade and deliveries; they have to go the long way around. Wee Arthur – that’s Auchtermelty’s Gym Leader, Isla – has been trying to dig it out single handed with his Pokemon but even he had to stop because it was too dangerous.”

“Arabella’s mother says it’s because the Vitalities are unhappy,” Skye interjected.

“Arabella’s mother needs to take a long walk off a short pier,” Blair said, and Skye let out a snort of laughter.

“Blair, watch your mouth,” Rhona said, without looking up.

“Well how stupid can you get?” Blair said. “The Vitalities aren’t to blame for this.”

“Wait, what’s all this about?” Isla asked, confused.

“Just an old legend, chick.” Rhona said. “I’m surprised you haven’t heard of them, considering you’re interested in the Chessmen tale.”

“Of course she hasn’t,” a voice rasped from the doorway and Isla nearly dropped her can of lemonade. Standing in the door’s alcove was an elderly woman, skin deeply lined, and grey hair styled into a candyfloss-like perm. She was tiny – maybe a whole foot smaller than Blair – but her voice was sharp and crisp like every word held a pointed edge. “Incomers don’t make a habit of learning our secrets,” the woman said, fixing her gaze on Isla. “Then they wouldn’t be secrets, would they?”

“Mum!” Rhona said, her voice tight. “What are you doing up?”

“You think I wouldn’t get up to greet our guest? Especially one who has such a vetted interest in our local legends?”

“Oh, here we go,” Blair stood up. “I think I’m going to get the Miltank in. Looks like a storm on the horizon. Skye, are you coming?”

Isla glanced out the window. The sky had turned granite-grey, swirled with black. When Skye and Blair left, a thin wind send the temperature plummeting. Rhona fiddled with the thermostat and the heating clanged into life, but it didn’t make a difference. Icy fingers had worked their way up Isla’s spine the minute the old woman had spoken.

“Isla, this is my mum, Morag. You can call her Nana Morag though, as my two do.” Rhona said. “Mum, why don’t you tell Isla about the Vitalities while I wash up?”

“Why not?” Nana Morag said, settling herself into the chair that Skye left empty. “The Vitalities legend dates to round about the same time as the Chessmen. Think of the two as intertwined, rather than separate. The Vitalities, made up of Voltean, Burnach, Creakrone, and Liathsong, were said to be able to give – and take – all forms of energy from the world around them. Legend has it that the earliest settlers, who came here centuries ago, were given gifts from the Vitalities that allowed them to heat their homes, harness the ocean, work on the harsh land, and even have some form of electricity hundreds of years before it became common use. Now, the Chessmen, they were different. They were said to control—”

“I know this,” Isla couldn’t help herself. “They’re known as the Progression, Expression, and Protection Pokemon. They gave early Kildonians the means to develop industry, arts, and security.”

The old woman nodded approvingly. “You know your stuff. Very good for an incomer.”

“Mother,” Rhona said warningly.

“You know how the legend ends, yes?” Nana Morag checked. “The Chessmen, enraged with how humans squandered their gifts, tore the region apart and set humanity back hundreds of years. The Chessmen became dormant and the Vitalities were banished, leaving the humans to rebuild alone. Many people believe the Vitalities are responsible for all the natural disasters—”

“They’re not disasters, Mother.”

“—because they’re still furious about being banished all those years ago.”

“Fascinating,” Isla breathed out. “Is there anything else you can tell me about them?”

“I think, for now, we’ll get you sorted in your room, shall we?” Rhona interjected hastily.

“Oh, of course. Thank you,” Isla said, trying to hide the disappointment in her voice.

As she manoeuvred her backpack out of the gap by the fridge, Nana Morag caught her by the elbow, her thin, bony hand proving a surprisingly strong grip. “I have some books that you might find interesting. I’ll drop them off for you later.”

And then Isla was climbing the creaky old stairs, ready to try and slot herself into this strange new home with these strange new people.

The rest of the day passed slowly, like petals of a flower unfurling in the sun. She met Kenneth, Rhona’s husband, who split his time between the farm and the market in town. He was frighteningly tall, too tall for the cottages’ low ceilings, and he walked with a noticeable hump even when there was enough space. Rhona was a mean cook, serving up a vast pot of bubbling stew, and Isla had to banish all thoughts of whether the meat too was “home-grown” from her head in order to enjoy it.

Tiredness swept in the moment she laid her knife and fork down. The night came in so much faster in Kildo than Johto, and it felt somehow thicker and darker, like she was swaddled in a large black cloak. She was glad when Rhona took one look at her when the family was doing the final storm checks on the farm and sent her straight up to bed.

Maybe it was the fresh air, maybe it was the excitement, maybe it was the long journey, but the second her head hit the pillow, Isla was dead asleep.

Hours slipped by, or maybe it was minutes, until her world was split apart by a huge bang! She sat bolt upright, cocooned in slippery blankets, and it was all she could do not to topple headfirst out of the bed. As the world phased in around her, freezing cold air gusted into the tiny room, causing goosepimples to erupt on her bare skin. The window, left on the latch before she fell asleep, had blown open. The storm had hit.

Slamming the light on, she untangled herself and grappled with the slippery latch. Eventually she shut out the wind. Outside, everything was pitch black like the swirl of spilled ink, and the rain lashed against the house, sounding like bullets. Isla pressed her face to the window, her breath misting the glass. Something bobbed in the distance, a single pin of light, moving through the velvety dark. It looked too small to be Blair or Kenneth. But who else would be out there during a storm?

The light moved closer. Isla scrubbed impatiently at the fogged glass, terrified that if she took her eyes away, even for a moment, it would disappear. It grew, doubling first, then tripling in size, then a crack of lightning split the sky. Isla let out a gasp as her entire room plunged into darkness. The power was out.

The light in the garden was growing brighter.

Or was it really a light? It looked almost solid now. Like a real living thing. Or maybe not a something. Maybe a someone. Something behind the light looked like the silhouette of a child.

It intensified, burning so bright that it seared Isla’s eyes and for a moment, all she saw was white. Then it faded and was gone. The lamp on her bedside table flickered back into life. The winds seemed to calm. The rain simpered to a stop. And Isla was alone, aside from the impression of a pair of wide, childlike eyes burned into the back of her head.

As we have a full Pokedex (130+ Fakemon), we decided to provide more details about each new Pokemon as it's introduced, especially as we may not always be able to give full details for each one. These aren't necessary to enjoy the story but it's here for anyone who is interested. So, here are the dex entries for Kildonian Wingull and Ruchter!

Kildonian Wingull Number: 041 Type: Water/Flying Evolution: Kleptern at Lv25 Abilities: Keen Eye/Pickpocket. HA: Rain Dish Stats: 50/55/30/30/30/75 Dex Description: Facing severe competition from Chibber for natural resources, Wingull have resorted to stealing food from witless tourists instead. As such, it has gained weight over time, but has also gained a more deceiving nature.

Ruchter Number: 090 Type: Flying/Ground Evolution: Evolved from Chickter (Happiness, Male-only) Abilities: Early Bird/Tough Claws. HA: Vital Spirit Stats: 100/125/55/50/55/90 Dex Description: Ruchter, the Farmer Pokemon. The evolved form of Chickter. Able to precisely work tough soil with their talons, Ruchter can cover a small field in minutes. Despite looking old and frail, they are tireless, and can work for hours without a break.”

#Checkmate #Pokemon #Pokemon fanfic #Pokemon fanfiction

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dustedmagazine · 3 years

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Slept Ons: The Best Records of 2020 That We Never Got Around To

Tattoos and shorts! How did we miss the Oily Boys?

It happens pretty much every year. After much fussing and second-guessing, the year-end list gets finalized, set in stone really, encapsulating 12 months of enthusiastic listening, and surely these are the best ten records anyone could find, right? Right? And then, a day or a week later, someone else puts up their list or records their year-end radio show, and there it is, the record you could have loved and pushed and written about…if only you’d known about it. My self-kick in the shins came during Joe Belock’s 2020 round-up on WFMU when he played the Chats. Others on our staff knew, earlier on, that they weren’t writing about records they loved for whatever reason — work, family, mp3 overload, etc. Except now they are. Here. Now. Enjoy.

Contributors include me (Jennifer Kelly), Eric McDowell, Jonathan Shaw, Justin Cober-Lake, Bill Meyer, Bryon Hayes, Ian Mathers, Andrew Forell, Michael Rosenstein and Patrick Masterson.

The Chats — High Risk Behavior (Bargain Bin)

High Risk Behaviour by The Chats

Cartoonishly primitive and gleefully out of luck, The Chats hurl Molotov cocktails of punk, bright and exploding even as they come. They’re from Australia, which totally makes sense; there’s a sunny, health-care-subsidized, devil-may-care vibe to their down-on-their luck stories. Musically, the songs are stripped down like Billy Childish, sped up like the Ramones, brute simple like Eddy Current Suppression Ring. Most of them are about alcohol: drinking, being drunk, getting arrested for being drunk, eating while drunk…etc. etc. But there’s an art to singing about getting hammered, and few manage the butt-headed conviction of “Drunk & Disorderly.” Its jungle rhythms, vicious, saw-toothed bass, quick knife jabs of guitar frame an all-hands drum-shocked chant: “Relaxation, mood alteration, boredom leads to intoxication.” Later singer Eamon Sandwith cuts right to the point about romance with the couplet, “I was cautious, double wrapped, but still I got the clap.” The album’s highlights include the most belligerently glorious song ever about cyber-fraud in “Identity Theft,” whose shout along chorus buoys you up, even as the dark web drains your savings account dry. The album strings together a laundry list of dead-end, unfortunate situations, one after another truly hopeless developments, but nonetheless it explodes with joy. Bandcamp says the guitar player has already left—so you’re too late to see the Chats live—but it must have been fun while it lasted.

Jennifer Kelly

Oliver Coates — skins n slime (RVNG Intl)

skins n slime by Oliver Coates

2020 was a year of loss, of losing, of feeling lost. Whether weathering the despair of illness and death, the discomfort of displacement or the drift of temporal reverie, English cellist Oliver Coates creates music to reflect all this and more on skins n slime. Using modulators, loops and effects, Coates employs elements from drone, shoegaze and industrial to extend the range of the cello and conjure otherworldly sounds of crushing intensity and great beauty. Beneath the layering, distortion and dissonance, the human element remains strong. The tactility of fingers and bow on strings and the expressive essence of tone form the core of Coates composition and performance. If his experiments seem a willful swipe at the restrictions of the classical world from whence he came, the visceral power of a track like “Reunification 2018”, which hunkers in the same netherworld as anything by Deathprod or Lawrence English, the liminal, static bedecked ache of “Honey” and the unadorned minimalism of “Caretaker Part 1 (Breathing)” are works of a serious talent. skins n slime is an album to sit with and soak in; allow it to percolate and permeate and you’ll find yourself forgetting the outside world, if only for a while.

Andrew Forell

Bertrand Denzler / Antonin Gerbal — Sbatax (Umlaut Records)

Sbatax by Denzler - Gerbal

Tenor sax player Bertrand Denzler and drummer Antonin Gerbal released this duo recording last summer which slipped under the radar of many listeners. Denzler is as likely to be heard these days composing and performing pieces by others in the French ensemble ONCEIM, playing solo, or in settings for quiet improvisation. But he’s been burning it up as a free jazz player for years now as well. Gerbal also casts a broad net, as a member of ONCEIM, deconstructing free bop in the group Peeping Tom, or recontextualizing the music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik along with Pat Thomas, Joel Grip and Seymour Wright in the group Ahmed amongst many other projects. The two have worked together in a variety of contexts for a decade now, recording a fantastic duo back in 2014. Sbatax, recorded five years later at a live performance in Berlin is a worthy follow-up.

Gerbal attacks his kit with ferocity out of the gate, with slashing cymbals and thundering kit, cascading along with drubbing momentum. Denzler charges in with a husky, jagged, repeated motif which he loops and teases apart, matching the caterwauling vigor of his partner straightaway. Over the course of this 40-minute outing, one can hear the two lock in, coursing forward with mounting intensity. Denzler increasingly peppers his playing with trenchant blasts and rasping salvos, riding along on Gerbal’s torrential fusillades. Throughout, one can hear the two dive deep in to free jazz traditions while shaping the arc of the improvisation with an acute ear toward the overall form of the piece. Midway through, Denzler steps back for a torrid drum solo, then jumps back in with renewed dynamism as the two ride waves of commanding potency and focus to a rousing conclusion, goaded on by the cheering audience. Anyone wondering whether there is still life in the tenor/drum duo format should dig this one up.

Michael Rosenstein

Kaelin Ellis — After Thoughts (self-released)

After Thoughts by KAELIN ELLIS

To be sure, “slept on” hardly characterizes Kaelin Ellis in 2020. After a trickle of lone tracks in the first months of the year, a Twitter video posted by the 23-year-old producer and multi-instrumentalist caught the attention of Lupe Fiasco, quickly precipitating the joint EP House. It’s a catchy story from any number of angles — the star-powered “discovery” of a young talent, the interconnectedness of the digital age, the silver linings of the COVID-19 pandemic — but it risks overshadowing Ellis’s two 2020 solo records: Moments, released in the lead-up to House, and After Thoughts, released in October. It doesn’t help that each album’s dozen tracks scarcely add up to as many minutes, or that the producer’s titles deliberately downplay the results. And some, of course, will judge these jazzy, deeply soulful beats only against their potential as platforms for some other, more extroverted artist. “I’d like to think I’m a jack of all trades,” Ellis told one interviewer, “but in all honesty my specialty is creating a space for others to stand out.”

Yet as with all small, good things, there’s reward in savoring these miniatures on their own terms, and After Thoughts in particular proved an unexpected retreat from last fall’s anxieties. Ellis has a poet’s gift for distillation and juxtaposition, a director’s knack for pathos and dramatic sequencing — powers that combine to somehow render a fully realized world. As fleeting as it is, Ellis’s work communicates a generosity of care and concentration, opening a space for others not just to stand out but also to settle in.

Eric McDowell

Lloyd Miller with Ian Camp and Adam Michael Terry — At the Ends of the World

At the Ends of the World by Lloyd Miller with Ian Camp and Adam Michael Terry

Miller and company fuse the feel of a contemporary classical concert with eastern modalities and instrumentation. The recordings sound live off the floor, and give a welcome sense of space and detail to the sensitive playing. Miller has explored the intersection between Persian and other cultural traditions and jazz through the lens of academic scholarship and recorded output since the 1960s. With this release, the performances linger in a space where vibe is as important as compositional structure. The results revel in the beauty when seemingly unrelated musical ideas emerge together in the same moment, with startling results.

Arthur Krumins

Oily Boys — Cro Memory Grin (Cool Death)

Cro Memory Grin by Oily Boys

The title of this 2020 LP by Australian punks Oily Boys sounds like a pun on “Cro-Magnon,” an outmoded scientific name for early humans. It’s apt: the music is smarter than knuckle-dragger beatdown or run-of-the-mill powerviolence, but still driven by a rancorous, id-bound savagery. The smarts are just perceptible enough to keep things pretty interesting. Some of the noisier, droning and semi-melodic stretches of Cro Memory Grin recall the records made by the Men (especially Leave Home) before they decided to try to make like Uncle Tupelo, or some lesser version of the Hold Steady. Oily Boys inhabit a darker sensibility, and their music is more profoundly bonkers than anything those other bands got up to. Aggro, discordant punk; flagellating hardcore burners; psych-rock-adjacent sonic exorcisms — you get it all, sometimes in a single five-minute passage of Cro Memory Grin (check out the sequence from “Lizard Scheme” to “Heat Harmony” to “Stick Him.” Yikes). A bunch of the tunes spill over into one another, feedback and sustain jumping the gap from one track to the next, which gives the record a live vibe. It feels volatile and sweaty. The ill intent and unmitigated nastiness accumulate into a palpable force, tainting the air and leaving stains on your tee shirt. Oily Boys have been kicking around Sydney’s punk scene since at least 2014, but this is their first full-length record. One hopes they can continue to play with this degree of possessed abandon without completing burning themselves to down to smoldering cinders. At least long enough to record some more music.

Jonathan Shaw

Dougie Poole — The Freelancer's Blues (Wharf Cat)

The Freelancer's Blues by Dougie Poole

A cursory listen might misconstrue the heart of Dougie Poole's second album, The Freelancer's Blues. When he mixes his wobbly country sound with lyrics like those in “Vaping on the Job,” it sounds like genre play, a smirking look at millennial life through an urban cowboy's vintage sound. Poole does target a particular set of issues, but mapping them with his own slightly psychedelic country comes with very little of the postmodern itch. His characters feel just as troubled as anyone coming out of 1970s Nashville, and as Poole explores these lives with wit and empathy, the songs quickly find their resonance.

The album, though it wouldn't reach for pretentious terms, carries an existential problem at its center. Poole circles around the fundamental void: work deadens, relocation doesn't help, spiritual pursuits falter, intelligence burdens, and even the drugs don't help. When Poole finally gets the title track, the preceding album gives his confession extra weight, a mix of life's strictures and personal limitation combining for a crisis best avoided but wonderfully shared. The Freelancer's Blues comes rich in Nashville tradition but finds an ideal fit in its contemporary place, likely providing a soundtrack for a variety of times and spaces yet to come.

Justin Cober-Lake

Schlippenbach Quartett — Three Nails Left (Corbett Vs. Dempsey)

You might say that this record has been slept on twice. The second recording to be released by the Alexander von Schlippenbach, Evan Parker and Paul Lovens (augmented this time by Peter Kowald) was released in 1975, and didn’t get a second pressing — on vinyl — until 2019. So, Corbett Vs. Dempsey stepped up last summer, it had never been on CD. But this writer was so stumped on how to relate how intense, startling, and unlike any other free improvisation it was and is, that he just… slept on it. Until now. Even if you know this band, if you don’t know this album, well, it’s time you got acquainted.

Bill Meyer

Stonegrass — Stonegrass (Cosmic Range)

STONEGRASS by Stonegrass

Released on the cusp of a tentative re-opening for the city of Toronto after two months of lock-down, this slab of psychedelic funk-rock was the perfect antidote to the COVID blues when it arrived at the tail end of a Spring spent in near-isolation. The jam sessions that became Stonegrass were also a new beginning for multi-instrumentalist Matthew “Doc” Dunn and drummer Jay Anderson, who reignited a spirit of collaboration after a decade of sonic estrangement following the demise of their Spiritual Sky Blues Band project. Listening to these songs, you’d never know they spent any time apart. The tight, bottom-wagging jams on offer are evidence that these two are joined together at the third eye. Anderson’s grooves run deep, and Dunn — whether he’s traipsing along on guitar, keys or flutes — is right there with him. There’s enough fuzz here to satiate the heads, but the real treat here is the rhythmic interplay. Strap in and prepare to get down.

Bryon Hayes

Bob Vylan — We Live Here EP (Venn Records)

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Bob Vylan flew under the radar in 2020 successfully enough that when someone nominated them for the best of 2020 poll in Tom Ewing’s Peoples’ Pop Polls project on Twitter (each month a different year or category gets voted on in World Cup-style brackets, it’s great fun and only occasionally maddening), most of the reaction was “is that one a typo?” Nobody had that response after listening to “We Live Here” — my wife also participates in the poll, so we just play all the candidates in our apartment, and Bob Vylan was the first time both of our jaws dropped in amazement; the song got played about ten times in a row at that point. Bobby (vocals/guitar/production) and Bobbie (drums/“spiritual inspiration”) Vylan’s 18-minute EP lives up to that title track, fireball after fireball aimed directly at the corrupt, crumbling, racist state that seems utterly indifferent to human suffering unless there’s profit in it. Whether it’s the raging catharsis of the title track or the cool, precise hostility of “Lynch Your Leaders,” Bob Vylan have made something vital and essential here, that very much speaks to 2020 but sadly will stay relevant long past it.

Ian Mathers

Working Men’s Club — Working Men’s Club (Heavenly Recordings)

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It’s been evident these past few years that I’ve retreated from music and committed myself to the slower world of books as a way of giving my mind a break from the accelerating madness outside, but I could never really leave my radio family the same way I could never really leave Dusted. Another great example why: A fellow CHIRP volunteer played “John Cooper Clarke” in a December Zoom social I actually managed to catch, and I’ve been addicted to Working Men’s Club’s debut LP from October ever since. The quartet hails from Todmodren, a market town you won’t be surprised upon listening to discover is roughly equidistant between Leeds and Manchester; the album screams Hacienda vibes in its seamless integration of post-punk signifiers and dancefloor style. It’s easy to bandy about names from Rip It Up and Start Again or even The Velvet Underground in 12-minute closer “Angel,” certainly one of the most arresting tracks of the year, but the thing that struck me immediately is that this was the record I’d always anticipated but never got from Factory Floor — smart, aloof and occasionally calculated, yet still fun enough to play for any crowd itching to move. Until the community of a dance party or Working Men’s Club live set is once again possible, patience and a fully formed first album will have to suffice. You’ll have to imagine the part where I corner you at the party to rave about it, I’m afraid.

Patrick Masterson

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dailyaudiobible · 4 years

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07/07/2020 DAB Transcript

1 Chronicles 4:5-5:17, Acts 25:1-27, Psalms 5:1-12, Proverbs 18:19

Today is the 7th day of July welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I am Brian it is a joy, it is an honor, it is a privilege just to be in your presence today, just to be here to take the next step forward as we gather around the Global Campfire and just let it go. All the stuff that's going on, it's gonna be there in a little while and we can pick it back up and carry on or we can reemerge out of this time with maybe some new perspective and a reminder that we’re not alone, we’re in this together and God will never abandon us. And, so, let's just still ourselves, open our hearts to God's word. We have been spending the last couple of days getting into the book of first Chronicles and we’ve talked about it. We’ve talked about first Chronicles. We’ve talked about genealogical names that we’re reading right now. And we’ll continue to read those names today, but hopefully since we talked about it a little bit yesterday, they'll have some gravity. And soon enough we’ll…we’ll come out of that genealogical section into some of the stories in first Chronicles. We’re also nearing the end of the book of Acts. As we end this week, we will also end the book of Acts. So, let's dive in. First Chronicles chapter 4 verse 5 through 5 verse 17 today. And, we’re reading from English Standard Version this week.

Commentary:

Okay. So, we can see we’re continuing with the genealogies in first Chronicles.

We can see that Paul, even though he's like incarcerated and has lost his freedom he’s still on a missionary journey. It’s just that he's not traveling around. Because he's incarcerated people are coming to him. So, Paul’s testifying and we’ll continue this tomorrow, but Paul’s testifying with a proconsul in charge of the region on behalf of the Romans and a king today. He's sharing the way of Jesus with people that he would scarcely even be able to see much less have a conversation with.

And then we get into the book of Proverbs. So, have you ever been offended in your life? That’s kind of a silly question probably. Have you ever been the offender? Have you ever offended anyone? Which is probably equally a silly question, but what does that feel like? What does it feel like when you are offended and the offender is trying somehow to make things right, but you are still in the steam of the moment? Or what does it feel like when you've done that? Like, you have made an offensive, you’ve said something to your spouse or whatever. And even as the words are spilling out of your lips, your like, “this is not something I should be saying.” And an offense happens, and you want to go and try to make this right, but you can’t because they’re unyielding. “A brother offended” the Proverb says “is more unyielding than a strong city and quarreling is like the bars of a castle.” Couldn't be stated more simply than that, couldn't be more true than that. When we find ourselves locked in an offense, we pull up the castle gates, fill up the moat and become an unyielding strong city. You are not getting in here. Some of this is…is a natural reaction but so often then we do not deal with these offenses. We let some time pass and then maybe there’s just a quick sorry or hug or whatever but the thing is left unresolved and so it's still in there. And offense after offense after offense after offense and building up over time makes us an offended person. We’re very easily offended because we’ve been hurt and not dealt with it for so long. And, so, that begins to become a stew inside of our hearts that begins to bubble and percolate and boil over, all these unresolved things. And then we’re led into all kinds of assumptions because we’re in isolation. And before you know it, we are a very isolated, very resentful unhealthy person. So, you can look at today's proverb and say, “yes, I identify. It’s just simply stating a fact. I don't know exactly what to do about it.” And maybe a natural thing to do is to think that maybe, “well…I just have to be less offensive. Like I’ve gotta have tougher skin and not be so offended.” But actually, it's not that, it's dealing with the offense. Because the proverb is talking about a walled city, castle bars, like a closed…closed off unavailable heart. So, nothing…nothing is flowing. Nothing is coming in and out. There is no flow. Everything is walled off and undealt with. So, maybe the antidote here is humility. Maybe the antidote here if you are the offender is true deep humility. And maybe the move here for the offended is grace. Because we consume the grace of God every single day, every single moment. We depend on the mercy of God and He is depending on us extending that mercy into the world. So, if an offense can lock a person down, right, make them all walled city then imagine what repentance can do. Imagine what loyalty and grace and mercy and love can do. Maybe like Jericho, the walls can come tumbling down.

Prayer:

Father. We acknowledge there's all kinds fences that are broken in our lives - broken relationships, broken stuff. Like, we are broken people and we seek You because there is no way to be restored. We are utterly helpless to change ourselves. And, so we come, and we come believing You will be gracious and merciful, and we come believing that by the power of Your Holy Spirit You will lead us on the narrow path that leads to life. And sometimes the narrow path that leads to life means that we have to humble ourselves under the mighty hand of God. And sometimes it means that we have to repent. Sometimes it means that we have to deal with things that are making us all walled city. And, so, whether we are the offender or the offended, because the truth is, we can identify on both sides of this coin. None of us are just perpetually offended, but we do know offending. We are all guilty and we all understand what's going on here. And, so, we invite Your Holy Spirit to help us deal with some of this so that the walls can come down, so that life can happen. And, so, Father when we offend, let us be humble. Let us first seek restoration and reconciliation in all humility. And when we are the offended help us Father to extend grace and mercy because it's not gonna be that long before we need it to be extended to us. Come Holy Spirit we pray. In the name of Jesus we ask. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website, its home base, it’s where you find out what's going on around here.

And today is the 7th of July so I’m probably talking to a lot of you who are out walking, out on a long walk just kinda getting into your day with God, taking that long walk and drinking in the beauty of nature, just getting eyes to see, like to look differently to become aware that life is happening all around us and we were unaware because we were so busy or we were so full of anxiety or fear or whatever. But this is like a reprieve from that, just a break from that, a re-centering, a time to just pour out our hearts, a time to be still and know that He is God, time to listen for His leading and direction as we…you know…as we’re here, like pretty, pretty close to the dead center of the year. And, so, first half of the year has had its trials and it's been weird and strange, but now we’re heading into the second half of the year and what is that supposed to look like. And, so, that's really what the long walk is all about. And, so, I'm with you. I'm on the same journey and doing the same thing. And every year it's so meaningful to just have one day to let it go and ask our Father…like show me how to aim myself, give me the north star and I can follow when it gets so crazy because it's been so crazy. Show me where I should head so that I don't get off to the left or off to the right, so that I'm not off in the weeds off the narrow path that leads to life. Show me what I need to know. And I love that He does, and He loves us and that He walks with us when just slow it all down and get comfortable in His presence. So, enjoy your time.

I’ve been mentioning this new resource that released today at midnight. So, it's available now. It’s called Heart, a contemplative journey. And I thought, after creating all this, I thought this is really…in our community here, this is this is perfect for the long walk because it gets the conversation going. It's like a guided prayer and then music plays over us as we invite God into all of the different emotions that…that this project contains and lot of the different emotions that we've all been feeling. So, it just kind of gets us into that place where we can then…ahh…relax and be with God on this long walk. So, you can find this project and download it today. It's all available in the iTunes store or in the Google Play store. You search for Hearts, a contemplative journey or you can search for my name and it should come up. And it's here to accompany us for part…for part of the journey, for part of the day, for a little part of the day to kind of, like I said, move us into the space that we need to be in to just enjoy fellowship with God. And, so, that's available and is a…is a great accompaniment to the long walk. So, check that out.

And those of you who are all over the world to doing your long walks, wherever it is that you went, wherever it is that you are, out in nature, out in beauty, just snap a picture, maybe you want to shoot a little video and post that to…like as a comment to the Daily Audio Bible Facebook page, which is facebook.com/dailyaudiobible and then we will post them up on the page and just watch as the day unfolds and look at all the different little windows into each other's lives. And over the next day or two it's just a beautiful thing to see. So, looking forward to that like every year.

And, so, yeah, I know we've already prayed, but let me pray over our long walk. Jesus it's simple. We’re slowing down the world and stepping away from the world that we’re in but not of and becoming aware that we’re not of it. But this world that You have created is magnificent and Your presence is permeating it all. And, so, come Jesus as we spend this time with You getting reacquainted with the lover of our soul. We love You. Be in and among and through and above and beneath and around us. Give us direction and clarity for the second half of this year we pray. In Your precious name, we ask. Amen.

Song:

In the Garden – Marvin Sapp

I come to the garden alone While the dew is still on the roses And the voice I hear falling on my ear The Son of God discloses

He speaks and the sound of His voice Is so sweet that the birds they hush their singing And the melody that He sends to me Within my heart is still ringing

And, and He walks with me And He talks with me And He tells me that I am His own

And the joy we share as we tarry, tarry there None other has ever, ever known None other has ever, ever known

None other has ever known None other has ever known None other has ever known

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catholicismabusedestiny · 3 years

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FSA! I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT THIS MEANT UNTIL RECENTLY

03.02.2019

My father’s birthday~ I think that is more than just a coincidence that I found myself researching this topic or this date, but I did! Ever since my 60th, which was an awful, hurtful and emotional draining weekend for me; I became a hermit for months because each time I so much as thought about that weekend, I’d begin to cry and I didn’t want to do that around anyone else – especially my friends!

In truth, it was the most hurtful (and yet INTENTIONAL) act that anyone’s ever done to me and no one even cares. I’d told everyone that my vision for that weekend was to celebrate the passing of my health issues, the blending of my friends and family (which I’ve tried to do for decades) and the starting of my new business in California. I described it as “the best” event in my life – given I wasn’t married; I viewed this as the one and only event intended for nothing but to celebrate me, Mike.

However, to then experience what actually occurred and to know that it was done intentionally to hurt me is/was something so harmful/difficult to process that I sought out my therapist’s assistance to make sense of it. Ironically, I’ve only been seeing this therapist about 6 months yet - he too – referred to FSA as something I needed to research and boy he was right.

Per my therapist’s advice, I’ve done some follow-up research on a topic we’ve discussed at length in therapy; he’s instructed me to review various case studies and ensure that I have a thorough understanding of the phenomena of Scapegoating, or FSA, as the therapist’s call it. In fact, I reviewed the content from a book he’s recommended and below are some excerpts from that book.

“Since publishing my first book on what I named Family Scapegoating Abuse (FSA), many readers have written me with questions regarding family scapegoating and the challenges faced when attempting to recover from its damaging effects. In today’s post I answer five critical questions about this most insidious form of systemic psycho-emotional abuse”.

Understanding Family Scapegoating Abuse (FSA)

Over the past few months, I’ve had many readers of my blog articles write to me privately or in comments to the effect of, “I can’t believe what I am reading – It’s like you’re writing about my own life!”

Many of those writing to me express the intensity of emotions they experience when recognizing themselves as FSA survivors. Typical comments include, “At last, there’s a name that describes what I’ve been experiencing”, and “Now that I understand what may have happened to me, I have hope that perhaps there’s a way for me to recover.”

Often those reaching out to me to share their experiences of being scapegoated also have a lot of questions about family scapegoating abuse as related to their experiences of painful and damaging family betrayal.

Below are five of the most frequently asked questions I am asked by clients and readers, along with my responses (in brief), that are critical to understanding scapegoating abuse and it’s effects on the targeted family member:

1 – What Is the ‘Family Scapegoat’? ‘The Scapegoat’ is one of the roles ‘assigned’ to a child growing up in a dysfunctional family system (I say more about this process in my answer to question 2). The scapegoating typically (but not always) begins in childhood and often continues into and throughout adulthood, although the role may be passed around to different family members at times.

Because family scapegoating processes can be insidious and subtle, many adult survivors do not realize that they are suffering from a most egregious (and often chronic) form of systemically-driven psycho-emotional bullying and abuse, with all of the painful consequences to body, mind, and spirit.

More specifically: Children and adult children who are caught in the ‘family scapegoat’ role are the ‘identified patient’ in their family. As such, they are often the targets of ‘shaming and blaming’, distorted family narratives (aka ‘smear campaigns’) and can end up rejected and discarded by those who were supposed to love them the most: Their own family-of-origin.

2 – Why Do Families Scapegoat? There are a multitude of reasons why one (or more) family members become the constant target of rejecting, shaming, and blaming behaviors within their family-of-origin. It is usually the case that most family members who scapegoat are genuinely oblivious to the fact that they are engaging in mentally and emotionally abusive behaviors and become highly defensive if confronted with their damaging and harmful behavior.

In Family Systems theory, scapegoating in a dysfunctional family system is understood to be fueled by unconscious processes whereby the family displaces their own collective psychological difficulties and complexes onto a specific family member.

This process of projection, shaming, and blaming serves to divert attention away from the rest of the family’s mental and emotional problems via casting the targeted family member into the role of ‘scapegoat’. This does not mean that all acts of blaming and shaming a child are unconscious – rather, the projection process fueling the scapegoating of the family member is unconscious.

Despite the fact that the ‘family scapegoat’ role is common to dysfunctional families, there is surprisingly little research or literature available to both lay-person and clinician describing family scapegoating’s features and effects on the targeted child / adult child. As a result, family scapegoating is seldom recognized as abuse warranting clinical intervention and treatment. More to the point, however, is that those within a family that’s exhibiting signs of Scapegoating will not recognize the signs themselves, or what role they might have in continuing this abuse.

3 – What Are the Effects of Family Scapegoating Abuse (FSA)? Many FSA adult survivors fail to realize that they have actually suffered from psycho-emotional abuse growing up, and even their therapist or counselor might miss the signs and symptoms associated with being in this most devastating dysfunctional family role. AMEN to this!!

Specifically: Adults seeking assistance from a mental health professional may find that the genuine pain and distress they are experiencing is minimized or even invalidated (e.g., “But they’re your family, of course they love you”; “Family connections are so important, it can’t be that bad”; “It’s best if you forgive, we need to maintain ties with our family to be healthy”), which only serves to reinforce the scapegoated adult’s fear that they are somehow fundamentally to blame for their strained (or non-existent) family relationships.

As a consequence of having their family relational distress and abuse symptoms go unrecognized, many adult survivors of FSA suffer from anxiety, panic attacks, depression, and anger management issues. They may have been diagnosed in the past with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Major Depressive Disorder, and even Dissociative Identity Disorder with Psychosis. Once again, AMEN!

In addition to the above disorders, FSA survivors may have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD), Bipolar Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and Agoraphobia. Others may be diagnosed with a personality disorder (Borderline Personality Disorder, especially), or an attachment disorder.

4 – Can Family Scapegoating Abuse Lead to Complex Trauma?

Yes. It has been my observation that in addition to being diagnosed with one or more of the disorders listed above, many family scapegoating abuse survivors are suffering from symptoms of undiagnosed, untreated post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which I will be addressing in a future blog post. Each and every diagnosed I’ve highlighted in red are contained within my medical files.

More specifically: As related to my ongoing work with adult survivors seeking to recover from family scapegoating abuse, it is my experience that the rejecting, shaming, and otherwise non-nurturing, harmful, and abusive family environment my clients grew up in (and had no means of escaping from) has actually contributed to their experiencing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD – which is also known as complex trauma disorder) secondary to chronic parental / family psycho-emotional (and at times physical) abuse.

5 – What’s One of the Biggest Obstacles to FSA Recovery? Scapegoated adults often don’t realize how their familial distress has been negatively impacting nearly every area of their life, including their mental and emotional health, relationships, work, and their ability to realize their most cherished goals and dreams. Over the years, therapist’s have referred to this phenomena; but, I was quick to dismiss it for various reasons; however, now that it’s had two decades to percolate in my head while familial strife worsened to the extent that I now feel like an orphan with instructions that “no one wants to hear anything you have to say” yet no one’s told me what it is their upset about? Now I’m thinking that they might not even know what their upset about.

More specifically: Scapegoated adults often feel debilitated by self-doubt and ‘imposter syndrome’ in their relationships and in the work-place, and blame themselves for their difficulties. They typically struggle in regard to creating and experiencing a sense of life mission, passion, and purpose, and find themselves succumbing to feelings of futility, hopelessness, depression, anxiety, and despair. In extreme cases they may feel that taking their own life is the only way to end their pain. OMG AMEN!

What the FSA victim may see as ‘family conflict’ is often unrecognized mental and emotional abuse. To compound matters further, the FSA victim typically doesn’t realize how being the target of family scapegoating is affecting their ability to succeed and thrive in their personal and professional life.

It may not even occur to the FSA victim that they may need to limit or (in extreme cases) even end contact with abusive family members (which has been recommended to me on more than one occasion) who refuse to take ownership for their damaging behaviors – especially if there are cultural and/or financial considerations that seem insurmountable and impossible to overcome.

While being scapegoated within one’s family-of-origin is recognized as being harmful, the negative effects are most often categorized as mental and emotional exclusively. However, being in the role of the family scapegoat can also result in the targeted child being physically bullied, sexually abused, or denied medical care. We as a society need to acknowledge this and stop putting our heads in the sand so as to avoid overwhelming and unpleasant realities.

Learn more about family scapegoating abuse and how to dis-identify from the false family narrative so you can release the 'scapegoat story' for good! I just ordered this book!

Rejected, Shamed, and Blamed

Help and Hope for Adults in the Family Scapegoat Role

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electraposts · 6 years

Text

AIC 30

Her day started ludicrously early, but suffering was just her lot in life so it made sense. Aiko was incredibly morose about it but she made it to the office at 4:30, right about the time that a wan-looking Nishikawa unlocked the doors. They exchanged a commiserating look. Aiko's protection detail merely stared at them, miserable and baggy-eyed a few feet back. The woman leaned against the wall while Nishikawa shuffled off to turn on the lights and turn off the security system.

She took a moment to wonder if her supposed bodyguard was going to keel over and die. It didn't seem like a bad option, honestly. The sun wasn't even up. Aiko was an absolute monster for causing her staff to be at work this early.

Silently, Aiko put a hand in her pocket and offered the bodyguard a candy from her stash.

The chuunin took it on a nimble reflex. Then she looked at her palm. Her mouth came open slightly and lines formed on her forehead. She looked genuinely confused about how this state of affairs had come to be. She was not ready to live in a world where there was a cherry candy on her palm. She had not prepared for it.

'I think the night shifts need to be shorter,' Aiko decided. '11 pm to 7 am is unreasonable. This lady is going to die.'

That seemed like a good time to go and start the coffeemaker. Aiko filled the one intended for her office staff and just stood there, waiting for it to percolate. Nishikawa came in as the machine was finishing up.

He gave her a mildly concussed stare, as if he wasn't completely certain who he was looking at. “Ah, thank you, Mizukage-sama.”

She meant to tell him it was no trouble, but she wound up yawning at him instead. He pretended not to smile and instead turned to pull out milk from the fridge.

She had already sorted through the dishdrainer to find the cup with his name on the bottom and set it next to hers on the counter, so she poured coffee the instant the dripping stopped. He took his mug gratefully and drained it as-is while she tore open sugar packets. He was half-finished by the time she leaned against the counter and started stirring with her usual yellow spoon. Security wasn't allowed to eat or drink from the same sources as the kage, so the chuunin went off to secure the premises.

They were both on their second cup before Aiko dredged up the will to focus on work. “Today.” She rubbed at her eyes. “I have a meeting with Sakurai at noon. Right?”

Nishikawa took a moment to respond, eyes flicking upward. “Yes,” he said slowly. “I'll make reservations and tell him where to meet you. Do you have a dining preference?”

“The private room in Koyama.” She yawned. She covered her mouth with her wrist. “Also invite Yuusaku and Karin to this lunch. I'll bring Gaara with me when I go. So make the reservation for 5, I suppose.”

He just nodded. “Would you like to order at the time, or for me to select from the menu?”

“We'll order,” Aiko decided. “Karin is picky, I think.” She knocked back the rest of the cup, and oh there was a deposit of sugar that she hadn't fully dissolved. Yes. So good. She deserved this. “Other than Sakurai, assign that group as working on the reserved space with me. Add Keisuke and Ryuusei too, tell them to report by 1:50. Kanagawa-sensei confirmed his group, right?”

“Un.” Nishikawa rinsed out his cup and filled it with water. “So you'll be out there from about 2 until 6?”

“Sounds right.” She gave a stretch. “I'll be back in the office around 7 to handle any correspondence and signover paperwork. Ask Saito-san her opinion on the two accountant candidates, but you'll make the final decision. I want someone starting on Monday.” She refilled her coffee and started tearing open sugar packets. “Priority is the letter to Nadeshiko, have Sakurai bring it with him to lunch so I can approve it. If it's good, send it with a three-man team.”

“Of course, Mizukage-sama,” he murmured. He watched her stir her coffee. “Is there anything else?”

She pursed her lips, but couldn't think of anything. “I think we're good.” Aiko lifted her coffee in salute on the way out. “Once more, into the breach.”

“It's Thursday,” Nishikawa called after her.

“I know. Twice more into the breach just doesn't sound that good,” Aiko yelled back. She heard him laugh as she opened her office door. Her protection detail had already unlocked it and circled the room to end up behind the genjutsu curtain. Aiko took pity and asked the chuunin to watch for threats from the vantage point of the couch. It did not take much convincing.

She spent way too much time doing paperwork. Other office workers began trickling in after a couple of hours, as well as her change in bodyguard. Aiko sent one of them away with a stack of documents to be filed when Mira came in. Saito came in with a particularly hard jaw to take the mission assignments. Aiko took the correspondences out to Nishikawa's desk personally.

And they were off. Gaara brought in a report about his investigation into the poison, and then sat in on her interview of the team that had escorted the relevant shipment.

“All the way from Nadeshiko to the processing,” Oda Kai promised. He managed to meet her eyes when he said it.

His twin sister nodded agreement. “We noted no irregularities. The merchants' identities and papers were verified in Nadeshiko, one of us was present and alert with the group at all times during transit, and no signs of tampering by the merchants or any outside party were discernible.”

“Right.” Aiko glanced down on the profile of the four-person merchant team. She had already checked over the information for the farmer and the processing plant where the tsukemono had been made. It looked legitimate so far as she could tell from Kirigakure. “This was the second such mission you have taken from Nadeshiko, correct? Have you done similar missions in past?”

The twins exchanged a glance. Kai tilted his head at Aoi. She sucked in the side of her pockmarked cheek and took the initiative. “Many. A truly numbing amount, but there was a break of several years between these escort missions for Nadeshiko and the missions we did prior.”

Gaara gave Aiko a sideways glance at that, but kept his mouth shut.

The movement had drawn both chuunins' attention to Gaara. Aiko considered their obvious curiosity and thought about publicly sharing Gaara's apprenticeship status. She should do that. Eventually. After she got things sorted out with Temari.

“The merchant company that came left Kirigakure after less than 24 hours within our walls. Does this align with their implied plans before your arrival?”

Kai nodded. “It does. And while that is an unusual profile for many merchant visitors, it aligns with a merchant delivering a pre-arranged contract. They would have a financial interest in returning as soon as possible to their home state.”

The interview didn't yield anything outright useful. Gaara rounded on her when the door shut behind the chuunin.

She leaned back and took a deep breath.

“The long period of time between their previous escort missions and the Nadeshiko escort is a discrepancy. Why?”

Aiko wound some hair around her fingers and pursed her lips at her student. She tried not to look too disappointed, because the answer there was easy. “You need me to tell you why that's true?”

Gaara looked a little affronted. He stood perfectly still and narrowed his eyes at her.

She tilted her head.

“Changes in leadership and economic troubles,” Gaara said.

“Pin-pon.” Aiko gave him a thumbs-up. “Good thought. They would have done that kind of mission routinely as experienced genin and novice chuunin. They would not be taking those missions now if we had caught up on the backlog of low-level missions.”

“So it is not relevant to the poisoning.” Gaara looked away.

“It isn't,” Aiko confirmed. “But it was good to notice that detail.” She felt mean to shut down his line of inquiry, but not all ideas were correct. Noticing the oddity in the first place and wondering about it was a sign that Gaara was applying analytical thinking. He was doing well.

She shook the thought off with a sigh. She'd bring it up at his next performance review. Giving feedback all the time wasn't a good use of their hours together.

“Do you want to personally come with me to Nadeshiko to speak with Shizuka?” Aiko put away his report and started digging for what she would need next. “I'm going to wait until a day or so after she should have received our official complaint about the issue. She will undoubtedly look into the incident on her end immediately to ensure that none of her people put her in breach of contract. So it's best to give her some time and cut down on waiting.” Aiko found what she was looking for and unrolled the long scroll onto her desk top. “Look at this, please.”

Gaara took two steps closer. “Accompanying you is acceptable. Is this the park project for the day?” His tone was neutral.

“It sure is,” Aiko said cheerfully. It was nice to be done with the absolute desperation measures. The bare bones of infrastructure for safety and housing were in place, so some community works could be done before pivoting to updating things like aging water lines. “You're going to help me dig out this lake here, and move the soil and sand over to form this bank and planting area. At that point, my genin- chuunin, sorry, my chuunin and the two genin teams will work on filling the lake with fuinjutsu while we go and retrieve the saplings.” She flexed her fingers. Then she went to dig out the hospital funding report, because she needed to talk to some old people about hallway width and secure storage for medicine.

“And then I will direct the Academy students in planting small trees,” Gaara said.

Aiko gave him a quick look through her eyelashes, because it was hard to read his mood from his voice there. His face didn't bring more enlightenment, so- “Yep. And poor Yuusaku gets to direct his teammates and Karin in using all the lumber to assemble the planting beds and park benches. Or maybe split them up from the genin teams...”

Gaara actually looked at her for that. He took a long, slow breath in. “Karin-san will not be pleased.”

“Karin is a genin,” Aiko said absently. “She can be as grumpy as she wants, she is a village asset just like everyone else. And we are making a pretty park together like a family.”

He gave her a long, steady look that implied he was weighing her chances of surviving that conversation. “This path here. What purpose does it serve?”

Aiko took a look. “Running path, for civilians and Academy students. It's a safe, central location away from the training grounds. It will also be very pretty when the plums and cherries are blooming.” Eat that, Konoha. They had pretty shit too.

“And the herbs will scent the air,” Gaara said. He seemed to be just a bit amused by the whole thing.

“That's practical,” Aiko defended. She sat back in her chair. “Planting herbs and fruit trees and vegetables for public consumption is part of combating poverty and hunger. In combination with the rice subsidy-”

“I did not mean to criticize.” Gaara unfolded his arms. “My apologies, Aiko-sama.”

She watched him suspiciously for a moment, but allowed her student to back away from his sass. “Go survey the area,” she ordered. Her attention was already turning to her next meeting. “Take the plans with you. After that, the morning is yours until you will meet me here at 11:45 to head to lunch.”

“Mizukage-sama.” Gaara rolled up the scroll and tucked it under his arm. He paused at the door. “There was one more thing.”

“Oh?” She tore herself away from the report. “Not about the poisoning- our guest?” Hell, they still had Raidou. Maybe they should, uh. Let him go or something. Or move him into diplomatic housing once it had electricity. What was he working on now? She should check up on that...

“The unconscious guest.” Gaara, bless him, said with with no humor at all. “He has awoken. About four minutes ago.” He seemed perfectly fine with the party line about the Konoha delegation and how they were enjoying splitting their time between Mizukage-inflicted hospital arrest and hard labor.

'Not like Utakata. The sighing every time he has to talk about the situation is getting old.'

Aiko considered telling him not to leave his sand on strangers to spy on them, but it seemed counterproductive. It was useful. “Alright, thank you. I'll go check on that soon. For now, he should be in good hands.”

'Am I being a bad mom by not correcting his manners, though? He should respect peoples' privacy. Sometimes. Why did he even want to spy on Sai? And why didn't he get bored with that? Sai has been unconscious for weeks. That was commitment. I want to be impressed but I also want to make him apologize.'

She touched a pen to her lips as she leaned back to watch her most confusing child leave.

Sanbi heaved a sigh and rolled over. He didn't even pretend to be interested in the dilemma.

God. She leaned on her elbows a bit, reflecting about how sorry she felt for herself. She would never have imagined her life turning out this way. She was a single parent and manager of a large flock of murderous lunatics. No one else was going to help, so she had to raise all her illicitly relocated children by herself.

...Actually, fair enough.

'But no, Karin is above-board. Her village head knows she's here to spy on me. So I didn't do anything illegal there anyway.'

Sanbi slapped against her mind. “Please let me rest. Your justifications are giving me a headache.”

The moral highground was a lonely place. Shame that all the turtles were down in the lowland of sinners.

The hospital board came and went, although they had the newly appointed head doctor with them this time. Utakata stopped by to make sure she drank some water and hovered until she finished eating the apple he cut for her. Someone came to apprise her of the change in Sai's condition and confirmed that her genjutsu hadn't fried his brain, which was pretty good to know. She approved some serious painkillers for him and fought her way through the rest of the morning and tugged her hair unpinned as she and Gaara left for lunch. It fell over her shoulders with interesting pin crinkles and some humidity frizz. Aiko made a mental note to get a haircut, because she had uneven ends from some fight or something. She couldn't keep track anymore.

Sakurai kept remarkable composure when his working lunch ballooned into a social gathering. Yuusaku arrived next, looking neat in his new chuunin jacket. That netted him a look of approval and a few minutes of chatting until Karin strolled in and pulled out her chair with a screech.

“Good afternoon,” Karin said cheerfully. She was already flipping the menu open. “It's a good day for oden, don't you think?”

Gaara sat back and watched her as though he suspected she might choose to bite someone. He didn't seem afraid for himself or anything, just as though he was certain a sudden smiting was an easy possibility.

'I wonder if that healthy wariness has to do with Karin herself or if it's an impression that Temari left about older sisters.'

“No, not when we're going to be using a lot of chakra. Oden is relaxing at home on a cold day food. I want steak,” Aiko said. She signaled over the waitstaff. “Hello, thank you. Could I get this? The sweet potato side, and tea. Water as well.”

Karin gave her a sharp look, but amended her order to katsudon. She didn't say anything else until the man left to take their orders to the kitchen. “What's this about a lot of work?” She turned her face a little to the side and tilted it so that her chin was at a positively dangerous angle. “I have a full day of training planned.”

Gaara went so still that it was obvious he was working not to lean back.

'I guess Karin laid down the law. Maybe about the way he drips everywhere out of the shower? That would drive her mad. I should be home in the evening more to keep an eye on them.'

“Karin, this is Sakurai-san.” Aiko gestured and repeated the introduction the other way. “Karin is my relative, a current genin. You might have heard of her. And Sakurai-san is a member of my administration who oversees the city development and planning.”

Karin's eyes glazed over. “Wow. That must be a fun job.”

“I like it,” Sakurai said mildly. “It's very nice to meet you. Will you be working with us today on the park project?”

“She will,” Aiko said cheerfully. The look she got from her prickly daughter was pure poison. Karin was going to be vicious one day and it was absolutely precious to look at the seeds. “She's going to learn how to interpret the diagrams for the wooden parts from Tazuna before he leaves today, and then she will be in charge of supervising the two genin teams working with us today.”

It was kind of beautiful, Aiko reflected. Karin puffed up to argue until the part where it became she was being involved as management. Then her curiosity won over her pride and she leaned in to ask-

“What is this project about?” She adjusted her glasses, because Yuusaku was frowning at the way they reflected light into his eyes.

Aiko nodded to Gaara.

His voice started off a bit gravelly. “It is a community welfare project that will increase the attractive qualities of the city, as well as serve as intensive training in water and earth ninjutsu for the lower-ranked shinobi involved.”

Karin frowned, but she didn't seem sure of what to think. “I see.” She pursed her lips. “I can see why you'd want to clean the place up a bit. It is pretty bleak.”

'Fuck is she talking about? Is Otogakure lined with fucking daisies? Orochimaru got a lot of fountains?'

She could feel a scowl coming on.

Sakurai swooped into the conversation, even and reasonable and ever so deserving of a raise. “We have many projects planned that will increase the visual appeal of Kirigakure as well as raising the quality of life here. We believe that it is an important factor for morale and mental health.”

blood splattered on the cobblestone steady steps behind but she was racing ahead of Tsunade. Touch one, two, three. They fall, they fall, they fall-

Aiko shook off a memory and crossed her legs. Kirikgakure didn't always make a great first impression, it was true. “This is going to be a large park, the west side dominated by a lake with a running path surrounded by various scented and edible trees and plants,” she said. “The east part is planned to be recreational fields as well as some gardens for relaxation and consumption.”

“Huh.” Karin wrapped a fist around some of her hair and leaned forward. “That seems alright, then.” She sniffed.

“Yuusaku will be supervising the jutsu usage of his team and supporting an Academy class in clearing the riverbed.” Her student seemed pleased to know his role, smiling slightly. “Gaara and I will help around, and then work on filling flowerbeds with the plants we have so far.”

Sakurai was hard to read, but at the least he didn't protest about the staff she had chosen for the project. The odd group got through lunch alright. Afterward Aiko snagged a finger through Karin's collar and tugged her along to meet Tazuna. He and his men were already packed up and ready to go. The village head was clearly waiting. He impatiently walked to meet her, face verging on thunder and precious architectural plans held in the hand that wasn't a fist. Aiko smiled at him and waved to some of the men milling behind. One of them ducked his head away, but a couple of them nodded. Three of them appeared to be sleeping on their luggage.

'It is definitely time for them to go home for a break. It is probably a week or two past the time they should have gone home. I need to make sure they're adequately compensated. I can't afford them to have a negative preconception when we are remaking our image.'

The brusque old man opened the plans and started talking as soon as Karin was within earshot. “I'm not repeating any of this. The namby-pamby arches are going to be death from above if you forget about the support here, so don't. It needs to go in at this angle. Benches are less dangerous, worst you'll get is a sore ass if someone screws up.” His grouchiness levels went down slightly at that point.

Karin gave Aiko an incredulous look. She smiled placidly back.

Tazuna drew his posture up aggressively, earning Karin's attention back. “But don't screw up anyway. Look at this here- don't skip it, I know it looks ornamental and it's a pain in the ass but it'll keep the damn thing around til the wood rots.” He cleared his throat and put his free hand on his hip. “You got all that?”

“I do,” Karin replied primly. She took the plans in a quick movement that Tazuna clearly didn't register until she was holding them behind her back. “I'll follow the instructions precisely. Is that all?”

Tazuna blinked at his empty hand. Then then veteran construction worker seemed to really look at Karin for the first time, with her sharp eyes, confident posture, and neatly tailored jacket. He sighed. “I liked those Konoha ninja I had around for a while, but I gotta say they make 'em a bit smarter in Kirigakure, don't they?” Aiko covered a snort as Tazuna shook his head. “You're a young lady like Hikari-chan, aren't you?”

'Ah, right. She has no idea that he thinks that's my name.'

Karin followed his nod to Aiko with a carefully neutral expression and no comment.

“She is,” Aiko said. She looked at her clever little cousin and felt proud. She swayed just that little bit closer to give Karin a companionable bump with her hip. “She's spying on us for a foreign country, but I like her just the same. I was sneaky when I was a teenager, too. It's a good phase.”

“What.” Karin's lips didn't entirely close. She took just one step back, turning so that her body was facing Aiko. She looked remarkably like she had been hit in the face with a squid. One hand slowly crept up toward her chest and stopped, unsure of what she should be doing. Panic? Become defensive? Deny it? Run away?

Sanbi started laughing. “Your youngling-” he cut himself off with a chuckle. “Her face. Ah, I think she understands my suffering.”

'It's good for a girl to be knocked off her high horse every once in a while,' Aiko thought unrepentantly. 'Tsunade did that kind of thing to me, and look at how I turned out.'

“Moral and considerate?”

'Nah. Sturdy.'

“Could do worse,” Tazuna agreed mildly. “She does remind me of you at that age.”

Aww. He was so dadly. Aiko tried not to let her expression soften as much as it wanted to. He had actually met her when she was not much younger than Karin. Not this specific Tazuna but hey, details. Aiko warmed at the implied compliment anyway.

“Yes, I hope she also ends up deposing someone to rule her own country when she grows up.” Aiko put a hand to her cheek and smiled warmly at her cousin.

She gave a quick check over, trying to read the younger girl's thoughts from her face and body. Karin's heels were thoroughly on the ground, her body language tense, her chest facing Aiko dead-on. A little defensive, but… Karin had correctly read the air and skipped right over the fear reaction for confusion, which meant anger was coming any time now. “We Uzumaki are born to be queens.”

Tazuna snorted. “Are we ready to go, your highness?” He made some fluttery motion that was probably not respectful enough for her station and dignity.

“Hold up.” Karin made a sharp hand motion and scowled. “Wait, what? You know that I'm a spy.” Karin crossed her arms and widened her legs. She was smart enough not to try denying it. She was brazen enough that the statement came out as an accusation. “What are you thinking?”

Tazuna sighed and turned around to rejoin his workers.

“Of course I know,” Aiko said mildly. She tilted her head down at her cousin, because come on. It had been very silly for Karin to think otherwise. “But I'm not worried. You don't know anything that could damage me, you haven't yet been contacted, and I'm going to have to kill Orochimaru-san anyway.”

Fury sparked in those red eyes. “Like you could,” Karin spat. She leaned into Aiko's personal space. “Orochimaru-sama is incredibly powerful.”

“He is,” Aiko agreed. “He's certainly one of the best shinobi in the world, and a genius. I would not feel eager to face him alone.” It wasn't difficult to keep her tone and body language neutral, because Karin just did not intimidate her at all. “But I'm strong as well, and I am working with two other nations to get back something that he stole. This is the way the shinobi world works- your personal strength is not always enough. A shinobi who lives without powerful allies is always at risk.” She put her hair back up with the ponytail on her wrist. It was time to get back to work.

“Hm.” Karin just watched Aiko adjust her hair, angry but silent. The vertical lines pressed between her eyebrows were proof enough that she was thinking over every possible angle. “You're very certain.”

Aiko nodded at the point, because of course she couldn't absolutely know. “We will probably kill him,” she amended. “If Orochimaru-san kills me, of course you would be wise to return to Oto. But if Orochimaru-san dies, I hope that you will consider staying with me. Family is important.” She smiled.

Karin was silent and impassive.

'Look at that. Two minutes after having her cover blown by a foreign kage, and she isn't panicking or putting herself at risk.' Aiko tried not to be too visibly proud. 'I told you that she was a clever girl. She has all the self-preservation instincts that skipped over the rest of our family. She'll outlive us all.'

“I did not contest her wit,” Sanbi said. He was clearly having a good time. She got the sense that he was leaning forward to catch every word that was said. “Now say something disinterested and walk away. That will be satisfying.”

'You're my best friend. Of course I'll be dramatic.'

Her voice came out serene. Aiko was hyper-aware of how having her hair up made her neck look long and dignified, her chin tilted at just the right angle to look at Karin through her lashes. “In any case, your outside loyalties are why you cannot be promoted or given much responsibility at this time. When and if you reconsider, you may be elevated. You may follow Yuusaku now.”

She nodded to the figure waiting not too far off, because keeping an eye on Karin was part of his job. Then she made eye contact with Tazuna and held up a hand to indicate she was ready to go.

Her sweet baby cousin stiffened at the dismissal. Karin looked like an offended Pomeranian, with her round eyes and wrinkled nose. If she'd had fur, it would be standing straight up. “Ugh.” Karin gave her a look somewhere between confusion and disgust.

Aiko gave a little wave and sauntered away.

“Ah, satisfying. That was an interesting approach,” Sanbi said. “Why do you not employ secrecy?” He sounded curious, not judgmental.

'Karin is direct, and it's important for her to respect the people she works for. She would never respect me if she thought that she was more clever than I am,' Aiko responded absently. She gave a little stretch before holding an arm out to Tazuna. 'If I let her view me as a mark, she won't want to stay here. I'm letting her know that she has actual options. If I just killed Orochimaru, she might stay here, but she would have the baggage of trying to conceal her original reasons for coming and fear of repercussions. I'm removing that consideration.'

“Seems like a sweet kid,” Tazuna said absently. He hefted his knapsack and kept his left hand on the straps. His right reached out to shake her hand, which had not been the plan but whatever.

“That's true,” Aiko agreed instantly. She grabbed the closest construction worker by the shoulder and took them to Tazuna's house. “I love her.” She let go of those two, flickered back to Kirigakure, and motioned over two more men.

But it was understandable that other people might not realize how sweet Karin was off-hand…. Aiko took a moment to ruminate on how ridiculous the first group of young shinobi Tazuna met had been. She dropped two construction workers at Tazuna's house. She went back to Kirigakure and motioned over two more people. Team 7 had set a false standard for young shinobi eccentricity. She thought it over while she efficiently transported the entire crew back home.

It was better not to correct those misconceptions, she decided.

She stood around and smiled and said the right things when Tazuna gave a little post-trip speech to his workers and their gathered families. He was supposed to wait to announce it, but he launched right from talking about how much money they had made to how Hikari and her little friends were going to revitalize their village by building things. For a group of about 30 people, they made an impressive ruckus when Tazuna started talking about how a girl from their village was the Mizukage. Wives, children, and random assorted relatives gave Tazuna delightfully baffled expressions at that. Tazuna and his men looked at her cheerfully.

There was a visible ripple of confusion from the villagers who had not spent two months in Kirigakure. They looked Aiko. She looked at them. She clasped her hands in front of her hips and gave a pleasant little nod in response to all the scrutiny.

Aiko smiled, but she felt tension run through her body. She didn't want to use genjutsu on any noncombatants if she could help it. She was not good at that. Sai still had a heaache. She looked over the crowd faces, cataloging their thoughts and reactions. Would anyone refute it?

“Wow,” someone said. And then the crowd erupted into excited conversation. A middle-aged woman gave Aiko an interested look and leaned to ask her husband something. He shrugged in response, showing his palms and a cheerful flash of teeth. Similar interactions were happening all around.

She tried not to laugh. 'It almost looks like none of them remember me,' she told Sanbi. 'How odd.'

“They take him at his word,” Sanbi noted. “This is unreasonable.”

'It makes some sense,' Aiko disagreed. 'Most people don't like to publicly tell their leader that he's wrong. And it's in their best interest to believe it- it's flattering for them. They'll probably spend the next couple of days deciding that they remember me just a little bit, especially as the people I put under genjutsu months ago chime in with unremarkable stories about my mother coming into town occasionally.'

The day dragged on. She returned to Kirigakure and hollowed out a lake. She and Gaara moved the leftover soil to the planting beds that Yuusaku had managed to direct into being so far. He gave her a tortured look over the heads of shrieking, muddy Academy children who were nominally helping. Keisuke was bent over picking a splinter out of someone's thumb while an Academy teacher directed the more obedient children in laying boards.

Aiko nodded at Yuusaku and gave a stretch. She swiveled her head over to check that Karin hadn't killed any genin yet. Everyone looked quite alive. Good, good.

She brushed her hands off and took Gaara to pick up the plants she had prepaid for. The salesman gave her a look of polite confusion that became stronger every time she carried potted plants behind the building, set them in Kirigakure, and hiraishin'd back for another peach tree. He gave his watch increasingly concerned looks and left at one point to splash water on his face.

“Will he ask?” Gaara said in an undertone.

Aiko shrugged. She bent down to deposit a particularly large plum tree with the small forest they were settling a few hundred feet from where Karin barked orders. “If you thought some two strangers were buying your whole stock and putting it in your alley, would you want to say something?”

“Yes.”

“Huh.” She cast him a curious look. “We are different people. I would just let that go. Sounds like none of my business.” They twined arms, crossed continent, and then dropped their contact to briskly walk into the greenhouse again.

The elderly man behind the till gave them a distressed look and pretended to be reading a newspaper. Aiko put a plum tree on one hip and a rosebush on the other, held the door open with her foot, and walked out the door and just around the corner. Gaara was carrying four plants with no sign of strain or wobbling, which was unbelievable until she looked close enough to see that they were actually hovering in place. A pot of lavender bumped cheerfully against his heel where it couldn't be seen from behind the counter. She suppressed a smile as she led them into the alley. As soon as they were out of easy sight Gaara obligingly touched his elbow to hers and then they were in Kiri. They set down plants. They returned. The old man took a step back from the window and started talking under his breath.

“Aiko-sama.” Gaara sounded thoughtful. She glanced down at him. “I will arrange the transport for the second shipment of seedlings.”

She shrugged. “Whatever you like. One less errand for me.”

“You will transport me,” Gaara disagreed. “And attempt to have a pleasant conversation with the floral staff while Yuusaku-san and I put plants into a wagon. Then the wagon will be pushed out of town. At that time, I will ask you to use your transportation technique.”

Aiko sighed and wiped some dirt off her shirt. “Your way sounds fine too.”

“Mizukage-sama.” Mei casually surveyed the work happening around, eyes lingering on the line of genin doing their best to fill the new lake. It was going slowly, but, uh, they were genin.

“Mei,” Aiko greeted. She kicked a pot over a few centimeters. “It's lovely to see you. Did you have a report from Ao-san?”

“Yes.” Mei's nose wrinkled. “We will have a visitor from Konohagakure in two days.”

She eyed her subordinate. “Is it Jiraiya?”

Mei's jaw was tight. “It is.”

Aiko sighed, and it was like all her energy left in that breath. Great. Jiraiya. He was such a great houseguest. “I'll greet him personally. Anything else?”

“Sunagakure has sent word ahead that we may expect them at the outer border tomorrow.” Mei cast a lazy stare on Gaara. “We will host a three-man team.”

“Ugh.” Aiko scrubbed at her face. “We'll have to work to keep Jiraiya ignorant, he's such a goddamn snoop. I'll babysit him. In that case, I need to run an errand out tonight. I don't want to leave Kirigakure while he's here unless I can help it.” She yawned, feeling a wave of exhaustion pressing down while the sunlight faded. “Thank you for the information. Oh- Raidou. Have him in my office at 9pm. I'll have a talk with him.”

“As you wish.” Mei nodded and turned away. “Mizukage-sama.”

Aiko watched her go and admired the way all that red hair moved in the wind. “Gaara.”

Her apprentice stopped and gave her an expectant look. The line of potted plants hovering en-route up the hill stopped and bobbed in place.

She reached out and ruffled his hair. “I'm never going to be as impressive-looking as Mei is, am I? She looks so cool. All the time.”

Gaara sighed.

#AIC #chapter 30 #extracontent #fanfic

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oliveratlanta · 4 years

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First person: Returning to Atlanta after two years, architect is amazed, disappointed

A 2017 photo of Midtown. Much has changed since then. | All photos by Michael Kahn

Having moved Down Under, the formerly local scribe is still optimistic for his changing hometown

It’s been nearly two years since I posted my final article as the Associate Editor of Curbed Atlanta, laying out aspirations and predictions for my rapidly transforming hometown. Much has changed since then. For better and worse.

While I was back in town for a quick trip around Thanksgiving, I gave myself a few hours to wander Midtown—still arguably the epicenter of Atlanta’s building boom, undergoing fundamentally altering developments. It’s amazing to walk the streets I used to traverse daily and see how far things have come (or in some instances, how little has been done).

With the benefit of hindsight, more than a bit of distance (I live in Australia now), and a job that allows me to see what other cities are up to, here are some updated thoughts on how Atlanta is doing and where things may be going.

First, I must admit that I’m shocked at just how the development cycle continues to sustain itself. Of course, there are projects still lingering in limbo (the No. 2 Opus skyscraper) or failing to materialize altogether (EVIVA), but overall, cranes are dominating Midtown’s skyline just as much as they did three years ago.

It’s great that so much of the development seems to be focused on office and mixed-use towers, with the potential to draw more Atlantans into the many residential towers built in the years Atlanta was clawing its way out of the Great Recession.

Cranes for Norfolk Southern’s forthcoming Midtown headquarters, a Fortune 500 company relocating to Atlanta, and an adjacent student housing tower.

I did notice that a slew of the new restaurants and retail spaces that accompanied the opening of some residential towers have failed, including places like Caravaca Market, Babalu, and MidiCi. While no expert in the survival of retail, I would posit that the over-concentration of new dining options, coupled with their often larger-than-necessary footprints and aforementioned lack of new residents in the adjacent buildings, did them in. Perhaps smaller format spaces like those found in other dense cities might make new restaurants and retail more sustainable in the long run as retail rents continue to climb.

With the new concentration of jobs, look for residential towers, retail spaces, and restaurants in Midtown to enjoy more success in the next few years. (I hope.)

That being said, Atlanta’s dependence on building infrastructure for cars—think of towering parking decks ubiquitous with each new development (from Midtown Union with eight stories of parking, to Emory’s 3,000-car parking deck)—will be the main restricting factor in Atlanta’s success.

Potential solutions could include mandatory parking maximums for development, especially around transportation nodes, and requirements for developers to heavily invest in infrastructure that enhances walkability and transit access adjacent to their properties. Systems like this work in cities around the world, from London to New York to Hong Kong.

The sidewalk in front of the NCR headquarters on Spring Street doesn’t do much to create an environment for pedestrians.

It’s important to acknowledge that small steps are being taken, often by organizations such as Midtown Alliance; the enhancement of Midtown Station is one example. But overall, Atlanta is severely lagging in making city streets a place for people.

Tying into that, transportation investment in the city is disappointingly slow and conservative. While various announcements over the last two years have indicated plans for improvements are percolating, there seems to be a continued disinterest in pushing the envelope, with a few notable exceptions.

One that sticks out, the pedestrianization of a swath of Peachtree Street in downtown, an idea that hasn’t seemed to gain much traction since its announcement.

While it may seem radical, other cities have found great success with similar initiatives. In New York, long stretches of Broadway have been successively, successfully closed to cars and converted into pedestrian plazas. And this Sunday in Sydney—a city with a population not much smaller than Atlanta’s—the city’s main street will reopen after conversion to a shared space, with light rail traversing its length and large chunks of it dedicated to pedestrian zones.

A main Sydney artery in 2012.

A new light rail vehicle traverses the recently pedestrianized George Street in central Sydney; above is the same street back in 2012. A similar transformation of Peachtree Street in Atlanta could be catalytic.

A decade ago, the proposal would have been unimaginable, and even five years ago the corridor was much like many streets in Atlanta. Is it easy? No. Is it disruptive to the way we currently use the city? Yes. Will it set the city up for success in the years to come? Undoubtedly. Does Atlanta need to look toward other cities if it hopes to retain international relevancy? Yes—100 percent.

A view of Midtown I’ll never tire of, from the downtown condo I recently sold.

Two years gone and, overall, I’m still bullish on Atlanta. Great things are happening throughout the city. The Beltline is getting built out, soulless parking lots around the city are being swallowed by development, and plenty of people are advocating for better functionality. We have to ensure that we continue to hold city leaders, developers, and designers accountable, as the Atlanta rapidly being built today will shape the Atlanta we experience for decades to come.

source https://atlanta.curbed.com/2019/12/12/21012680/midtown-atlanta-downtown-architecture-development

#OliverAtlanta

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kootenaygoon · 4 years

Photo

So,

Every morning when he got up, Brendan would put on music. At least once a morning he would play “Spirits” by the Strumbellas. I got guns in my head and they won't go, they sang. Spirits in my head and they won't go. There was a chorus, all singing in unison: But the gun still rattles, the gun still rattles, oh! I hadn’t successfully gotten to sleep that night, instead wasting time writing increasingly desperate emails to Blayne. We’d hooked up a few times before she moved to Victoria but now she was giving me the cold shoulder, and what the fuck did I do wrong? My mind was a nuclear circus.

I hobbled up the steps from the basement and up into the kitchen. I could hear Brendan at his computer, in his study. He was putting together business plans for a project he was still keeping under his hat. I leaned in the doorway and he noticed me there, took off his headphones.

“Dude, you look rough,” he said.

I began to cry. “I think I fucked up. Paisley says she’s afraid for her safety and I’m not allowed to talk to her anymore because I fucked everything up.”

Brendan went into emergency mode. He jumped to his feet, took me by the shoulders, and led me to his breakfast table. This was where I hung out with Dylan and Tasha, the two little beacons of innocence in my life. Everything else was black and worthless and I didn’t even feel like fucking dealing with anything anymore. I rambled to Brendan, manic, while he set up the percolator to make us coffee. I could tell it wasn’t his first time talking someone off a ledge.

“You haven’t slept, man. Do you hear me? You’re not thinking properly. Your thoughts are all messed up. You need to sleep.”

“No, I need to go see Ed first.”

Brendan shook his head. “No, man. I’ll call Ed, tell him you’re calling in sick. There’s no need for you to go in, not in this state. You’re too upset.”

“No, I’ve gotta go talk to him at least. Explain what’s going on.”

“He doesn’t need to know what’s going on. Just chill for a second, okay? Stay right there and don’t move.”

Within ten minutes Brendan had produced some bacon, eggs and toast. I greedily devoured it all, my ears still ringing from self-induced stress. After my fight with Paisley I’d smoked three joints in quick succession, then I started spewing a whole bunch of deranged shit on Twitter. From there I worked into my email inbox, where I did more damage to the important relationships in my life. I described this all to Brendan, and he breathed exclusively through his nose for a bit. He looked worried.

“Now, listen to me. I want you to remember what I’m telling you right now, Will. You are smoking too much pot. You’re not making sense. You’re getting yourself worked up over nothing.”

“Is rape culture nothing?”

He yelled with exasperation. “This is what I’m talking about! You’re making no sense. We’re not talking about rape culture, we’re talking about how you need to smoke less weed and get some fucking sleep. You’re a mess, okay? But you can make better choices, I believe that.”

“There are all these women that have been raped. At Shambhala. And all over town. Natalya said she knows five women who were raped at Shambhala.”

“What does that have to do with you? Why are you telling me this?”

“Nobody’s holding them accountable.”

“And who’re you? Batman? Obviously this shit you heard upset you, but bad things happen. They just do. Bad things happen and sometimes you can’t do anything about it. But it’s not helping anyone, making a scene in my kitchen like this.”

“I’m over Paisley. I’ve moved on.”

“Sure,” he said. “Finish your eggs.”

Brendan had been through an acrimonious split with his ex, and his experiences had hardened him. Made him cynical. He had no patience for my Paisley nostalgia, how I kept bringing the dogs around once a week. Over and over again he told me I had to let go. I was clearly engaging with other women, while she had this ultra-serious new boyfriend, so why couldn’t I move on? What if there wasn’t anyone in Nelson I could successfully connect with? Would I have to endure any more singlehood? I didn’t trust myself alone.

Late the night before I’d turned to the page of my journal where I kept track of my cannabis consumption. I had written in giant letters across two pages: POT MAKES ME WEAK. Then I underlined it three times.

“You know what, I’m feeling better. I just got triggered there and I kind of freaked out, you know? I think I should be able to get back to sleep. I’m going to call in sick, like you said.”

He nodded, concern in his eyes. “We love you, Will. You’re like family now. We just want you to be well. But you can’t keep going like this.”

I stood up. “I’m going to be proactive, I promise.”

Brendan shook his head at me, half-laughing at the outrageous behaviour from the night before. I laughed too, and then he stood to embrace me in a huge hug. He put his hands on my shoulders, and in that moment he was Mufasa from The Lion King.

“You’ve got this.”

The Kootenay Goon

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stillellensibley · 5 years

Text

The Noise In-Between: An Interview With Ivan Seal

Declan Tan talks memory, meaning, and material with Berlin-based artist and Caretaker collaborator, Ivan Seal

Ivan Seal, adultery bi prenontspliver, 2015

Memory. It’s a funny old thing. And for Berlin-based artist Ivan Seal, memory isn’t only funny – you can throw in beguiling, banal, totally enthralling and infinitely alluring while you’re at it. That’s because it’s this central subject of memory that underlines Seal’s ‘endless alphabet’, a series of paintings – imagined scenes and remembered objects made using no reference materials except for his own grey matter, and the canvases themselves – in a project spanning over six years, with no signs of fading like the neurons that imagined them.

With this style and method, Seal has struck deep into a vein of psychological, nigh on neuro-exploratory art, an intersection where figurative and abstract combine and bloom out like a billowing mushroom cloud of possibility and meaning. But to attempt to explain or classify his work would kind of miss the point.

I first came to Seal through his collaboration with fellow Stockport export, the experimental electronic producer and underground darts maestro Leyland James Kirby (a.k.a. V/Vm), creating the artwork for the latter’s Caretaker project – itself a study of memory and the effects of dementia.

The mysterious hunk of clay, with its single baffling matchstick, sat on the sleeve of An Empty Bliss Beyond This World compelled me to seek him out. And discovering that he’s down the road from me on this now foreign continent (a long-ish road, given), we ducked into a café to discuss where this all grew from.

Over a cortado he settles into the weighty Chesterfield, a kind of fizzing energy coming off him – not just from the coffee. We’re only 1pm and he says he’s already completed a painting today, and worked on several others.

The conversation soon branches out, like one of his paintings, taking in everything from D&D to teaching at the Royal College of Art – in fact, I feel like I get so much material that I completely forget my laptop on the café table, only realising what I’ve done three U-Bahn stops away in a total panic. By the time I’ve switched platforms and sprinted back, cursing (almost crying, if I’m honest) into my elbow bends that it’s happened again, £1,000 dropped, I find the table occupied only by a young German family sharing creamy cakes. The staff haven’t seen it either. It’s gone. Very quickly one of my dream interviews becomes a nightmare.

I think back through the interview. I remember pointing out early that, in terms of subject matter, we’ve had some overlapping interests. I mention that I caught one of his online video interviews, in which he begins proceedings by discussing LSD and ecstasy, apropos of very little. It seems a good a place as any to kick us off. It occurs to me that the mystifying aspect of Seal’s work might stem from that percolation of substances into his often-surreal painted dramas. I dig right in with a favourite Kubrick quote to see where he stands: “Drugs are basically of more use to the audience than to the artist.”

“When you get into your own thing,” he says “then you realise that that can give you a deeper, longer and more frustrating hit. Imagine taking something which has a highly addictive property in it – which for me is making art. It’s something which is not maybe the wisest of life choices – but you keep coming back to it. I didn’t paint for years and then I started painting again when I was 31 or something, and in that found the addiction again. I had that before but gave up painting – for the wrong reasons, I think.”

It was his Sheffield art college tutor Steve Dutton who suggested artists can tackle the problems within painting with any medium. “It doesn’t actually have to be paint. And I still believe in that.” Venturing into installation and then sound, it took Seal ten years to return to the canvas. “I see it as a journey to get back to a moment where you ask yourself, what do you actually want to do? But I think that moment needs working towards and it took a long time, to ask what action has the promise of satisfaction somewhere in it? And I thought the last time that happened was when I used to paint. So I started painting again.”

But he found that painting re-uptake somewhat inhibited. For about four years, he found himself painting over paintings, again and again. “I had about ten paintings, and they’d all be ten not-so-great paintings. But it was more about opening that doorway and slowly getting in – because I didn’t know what to paint.

“Over-painting and over-painting and over-painting – it all felt very academic in a way. Then I was advised to just get a lot of canvases or paper, and just do a lot, rather than try to make some bloody masterpiece. That’s advice you give students when you notice they’re constantly polishing a turd, and it happened to me.” Arriving at this moment himself, Seal had an epiphany. “That’s when I first kind of came to this idea of the disaster, the catastrophe which is inherent in a blank canvas, blank page, or a blank file in front of you. You’re only going to ruin it, but for some reason you have this urge to ruin and you start with that.”

Ivan Seal, allchav tart, 2016

For Seal, the whole activity of painting is entangled with a notion of failure – “a notion of struggle. And struggling with your own failings until something works. I don’t paint from photographs or objects. I constantly return to that moment of blank canvas and ruining it, and coping with it.”

For the first piece of this series, he wanted to paint something: not somewhere, not someone, “because I wanted the somewhere and the someone to be in something. Then I thought, then I’ll paint something that’s kind of nothing, in a way.”

He had been reading a story called The Golem. “It’s this idea that comes from Jewish fables. You have this lump and you form it into a little person and it does things for you. But if it doesn’t have this sticker on its forehead – which I think translated is ‘truth’ – then it just does its own will. And for me, this notion you have something, you create something, but it’ll in turn to attack you and destroy you, seemed very apt to painting.”

It must have been hard to predict how that base material, painted on canvas, would transform into an unending project. “Clay is where a lot of art comes from, a very basic form. I knew I wanted to paint a lump of black clay, but I didn’t want it to be somewhere that was ‘located’. In art, you put things on plinths, like a stage – so I put literally a lump of clay on a plinth in paint. Then I painted a match in it. Suddenly I had drama. And I’ve been working on that series since. In some senses, the action is utterly banal, and the intent is absolutely banal, but there’s the same point which holds, I feel, countless opportunities for somebody to look at it, and for somebody to interpret.”

Now Seal produces this work at an astonishing rate. “Some of them are very small,” he says, now upstairs in the studio, “then other ones I could be working on for like a year. Constantly going back to them.”

This approach means he has twenty or more canvases on the go at any one time, spread across two rooms in what used to be his apartment. They’re stacked up by the dozen in a storage room. The only noticeable piece not by his own hand is a painting of a bridge and town by his grandfather, a source of inspiration for many of his colours, Seal says.

“Rather than having one singular moment, painting like this works more like a brain,” he says as we stroll across the bare floorboards. “It works more like how you think. The studio somehow becomes an active way of thinking, a big head which I’m stepping into every day and basically poking around, like your own head works when you’re thinking about stuff.” He pauses.

“You can’t trust any memories at all, can you? Because it’s all glitched. It’s all nonsense in a way.”

Ivan Seal, the pot complains, 2016

Painting in this way is a meandering thought process, “but whilst moving your hand – and it’s somehow about making this distance between your hand and the head as short as possible.

“That’s what I’ve always loved about improvised music, the immediacy. It’s not people dicking about, it’s just thinking on a really hyper-fast level. Each move is very quick, it’s not like I’m executing tiny bits, and it’s very laboured.” He crouches down and picks roughly at the paint as if to illustrate his point.

“But I’m shifting paint around as well, taking paint off, putting it on, taking it off again. Then you often look at the paintings – and you don’t get this if you look at them online – if you see them physically, the paintings have a lot of scars on them, all over. You can see bits where something else was there, and I’ve just worked through. Instead of trying to illustrate something, I wanted the actual action of painting to be ‘it’.”

“It’s like you concentrate on one thing and you’ve got all this other information coming in,” he continues, “and that stains it. That alters the taste of it, recreates it – like that notion of glitch. They create errors in it. These painted objects are like a sum of these errors and glitches and that’s why there’s a hell of a lot of thick overpainting of things. A lot of the time I’ll start with something and then start layering paint on to cover up my tracks, or to cover up something too personal. Because that’s what we do.”

Ivan Seal, auxch noise reduced, 2016

For the last half a decade or more, he’s been evolving this idea that the action of painting becomes very close to the errors of how we think, or how you remember something – a kind of psychology of painting. “I always have to be careful,” he says. “When you talk about memory, people always think of the romantic idea. But memory is also the memory of meeting you now, or the memory of the Apotheke front window I saw this morning, with these horrible straw faces in. But each time the memory is glitched.”

“If you put the original event next to the memory, they’d be totally different. And I love this noise in-between, what you’ve gone through, your life. And trying to put it down somehow, or trick time somehow by activating it, and I find this noise, this glitch, has countless potentials and paintings in it.”

“Art is always working from memory,” he says. “It’s all questions of – even if you’re painting from something directly in front of you – it’s about that distance to inside you and then out. Like a loop. It’s about what you can do with that and how you pervert it.”

The son of a butcher and a ballroom dancer, Seal finds there are subjects and figures he naturally returns to, as a way of understanding them. His dramas are now more likely to be populated with gesturing porcelain figurines and mysterious, metamorphosing clays transforming like waking dreams from one form into another, as if consuming themselves.

“I don’t want to paint them but I do,” he says of the porcelain pieces – like dusty abandoned objects on some wooden-veneered, fat-back cathode ray TV from the 80s. “And they’re personal things. I can understand them, but they’re more like starting points. The dancers in my paintings are often like that, something I’m familiar with and just somehow know or have a warming to – and that’s the vehicle to get to other things.”

Ivan Seal, syntaksipolontian klapis, 2015

At several points in the conversation, like this, Seal drops a register and explains candidly his suspicion of painting, and of painters. It’s clear he takes his work seriously, but not this romantic ideal of ‘the artist’.

“Images are constantly telling us how to think. If you create, you’re involved in something which rather than saying ‘think this’, you can say ‘think with’. Then the process of looking at the work, I hope, is close to the process of making it. Because it’s just something to use and then to make your own sense of, in the context of your own life and your own memories, and everything which went from being born to being stood right in front of it. All that comes into it, so why not use it.

“As soon as you look at a painting, you’re decoding. But the actual decoding becomes something which becomes immersive. But I don’t want it to be ambient. I have a problem with that ‘drugginess’ of ambience and this ‘letting go’. I want the paintings still to be active. Like this thing that this collaborative outfit Farmers Manual said once: you’re building something to a certain point until you cease to be the makers and you become the audience. That’s how I see the painting, as soon as I get to that point when I’m pushed out as the artist, the maker, that romantic idea, and suddenly I’m just back into being, looking, thinking: ‘Who the hell are you?’ That’s when I know it’s hit on something that it shouldn’t have, and it’s good to go out the door.”

I ask him about his rough handling of the canvas as he crouches down and peels something off a corner. “I don’t think you can ruin a painting,” he laughs, looking up. “There’s always opportunity for them. Even if you’ve terrorised it, or you think you’ve destroyed it, it’s just another opportunity. It’s just another thing to improvise with.”

You’ve never destroyed a canvas? “No, I don’t destroy canvases. I often get to a point where it’s terrible, and then something very quick can happen and you finish it within a couple of hours.” He stands: “Someone asked Philip Gusten, how do you know when a painting’s finished? He said, ‘It stops staring at me.’ And there’s something in that. Work is something you just know.

“Often one talks about truth of material in arts. They say if you make a sculpture out of clay then you have a truth to material, it has all these thumb prints and how the material actually works. But with painting, the truth of the material is its lies. It’s a lying thing. It says ‘I’m this’, but it isn’t.”

He segues quickly into ‘making art’ versus ‘showing art’. “Those are two very different things,” according to Seal. “You can have your reasons to make art, but you’ve got to have your reasons to show art. For me, that was about creating an opportunity where people can all leap, with just this thing on the wall. I like its economy of means. I like that it’s minimal in a way.”

Economy of means. The words ring in my ears. Back to that laptop, now three stops from the café and counting. I think to call up Ivan and ask if he saw the Macbook. I think no, actually, that’s not a good way to end an interview. Now I see my wife’s face in my mind’s eye. She will fully murder me, I’m convinced (I left another one on a bus in Leipzig only six months ago).

It takes a further thirty minutes of cursing into my elbows and at my shoes stood on the now-rush hour U-Bahn to get back to the flat, as the hope of the silver flaps still charging somewhere at home quickens my crepe soles across the dusk snow-slush. I try to grasp firmly onto the memory of it in the café but each time the laptop slips away, the train carriage glitches. Was it ever there? How did I just walk off, leaving it behind? How did I get so swept up in the discussion. Easily, I think. It’s a price to pay for the interview. It’s fine.

I charge into the living room, and there it is. Full battery.

Memory. It’s a fucked, banal, funny old thing.

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buzzdixonwriter · 7 years

Text

Writing Report September 19, 2017

As I mentioned elsewhere, I recently wrote a one act grand guignol style play (4,700 words) in a single afternoon.

Let me clarify that: I typed up the play in a single afternoon, but it had been percolating for three or four days.

Here’s how this writer’s mind works: While looking up something entirely different, I came across a reference to Le Grand Guignol, the notorious Parisian theater of blood and horror.

I’d known about Le Grand Guignol since…well…childhood actually (thank you, Forry Ackerman!) and had seen posters and pictures and brief synopsis from a few of its productions but had never read any of the full scripts (many but far from all were based on Poe stories; in flavor they appear to be similar to the classic EC horror comics with a decidedly French accent).

So, curiosity triggered by the stray reference I’d stumbled across, I did a quick Google search…

…and turned up bupkis. The theater, it seems, is best remembered for style rather than substance.

But my search did turn up a couple of Le Grand Guignol posers I hadn’t seen before, one showing three clowns peering through a window at a fourth clown stretched out…dead? Drunk? Senseless?

No matter, the image stuck with me. What could that story be? I wondered…

…and immediately began crafting one of my own.

Okay, so first night I got the basic idea: Three clowns plan to rob a fourth clown who’s in a drunken stupor. This is Le Grand Guignol, can’t be mere robbery, must be murder.

Well, that implies a personal motive, much more than simple greed, and that would suggest one of the other three clowns is the intended victim’s wife, which in turn means the clown to be robbed must be a pretty crappy human being…

Okay, it was late at night, I didn’t feel like writing any details down, tuck it away until the next day.

But the next day and the day after I kept getting sidetracked by other things, both around the house and with other projects I’m working on.

So it wasn’t until Friday that I actually had a chance to put anything down on paper (and then merely a description of the play’s setting). Ideas kept bubbling up, but I couldn’t find time to write any of them down.

One thing I did do, however, was to try to work out the mechanics of the story. I knew how it must end, so it was merely a matter of reverse engineering. In order for the tragi-farce to play out fully the three thieves needed to turn against one another, the trio (A+B+C) becoming three overlapping couples trying to double cross the third partner in crime (A+B > C / A+C > B / B+C > A).

I spent Saturday trying to figure out the plot mechanics in my head, coming up with great little bits I filed away, but still not committing anything to paper or pixel, still not satisfied with the story.

Something was lacking.

So I thought, Why not add complications?

In this case, complications in the form of two other circus performers who are independently seeking to rob the drunken clown for reasons of their own.

That proved unworkable almost immediately. Too many crooks spoiling the broth, especially since one of the other performers would be a magician and the clowns wouldn’t want him involved in the robbery for fear he’d palm much of the loot.

But the fourth performer, she could stay, a rival to the victim’s wife.

Well, that certainly opened up fertile new territory, and so Sunday, after clearing my decks of some household duties, I sat down and start writing. (Finally!)

I was surprised at how much work my subconscious had done over the previous four days. While writing, I’d find myself adding details to the location, or particular lines of dialog to characters, with no clear idea of what I would do with them or what they meant…

…but as I got closer and closer to the climax, I saw I was laying track for my conclusion, not just laying track for the ending I planned, but building on it in new and startling ways.

I’m still not completely finished with it -- still some character names to finalize, some dialog to polish -- but I’m at least 95% done.

- - -

Housekeeping note: Over the next few days / weeks / months I’m going to be going through and deleting or reposting a number of my older posts.

The deletions will be time oriented stuff such as convention announcements, comments on ongoing events, etc.

The reposts will be things I had done with the old blog format in mind, the one with a dark charcoal grey background and using Wordpress, which enable me to experiment with various color and hidden text effects, as well as load up my posts with lots of graphics.

The new Squarespace software doesn’t allow for color text, and while I can imbed illos in the text, I like the look of one big graphic above text so I’m opting to stick with that.

#writing report #writing #Le Grand Guignol #EC Comics #how this writer's mind works

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writing-royza · 7 years

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Two Hundred and Thirty-two - Shirt, 3.0

A/N: Happy Sunday, everyone, and Happy Mothers’ Day! To all mother figures out there – mothers, grandmothers, aunts, family friends, teachers, coaches, bosses, or what-have-you – I wish you continued appreciation and love from the lives you touch.

I do not own FMA.

Two Hundred and Thirty-two - Shirt, 3.0

Crouched beside the table, fingers running along the mangled wood, Roy lifted a skeptical eyebrow. “…Are you sure you got a dog and not a beaver? This is a mess….”

Standing beside him, the puppy cradled in her arms, Riza grimaced. “Yes, I’m sure. He’s just teething.” She lifted her chin, pulling it out of reach as Hayate licked at it. “Though it does give me a definite age for him. He’s at least eight weeks old, but given his size —“ she hefted him, shifting him to a one-handed hold. “— I’d say he’s almost three months.”

“Which means he’s only just starting to get his adult teeth.” Getting to his feet, Roy reached out to scratch behind the pup’s ears. “I can fix the table leg easily, but has he chewed anything else?”

Riza bent, setting Hayate on the floor. He immediately scampered off after the tennis ball lying in a corner. “You name it, and he’s probably had it in his mouth,” she said, brown eyes following him. “The table legs, chair legs, water bowl, bed frame, his leash…. I even caught him with my toothbrush once.”

“Just once?”

She gave him a wry look. “After I replaced it, I made sure to start keeping it in the medicine cabinet. I don’t even know how he managed to get it.” She gestured to the table. “I really appreciate the help, sir; especially if it’ll help me avoid forfeiting the security deposit.”

“Hey, it’s part of the deal.” Drawing a piece of chalk from his pocket, Roy knelt to the floorboards, beginning to trace a transmutation circle around the splintered table leg. “You help me with paperwork I can never wrap my head around, I help you with apartment repairs.” He smiled. “You might just have a few extra, now.”

“I don’t doubt it.” She moved toward the stove in the corner. “Can I interest you in a cup of a coffee, since you’re here?”

“Sure. Thank you.”

In the time it took to finish the circle and repair the table leg — leaving it smooth again, though perhaps slightly thinner — Riza had the percolator filled and sitting on a warming burner. Dusting chalk from his fingers, Roy stood.

“Did you want me to do the chair legs and bed frame, too?” he asked, testing the table to make sure it didn’t wobble. “I mean, I might as well, right? I just didn’t want to go drawing chalk circles all over the floor if you didn’t want me to.”

Riza smiled wryly. “I’ll take chalked-up floors over chewed-up furniture any day; it’s easier to clean up.” Her gaze dropped to the floor, studying it critically. “I’m still finding splinters everywhere.”

“No doubt. And by the way….” He held out a small piece of fabric to her, pale blue and frayed-looking. “I found this, while I was down there. Could be something else he chewed through; looks pretty torn up.”

Brown eyes widened in recognition as she took the scrap. “…Oh no….” She brushed past Roy, heading for the closet beside her bed. Pulling open the door, she crouched in front of the basket of laundry inside, sorting through it briefly before pulling out something the same shade of faded blue. “…As suspected.”

Roy fought an uncharacteristic blush, clearing his throat to find his voice. “He didn’t chew through underwear or something, did he?”

“No.” Getting to her feet, Riza turned toward him, holding up a T-shirt with the words “Eastern Military Academy” printed across the front and several visible holes along the left sleeve. “This.”

“Oh.” Something peculiarly like relief flooded his veins — why? Why did the thought of his Lieutenant’s unmentionables make him nervous like that? It was ridiculous. “Well, that’s not so bad. I mean… that shirt is, what, probably six or seven years old? I don’t know I’ve seen you wear it recently, unless it was under your uniform.”

“You wouldn’t; I use it for sleeping.” Turning the garment over in her hands, Riza looked down at the printing on the front. “Look, I’ll be the first to admit I’m not a sentimental person, but even I have things I like to hold onto.” She shrugged. “This was one of them.”

He tilted his head curiously. “May I ask why?”

“I don’t know. I just….” A smile tugged at her mouth. “There’s really no explanation for it. I just… like it. It was comfortable.” Turning, she folded it up and set it on the bed. “I suppose it’s a lost cause now.”

Roy slid his hands into his pockets, eyes on the shirt. “Using alchemy to fix it would make it thinner. Probably would just wear out faster, then, but I can try it, if you like.”

“No, it’s all right. Letting go of the past is a healthy practice.” She gave him a quick smile, before her gaze slid past him. “Oh — looks like I have other things to take care of, sir.” He glanced back to find Hayate sitting by the door, giving pointed glances toward his leash. “Are you all right on your own if I step out for a few minutes?”

He waved her concern away. “Sure; I can get started on those other repairs we talked about. Go look after your boy.”

He waited until the door closed behind her before he picked up the phone, dialling a number from memory. A trio of rings later, the other end was answered. “Hey, Aunt Chris, it’s me.” A pause, and he grinned. “Why do I have to need something? All I have is a question. Does Evangeline still do little sewing projects for the other girls?” He waited, listening. “Good. Can you tell her I might have a little project for her? If she’s interested, of course.”

———————-

She had only just changed into her pajamas when the knock came at her door. Riza glanced once toward it, then down at herself, and sighed in resignation. Of course. Picking up her bathrobe from the back of the bathroom door as she passed, she slid into it, knotting the sash around her waist as her foot nudged Hayate away from the door. Removing the deadbolt, she opened the door just a few inches… and then fully as she found Roy Mustang, bent with one hand on his knee, trying to catch his breath. “…Are you all right, sir?”

“Fine… had to take the stairs… trying to be quick because I knew I was probably risking getting you out of bed….” Taking a deep breath, he stood straight, and promptly gave her an involuntary once-over as he realized what she was wearing. “…And it appears I did that anyway.”

She smiled, shaking her head. “No, sir. You cut it close, though. May I ask why you needed to see me?”

“Right.” Holding out a previously-unnoticed box, he smiled. “I was waiting for the others to be out of the office today before I gave this to you, but today was apparently the one day where everyone actually decided to be as dedicated to their work as you are. And then you left early to take Hayate to the vet, and I got caught up in what I was doing….” The smile turned lop-sided. “There are days where I just can’t win for trying.”

“You made it here, didn’t you, sir?” She still didn’t lift a hand to take the box. “What is this? I can’t think of anything that —“

“It’s the last of the repairs from last weekend,” he said. He waggled the box impatiently. “Come on, just open it. It’s nothing sinister, I promise.”

Relenting, Riza reached out to take the box, finding it surprisingly light. She pulled off the lid… and felt her eyes widen. “What…?”

He was standing tall, grinning proudly. “You said, you liked it, and you obviously didn’t want to give it up. But I couldn’t fix it without making it thinner and therefore less durable. So I found someone who could.”

Taking the neatly folded shirt, Riza crouched to set the box on the floor. “When I came back from walking Hayate and it was gone, I assumed you had just thrown it out for me,” she said quietly. Looking up, she smiled brightly. “Thank you, sir. This was very thoughtful.”

“I thought you might like to keep it a while longer. One of my sisters is pretty handy with a needle and thread; she agreed to help me out. Although….” Reaching out, he took the shirt and unfolded it. “I did not specify style, and she doesn’t know your personal one, so this could be a little interesting in terms of keeping your secrets hidden.”

Riza took in the inch-wide straps of her now-sleeveless shirt, the smile not fading in the slightest. “It’s a sleep shirt, sir. Who else is going to see, much less care?” Her head tilted to the Shiba Inu watching closely from behind her ankles. “I don’t think Hayate is going to spill my secret.” She took the shirt back as he offered it, leaning outside the door to glance around the hallway. “It’s late, sir. You should be getting home.”

“My thoughts exactly.” He nodded once in farewell. “Sleep well, Lieutenant.”

Her voice stopped him as he turned to leave. “One last thing, sir.” Her smile was not so sure this time, the hands holding the shirt fidgeting lightly with the material. “I’ve already said it, but….” Stepping close, she rose slightly onto her toes, planting a soft kiss on his cheek. “Thank you. Again.”

#fma #fmab #Roy Mustang #Riza Hawkeye #royza #royai #fma fanfiction #royai fanfiction #snap shots

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marysocontrary1 · 7 years

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Supergirl: Katie McGrath Is in Love With 'Badass' Lena Luthor — Aren't You?

By Matt Webb Mitovich / April 11 2017, 11:20 AM PDT

“So, so sorry to keep you waiting! But there were puppies.”

Supergirl’s Katie McGrath comes shuffling around the corner toward her setside trailer, having just made some furry friends over in hair-and-makeup. For someone so enigmatic both on-screen (Is Lena so different from brother Lex?) and off (Why doesn’t she have a birth date?), the Irish actress is wonderfully warm and welcoming, veritably champing at the bit to give her first in-depth interview since making her debut on the CW series last fall.

McGrath led TVLine on a quick iPhone tour of the puppies she just played with (peppered with some commentary on canine couture), before sitting for a cozy Q&A. Weeks afterward, she would earn a promotion to series regular for Season 3 — news she surely reveled in, given her girl crush on Miss Luthor, detailed below.

TVLINE | First of all, tell me what you’re shooting today. What am I shooting today? We are on [Episode] 218, so it’s a storyline with Rahul [Kohli], from iZombie. He plays Jack Spheer, who is a love interest for moi.

TVLINE | Jack is Lena’s ex, though, right? Yeah, but if there’s an ex, there’s still [with a flourish of the hand] frisson there, you know? We were together for a while. I feel very privileged that they thought enough of my character to give me a hot man to play with for an episode (airing Monday, April 24, when Season 2 resumes).

TVLINE | It sounds like a big episode for you. It is, actually. What’s nice about it is you’re getting quite a bit of backstory for me as a character. You haven’t really seen storylines for Lena outside of her being a Luthor and all the stories to do with her family…

TVLINE | It always seems to come back to her mom. Exactly. Or her brother… all of that kind of stuff. And this is separate to that, which is nice. It gives you more of an insight of her as an individual rather than her as part of her family.

TVLINE | But as Lena reconnects with Jack, Kara (played by Melissa Benoist) gets to investigating one of them…? There is the release of some new technology that to Kara seems a bit suspect and seems to be connected to a few dastardly dealings going on. She’s attempting to investigate it, on one hand, because journalistically she thinks that it’s interesting. And then on the other hand, she’s investigating it because she’s worried about me as her friend. So, there’s both of those going on.

TVLINE | So, you think Lena and Kara are friends at this point? They’re like bezzie mates.

TVLINE | Yeah? Yeah! Yeah! See, everybody’s got this idea that…. It’s always hard when you’re playing a character that everybody thinks is going to go one direction. They’re convinced she’s going to go down the road of Lex—

TVLINE | I’m not. But the two of them have bumped heads a bit. No, but they bump heads like anyone. Don’t you ever bump heads with your friends? But they always come back to, you know, a place of mutual respect of each other.

TVLINE | What might Kara’s investigation do to that dynamic? I can’t give away the ending. [Laughs] But ultimately, we’ve spent 18 episodes over the season building a friendship between the two of them, and it’s not going to be able to be destroyed in one episode. That’s one of the things I’m most proud of actually on this show, and I didn’t think that’s where it was going to go, because when I came in, I only came in for a few episodes. And [the friendship] has slowly and very realistically, I think, built up over this season. We’ve all put a lot of work into it and I’m glad that they’re taking the time to get there, and keeping it.

TVLINE | You were talking about how everything always loops back to Lena’s mom or the whole Luthor thing, but is there a bigger picture to ultimately be revealed? Might Lena have a scheme of her own percolating that we’re completely oblivious to thus far? I don’t think so…. I think Lena is a very genuine person. What you see is what you get with her. She is honestly trying to do the best she can, and she is honestly a good person. That’s not to say that other people don’t use her for ills, because she’s the head of this company, she has all of these other relationships that people can manipulate — like her mother — and get her into these situations that…. A normal person isn’t going to be b put in jail by, you know, Cadmus with giant green ray guns! It doesn’t happen to people that are not a Luthor, but it’s how Lena reacts to it differently than the rest of her family which makes her interesting to play. You think she’s going to “be a Luthor” about something, but then she turns around and completely surprises you, which I guess is what makes her an interesting character to watch — and definitely an interesting character to play.

TVLINE | So, at the end of the season finale she’s not going to let out a maniacal cackle and say, “At long last, Project Leviathan can be unleashed!”? You know, she might! I haven’t read the end of the [season], so anything is possible. [Laughs] She could decide to move to a giant moon made of cheese. I mean, at this point, who knows!

TVLINE | Who have you been working with lately besides Melissa? Besides Melissa? I’ve been working with Rahul. I have been working with Brenda [Strong], my mom, who is just so delicious.

TVLINE | And tall. [Nods] God. I swear. But just, like, perfectly, elegantly in proportion. [Sweeping her hand from head to toe] She’s like a dancer. It’s unbelievable. I then rock up like an Irish potato going, “This is great. I am so not your child.”

TVLINE | Have you worked with Jeremy Jordan lately? You two have had a couple of fun scenes. I haven’t worked with him since our little meeting underneath the stage. It’s funny because I seem to play these characters, generally, that are separate from the main storyline. So most of my stuff actually is just with Melissa, which is really nice, and it always tends to be real character stuff…. Us sitting down talking about things that are important…

TVLINE | And it always passes the Bechdel Test. Yes! Exactly. It does. It’s proper scenes between two women, do you know what I mean? And it’s rare, generally, that you get to do that on TV. I think that’s why the relationship resonates with so many people — and it’s definitely why I love to play it.

TVLINE | Speaking of the Lena/Kara relationship, what do you think about the whole “Supercorp” thing? You’re not out there on Twitter…. I’m not on Twitter, no. But I’ve had people tell me about it.

TVLINE | How does a person who’s not on Twitter hear about it? Well, Melissa will tell me, or anybody else on set. My brother mentioned it a few times.

TVLINE | Do you remember the first time you heard the term, or who from? Who did I hear it from…? I couldn’t even tell you…. I think it was Melissa, actually, who first told me. I’ve played quite a few characters that have either been gay or they’ve had, you know, some very obvious gay undertones, and to be completely honest, this was the first time I was like, “Well, this role doesn’t have any!” You’re laughing now — how naive was I? And then after the first episode… I go back and I watch and I was like, “Oh, yeah, now I can see it. That makes sense to me.”

TVLINE | On Buffy’s anniversary, I read an interview where Joss Whedon talked about people who would see lesbian subtext between his female characters and he at first was like, “What are you talking about?” But once he looked for it, he was like, “Ohhhh, yeah.” It’s funny because sometimes it’s so obvious when you’re playing it. You read it and you’ve got the characters and you’re like, “Oh, yeah, I know this is going to happen.” And then there are other times… and [with Lena/Kara] honestly, it just didn’t even enter into my head. But then you get the response and you go back and you’re like, “Yeah, I can see where that came from.” It doesn’t bother me at all. I think it’s great, because what really makes me feel good is that they can see the characters are working on more than one level. Do you know what I mean? It’s not just what we put into it. It’s what the writers put in, and the directors, and then what people can take from it. It means that the characters we’re playing are not just one dimension, they work on so many levels.

TVLINE | You’re stirring people’s imaginations. You want to do that with a character. Exactly. Of course, it makes you feel really good to know that what you’re doing is quality.

TVLINE | What’s your dream casting for Lex? If Katie McGrath could grab anybody to play Lex for one episode…. One episode? Bruce Willis, the most amazingly, good-looking, bald man there ever is.

TVLINE | I just saw him at the end of M. Night Shyamalan’s Split. Right? Was he delicious? He’s delicious. He’d be a good Lex.

TVLINE | If you could give Lena one piece of advice, what would it be? “Keep doin’ what you’re doin’. Don’t stop. Don’t second guess yourself.” She’s honest, she’s true to Kara, she’s true to her friends, she’s doing her best…. She’s trying, in the face of all the things people keep throwing at her, and all the expectations that people have, and she’s defying them.

TVLINE | You’re in love with Lena. [Cocking an eyebrow] Wouldn’t you be…?

TVLINE | [Stammering, some blushing] [Laughs] There is only one answer to that, and that is, “Yes, Lena’s a badass.”

http://tvline.com/2017/04/11/supergirl-season-2-interview-katie-mcgrath-lena-luthor/

#Katie McGrath #Lena Luthor #Supergirl #2x18

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clubsocial-india · 4 years

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New on Sports Illustrated: Trump's Fumbling of the Coronavirus Crisis Could Kill the College Football Season

The president is marinating in a midsummer mess of his own creation, and his epic failure of leadership will result in a ruined college football season.

One of Donald Trump’s favorite things to do as President has been visiting college football games in friendly locations, bathing his eternally needy ego in applause and affirmation. Last season alone, he attended the LSU-Alabama game in November, the Army-Navy game in December, and the College Football Playoff championship between LSU and Clemson in January. The First Football Fan was nearly as ubiquitous within the sport as Kirk Herbstreit.

That’s going to be a difficult vanity play to repeat in 2020.

There will be no college football crowds of the usual size. There might not be college football, period. Pessimism percolates as the time for solutions dwindles. We are speeding in the wrong direction as a nation in terms of combating the coronavirus pandemic, and one of the cultural casualties of American casualness is an endeavor millions of us want and every college athletic department needs.

If the season dies, we know who had the biggest hand in killing any chance of it happening: Donald Trump.

When he inevitably gets around to Twitter-ranting about what has happened to the sport, Trump should instead do what he never does—accept some accountability for the state of affairs. By blowing the summer he’s jeopardized the fall, doing more to endanger the college football season than anyone in America.

Slow to respond, quick to downplay the risk, unwilling to create a national strategy, quite willing to attack governors who took the pandemic seriously, pushing for premature openings of states, flaunting a no-mask stance for months and turning that into a belligerent political statement, Trump and his ideologues are now marinating in a midsummer mess of their own creation. What an epic failure of leadership, one that will deprive Trump of his cherished autumn fealty festivals at a packed football stadium.

As athletic departments do their best to cloister athletes and drive down positive test counts, the spread of disease in regions around many campuses is like wildfire. And on Thursday, the decision makers in college sports laid out the current crisis in stark terms.

A graphic in the NCAA’s latest set of return-to-sport guidelines was a reality slap. The graphic showed where the United States was in terms of confirmed cases in late April, when the NCAA began crafting procedures for how college athletics can resume in the fall. It showed the projected downward trend line for where the U.S. was heading, if it sustained initiatives it had begun and reopened with commensurate pragmatism and care. And it showed how our numbers went the other way while Europe, Canada and Japan flattened the curve.

From the NCAA report: “As the graph below indicates, when the NCAA began discussions about return of sport after the cancellation of 2020 winter and spring championships, there was an expectation that such a return would take place within a context that assumed syndromic surveillance, national testing strategies and enhanced contact tracing. Although testing and contact tracing infrastructure have expanded considerably, the variations in approach to reopening America for business and recreation have correlated with a considerable spike in cases in recent weeks. This requires that schools contemplate a holistic strategy that includes testing to return to sports with a high contact risk.”

The rest of the NCAA document, and a corresponding set of policies from the Power 5 conferences that was obtained earlier Thursday by my Sports Illustrated colleague Ross Dellenger, portray the daunting task facing college sports—and primarily football—this fall. Crafted with the input of dozens of health experts, the two documents lay out parameters that make it difficult to envision a fall season being played without massive interruption. If it’s played at all.

Consider this, from the NCAA guidelines: “When an athlete tests positive for COVID-19, local public health officials must be notified, and contact tracing protocols must be put in place. All individuals with a high risk of exposure should be placed in quarantine for 14 days as per CDC guidance. This includes members of opposing teams after competition. The difficulty is defining individuals with a high risk of exposure, and in some cases, this could mean an entire team (or teams).”

So, this is a potential scenario as the schedule currently stands: Ohio State plays at Michigan State Oct. 17. Afterward, a Buckeye who saw significant action in the game tests positive. The entire team could then be subject to missing the matchup the following week at Penn State, and the Spartans could decimated for their game the following week against Indiana. And who knows about the week after that.

Virus spread had been sufficiently contained in some other countries to allow sports to be played, thus far without disastrous fallout. The U.S. has lost all containment, yet still is hoping to play games. Professional leagues are one thing—well-paid adults represented by unions are making their own choices. College athletics, which many in America consider a raw deal for the star athletes in revenue-producing sports, are something else entirely.

Even if everything were going smoothly, the college football optics would not be great. Things are not going smoothly in Donald Trump’s America.

From July 8-15, the average daily confirmed virus cases in the U.S. was 63,018, according to The New York Times. That’s the highest seven-day average to date, which has added rising stress to hospitals and medical personnel in hard-hit states such as Florida, Texas and California.

But this isn’t just about caseload, which many Trump acolytes like to dismiss as immaterial. The positivity rate is climbing, and so is the death rate. The average death toll from July 8-15 was 726, highest it had been in a month after bottoming out at 471 earlier in July. Bad trend. Very bad trend.

What could shut down a season? The NCAA delves into that as well, noting the increase in COVID-19 spread and saying that “it is possible that sports, especially high contact risk sports, may not be practiced safely in some areas. In conjunction with public health officials, schools should consider pausing or discontinuing athletics activities when local circumstances warrant such consideration.” Among the factors that could end a season: “Campuswide or local community test rates that are considered unsafe by local public health officials.”

For everyone screaming that positive tests among young athletes don’t matter, health officials beg to differ. Healthy young people do not live in a vacuum, even on a college campus. They come in contact with many others who can be more susceptible to major health issues, up to and including death.

The caution being preached by every major conference, and the NCAA, is not politics. It’s on advice of people who deal with this disease for a living.

Still, a perverse line of thought has percolated in some dim corners that people with a stake in the game are rooting for the virus and against college football. The NCAA is not rooting against football. The power conferences, having fed at the revenue trough for decades and now begging fans to wear masks, are not rooting against football. The sports media industry, which is staring at its own economic disaster, is not rooting against football.

All those entities very much want college football. They’re also listening to experts tell them why college football is a really risky endeavor right now.

Perhaps football in the fall was always an impossible dream, but it seemed much more real in late May and early June, with America sacrificing and caseloads dropping. Then the shallow reservoir of Trumpian forbearance ran out, and people went back to doing whatever they wanted to do, gorging on “freedom.”

And now we’ll see whether some semblance of college football can still be played. If not, send the receipts for a lost season to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

July 17, 2020 at 05:25AM Trump's Fumbling of the Coronavirus Crisis Could Kill the College Football Season from Blogger https://ift.tt/2Bc4ws0

#Blogger

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bbnnfeed-blog · 6 years

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Navigating The Topsy-Turvy, High Stakes World of ICOs: Is There A Platform For That?

New Post has been published on https://bnn.io/news/navigating-topsy-turvy-high-stakes-world-icos-platform/?utm_source=Tumblr&utm_medium=socialpush&utm_campaign=SNAP

Navigating The Topsy-Turvy, High Stakes World of ICOs: Is There A Platform For That?

The global ICO market’s rapid emergence has been well documented. Percolating along at a frenzied pace for months, this space is now flush with scores of projects vying for attention and investment interest.

Amid this trend, the prevalence of scams and pump-and-dump schemes has escalated, creating uncertainty among many potential investors. A recent Wall Street Journal investigation, in fact, discovered that nearly 20 percent of 1,450 projects were clearly frauds. This has led to increased attention on the part of regulatory bodies like the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in terms of the monitoring of these unregistered “utility tokens.”

In addition, the move on the part of Facebook, Twitter, and Google to ban crypto related ads, has created a chilling effect on crypto projects and the promotion of these campaigns. Meanwhile, there has been a pronounced drop in prices on cryptocurrency markets leaving many investors skeptical and with fewer resources to put toward ICO investments.

The great innovation that ICOs brought to the table was their ability to remove a great deal of the friction associated with startup fundraising. But now with regulatory constraints, questionable projects, and a crowded ICO market, it’s becoming increasingly challenging for the average investor, even experienced ones, to make informed decisions about various ICO/STO opportunities.

Mike Finch

We here at BBNN recently interviewed Mike Finch, co-founder, and COO of ICO Alert, a trusted platform of active and upcoming Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) and Security Token Offerings (STOs) for his views on this rapidly emerging space. ICO Alert arguably has the most comprehensive list of Pre-ICOs (also referred to as pre-sales) and Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). It has published hundreds of in-depth ICO Alert reports, delivering insight into past, active, and upcoming ICOs. It also maintains a highly popular Alert Podcast, which features exclusive interviews with the largest founders and thought leaders in the blockchain space. Here are a few of Finch’s thoughts from the interview:

Take us back to mid-June and the SEC announcements that neither bitcoin and ether are not considered securities. What are your thoughts about these developments and what sort of impact will they have on token sales?

MF: Yes. In many ways, it was a good day for the crypto-sphere. Essentially, Ether was determined not to be a security by the SEC. And there was a handful of other informal guidance by a gentleman at the Yahoo finance summit as well. Lots of great news all around.

But I don’t recall that it specifically determined one way or another whether or not ERC20 tokens will be considered securities.

MF: No doubt, there are still some missing pieces from what I’ve been told and heard. Either way, it is good news as we, hopefully, move towards further regulatory guidance at a minimum. Obviously, some of these guidelines that were presented are not formal. They are not written into law. But it does give folks more information on how they should be conducting a token sale.

In other words, those in the ICO space should not see this as definitive?

MF: No. Clarity seems to be happening in baby steps. We will take it when we can get it. I hope it comes sooner rather than later.

So talk to us about ICO Alert and its value proposition for users?

MF: Absolutely, let me give you a brief history. ICO Alert was originally designed by my brother and me just for us, never as a website [or business] for anyone else. But we very quickly discovered a need in the ICO and cryptocurrency industry. Prior to us launching, it was very difficult for the average person to figure out which ICOs were raising money. ICO Alert came along as a comprehensive resource for the different token sales that are out there. We list ICOs, STOs, and Airdrops on our platform. We’re completely independent, which allows us to be comprehensive.

Describe the scope of your information gathering efforts?

MF: We’ve listed nearly 4,000 ICOs since the business launched on April 1, 2017. So if you look at Investing.com or your ICO Bench, or whatever the case, you’ll see that they do not have nearly as many token sales as we do. We don’t tell people what to invest in. Rather we give them the information they need to go through and use their own metrics to make their own decisions.

Describe the typical user of your site?

MF: Our typical user is one who has only been in the ICO space only for a couple of months or maybe weeks. A big problem we have in the space is ratings. A lot of sites have a lot of traffic and are giving out ratings that are completely subjective or, much worse, are paid for. What you have are a lot of new users searching for information [and] metrics, trying to make their own decisions. The problem is that the data they’re receiving is inaccurate, incomplete, or simply biased for some financial incentive.

How can this be changed?

MF: What I think it’s going to take like any other new asset, is education. In other words, the user needs to take the time to educate themselves. Cryptocurrency has been and continues to be considered a get rich quick scheme, one where you can spend a couple of days on it and immediately make a ton of money. In reality, that’s not the case. There are tons and tons of layers to understanding how to invest in cryptocurrency and where the value is. And the same case exists for ICOs. I think we’re coming to a realization in the ICO space that this isn’t as simple as throwing your money at these projects and then selling the token at a higher price anymore.

Reports continue to circulate in the media world about crypto heists and all of those ugly sorts of things that hurt the integrity of the space. How pervasive is this from your vantage point?

MF: That’s certainly a big question with many layers, one that’s not easy to answer. I think the majority of the time users are not falling victim to scams or having their cryptocurrency stolen. But reading about this in the media time and time again can make you feel like that might be the case. Fortunately, there are a lot of third-party solutions coming out to address these concerns.

Like?

MF: Hardware wallets are a big one. These projects continue to expand their offerings so that you don’t have to store your cryptocurrency on any exchange. Exchanges getting hacked, I would guess, are the most common way people are losing their cryptocurrency. Having a hardware wallet and understanding how it functions, how to communicate with it, how to store your various tokens on that wallet is a great first step.

In general, what are some cautionary tales in terms of what the average everyday person should be mindful of in terms of investing in an ICO?

MF: For example, there are a handful of things that we are doing at ICO Alert to make sure we are not listing scams. We want to make sure that these projects are holding themselves accountable and not doing something that is detrimental to a user. But more directly to your questions, newbies who are seeking to get into the ICO space certainly should start with things like Satoshi’s (bitcoin founder’s) white paper and basic information on how to store cryptocurrency on a hardware wallet. Then there are some big barriers to entry in the ICO space that, as ICO alert continues to grow, we hope to address. The biggest one is that [to] contribute to most ICOs you have to use bitcoin or ethereum, or even NEO. Communicating with an ICO via a smart contract can be very complicated. Understanding that process, finding those resources that are going to help with understanding that process, is going to be key before one actually look into which projects they want to invest in.

Talk with us about the regulatory environment. What are your opinions on that? Do you think it’s a good thing? Or will it create enormous barriers for the ICO space?

MF: That’s a great question [and] one that we constantly debate in the office. Honestly, this is probably the biggest barrier right now in terms of the continued growth of cryptocurrencies or ICOs. There are certainly some pros that regulation could bring, while at the same time really creating some unnecessary barriers to the space.

Can you elaborate on this a bit?

MF: Sure. If you look at ICOs for example, their main draw is that now anyone can fund a startup, whether you have ten dollars in Africa or a million dollars in New York City: you [can] fund one. You don’t need to be an accredited investor. You can do it online, you can, supposedly, access all the information you need to make that decision. But if now, at least in the United States, ICOs are illegal; you have these barriers that don’t allow a large portion of the investing world to contribute to what should be a decentralized, low barrier to entry investment vehicle.

So how do you think all of this will eventually shake out?

MF: It will be interesting for sure. Hopefully, we find some solution that is halfway, one where some compromises are made. But right now a bigger issue is easing some of the concerns among those out there who are seeking to raise money for their entrepreneurial project. It’s important for them to have a mechanism like ICOs for funding their startups or ideas. Otherwise, the United States and other countries are going to fall behind when it comes to innovation.

What are you looking to contribute to this quest at ICO Alert?

Our largest goal for 2018 is to collect anywhere from 150 to 200 data points on every single ICO, STO, and Airdrop that has ever existed. We’re not filtering our list by those who pay us. Nor are we filtering the list by some sort of subjective rating. We aren’t doing top 50, top 100, anything like that. We simply intend to collect information—we’ll be done relatively soon—for every single ICO that has ever existed so that we can be able to share this data with the average, everyday person. We’ll also be sharing it with institutional players: hedge funds and more traditional financial bodies who need this data. We believe we can present this information in really unique ways to our users so that as they continue to learn about which projects they think will be most successful. We’re super excited about unveiling these new projects this year and towards the beginning of next year.

Finally, what do you think is on the horizon for the remainder of 2018 in terms of ICOs and STOs?

MF: Another great question. Well, I am far from a fortune teller. But I do think that a lot of what occurs the remainder of this year is going to have to do with regulation. In particular, there is an opportunity for security tokens to take off this year if the regulatory uncertainty continues. I think there is an important context to consider in terms of why security tokens have a much longer road to travel than ICOs did. Custody is a big one. The ease of use or launch between STOs and ICOs are completely different.

Tell us more here?

MF: For a crypto asset like an ICO to have grown from where there were under 100 in 2016 up to nearly 2,000 in 2017 — that didn’t come simply because people were investing in them. A lot of that had to do with the fact that anyone could launch and ICO given that its a brand new crypto asset that’s unregulated and uses a decentralized token model to raise funds.

STOs don’t benefit from that same thing, and they have a lot of big questions that still need to be answered. Custody, as I said earlier, is a huge one. I am not convinced that STOs will be able to move quickly enough to take advantage of the current landscape. I think they will likely exist in the future but will act more as a tokenized version of the current securities out there.

And?

MF: I think there is plenty of room for both ICOs and STOs. We list both on our site, so we are neutral. I just think STOs will exist more for those securities that already exist [and] for those larger companies that are trying to cut costs in various ways. ICOs will continue to exist for the much smaller startup—the company trying to raise three, five, ten, twenty million versus massive 100 million dollar rounds like you’ve seen with Telegram and others. It certainly will be interesting to see how all of this eventually shakes out.

Michael Scott is Editor-In-Chief of Blockchain Business News Network

#ICO's

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neddysmithbass-blog · 6 years

Text

The Music Within

Finally, the album, MY POCOMANIAN GIRL is done and was released for purchase to the worldwide public on, November 15, 2017. My wish is for everyone to think of getting a copy as a gift for their loved ones

The Man and His Music

When I initially started out recording this project, I had another intended purpose in mind. However, this title came as a surprise from the original as a second thought. You see, I was already in the process of working on an album to feature mostly the future generation such as one of my sons who Raps very well and including my granddaughter who also loves to sing and tell stories. Invariably, what happened to me personally and spiritually, after visiting my native ancestral land, Jamaica, was transformational.

The trip started out with me and other family members who traveled to the Island and shared so many great moments reminiscing on a daily basis was not only to have a wonderful time but to reflect. And most importantly, to take care in support of the passing of a family member and also, some unfinished personal business. But instead, I was transformed by an extraordinary experience I had encountered that triggered my deepest past during a period of solitude at one of my ancestral homes.

For twelve months, I’ve dedicated some time to writing specifically a blog each month throughout 2017. I had chosen the theme, Words & Music. During this period, my writing was primarily on words that express thoughts from my past that triggered the present state of mind to wonder and marveled at the endless ideas percolated during those early years and how I am currently digesting coming alive from deep within my soul for future storytelling.

Secondly, my music has always been the core of my abstract thinking from a perspective of innate and philosophical views on expressing myself through stories aided by the words used so others can visualize my abstract thoughts. That’s how I’ve customarily expressed my most profound intent, in notation reflecting sounds designing through the imagination and faculties transcribed to a medium as a composition to represent musically, the experiences painted on the sonic canvas from the invention of the mind.

It’s now December, and as the year is coming to a close, it only fits for me to say thanks to all those who’ve read my blogs and supported my musical career throughout the years. On the other hand, to be quite honest, my blogs were not written as a quick read. They mostly intended therapy to satisfy my soul and bring closure to many of my missing links.

Anyone who’ve spent the time to read all or even some my Words & Music blogs, especially the ones posted as ES-9,10,11 and 11-CD would have realized that the “My Pocomanian Girl” album tells a personal story. Thus, I am summing up what I’ve accomplished by transitioning from authoring a novel, producing, writing songs and composing music not merely an ordinary thing to do but as one who loves to write and tell stories, or to follow through arranging instrumental and vocal recordings.

Honestly, I do believe that everything is within itself. A tree stored in its seed, and the fruit contained the seeds and so is life is within life. What it means to me is this, whenever an idea comes to me and reveal itself, that’s the time for its discovery and me to recognize what was always hidden deep in my subconscious memory as a whole. But as an unintended consequence, the trip to Jamaica invariably induced a paradigm shift from the original title, “Am Pocomanian.” I’ve continued through as a songwriter and as a musician to extrapolate from personal and imagined experiences for this album. Thus, I was able to fulfill a particular goal that took me closer than ever before to my Jamaican ancestral roots.

One of the reasons many people, including myself, are afraid to tell stories is fear of self-exposure. It was for this reason that I continued to write. I remember making a decision not to take my DSLR camera on my Jamaican trip. But instead, I took a few notepads and began writing and never missed taking a digital photograph except what I took with my cell phone.

The reasoning could merely be that because we’re nervous that they will reveal so much of what is right about ourselves. For example, when I started writing my first blog, I had not planned on traveling to the Island or anywhere for that matter. As a published writer, recording artist and musician, it was personal and meant a lot for me to follow-through on a promise I made to myself. I wanted to check off another item from off my bucket list.

I cannot help but say that the music within me is a living organism that never goes away. Even when I am not thinking of it, something will always remind me of a sonic experience. It could be a color, a tapestry, texture or a story from a painting. No matter what it is, music resides in the secret places of my soul waiting to be discovered by my physical senses. It’s the spirit that flows through my entire being that ultimately exposes to the world whatever was once hidden will be brought into the light.

Whenever I set a deadline to accomplished an objective, I am focused like a laser beam vectored on its targeted goals. That’s one of the reasons I’ve had to have accountability by discussing with my business mentor and getting honest and constructive feedback while differentiating the emotional from the logistical such that I am always helped by counsel to keep me on target.

In conclusion, the release of the album to the worldwide public dropped November 15TH. It’s now available online via digital download, streaming and on physical media for purchase mostly via stores such as CDBaby®, Amazon®, iTunes®, and others where music is sold and streamed internationally.

Web Links:

CDBaby

https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/neddysmith4

Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/My-Pocomanian-Girl-Neddy-Smith/dp/B076TRRMQ2/ref=sr_1_1?s=dmusic&ie=UTF8&qid=1511980577&sr=1-1-mp3-albums-bar-strip-0&keywords=Neddy

iTunes and

Others

Artist interview:

https://www.artistpr.com/artist-interviews/artist-interview-neddy-smith/

YouTube:

Blogs: S09, ES10 to ES11:

https://neddysmith.wordpress.com/

Website:

http://www.nedgjean.com/my_pocomanian_girl

Album/CD Track List:

The songs on this album tell a story about my past, present, and future of a life deeply felt by my Pocomanian experience. As a child, growing up in the Island of Jamaica, the message of love, peace, and happiness once given is for humanity to honor and share with generations to provide hope.

My Pocomanian Girl

Am Pocomanian

Drifting

How Many Times

I Am Sorry

Live as One

Am Looking Out

Love Peace and Happiness

A Pocomanian Cry

Searching for Love

When I Go Home

When Will It End

She Swims Like a Fish

Tropical Groove

Web Links:

CDBaby

https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/neddysmith4

Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/My-Pocomanian-Girl-Neddy-Smith/dp/B076TRRMQ2/ref=sr_1_1?s=dmusic&ie=UTF8&qid=1511980577&sr=1-1-mp3-albums-bar-strip-0&keywords=Neddy

iTunes and

Others

Artist interview:

https://www.artistpr.com/artist-interviews/artist-interview-neddy-smith/

YouTube:

Blogs: S09, ES10 to ES11:

https://neddysmith.wordpress.com/

Website:

http://www.nedgjean.com/my_pocomanian_girl

Album/CD Track List:

My Pocomanian Girl

Am Pocomanian

Drifting

How Many Times

I Am Sorry

Live as One

Am Looking Out

Love Peace and Happiness

A Pocomanian Cry

Searching for Love

When I Go Home

When Will It End

She Swims Like a Fish

Tropical Groove

WORDS & MUSIC ES12 The Music Within Finally, the album, MY POCOMANIAN GIRL is done and was released for purchase to the worldwide public on, November 15, 2017.

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