#another part of me wishes i had Infinite Funds and could use it to make a mold to cast it in Actual Gold

[waffliesinyoface]

im still waiting on the pins and spikes of the ring to be made before I can actually assemble the thing, but like. I can't stop playing with it. It's cool. part of me is wondering how much it would cost to, instead of painting it, actually plate it in metal.

yes, i'm being incredibly normal about this, can't you tell

#another part of me wishes i had Infinite Funds and could use it to make a mold to cast it in Actual Gold #but that is PURELY a fantasy. because. a solid gold millennium ring would be STUPIDLY FUCKING EXPENSIVE #yugioh

[mischiefmaxed]

MEMORIES┊MAY THE BEST MAN WIN.

CONTENT :          ↪ max's age: 22.              trigger warnings: fight mention. 

“who d’you think will win?” “big al, obviously.” “nah, the other guy looks good.” “ha! good for a dead man, maybe. didn’t you see the fight last week? big al just about slaughtered the dude.” “yeah, well, i’m a bettin’ man.” “you’re a fuckin’ idiot, is what you are.”

ah, pigeons. never did they cease to entertain her. so terribly dumb and naive. those that slinked their way through the golden rose warehouse in search of entertainment were often the kind that couldn’t rub two coins together if they had as much to their name. not that it made a difference to one such as herself, or the man she worked for. the aim of the game had always been to take them for all they had; no matter how large, or little.

and tonight is no different from any other. a crowd would gather around the ring perfectly centered on the ground floor of the house and, some unlucky fool would test his luck against their finest fighter. alan, so lovingly nicknamed ‘big al’, stood at six feet seven inches with bulging muscles and a nice, shiny, bald head. a pawn in LJ’s games, if nothing else. his only responsibilities were to make sure the club ran smoothly, and to put anyone who entered the ring with him on their ass. his winnings were LJ’s winnings and, their master never bet lightly on his oaf.

nothing encouraged a win like a monster breathing down one’s neck, after all.

truth be told, she liked alan. though mentally dimwitted and most certainly a house with lights on and no one home, their playful banter often aided her through the most boring of jobs and cases. he tended her wounds when her training became all too brutal for her tiny form to handle and her tab at the bar remained infinitely open without expectation for payment. though, she didn’t live in ignorance. the only reason alan liked her at all was because of her position. her power. not a man alive within the crew refrained from taking a knee around her any more. perhaps it’s a perk of being the boss’ right hand.

from her perch upon the highest floor of the warehouse, she could see all. the way patrons mingled with excitement, discussing their bets and the fights. even with the club moving to new york, LJ insisted the underground battles remained open to those sleezy enough to attend them. “pocket money,” he’d called it when she’d questioned the purpose of such repetitive and stale evenings. “an investment for the future.”

his motives still often confused her, even as privy as she were to his schemes. she’d often argue her efforts were enough to fund his plans, insisted on it so. but LJ would simply smile and kiss her, and remind her it never hurt to have options. as if she wasn’t enough. as if she alone could never be enough.

insignificant, he’d called her once. a waste of his resources.

“we have a problem,” comes a familiar voice to draw her from her thoughts. the thief blinks herself back into existence, glancing over her shoulder at the man who so often softened her features. “al isn’t fighting.”

“hell do you mean he isn’t fightin’?”

“the boss pulled him out. he wants you in there instead.” orion comes to her side, concern written into his features as he rests his hands on her balcony, peering down at the ring already stained red.

“reason bein’?”

“a client’s request.”

it’s with an audible groan that she answers, hanging over the railings with the temptation to throw herself over it entirely. she, like most, loved the fight. but it wasn’t a fight LJ would be looking for. a performance, would be more accurate. one filled with dramatics and flare. the sorts to drag out, to keep watchers on their toes. such things were no fun for her. they lacked substance. if she were to enter the ring, she wanted blood. she wanted the thrill. “why can’ you do it?”

“because they didn’t ask for me,” orion chuckles, reaching out with a hand to tenderly grasp her shirt, pulling her back onto her feet. “it’s shelley’s man.”

“shelley ain’ nothin’ but a snivellin’ swine.” one who undoubtedly wished to watch her fight for the simple pleasure of seeing her. an uncomfortable matter, that much is certain and LJ so loved to parade her before him, given the chance. she could only assume they’d be rewarded with new deals, and new territory. that’s the point of nesting in new york, after all. LJ wanted hell’s kitchen.

and hell’s kitchen he most certainly would get.

“look, you do this well, and maybe he’ll lay off you for a while. give you a break. a happy boss is a happy life, remember?”

“yeah, yeah. what abou’ me, hm? what abou’ a happy max?”

orion grins, his fingers moving to brush the hair from her eyes. “a problem for later. curtain call is in five... break a leg?”

“oh, i’m goin’ to break somethin’,” she swears, swatting away his hand with a fond bout of laughter. “cheer for me, won’ you?”

“forever and always,” orion promises.

                                                    ----------------------------------

and it’s safe to say that the crowd didn’t think much of her as she ducked into the ring. they were waiting for a guy five times her size and, to say they were disappointed by the short, little woman before them would be an understatement. it’s a scene she plays into, looking at their faces with her blue eyes doe like, her bottom lip puffed out in a pout. a few men boo, and she smirks in their direction. another whistles, and she responds in kind. the thief scans the stands for her audience; the fat man with a bad sense of fashion and her keeper and, when she finds them, she bows low, locking eyes with LJ for his order.

the man beside him — hudson, she comes to realise — takes a stand to offer her a round of applause. to this, she blows a kiss, taking on the role of court jester as if it’s the mask she always wore. hudson wipes the drool from his chin and sits back down next to LJ, a flurry of hushed and excited whispers offering her master thanks. oh, to have a brain as small as hudson, so easily amused.

“ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls! are you ready?” booms a voice from the speakers around the warehouse. orion enters the ring with a mic in hand, he too, playing his part. the crowd cheers, and the thief laughs, watching as he jogged around the ring with a hand in the air. “i can’t hear you,” he hums into the microphone, a mocking frown written into his features. “i said, are you ready?!”

inevitably, the crowd slips into a roar, drinks sloshing over the floor as pigeons raised their glasses, as they bumped into each other in their thrill. whether or not they’d been disappointed in the appearance of max, it didn’t matter. a fight is a fight and it’s what they were here for.

“good. that’s more like it,” orion praises, coming to a stand still in the middle of the ring.

it’d always been fun to watch orion work. he possessed quite the talent for engaging with crowds, for holding their attention. he’s the perfect example of what it is to distract and cause a scene, allowing those like herself to get up to no good unnoticed. it worked well here, for his encouragements and charm often lead bets to increase. orion could convince a man to willingly hand over his wallet, this much she’s sure of.

he’d won her over after all, hadn’t he?

and he does his part of introducing her, fondly reminding all of the nickname he’d so lovingly given her. “the devil of new orleans!” he cheers, grasping her hand in his to spin her into a twirl. she follows his step, rising onto her tip toes to pirouette. she glances to the stands as she poses, amused when hudson applauds her once more, and LJ smirks in approval.

he wanted a performance. and a performance she would give.

“and facing the devil tonight is none other than... wow, really? you’re just gonna use your... okay... ahem... the uh!  — it’s pete.”

now, she couldn’t help but giggle, the sight of her opponent arrogantly getting into the ring. he flexes his muscles, and she fakes a gasp, pressing her hand to her mouth. clearly the sight of a young woman instead of the big brute of a man he’d expected ignited the idea of an easy win. this, she could tell, for when orion wishes him luck with a pat on the back, pete shakes him off with a click of his tongue. “this isn’t a fight,” he barks, pointing at the thief with a confident smirk. “piece of cake.”

“i am very sweet, you’re righ’,” max nods, placing her hands behind her back. she threads her fingers together tight, locking them into place. “ain’ ever been called cake before, though. that’s new.”

“at the request of our most humble leader, this is a fight to the knock out. last man standing, wins,” orion announces, dipping out of the ring to clear the stage. “all rules are null. may the best man win!” and with that, he pulls his gun from his holster, pointing into the air. finish him, he mouths, his finger squeezing the trigger. a blank sounds like an alarm, and max turns her attention back to the man before her.

may the best man win, indeed.

#( drabbles. ) #( idk i just wanted to do something funnnn and flesh out her history a bit! #badly written but u kno u kno u kno!! ) #( pls ignore any mistakes and such because #what is proof reading?? i dont know her )

[zargsnake]

Leyr Burnridge and the Undead Star

Word Count: 3582

This is a story within a story. The framing device involves Star Wars characters, but if you don’t like Star Wars you can skip those parts and just read the main story. The framing device is indented.

   *   *   *

"They were older than our numbers can count, but not older than theirs could. A long time ago, they were just like us: petty, mortal, recycled, thinking from A to B, feeling from B to A, bound to an odd number of senses, and detached from answers to the biggest questions. They had found those answers -- some they figured out themselves, and some they had help from others...others who they had to leave behind. But that was a long time ago. Longer than we could count, but not longer than they could.

They knew everything, saw everything, held everything, controlled everything. They wanted nothing, guessed nothing, believed nothing, tried nothing. They boxed infinity. And for one of them, it was unbearable.”

   *   *   *

Jocasta Nu feels old herself when she looks at the name at the top of the "Year-16 [Adapted] Creative Writing Assignment." Serran's student's student's student, young Skywalker. With his light hair and quiet manner, the young man is a far reach from his great-grandteacher, that outspoken charmer who had bewitched the entire Temple. Back when the Ossus excavation was still well-funded, when the Students for Progress still held meetings with representatives from all levels of the planet, when the Jedi Exploration Corps had a full slate of planned missions -- back when things were good here, really good, because the future seemed so good, because people wanted it to be good -- Serran more than anyone.

She wishes he were still here in the Temple, with that desire and that action, because things are sadder now. The old projects were too ambitious, and people gave up. It turned out the sins of the Outer Rim were worse than anyone had thought. Now even the biggest thinkers assume controlling them is impossible. Determined capitalists can just hold important Mid Rim planets hostage now; people seem to just accept that. And what can you say against the Chancellor? It is seven years into his term, and though people are more miserable than ever, Jocasta thinks his detractors have become just as unreasonable and small-minded as his supporters. And worst of all, of course, the Sith are back. Just when the Mandalorians seemed quelled for good -- the Sith are back, lurking out there in the shadows somewhere. It is all too much. So people just don't care anymore. They just don't believe in anything.

But she knows that even if Serran were here, even if he could keep his legacy intact, so that he was not a stranger to his own direct line -- he wouldn't. Because he doesn't believe in anything anymore either. He told her so, before he left, but she knew before he told her.

   *   *   *

“Leyr Burnridge sat on her windowsill, looking out at the stars, wishing one of them would fall and die. She had an idea that the stars -- for all science says about gases and gravity -- were actually another type of people, a powerful and mysterious alien people -- and if one of them died and you saw it, then they would survive and become your slave forever. She couldn't tell you where she'd gotten this idea -- from a story, maybe, or a dream, or just a wish she'd come up with herself.

If she had an almighty starperson, the first thing she would ask for would be a ship. She did not like to stay in one place. The next thing she would want would be clothes -- she hated to look just one way. She wanted to be anywhere, looking like anything -- fitting in as well or as poorly as she pleased. If she wanted to meet the queen, the snooty courtiers would see her in her finery and let her straight in. If she wanted to plunge into a black hole, she would simply wear a strong enough spacesuit.

Leyr imagined more scenarios like that. She thought it was a very good idea. But she did not break her concentration on the stars. They were as still as her mind was wild, until -- a strike -- a fall. She saw it and smiled.

And then she felt a hand on her shoulder."

   *   *   *

Jocasta remembers the Year-16 CWAs she and Serran wrote. As with all the important or interesting projects of that time, they did them together. The assignment asks Jedi students to reach out through the Force, through all of space and time, and then try to imagine something that is perfectly and utterly impossible. Something that never has happened and never will, not even in the most obscure corners of the galaxy. The very furthest thing from reality -- to imagine that, to the best of their ability.

It is a strange assignment, but a beloved one, and quite traditional. She had asked her master, a shrewd Echani named Menoc Thebe, what the purpose of the assignment was. They told her that the assignment teaches Jedi to separate fact from fiction -- an exercise of surprising importance to their way of life. After all, between prophecies, visions, and universal compassion for every form of life from microscopic organisms to space-faring superbeasts, a Jedi's sense of reality must be bigger and more flexible than that of an ordinary person. Master Menoc had clarified that this heightened awareness has been known, historically, to take a toll on the mental well-being of Jedi knights.

She remembers recounting this exchange to Serran, and his response; he had laughed and said, "The things they do to keep us from going mad."

   *   *   *

"Leyr looked over her shoulder, expecting to see her roommate, but instead she saw a strange man. He was tall, with long silver hair and a young, sad face. His eyes were dark against his shimmering skin, and they seemed more real than the rest of him. Tiny bits and pieces of him disappeared or flickered around, and he faded away altogether half a foot before he reached the floor. Despite all this, he was quite fashionably dressed. Like a prince. Or a devil.

Leyr was not easily scared, and though he must have meant to startle her, she did not let it show. She pushed his hand off her shoulder and shifted her position on the windowsill to face him.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"Your star," he replied, "The one you saw die... You have me now."

His voice was a chorus of sounds -- different winds blowing through different tubes, none of them quite like a throat -- more like flutes and low whistles -- and soft percussion, like rain, or static.

"Do -- do you have a name?"

"... No... I am your undead star."

"Are you telling the truth?"

"Yes," he said, after a pause.

"Prove it."

"Look outside. Look down this time."

Leyr didn't like to take her eyes off the alien, but she could not resist. Outside, on top of her roommate's garden, was a sleek and beautiful spaceship -- almost exactly like the one she had been admiring in last week's catalogue, but with the improvements she had imagined in her head.

"You'll find the walk-in closet full, to your liking," he said.

She looked back at him, unable to hide her awe.

"Infinitely full, in fact."

   *   *   *

Jocasta finds great joy in reading the short stories. Over her many years as leader of the Year-16 CWA Committee, she has read thousands of them. While she does not have as much experience with the creative writing abilities of non-Jedi children, she can't imagine that they could possibly compare. Jedi reach out to the rest of the universe every day; their imaginations are, by necessity, extremely advanced. At the annual ceremony in which Jocasta explains the assignment, she always says, "Reach out into the Force, as far as you can. And then look even further, to the preposterous beyond."

She is still, even now, proud of the story she wrote herself. It was about a book which had no writer nor publisher; it simply appeared one day, on the desk of an unassuming clerk. The clerk, curious, opened it up and saw his own name there. He hesitated but kept going, and read his fictional self gamble on a fathier race and win. He looked up the next race on Canto Bight's channel, and saw every animal's name, just as it was in the book. He gambled and won, just as he was told.

He used the book as a guide to make the perfect life, and it even told him how to win the love of the man of his dreams. When they were married, he finally told his husband his secret. But when his husband read the book himself, his fictional self became sick and died. This fiction came to pass in reality, too: the young man did not last a week.

Jocasta thought it was a rather scary story, and quite clever, because it was about a story. And it was certainly impossible. Books cannot come from nowhere -- neither can fortune, nor harm. In reality, everything has a source. And it is foolish to put too much trust in a source that you do not understand.

   *   *   *

"For Leyr it was a year; for the undead star, it was barely a moment. He remembered every detail, far better than she did. He even felt it all, which he had not expected. He felt the cold of space and the brilliant sparks of her feelings -- anger, joy, drunkenness, sadness, longing. He could smell the filth of her garbage as he vanished it from existence; he could taste her lips when she kissed him. He could even burn his hand on the ship's stove or exhaust port, though it healed instantaneously. He still felt it. He could almost care.

Anything Leyr could imagine came true, even before she could finish thinking it. Her undead star knew her perfectly, better than anyone ever had, even her own family. Her silliest dreams, her darkest thoughts, her solemnest ideas.

She went around and around on accepting his gifts. Of course, it wasn't fair. She was not the worst-off person; she did not need so much help. And she was not the best person, either -- she didn't deserve it. Not like other people did, surely. But he would always say that she was the one who saw him die, and so he belonged to her.

She would ask what he wanted in return, and his answers would change, and she realized that he was only ever saying what she wanted to hear. He would say "nothing;" but when she grew uneasy with that, he would say "your company;" then after she told him she loved him, he would say "your love." Over time, she realized he didn't mean that. That realization hurt worse than anything ever had. And so she stopped asking him, but she did not stop loving him.

He felt like a breathing lightning storm, always flickering, every part of him a different heartbeat. He weighed as much or as little as she remembered he did. He arranged for her any lover she could think of -- even imaginary ones. But after a while, she stopped caring for others. All she wanted was him.

She felt they were like an electrical circuit. He was the current, and she was the ground. She realized, slowly -- slowly for her -- that he was nothing more than voltages. He had no will of his own, no direction. But she would still absorb the shocks -- if no one else was going to!"

   *   *   *

Jocasta remembers Serran's story, too. He wrote about utopia. In his perfect world, there were no rules; people did not need them. People were good all on their own. It was a world of constant change, without any loyalties at all. It was a world of absolute freedom.

The story was flimsy, something about a family escaping tyranny in their rickety ship only to crash land on his perfect world. Most of the text was the family getting shown around the planet in a grand, beautiful tour. It was inspiring. Even thinking of it now brings tears to Jocasta's eyes. The peace and happiness, the tenderness and trust.

But it will always break her heart to think that, when tasked to create something impossible, Serran created something happy.

   *   *   *

"One day she brought it up again -- that he was lying about wanting her love. He said all the right things, but she was beginning to get too smart for that. So he kissed her and held her, and though she knew she should see through that, too -- she didn't, not as well.

They lay in silence in the night, deep into nowhere. She felt alone. He felt alone, too.

"There is something I want," her undead star said, avoiding her gaze.

"Oh, really?" replied Leyr, not believing.

"Sort of," he responded. "The truth is, my people do not want anything. We evolved past that long ago, before your people existed."

"Oh." She thought about that for a while. "Do you remember when that happened?"

"Yes."

"What do you remember?"

He thought for a few minutes -- not about his answer, but how to explain it to her.

"My creator. We used to have beginnings and ends, like you do. I remember the other being, the one who created me."

"So, like your mother."

"Not really."

They were silent again.

"Did she die before you evolved?" Leyr asked.

"No," he replied. "But after we evolved, we were not related to each other like that anymore... We were unrecognizable."

"That's rough," she said. "I'm sorry."

"I appreciate that," he said, and he meant it, though she didn't think he did. He had said too many lies in the past.

"So what do you 'want,' then? As much as you can want anything."

He was silent. She felt him breathing, louder than before. It sounded like distress. It sure seemed real. She held his hand, and the feeling calmed him. She prayed that it was real.

"Do you want to die?" she asked, sadly.

"No," he said. "I don't want to end myself... I want to begin something else."

He turned to look at her.

"I came to you because you, of all people, had so many wishes. I tried to give them to you."

"You have," she said, stroking his hair. "...But they all seem so trivial, now."

"Perhaps."

He held her face and kissed her again.

"Will you have a child with me?" he asked her.

Leyr had dark eyes, too, and the alien gazed into them. He knew every thought and feeling behind those eyes; he saw her secrets plainly, churning around in chaos at his strange, abrupt question.

He thought her eyes were beautiful. He wouldn't have thought that a year ago.

"Is that possible?" was the question she prioritized. A silly question, but necessary for her linear, agitated mind.

"Anything is possible," he answered, smiling. She played the endless game, guessing if his expression was real or not. This smile seemed different than any other -- perhaps a clue to its authenticity. Certainly this conversation was different than any other. He had never asked for anything before.

"What would our child be like? Like me, or like you?"

"Definitely like you…Partially like me."

"What do you mean? How much of a part?"

"I don't know," he said, after a pause.

"What do you mean, you don't know? You know everything."

"Not this. This is the one thing I don't know."

"How?"

"Because none of my people have done it before." He had never held her hand so tightly. "Because we decided to be through with beginnings and ends, risks, love, all of it. It is forbidden. And I'm the only one of us who can't stand it anymore."

"But what if something terrible happens?" She freed her hand from his grip and held him more gently. "What if such a baby can't make it? What if its life is miserable? What if your people find it and take it away, and make it unrecognizable, anyway?"

"Then, perhaps, I would want to die."

She cradled his head.

"...You have to tell me what would happen," he continued. "I do not know. And what I don't know, I don't know. I can't guess. Only you can guess."

She supposed that made sense, though it felt very unusual.

"Was this your plan all along?" she asked.

"Yes," he said, his breath warm on her skin. "Just as you wished for me, I wished for you."

Leyr gazed up at the stars through the spaceship's great window above their bed. What kind of a choice was this? He held every advantage. He could make the whole ship vanish in a blink. But she wasn't afraid of him. She never had been. She trusted him. She loved him. He was asking to move forward in their relationship -- it was the least alien thing he had ever done.

He could not imagine, but she could. She imagined their child, its every wish granted, its every moment perfect -- just as her life had been perfect this past year. Had it only been a year?

And the alternative? To go on like this, knowing what she knows now of his great misery -- though he wouldn't call it that. Now that she finally knows the truth -- she can't just ignore it. She can't just keep wishing and adventuring, chasing whims and fantasies forever. It's one thing to have an unfair advantage over everyone else in the world -- but to have one over the person she loves most?

"Yes, I'll have a child with you," she said, after this short mental exercise. "I love you."

It was the one of the last things she ever said to him. She woke up in a small apartment in a large city. The sparse, clean rooms had no trace of her lover or anyone else. The son she had shortly after did not look alien. He didn't behave especially strangely, either -- at least, not as strangely as his father.

For a creature who knew all the answers, the undead star had left Leyr with only questions. Perhaps these are the sorts of questions we need to ask, in order to evolve beyond mortality ourselves. Perhaps this is their way to guide us along, to bring us closer to themselves. Or perhaps they will only ever leave us behind.

Leyr Burnridge sat on her windowsill and looked at the stars, wishing one of them would fall and die -- though she knew now that that whole scenario was entirely made-up to seduce her. A godlike alien read her mind and took advantage of her silly idea, all for some great, elaborate ploy to burden her with his little parasite.

Why did he bother? She wished that was the question that kept her up at night. But it was not.

The only question she really cared about was this: Did he leave her, or did they take him away?

In her nightmares, they punished him. They demagnetized the fragile bonds holding the gossamer particles of his body together. They washed the clarity out of his eyes, and ground his soul into wires and glue. They killed him, or assimilated him into whatever horrible, unfathomable thing they are.

It would be simpler to say that she was angry, but that's not the kind of person she was. It would be good to say that she was hopeful, that she believed, that she waited -- and that is a little closer to the truth. But I can't say either of those things. She was afraid -- afraid for her lover and afraid for her son, afraid of impossible creatures who she couldn't explain.

That fear sunk deep under her skin. Deeper than they could feel, but not deeper than we can.

The son of Leyr Burnridge and the undead star could fear just as deeply as his mother could...and he could count for as long as his father could.

His father was lost and his mother was forsaken. But he was born to find the answers, and, this time, to leave no one behind."

   *   *   *

Anakin wonders what to do with the second half of the story. He only sent in the first half, of course, ending at the electric circuit metaphor. It is a bit of an abrupt ending, and makes the story rather short, but he knew the old lady wouldn't mark it as incomplete since it was already getting way too inappropriate. That was a trick Aayla taught him to get away with sending in shorter projects: just make them kind of sexy. It works on most of the teachers here, though you have to be careful not to use it too much because they will tell your master.

He hadn't meant to keep writing, really, after that. He'd meant to keep it all in his head. But it just spilled out so easily and now he's got it, right here, on his stupid computer and Obi Wan -- or worse -- could access it anytime, because Padawan security locks are worthless.

Would that be so bad? ... Yeah. It would.

He wants to just delete it. The only problem is he likes it.

He downloads it onto a datarod, deletes the source document, throws the datarod under his bed and forgets about it until he gets knighted years later and has to thoroughly clean his room so he can move to a bigger one. When he rediscovers it then, at twenty, and remembers what it's about, and how it ends, he tells Artoo to blow it up. Artoo happily obeys.

#my story #my art #leyr burnridge and the undead star #anakin skywalker #jocasta nu #count dooku #star wars #scifi #tragedy

[geekgemsspooksandtoons]

Bioshock Rebirth Timeline

This is a timeline of an AU I’ve had been developing for a long time now. I wanted to get this out there before I got on vacation. Where I’ll will be only able to use my phone to go on Tumblr. Be warned a long introduction. 

Bioshock Rebirth is an AU that’s actually a reimagining of the Bioshock series. Basically a reboot of the series. But also in a strange way it’s a, “What If” scenario. The origins of this AU were quite strange and it became this one thing. Where I have admitted I went too far with how deep it was going. There was this passion and me trying to develop it(Such as imagining how it would work as a video game. Even though this is my story). Including I made some stories for it. Along with an ages chart of a lot of characters. 

During development I was trying to understand what made Bioshock well Bioshock. Yet make something that seem plausible despite how I considered it insane in it’s early stages.

I’ve been so nervous and shy to share it with the Bioshock community on Tumblr. Because it’s complex, and I’m concerned of what the reactions would be to it. Especially some parts I feel like became quite dark. With this AU I have used elements and characters from the first three games. But the timeline is mainly mostly like Bioshock 1, 2, and taking things from the novel. Despite what some reactions were to that novel.

I looked into the timeline before Infinite made things more messy. 

One of the origins for Rebirth it’s supposed to be a more hopeful version of Infinite. A contrast to that game’s ideals and whatever else. Including a weird way to explain how this timeline existed. Because of the incontinences and errors in Bioshock Infinite’s, “Burial At Sea” and the events of Infinite did something to the multiverse. Mainly in a way that despite how Ken Levine tried to erase Bioshock 2 out of canon. Basically, “Burial At Sea” destroyed the timeline and in a way caused a ripple. Thus resulting in a new timeline that is a neighbor to the main universe. A, “Reborn” version of the timeline. Where Rapture was created way later. When the Cold War was still going on.

But this, “Reborn” timeline was made into a more linear timeline. Where characters, and some events were reborn into a new reality. Meaning nearly every character from the first three games were, “Reborn” into one linear timeline. Where the floating city of Columbia isn’t a thing.

While that doesn’t make sense and it’s weird. What’s amazing that during development, some of my Bioshock jokes...became literal. Such as the, “Burial At Sea was a mistake” line. Yet I could say another funny reason was two entities fought over the universe of Bioshock. One being Ken and the other being GeekGem. But I don’t wanna get into that.

I guess you say I feel glad to see many Bioshock fans don’t like Burial At Sea(Especially Bioshock 2 fans) and how Ken wrote it along how he approached Infinite. Glad to see I’m not the only one. In a silly way....Rebirth is a middle finger to Ken trying to rework the timeline. Along with other reasons that it’s amazing I went so deep into this. Basically in retaliation to Burial At Sea, Rebirth was born.

I wanna thank my good friend @pikablob for encouraging me to share this. Because he was the first person where I revealed this in it’s early development stage. But there is one person I really wanna thank but they wish to remain anonymous. A person who had given me ideas and even asked if I could mention them. I am eternally grateful for them helping me develop ideas. Especially to hear from another Bioshock fan who didn’t like BAS and who seemed passionate about the series. Yet they were glad to see I was passionate about the games.

I’ve been concerned with how people would view this and may hate it. But overtime I feel like I made a, “Love Letter” to the Bioshock franchise. Despite some directions I went with. I really like these games, the characters, and this world they live in. Where I really tried to keep them in character as much as possible, how these characters would make sense in this timeline, thinking about the criticisms of Infinite, and other things.

I will admit before making this introduction. One character I wanted to include was Charles Milton Porter from Minerva’s Den. I decided to look into his story and the DLC’s story on the Bioshock wiki. Because this DLC was beloved by the community and I wanted to keep that character and his story intact. But I just wanna post this because I’m done keeping it as a draft. Yet I feel like wanna say compared to this main universe counterpart. Porter is most likely okay. So don’t worry about him. He’s probably still around and fine.

Be warned of spoilers from the Bioshock saga. Including as I am going to reveal the twist behind a character named Archie Wynand. Who’s creation and development process was a weird one. I’m sorry if there are some errors. Was fixing up some stuff before posting this.

1981: Rapture is first established on November 5th 1981. While the rest of the construction of the city is finished in late 1986. Rapture was made to escape the surface especially the affects of the Cold War going on between America and Russia. To make a utopia for the world’s greatest minds and artists.

1983: Earlier that year, Brigid Tenenbaum is welcomed to Rapture because of her status as, “The Wonder Child”. ADAM is finally discovered through the slugs by Brigid. But because of injecting a sample into a volunteer named Annabelle Dewitt,  Annabelle dies giving birth and Elizabeth/Anna is born. The girl was unusually healthy that  Andrew Ryan convinced a grieving Booker Dewitt to give his kid away for a better life. When in reality Andrew saw something in the girl. Along with Yi Suchong.

During one night, enraged by the loss of his wife. Booker invades Brigid’s apartment, tying and gagging her up with the intention to kill her. Accusing her of killing his wife. But he relents after seeing the woman cry and realizes violence isn’t gonna solve anything.

After this, Booker leaves Rapture without anyone noticing. Later down the line joining the CIA. But during his work in the CIA, being affected by the loss of his wife and giving away his daughter. Booker becomes some what of a apathic psychopath. Which creates a terrible reputation for himself. 

Because of what happened with Annabelle, Brigid is turned away from many research facilities. But Frank Fontaine saw the value of her discovery and agreed to fund her research. Including during this, he and Tenenbaum are made aware of Elizabeth’s existence to study her growing up. Including later the Lutece Twins. Mainly to help study the girl. The reason Fontaine also involved with Tenenbaum because she was his employer.

During this process. Brigid gives Elizabeth the last name of Comstock. Because Ryan would feel disgusted if the girl shared the same last name as him.

1986: During the 80′s and 90′s. Elizabeth is placed into a building and her existence is kept a secret. Yet in 1986 when nearing a closing teleporter made by the twins. Her pinky finger is severed. 

After this, because of her blood and what happened with the tear. She was able to gain the power to open tears. But because of this incident, her prison becomes less loose and more strict. Such as the twins creating a device to control the use of her powers.  During this time, Yi Suchong creates the, “Proto Daddy” to keep her company as her guardian. Which Elizabeth nicknamed him, “Bluto”.

Elizabeth is kept as a secret in case for the possibility in case he hopes it never happens. If Rapture were to fall and soon taken over. Whether it be the, “Parasites” or someone else. Elizabeth is his secret weapon. If she were to be revealed now, Rapture as a society might collapse. Showcasing his lines of, “No gods or kings, only man” as just something he went against.

But in the tower, they keep her there and watch her as she grows up. With Andrew not calling her it instead of her, and Suchong studying her as well. 

1988: Elizabeth was the inspiration for the Little Sisters. Which results in Frank Fontaine starting the Little Sisters orphanage.

Elizabeth is basically the, "Proto-Sister" of the Little Sisters.

1995: The UK’s Royal Navy deep sea diver, Sergeant Johnathan Gunnar AKA Johnny Topside finds Rapture by mistake but is captured. He is presumed dead by his government. Johnny is given the freedom to live unless he lives in Rapture which he does. Mainly due to his career as a diver. Now helping as a construction worker to keep the city from falling apart.

Eleanor Lamb is born to Sofia Lamb. Because of during one therapy session she got, ‘acquainted’ with a patient, and had sex while drunk. Sofia refuses to speak about it. Yet she finally has a daughter for her own purposes. The father is unknown at this point.

Because of this and the increase of the Rapture possibly being discovered. Andrew personally sets out to find a someone that has the skills but does not seem to care about anyone else. He finds Booker Dewitt who is now a ex CIA operative due to his increasing rage and violence over the years. The American government thought he was a disgrace.

Andrew see’s this as a opportunity and gives Booker some what of a 2nd chance. To be Andrew’s personal soldier. In case things go south where he may want Booker to take care of any problematic people who apposed Rapture.

Booker became Andrew Ryan’s personal Grim Reaper. With Andrew allowing him to wear a skull mask that looked like the jaws of an Angler Fish. To showcase fear to any of his enemies.

1997 to 1998: Jasmine becomes pregnant by Andrew Ryan. After discovering from the audio recordings of a surveillance device planted in Jasmine’s room.  Using Tenenbaum as an intermediary, Fontaine offered to pay Jolene a large sum of money in exchange for the fetus of her unborn child, which he planned to nurture to become his "Ace In The Hole" in his schemes against Ryan. Brigid, Yi, and others were tasked with developing a young Jack Ryan.

The Alpha Big Daddy series is soon made. Inspired by the, “Proto Daddy”. To protect the Little Sisters from getting attacked from people who used ADAM too much. Who were called the Splicers.

Yi Suchong and Gil Alexander were involved in the making of the Alpha series.

Johnny Topside discovers the process about Jack. Including what Frank planned to use the child for.

Johnny risks his own life and future to give the boy a life. Fighting against Frank’s forces and even Andrew’s own men as they think he’s gone against Rapture. Even one time assaulting Yi once to rescue Jack from him.

Due to Brigid’s feeling regret of what she did to the Little Sisters. She secretly helps Johnny by making sure the, “Would you kindly” phrase doesn’t work or any other functions Frank would of used. Including to stop the sped up aging. This was done in a secret safehouse she would use later on. While a pair of twins secretly smuggle Jack out of Rapture. With giving the boy a new name Archie Wynand, a high school diploma, birth certificate, lots of money, and new memories showcasing that he had loving parents who disappeared in the ocean. To make sure he never wonders about Rapture. But also to make sure he is set for life.

The chain tattoos are covered up some how. During this time Jack was only 1 but physically 19 due to the experiments performed on him. Again feeling sympathy over the child and not wanting this to be his fate. Despite never raising a child before.

Johnny also tried to make sure nothing would lead back to Jasmine being Jack’s mother. Worried the woman would get killed if Andrew found out.

But after he is smuggled out by these twins, Johnny is caught. Angered by this, Frank tells Andrew that Johnny was gonna expose Rapture to the whole world. That Johnny finally lost it.

As punishment, Johnny is turned into an Alpha series Big Daddy named Subject Delta. Where his Plasmid testing and more is done by Sinclair.

Afterwards Andrew Ryan soon discovers what Frank was trying to cover up. That he was gonna use his own seed to turn against him. Including when he discovered Frank wanted to sell ADAM to the surface and would smuggle it.

This resulted in one last shootout which left Frank dead. Along with Andrew ordering Booker to show Frank no mercy. Many others thought Frank was dead. But it was all a set up for Frank to disguise himself as a new person named Atlas.

Surprisingly the concept of Atlas was also inspired by Johnny Topside himself. Despite Atlas would be of Irish decent and other things.

During late 1998, Atlas would soon start becoming a public figure to the poorer citizens of Rapture. Posing as a fisherman, proletariat hero, and a family man. To act as a humble freedom fighter to who would stand up to Ryan and his colleagues. Along with the bonus that Atlas was originally in the Irish Army for some time.

But because of what Johnny Topside did. Frank’s original, “Ace In The Hole” was gone. His original plan that was so perfect was ruined. His personal slave was lost and broken now. Now things have to start over.

Yet there was one last thing he could of used. Something he knew for a long time. Elizabeth, if he could use her for his own purposes. She was born with ADAM in her, and able to create these tears. He would become unstoppable. But now he has to take it slow and steady.

Because of her new found heart after what she did to the Little Sisters. Yet this also caused Frank to fire her earlier. Brigid wanted to help rescue the Little Sisters. Yet after her renunciation of the Little Sister orphanage. She was called a madwoman by the public and hid from the public eye.

She secretly has a safe house for any rescued Little Sisters. Which she has also made a living space for herself. Because living in her apartment would be considered too dangerous. But also because of her new found heart and living with the guilt for many years. Brigid feels responsible for Elizabeth’s predicament. Wanting to save and take care of her like she was with her little ones. Despite she can’t get to that tower now considering how well guarded she is. Along with Brigid’s reputation was destroyed at the time.

Throughout 1998 and to 2002. Because thinking his parents were gone. Archie was a loner and an introvert. He had no family to live with. Yet it was because of Johnny’s kindness and the memory that his thought to be dead parents left an lasting impact on him. Making Archie a tender and genuine kind person.

Archie joined the 75th Ranger Regiment in respect of his father and to help people in need. He joined in late 1998. Passing his testing and training with unseen excellence than other people. This was because of what the testing did to him as a child.

Because Frank wanted Jack to become the ultimate killing machine. To make sure when the time came, Jack would of been ready to take on Rapture when he activated him. Thus in a way making Jack some what of a living weapon.

Something that even his commanders were so shocked at his excellence that they questioned if he was human. With some of them being strangely terrified that he never showed attitude, never showed off, or anything that a normal rookie would of done. Nearly everyone treated with him respect despite their disbelief that any human can train like that.

When joining the US Army Rangers, this enhanced Archie’s status as a weapon. Thus making him even more of a force of nature. Reserving his extreme emotions but not becoming emotionless. At the age of 21, he became a sergeant.

Because of Johnny, Jack now as Archie became more than Frank would of ever done for him.

Archie became a force of nature. Unbreakable, raw, incorruptible, loyal to a fault, and unyielding. What was supposed to be a sleeper agent became a legitimate super soldier.

Yet despite all that. Archie was an outcast.

Despite Brigid trying to make sure his original programming didn’t work. If, “Would you kindly” was said to him. His head would start hurting. Almost like a migraine or headache. If the phrase was said more. His mindset would start getting worse. Starting to remember things and being confused of what’s going on. 

Seeing things such as faces, including Andrew Ryan, Frank Fontaine, and other things. 

The, “Code Yellow” command was still intact. Yet more raw now if it was mentioned. Because Yi and Fontaine only knew about it.

1998 to 2001: Atlas begins to start giving the poorer citizens of Rapture a voice. The tensions between the social classes begin to rise. Including with ADAM becoming more of a problem now due to addiction. Especially with later down the line Ryan nationalizing Fontaine Futuristics. Which causes Bill to resign. But afterwards, Atlas convinces Bill to join his rebellion in secret.

2000 to 2001:  Sofia Lamb was arrested after Ryan finds out she is a Collectivist and spreading her beliefs to people in Rapture. Eleanor Lamb was put in the care of Grace Holloway. But after finding out Stanley Poole was a spy for Andrew Ryan. He had Eleanor kidnapped and turned into a Little Sister. She spent time in the Little Sister Orphanage and was under the care of Dr. Gil Alexander. She is later paired with Subject Delta. They form the first pair bond between Little Sister and Big Daddy.

Over time the pair bond between the Alpha series and Little Sisters worked too well. If a Little Sister were to die. The remaining Alpha Big Daddy would be left to be aggressive. Because of this, it was decided to go for a more generic, but versatile route for the protectors for the Little Sisters.

Which results in the creations of other Big Daddies such as the Bouncer and Rosie models. That were still construction workers. But now having to protect a Little Sister. The pairing process was different. With now adopting being a thing.

But also during this time. Sinclair started to realize the error of his ways and tried to better himself. Especially with Rapture slowly falling apart.

Charles Milton Porter is framed by Reed Wahl with a recording of Porter siding with Atlas. Porter comes up with a back up plan if he were to become a Big Daddy and manages to message Brigid before being taken away. Who was the only person Brigid could safely come into contact with because they are good friends. 

2002: On New Year’s Eve, Atlas leads an attack that starts the Rapture Civil War. Which also scars Diane who after some time joins Atlas and his cause. Including Daisy Fitzroy joins as well. Becoming in a way Atlas’s 2nd in command.

Yet also during this, Sofia Lamb a month earlier escapes prison during an uprising. To finally get Eleanor away from Delta. Which she succeeds in doing so. Yet during this, Sofia discovers the original WYK plans and the experiments of speeding up a child's age. Which she plans to use on Eleanor and any Little Sisters she may catch. But for what she thinks is the common good.

But during this because he no longer has Jack. Frank no longer has a back up plan. Andrew is winning this civil war. The city is slowly falling apart. While some areas are still populated. Other parts of the city have gone dark. Making them a paradise for Splicers. Despite some Splicers and others would get into more better areas.

In June 2002, Atlas becomes desperate that he decides to make a distress call to the surface. His plan is to trick anyone that would come into helping him into rescuing Elizabeth and taking over Rapture. With making false promises to call the US government to take in Andrew Ryan and anything else.

In Georgia, the Army Rangers get the distress call and are deployed quickly. When their aircraft gets near the location. They are confused it’s in the middle of the ocean but there’s a mysterious lighthouse.

Seeing this, Andrew fires down the aircraft using a special heat seeking missile that can be fired from the city. This causes the aircraft to crash and there is only one survivor. 

Surprisingly for Atlas and others by chance. That survivor was his original, “Ace In The Hole” Jack. Now known as Sergeant Archie Wynand.

The story of Bioshock Rebirth happens. Which results in Archie finding out who he really is. Along with other things. Leading up to Archie killing a half ADAM powered Atlas/Frank Fontaine by stabbing him in the chest with a syringe to suck the ADAM out of him. Then hanging him from a roof. Ultimately killing  Effectively ending the Rapture Civil War once and for all.

During this, Sofia’s influence becomes stronger. With, “The Rapture Family” slowly rising in power and to make Eleanor, “The People’s Daughter”. As of now because of the sped up aging, Eleanor is 17 years old. 

After the events of Bioshock Rebirth. The Vox Populi are formed. A reformation of what Atlas had done. 

Two months later in August 2002.

Rapture is in a better state. With the Vox trying to make it in a better place to live in. With a community that would help each other. But Andrew Ryan has gone into hiding and is nowhere to be found. While the Vox led by Daisy Fitzroy and Bill Mcdonagh try to capture and find certain people in Rapture to emprison them. Such as Yi Suchong, Booker Dewitt, Sander Cohen, and whoever else considered to be a criminal that doesn’t wanna change.

Including during these events, Subject Delta is brought back to life by Eleanor through the help of the Little Sisters. With also Eleanor contacting Brigid to help aid in undoing the psychological conditioning imprinted imprinted in Delta’s mind when he was a Big Daddy. The plan works well and Delta meets Brigid and others.

Soon, Sofia does a hostile takeover a Rapture. With, “The Rapture Family” and the, “Vox Populi” going to war. But the Big Sisters turn the tide of it. With the Vox’s secret weapons being Sgt. Archie Wynand, Elizabeth Comstock, and Subject Delta.

Sofia demonizes Delta but also calling Archie, “The Demon Of Rapture” because of his actions and his own birth. Because most people in Rapture know of his existence as, “The Prodigal Son”. Sofia worries Archie may influence Eleanor. But realizes later on, it’s Delta she needs to worry about.

Sofia has the support of Grace Holloway(Who then joins the Vox after realizing who Archie really is and seeing Delta isn’t a monster), Stanley Poole, Gil Alexander(Who is now possibly Alex The Great), but also Ava Tate. A seductive woman who made propaganda films for Andrew Ryan. Along with being one of Sander Cohen’s colleagues. But also Sofia’s right hand woman. 

But because of Sofia’s hostile takeover. Because of the old programming. Archie starts seeing hallucinations of Atlas using his Irish accent. Haunting the young man and trying to get him to certain things. Such as killing Suchong and Sofia Lamb when he shouldn’t. Or other things that weren’t exactly right.

This is because the PTSD is finally catching up to Archie. 

During this because Little Sisters were running low. A Big Sister was able to go to the sister and take some girls away from the surface. Which leads a man named Mark Meltzer to search for his daughter. But also the surface possibly may try to search for Rapture. Considering now little girls who going missing.

After a exhausting journey to get Eleanor back. Because of Delta’s kindness to not kill but save the Big Sisters. When they sense him being in danger after Sofia suffocates Eleanor. They come back and attack Sofia’s base of operations. Saving Elizabeth, Brigid, Daisy, other Little Sisters, Archie, Delta, and Eleanor.

Even after everything she’s done and Rapture being almost revealed to the surface. Eleanor lets Sofia live so can begin a long road of redemption. Despite how others may look at it differently. Delta lives, and Archie with the help of Elizabeth, Brigid, and even Eleanor and Delta. The Atlas hallucination that has been haunting him is gone that week is gone.

A week after the events. They manage to find Subject Sigma and help him get back the Thinker from Reed Wahl. With Subject Sigma finding out he was Charles Milton Porter and later on letting go of his late wife Pearl. With Porter being turned back to normal. While Delta is a tricky situation.

It is likely afterwards. Despite helping Rapture becoming a livable place again. Archie and others may of gone back to the surface for a while. But they can visit Rapture still. 

But during the ending part of the Rapture Family vs the Vox Populi. Ava Tate had escaped to the surface. While Stanley Poole was later killed by Booker Dewitt. 

#bioshock #bioshock rebirth #bioshock au #archie wynand

[crimsonrae]

Bear and Birdie

Chapter One

Summary: AU Howard only ever had Birdie to confide in as a child and Steve only ever had Bucky. So, what happens when more than just a supersoldier serum connects these people? Told in a collection of one-shots and flashbacks, rating subject to change.

Bucky BarnesxOFC

Rating: Mature

A/N: Okay I have this posted on FF and haven’t updated it in a... long time, but I’m going to post here and hope I find inspiration to finish their story, because they live in my mind and I love them.

Chapter One

1935 Brooklyn, New York

It was quiet.

But...it wasn't the world is just silent right now quiet. It was heavy, just shy of tangible.

James Buchanan Barnes, Bucky to his friends, frowned at the silence unsure why the quiet unsettled him that morning. The sun drifted through the cloudy windows of Saint Catherine's Lost Home for Boys in a hazy laziness that only seemed to add to the heavy silence of the lobby. It was almost oppressive. He bit back a sigh as he turned his attention to the paperwork he needed to fill out, lightly twirling a pen through his fingers as he read.

Official release documents – at eighteen-years-old James Barnes could no longer and would no longer be considered a ward of the great state of New York.

Bucky had known this day would come, had known he would have to say goodbye to the only stable home he ever had. He had thought he would feel angry about this day or maybe sad. He had thought he would feel something more than a slight dread and muted indifference. Maybe it was the fact that he knew the orphanage could never be a true home, a place to come back to when life became too much as he grew older. Hell, when he had arrived he hadn't intended to stay as long as he had, it was just…it was just the world seemed to have other plans for him.

If he was being completely honest with himself, the orphanage had stopped being home over a year ago. Maybe that was why he felt so indifferent to this whole process.

The lack of funding that Saint Cat's had received in the past few years had caused Bucky to ease away from the system long before it was ready to release him. The parish fought for every penny to feed and dress the growing number of children under its care. Yet, he hadn't felt right taking those meals and clothes when he knew he could take care of himself. He had spent his spare time working odd shifts down at the docks and at various diners in the area. Whatever work he could find he would take. He probably would have dropped out of school, if not for his entirely too lecture-friendly best friend - Steve Rogers would drag him off to class whenever necessary. James smirked, he had graduate by the skin of his teeth and he knew it. School was for the smart cats like Steve, not dumb bastards like him.

Not dumb bastards like him.

The paperwork seemed to glare up at him in stark black and white confirmation of that thought. James sighed resignedly, not entirely sure where his head was at as he finally lifted his hand to scrawl messily across the bottom of the page.

It was official now – he was no longer a lost boy, only a lost man. He snorted quietly, somehow that seemed far worse.

A muffled cough disturbed the oppressive silence and made Bucky blink up from his release papers directly into the sad green eyes of Sister Madeleine. He had forgotten she had been waiting for him to finish. The old Sister seemed to fade into the framework of the lobby. Always a part of the structure, but infinitely her own. Bucky pushed a small smile to his lips as he handed her the papers. Neither seemed to want to disturb the odd silence of the lobby as they waited for the other to speak. They didn't have to – the sound of shallow steps and a light grunt caught their ears as they turned toward the hallway entrance. Bucky nearly rolled his eyes.

"Stevie, what're you doing?" James sighed tiredly as he watched his best friend trudge into the lobby of the orphanage carrying a duffel that was almost as big as him.

The shorter blonde sent James a pointed look that said he shouldn't be surprised. In truth, Bucky wasn't. He had half-expected Steve to show up at the boarding house with a room key already in hand. In their almost decade long friendship and adopted brotherhood there wasn't much that Steve Rogers could do that Bucky didn't see coming, "You didn't seriously think I would stay here with Richie Long and Herman Dutt, did you?"

Bucky didn't even blink at the mention of Steve's long time tormentors, knowing it was a smokescreen. He merely quirked a brow, "And here I thought you three had made nice."

Steve snorted, "There's making nice and then there's being friendly, Buck." He paused as he ruffled through his coat to pull out paperwork that looked suspiciously like the documents that Bucky had just signed before handing them over to Sister Madeleine, "Sides, it's not like I'd be staying here much longer."

Bucky frowned as Steve glanced at him with a sly smile and certain spark in his blue eyes. Steve had at least another ten months before his release papers would need to be signed. He pursed his lips in question when the light bulb finally went on, "You got it. You got the scholarship."

Steve nodded almost shyly and Bucky just about crowed. Somehow, Steve had managed to graduate a year early with Bucky. James hadn't questioned it. He knew how determined his best friend could be and that he was smart enough to understand all the extra work. But the scholarship to Columbia...The scholarship had been a goal of Steve's since they had started high school. Bucky knew it had to do with a promise Steve had made to his mother before she passed...but Columbia.

Suddenly, leaving Saint Cat's didn't seem as unsettling. He grinned widely at his friend as he snatched his duffel up from the ground. Once again forgetting Sister Madeleine's presence as he nudged Steve in the shoulder, "This calls for a celebration. Let's go get some breakfast down at Mel's."

"We can't afford Mel's." Steve stated dryly as he followed Bucky's lead, unable to keep his small prideful smile from his lips.

Bucky just chuckled, "I think Cassie is working this morning. She'll get us something. We're celebrating Stevie. Man, you just got into Columbia. You'll be rubbing elbows with the blue-bloods soon enough."

"God, I hope not." Steve muttered amused. He tried not to shake his head at Bucky's excitement. He hadn't even been that happy when he received his acceptance letter, but it was good to see that smile. He hadn't seen Bucky smile at much lately. Swallowing tightly as the duo stepped outside he reached into the side of his bag and pulled out an envelope, "Here."

James frowned curiously as he took the wrinkled envelope. There wasn't paper inside. The contents too bulky and hard in his grasp, "What's this?"

But even as he asked, his fingers were prying open the flap to let loose two brass keys. He knew these keys. Steve almost fidgeted in place as he met Bucky's sharp gaze, "Aunt Mabel never sold Mom's apartment... just packed up and headed home to Oklahoma after...well after. And we need a place, so."

"Stevie..." Bucky started, unsure what he wanted to say, but knowing he should say something. Sarah Rogers had died in her apartment after a long drawn out battle with a sickness that he could barely understand. He couldn't see Steve living there...not after everything, "We can find another place."

"Like where, Buck? The boarding house you've been going to?" Steve pushed stodgily, "A roof is a roof, right? I can deal."

"The boarding house ain't so bad." Bucky murmured tiredly, because he couldn't quiet see Steve living there either.

Steve shrugged, he wouldn't admit that he didn't want to live in his mom's old run down box of an apartment, but he also wasn't ready to sell it yet. He hadn't even finished going through her things and she had passed over two years ago, "The apartment ain't so bad either, jerk."

James had a few reservations about that statement, but he wouldn't fight about it with Steve. Not now, maybe not ever. Instead he rolled his eyes and slung his arm around Steve's shoulder, "So, how long have you known about the scholarship, ya punk?"

"A week."

"A week? You didn't tell me for a week? You really are a punk, you know that?"

Steve snickered, "I think you'll get over it."

"Nah, we have a week worth of celebration to do now." Bucky said boastfully as he pushed his thoughts and Steve's away from Sarah Rogers.

Steve nearly rolled his eyes as he held in a groan. He had a week of Bucky trying to drag him out to a club or with a girl now. It wasn't the worst fate in the world, but he was sure it would be the most exhausting. The two sniped at each other as they walked. Their feet automatically moving where they needed.

The duo made it halfway to Mel's Diner when Steve snorted and nudged his friend, "Hey Buck?"

"Yeah?"

"Happy Birthday."

         ●○●○●○●○●○●○●○●○●○●

1935 Kingston, New York

It was an unbearably hot morning. The sun seemed to be reminding the world that it was a giant ball of burning gas. Well maybe not the world, but the heat was definitely making its presence known to the small group segregated in a cemetery just outside of Kingston. Elena Turner stifled a sigh as she tried not to tug at the sleeves of her mourning dress. The satiny material didn't breathe and was beginning to cling to her skin…she wished the preacher would talk faster, this farce of a funeral needed to be over. She felt her cousin shift uncomfortably next to her and knew that he too was becoming impatient. She couldn't help, but turn to look at him. His eyes were glazed red and glaring miserably at the wooden coffin perched before them. He had foregone any pretense at being composed and was pulling clumsily at his collar.

Elena supposed it was for the best, Howard was supposed to be playing the role of the grieving son. She doubted that anyone, but herself and a few servants, knew that his pallid complexion and bloodshot eyes were the result from a night of drinking in celebration, rather than crying in sorrow. He was beyond hungover and the strange heat was doing nothing to make him better. She only hoped that he wouldn't do something incredibly…stupid.

"Stop fidgeting." Elena warned quietly, "There are more than enough people staring at you."

"I think I'm going to throw up." Howard murmured uneasily as he continued to pull at his collar. He could care less about the people watching him. He had spent the past week in a wild state of relief, shock and horror and it was almost over. As soon as the coffin was in the ground, he could move on.

"Please don't." Elena said with a small grimace, "I told you not to drink so much last night."

He rolled his eyes and instantly regretted it as the sensation of a million needles pierced his skull, "How was I supposed to know it would be such a wretched morning? Isn't it supposed to rain at funerals?...God, I'm dying."

"You're not dying, you big baby. Besides, I think the world is rather happy that your father is no longer in it, I know I am." Elena muttered lightly as she watched the preacher finally close his bible and step back from the coffin to let the gravediggers have access.

Howard nearly cried in relief at the sight of the slightly grungy men, "Give me a break. The only person mourning daddy dearest is your mother."

As if the woman in question could hear his words from across the aisle of folding chairs, Vitoria Turner, sister of Howard Stark Senior, let out an awful screeching sob. Elena was sure the entire congregation cringed at the sound as she tried to hold back a groan of disgust. She could see her older brother, Fergus, quickly coming to her mother's aid with a handkerchief. It wasn't even eleven in the morning and already the day was too long.

"Think she'll still be crying when she finds out that father left her out of his will?" Her cousin murmured amusedly as he watched the spectacle his aunt was making.

"Yes, except then the tears will be real." Elena muttered dryly as she turned her attention back to the lowering of the casket. She honestly didn't want to think about her mother receiving that news. The woman was intolerable on a good day; on a bad day, Vitoria Turner could make Satan cry, "Can I stay with you when that happens?"

Howard sent her a sympathetic look, "Do you even have to ask, Birdie? You're always welcome in my home." He tugged at his collar again, "My God, what is with this heat? It's barely even May. I swear this is my father's doing. He's making sure I'm miserable even when he's gone."

"Don't say that!" Elena whispered harshly as she went pale at the thought of her uncle still having any influence on the world.

She sensed Howard's sharp eyes studying her and suddenly felt her stomach roll with silent shame. He hadn't been the only one to have a tumultuous week. She had been bouncing between the same emotions he had, the only difference was that Elena knew they would not be able to move on as easily as her cousin seemed to think. Her eyes drifted back towards the rectangular hole in the ground, and suddenly, her dress wasn't the only thing unable to breathe. What had she done?

As if he knew what she was thinking, Howard quickly grasped her hand and squeezed her fingers. Her blue gaze quickly snapped to him, but all Howard could do was shake his head. Don't fall apart now, he was silently trying to tell her. Not yet.

"Where's that flask you snatched this morning?" He whispered instead, no longer meeting her stare. If he had, then he would have seen the exasperated disbelief that sparked in her blue orbs.

"I'm not giving you anymore alcohol."

Howard bit back a smile as he heard the annoyance coating her voice. However, he hadn't been asking for the flask for himself to use, but for her. Elena could use a little alcohol to calm her nerves. He turned to explain this to her, but was only able to get his mouth open when another resounding screech was heard from the other side of the aisle as the mourners began to stand for final farewells.

Elena glared at him, "If I have to deal with my mother sober, then so do you."

Howard wisely kept his mouth shut and stood to receive the forming line of condolence wishes. Suddenly, he wished she had given him the flask. In a perfect world, he would not have had to arrange a funeral at the age of sixteen. His eyes drifted toward the now lowered casket that had induced Elena's minor panic moments before, but then he should not have killed his father either. His hands went clammy and the headache he had been nursing all morning seemed to become even more unbearable. He just needed to get past today. A moment later, he felt Elena come to his side. Her hand lightly tapped his elbow to let him know that she was there if he needed her. He smiled gratefully at her.

"Uncle Leo is here." Elena whispered as he began to shake hands, "He'll take us back to the house once we're done here."

Howard nodded his understanding as he spared another glance toward his father's grave. As he glanced back at the mourners, he caught Elena's gaze. A look of grim understanding passed between them.

No one could know.

Next Chapter

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[paullicino]

On moving

I am packing my things. It is, at this point, just another routine. There are various combinations of packing that I do depending upon the transport I’m taking and I’ve become very good at following routines that mean I immediately, instinctively know where to find things later.

These things go in the suitcase. These things go in my messenger bag. Long before I reach any airport scanners, all of the objects in my pockets are already in the pockets of that same messenger bag. I know exactly which of my things will set off a metal detector. I dress appropriately the morning before. And I shave. I shave and look like as respectable a traveller as I can.

Outside the sky is a pale blue the exact shade of longing, pierced by telegraph poles and criss-crossed with wires hanging heavy under the weight of the stories they carry. One of those stories is mine, carried on to you right now.

Change might be coming. It might happen any moment now. Nobody is sure. Nothing is certain. The wind blows and every plant, shrub, bush and tree bends in accordance as if this was always meant to be.

Something happens when I try to move. The wheels of time become greased and the clocks spin right in front of my eyes. At the same time, the ground becomes tar. It is sticky and sour and it yearns to pull me downward even as I try to move on. Whatever day I decide I’m travelling on I never manage to get enough sleep. I never make enough time. I am always in a rush.

I got up today before seven. I had all sorts of tasks to finish. I still haven’t. Sat next to me right now is a postcard I need to send back to friends to thank them for taking care of me. I haven’t had dinner. I haven’t checked my travel times.

That tar has been following me around for a long time now. It’s a strange creature that lives in the ground and that slurps its way from continent to continent, hunting me down, ready to form a new broiling, bubbling pit of blackness below me when I most want to be free. I fear that, one day, it will suck me down inside and I will never be able to move on again.

I have been re-reading things that I wrote back in December 2014. The month was a blur. It was a blur of packing, of travel plans and of shedding so many of my possessions. I climbed into a catapult aimed at Vancouver and I missed. I was so tired that I booked a flight to Calgary.

I struggled to get rid of a sofa for free. London is packed with middle class people who scour freecycle sites and they get very picky about the furniture you are giving away. You live too far. It’s too scratched. It’s the wrong colour. It’s a fucking free sofa.

I frantically edited the longest video I ever made, staying up late, unable to sleep, falling into bed to wake up at all kinds of times and watch those clocks spin and spin and spin.

At moments like these I try to do everything myself, because I feel more confident that way and also more informed. I organise it all and, apart from the occasional flight to Calgary, I tend to get it all right. I got a lot of things wrong in December 2014, mind you, because I had never before given away or thrown away half of my worldly possessions, planned to move abroad or leapt forward into the void without knowing where I was living next. At moments like these, my friends and family also find tiny ways to help, which inevitably end up becoming extremely useful. They can be as simple as Ed booking me the cab that took me away from my last London flat for the last time.

I cursed myself as I left, because I realised I’d forgotten my toiletries. I’d also left cheese in the fridge and I would find out later that the landlady was furious about this. The flat had months of water damage from flooding that she hadn’t been able to repair because of the complexities of where the leak was coming from and because an infinite amount of plumbers and builders had given her estimates she didn’t like, so she just kept sending new people over to tut at the mouldy walls and leaking ceiling.

There were a bunch of other problems, too, but that was the worst. Everything stank long before she complained about an ageing piece of cheese that it took five seconds to put in the bin. Fuck her.

I looked back over my notes from that time. I found that I’d written this.

“I don’t sleep much. I wake up stressed about packing and preparation. Moving out remains a full time job.

Ed came to see me and, very kindly, also ordered me a taxi. It was a taxi that would help take me and more objects than I ever expected to carry all the way out of London, where I may well never ever live again. I dismantled my PC in front of him and gave him the case. I packed the rest of its wiry innards away. I heaved a rucksack onto my back, loaded my laptop bag with everything that would fit inside it and crammed the last of the things I had into the giant rolling suitcase that I bought myself a few days ago.

It took me a long time to pick that suitcase. I found a street vendor on Tottenham Court Road who had an enormous stall selling cases of all shapes and sizes. I tried to work out weights. I tried to work out capacities. It took me a long time, as I fussed and fretted over every possible one, trying them all out, seeing how solid they were, seeing if they would safely transport computer parts or fragile items or anything else. The guy selling them was very, very patient and helpful. I trundled away with a blue thing which is effectively my new home.

I talked with Ed and he wished me well and then the taxi he’d called arrived. I loaded all my many things into the back of it and began the slow, constipated journey toward Waterloo, inching and forcing a passage through the twisting intestines of south London's bulging and buckling infrastructure. All things were dark and dense with people and litter and London's very particular flavour of incredibly oily night seeping into it all.

The capital looked stained and weathered and wrinkled everywhere I turned my eyes, at every junction, intersection or street that my taxi tried to squeeze its way through. It held onto me as long and as tight as it could and I pushed my way through the thousands of people filling Waterloo in numbers I never saw when I took my first regular trips in, well over ten years gone. I felt only the tiniest bit of pity for it as I snatched typical station snack food from an outlet and dragged all my things onto a train, ready to be firmly, thoroughly, definitively expelled from that strange and sickly and suffering underworld of a place.”

I also wrote that London was a tar pit. I feared that I was sinking into it forever and that I would never be free. Each time I pulled one part of myself out, another was newly smeared as something began to tug it under. I couldn’t get my feet free. I couldn’t get my hands free. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe.

I hear that tar bubbling again. I am going to pack the last of my things away now. I have to go. Change might be coming. It might happen any moment now. Nobody is sure. Nothing is certain.

The wind blows and I stand firm against it. I step forward.

This writing was funded by my supporters on Patreon. I’ve decided to make my standard posts there public, so you can now read lots more work like this. And if you’re interested in reading even more, there’s plenty to enjoy if you'd like to support me at a higher tier.

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[charminglatina]

Riverdale Characters as Tropes (Part II) ⭐️.

#9. Hiram Lodge (Main Trope: Fiction 500; Secondary Tropes: Big Bad, Evil Overlord, 0% Approval Rating, The Don, The Patriarch, Bad Boss, Corrupt Corporate Executive, Magnificent Bastard, Sharp Dressed Man, Badass In A Nice Suit, Man Of Wealth And Taste)

Fiction is loaded with Wish Fulfillment, and being rich enough to bend reality is one of them. These are characters whose wealth is almost impossible to quantify. More Money Than God is the bare minimum. Now this could happen in Real Life, like royalty who owned literally thousands of Pimped Out Dresses, or a man in India who built a private skyscraper for his family, staff, and fleet of cars, or Marcus Licinius Crassus, who had three times as much money as Bill Gates and personally funded the reconstruction of the Roman army. But in fiction, that's on the lower end of this scale. Stuff that generally does not qualify you to be a member of the Fiction 500: Big Fancy House, Cool Chair, Cool Boat, Cool Plane, Cool Car, Battle Butler, Maid Corps, or even simply having assets in the billions.

Stuff that generally does qualify you to be a member of the Fiction 500:

You have become a cultural symbol for absurd wealth, and the story leaves no doubt your reputation is completely justified.

You routinely spend money on a scale normal super-rich people might do once or twice in a lifetime, whether it be major investments or mere Conspicuous Consumption. If a real amount is given, even if in the hundreds of millions, or billions, it's chump change to these characters.

You personally fund projects associated with major corporations, governments, aliens, etc. This includes Crimefighting with Cash.

You have the resources of a global superpower without yourself ruling a global superpower.

You personally fund projects that apparently break the rules of physics using only wealth and the Rule of Cool, or sometimes Rule of Funny. In other words, Screw The Universe; I Have Money! But if some other convenient fictional trope makes something possible, it doesn't count. You don't buy sound in space when Space Is Noisy. It's not impressive to have Infinite Supplies when everyone else does. Building a Humongous Mechais not noteworthy when any random scientist can make five in a weekend.

You're surprised to discover your latest project's market success has not increased your net income because you have a monopoly on the product it's competing with.

You can do any of the above without leaving a paper trail or an electronic footprint. Many of these Fiction 500 rich characters operate either clandestinely or under a secret identity, especially if they are Crimefighting with Cash, The Chess Master or Evil Mastermind types. They must have methods for secretly diverting hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to their schemes (like building that army of Mooks, Elaborate Underground Base, Bat Cave, or Batmobile) while making it seem like a legit and legal expenditure or keeping it out of the books. It should be noted that even if a character uses their personal fortune, these transactions would still typically have to show up somewhere when tax time comes.

Now personality doesn't really matter. You could be a Rich Bitch or Uncle Pennybags. You could be a law abiding citizen and even be Batman, or instead think you can screw the rules. Name is based on the top 500 grossing companies annually compiled by "Fortune" Magazine. And despite the name implying otherwise, there can be any number of characters here. Also, there is almost no way to objectively rank them, although Forbes tries with their "Fictional 15" list. Compare Arbitrarily Large Bank Account, Conspicuous Consumption, Undisclosed Funds, Organization with Unlimited Funding, and N.G.O. Superpower. For real people who are considered the richest in the world, see The World's Billionaires, an annual ranking made by Forbes (which has its own article on The Other Wiki, BTW).

The cause of all bad happenings in a story. A Big Bad could be a character with Evil Plans or it could be an omnipresent situation, such as a comet heading towards the Earth. In a serial story, the Big Bad exerts an effect across a number of episodes, even an entire season. This trope is not a catch-all term for the biggest, ugliest villain of any given story. In fact, it doesn't have to be a villain at all, as we just said. If it is a villain, though, it should be identified correctly; the badass leader of the outlaw gang that causes the most personal trouble is not the Big Bad. The railroad tycoon who is using the gang as muscle is the Big Bad. The Man Behind the Manis very common for this trope, leaving the reveal of the big bad as The Chessmaster behind it all and proving themselves far more clever and resourceful than the Villain of the Week. Sometimes the Big Bad is the grand enemy of an entire franchise as an Overarching Villain. At other times, the Big Bad is an Arc Villain who causes trouble for a period of time only to be replaced by another Big Bad. When you look at a season-long story or a major Story Arc and you can identify one problem being the cause of everything, that is the Big Bad. In its most general form, a Big Bad will be at the center of the Myth Arc rather than just any Story Arc. The term "Big Bad" was popularized in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was characteristic of Buffy's Big Bads for their identity or nature, or even the fact that they are the Big Bad at all, to remain unclear for a considerable time. Occasionally, characters would even refer to themselves as "the Big Bad". Whether or not they were, though, this is a Big Bad Wannabe. The structure of Buffy placed the Big Bad as being crucial to the Half-Arc Season, half the episodes are filler dealing with unrelated enemies while the other half involved the ongoing Myth Arc with the Big Bad. Each season can easily be defined by who the Big Bad was. If a show has a series of Big Bad jeopardies, they can function like a series of Monsters of the Week that take more than one week to finish off. If there is a Legion of Doom, you can expect the Big Bad to be involved somehow. They're probably sorted by power, with the strongest for last, following the Sorting Algorithm of Evil. Evil Overlord, Diabolical Mastermind, The Chessmaster, Arch-Enemy, The Man Behind the Man, and often Manipulative Bastard are specific types of villains who are liable to show up as Big Bads. If they're a Magnificent Bastard or Hero Killer, the good guys are in big trouble. The heroic counterpart of this character is the Big Good, who will very often be the focus of this character's attention over The Hero at the beginning of a series. If a work of fiction is conspicuously lacking a Big Bad, it may be a case of No Antagonist. See also Big Bad Duumvirate for two (or more) Big Bads working together. Sometimes a Big Bad will get their start as a servant to another villain — if that's the case, they're a Dragon Ascendant. If the character who fills the role of Big Bad in most meaningful ways is nominally subordinate to someone else (someone significantly less menacing by comparison), they are a Dragon-in-Chief. If the story has many Big Bads at once who don't work together, see Big Bad Ensemble. The Big Bad Shuffle occurs when there are multiple candidates for the Big Bad position. If the Big Bad doesn't start out as bad but develops over the course of the story, it's Big Bad Slippage. If the Big Bad of one section of a work doesn't die on being defeated and stays around as a character in a different plot role (reformed or not), that's Ex-Big Bad. The Big Bad of a story is not always the most powerful or oldest existing evil force. Perhaps an evil presence along the lines of an Eldritch Abominationovershadows the work's setting, but is mainly divorced from the story's events — that would be the Greater-Scope Villain.

#10. Hermione Lodge (Main Trope: Femme Fatale; Secondary Tropes: Iron Lady, Proper Lady, Spicy Latina, Gold Digger, Corrupt Politician, Grande Dame, Silk Hiding Steel, The Woman Wearing The Queenly Mask, God Save Us From The Queen, Sugar-And-Ice-Personality)

First, she turns you on. Then, she turns on you. The typical client in a Hardboiled Detective story (French for "fatal woman," idiomatically "woman to die for"). You know the type. Dressed all in black with legs up to here and shady motives, she slinksinto the PI's office, sometimes holding a cigarette on a long, long holder, saying "Oh, Mr. Rockhammer, you're the only one who can help me find out who killed my extremely wealthy husband." Did she do it? Do I care? Wait, where'd that saxophone music come from? Whatever her story is, whether she did it or not, she's definitely keeping some secrets. The Femme Fatale is sexy and she knows it. Made famous by Film Noir and hard-boiled detective stories, she manipulates and confuses The Hero with her undeniable aura of sexiness and danger. Unlike the virginal and sweet Damsel in Distress (or possibly Action Girl), the Femme Fatale exploits with everything she's got to wrap men around her finger. (In some eras, use of make-up is a tell-tale sign.) He knows that she's walking trouble and knows much more about the bad guys than she should, but damn it if he can't resist her feminine wiles. If the Femme Fatale is vying for the hero's romantic attentions she will likely have a sweeter and purer rival. The hero might decide that she's not worth the trouble she causes, but if he doesn't, then they might become an Outlaw Couple. While related to The Vamp, the Femme Fatale is not just any seductress; she has a distinct look and feel. The main distinction is how she presents herself. If you know she's dangerous from the start, but she's sexy enough that you don't care, she's likely a Femme Fatale. On a lesser note, the Femme Fatale generally uses sensuality instead of upfront sexual advances. She may implythat you could have sex later, but she'll never promise it, not even say it—that would decrease her air of mystery and power. Her wiles may include apparent helplessness and distress, and appeals to the man's greed, desire for revenge, or gullibility, as well as the implication of possible romance or sexual rewards, while The Vamp more often reliances on raunchy sex or the promise of it sometime real soon. The Femme Fatale is generally villainous, and heroic exceptions—in an artificial context to snare the bad guy—are closer to Heroic Seductress. Frequently, she is a Wild Card, changing sides according to her own desires and goals; she does not often go through a High-Heel–Face Turn. If she's actually a kind-hearted person who puts on this facade just for fun, this is Trickster Girlfriend. She's often the Lady in Red but possibly dressed like everyone else so as to not be Colour-Coded for Your Convenience. The Femme Fatale is one of the female character types that can often be seen wearing High Class Gloves, especially in conjunction with her sexy evening gowns, and, during the daytime (particularly in old Film Noir movies), is often seen wearing a "fascinator" or "pillbox" hat with a partial- or full-face veil. She's definitely not above using the Kiss of Distraction. If she can fight, too, then she's really going to be trouble. Subtrope of Manipulative Bastard. The younger version of this is the Fille Fatale. The spy version of this is Femme Fatale Spy.

#11. FP Jones (Main Trope: The Casanova; Secondary Tropes: Action Dad, The Alcoholic, Alcoholic Parent, The Good King, The Quarterback, The Sheriff, Dirty Cop, Reasonable Authority Figure, Jaded Washout)

The (legal, and less repulsive than the better-known types) sexual predator — a man who relentlessly pursues, lands, loves, and then abandons members of the opposite sex, a skill bestowed upon him to demonstrate what a badass he is. Sometimes comic, sometimes a monster, always successful, this character leaves behind a string of broken hearts, and occasional vows ofrevenge that are rarely fulfilled. Casanova's only motivation is indulging his lust and desire, sating them with the bodies of his conquests.

This trope tends to suffer from three double standards when portrayed in media;

The first is that the Casanova is always male, given that women are usually shamed for having an active sex life. The comparatively rarer female version is an "aphrodite", but she’ll likely be portrayed as an evil character who exploits her sexuality to manipulate innocent men. The womanizing skills of the Casanova, on the other hand, will almost always be granted to him to make him look like a champion.

This trope also applies almost exclusively to straight men, given that queer people with an active sex life are usually villainized in media. Meanwhile, straight men get to be portrayed as badasses for having multiple women at their beck and call. Bisexuals or demisexuals are even rarer, though not unheard of; for example Oberyn Martell.

The Casanova trope is also usually only applied to Caucasian/white men. Non-white men having, expressing or giving into their sexual desires is often portrayed negatively or Played for Laughs. Also, while white male Casanovas being with non-white women is generally portrayed as fine, men of color are often limited in a work to dating, having sex, marrying or even flirting only with women of the same nationality or skin color as them. If they do have a romantic relationship or sexual encounter with a woman of a different nationality or skin-color, it is usually held in scorn by some in-universe (and sometimes out-of-universe, unfortunately).

Contrast with the unsuccessful Casanova Wannabe. Compare with the inexplicable Kavorka Man. A guy who gets the girls like a Casanova, but unintentionally, is a Chick Magnet. If kind-hearted, may overlap with Chivalrous Pervert. The Charmer is equally charming but less sex-obsessed. If they really get around but want to settle down, it's Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places. A Handsome Lech has more negative connotations and a sparser scorecard than the Casanova. The trope is named for Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798), a soldier, spy, diplomat, adventurer, and librarian whose extensive but unreliable autobiography (in which he almost literally described himself as God's Gift to Womennote ) established his eternal fame as a lover. It should be noted that the historical Casanova was closer to a Chivalrous Pervert who really was looking for love... just with women who were locked in loveless political marriages — and also gained his successes famously ugly. (Definitely◊ he was no Heath Ledger◊.) Interesting and prone to be noted for his modern wannabes, he was one of the few 18th century men who bathed almost dailyand asked the same thing from his partners. Many films, TV movies and TV mini-series are named for and based on that person. The best known are Fellini's 1976 film, the 2005 film starring Heath Ledger, and the 2005 BBC drama mini-series starring David Tennant. The latter is considered one of the more faithful adaptations of Casanova's memoirs, while Fellini's... wasn't. For the juvenile version — all of the above without the sex — see Kid-anova. Contrast the Serial Romeo (who falls in love with a long succession of women, one at a time and for reasonable periods). If the guy is actually only rumored to be a Casanova and has no evidence onscreen, it's the Urban Legend Love Life. If he develops feelings for one of his conquests (or someone who refuses him), he's a Ladykiller in Love. See More Friends, More Benefits for when the mechanics of a game encourage the player character to act this way. Note: It should be mentioned that even after the affairs were over, most of Casanova's ex-lovers still liked him, and he was reputedly quite the gentleman. This trope would probably fit (the fictional) Don Juan better.

#12. Gladys Jones (Main Trope: Evil Matriarch; Secondary Tropes: Dark Is Evil, Parental Abandonment, Action Mom, Drugs Are Bad, Bitch In Sheeps Clothing, Bait The Dog)

A mother is one of the most central figures that a character can have growing up, and her influence can have an impact on that character even as an adult. If the character is lucky, that mother will be a loving one, and if he or she is really lucky, she'll be an Action Mom who can kick ass and take names if the character is ever threatened. But if the character is really unlucky and isn't suffering from Parental Abandonment, the character's mother will be an Evil Matriarch and chances are, she will make that character's life a living hell.

The Evil Matriarch comes in two forms:

Comedic: Usually used in the Dom Com, this variety is usually the mother of one of the two parents on the show who comes to visit every so often, and someone on the cast dreads it. Usually (though not always) this variety of Evil Matriarch is a meddling parent, often to an irrational extreme. Classically, this is a Mother-in-Law situation, but from time to time, the kids themselves, or even the child of the mother is the one that dreads it. In some cases, everyone hates the Evil Matriarch, like in Malcolm in the Middle where everyone dreads Lois's mother coming to visit. In other cases, her visit is appreciated by everyone but the daughter or son of the Evil Matriarch, like in Family Ties, where the matriarch is evil because her daughter feels she can't live up to mom's perfection. Expect this variety of Evil Matriarch to have Power Hair and other Fashionable Evil.

Dramatic: This variety, which shows up in more dramatic media, is truly evil in a traditional sense, and is one of the worst villains one can face, especially if one of the Heroes or Love Interests is one of her children (or if she's married into his or her family as a stepmother). Many such Evil Matriarchs are completely convinced that they, and only they, know what's best for their children, and can be very controlling, manipulative, and perfectly willing to do anything they deem necessary for their children's sake, no matter how evil or destructive it may be. The most vicious examples of this variety of Evil Matriarch despise their children (or at least the one they've singled out as The Unfavorite) and are often physically or emotionally abusive towards them, and many of them are not above Offing the Offspring.

If she's not entirely human, then expect her to be a Hive Queen. If she is also the Queen, expect God Save Us from the Queen!. The Spear Counterpart of this character type is Archnemesis Dad. The inversion is Antagonistic Offspring. See Abusive Parents and Parental Neglect for the more mundane versions. See Offing the Offspring and/or Matricide for what this might lead to if the kids fight back. If it's not your mother but her replacement who's making your life a living Hell, see Wicked Stepmother.

#13. Hal Cooper (Main Trope: Ax-Crazy; Secondary Tropes: Serial Killer, The Bluebeard, Malevolent Masked Man, Knight Templar Parent, Insane Equals Violent, Light Is Not Good, Icy Blue Eyes)

An "ax-crazy" character is someone who is psychologically unstable and presents a clear and present danger to others. They are capable of extreme violence, whether carried out with a Slasher Smile, insane laughter, speaking in a Creepy Monotone, or out and out murderous rage, and with no way of knowing just what will set them off, which makes them extremely frightening to deal with. This mainly differentiates them from other eccentric characters who may themselves be obsessive, weird or seemingly crazy, but use this condition hand in hand with doing good, or at least not being in the way. However, some formerly established heroes can go through an episode of ax-craziness and still retain their heroic mantle. Despite the title, ax-crazies aren't limited to wielding axes. Any instrument of death will do, from knives or straight razors to swords to chainsaws and beyond. A good number of other ax-crazies are also Trigger Happy, preferring either Hand Cannons that blow really big holes in people, or weapons that allow them to kill lots of people with reckless abandon, such as any automatic weapon. And for the truly psychopathic among psychopaths for whom the above just won't do, a heaping helping of high explosives or a good-sized flamethrower will do quite nicely. Sometimes, they don't even need weapons and just use magic spells or other powers if they have them. There are also plenty who are just as happy to beat people into an unrecognizable pulp-like mass with their bare hands. It is rare for a truly Ax-Crazy character to be a protagonist, largely due to it being a Sub-Trope of Obviously Evil, and most Ax-Crazy characters usually are Obviously Evil. They're common as the antagonists in Superhero and Crime and Punishment Series, often serving as a Psycho for Hire. If they area protagonist, they will most certainly be a Nominal Hero or Villain Protagonist. The difference between them and Blood Knight is this trope is all about killing while the Blood Knight is only interested in fighting. There is, of course, plenty of room for overlap. See also Insane Equals Violent, The Butcher, The Dreaded, Mad Bomber, Cute and Psycho, Blood Knight, Psycho for Hire, Yandere, The Sociopath, Mad Doctor, Pyro Maniac, Hair-Trigger Temper, Colonel Kilgore, General Ripper, Insane Admiral, and Sociopathic Soldier. Compare and contrast Mama Bear, Papa Wolf, Big Brother Instinct, and Violently Protective Girlfriend, who may be capable of temporary Ax-Craziness when their kids, younger sibling(s) or mate are under threat, but are often played sympathetically. Contrast Suicidal Pacifism, when a character never, ever resorts to violence even if it is necessary; and Extreme Doormat, when a character is a complete pushover unable to fight back. The canonical Character Alignment for most Ax-Crazy characters is Chaotic or Neutral Evil, though a couple of Chaotic Neutral examples exist. Sometimes The Unfettered, depending on whether they feel freed or enslaved by their bloodlust. At least one or more examples are an Anti-Villian, where you kinda feel bad for them since their enemies pushed them too far with actions such as killing their family, their friends, or even the enemies trying to kill them, making them go Ax-Crazy. It's very common to be Played for Drama, usually as either the Big Bad, or The Dragon to the the Big Bad. It is far less common, but not unheard of, for it to be Played for Laughs; this is most likely to be seen in a Sadist Show, especially one featuring a lot of Comedic Sociopathy and/or heavy Satire, with it appearing most often in humorous comic strips, Anime, Web Originalworks, and the more adult-oriented Western Animation of the Renaissanceand Millennium periods. A very large number of pages link to this when they should link to An Axe to Grind. This page is about violent crazy people, not people whose Weapon of Choice is an axe (despite the potential for overlap).

#14. Alice Cooper (Main Trope: Ice Queen; Secondary Tropes: Education Mama, Control Freak, Former Teen Rebel, Female Misogynist, The Fundamentalist, Holier Than Thou)

Much like a Tomboy, the Ice Queen is a major character archetype which is somewhat hard to define. Her signature characteristic is that she is cold; the ambiguity comes from what "cold" means. She has a cold heart, a frosty demeanor; she attracts but will never be wooed. Scorned men are likely to call their failed conquests Ice Queens (after all, normal women would have given in to them). Due to the Double Standard, the Ice Queen is (almost) Always Female. The Ice Queen is considered dangerous to love because she will not (or cannot) love back. She's not much for friendship either, preferring to be alone. Situations where an Ice Queen "thaws" and learns to enjoy the company of others are so common that they have their own trope. Being an Ice Queen is purely about personality; having ice-related abilities does not make a character an Ice Queen. That said, it's not at all uncommon for a character with a cold personality to be given cold powers. Not to be confused with a character who has a royal title associated with ice or snow, though they two may overlap (and often do in more magical settings). An Ice Queen requires at least one "cold" personality trait that gets her labeled as an Ice Queen. 

#15. Fred Andrews (Main Trope: The Heart; Secondary Tropes: Like Father, Like Son, Betty And Veronica, Family Man, Standard 50′s Father, The Conscience, Big Good, Good Parents)

The Heart is a personality aspect that comes up in just about any ensemble. Their personality is based on getting the others to recognize that there are more things at stake than their personal vendettas, especially if The Team is becoming a group of Knights Templar, or if any individual becomes a Well-Intentioned Extremist. This is the person who will argue and fight against the justification of "I Did What I Had to Do". Quite often The Heart character will also be an All-Loving Hero, where they go out of their way to help all of the little people. Within the ensemble this character will most often be merged with the role of The Chick. Like The Hero and The Leader, they aren't one and the same, but they often overlap since they are a good fit. If The Chick is usually a non-action character, having personality traits of The Heart will give them more to do, especially if the team is always at each other's throats. For the same reason, The Heart can also be The Hero (in the case of the Magnetic Hero) or The Leader, as their leadership skills keep the team from falling apart. May be part of the Command Roster. The character whose death or loss is most likely to trigger Losing the Team Spirit. Where Elemental Powers come into play, other characters may be in for a Heart Beatdown. Due to their usual relative introversion, and tendencies towards pacifism (whether technical or actual), this character is sadly often C-List Fodder and a prime target for a single-character (rather than the entire show) version of The Firefly Effect. Many series will start out with a Heart character, but the writers will begin to view them as boring and impossible to write for, so they end up being either Put on a Bus/kept Out of Focus at best, or Character Death at worst. This also tends to happen when studio executives want to replace the character with a more talented or physically attractive character, in an attempt to boost ratings. Given that said characters are usually sweet types (and peacekeepers), this also tends to seriously anger a certain portion of the fanbase, but because the studio executives care more about ratings than they do about upsetting what is normally a minority, the character will stay dead. If fan outrage is sufficiently vocal, and the executives haven't managed to completely alienate the actor, then the character may come back periodically as a ghost or a clone. Compare The Face who does the talking on The Team. See also Restored My Faith in Humanity and Morality Chain. Compare The Conscience, Token Good Teammate. Not to be confused with What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway? or Heart Is an Awesome Power though this trope often overlaps with them. Contrast with Lack of Empathy.

#16. Mary Andrews (Main Trope: Fiery Redhead; Secondary Tropes: Missing Mom, Mama Bear, Heroes Want Redheads, Almighty Mom, Brutal Honesty)

A Fiery Redhead is a red-haired character who is strong, Hot-Blooded, out going, usually outspoken, and (if a love interest) often female. She has a big personality and she's not afraid to use it. Whatever you do, don't get on her bad side, or there will be hell to pay. (Especially if powers of personality and/or elements are present: she likes Playing with Fire. Thus, in a Four-Temperament Ensemble, expect her to be Choleric.) She will be unladylike unless it's the case of a redheaded Spirited Young Lady. She might be One of the Boys, a tomboy, or a lad-ette. Heroes do like redheads after all. This hair-color stereotype probably developed since red hair was associated with the Irish and Scottish (and before this, Horny Vikings) for a long time, and they ended up being stereotyped as loud, strong, and passionate (see the Fighting Irish and Violent Glaswegian tropes for more info on that). On the other hand, it's even found in Eastern Europe where any association would have been with Russians or Swedes, and these are nationalities not generally stereotyped as hotheaded. In addition to this, it extends even into ancient texts from Babylonian and Scandinavian Oral Historian. In the Prose Edda, Odin is depicted as blonde, green-eyed, cool, and calculating—while his son, Thor, is a redheaded, blue-eyed (something of an omen of war/perfection in Scandinavian culture) fire-breathing stereotypical Viking (the raiding kind) who treats Earth as a giant freshman mixer. Gilgamesh is also a Fiery Redhead with blue eyes whose duties include being a good precursor to Thor, for the most part—though with more reservation and a cooling trend near the end of his life (this makes both an eerie paradigm of Fiery Redheads at the creation of their respective people's writings). The whole "red-haired, blue-eyed" thing is usually split in Japan between two people. Although real redheads can have tempers like everyone else, this trait is exaggerated in fiction. Also, they can have Green Eyes and this association is also exaggerated in fiction. Compare Heroes Want Redheads, Dark-Skinned Redhead, Evil Redhead, Rose-Haired Sweetie, Red-Headed Stepchild, Redheads Are Uncool, Redheaded Hero. In anime, could be a Shana Clone. If you have a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead in close proximity (i.e. in the main cast), it's Blonde, Brunette, Redhead. Contrast Shy Blue-Haired Girl for Red Oni, Blue Oni and Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette for the realistic opposite hair color and personality. Please do not confuse this with a redhead being literally fiery, or having literal fiery head, although these tropes may overlap. And a red who's literally firey does have their hair color fit their elemental powers. See also Red Is Violent (in this case, the hair color).

#17. Clifford Blossom (Main Trope: Abusive Dad; Secondary Tropes: Archnemesis Dad, Faux Affably Evil, Offing The Offspring, Mean Boss)

Parents are supposed to be the protectors of children, but these parents are either so damaged themselves that they can't do the job, greedy or villainous to the point that they never had any interest in doing the job properly, or would rather use the child as a means to an end. Sometimes they're just sadistic assholes. This includes parents who are emotionally, verbally, physically, or mentally abusive, or who neglectfully allow their children to be abused by others if they don't abuse the child themselves; sexual abuse is typically treated as a special kind of evil. Sometimes, the abuse at the hands of their parents becomes a Freudian Excuse for a villain. Other times, the character manages to not grow up broken, bitter, and hateful, and instead a different and better person than the upbringing would incline one to think. Troubling Unchildlike Behavior is often a tell-tale sign that things are not right at home. Abusive Parents are commonplace in fairy tales and Classical Mythologywhich makes this trope Older Than Feudalism. Note that The Brothers Grimm, when they collected European fairy tales, were uncomfortable with the idea of Abusive Parents and so frequently changed the Abusive Parents in the traditional stories into abusive step parents. Sometimes, a parent will go as far as to kill the child in question, in which case this is Offing the Offspring. In other cases, the parent's abuse occasionally drives the offspring to snap, commit Revenge and finally kill them, thus becoming a Self-Made Orphan. Calling the Old Man Out occurs when a fed-up child retaliates with a "The Reason You Suck" Speech. If the child gets out of the broken family and forms healthy friendships, but reacts badly when their abusive parents show up again, well, Friends Are Chosen, Family Aren't. Bear in mind that not everyone agrees on the line between actual abuse and merely heavy-handed parenting (or even normal parenting). Is Moving the Goalposts merely inspiring the child to achieve more, or the most insidious form of abuse to instill mistrust and paranoia to the children? Some include spanking as abuse; others think it's appropriate given certain guidelines. Some believe it's okay to make a kid go without a meal (they won't starve that easily); others disagree. Making a kid miss a friend's birthday sleepover — is that emotional abuse? Raising a kid without exposure to TV? Telling your daughter she's getting fat? A little friendly name-calling? There's a line here somewhere, but not everyone agrees on where it is. If a parent has just dumped the child, for whatever reason, that's Parental Abandonment; if they aren't paying attention, that's Parental Neglect. If the parents refuse to discipline their kids, they are Pushover Parents. Contrast Mama Bear or Papa Wolf (where others abuse the children and the parents abuse the abusers), and the more extreme variant of Knight Templar Parent, where the abusive parent is violently overprotective. Abusive Precursors can be considered this on a metaphorical level. See Hilariously Abusive Childhood for when this is cranked up to absurd levels and played for laughs. Black Comedy is often connected in the comedic aspect of it, and a Big, Screwed-Up Family may be involved if it is adult comedy. In keeping with the above note, some may call the show on it and say Dude, Not Funny!. See Evil Matriarch and Archnemesis Dad for characters who are beyond abusiveand outright evil. For parents who are mostly abused by their children, see Pushover Parents. While they do not have to be the child's actual, technical parents to be part of this trope, it's pretty important that they are closely related and live together, like a Wicked Stepmother or an Evil Uncle taking care of the Parentally Deprived. After all, it's much more disgusting that somebody related to the child could bring themselves to hurt them, rather than a mere foster family. The polar opposite, of course, are Good Parents.

#18. Penelope Blossom (Main Trope: Black Widow; Secondary Tropes: Evil Redhead, Widow Woman, Straw Feminist, The Vamp, High Class Call Girl, Dark Mistress)

The man-eater, the woman whose husbands/Love Interests keep on dying. Usually, a Black Widow is a cross between a Con Artist and a Serial Killer, a woman who seduces, marries, and then murders men for their money, always using a different name and identity each time to keep the police and her intended victims from twigging to her real identity. She's very much a highly successful vamp. Black Widows' methods may vary, but poisoning is often favored: it doesn't demand superior strength or leave obvious marks, and it's traditional for wives to do the cooking for their husbands. Also, many types of poisoning can have symptoms similar to those of common illnesses, which makes it easier for a Black Widow to collect life insurance money (a very common motivation). There are too many Truth in Television instances to count. Occasionally there are more nefarious methods. The name "black widow" comes from the official FBI designation for this kind of killer and from the black widow spider, which is so named because of the occasional habit of female black widow spiders (particularly the Australian redback spiders and the southern black widows) to devour their mates after mating. For this reason the trope may be paired with Arachnid Appearance and Attire to really drive the spider metaphor home. A Sub-Trope of Sleeping Their Way to the Top, Murder in the Family, and Gold Digger (this one prefers to kill her Meal Ticket instead of living with him). A Sister Trope to The Bluebeard (the Spear Counterpart). Compare Yandere, Comforting the Widow, Widow Woman (for other widow tropes), Will and Inheritance Tropes and Cartwright Curse. When a pregnancy is involved, this intersects with Conceive and Kill. See also Literal Maneater, which is an actual monster that uses the disguise of a woman to lure in its prey.

Look out for Part III!

#Hiram lodge #Hermione lodge #fred andrews #Alice cooper #fp jones #gladys jones #riverdale #tropes

[operationrainfall]

Title Teleportals Developer PixelGreeds Publisher PixelGreeds Original Release Date June 15th, 2018 Genre Platformer Platform PC Age Rating Unpatched: Mature Patched: 18+

After having played Maytroid and giving it an average score, I decided to review another game by PixelGreeds to see if I would have a similar experience. When it comes to developers that are new to me, I do try to play more than one game by them if available, especially if it proves a group has a wider range, style, and a greater skill set than what a single game can convey. And so, I decided to give an earlier game by PixelGreeds a chance. Teleportals, as one could guess, is named after Portal, yet, similar to Maytroid’s naming, is not quite the carbon copy one should expect going in.

Teleportals is a puzzle-platformer in which you control a woman named Susan, who randomly arrives in an alternate realm. How she got there or why remains a mystery. She soon finds a companion in a one-eyed ball-like creature named Maki, who tells her that time spent in this realm will have an adverse effect on her. The only way to prevent her eventual demise is to escape. The single upside in all of this is that she can teleport to where Maki is dropped. With not much choice, Susan takes Maki with her and begins making her way through this realm in hopes of finding an exit.

The overarching plot of Teleportals is painfully straightforward with escape as a driving force. Susan arrives, wants to leave, and so she goes on her way. As to where she is, how she got there, who these things are that she meets, and how she can teleport with them, none of this is explained. It just is, and we’re meant to take it at face value. Setting all of these questions aside, there is another narrative that takes place, which does a far better job of providing a much needed story element, as well as adding character development. For one, Susan has a backstory, in that she is a scientist researching a virus. Due to her lab running out of funding, one of her colleagues, Nancy, infects herself with said virus in an attempt to garner funding and push the research forward. Susan’s thoughts often return to Nancy, a means for Susan to strive ever closer to escape.

Maki also provides narrative strength, discussing his interest in movies, which serve as his attempts to have Susan open up during their campaign. There are several moments of humor and charm here and they contrast in a particularly satisfying way with Susan’s concern for Nancy and her drive to return and finish her work. We even see Susan forget her troubles at times, hinting at a desire to run away from an anxiety that potentially runs deeper than first implied. In fact, the narrative even suggests that there is more to the situation of Nancy infecting herself than Susan lets on. These glimmers of story are helpful to a weak plot and I would have liked far more than what is delivered.

Why do I say “far more?” Because glimmers of a story do not make an intriguing, immersive experience. More than anything, I felt dissatisfied, as I was left confused, maybe even a little cheated when I finished the game. All we actually get are hints at an underlying conflict that goes beyond the text we are given. The text itself, which I believe is a translation from another language, is not nearly strong enough to make the implications it’s attempting to make. Also, there is no proper resolution to the story at the end. We are left wondering what happened, why, and again, what significance it’s trying to imply. After one ending and credit roll, there are more levels and then a vague epilogue as if those last levels didn’t happen. What was even the point? More mystery? No, just more random nonsense. Zero genuine conclusions can be made with such a fierce lack of details.

The developers want to insinuate that there’s more happening in the plot, but without proper set up and build, it comes off as a collection of fragmented ideas that, again, seem nonsensical. If you’re planning to develop a deep lore, you need details. Vague is not the same as mysterious, nor does it build mystery. Now, there are theories floating around on the game’s Steam discussion board that could potentially make sense and better connect these fragments into a coherent story. However, I believe these theories are simply too far-fetched. Huge stretches need to be made and some major assumptions are necessary for these theories to work. Granted, you can theorize until you’re blue in the face with such a lack of detail and depth. A stronger overarching plot and a far more detailed look into these characters would have turned a forgettable mess of a story into one of legitimate intrigue.

Although Teleportals suffers from this lack of story, a recurring problem I’ve seen from them, its gameplay fares better. As I mentioned, this is a puzzle-platformer, in which the goal is to reach each room’s exit. Every single room is its own puzzle filled with traps for you to avoid and designs that require the unique attributes of your companions. Susan has the ability to swap places with Maki and another character, Bruce, who you meet later on. Susan can run and jump, as well as activate switches. Maki is small and light, allowing him to pass through narrow spaces and also bounce on special platforms when dropped. This bouncing can allow Susan to swap and reach higher areas or launch over hazards. Also, if there is a jump too high for Susan, she can place a companion near the jump point, bounce herself, swap, and ride the momentum for a higher jump. As for Bruce, he is a block-shaped entity that can act as a shield against projectiles or a step for higher platforms. Many of the later rooms will require you to utilize both companions, using their attributes and working them in tandem to reach the exit. Once you start playing, it may seem like gameplay is one-dimensional, but I was easily engaged throughout. There were several puzzles that caused some frustration, but I will admit that it was always pretty satisfying to solve these more troublesome rooms, especially the ones that take you multiple tries.

Other gameplay points include zero penalties for dying and a quick reset button for starting a room over. For the most part, the game is pretty fun and it challenges you thoroughly, however some puzzles have quite a few obnoxious elements to them. Even so, with no consequences to infinite attempts, every puzzle is doable with practice. Also, there is no combat in this game. While there is a means for Susan to destroy certain traps, there are no real enemies to fight. It’s simply surviving each room and exiting, yet the simplicity offers a lot more fun than I could have expected. Finally, gameplay options include support for multiple languages. I can appreciate the wider audience multiple languages can garner, but I’m still wondering if some things got lost in the translation.

My only complaint with Teleportals’ gameplay is in regards to its controls. I had the same complaint previously with PixelGreeds, in that if you wish to use a controller, you must rely on third-party software for any customization. Teleportals requires precision in your moves, so having zero controller customization out of the box is disheartening. Keyboard controls have customization, but if you wish to make changes, you must input all of your changes anew, as you cannot simply change a single key binding.

Moving on to the aesthetics, I had much to say about several of the visual additions seen in Maytroid that basically took a game that could have been for all ages into mature and 18+ territories. This seems to be PixelGreeds’ style, as an ecchi CG gallery that can become fully 18+ with a patch is present here. And, as in my Maytroid review, this inclusion does nothing for Teleportals. It’s senseless, as it limits the potential audience that can play this game. Perhaps my opinion is an unpopular one, but not everything needs naked women to make it better. Putting that time and effort towards the plot would have made more sense. Or, if you want hentai in your game, make it the focus of the game and don’t just tack it on. Having said that, the artists responsible for these CGs do seem to have a bit of talent. I only wish those talents were utilized in the form of in-game CGs to support dialogue or other on-screen events.

As for the in-game presentation, the aesthetics are satisfactory with its 16-bit visual style. Even though this game uses the same tilesets and backgrounds as Maytroid, they are no less impressive. Several different environments are depicted, from dusty deserts to snow-covered forests. It’s hinted that these environments even symbolize the symptoms of the virus Susan is researching. For example, one of the early symptoms is coughing or a sore throat. She makes this comment while in an arid desert, which is an early game area. A later symptom is a high fever and the connection is Susan commenting that she doesn’t feel cold, despite walking around wearing only a nightie while traveling through a snowstorm. As this narrative takes place later in the game, it points to the later stage symptoms of the disease.

Unfortunately, these connections to location, time, and viral symptoms all amount to speculation, theorizing, and tidbits the developers mention on Steam, as none of this is ever directly addressed in-game. A stronger symbolism or one with more direct connections would have made more impact. I realize this is another criticism of narrative, not aesthetics, but give me a strong, fleshed out story first, and then pepper it with secrets using the other facets of the game. Having said that, the storytelling flaws don’t take away from the quality of the visuals themselves. Finally, the audio is fair, with each track pairing to their locations adequately. My complaints are that the music itself isn’t all that memorable and there is too little of it. I think I counted just four or five tracks in the entire game. Also, these tracks may actually be the same ones used in Maytroid, but again, unmemorable.

Teleportals as a whole is a collection of great gameplay elements beaten down by unfinished ideas and bad decisions. If you were to strip away the plot and the lewdness, then the gameplay by itself would most definitely serve as a fantastic base for a potentially great game. I would even say by expanding gameplay further and properly addressing the plot, this would have had the makings of a hidden gem. The game can be completed in a single sitting, clocking in between three to five hours. Perhaps its saving grace, Teleportals can be picked up for $1, even less during a sale. So, if you’re in the mood for some quick platforming fun, and not a darn thing more, then maybe Teleportals is worth your consideration.

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[easyreview cat1title=”Overall” cat1detail=”” cat1rating=”2.5″]

Review copy provided by developer.

TBT REVIEW: Teleportals Title Teleportals Developer PixelGreeds Publisher PixelGreeds Original Release Date June 15th, 2018 Genre Platformer Platform PC…

#pixelgreeds #platformer #puzzle #Teleportals #Teleportals. I swear it&039;s a nice game

[bat-besties]

On Impossibility - 5

Chapter 1   Chapter 2   Chapter 3    Chapter 4    Chapter 6   Chapter 7   Chapter 8  Chapter 9

A popular!Logan and loser!Roman high school AU based on @2pointomg’s idea with eventual Prinxiety. 

impossible 

ɪmˈpɒsɪb(ə)l

adjective

·       not able to occur, exist, or be done.

Eg. It is impossible to fund both the sports and drama programmes with the school’s limited budget.

·       very difficult to deal with.

Eg. The situation which Logan Sanders, Student Body President, is in after he convinced the school board to cut the unsuccessful drama programmes is impossible.

·       (of a person) very unreasonable.

Eg. Roman Prince.

To Roman, nothing is impossible. Not following his older brother Patton to acting college, not being a loser taking on the school’s popular Student Body President and definitely not writing and performing an epic school play with no money and six cast and crew members.

Edited by @alpacasarethegreenestanimal, who has an amazing fanfiction on AO3! If you like superheroes, sarcasm and Virgil angst then you'll love this

@toolazytothinkofcreativename

@entitydark

@romanasanders

@barclays-sides

@cashmeredragon

@jughead-is-canonically-aroace

@immacrazyfangirl

@narniasfinestavengingsociopath

@featuredfander

@what-a-catch-joe

@mightaswellenthuseaboutbooks

@candiukas​

@whatamessofwords 

Logan had never been more productive. He was ahead on homework, debate preparation and extra credit work, more invested than ever in running the student council and had recently taken over running the accounts of Elise's band. Cutting out lunchtime as a break had greatly improved his efficiency, which was doubly true when he followed a traditional meal structure of seven or eight meals throughout the day, skipping the need for a proper lunch altogether. His parents had always tried to understand their unique son, so when he explained his new regimen to them they let him take a smaller dinner at his desk as well, providing that he promised them he wouldn’t work himself too hard. Logan wasn’t working hard enough – he taught himself basic ASL and studied Hamlet, watched Bill Nye on his laptop as he read essays on Cicero, then took up jogging every morning before school so he could join the track team. It may seem counter-intuitive, but two weeks on Logan had confirmed the hypothesis that losing Virgil was the best thing which had ever happened to him. 

Virgil leant against Logan's bright red locker, looking as though he was the fulfilment of the collective hopes of Simmons High and had fallen back to sleep. The position was much less comfortable than it looked, and the currents of conversation swirling past him were unnerving, but if he couldn’t see Logan coming then he would be engaged in conversation before he could run away.

There they were – those tapping soles in their regular rhythm cutting across the scuffles and pounding feet of the rest of the student body.

‘Virgil.’ succinct for once in his life, the single word from Logan was both an inquiry and an accusation.

Virgil forced himself to open his eyes slowly. God, Logan looked awful. He had lines under his eyes and his polo shirt had a tiny crease on the shoulder. To the outside eye he seemed fine, but Virgil knew that for Logan this was like rocking up to school in a dressing gown clutching a beer bottle. Why was he like this? Had Elise not checked he was fine after the fight, and had Joan not seen how exhausted he looked, and had the people constantly asking him for help not noticed how overburdened he was? He was with all these damn people the whole time, why hadn’t he asked a single one for help? Virgil hated that he couldn’t stand on his moral high ground when he saw his friend floundering in the waves beneath him.

‘Virgil?’ Logan’s forehead was creased with concern.

'Um, yeah. Well, I was just going to ask you something, but you look really bad man, is everything...Are you okay?’

'I am fine, not that it is any of your concern. What do you want?’

‘Well, I’ve joined Roman’s play thing and we really need money for costumes, so I was wondering if you could, you know find some to, you know, fund it.’

Logan stared at him wide-eyed, ‘Virgil – there is no money. I looked. I don’t know if anyone else but me has realised, but the school has to spend a lot of money ensuring standard of learning is maintained, and its extra-curricular fund is not infinite.’

‘OK, look, man, let’s do this another time, what time were you up last night?’

‘Don’t patronise me, Virgil. Let’s do this right now.’ Logan folded his arms and somehow managed to stand even straighter, ‘I have agreed to help a small group of people from my Spanish class go over verb endings before a pop quiz, and I do not want to keep them waiting.’

‘Fine – what about the debate team trip to New York, could that be made less expensive?’

‘No. And we can’t cancel – all five of us are counting on a national win or at least placing high out of the finalists for college.’

‘Well, the theatre kids need stuff for college too.’

‘I am fully aware of that.’

‘Well, then can we- ‘

‘There is no money!’ Logan quietened his voice after people looked round at his outburst, ‘I have checked, and re-checked, and checked again, and we can run debate, sports teams, bands and choir and assorted student-led societies. Nothing else. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get to Spanish.’

‘See you around.’

Something in Logan went slack at that smallest of amicable farewells. Then he drew himself up again. ‘Goodbye.’

Time to wade into the fucking river. ‘Logan, wait.’ The boy turned, ‘Um, we’ve been using lunch to iron out small details to maximise rehearsal time. It’s a good plan – I got it from you.’

Logan smiled a little, ‘Using dead time to work. It does sound like a good plan.’

Virgil cupped a hand at the back of his neck. ‘Would you like to join us? No big deal, just so you’re not sitting alone anymore.’

So, Virgil had noticed him – he had seemed too caught up in stirring up the theatre kids to louder and louder shouts of laughter with his little comments and observations. It was a nice gesture, but when Logan had spent so long as one half of a pair it was hard to be tacked onto Virgil’s new group: all loud, all weird and all on the outskirts of the social structure of the school. Besides, they wouldn’t want him there. He doubted Roman wanted him on the same continent as him, let alone the same lunch table.

‘Sorry, Virgil. I too have been maximising lunchtime efficiency. I – I am glad you at least learnt something from me. Well, I must be going.’

Virgil stood for a moment, watching the crowds rush past him and swallow up Logan. In that moment, he wished he could just let it go, ignore Roman and his crazy dream and Talyn and their beautiful designs trapped on the page, and Dahlia and her corny puns, and Terrence’s dancing, and Valerie’s evil laugh, and Kyle’s love of monologues. He wished he could let go of the memories of green plastic and blood rushing to his head, of the imagined scenario in which he could no longer paint and how much having that taken from him would hurt.

He didn’t want to dramatically run after Logan or tell him he was right and abandon his principles. All he wanted was to be lying on his bed, scrolling through Tumblr and to have Logan flipping through a book on his bedroom floor. Every now and then one would read out something interesting or amusing to the other, mostly they were silent. They might have film music on in the background and there would be a plate of Mint Oreos halfway between them, so that they could both reach. Perhaps later they would brainstorm ideas for Logan’s project, or come up with silly names for emo bands, or watch Cosmos for the fifteenth time and have twin existential crises afterwards. Perhaps they would have dinner with Virgil’s parents and tap Morse code on each other’s chairs beneath the table in one-word inside jokes. Perhaps they would just stay there forever, preserved in the golden afternoon sunlight as though in amber.

The school bell rang shrilly, and Virgil jumped, cursed, and ran to his first lesson.

-----------------------------------

It was ironic, really – Logan working on his Macbook in a comfortable suburban house worrying about money. It wasn’t impacting whether he’d eat or what he could afford to spend his weekend doing. It wasn’t part of his job at all to look at the school’s accounts, but Logan could not just stick to ‘salad bars’ or ‘laptops’. He had gotten this job (twice) to change things, and it had given him power and popularity, so he would do it properly. He had negatively impacted the lives of the theatre kids, and now he had to rectify that. Before, he had decided to follow logic: money for football, track and swimming meant college scholarships for the athletes and prestige for the school, which came at the expense of only fifteen people, and only six of these were really hurt by the decision. But now he would try something different – he couldn’t do the impossible Roman wanted him to, but for Virgil he would try his best to examine what he could do to help the play.

At least he had somewhere to start from: there was no money. How could he get some? Borrowing from a bank wouldn’t work, even if money could be made selling tickets. Fundraising, then. He knew enough by now to know that selling rainbow T-shirts to raise money for theatre may be seen as a slight. Moreover, those free T-shirts were part of a project which would be his legacy to the school which had accepted him: compassion, equality and empathy.  Fine, at $3 each if he could sell 50, then that was $150. It was a start.

He stared out of his window, down the darkening street. Bake sales? Eight people could make a lot of cake, even if two of those had baking skills so disastrous they had vowed to never try having any snacks but Mint Oreos ever again. Logan pushed away his laptop to lie on his bed instead. He closed his eyes. There was a calculus test tomorrow, and he had an essay due in he really should rewrite. However, his priority should be to help the people he was elected to represent.

--------------------

Mariana Sanders tried. She tried to tell her son he didn’t have to do everything himself, she tried not to feel hurt when he corrected her grammar or brushed aside her view on science even if she held a chemistry degree, she even tried to take his textbooks away from him when he stayed up at night working until he began to plead with her and she relented. His father was happy to let Logan do what he wanted, provided he seemed happy and in control, but she just wanted to understand what was making him happy and if he needed help staying in control. She stopped outside his bedroom door and knocked softly. ‘Honey?’

‘Vinegar.’ He sounded tired.

She pushed the door open and threw some papers at him.

‘`Sweet Pea' and `Pussy Cat': An Examination of Idiom Use and Marital Satisfaction Over the Life Cycle’’ he read, then smiled up at her. ‘We’re not married.’

‘Same principle.’ She was glad he was lying down, and his school stuff was away on its shelf, ‘Are you going to bed soon?’

‘Soon.’

‘Sleep is incredibly important- ‘

‘I know.’

She sat down on the bed and tugged on his tie. Sighing dramatically, Logan loosened it, then at a look from his mother removed it completely.

‘Everything alright with you?’

‘There’s a lot on. Still, you know me, perfectly in control of it all.’

‘Invite Virgil over tomorrow, you need a break and I miss his confusion whenever I slip an MCR quote into general conversation.’ She rubbed his arm, ‘I’ll get you guys Oreos.’

‘Mmm.’

Mariana frowned. ‘Logan, is everything alright with you and Virgil?’

That look. He had that look and she was knocked back years. ‘How did you lose your new astronomy book?’, ‘Are you sure that everyone is away on your birthday?’ and once, terrifyingly, ‘Where did you get that bruise?’

‘No. Just a slight disagreement, both he and I are men of principles…’

She pulled him into hug, and he broke off. There was a beat before ugly, racking sobs began to shake his body and he clung onto her desperately. ‘There, there.’ She stroked his back.

A single tear wended its way through Logan’s hair, though he was too upset to notice it. Mariana tried to blink it back. She was the mother, and she was meant to sit and be a rock, not break down alongside her son! But – she was upset for him and angry at him, and goddammit she was human too.

Logan couldn’t even think straight. ‘Mom.’ He had soaked the back of her top, ‘Mom.’

‘I’m here, Lo.’ She was crying openly now, ‘Lo, you idiot, I’m here. I’m here.’

#sanders sides fanfiction #sanders sides #virgil sanders #roman sanders #logan sanders #prinxiety #ts fic

[sketchesofsam]

The Illustration Master Class - A First Timer's Journal

This is a long blog post. It's mostly for my own purposes, but also for those who want an in-depth look at what being at the IMC is like. I have some pointers for first timers, things you might not think of and things to consider in advance. They'll be at the end of the article. I want to thank Dave Palumbo for allowing me to use a couple of his amazing photos too, he's a talented SOB. 

probably won't forget the moment my Facebook messages suddenly started pinging off. 'Congrats Sam!' 'Hey Sam, you won!' I distinctly remember thinking, hmm, what did I win? Did I enter another twitter giveaway or something? Then someone followed up with 'you won the scholarship!' It took me a moment. Then the chat I was in the middle of with my other half suddenly filled with lots of expletives and capitals on my end. Holy shit. I'd won the Muddy Colors scholarship to the IMC, something that had been a long-term wish of mine since I'd found out about it 5 or 6 years prior but hadn't ever had the funds to attend. So to find out that my entry to their scholarship program - through the generous donations of the Muddy Colors Patreon - submitted on a 'what have I got to lose' mentality that was still shadowed by the fuzzy sting of not getting into Spectrum, had scored me the full cost of the course. I'd honestly forgotten I'd applied. Let that be a lesson to those of you who hold back on submitting to things, especially the things that are free. It's always worth a punt. 

So what's it like to go to the IMC? I can tell you that winning the scholarship made the pre-IMC thumbnail assignment a lot more stressful than if I'd paid for it. The weight of imagining disappointing the people who had seen my work and voted for it - artistic heroes of mine -  was pretty heavy. It made me feel like I couldn't just go and do the same thing I'd always done, even if it had won me the scholarship. Before I started drawing, I reconsidered my influences. I'd started a secret pinterest board a few months back simply called 'Ho Fuck That's Good.' Stuff that gave me a gut punch when I looked at it. I spent a lot of time looking at those images and a lot of the others I had pinned. I stopped paying attention to work that I simply found technically impressive, that had awesome composition or great values. I looked for what moved me. Why it moved me. I started making notes about themes I found compelling or that cropped up a lot in my own work. I decided I wasn't going to do just a straight up realistic narrative Whaler Girl piece, I was going to try and make my own work be more like that which moved me. A risky, and perhaps somewhat dumb move, given those same realistic, narrative images had won me the scholarship. 

We were asked to provide 4 or 5 thumbnails, either of our own choosing, or from an assignment provided, such as an illustration to accompany a short story, the likes of which are often published on Tor.com. With themes like duality, death, grief and love in relationships crowding my brain, I created a lot of thumbnails. I wasn't going to take the first 3 or 4 that came out. I did about 20 in total and narrowed it down to the 6 I felt most attached to. Some of them even had hints back to The Whaler Girl in a very asbtract way. They'd come out better than I'd hoped for and I could see a tiny glimpse of the sort of painting I might get out of it. It made me excited to put them in front of my chosen faculty member. 

We were asked to pick a top 5 from the vertiable smorgasbord of faculty. That was hard. It turned out that most people got grouped with their top pick and that dictated who the other faculty were that would give you feedback. I suspect my pick would have surprised a few people. Kent Williams was actually the instructor I was least familiar with, but researching his work, especially his most recent work, it hit the same kind of buttons that my inspiration board had. His work felt emotionally personal and while I knew I didn't want to necessarily paint like he did, I felt he might be able to give good feedback on how to tap into that sense of the personal. Perhaps someone who could help keep me on track with the first wibbly steps I was taking with my own work. I count myself lucky to have landed in the group with Rebecca, Kent and Tara (McPherson). 

I wanted to make a good first impression, but there were so many approaches to the dreaded 'crit day'. Some folks brought only one or two finished colour thumbs, some folks just had small, traditionally drawn thumbnails, occasionally done on arrival the night before. Some brought photo mockups of the exact piece they wanted to work on. All approaches got good feedback. I'd been forewarned that crit day could be rough, but I think the Studio 201 guys were pretty chill. I did peek my head in on the other two rooms briefly. Donato, Greg Ruth and Scott Fischer were all highly animated and I've been told often argued with each other's feedback. Dan Dos Santos, Irene Gallo and Greg Manchess were part of the group that, from chatting to folks, seemed to get the most direct feedback.

I was a little surprised when there was no tracing paper used during my crit. All three faculty members responded favourably to what had been my favourite thumbnail, despite its weirdness. No direct suggestions other than resolving the shapes in my minimal, non-figurative space (that minor bit of feedback would come to haunt me by The Thursday of DOOM, but I'll get to that later). Inspirations like Inka Essenhigh, Hope Gangloff and Dorothea Tanning were thrown my way, I loved all three for very different reasons. It was safe to say inspiration was running high and I had a tonne of positive energy to run with. 

I felt like I was well prepped going into the IMC, but I wasn't. Choosing to go full traditional when having to fly internationally was a pain. I didn't have a lot of the stuff I needed and had to rely on the infinite kindness of my fellow students and faculty to see me through. Stephen, Annie, Chris, Julia, you were all lovely, I can't thank you enough. 

My Tuesday started with James Gurney sat at my breakfast table. That was surreal but awesome. He and his wife Jeanette are as lovely two people as you could hope to meet, full of insight and always taking notes. The previous day's lecture on photo reference was flowing through my mind and I dreaded having to ask fellow students. My figures were both nudes and that wasn't something I was comfortable with, though I thought perhaps I could take individual legs and arms and use a little online ref to fill in the rest. I wish I'd drummed up the courage to ask my fellow students, but that particular social step eluded me the whole week. I spent the day instead with many sheets of tracing paper, figuring out What marks were what. I had discussions with Greg Ruth and Donato Giancola about how to find those shapes and make them fit in my piece. You have to figure out who to listen to, and whose advice to stash for a later date. You get bombarded with advice if you go in as open-minded as I did. I'd thrown myself into a pool I should have been paddling in first, pretty much at the very public deep end. I'll admit I found ways to put off getting to painting, as it was only the 2nd oil painting I'd done in the last 20 years and the company I had in the room was stellar and a little overwhelming. Eventually, I chose to redraw via a grid so I could edit as I went along and I used some reference I shot of my own limbs to help flesh the drawing out. I left Tuesday feeling reasonably positive about the work.

Wednesday was a full day with faculty feedback, up to the first 5 pm lecture. Dan Dos Santos, who is perfectly lovely, but also very honest with feedback, stopped by my easel. Overall, very complimentary, he pulled me on a bit of weird anatomy, that after using a lot more photo ref with the rest of the piece, had begun to stand out. He suggested I grab Rebecca after our discussion. I'd responded best to her feedback, as she seemed to understand what I was trying to do, so I grabbed her after lunch. She immediately told me the leg and anatomy I'd had in the thumbnail had been working, and that if I liked the weirdness (which I did) to go weird with the rest of the piece to make the leg fit. Literally the opposite of Dan's feedback. Feedback is such a personal thing, every instructor has their own view of art and own journey. I'd probably tried to take a little bit of everyone who'd stopped by and given feedback and every little bit had nudged me slightly off the course I'd intended to take. Dan's feedback was spot on, if I'd been after something with a solid grounding in realism, but I wasn't. I was after an emotional feeling rather than muscles that looked like they fit where they were supposed to go. Rebecca suggested I just print the thumbnail out, mount it to masonite and paint on that. But resolve my shapes first. 

That led me to ask Tara for advice and after some back and forth, I thought I knew where I was going, and decided rather than be tied to the values I'd got in the thumbnail to start with, I'd trace down the printed thumbnail and resolve my shapes. All went well, I got the drawing on the board, and aware of the ever-ticking clock and my ability to get feedback on my painting process, I was keen to get started the following day.

I nick-named Thursday 'Thursday of DOOOOOOOM' in my sketchbook notes. With that many 'O's'. It started well, with my sketch on my illustration board, I figured I'd use acrylic underpainting to speed up the process, then seal with matte medium and start on top in oils. I'd brought a lovely lime green and violet with me, my underpainting was done in warm purple-reds as a counterpoint, and I was winging it. It felt good. I stepped away for a bit before lunch and came back after to the horror of a C-shaped warped board. A brand I'd not used before, I hadn't been heavy with it at all. I threw some matte medium on the back in the hopes it would pull itself out of the curve, but it only stiffened. I think panic set in at this point, I knew there was no point in doing more on the board, but I'd been stubborn over mounting the printouts I'd done. Old dog, new tricks and all that.

Distraught, I knew I had no choice. I slunk off to the back of the studio and tried not to blub my eyes out as I tried a totally new method of mounting with less than perfect tools. Flustered, my hair constantly got stuck in the medium, making me even more panicked that the whole thing would be a disaster and that I'd missed the last supply run and would have to face the very public shame of asking someone for actual help. If there's one thing I hate, it's not being self-sufficient. My fellow students would have happily helped out, but shame is a pretty powerful emotion, it tends to rule what you do. I prayed the mounted paper wouldn't need a 2nd sheet mounting on the back to counter the drawing mounted on the front. At best, in the blazing sun, this stuff would take a couple of hours to dry to the point I could paint on it. The wind did its best to prevent me from stacking the board outside and in my hours of deepest bleakness, I figured that maybe if it blew over into the dirt and insects, I'd say fuck it and make them part of the fucking thing too. It was also at this point I realised the printouts had cropped the two thumbnails I'd chosen to work with, altering their composition drastically. My own dumb fault for not setting the page size up properly in the printer. One more shame I'd suck up and live with. I wish I'd asked for help. I think knowing the pieces weren't what I'd initially intended broke my ability to give them my full attention and killed my mojo for the next couple of days. My anxiety rats, as Rebecca delightfully referred to them, were in full swing. 

While I waited for it to dry, I headed back into the studio and mentioned to Rebecca I'd given in with the curved board and mounted the thumbnail and would she have a look over what I'd chosen to do with the background. Rebecca is gracious and lovely and patiently listens to me explain what I've done. Then she points to some of the graphic elements I'd put in and gently says that they still feel too literal and forced, that the motifs I choose should be something I relate to closely and that it doesn't quite live up to the right hand, figurative side of the painting. I suggest a couple of other ideas, feeling a scrabbling panic bulding in me, only to hear her tell me everything still feels too literal. My logic brain knows she's right, but after a distraught morning, I'm clasping at any straw I have to salvage the situation. I don't know if it showed, and she saw that I was struggling with it or if it was just honest feedback for the moment, but at that point, she looked at me and said 'maybe this piece is a step too far for you right now, maybe you should do the other piece, if that's something that's more comfortable for you.' I think I agreed with her, nodded and extolled the virtues of taking a step back into my comfort zone, getting a painting I knew how to do done was a good thing, yes? But damn if that wasn't a kick to the gut at that very moment. 

She was absolutely right, though. I'd throw myself into a deep pool, with people who were olympic athletes at diving its depths, and in the course of a week expected to be able to at least dive a good distance with them. I'd been able to get my head underwater with my well-planned thumbnails, but in this overwhelming, information packed, inspiring, public test of artistic mettle, I'd punched above my depth, so to speak. Trying to shift gears artistically when you have your own space and the time to find your journey is one thing, I don't know if it can be done in a week, no matter how much amazing input you get from your artistic heroes. Chris, Erin, Annie, I'm sorry if my energy those next 48 hours was a bummer, it wasn't a place I was familiar with being. 

Kent Williams came to the rescue of my very bruised ego that evening with a talk about his personal journey through art. Indirectly, seeing the bredth and depth of his work over such a long time span, I confess to feeling a little idiotic that I'd expected to be able to make that leap in a week. Every faculty member who gave a talk like that had shown me that their journeys were long, and often fraught with failed ventures or periods of doing artistic things they didn't want to. I left the lecture with my tail between my legs, but a renewed sense that I would do my best with the hand I'd given myself. I did a couple of colour studies that evening, traditionally, inspired by seeing James Gurney's master studies in his lecture. I loved doing them, and wish I'd had more time to do more. But I found a piece online that had a palette I liked and did a couple of explorations of a similar theme. I finally, finally, 4 days into the escapade, managed to put down some oil paint. 

Friday and Saturday I painted as much as I could, but tentatively, I was making marks I'd never made before. I listened to the feedback being given around me and let anyone who wanted to stop and give me feedback, do so. I'm not sure I actively asked for it. I struggled as the ladies around me with their amazinly characterful pieces drew the attention of everyone who went past. I wondered if I was so far off the mark and weird that no one knew what to say about my piece. Maybe it was so bland that they couldn't praise or crit it. In retrospect, I recognise that my mood and lack of decent sleep was tinting my mood heavily, and I suspect I was giving off the same vibe, which is enough to make folks give you a bit of a wide berth. 

The theme of finding your niche and doing what you love came up in more than one lecture over those days. I went to bed at 2 am both nights, in an attempt to get as much done as I could. I socialised a little more, realising that was as much a part of the experience as the painting. If not more. I'm hugely thankful for the bonds I forged during that week, something I couldn't have done at home, no matter how much I painted. Those bonds were worth much more to me than the painting I half finished. I think I came to accept that what I wanted to do was going to be a journey that needed a little longer than a week to take. I wish there had been more 'round table' lectures with all the faculty, seeing them interact together on the business lecture was amazing. 

Sunday was chill. I'd had the intention of painting more, but clearing up took a while, and I felt good being relaxed. So I socialised more instead. Our final lecture with Donato was the perfect note to end the experience on and the open house was a chance to take in everyone's work, the standard of which was amazing. After a super tasty mexican dinner and strawberry margherita, the bar beckoned. After drawing I don't know how much hentai in people's sketchbooks and getting a badass Bill Nighy sketch from the awesome Bud Cook in my own sketchbook, alongside the weirdest pseudonyms and animal drawings ever, I crashed and burned as being under the influence after a week of mental stress and lack of sleep took its toll on me. Conan, thank you for making sure I got back safely that night, I really appreciate it, I suspect I'd have passed out in a dark corner of the bar otherwise. Sad I missed out on the late night partying that ensued, but damn, did I need that night's sleep. 

So there's one woman's view of what it's like to go to the IMC, to throw yourself at the mercy of the faculty and your own desires. To fail and not deal with it well, to realise that the painting was never the important thing. IMC was amazing. I can only hope this gives those of you who haven't been a teensy insight. I'm not going to cover what the lectures were or what faculty shared with us, that's a very specific IMC experience, that you really have to go to appreciate. I will say I am hugely thankful to Dan, Rebecca and all of those on Muddy Colors who made that experience real for me. It has enriched me in ways I suspect I'll only realise as my journey continues. Thank you to everyone who gave me kind words and praise and to those who tried to guide me on my way. If ever the opportunity arises for you to attend, I would say grab it with both hands and run with it. Even if your experience doesn't run as profound as mine, and it simply lets you have some time to paint whatever the hell you want, being in a huge room full of people going through the same thing is well worth the price, not to mention watching faculty paint in real time is invaluable. 

So, what if you've taken that leap, some months from now and you're going to the IMC? Here's a few pointers from someone who thought they were prepared and was woefully not. 

1 -  THE DORMS Are basic AF. I was somewhat prepared, but when the FAQ says the beds are firm, they mean it. Think springs wrapped in a bit of plastic tarp. The sheets are functional, but the blanket looked like someone had put used dog bedding through a shredder and mushed it out into a rectangle. I bought a spare blanket at the CVS store, cause no way was that thing touching my skin. I may be a little sensitive though. I affectionately referred to the whole set up as my prison bed, cause honestly, that's all I could think of. If you can bring your own bedding, I'd recommend it.

The dorm bathrooms are gender neutral, which means anyone can use them. I was fine with it, but it's odd the first time you wander into the bathroom and find the opposite sex brushing their teeth. I never had any problems taking a shower, though, they were pretty quiet. 

Morris Pratt Dorm was definitely the more social, I was very thankful to be on the 3rd floor, as a light sleeper, the partying into the wee hours would have kept me awake had I been on the lower floors. The box fans helped with white noise, but the doors are all pretty heavy, so unless folks are very delicate with how they close them, expect some noise. I found the box fan enough without the AC, even when it got pretty warm on the last couple of days. 

2 - FOOD. Having never been to a large educational establishment in the US, I wasn't sure what to expect with the food. Would I have to venture into Amherst to find healthy stuff, would there be much choice? The food was surprisingly decent. It's still a large facility, so it's never going to be amazing restaurant quality, but there were a few choices every day and a well-stocked salad bar. They even had a soft serve ice cream machine, that I managed to avoid until Sunday. I'm not a coffee drinker, but I had it on good authority that the coffee in the dining hall wasn't great. It might be an idea to bring a drinks container with you, as mealtimes are the only time you can get drinks on campus, outside of water fountains. Amherst is only a 10-minute walk down the road, though. 

3 - ART SUPPLIES AND STUDIO SAFETY. I brought paints, brushes and surfaces with me, with the knowledge I'd ordered a couple extra things for while I was there and that there was a supply run. If you work on specific surfaces, it's best to bring those with, Michael's wasn't super well stocked, and more speciality things like large clayboard weren't available. A lot of people bring extras and are happy to share, thankfully. I would have brought more old rags or kitchen towels and some tape. People often used walls to tape up thumbnails or other pieces of art.

The university runs a very strict number of safety policies surrounding paints, water and mediums. Bring some lidded jars with you for mediums and water. Everything has to be labelled clearly and remained closed when not in use. Even water used for rinsing acrylic and watercolours. All have to be disposed of carefully too. Same with anything you wipe paint or mediums on, so using something a bit more disposable like kitchen towel might do you better. They ask you to cover your oil paints when not in use, though that can be with a simple piece of palette paper. 

If you choose an easel, if you have space for a little extra table, you'll likely make good use of it. The chairs they supply are also very basic and not comfortable for long periods, so bringing a cushion is definitely a good idea.  Oh, and they say the studio opens at 8 am on Monday but I got there at 8 am and a lot of the spaces had already been taken, so if you want prime real estate, get there early! 

4 - SELF PROMOTION This sounds like a no-brainer. I brought business cards for the faculty and my portfolio review with Irene Gallo. I thought I'd sorted my work out reasonably well, but actually, my website would have been a better place to show off my work. I also wish I'd brought a physical portfolio to leave out for students and faculty to flick through, perhaps an example of finished work that was either nicely printed if I was doing digital, or one of my traditional pieces. The latter is tricky when flying. My business cards were on the pricey side so I wish I'd had some decent postcards or stickers, printed for the open studio, where folks were picking stuff up. You never know who's going to pick one up! The internet can be spotty in the building, so unless you have some 4G going on, it can be tricky to show off folios digitally. 

You might also be lucky enough to score a second portfolio review if the guests have enough time, I am so glad I could put my work in front of WotC's Jeremy Jarvis. It cheered my Saturday up no end! Make sure you check the lists when they go up and bag your second spot early. And don't puss out. 

5 - DON'T BE AFRAID TO ASK FOR HELP I'm stubborn and British, so asking for help is the worst, but everyone there will gladly help you out if they can. Especially the assistant team, Daneen, Julia and Stephen and the 'honored easels' who've been in your situation. Take advantage of them, they are all lovely people.

And that sums it up! An amazing, tiring, exhausting, mentally demanding, inspiring, overwhelming experience that I wouldn't change for the world. I hope to repeat it in the next year or two. I count myself lucky to be part of the alumni and perhaps if you're reading this, I might see you there too. 

[spamzineglasgow]

(HOT TAKE) Notes on a Conditional Form by The 1975, part 1

In the first instalment of a two part dialogic HOT TAKE of The 1975′s latest album, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit, 2020), Maria Sledmere writes to musician and critic Scott Morrison with meditations on the controversial motormouth and prince of sincerity that is Matty Healy, the poetics of wrongness, millennial digression and what it means to play and compose from the middle.

Dear Scott,

> So we have agreed to write something on The 1975’s fourth studio album, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit/Polydor). I have been traipsing around the various necropoli of Glasgow on my state-sanctioned walks this week, listening to the long meandering 80-minute world of it, disentangling my headphones from the overgrown ferns, caught between the living and dead. Can you have a long world, a sprawling fantasia, when ‘the world’ feels increasingly shortened, small, boiled down to its ‘essentials’? Let’s go around the world in 80 minutes, the band seem to say, take this short-circuit to the infinite with me. I like that; I don’t even need a boat, just a half-arsed WiFi connection and a will to download. I’m really excited to be talking with you, writing you both about this; it’s an honour to connect our thoughts. I want writing right now to feel a bit like listening, so I write this listening. When my friend Katy slid into my DMs on a Monday morning with ‘omg the 1975 album starts with greta?????????’ and then ‘what on earth is the genre of this album ?!’ I just knew it had to happen, this writing-listening, because I was equally alarmed and charmed by the cognitive dissonance of that fall from Greta’s soft, yet urgent call to rebel (‘The 1975’), into ‘People’ with its parodic refrain of post-punk hedonism that would eat Fat White Family on a Dadaesque meal-deal platter ‘WELL, GIRLS, FOOD, GEAR [...] Yeah, woo, yeah, that’s right’. Scott, you and I went to see The 1975 play at the Hydro on the 1st of March, my last gig before lockdown. I’d been up all night drinking straight gin and doing cartwheels and crying on my friend’s carpet, and the sleeplessness made everything all the more lush and intense. Those slogans, the theatrical backdrops, the dancers, the lights, the travellator! Everything so EXTRA, what a JOURNEY. And well, it would be rude of me not to invite you to contribute to this conversation, as a thank you for the ticket but also because of your fortunate (and probably unusual) positioning as both a classically trained musician (with a fine-tuned listening ear) and fervent fan of the band (readers, Scott messaged me with pictures of pre-ordered vinyl to prove it).

> It seems impossible to begin this dialogue without first addressing the FRAUGHT and oft~problematic question of Matty Healy, the band’s frontman, variously described as ‘the enfant terrible of pop-rock’ and ‘outspoken avatar’ (Sam Sodomsky, Pitchfork), ‘enigmatic deity’ (Douglas Greenwood for i-D), ‘a charismatic thirty-one-year-old’ and ‘scrawny’, rock star ‘archetype’, not to mention ‘avatar of modern authenticity, wit, and flamboyance’ (Carrie Battan, The New Yorker). ‘Divisive motormouth or voice of a generation?’ asks Dorian Lynskey with (fair enough) somewhat tired provocation in The Guardian, as if you could have one without the other, these days. ‘There are’, writes Dan Stubbs for The NME, ‘as many Matty Healys here as there are musical styles’. So far, so postmodern, so elliptical, so everything/yeah/woo/whatever/that’s right. Come to think of it, it makes sense for The 1975 to draft in Greta Thunberg to read her climate speech over the opening eponymous track. Both Matty and Greta, for divergent yet somehow intersecting reasons, suffer the troublesome, universalising label of voice of a generation. Why not join forces to exploit this label, to put out a message? I’ve always thought of pop music as a kind of potential broadcast, a hypnotic, smooth space for desire’s traversal and recalibration. More on that later, maybe. What do you think?

> You can imagine Matty leaping out of a cryptic, post-internet Cocteau novelette (if not then straight onto James Cordon’s studio desk), emoji streaming from his fingertips like the lightning that Justine wields in Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011); but the terrifying candour of the enfant terrible is also his propensity to wax lyrical on another (bear with my clickhole) YouTube interview about his thoughts on Situationism and the Snapchat generation. It feels relevant to mention cinema right now, if only in passing, because this album is full of cinematic moments: strings and swells worthy of Weyes Blood’s latest paean to the movies, but also a Disneyfication of sentiment clotted and packed between house tracks, ballads and rarefied indie hits. Nobody does the interlude quite like The 1975. Maybe more on that later, also.

> Where do I start though, how to really write about this, how to attain something like necessary distance in the space of a writing-listening? Matty Healy, I suppose, like SPAM’s celebrated authorial mascot, Tom McCarthy, poses the same problem of response: how to write about an artist whose own critical commentary is like an eloquent, overzealous and self-devouring, carnivorous vine of opinion?  

> Now, let’s not turn this into a discussion about who wears pinstripes better (we can leave that to readers - these are total Notes from the Watercooler levels of quiche). There seems to be this obsession with pinning (excuse the pun) Matty down to a flat surface of multiples: a moodboard, avatar, placeholder for automatic cancellation. He’s the soft cork you wanna prod your anxieties through and call it identity, you wanna provoke into saying something bizarrely, painfully true about life ‘as it is now’. Healy himself quips self-referentially, ‘a millennial that babyboomers like’. I don’t really know where to start really, not even on Matty; my brain is all over the place and I can’t find a critical place to settle. I’m lost in the fog and the stripes, some stars also; I haven’t even washed my hair for a week. Funnily enough, in 2018 for SPAM’s #7 Prom Date issue I wrote a poem called ‘Just Messing Around’ where the speaker mentions ‘pinning my eye to the right side / of matt healy’s hair all shaved / & serene’ and you don’t really know if it’s the eye that’s shaved or the hair, but both I guess offer different kinds of vision. Every time I google the man, IRL Matty I mean, I am offered a candied proliferation of alluring headlines: ‘The 1975’s Matty Healy opens up on his beef with Imagine Dragons’, ‘The 1975’s Matty Healy savagely destroys Maroon 5 over plagiarism claims’. Perhaps the whole point is to define (or slay?) by negation. Hey, I’ll write another poem. The opening sentence comes from Matty’s recent Guardian interview.

Superstar

I’m not an avocado, not everyone thinks I’m amazing. That’s why they call me the avocado, baby was a song released by Los Campesinos! in 2013, same year as the 1975’s debut. In the am I have been wanting to listen and Andy puts up a meme like ‘The 1975 names their albums stuff like “A Treatise on Epistemological Suffering” and then spends 2 hours singing about how hard it is to be 26’ and I reply being 26 IS epistemological suffering (isn’t that the affirmative dismissal contained in the title, ‘Yeah I Know’) I mean only yesterday I had to ask myself if it’s true you can wish on 11:11 or take zinc to improve your immune system or use an expired provisional license to buy alcohol like why are they even still asking I thought indie had died after that excruciating Hadouken! song called ‘Superstar’ which was all like You don’t like my scene / You don’t like my song / Well, if you Somewhere I’ve done something wrong it seems a delirious, 3-minute scold of the retro infinitude of scarf-wearing cunts with haircuts, and yeah sure kids dressed as emos rapping to rave is not the end of the world, per se, similarly I had to ask myself is there a life in academia is there a wage here or there, like the Talking Heads song And you may ask yourself, well How did I get here? Good thing I turn 27 next month Timothy Morton often uses the refrain, this is not my beautiful house this is not my beautiful wife to refer to those moments you find yourself caught in the irony loop and that’s dark ecology the closer you are the stranger it feels like slice me in half I’ll fall out with more questions you can plant in the soil like a stone or stoner, just one more drag of does it offend you, yeah? will I live and die in a band Matty sings the sweet green meat of my much-too-old -and-such-youthful experience of adding healthy fat to conference dialogue, like ‘Avocado, Baby’ was released on a record called No Blues I believe a large automobile is hurtling towards me now in negative space and the driver is crooning Elvis and reciting my funding conditions and everything feels like there aren’t not still people who believe the new culture of content is a space ‘over there’ and you can still have earnest power ballads about love if you want them =/ to cancel (too many tabs don’t make a tableau but in the future facebook has a paywall) and fame is a drag the pressure we put on the atmosphere, like somewhere you’re alive and still amazing asking wtf I’m reading this novel by Roberto Bolaño set partly in 1975 before we had internet it seems poets got laid a lot that year in Mexico City before I was born to pick up video calls with a spliff in one hand in the splendid, essential heat like a difficult knife in my side you can put me on toast, grind the pepper over me gently and say fucking hell this has taken forever.

> I guess I want or wanted to begin with this question of difficulty that rises when responding to Notes on a Conditional Form. How do you approach an album whose delayed release places it in a position of considerable hype, an album whose world tour and promotion is again delayed by global pandemic, an album shrouded in the ever-shifting controversy of Matty’s persona, an album whose length and sonic variety risks collapse into litanies of zany superlative and necrophilic attempts to revive musical category as vaguely relevant here? As beautiful as it is to catalogue the offbeat Pinegrove vibes of ‘Roadkill’, the shoegaze croons of ‘Then Because She Goes’ and the pop-punk, chord-bright euphoria of ‘Me & You Together Song’, I could keep going and going with this. I could just list and just list this. The album is a generous offering: a tribute to the album as form in an age where attention tapers away on high-streaming playlists set to conditioned, circadian moods curated by the likes of Spotify or Apple Music. The album is a Borgesian plenitude of multiple pathways, multiple timelines, infinite feed, choose your own adventure; a hypertext of cultural reference almost worthy of Manic Street Preachers at their Richey Edwards era of paranoid, intellectual peak; a metamodernist feat of oscillation between irony and sincerity, an extended tract, a drunk millennial ramble, a journey that loops from house party to club basement to the streams of sexuality repressed and expressed encounter...and yet. It is both more and less than these things. In trying to capture Notes on a Conditional Form with some pithy, journalist’s statement, I’m doing it all wrong.

> Sidenote: I recently listened to Rachel Zucker give a 2016 lecture on ‘The Poetics of Wrongness’ as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. She makes a case for wrongness in poetry and critique, rejects the poem of pithy essence, the short, pretty and to the point lyric whose meaning is easily digested in a greetings card, or A Level exam paper, say. ‘Instead of the Fabergé egg of the short lyric, I prefer the aesthetics of intractability and exhausted exhaustedness’, the mistakes, lags or aporia made along the way in one of these long and winding poems. Notes on a Conditional Form is full of what some might deem mistakes, digression, exhaustion; but it is also peppered with the gloss of almost perfect pop ‘hits’ such as ‘Me & You Together Song’ and ‘If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)’. A wrong poem should be, ‘ashamed and irreverent’, which feels like a decent description of The 1975’s general orientation towards artistic conception. There is cringe and incongruity, there is by all intents and purposes ‘too much of it’, whatever we mean by ‘it’. And yet, that is its beautiful poetics of wrongness, the sound of wrongness, which ‘prefers the stairs’ to the easy elevator pitch (as Zucker puts it), that ‘prefers a half-finishing crumbling stairwell to nowhere’. I like to think about this 1975 album as a kind of exhausting Escherian scene of shifting, crumbling stairwells, shuffling and reassembling against the glistering backdrop of the internet’s inverse void, where everything, literally everything is translated to a starry excess of 1s and 0s, our collective binary data, the white hot, unreadable howl of our noise. What do you think Scott, would Matty find this image agreeable? Does that matter?

> Pushing dear Matty aside, say what you like, let’s start (again) with the title: Notes on a Conditional Form. Following 2018’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, it’s fair to position these records as gestures towards philosophical statements ‘of the times’. Important to recognise the resistance to total or dominating knowledge built into the titles: these are not complete tracts or theses, but rather ‘a brief inquiry’ and ‘notes’. It’s obviously the ancient yet *hip* thing to do in capital-P Philosophy, to put out your statement on aesthetics and ethics, and I think The 1975 are playing with that tradition and its failure. You can imagine if his attention span were different, Matty Healy would’ve already written a PhD thesis on this stuff and published it as drunken bulletins on LiveJournal in 2007. As it stands, we have the smorgasbord sprawl of this eclectic record to get through in this cursèd year of 2020 — it’s not like we have much of anything better to do right now, when everything feels so futile, beyond reason and even the greatest human endeavour. Haha, woo, Yeah :’(((.

> Let’s stay in that conditional space between crying and laughter. Conditional form is interesting as a term, often used in grammar to refer to the ‘unreal past’ because it uses a past tense but does not actually refer to something that literally happened in the past: If I had texted him back, we would probably have gone to the gig that night. There’s something about the conditional as the ur-condition of the internet, the proliferating possibilities it offers and the hauntological strains of what could have been had we chosen x option over y, z, a, b, c, infinity...As millennials, we often make decisions by hedging, always caught in the conditional state of what it is to be. Hovering in the emotional shortcuts provided by dumb yellow icons, the poetics of abstraction. A verb form’s dalliance with uncertain reverb; and so we live our conditional lives.

> To push this further, we can say the internet is, as ever, Matty Healy’s natural habitat. In a recent podcast interview with Conor Oberst for The Face, Healy tells his favourite emo-country hero that ‘my natural environment by the time I started The 1975 was the fucking internet’. So how does that ecosystem play into the music? In a damning review for The Line of Best Fit, Claire Biddles concludes:

The 1975’s first three albums are ideal and distinct worlds to inhabit, each individually cohesive but situated in specific contexts — the anticipation of the small town, profundity in the face of vacuous fame, and the horror and isolation of late capitalism. Perhaps because of its broken genesis, Notes has no such common context, and ends up feeling flat, directionless and inessential, where its forebears felt vital, worthy of devoting a life to. For a band with proven dexterity in deftly capturing the nuances and quick changes of contemporary conversation, it is disheartening to witness them with nearly nothing of note to say.

That description — ‘flat, directionless and inessential’ — is kind of how I experience the internet right now, in the paradox of Web 2.0 becoming utterly essential, somehow, to how I live my life, how I love, how I am with friends. The internet as my ecosystem, my utility, my complete environment, my Imaginary — beyond the mere utility of a WiFi connection. Broken genesis might well describe the childhoods of those of us who grew up online, whose platforms collapsed around them, whose adolescent data was lost in the great ~accidental annihilation of the MySpace servers, whose identities were always already fractured, performed, anonymised or exquisitely personalised, deferred into only the (im)possible keystroke of utterance and trace, the fort-da play of MSN sign-ins. ‘My life is defined by a desire to be outward followed by a fear of being seen’, Matty says in a new short film for Apple Music, released in tandem with the album. The internet requires this chiaroscuro destiny: not to burn always with Baudelaire’s hard and gem-like flame (O to be an IRL flaneur beyond times of lockdown) but to endlessly flicker between the bright green light of presence and the shade of what once was called afk, away from keyboard. To live and burn in the gap between extroversion and introversion, to live in this conditional state of tendency. To express with emoji, send pics, is to both reveal and withhold something else, essential.

> I like albums to feel like worlds; I appreciate Biddles’ evocation of the cohesion experienced in the first three 1975 records. But perhaps it is a kind of violence to assume a world must have cohesion to exist. What is even meant by ‘common context’? What pressure are we putting on a singer, a band, a cultural moment to produce something familiar and harmonious, and to whom, at what scale? What does it mean to be the biggest band in the world...for a bit? How does that work when everything is dissonance, transience, noise, interference; both this and not-this; when life itself is lived as the flat traversal of a millioning existential terrains that seem to collapse into this nowness in which I feel myself sliding forever? Can anyone weigh-in on what it means to make music, art or writing that’s ‘worthy of devoting a life to’, because the gravity and force of that condition for good art, good pop, seduces me so.

> Maybe the point is to always be in the middle, to never quite start to write about The 1975, to find yourself always already writing about this album because this album was always already writing about your life. I have said nobody does the interlude quite like The 1975, but I was being coy, because the hottest twentieth-century philosophical double act, Deleuze and Guattari (haters gonna hate), do the interlude rather nicely. The point of a rhizome being ‘no beginning or end [...] always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo’ as they write in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). I see the musical interlude of a pop record, the instrumental moment without lyric, as a kind of middling gesture that places the listener in that conditional state of presence and absence, a hinge between songs, times and narrative moments. Maybe my favourite moment in A Thousand Plateaus is the statement: ‘RHIZOMATICS = POP ANALYSIS, even if the people have other things to do besides read it, even if the blocks of academic culture or pseudoscien-tificity in it are still too painful or ponderous’. Painful or ponderous might be a fair critique levelled at the enfant terrible vibes of Matty’s lyrics and generic pick’n’mix, but isn’t this tactic a kind of swerving punch at the categorical violence that keeps people out of academia, that keeps academic discourse so often stale in the first place? Unlike most journal articles, let’s face it, pop reaches ‘“the people”’. Perhaps Notes on a Conditional Form is the rhizomatic sprawl of the myriad we need as an alternative to institutional hierarchy, ring-fencing and the language games of academia. Surely the title is a reference to the very ‘pseudoscient-tificity’ D&G mention? I’m gonna quote Richard Scott’s blurb to Colin Herd’s 2019 poetry collection, You Name It here (not least because the indie publishers, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, come straight out of Manchester, home to The 1975, and because Herd’s poetic spirit is pure pop generosity with a platter of theory on the side), because I want to say similar things of this album: ‘Colin Herd’s poems are masterpieces of variousness. They are talismans against Macho demons. They are snatches of theory operating under lavish spills of language’. The good thing about Herd’s poetry and Matty Healy’s lyrics is that the impulse towards romantic or florid expression is always tapered by an interest in the mundane and everyday. Healy is always singing about pissing or buying clothes online or, as on ‘The Birthday Party’, singing about ‘a place I’ve been going’ that seems to consist of the lonely, infinite regress of conversations about seeing friends and watching someone drink kombucha while buying, in the convenient life of rhyme, Ed Ruscha prints.

Ed Ruscher, Cold Beer, Beautiful Girls (2009)

> So what kind of listening does this rhizomatic sprawl demand — does it expand beyond the banal or find a holding space there, a heaven of affect chilled to late-modernity’s crisp perfection? ‘The End (Music For Cars)’ is a luxurious, Hollywood ‘soaring’ moment, all strings and swells, fucking woodwind, and comes as the third track on the album, where normally you’d place it as some kind of penultimate climax, the album’s landscape pan-out or big swelling screen kiss in three-dimensional rotation. The band’s ‘Music For Cars’ era comprises their two most recent records, and you have to take it as a nod to Brian Eno’s 1978 ambient classic Ambient 1: Music for Airports (Matty recently interviewed Eno again for The Face, cool). The thing about cars is you drive around in them, you follow rules but also whims and desires, convictions; you choose to join others or you pursue the selfish acceleration (‘People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles’ goes the laconic teenage refrain in Bret Easton Ellis’ 1985 debut novel Less Than Zero). You only listen to music half-attentively; you don’t listen close enough to trade in souls. Are we being invited to experience this album as an ambient disruption of figure and ground, presence and absence, here and there, space and place, intimacy and despondency? Driving feels increasingly ‘directionless and inessential’ when the scale effects and obscenities of the anthropocene, of covid and other late-capitalist crises loom in our vision, when the sign systems we used to navigate our lives by seem to shimmer out of focus, or pixelate and deteriorate through endless memetic replication... You can’t help feel like Biddles review kind of misses the point.

Sylvano Bussoti, Five Pieces for Piano for David Tudor (1959)

> What point would that be though, in a world of rhizomatic overlap and intersecting, middling lines, a direction without seeming end? I love the approximation at work when Biddles writes, ‘with nearly nothing of note to say’, because that seems to be a possibility condition for writing in the age of the internet. To write in a way that is almost less than zero and loop back upon some kind of infinity, yet keep it in 2-step. I think back to Rachel Zucker’s image of the half-finished crumbling stairwell, and feel an amiable sense of approval towards this band who always work between the registers of diary, confession, advertising, provocative sloganeering and faux-didactics, never quite settling in to specifically tell you this particular story. It’s all mess, and it’s awful and delicious, I’m sorry. ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’ is the title of track 13 on the album: that movement between nothing and everything feels like the absolutist, absurdist conditions of ‘truth’ possibility in the Trumpocene/age of so-called ‘post-truth’. ‘Life feels like a lie, I need something to be true’, Healy sings with strained conviction in the song’s opening. But what is at stake in this truth? ‘I never fucked in a car, I was lying’, goes the line, referring back to the dramatic in medias res opening to ‘Love It If We Made It’, notable banger from A Brief Inquiry…: ‘We’re fucking in a car, shooting heroin / Saying controversial things just for the hell of it’. If lying is a pun on telling a mistruth or laying back, practically sexless in a passive state, there’s a deliberate play on apathy, agency and distortion here. It’s something Matty seems snagged on. On ‘I Like America & America Likes Me’ he collapses aesthetic superficiality, capital’s lyric abstraction (‘Oh, what’s a fiver?’) and generalised crisis into this (un)conscious desire for shutdown, expressed in fragmentary bullets of needing-to-know-and-not-know: ‘Is that designer? Is that on fire? Am I a liar? Oh, will this help me lay down?’ And then that impassioned refrain, processed through vocal distortion as if to enact the difficulty in clarity as overcome somehow by the sheer making of noise: ‘Belief and saying something / And saying something / And saying something’. It’s the endless, driving recursion of our lives online, online.

> Back to ‘The End (Music for Cars)’ which really is the middle of the beginning. It’s weird to listen to songs about driving and lying down in the middle of lockdown, drowning in the bloat of social media, on top of our ongoing climate emergency (yeah, remember that, it’s still happening), where high-carbon travel feels like an exhausted, almost impossible concept. A musician complaining about travelling is an age-old subject for a song, but this feels just as much about living in the in-between times of the internet (remember the sweet naivety of the information superhighway) as much as the great Road, for which Kerouac longed as much as Springsteen, Dylan, or Lana Del Rey. Is Matty Healy homesick though? ‘Get somewhere, change my mind, eh / Get somewhere but don’t find it / I don’t find what I’m looking for’. It’s all ‘(out there)’ as the parenthetical refrain goes, but maybe ‘out there’, outside, is the maddening supplement, as Derrida would say, to our lives online, thus revealing their mutual, entwined dependency. Imagine the M6 but tangled up crazily, zanily, like one of those Sylvano Bussoti scores. It’s not like you’re trying to get home, get back, exactly. It’s not like you can just click back on your browser and erase that trace of the touch that enacts it. That’s the weird-ass sensation of being an ecological being: ‘Wherever you go, there you are’, writes Tim Morton in Being Ecological (2018). We’re all pretty alien, even to ourselves.

> If life feels like a lie, as Matty sings, does it matter anymore whether it is or not? Or, to pose the question differently, how do we feel into, attune to something like ‘truth’, a shared reality or feeling? ‘Out there’ is only a state of ellipsis [...] a vine extended, something for the listener, user, consumer and/or human to cling to — or be strangled by. In the aforementioned Apple Music video, Matty takes away the canvas and presents the frame beneath, in a gesture that is comically overwrought with Duchampian pretention around the state and context of the artwork itself. ‘Sometimes I think what is the point of...it’s not my atheism coming out, it’s just my being human coming out’, he muses. The phrase ‘coming out’, with its connotations of closeting, shame and cocoon-like emergence is intriguing here. In a dehumanising, post-internet world of neoliberalism and its attendant microfascisms, its commodification of all kinds of art, its easythink translation of poetry-to-advertising, what would it mean to come out as human after, or better still, in the middle of all this? It’s significant that he trails off after ‘the point of…’, for surely the point itself (of the art?) would be to find yourself here, there, right in the middle of it all. And then in ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’, it’s like Matty is calling us back from that epistemological and ontological boiling point of knowing and being, like in singing we could go along, we could feel present and ‘true’ again, even with friction and difference. We gotta take hold, cool ourselves down from the rhetoric and into warm emotion, the smell of paint, erotic vibration of bass, in a manner of speaking.

> What if the mode of inquiry were not to investigate but rather to follow the lines of flight, to riff on this world where narrative arcs and chains are replaced by the multiple possibilities of hallucinatory experience, what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’? To just desire and trace it. This, Scott, is where you come in (and I finally shut up to listen). There is so much more to write about this album, echo for echo, and I feel like I’ve only begun the tracing which was already beginning: I want to know your thoughts on The 1975 and America, on gender and genre, on bodies and football and friendship, on political engagement, those house beats, on the beautiful, sultry appearance of Phoebe (fucking) Bridgers, on sincerity, on the question of ‘What Should I Say’...It’s been playing on my mind that I will never say what I want to, or should, or would say of this album, but this perhaps is what I would otherwise have said. I give you my notes in conditional form.

Read part 2 of our review in Scott Morrison’s response here.

Notes on a Conditional Form is out now and available to order. 

~

Text: Maria Sledmere

Published: 23/6/20

#review #reviews #music reviews #album review #The 1975 #Matty Healy #Maria Sledmere #music criticism #Scott Morrison

[adaplay]

Breathtaking Coda

7/28/2017      ADA AND THE MEMORY ENGINE           Essential Theatre *****  ( A+ ) 01001100 01001111 01000111 01001001 01000011 01000001 01001100 00100000 01001001 01001110 01010100 01010101 01001001 01010100 01001001 01001111 01001110 01010011  (*) (Bias Alert:  I am friends with Essential Artistic Director Peter Hardy and with leading actress Ashley Anderson.  I also have not seen a Lauren Gunderson play I haven't liked -- her works topped my "favorites" lists in both 2015 and 2016.  Yeah, I went into this one with my "inclined to like" filters focused fully.) So, computers. We all use them.  Our cars use them.  (Too) Many objects in our homes use them.  We carry them in our pockets, a mere seventy years after the smallest computer filled a large room. So, when did all this madness begin?  1911's Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (Soon to become IBM)?  1946's ENIAC?   1950's Turing Test?   1981's DOS?   All of the above? Let's go the whole way back to 1833, or "When Charles Babbage met Ada Lovelace!" You see, Mr. Babbage had conceived and modeled what he called his "Difference Engine," a machine that could be "programmed" to perform simple arithmetic functions.  Ms. Lovelace, (pronounced "love-less," interestingly enough), the only "legitimate" daughter of Lord Byron, had been raised by her (bitter) mother to eschew anything artistic, becoming a bit of a mathematical genius.  She saw the potential of Babbage's machine to do more than simple addition. In 1840, Babbage gave a lecture at the University of Turin about his engine, which was transcribed in French.  Ms. Lovelace translated the paper into English, including a "Notes" section longer than the paper itself.  That appendix included what is thought to be the world's very first "program," instructions for the "engine" to calculate a series of Bournoulli Numbers. (I'd explain what they are, but I'm not a mathematician.  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli_number if you must.) Okay, there is some debate over whether or not Lovelace actually conceived the program, or whether she merely transcribed Babbage's work.  Whichever is true, it is definitely factual that she was an infinitely more accomplished communicator than Babbage, and it is reasonable to assume she had input to the production of the "program." Although Babbage was never able to get funding for his admittedly expensive engine, he had the last laugh -- In 2011, researchers in England actually produced a working model from his notes, and Lovelace's program worked perfectly. All this is basic Wikipedia background to Lauren Gunderson's marvelous "Ada and the Memory Engine," another in her series of plays about "forgotten" women of science.  I loved both "Emilie:  La Marquise du Châtelet Defends her Life Tonight" and "Silent Sky," and I expected to love this one as well.  And indeed I did.  Okay, maybe it has a tad TOO much in common with "Silent Sky," including clueless men, a heroine who suffers handicap and early demise, ineluctable societal paradigms, and a finale involving projections of the universe (so to speak).   It's merely coincidental that the clueless Lord Lovelace is played by the same actor (Brandon Partrick) who played the clueless astronomer in "Silent Sky" at Theatrical Outfit. That being said, this production is driven by an incredible wide-ranging and energetic performance by Ashley Anderson, a dynamo of an actress who creates an indelible impression from moment one, a compelling portrait that continues throughout.  Much of the sadness of Ada's story, as presented here, is the drastic "snuffing out" as her "life force" decrescendos as the cancer ultimately consumes her.  It's a totally logical extension that death itself is merely another hurdle, not a roadblock, and it leads to an exquisite "coda" in which she encounters a mysterious man who turns out to be {Deleted by the spoiler police, but if you can't guess, you're not paying enough attention.  An impossibility considering Ms. Anderson's undeniable magnetism}. I also have to give props to Mark Cosby, who brings to Babbage a wistful vulnerability that makes him attractive, even when he's being a bit of a jerk (which admittedly happens fairly often).  Too old to sustain a romantic relationship with Ada, he and Ms. Anderson have a palpable chemistry that is electrical and compelling. This may be "hottest" "friend zone" relationship you're likely to see for a while. And the aforementioned Mr. Partrick is near perfect as Lord Lovelace, a bit pompous, a bit innocent, a bit more open-minded than probably ANY of his contemporaries, and as besotted with Ada as Charles.  You almost feel sorry for him as he wallows in the gender-based paradigms of his era.  Holly Stephenson also shines (as expected) as Ada's bitter mother, the former Lady Byron, Anabella.  Perhaps painted a bit more "helicopter" than her historical analog (who, according to Wikipedia, left Ada with her own mother and referred to her as "it," except when it came to that whole custody thing with her wayward ex).  Ms. Stephenson is equal parts society Grande Dame,  and loving caretaker, at least as Ada lies dying.  And she wears the best dresses! Which reminds me -- the remarkable Jane Kroessig outdoes her usual excellent work with a mid-19th century costume plot that is gorgeous to look at, character-specific, and as elegant as a perfect algorithm.  The set stays simple, a schematic of Babbage's engine on the floor, projections setting the scenes;  props remain period specific, though it was easy to see that all the "papers" and pages were blank pages.  But that only matters to picky picky people without an ounce of logic or intuition. And, of course, director Ellen McQueen has gathered a perfect cast, put them in a perfect "space," and guided them to do what may prove to be their very best work. So, Lauren Gunderson shows WHY she's the most-produced living playwright in America.  "Ada and the Memory Engine" is a sparkling look at another forgotten "Woman of Science," a well-researched, well-executed look at a specific period of history, complete with its own ethos and shortcomings, and she has peopled it with characters that dominate the stage.  And Ashley Anderson glows, and sparks, and creates this woman I really wish I could one day meet.  Perhaps in that same place where she meets {Don't Make me get out The Spoiler Stick}  in the breathtaking coda.  Ms. Gunderson writes like no other playwright, and the theatre is richer for her efforts.            --  Brad Rudy  ([email protected]  @bk_rudy   #EssentialFestival #Ada&TheMemoryEngine ) (*)   Translation:  LOGICAL INTUITIONS ​

[lindaeatmon-jones-blog]

Things Boomers and Gen X Can Learn From the Millennials

The mass-stereotyping of an entire generation has distracted us from the new direction the Millennials (Gen Y) are leading us towards. A Gen X says, "Our baby boomer parents spent 30+ years in a job they hated. Then when they finally got out, they said, 'Man, I wish I had done that 10 years ago.' " Millennials watched their parents and grandparents work long hours at jobs they didn't care about. "Work hard and climb the corporate ladder so you can enjoy retirement," the Gen X and Boomers told their kids/grandkids. Millennials think Boomers got caught climbing the corporate ladder and hated every rung. Gen Y heard "You can't have all what you want, so settle. For the first time in history, your generation will not do better than the previous ones." They want nothing to do with this thinking. Their response is, "Mom, Dad, and grandparents, we appreciate all you've done, but we have a better vision for the world." They're clear on their vision and they are living it. Many studies and research have been done and they all seem to converge on a similar shared vision for the world. They truly believe the Boomers and Gen X can learn from their new perspective. Studies reveal the following seven salient beliefs of the Millennials. 1. Embrace Technology. This is the obvious one. Technology is here to stay and you have to embrace it. Older people stand to benefit the most - they can keep in touch through email, Skype, and so forth. Also, older people can learn a lot about health conditions, advancements in medicine and medications, environmental and safety concerns, aging, and physical health on the Internet. 2. Give back. What you do should make the world better. Millennials want to make money and live comfortably but also want to give back to causes they care about. They're eager to use their social networks to share what they learn quickly so many people can benefit. Whether it’s crowdfunding or go-fund-me pages to raise funds or change.org campaigns to raise awareness and influence social policies; their social conscious outlook has more of a worldview than a local one. 3. Do What You Want. Doing something just because it pays well or there's demand for the skill won't make you happy. Millennials believe you should figure out what you want to do and do it. They believe you should be fulfilled by what you do. A 24-year-old says, "I never want to look back and say 'Gee, I really wish I had tried to make my dreams happen.' " 4. Don't Separate Work and Life. If you're doing something you are passionate about, there's no need for work-life balance. They see it all as "living." Move seamlessly from work to play, mix the two and enjoy them both. Buddy Hobart, baby boomer, and Gen Y expert say, "Work-life balance is a myth and you do not have a "work life" and a "personal life," you simply have a life." 5. Learn Fast. Our rapidly evolving world requires a new skill: learning quickly. Conditions change too fast to learn one skill and spend years developing it in the workplace. Develop the skill of learning and adapting quickly so you can do many different things. Gen Y business owners say, "When I get resumes, I look for a diversity of experiences, a wide social network, and a track record of success in varying situations." 6. Be Open-minded about the Future. Many opportunities will come along in life, and if you are stuck in a preconceived idea of what the future should look like, you'll miss the exciting things that come along; they may be better than you ever thought possible. Life is a process of discovery. Be open to discovering things and seeing change as a constant thing in life. 7. Take Risks. Taking risks is a necessary part of achievement and Gen Y gets that. They also appreciate that their Boomer parents let them move back home occasionally when they stumble, as successful people inevitably do. Taking the safe path guarantees your life will be mediocre. Taking risks means there will be a failure, but millennials are more interested in the infinite possibilities that risk-taking brings. A 27-year-old entrepreneur says, "Any failure I meet will be the greatest teacher of all and I'm willing to learn." Millennials aren't bitter and they aren't lazy. Boomers and Gen X see them as “entitled." If an unwillingness to settle for a life of mediocrity is entitled, then they say the answer is yes. They see it as being committed. They know their parents/grandparents worked hard and did the best they could with what they had. However, the research shows, Gen Y is following that example by doing the best they can with what they have: more technology, more connectivity, and the benefit of their elders' experiences. Millennials understand the value of age and experience and want us all to work together on this new future. A 25-year-old entrepreneur says, "There is such an abundance of information today, but a shocking shortage of wisdom. Boomers and Gen X, We Need You!" However, what is pretty silent in their responses to research and studies are their thoughts about education, spirituality, family, and geopolitical aspects of the world they embrace. Perhaps these are areas that the “wisdom” they are requesting from the Boomers and Gen X can be of value. Layering accumulated knowledge and experiences from generation to generation is how we evolve. It's how we improve the experience of being human. Let's partner up with these young people and create a better world together. We can all learn from one another. Have you read my article about Easter Symbols: Religious and Non-Religious - Any Connection? Read the full article

#Babyboomers #boomers #LindaEatmon-Jones #lindaeatmon-jonesbooks #millenial #touchstonebooks

[ratherhavetheblues]

KELLY REICHARDT’S ‘WENDY AND LUCY’

© 2018 by James Clark

The truest way to the heart of Kelly Reichardt’s film, Wendy and Lucy (2008), may turn out to be its penultimate moment. This was not always my approach, as a reading of the Wonders in the Dark blog from February 15, 2012—A Dangerous Devotion: Lars von Trier’s “Dancer in the Dark” and Kelly Reichardt’s “Wendy and Lucy”—would show. There I was intent upon engaging the protagonists of each work having risked everything (like Joan of Arc) for the sake of getting to the bottom of a dilemma unfortunately even beyond their very alert and brave powers. What, specifically, drives such souls to the brink of destruction?

There are ways of taking a closer look at the phenomenon, and Wendy and Lucyshows the way. Like Mouchette, a classic film figure under heavy fire, Wendy can no longer stand her emotionally violent, Midwestern blue-collar family and neighbors and their Rust Belt home base spanning Muncie and Fort Wayne, Indiana. Unlike Mouchette, the famous waif, she does not choose suicide as a meaningful change (nor is she destined to be immortalized by a forum of movie buffs). She hits the road with 500 dollars in savings from unspecified jobs, and a clunker supposedly capable of reaching that land of fool’s gold, Alaska. (Where others dream of gold, she—speaking volumes—dreams of a job in a cannery which, at least, does not resemble Indiana.) However, she does also bring a stunningly vast fortune in the form of her golden retriever, Lucy (a born retriever of buried treasures).

Right from the get-go we know Wendy will precipitate some kind of screw-up. Getting to that late and primary revelation mentioned above, there is Lucy in the back yard of a suburban Portland, Oregon, home, having become a foster-home for her as the upshot of Wendy’s jail time for shoplifting. (Perhaps before beginning with that end of their era together, in that tranquil yard, we should notice that, in the course of Wendy’s return to freedom she distributes posters including a photo, around the area where Lucy was last seen. “I’m lost!” the tag-line runs. When Mouchette is confronted in a forest by a figure suspicious about her intent, she defends herself by blurting out, “Lost, Sir! Lost!” The truly lost, Wendy, having found where her beloved had landed, proceeds there to confirm her incurable lostness. (And Lucy proceeds to confirm her genius.) The subversion of mainstream sentimental film reunions here is an important gift.

Wendy first sees Lucy gazing at a flock of seagulls circling her new and possibly very short-term yard. Calling out to her and saying, “You miss me, Lu?” Wendy passionately clings to the chain-link fence. Lucy forgets the seagulls and rushes to the only familiar aspect of a life having undergone a shock we never fully see, this being a remarkable hallmark of Reichardt’s narratives. “I’m sorry, Lu,” is a recognition that Wendy sees her friend as having smashed out the cliché ceiling where jerks come up smelling of roses in the hands of infinite forgiveness. “I know… I know, Lu” the wanderer emotes. But does she in fact comprehend that when, at the entrance of the grocery store she was about to rip off (after not entirely sincere calming kisses and caresses), Lucy could read her friend’s being a disappointment as spiked by, after Lucy’s desperate barking a warning, undergoing Wendy’s marching up to the leashed-secured companion, clamping down her snout and angrily telling her, “Don’t be a nuisance! I don’t need that?”

The beginning of Lucy’s painful realization that she doesn’t need the felon includes the frenzy on seeing her partner brought back to the store by a clerk and then taken away in a squad car (all the more disturbing in never seeing the back-door departure while left to puzzled and desperate staring at the front door). However, the generally supposed-to-be dull-one’s real struggle is left for us to reconstruct. As now newly composed, Lucy listens to Wendy’s solicitude and her heart is both joyous and something else, very hard to undergo. “Don’t be mad, Lu… Here, I got you this!” [a stick, to fetch]. She throws it toward where the seagulls were. “Such a good catch! Drop it! Good dog! Good girl!”  Lu happily plays, with old-time and not old-time energy. (Lucy’s flagging and once prominent lodestar [with funds having dwindled by way of the shoplifting fine, the car disposal and a theft/ assault in the woods] had become a lachrymose spent force like Mouchette; while Lucy had become a form of another cinema figure—unforgettable to a choice clientele—namely, Baltazar, the donkey, carelessly regarded as “The Mathematical Donkey.”) “I’m sorry, Lu,” is followed with a defeated cry. “I lost the car…” comes next, followed by the rather hasty, wishful thought, “That man seems very nice…” Suddenly it’s, “You be good…  I’m gonna make some money, and I’ll be back! OK, Lu, be good…”

How good Lucy could be in face of that collapse requires inference about how she weathered the abandonment. After Wendy’s release, she looks for Lucy at the pound. Though she comes up empty, we can imagine her dog going through the fear and depression seen in all the inmates on hand. We can imagine Lucy’s sense of being ripped away from not only a person of great interest but the infrastructure by which they had been sustained. Missing the interpersonal love intrinsic to that stemming would not be the end of Lucy’s heavy reflections. The moment of their kiss and caress through the fence out in the suburbs, fathoming how much is left and how much is gone, offers a wider range of action whereby other entities (seagulls, for instance; and the sea itself) offer creative love more resilient than that of Wendy.

From that perspective, accessible only to those who, with passions unstinting, beat back lostness, Wendy’s way of concluding the interplay is far more breathtaking and chilling than any gun battle. The intensity of this kinship should not be allowed to filter down as a sentimental highlight of melodramatic, advantage-addicted presences bending to the dubious powers of physics, religion and morality. Wendy, by and large, seems common and flighty. But, as we are about to investigate and define, her awkwardness and suspicion (and responsiveness to generosity) stem from an aristocratic spell. She does not cherish many others of her species for the very good reason –but too bluntly rendered—that they are far more remote from her energies than Lucy.

In the subsequent Reichardt film, Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Emily (played by actress, Michelle Williams, who also puts Wendy on the map) sees her real world shrink to one American Indian heading for the hills without her. She had considerably come to the point of being enraptured, from which to chart a difficult and seldom seen course. Here it is Lucy who sustains what Emily is about to undergo, while Wendy more closely approximates Emily’s game but uninspired husband, Solomon. While Wendy was spinning her wheels to little effect, Lucy was bringing lucidity to the matter, lucidity in the sense that effective love requires effective hate. That shocker, in the context of a sweet pup, requires incisive explanation. Creatures great and small, as our film makes efforts to highlight, find themselves intent upon many objectives. But their most remarkable action, namely, participating along with creativity itself (mustering the energy to complete its presence) is not widely accomplished among humankind. Wild creatures, including pets more fluent with carnality and its paradoxes, put together far better numbers of this sort. Though much of the world’s humans hunker down in finalities seeming to them consummate, from the perspective of that other way (being about kinetic coordination, rather than a stand) there comes to pass a state of impasse massively hindering forward momentum. By the same token, wild creatures (including some humans) feel at war; but also—through agencies of daring and reflection—a kind of peace. As the reservoir of coming to grips with impasse veers to more sanguine areas, there is the possibility of oscillating overtures amongst the options, especially in the syntheses of blithe percolation, increasingly putting heat on the opposition by attractive ways careening (like happy wolves) as part of a delicate wolf pack. Thereby, the problematicness of such a pragmatic inertia, never to be dislodged, can paradoxically flourish in ways integral to a cogent primordiality.

The power of the scene where Lucy and Wendy go their separate ways derives from that unique, compelling infrastructure. Such a smash-up, between those who have travelled where so many haven’t, elicits a post-mortem (where no one has actually died) for the sake of casting light upon a skill with consequences far beyond domestic viability. When it comes to breathing down Wendy’s neck to discern what’s the matter, we can begin by availing ourselves of Reichardt’s previous film, Old Joy (2006), where a couple of incompatible guys waste the beauties of rural Oregon and spend a bonfire night worsening their intrinsic depressiveness. In the course of Wendy’s joyless playing fetch-a-stick with Lucy where we first see them along a forested path in Oregon, the retriever stumbles upon a tribe of runaways spending the night around a bonfire. Actor, Will Oldham, who, in Old Joy, joylessly goes through the motions of play with the dog of the hour—Lucy, in fact—comes back to haunt Wendy and Lucy as once again a nocturnal presence proud of making a statement against those who work with a will. A (strategically significant) responder to Lucy’s neglect—an unwashed young girl with a large ring through one nostril and looking more affectionate than Wendy—readily becomes the leading light, eclipsing the loudmouth (Icky), though another boy, weighted down with a sense of his own errancy, also outperforms the medicine man. Wendy eventually comes into the picture, a picture of wanting to be somewhere else. She—a mixture of shyness and mistrust—divulges her travel plan, which prompts Lucy’s new friend to call out, “Hey. Icky, this lady’s going to Alaska!” That sets off Wendy’s having to hear the know-it-all recommend a company to work for (later we see her jotting down the particulars), without any recognition that she has anything in common with him. Increasing the alienation is Icky’s follow-up boasting about totaling a two-hundred-thousand-dollar earth mover there, when stoned, of course (Oldham’s playing the part of a stoner, in Old Joy). “They couldn’t pin it on me… I was gone!”) Her rather brittle body language here is a case of being all to the good and yet all to the bad. Before Lucy rushes ahead to that intriguing underworld, there is a play of twilight in the trees, smudges of vivid color—forming a dynamic incentive leaving Wendy far behind.

Following directly upon that wake-up call where a bonfire has a hard time priming Icky and Wendy toward some semblance of viability, there is Wendy’s parking her car on a quiet street; and a blurry pink figure, due to car and house lights springs, up by her window. “Sleep, girl,” she tells Lucy; but wakening is the keyword. Next morning our protagonists are wakened by a security officer, who informs her, “You can’t sleep here, Ma’am…” Almost simultaneously, a pigeon flashes skyward by that same window touched the night before. Its joining the patterns of exhortation constitutes a final bon voyage before Wendy’s limitations take over.

Her malaise and hard eyes in spying at the periphery of Icky’s campsite, before joining Lucy being treated well, bespeak more fear than alertness. The prompt death of her car (an Accord, of all things) while being told by the officer to move it sends her into an anxiety attack hardening into crude defensiveness. That same morning of ignition not happening brings the revelation that Lucy’s food bag contains 10 small kibbles. Rather than dip into her puny war chest to care for her partner, we have Lucy on a tight leash and Wendy scavenging for bottles and cans (an occupation of Oldham’s Kurt, in Old Joy). In their constriction (Lucy on the lookout for anything edible on the ground), Wendy ties her friend to a fixture at a strip mall while she goes off to a public washroom. She brushes her teeth, gives herself a sponge bath (attending to an injury at her Achilles heel) and fills a bottle with water; but Lucy does not become a beneficiary of that exercise, exposing how patently hopeless the master of rugged and woozy individualism amounts to. On the other hand, with the lady going to Alaska chewing on some nondescript scrap and Lucy at a loss to find even a scrap, their peril, pain and stoicism disclose that this is no mere folly but an enduring and profound love, however disastrous.

The dead car having changed a rout into a massacre, Wendy attempts to shoplift a can of I AMS (and sundry snacks), and the young stock boy who intercepts her proves to be an instance of all she hates and carelessly hopes to hide from. (The shoplifting scene in Greta Gerwig’s film, Lady Bird [2017], where two young check-out girls regard the effort as a laughable farce, seems to be more Icky than Wendy—a somewhat inadvertent underlining of how uniquely pitched our film has been composed.) The clerk may be a schoolboy part-timer, but his rhetorical apparatus, as fortified by a crucifix, comes to us as redolent of a fanatical opportunism able to override the far more rounded and easy-going manager. So well on top of her subject, Reichardt endows the moralist with a voice recalling smug Eddy in Leave It to Beaver; and also Kurt in Old Joy and Icky in our film today. Not leaving the experience with that, she shows us that Wendy herself has little trouble slipping into that murder-inciting register. “Excuse me, Ma’am? I think you’re forgetting something…” More an Inquisition than a secular mishap, Andy, the born cop, impressively hounds his boss, Mr. Hunt, who had begun with the modulated outlook, “OK, well, what are we talking about here?” Having nothing to do with grey zones, the upstanding choir boy invokes an egalitarian axiom being hard to deny. “The rules apply to everyone equally.” With the can of I Ams on the desk as Exhibit A, the clean-up drive puts forward another indubitable truth, “If a person can’t afford dog food, they shouldn’t have a dog.” Wendy, who had only too quickly put out the fabrication that she was intending to pay for the loot after checking on how her dog, tied outside, was doing (far worse, in fact, than Wendy was able to comprehend), expertly directs her smarts and phony sincerity to the generous motives of Mr. Hunt. “I’m very sorry… This isn’t going to happen again…” (The frenzy, despair and hopelessness of Lucy, on seeing her being ushered back in, comprising what we can imagine to be far from a unique error.) Andy presses on, with, “The food is not the issue. It’s about setting an example, right?” Wendy’s being as annoying a sophist as Andy kills any hope she might have had. “I’m not from around her, so I couldn’t be an example…” This brings Hunt to say, “We have a policy, Ma’am.”

Film stories about troubled humans and their dogs seem to invite the clientele to an evening of strong feelings everyone can easily appreciate. Wendy and Lucyis a film far from easy to fathom. In their first walk seen together, after a rather routine fetch-and-drop ramble, Lucy upgrades to that remarkably rough-hewn young girl who, when Wendy finally catches up, tells her, “Great dog!” [greatness being measured not by looks but by another kind of presence]. Learning of her name, the nomad declares happily, “You’re a sweetheart, Lucy!” What she sees, even if she can’t begin to explain it, is depth. She asks Wendy about Lucy’s breed, not as if it matters. The question catches the owner only half-listening, “I don’t know… a mix of hunting dog and retriever…” That verbal fumble becomes one of a series of sloppy assertions in Reichardt’s films, exposing the speaker as lacking articulative grip but unable to admit any shortfall in mastery within a troubling preoccupation. (Propped upon that bemusing skid, there is the nearly magical dialectic of hunt and retrieve, the “greatness” of which Wendy misplays and Lucy embraces.) Another form of elegant and ironic composition comes our way here in the form of a reprise of hugging Lucy, this time by Wendy. On realizing that collecting empty drink containers is not going to fit the bill, Wendy, outside the grocery store, performs a preamble to theft she has repeated frequently. She, too, caresses Lucy, and Lucy, as with the person the night before not having any ulterior motives, licks her face, always having been on the lookout for Wendy being as heartfelt as herself. Why would the supposedly advanced discernment need to prepare the lower form toward passivity, unless the latter has been treated to Wendy’s dark side, again and again? (Here, once again, the Shirley Temple, Depression Era concomitants of this duo lead first only to the shattered, for the sake of harder and deeper gifts.) “Don’t bother anyone, OK?” is the remarkably cynical patter on account of providing for her dear one’s breakfast. Lucy begins to wail and swish her tail fiercely in a vain gesture to make the coming outrage devolve to some kind of creative lift. Wendy turns back in anger and scolds, “What did I say?” She clamps Lucy’s snout and we wonder at the crude hysteria by which she would suppose to attain to innovative distinction.

After paying the $50 fine, Wendy returns to the scene of the crime and the scene of the end of her partnership. The bus that drives her there (a conduit of freedom) contains an ad which runs, “It’s not too late to sleep like a baby.” That seems the right time to attend to the sizeable unemployment and poverty constituency at that moment of truth. Having scandalized so many other expectations, this film is very apt to transcend political and moral bromides. All the scavengers flocking about the bottle returns depot are unfailingly gracious. When Wendy, seeing fit to retire from that trade after an hour or so, contributes to the cache of a man in a wheelchair, he describes her generosity as “cool.” Right from that first walk, ending with Icky and associates having more in common with the scavengers than marauders, a murmuring, lullaby motif of a woman’s voice wafts over moments of promise. Accordingly, it comes to light during the first moments of her bottles pick-ups. Its maintaining a sensuous balance, where imbalance so overtly threatens, combines with Lucy’s vigorous command of emotions (and capacity to be still) to expose sleeping-like-a-baby inertia as decadence, not accomplishment. Wendy, for all her gross incompetence, has had the drive to leave Rust Belt Fort Wayne. But choosing an extravagant (“cool”) destination she clearly cannot afford, from the points of view of money and maturity, leaves her floundering in distraction and melancholy similar to the casualties of the defunct saw mill which pushed a modicum of self-confidence to the total loss of such a state. (There is a startling and thrilling cinematic delivery apropos of this vale of anxiety. The district repair shop is closed for Sunday and a dispirited Wendy cups her hands to the shop’s window to see its interior free of reflection. In Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go [2010]—where a “Miss Lucy” is fired from her teaching job for siding with school children having been being bred for body parts—the schoolgirl protagonist and her friends cup their hands to a travel bureau window in order to ascertain that an employee within is the mother [the “origin”] of the doomed protagonist.)

Two other fixtures of that Portland exurb are the grandfatherly Walgrens parking lot minder who is mindful of Wendy; and a demented, self-pitying and rather far-seeing thief who steals about half of her meagre liquid assets. The man who said a mouthful when he said, “You can’t sleep here, Ma’am,” does in fact demonstrate alertness to Wendy’s predicament and that of those meek undead. Though he never deals with Lucy, the parking monitor functions in this distressed-dog movie the way Edmund Gwenn calms the maelstrom in Lassie Come Home (1943). Here, once again, good-will folk wisdom and cliched expectation in the foreground are no match for that nature in the background which Reichardt knows to be paramount. In response to Wendy’s counting on the local pound to eventually produce a Lucy Come Home, the Gwenn figure recommends the more active strategy (seemingly proven in his family history) of leaving on the ground items of her clothing to induce the missing loved-one to the happy fate befalling Lassie. Her departure from him includes his gift of a few dollars, all he can spare on a minimum wage salary, while making sure his granddaughter (having a body language in league with Andy) doesn’t see what is transpiring. (Just before that, we found Wendy angrily stalking about, demanding Lucy to appear and stop spoiling her excellent life. She catches up with Andy, being picked up by his mother after work, and punk-style, howls, “Have a great night, OK? Your son’s a real hero! [“Lucy! Come now!”].) A sweetheart, like Gwenn; but careful not to disrupt mainstream family priorities. Gwenn’s independence as a tinker provides food for thought. Waiting for news of Lucy, Wendy—perhaps feeling the need to do justice to the greenery she has denied herself—thinks to spend a night in the forest nearby the train tracks, where a golden patch of foliage only slightly steadies her. But her bid for bracing solitude exposes her to, like so many other of her overtures, a down side of the open road. The soporific aura of that hard-luck, wrong-side-of-the-tracks constituency seems to confirm her assumption that risk inheres in a field readily and quite pleasantly consumed. With her elderly friend (spending numbing days standing on the dead cement, and counting it a great improvement over his previous all-night job), she hears him declare, “It’s all fixed!” [needing a job to find a job]. “That’s why I’m going!” [to another type of numbing]. Suddenly highlighting the meaning of true risk is a predator who tells her, “Don’t look at me!” as he loots that portion of her money she hasn’t kept in her money-belt. The real plus of this episode consists in the sociopath very closely seeing-eye-to-eye with Wendy. “I don’t like this place… It’s the fuckin’ people that bother me… I’m out here trying to be a good boy, but they don’t want to let me… They treat me like having no rights… They can smell the fear… Fuck! I killed more than 700,000 people with my bare hands! Fuck if I know!”

“They can smell the fear,” is a brief sentence presiding over many horrific missteps. (Lucy can smell the fear.) In the aftermath of the car trouble, Wendy calls back to Indiana and her sister and her sister’s husband, on the vague supposition they might be interested in her troubled life to date. The far more sanguine husband picks up the call and kindly listens about the end of the vehicle. “It’s kinda bad here, actually…” “What does she want us to do about that?” the sister loudly asks, being like one of those the invader imagines killing with his bare hands. Wendy comes back with, “I don’t want anything,” [from the likes of you]. But countenancing the likes of her—and him—makes, as Lucy knows, more sense than going to Alaska. As with the complaining mugger and the whole town, it seems (and maybe the whole planet), vividly addressing sleeping babies seems to be a forgotten, or perhaps never found, skill. (Andy’s rabidity being merely a variant of falling prey to a gigantic creative exigency no one wants to pay the cost of.)

Lucy, on the other hand, has shown us what succeeding-to-thrive looks like. (A recent Time magazine expose, of the very smart and the very workaholic hogging material wealth, prescribes ways of letting others in on that rational advantage binge. That would be way down the track where Lucy thrives.) Wendy hops a freight going North, and as she slouches on the floor with a scowl on her face she looks out at the countless conifers (the most primordial trees), pulled along like toffee, into a mysterious weave by the speeding train. Lucy, too, is carried along, by the vicissitudes of foster care. Wendy is crushed by the countless obstacles. Lucy, by her own lights, knows of a fluid, mysterious range she is acute enough to recognize as being her real home. Lucy Come Home.

#kelly reichardt

[jcllyhclly-blog]

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HeikoAL / Pixabay

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Q2 hedge fund letters, convention, scoops and so on

“Duck Pizza”! This he would shout into his cellphone as an indication of the platform’s capabilities to satisfy even probably the most obscure of fantasies for transacting commerce by way of voice command. He would trot out surrogate father and Academy Award profitable Actor, Martin Landau, bringing an previous Hollywood appeal and credibility to his providing. Whereas on paper, his technique was flawless, each demo appeared to fail mid-pitch as his speech recognition software program simply couldn’t maintain tempo together with his imaginative and prescient. Any enthusiasm from company executives waned with each botched demo. We cobbled collectively a couple of small offers to check the system’s  usefulness to advertisers, however this nascent know-how couldn’t help a sustainable enterprise.

Quickly, I moved on and redirected my power to make method for the approaching of the Nice Podcast Revolution. Bob fought valiantly for an additional decade. Two years in the past, all out of cash and a Rolodex lengthy worn skinny, Bob awoke from his inconceivable dream. Scrapping “The Voice Web” for elements, he bought the world’s greatest vainness telephone quantity to a regulation firmThe Voice Web had been disconnected.

In a tragic coincidence, the demise of “The Voice Web” occurred on the exact second that a voice-connected web was reborn within the type of Amazon Echo, Google House, and Apple HomePod. All alongside, Robert Blaisch had been proper in his imaginative and prescient, however mistaken in his timing. And, maybe, execution.

In know-how, timing is every little thing. However like gazing out on the stars with the bare eye, what seems to be the current is simply an approximation of the best way issues as soon as have been. To foretell the place issues are going, we should triangulate from the recognized previous in addition to our creativeness.

For these of us who will not be technological futurists by commerce, how are we to reside and adapt to the altering of an period? We now have witnessed The Info Age and watched it dismantle and reorganize our actuality as we knew it. Now we really feel the tremors of a brand new wave of know-how. For the primary time, we’re legitimately not sure of our future worth or potential to compete with the forthcoming capabilities of machines.

If there have been promenade for the telecommunications business in 2019, podcast can be the belle of the ball. As a market pressure, although, it’s nonetheless small potatoes. Underneath $500 Million as an business, it’s lower than four% of terrestrial’s enterprise. We’re not even speaking Roku cash right here. Quickly podcast will cross the $1Billion threshold, however even then we’re speaking about lower than 1% of the digital income pie. Podcast has been a rising star for the previous 5 years, far more pronounced because the launch of pervasively in style Serial, and ushering in an assured programming renaissance.

The very topic has commanded worldwide buzz and on the digital pages of commerce publications, a substantial amount of ink has been spilt. Nevertheless, in mild of the modifications occurring beneath the crust of the telecommunications business, podcast is extra like a Purple Dwarf. A tour de pressure, undoubtedly, however a heat up act to the oncoming elementary disestablishment of the whole lot we’ve understood concerning the transmission of audio and the way it impacts our lives.

Do you hear what I hear? In lower than 5 years, Amazon, Google, and Apple (mixed market cap north of $2.5 Trillion) have put sensible audio system into the palms and houses of greater than 50 million People, with half of these proudly owning two or extra. Although championed by titans and heading towards inevitable ubiquity, the present capabilities of the sensible speaker are laughable. Trendy utilization is just not a lot additional superior or dependable than a clock radio with a thermometer, combined with audio’s model of AskJeeves. It could possibly be an entire home distant management in your mouth if solely your sensible units had developed seamless integration. It’s an audiobook library in addition to a researcher; a private secretary; meals supply service; a gaming system, and it retains you firm. Many fear it’s a spy. It’s Google. However not likely. Not but.

“Alexa, inform me once you’ve labored out the kinks” could also be properly and good for shoppers who haven’t but seen its capabilities show any extra priceless than the lack of privateness. But working professionals and business can’t afford to take this strategy. By wanting on the historical past of telecommunications, we get a glimpse of what lies forward.

Sensible speaker know-how immediately is like the times of dial-up web entry. When broadband stepped onto the scene round 2003, issues acquired fascinating. Leisure, commerce, storage, mobility, have been all radically reworked within the decade that adopted. Your sensible speaker could also be appearing like America On-line at this second, however the onslaught of 5G goes to assist it catch up briefly as digital info will course of 10-100 occasions quicker than it’s as we speak. Take into account that, in 2019, sensible audio system are anticipated to develop quicker than another IoT system class.  We’re getting into what some are calling “the post-smartphone period”.

I can’t use this venue to discover the privateness implications or Muskian considerations of cyborg wars and robotic dictators. These subjects have their place, however our fast goal is to sidestep them. My chief objective, is that will help you keep employed—and thriving—as these technological developments march ahead, with the wind at your again quite than blowing towards you.

So what’s subsequent? You’ll discover quickly discover your sensible speaker smarter, rising extra so day-after-day. Not a mere system that may pay attention and reply, it is going to transfer towards superior prediction and personalization, as suggestions from machine studying turn into exponentially extra refined and helpful. Think about calling a customer support line the place extroverts favor the machine over a reside agent. Then it’s additionally a companion who shares your pursuits and converses with you about them in methods you have got solely seen in fiction.

Your sensible speaker is a coach and a instructor, too. However this instructor possesses all of the world’s information and may distill it into phrases and voice that attraction to your private studying fashion and preferences. Siri will tackle the voice of your required movie star, like Waze does at present, however directing you thru your life, not simply visitors, and turning into infinitely extra adaptable. It might play nanny to your baby when you’re cooking—or assist with homework. Alexa is your therapist.

Keep in mind social media? How would you wish to be transported into conversations with somebody you’ve by no means met, however are extra suitable with you than 99.9% of the individuals you encounter IRL. Maybe it might assist your courting possibilities. Don’t hassle filling out a profile, although, since your sensible speaker has been filling it out (and updating it) for you whereas it observes your interactions and pursuits in your each waking hour for years. Wait till it matches you with suitable customers reside, based mostly on any standards it might consider, able to discover any matter in your thoughts. The world has turn into infinitely smaller.

As IoT evolves with equal rapidity, the usefulness of your sensible speaker shall be amplified by units coping with different senses. How will sound interact with sight, odor, style, and contact? Are you hungry? Wearable know-how will know what meals will stability your style choice, temper, weight objectives, nutrient deficiencies, meals allergic reactions, and extra; you don’t have to think about what you need for dinner as a result of it already is aware of. Approve the Alexa suggestion, and a drone will ship the right meal to your door in minutes.

Are you lonely, however don’t need to cope with human conduct? Proxies of actual individuals await your organization. Recorded knowledge from different customers could be accessed, forming a composite of that individual to offer a reputable approximation of what statements they could make; how they might reply to your query, of their voice; even utilizing their talking patterns, accents, intonations, vocal tics, and unimaginable likeness. The extra knowledge captured by or about a person, the higher HomePod can approximate them. Within the absence of knowledge, it will probably extrapolate from the recognized and statistically possible statements from lookalike personas. And now you can watch any film, present, or sporting occasion with anybody you want, whether or not you’ve met or not. Modify the settings should you would relatively they maintain their complaints.

It might increase the lifeless.

What would Abraham Lincoln do? Sooner or later, an apparition will let you understand. As soon as all his speeches, letters, testimony from witnesses, pictures, and recreations have been fed right into a machine studying system, Three-D Holograms will deliver his being into your bodily area. What number of others have handed away that at the moment are obtainable to interact with you?

How far are we at “AI studying” a lot about our preferences and response patterns that it could possibly in truth predict your ideas and decode your creativeness? At what level will it know what we would like earlier than we would like it and can it know what we’re prepared to do to get the issues that we would like? The chances could also be too extraordinary to think about for sensible functions.

How then we could reside amongst the sensible audio system? One period at a time. Once we purchased that first iPod, we didn’t know we have been creating the podcast business, or that this sensible gadget would evolve into the smartphone. Step one is to acknowledge that your sensible speaker is greater than a contemporary radio to maintain in your house. The sensible speaker is infinitely studying and increasing on its talents. We’ve got found a brand new world—and now we should until the soil.

Assume again 1 / 4 century. In case you knew then what you recognize now, what would you do in a different way? How would you direct your power to be prepared for a world of net pages and serps? Let’s begin there. Pay much less consideration to each capturing star, lest your again be turned at your solely probability to catch Hailey’s Comet. “The Voice Web” has arrived. The subsequent 10 years will probably be in contrast to any in human historical past. So what are you going to do about it?

Article by Dan Granger, CEO of Oxford Street

The post The Rise Of The Smart Speakers And The Dangers They Pose appeared first on Reel Insight.

#Movies #Smart speakers #Technology #voice internet

[notesfromthepen]

The Chronicles of the king of Richmond

I came across some shit today that I had to share. Something too funny, dark, and ridiculous to keep to myself. But I had to figure out a way to first, get my hands on the material, and then how to give the context needed for it to be fully appreciated.

First I should start with the characters involved. We are a trio. Me, Joe, and the 'king'. I'll refer to him as the 'king' (with a lowercase 'k') because he wanted to remain anonymous, for several reasons, that should become clear later. 

Joe is, by far, my best friend in here and we've been pretty much inseparable for years now, (we were bunkies twice at another facility). Some of you may have read previous posts about him. We are very different people, which is often the case with really good friends. But there is no doubt that our bond is, almost entirely, built on our shared sense of humor. A sarcastic, brutally honest, self deprecating, anything for a laugh, sense of humor. 

A sense of humor developed since childhood surrounded by witty, smart-assed, assholish mentors and peers. It can be a harsh environment to grow up in, but there is a purity to be found there. An accountability and brutal honesty that is humbling and real. There are no aires allowed to survive amongst friends with no fear of giving offense. No bullshit is left uncalled, no lies left un-confronted, and no opinions restrained. Nothing is sacred and everything is mined for a laugh. 

Basically we talk a lot of shit.

Nothing bonds me to another person more instantly than a similar sense of humor. Since coming to this new prison Joe and I have found a fellow, flawed, degenerate asshole, willing to laugh at himself and judge others for the sake humor. 

This, is the so called 'king of Richmond.' His majesty is a large guy, about 6'1 and 240 lbs. of slightly chubby, bearded, man beef. He's well kept and neat in appearance (aside from his portly build). He's got some charisma and charm at his disposal and makes decent use of it when needed.

The king, however, has a glaring flaw, as do most of us. He's a raging addict, whose life is lived for, and run by, an incessant need for opiates. This adds an interesting but constantly problematic dimension to his life behind bars. The perpetual need to produce the money for his lifestyle is a constant story line. Most of his fundraising is done over the phone. Preferably through manipulation, but he's not above blatant begging from people in the free-world. Family members, friends, exes, and a sugar momma round out his fundraising Rolodex. 

A few days ago, Joe borrowed his Majesty's tablet to listen to his music, and being the stand up friends we are, we wasted no time before invading his privacy. We opened his 'sent email' files and struck gold. Dark, hilarious, sad, revealing gold. What we found was email after email of mental and emotional manipulation in a quest to fund his lifestyle. That's the sad part. The hilarious part is witnessing the level of shameless groveling, damage control, and clumsy begging, our friend is willing to stoop to. 

After an intervention filled with embarrassment, ridicule, and some tear inducing laughs from all parties, I gained the 'kings' permission to post some of the gems. 

But first a disclaimer: If any form of self-respect or sense of shame is something you're expecting, then prepare yourself, because you will find neither in these emails. Also, I wanted to maintain the "purity" of the emails as they were originally written, so I left the misspellings and incorrect grammar. However, for the sake of read-ability, I added some commas and periods here and there. Other than that they are all original text, with the exception of my commentary, which will be in [brackets].

So without further adieu, I now present to you: The Chronicles Of The king Of Richmond.

Sugar Momma

The following correspondence was sent to the kings sugar momma. As her title would imply she is his main source of income. His "Go-To". She works at McDonalds and has had the unfortunate luck to be in  "love" with the king for roughly a year now. This letter is the most recent and well into the travesty that is their "relationship". This email is more focused on making excuses for begging than actual begging, but stay tuned they get worse.

His words are in "quotes" and my commentary is in [brackets]. Some are comments and some are translations of his bullshit, what he really means.

KOR 11/24  “listen, I wasn't insinuating you were fat, and honestly I wasn't trying to hurt your feelings. [he definitely was] I was giving you an example of how you could save a few bucks, so maybe out of the kindness of your heart [or from my incessant guilt laden begging] you could send me a few. Belive it or not, its rough in here, and sometimes I need money to survive in here. [Let's make one thing clear: The constant stress of his habit and the debts he accrues makes his time infinitely more difficult than it needs to be. So more money isn't the solution. It’s the problem.] That's what I was saying. I've been down for 5yrs Jenn and pretty much aint had much help, except from a few. [Just a little context. I get 50$ a month. This jackass spends 300$ a week]. We were together a long time. we broke up when I was in here, so yeah its a little different than if you were just some ex. I shouldn't exspect [too bad they don't give out money for misspelled words] it, but I would hope”. 

“I guess I wasn't who I thought I was to you. [what a word-smith]. I might have put you through a lot of shit, but you sought me out. Remember that. You knew who I was. [Yeah, so you deserve everything I put you through.] Everyone did. I was the king of that town [AND THERE IT IS! The self proclaimed king of Richmond...Oh I can't tell you how embarrassed for him, angered at him, and ashamed to call him my friend I was when I read this!] not to try and sound conceited but I was, [OK. You can't say you’re not being  conceited and then double down on your brag. BTW Richmond has a population smaller than most elementary schools. So it was a small 'kingdom' to say the least] and now no one has my back. it sucks, out of everyone, I hoped that you would have, but no!! [I hope he had a neck brace on when he wrote this. This guy can go from bragging to groveling so fast that it causes whiplash]. When we broke up I wanted you to be happy and get married and do what ever. [He ran out of ideas! That's his limit of things he could conjure up that would make her happy: 2] I just wanted you to still be there for me [AKA: support my habit] and if roles were reversed Jenn, you would have 50 every month and my family would probaly even send you money and that's the proven truth. [From probably to proven truth in half a sentence?]  And you know it, so that shit hurts me, let's just remember who's the one locked up!! I'm the old me again [king?] and I'll remember all my real friends, that were there for me, when I get out in 3 in a half years.[Yeah but will they remember you?] Not long at all. And the thing with frank, [Oh yes! Thankgod he's back on the whole Frank thing! I wish I knew his address I'd send him a bottle of whisky!] belive me, I heard stories, a few. [Yeah and they haunt his dreams] but regardless, I love you, just wish you were kinder to me. ...The king”

[That's his cleanup? Someone get him a neck brace]

KOR 12/6 [Damage control] “baby, funny you say sober honestly, but no i totally understand. im sorry if it feels like sometimes I take you for granted.[by sometimes he means 'all the time'] let me try to explain [please do], in here if you don't get in a constant routine and try to make things repetitive, the time will do you, not you do the time. [A vague prison saying he heard someone say in here once and thought it sounded cool] if that makes sense [it doesn't.], its not my intentions to make it carry over into our relationship [but if it does I'm willing to live with it] I'm sorry [that I have to do this song and dance to get money]. and I fully intend to check myself and let you know how special you truly are to me [and by 'check myself' I mean I'll continue doing the exact same amount of drugs, if not more. and I'll show you how special you are by kindly taking your minimum wage paycheck]. The money you send me is for me to live comfortably in here [get high], that means getting things done that I need to get done while I'm here [I mean, these drugs aren't gonna do themselves.] and 90%, is the food and shit i need to survive [but mostly drugs]. We are already at a disadvantage because I only get 75% of what you send, which sucks [it would be much more efficient if I could put 100% of what you send me up my nose]. And they rip us off on prices on the food as it is. So I'm sorry, but i want you to fully understand you are my baby girl [creepy] and when i get out, roles will reverse and I'll be the provider and you'll live real comfortable [said with his fingers crossed], except when I come home every night and blow that back out bitch!!!! [and theres that winning charm I mentioned! what a smooth operator] I love you. [He doesn't] I got to go to the doctor at 9:30 [Ironically its 'his' back that's blown out] so I'll call you after count [to beg for more $]. I love you [again he doesn't]. if that eases your mind [It shouldn't] I love you!!! [and one final lie to cap off this masterpiece.]

Ex-Girlfriend

These next three are to his ex-girlfriend. She's somewhere down the list of reliable donors, but desperate times call for desperate measures and being a dope fiend in prison means, constant desperate times.

KOR 11/23 "So happy thanksgiving! [Now that the pleasantries are out of the way] So I havnt had any money lately, so no stamps but I just got some anyways [2nd sentence in and already caught in a lie. Clearly if he sent this, he has stamps]. Yeah I heard all about you and Carol's argument, and Dan and Josh messaging, and you jumping in on their message, and Dan cutting into you about being a shitty ex (/friend) [OK, I have to translate. First of all, this email seems to be sponsored by unnecessary commas. I guess some people were attacking her on Facebook for not sending the 'king' an adequate amount of money] Most I agree with. [Especially the money part] You havnt been there for me Jennifer [how dare you!]. I belive you have kinda done me wrong [how do you sleep at night?] and other people believe that too [so there!]. Im not saying your wrong for living your life [but you are] and going and being with someone new [because there's no way he's cooler than me]. but you can look out for the man [I use the term man loosely] that looked out for you since you were just a baby! [???? what???? creepy! actually I need to go ask him about this one.. OK he said he meant when she was 18] When I have asked for money in the past, you deny me [who the fuck do you think you are an ex?]. Hell, I'm broke right now [and that's your responsibility]. I can't get money. [But regardless I incessantly ask for it? Blatant lie no.2] uncle only sends me 50 a month and that ain't shit, that's hygiene a month. [Who calls their uncle uncle and not my uncle? What is he an orphan from the 1800's?] You don't keep money on the phone Jenn. I don't care who your new man is [again, not cooler than me], if you truly love me, you can talk to me. And 50 dollars, every couple of months ain't shit Jenn [trust me its nothing! I blow through it in no time]. So I and everyone else just think your wrong for that [OK, now he's literally speaking for everyone. Which is strange because I don't remember giving him my opinion on how much money his ex should be spending on his habit]. I will always have love for you. I just wish you would treat me with the respect I deserve [but have in no way earned]. I've been down 5 yrs and havnt got no more than 100 dollars from you. i basicaly took the rap and I get no respect. [Now he's doing his Rodney Dangerfield impression? what's next, Dr Vinnie Boombatz? (look it up)]  That's fucked up!!!!! well I thought, since I finally got some stamps I can finally reply. I wish you would start respecting me as someone you love!!! 

'The King of Richmond' (The realest you've ever known!)”  [That last part is 100% real. I almost died laughing when I read this! The realest? No comment I can muster will be adequate at dealing with the ridiculousness of this sign off. What a heavy handed attempt to sound like a cool guy. Remember, this is to an ex-girlfriend! No way does playing the cool guy ever work on an ex. She's been in the bathroom after you. She's smelled your shit. Also remember that the whole point of this email is to beg for money! Oh I'm so glad I'm friends with this silly degenerate!]

KOR 11/24 “what? really I thought we just made it through everything; [Im going to say we and then make you feel bad for a bunch of shit you needed] your rent to your sister, the presents for the babies, your phone you needed [you know, the trivial shit]. I thought we got through it baby? [You mean to tell me the babies got my drug money?] I owe a 100$ and I don't even got a noodle right now. Thank god for you, because my brother doesn't give a fuck if I rot in here [because be knows the real me] and everyone else apparently don't care. [Possibly the most poorly crafted sentence in the history of writing, and now down to business] We can do 100 and then 50. [Tell the babies and your sister to fuck off! I have needs.] So I can eat off the 35 from the 50 for the rest of this month [hope I confused her with all the numbers and poor grammar] cause the only thing I have is 2 soaps [just to be sure, one more number]. so work with me on this and I will make that last to the first OK! [In no world, was he able to make it last until the 1st] 

[And now back to the unwarranted guilt trip:] I thought you were done with all the present buying and rent.You even had a b-day!! [So there's really no excuse for not feeding my addiction. What are you selfish? Use your b-day money!] Which I think you needed to let loose a little anyways. [You really earned it, putting up with my begging and whatnot] I love you babe. I'll call you after count were supposed to have a blizzard today F U N!!!!!” [Bringing it all together with a little sarcastic humor? NICE!]

KOR 12/5 "Really Jenn? Don't think you can shame me for [well, anything but specifically] expecting a little money every once in a while” [you should know by now that shame is not a factor!] "Its not hard to skip going out to eat or buying that extra shirt, [extra shirt?Clearly he could only think of one good example to save money.] to throw me a little extra dough. [yeah, just go hungry and topless] I didn't bring Josh or Dan into this. [This whole exchange is about his friends and sugar mamma shaming Jenn for not sending home enough money] They did that on their own. They told me the conversation they had with you. I just agreed. I also didn't tell Carol to do that. She did that after her and Josh had a conversation about what had happened. Another thing is Jenn, don't kid yourself, I blew through a 35,000 dollar [insurance] check taking care of us, making sure we had a good time and 2 to 3 thousand every month up until i did that year in county (jail) [Yeah, I was a great provider until I got arrested! And by provider I mean cashing an insurance check]. So don't cry to me about a couple hundo [that's right, he's too cool to say hundred] and your fucking Ford Contour. I think your being rude, and you tried your damnest to fuck frank. [OK this is where it goes off the rails. He couldn't wait to mention the whole frank thing so he just shoehorned it in the conversation] I heard. [I'm confused, was she successful in her 'dam nest' attempt to fuck ole Frank?] That's funny [is it?], not that I care [well, I'm convinced. Nothing screams 'I care and it hurts so much' like saying I 'don't care'], cause I do have a good girl (a ride or die bitch I wish I always had) who does take care of me and keeps money on the phone and keeps me in touch with everyone [but only when I beg and grovel]. I'm in prison still pulling bitches [WOW!!! first of all he's definitely not and more importantly that's the most pathetic attempt at intended jealousy]. my point really isn't to brag, that's not what im trying to do. [It is] I'm just saying, its possible to still have a life and support someone in prison. even a little. you have just made NO effort at all and that piss people off and me. cause McDonald's checks weren't supporting our sort of lifestyle sweetie!!!!!! so I guess I wish you would change, but I doubt it. Anyways, happy to hear your grand ma is doing good. and next time you write, attach a stamp.” [OK, he's always good for a ridiculous ending but this one takes the cake. Let's examine: He spends 90% of this letter guilt tripping, berating, talking shit to, and begging for money. Then, literally in the 2nd to last sentence, he mentions her sick grandma's recovery? I have ask him how he carries around such big balls without a limp! And if you're still naive enough to think that he's done, you clearly don't know the ‘king’.]

[Our royal highness still has enough balls, and not enough shame, to ask this poor girl to attach a return stamp so she can continue this charming and fulfilling correspondence with her incarcerated ex-boyfriend. And now its clear how he became the king of Richmond: By sheer clumsy manipulation, a ruthless disregard for self respect, the freedom of movement that a spineless body provides and a fortitude willing to stoop to any low to accomplish his goal to get inebriated. The same way presidents get elected in this country. At any cost he would take the crown and he did. Without ever being to Richmond, I can say this with confidence: Anyone who would make him king and pay tribute to his court, truly deserves his rule. What a spectacular asshole the king is and I count him as a flawed degenerate of the worst degree. But I also count him as a friend…]