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forasecondtherewedwon · 4 years

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Beyond a Seasonable Doubt

Pairing: Peter Parker x Michelle Jones (Spideychelle) Rating: T Word count: 7478 @spideychelleweek

Spideychelle Week Day 2: Soulmate AU

Summary: Peter's been living in winter for 17 years. A single smile from his soulmate would bring him into spring. Today, he finally has a real conversation with MJ, the girl he's pretty sure is the one.

Every day, Peter Parker wakes up certain of three things: that he won’t leave himself enough time to finish his cereal, that he should dress for snow, and the (probable) identity of his soulmate.

Ok, the first one’s not a certainty per say―sometimes he has microwave oatmeal or blueberry toaster waffles―but the second one’s been true his whole life. Every single day, for the past seventeen years and change, he’s been swaddled for winter weather. Could be January when he’s three years old and his puffy snowsuit looks totally appropriate as his mom pushes him down a slushy sidewalk in his stroller. Could be August 10th just last year and he’s wearing a woolen fisherman sweater (inherited from his Uncle Ben) and two pairs of socks to his own birthday pool party. Until his soulmate is confirmed, he won’t be part of the regular changing of the seasons that, up to this point, he’s only heard about and seen pictures and video of. For all intents and purposes, in Peter’s world, it’s winter. Some people say the date they’re stuck on bothers them. Personally, he doesn’t know how it could, since he’s never known anything different. You just have to layer up and get on with it.

His arm’s deep in his backpack, feeling around for the scarf he could swear he stuffed in there yesterday, as he walks into the kitchen. It’s a rare day; both Happy and May are at the table, working from home today. With ambivalence to the inevitability that he’ll be dumping half of it in the sink, Peter starts in on his Cheerios. He’s less apathetic about watching his dining companions. They haven’t had the easiest path, so he studies them for clues. May’s first soulmate was Uncle Ben. That’s not up for debate. Within 24 hours of when they met, the seasons adjusted themselves and two more people joined the rest of the world’s matched soulmates in enjoying the proper rotation of the earth around the sun. After Ben’s death, May told Peter that the seasons continued to change for her, but they slowed. Once a couple of years passed, there was a noticeable lag. She fell out of step with the world. When Happy came on the scene, things got back on track. Voilà, soulmate number two. From what Peter’s read, it’s not that unusual to find another soulmate if you lose your first, but honestly, he’d be happy just to get one.

May and Happy are dressed for mid-spring.

“Rain today?” Peter wonders, spooning Cheerios into his mouth.

“It’s holding off for now,” his aunt informs him.

When he turns to look out the window, there’s a cottony haze of thick snowflakes, like all of Queens is having a pillow fight on the rooftops. He sighs with acceptance rather than despair. Nothing was going to change overnight. It couldn’t, not without her, whoever she is. (He thinks he knows.)

“Cool.”

He leaves in a rush, slopping milk into the sink, and pulling on a hat.

A season isn’t much of a clue, but that’s not exactly how everyone experiences their pre-soulmate life. Instead of cycling through an entire spring, for example, and then starting again, each person exists in the weather as it was on the day their soulmate was born. The universe was kinda against Peter from the first. Snow, in his mind, goes with winter, but of course, in their New York climate, snow isn’t trapped between the boundaries of December and March. It wasn’t until he got his second clue that he figured out the first. The second clue was that this one girl would never smile at him. Soulmates need to smile at each other. That’s it. Just smile and everything else falls into place. No more dressing for the same temperature every day or involuntarily shivering when they see people in shorts and t-shirts in a world they observe to be covered in snow. Most people who haven’t found their soulmate yet smile a lot, trying to catch everyone’s eye, in the hope of locating the right person, so the fact that this one girl refused to smile at him (and continues to refuse) made Peter curious―curious enough to do some research to find out her birthday. End of November. Meaning autumn, not winter. He checked the weather for the year he was born, assuming he’s got the right girl and they share a birth year. Bingo. Big cold front, unexpectedly heavy snowfall that day. Plus, this girl dresses like it’s the peak of summer, which fits with when his birthday is, and he’s never seen her wear an outfit for cooler weather or hang around with any one person in particular (soulmates, especially those his age, tend to cling).

So, the third certainty. Peter’s pretty sure he knows who his soulmate is. What he doesn’t know is why the hell Michelle Jones won’t smile at him.

―

Every day, Michelle Jones wakes up certain of three things: that the inevitable sweat patches in the armpits of her uniform shirt will aid her in bullying Coach Wilson into letting her sit out during gym, that Peter Parker is her soulmate, and that she’d really prefer that he wasn’t.

People think she’s rude, which is maybe correct in the effect she has on them but not in the intention of her actions. She doesn’t like acting a certain way because it’s how she’s supposed to act. She doesn’t like etiquette, she doesn’t like rules, and she doesn’t like soulmates. Doesn’t want one, doesn’t need one. It’s an opinion adults condescendingly informed her she’d grow out of―as if accepting that she’s being denied free will is the kind of thing she’d mature into―until she quit voicing it. People love the system as long as they believe it’s working for them. What’s childish, as far as MJ is concerned, is placing complete faith in something as pervasive as soulmates simply because it seems too big to fail. That expression always makes her think of the Titanic.

She knows it’s not the cotton candy fantasy everyone wants to believe it is, and she’s not just disillusioned because she wakes up to a heatwave every day and has to carry deodorant with her all the time. Like most people, she was born the child of two soulmates. They met, they smiled, they took the soulmate bait, hook, line, and sinker. And then, even though they loved each other and got married and made MJ, her mom became mildly depressed. Her doctor thought it was the consequence of the seasons. MJ’s dad was a late-April baby, so maybe her mom was just one of those people who took longer to get used to variations in temperature and hours of daylight. The doctor thought she’d snap out of it when winter ended and nice weather came again. The problem was that MJ’s mom packed up and left in February. MJ’s never going to know for sure if it was the weather that made her go, but she does know that the soulmate bond wasn’t enough to make her mom stay. It taught her that, if a person’s determined enough, they can override destiny.

So she’s thankful to her mom, wherever she is, for that.

Based on her motives for distrusting the soulmate influence, the reason she doesn’t want Peter should be because she doesn’t want anybody, but no, it’s him in particular that MJ’s pretty much convinced she could do without. He’s smart, funny on occasion and mostly by accident, and he’s experienced family tragedy that’s different from hers, so they could connect over their messed-up pasts without too much overlap. All of that is more than she wants to deal with. If the universe attempted to shack her up with some trust-fund-having, loafer-wearing, future-frat-house-keg-meister, she could’ve worked with that. She would’ve smiled at the silver-spoon-suckling to confirm they were soulmates, then let that puppy-dog trail her from protest to protest while she told him when to pull out his chequebook and how many zeros to put down. There would’ve been a clear, Robin Hoodian purpose to that relationship. There’s not a point to Peter, besides him being someone she could very probably, very quickly fall in love with. Obviously, she can’t do that because soulmates are bullshit and true love is a con and long-term monogamy is a doomed enterprise.

…And she’s going to be late for her first class, Biology. Ugh, Peter always does this to her―intentionally walks slow to try to trick her into catching up with him. All that does is make MJ take a longer route and misjudge how quickly she needs to move. She wishes he’d knock it off. He’s backed off on a lot of other things for her sake (that’s an assumption based on observation because, of course, she’s never initiated a conversation with him), like sitting across from her in the cafeteria and dropping out of marching band (he plays trombone, she plays euphonium, and the brass section was too cozy a space for successfully avoiding someone). That second one was a waste because she was about to quit anyway, so now neither of them are in it and the whole band’s off balance. Too many fucking flautists. If Peter would commit to doing one or the other―pestering her or ignoring her―that would be convenient, but he’s inconsistent and she’s annoyed.

Oh, here’s another thing that happens every day: MJ hopes her displeasure will protect her from the urge to smile at the adorable, well-intentioned pain in her neck that destiny wants to tie her to until one of them drops dead or, marginally less dramatic, runs out on the young family they’ve created. It really pisses her off that Peter seems like he’ll be a great dad in another decade or two.

“Hey, MJ,” he says, when she finally makes it to Bio and slides behind the lab desk in front of his.

“Kiss my ass, Parker,” she mutters back.

He’s the reason for the sweat running down her spine. MJ pinches the front of her t-shirt and flaps it away from her skin, trying to stimulate enough airflow to make it through the period.

―

“You could trick her into smiling at you,” Ned suggests. They’re sitting together at lunch and Peter has a glumness hangover from MJ ignoring him (again) that morning.

“Babe,” Betty admonishes.

“Babe, he’d only feel bad if MJ really is his soulmate. If she’s not, then at least they know for sure and they can quit being weird with each other.”

“I’m not being weird with her,” Peter objects. “I’m just being nice! And I told you, I know it’s her.”

“You get that feeling?” Ned checks. “That warm feeling like I got the first time I saw Betty’s beautiful face?”

“Aw, babe!”

Their arms are already linked as they eat, but now Betty lays her head on her soulmate’s shoulder. If they get much closer, she’ll be in Ned’s lap, at which point Peter will have to make himself scarce. Though love is cute, it’s also kind of an affliction with a lot of messy symptoms.

“I don’t feel like I’m doing anything wrong!” he blurts out in frustration, jabbing at the salad May made him for lunch. “How could we be so incompatible?”

“You’re not though,” Betty counters. “You’re totally compatible.”

“Yeah, but we haven’t even taken the first step.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t think of it as the first step,” Ned suggests, being all wise.

“What do you mean?” Peter asked cautiously.

“Babe, you couldn’t be more correct,” Betty gushes. Peter sighs impatiently. He shouldn’t―they’re trying to help him―but it’s hard having paired up friends while his own soulmate stays just out of reach.

“Elaborate please,” he prompts.

He shifts in place and shivers when he accidentally moves out of the space his butt’s been warming. Meanwhile, here are Ned and Betty in their lightweight sweaters and sneakers. Peter’s boots clomp under the table.

“Well,” Ned posits, “isn’t confirming you’re soulmates more like the final step? You’ve done your waiting and now you get to be together?” Betty kisses his cheek in agreement.

“Maybe,” Peter allows.

“If you accept that confirming your bond isn’t the very next step, then you can start considering what is the next step. What do you think that might be, Peter?” Betty asks.

“I should… get MJ to tell me why she isn’t ready or interested in confirming it. In a respectful way that doesn’t pressure her,” he adds when Betty narrows her eyes judgementally.

“And how do you plan to achieve that?”

“Babe,” Ned intercedes, “let’s give him a minute to think about it.”

Peter tries to do that while he finishes his lunch. There are a lot of vegetables in here and they’re seasonal, just not for the season he’s experiencing. May’s always trying to load him up with vitamin-rich foods, since most of his day’s snowy; the clouds clear for a while around the time he gets out of school, allowing him some sun on his face as long as he doesn’t dawdle or land in detention. That train of thought makes him realize that detention would be the perfect place to talk this out with MJ, except that he’s against Ned’s plan of tricking her into becoming his soulmate and making sure she landed in detention with him would probably involve tricking. He knows she used to hang out there voluntarily from time to time, but not since they became aware of their connection. Now, she seems to avoid any place she might get stuck in and be cornered by Peter.

Ugh! He’s so ready to love and be loved! It’s super awesome to have people to love and worry about and have breakfast with. Love and breakfast are precious, in Peter’s opinion, and so is time. Getting enough of it isn’t something to be depended upon. After his parents and then Uncle Ben, he can’t trust quantity―he gives and gets quality love these days. He doesn’t know everything about Michelle Jones, but he’d like her to understand that, the irreplaceable value she represents to him. If she’d just be a plain envelope, he’d do all the work; put on the stamp, write out the address, compose the note it would hold. Right now, she’s like a sheet of paper, he guesses, one that they fold up into an envelope. She hasn’t been cut out or had that gross glue strip applied and it seems like it might be a long time before she’s ready for a letter or, like, a Happy Bar Mitzvah card. MJ might not want to be his envelope person, or she just might not know the things he could be for her (glue-licking, stamp-applying, Mazel Tov!-writing). If she at least knows, then he’ll concede that he’s done everything he can. If she knows, it’ll hopefully be enough for her to make a decision. Peter can’t force her to decide in his favour, but even if she understands and decides that she needs another five years before she wants to talk to him about the probability of their being soulmates and maybe revisit the smiling thing, he’ll know something too. Waiting is really tough.

―

“Don’t smile at me,” Peter requests, both hands up, when MJ shuts her locker to see him standing there.

She rolls her eyes. Nothing about the one person she’s actively avoiding hanging out at a place she has to be makes her want to smile. Did he decide that if he couldn’t be her soulmate he’d settle for being her stalker?

…Probably not. He’s way too good a person for that. Seriously, she tries to make these made-up accusations stick to him, but he’s just not that guy. That doesn’t mean she accepts, likes, or appreciates this latest move to get her attention.

“Are you trying reverse psychology now?” MJ demands.

“I’m just trying to make it extra clear that, whatever your reasons are for not smiling, I respect them.” He shrugs his shoulders and she glances down at the lunchbox he’s carrying. She wonders what he ate today.

“What if I’m not smiling because I’m plotting a bank heist in my head? Do you respect that? Do you respect theft, Peter?”

His expression is so satisfyingly startled that she almost does smile. No, fuck this. There are only ten minutes or so left in the lunch hour and she can wander the halls until the next class starts. She goes to step around him, but their shoulders brush and she feels something. It’s more aggressive than the welcoming warmth the bond (that’s what she attributes it to) usually makes her feel when she sees him. This is pure affection and it’s really hard to put her back to it. MJ pauses, facing away from Peter, and she’s almost got the new feeling under control when he turns and starts walking beside her.

“I think we can figure this out,” he says eagerly. Dammit. His enthusiasm for learning is one of the traits she finds most attractive in him. Can’t he just lay off with that fucking fated appeal?

“I think I already have,” she shoots back, not looking at him. “The universe wants to play sock puppets and guess what? We’re the sock puppets.”

“Look,” Peter says. He’s shockingly persistent today as he jumps in front of her and catches her eye. “We don’t have to play by its rules. We can make our own.”

“You wanna be with me?” she asks point-blank. Her chin jerks up instinctively when she questions him, eyes appraising. Either the question or the blunt stare makes him blush.

“Yeah, I, I think I probably do.”

“You want me to fall in love with you? For us to get married? Live together? Have kids? Me and you against the world, forever?”

“Maybe?”

“Well, you can’t just want one thing, Peter,” MJ tells him. Her fingers grip hard at the books in her hands. “There’s no shallow end of the soulmate bond. Its plan is not for us to casually date and let things plateau if it doesn’t work out.”

“But it would work out.” Poor thing looks confused.

“Says who?”

He shrugs.

“Everybody.”

“Check your sources.”

She hangs a left into the girls’ bathroom before Peter can respond, but he’s waiting in the hall when she returns.

“You can’t ignore it,” is the first thing he says to her, pushing off the wall. This time, MJ plants her feet.

“Or you, apparently, if you keep stalking me.”

“I’m not trying to. I just want us―”

“To talk,” she finishes for him. “Which is pointless. You’re not going to gain any ground with me, Peter. I have no ground for you to gain on this issue.”

“Maybe, if you told me why you won’t smile, you’ll feel better.”

“I feel fine.”

“You do not. You’re trying not to let someone care a lot about you when it’s guaranteed that they would. He would. I would,” Peter rambles. He takes a deep breath and looks her firmly in the eye. “Isn’t that, like, the one thing everybody wants? To be able to count on someone caring?”

“I’m not broken just because I don’t want what everybody wants,” she bites back, feeling herself flush with annoyance and, beneath that, embarrassment at being assessed.

“I would never call you broken,” he swears in a quiet voice. He is not going to make her tear up right now. She’s softening though, she can feel it. Stupid sincere soulmate. “I mean, if anything, I’m broken, so I could never judge, even if I wanted to. I know people try hard to find their perfect match, but I feel greedy sometimes with how badly I want it to happen to me. I know it’s not fair to you, I’ve been coming to terms with―”

“You’re not broken, Peter. Wanting someone to love you doesn’t make you broken. Or, if it does, then most people are. You’re not alone just because you don’t have me.”

Clearly, the time to stop herself was one sentence sooner. Because the jerk smiles at her and the next thing she does is agree to discuss this further after school.

―

There was something she said, while they were talking after lunch, that has him considering their potential as platonic soulmates well into third period. That’s what soulmates are for some people―they want all of the kindness and support of the bond with none of the romance, and the universe gives them what they need. When MJ said that stuff about marriage and babies and forever, Peter began contemplating whether they could achieve the third thing without the first two. Almost immediately, he ruled it out. He knew what attraction felt like. Sure, being soulmates was probably influencing him towards MJ, but she wasn’t the only person he found attractive. He used to have a crush on Liz. One day, when his Business class was on a field trip and it rained, he saw Flash with all the product washed out of his hair and was attracted to him (right up until Flash made a few loud comments about getting ‘Penis’ out of the cold weather before he shriveled up).

The conclusion he comes to is clear: Peter’s definitely hot for MJ. While marriage can wait, falling dizzily, hopelessly in love―and properly, in the kind of love they could have with their soulmate bond confirmed―is something he can only ever half-heartedly postpone. He wants to give her presents with love on her birthday. He wants to hug her and feel a new kind of complete. He wants to be her Valentine.

When Peter sees MJ hanging back to wait for him once the final bell rings, he’s relieved. Then tense. Not screwing this up might literally be the most important thing in his future. Trying to reassure her that he isn’t planning some sort of ambush to force a smile out of her, he suggests they talk someplace where other people will be around. She flat-out refuses to go to a coffee shop with him because it would be way too date-like. (Yeah, he gets that, picturing an awkward moment in which he attempts to pay for both their orders, or their shoes bump under the table.) They agree on the gym, where the girls’ indoor soccer team is having practice. Together―him in flannel-lined jeans and her in shorts―they thud up the bleachers to sit at the very top. MJ catches her foot and Peter notices that, when he instinctively reaches out to steady her, she shies away with a regretful look on her face. He really doesn’t expect her to explain, but then she does as they sit down.

“It does something to me,” she says, jerking her head as though to reference their near-contact.

Peter shrugs.

“Yeah, me too, but I’ve never been trying to avoid that feeling. I’ve gotten used to, like, um,” he stammers, “leaning into it. But I’m sorry. I won’t touch you.”

“Well, you know that I have the opposite habit.” MJ takes a deep breath, and Peter gets the sense that this would be the moment for her to be vulnerable with him and explain why she works so hard to ignore him. Ultimately, volunteering that information appears to be too much of an emotional effort. She decides to ask, “Is that something you’re interested in knowing more about?”

“Anything you wanna tell me,” he says quickly. He’s been waiting forever for this opportunity. “You can ask me things too. Open book.”

“I’m… not used to just spilling stuff about my life.”

He considers that.

“Why’d you say yes to this?”

She sighs and leans forward to rest her elbows on her knees. Then, she cups her face in her hand and turns to meet his eye.

“I’m tired of the way seeing you is always such a big deal. The bond says it’s wonderful and my brain hates it. I don’t want to be so torn all the time.”

“So…” he begins uncertainly. “Which outcome are you hoping for? Thinking I’m wonderful or hating my guts?”

The speed with which MJ turns her face away from him makes him wonder if she’s hiding a smile. He wasn’t trying to be funny.

“Quit twisting my words,” she requests, straight-faced as she stares straight ahead to where the soccer players are booting around what looks like an oversized tennis ball. “I didn’t say I hate you.”

“Just your brain.”

“Mhmm. My brain hates the idea of you.”

“MJ,” Peter says earnestly. She looks at him. “Why?”

“You control my whole life!” she says abruptly. “I’m sweating from climbing these stupid bleachers because of you. I have the urge to smile right now, when I’m irritated, because of you. Your existence tells me what to wear even when I’m not with you and how to feel whenever I see you.”

“I’m sorry―”

“And I can’t even seriously blame you because it’s not actually your fault!”

The girls’ team has quit weaving and shooting the ball, heading and passing it. Peter gets that MJ wanted a public place, but now he knows they’re being eavesdropped on. He’s quiet, though not because of the potential listeners; he doesn’t want to stop MJ from saying whatever she might tell him next. He’s been longing to hear her thoughts for ages.

“And that’s just, like, surface stuff!” she huffs. She’s flushed. If he could hold her face between his hands, the warmth might stay with him all the way home while he trudges along the sidewalk, ploughing snow aside with his shins.

“Please,” Peter says softly, “tell me more. Tell me anything you want.”

―

She went into it knowing she wouldn’t be allowing her soulmate to make her smile, but MJ didn’t anticipate letting him see her cry. He’s so open and she’s fortified her defenses against this topic for such a long time. Apparently, that’s enough for discussing her emotions and fears to make her crack like an egg. Peter doesn’t rush her or tell her that her feelings are the wrong feelings and the whole time he watches her face with a startling amount of attention. Has anybody looked at her like this? Really looked at her? Ever? She feels like a mom would’ve, but she can’t remember if her mom did. And that’s who she’s talking about, that’s the part of the story she’s at, when she feels the tears dribble out and tilts her head to let them drain away over her cheek. God, this is embarrassing. At least the soccer team packed up and left before she felt her throat getting thick.

“I don’t know if I’m still just letting my mom decide whether or not I get to be happy,” MJ admits, face wet until she catches her tear tracks with the back of her wrist. “I’m trying to do this, ignore the soulmate bond, for me, but maybe… I don’t know…”

“You’re forcing me away from you?” Peter suggests.

“Yeah. I’m abandoning you before we can get attached.” Somehow, this dork has Kleenex in his backpack and hands her one. She blows her nose hard, then crumples the tissue in her hand. “Pretty fucked up.”

“Ok, this is gonna sound really stupid, because we’re not even together, but I don’t think I’m the kind of person who could leave you.”

“You can’t promise that though,” MJ says―so, so quietly. She wants her words to run away and hide under the bleachers with the dust bunnies.

“Would you rather have nothing?” he asks.

Coming from someone else, she’s pretty sure that would be an ultimatum, some kind of threat to accept him as her soulmate now or never get another chance. Peter asks it with as little agenda as he’s asked everything else, easing her through her memories and her dreads.

“I’m not sure,” she says.

“Can I tell you something? I’m not sure I could be with someone whose goal was to resist getting or giving love. I mean, I’ve heard everything you’ve told me and I can see why you’ve been dodging the soulmate thing, but if you get to look way ahead and worry about things that are only possible and far in the future, like me leaving you, then I get to look ahead too.” He pauses and she nods to indicate that, yeah, that’s fair. MJ thinks this is very brave of him, stepping out of the situation for a second to consider what he might need later when what he wants is to be with her right away. “I don’t wanna be left either. I don’t want you not to be able to overcome the idea that soulmates are bad and wrong. Maybe it doesn’t matter if you think that in general, but if it’s a part of our relationship, then you’re always going to be expecting things to end. It would be like you were trying to think your way out of it instead of enjoying whatever we could have. And what we could have, by the way? I don’t think the bond has anything to say about that. Does it encourage us to get together? Yeah, sure, fine, it does and we accept that’s how it works. Once we are together though, isn’t the rest on our terms?”

Finally, Peter takes a longer breath and some of the intensity fades from his expression.

“You’re looking at me funny,” he notes. “I know I talked a lot. Are you gonna say something?”

“Just that you sounded smart and it’s pissing me off.”

He gives her dry joke a sad smile.

“Losing people sucks.” His voice is like a rock falling, falling, falling through deep water. “For as much as you don’t want me to make promises, I know that I’d try really fucking hard not to lose you. You can’t hate me, or your brain can’t hate me, for that. It’s the human element of this whole thing, which should be the part you like, since you’re so anti-destiny.”

Looks like Peter’s raised his own spirits enough to offer a conspiratorial little smile at the end there.

“Another repulsively astute point,” she says flatly and watches his smile broaden. Fuck, it makes her heart feel like a marshmallow that’s melting onto a s’more and simultaneously being stretched until it tears into sticky ribbons.

He checks his watch and gets to his feet.

“I gotta get home.”

“Did I miss the soulmate-decision deadline?” she teases. Feels weird. She stands too and they clomp back down to the gym floor.

“No! God, no, I wasn’t trying to rush you by looking at the time!”

“Parker, I’m messing with you. Chill.”

She eyes his winter clothing.

“Or maybe don’t. Looks like you’re chill enough already. Sorry for being born during a blizzard. My dad told me he and my mom barely got to the hospital in time for me to not be born in the car, the roads were so bad.”

Peter appraises her right back.

“Sorry for being born during a heatwave. I wish I could ask my mom what that was like, but you already know about my parents.”

“Shit, I didn’t mean to start comparing…”

“No, I know,” Peter says. “I miss her, but it’s not always the worst, having a certain moment make me notice that I could’ve learned something from her here. It’s actually easier to appreciate than forget, even if it’s sad for a little while.”

“If I promise to try it, will you cut it out with the insightful bullshit?”

Instead of answering that question, he springs something else on her.

“For the record, I know the only reason you didn’t smile at me is because you were trying so hard not to.”

Immediately, MJ turns her back on him and smirks as she heads for the far exit.

―

Peter’s seen a lot of snow. Almost all the weather he’s ever seen is snow, and even at the point in his day when the snowfall takes its lunchbreak, there’s over a foot on the ground and dense grey clouds up above. He thinks it’s crazy how snow fills people with wonder―mainly in Christmas movies and holiday episodes of TV shows. The way he feels about snow is probably how people living in late-spring-to-early-fall weather feel about grass. It’s just there, the base layer of their environment.

Except tonight Peter has his blind up, watching the thin sprinkle the blizzard has slowed into catch the light from other people’s apartments, a clean, meltable glitter. He’s tired and can’t sleep, but it’s a quiet comfort of sleeplessness, not the kind where he stresses and twists around between his sheets. The weight of the day keeps him flat on his back in bed as he thinks it all over. His feelings, MJ’s, the satisfaction of finally having a long talk with her, the biting pain of seeing her cry. In his mind, since he first guessed it might be her who’s his soulmate, he’s been tailoring their love. Their potential love. He didn’t know what it would look like before having her to mould a concept around. Learning that she was probably his soulmate, studying her, Peter decided they were meant for a slow love. Love would be something that slipped gradually across them, like pulling up the sheet on a bed or stepping into a long summertime shadow.

He’s surprised at the kind of love MJ envisioned; from the berth she gave it when she talked that afternoon, it sounded big and powerful and immediate. Faster than an avalanche, ringing through their lives louder than a thunderclap. He wanted them to confirm their bond soon so that unhurried love could begin to develop and she was afraid that the second they started would be the second they were swept away. No wonder she avoided him, Peter thinks. The love she anticipated would equal an act of god and he isn’t ready for that either. He turns his face away from the direction of the window and stares at his dark ceiling.

Peter has plenty of forceful love in his life―he can’t consider it enough forceful love, because there’s no such thing as enough love, is there?―thanks to May. She took on the mom-ish role of caring for him after his parents were gone, then the single-mom-ish role of raising him into approaching adulthood without Uncle Ben. While her aura is soft, her whole attitude has been very roll-up-your-sleeves where he’s concerned. May faced down his extreme need for parental TLC like it was a battle and continues to love him fiercely, even if his steadily increasing age and Happy’s calming presence temper her a little these days. So Peter’s covered in the department of that kind of love. He hopes his forever person doesn’t feel the need to bombard him with a truckload of love from the start; it would make him feel pitied, somehow, like they were putting all their effort into making up for the fact that he doesn’t have parents anymore. Peter knows he doesn’t have parents, he doesn’t want or need to be smothered to make up for their absence.

This chance (it still isn’t a solid thing) with MJ could let him grow into devotion. He’s kinda longing to know what that feels like. The theoretical adjective he’d attach to it is normal. Whatever the universe’s input here, Peter really believes the most normal thing after confirming their bond would be to allow things to develop however felt right. And with the bond backing them, technically anything they do would be right, right? He wants them to grow up together and grow into each other. He doesn’t want MJ to be the bond or a love lightning bolt, zipping down to fry him. The assurance that they’ll fall in love is enough to start. It’s an invaluable forecast, as dependable as the weather he’s been experiencing all his life.

When his phone buzzes on his nightstand, Peter feels as though he’s being retracted like a telescope―thoughts way far out in space drawing back to his building, his bedroom, his body. He rubs his eyes with his knuckle as he looks at the screen.

So… you were unexpectedly deep today, MJ’s text reads.

They never exactly exchanged numbers, but he got hers from Betty one time and saved it just in case. His heart beats faster at the thought that maybe MJ did the same.

And you’re still mad about it? Peter guesses, tapping out his reply.

Oh, you are up.

There was a lot to think about, he tells her honestly. Why are you still awake?

Because the day you were born must have been the most humid day of the year. It’s too hot to sleep.

Also, MJ tags on, that crap you said about thinking.

―

She lets her phone drop onto the thin cotton sheet of the mattress and uses its light to help her see as she rips nervously at the skin around her fingernail. Texting Peter wasn’t even really a thought―she just found herself doing it, surprised by how natural the instinct felt and despite the fact that she really doesn’t reach out to people. That she would reach out to the one person she was utterly vulnerable in front of less than 12 hours ago is something MJ would never have expected of herself. But she’s let him in this far.

And you decided to talk to me about it? Peter finally responds, postponing further anxiety.

I know. My boundaries are completely fucked after this afternoon. I might never be able to bottle up my feelings again. Hope you’re happy, loser.

Well, Peter texts, you don’t have to do that. If you need to empty the bottle every once in a while, I get it. I can be your glass. Or your straw?

You want to suck up my feelings? Like some kind of feelings-vampire?

God, she is fucking this up so severely. He’s going to wish she’d just kept ignoring him instead of caving to his persistent friendliness and that look he gets that’s all eyes, totally impossible to say no to. Amazingly, her last stupid text isn’t enough to make him say he’s going to sleep now, or worse, not respond at all.

Just a feelings-relief, he corrects. Unless you like the idea of the feelings-vampire better.

You don’t need to bend to my will like that, Parker. Suddenly, MJ’s kind of angry.

Don’t give me what you think I want just because you feel bad about seeing me cry, she continues. Or because you think you can make this work by doing whatever I want. Never appease me.

I care, he says simply.

Wow, she feels like a jerk.

Because destiny told you that you could take that care and trade up for the promise of eternal love? she snarks back, apparently not quite done with the jerk thing.

I had no idea texting you would be even more fun than talking in person.

Is he… is he being sarcastic with her? MJ smiles at her phone. Incredible.

I’m fun in all mediums, she says, not having a clear idea of what she means and looking forward to Peter trying really hard to interpret it.

Knock knock, is his response.

Who’s there?

Ummmm idk.

‘Ummmm idk’ who?

No, I seriously don’t know, he says.

MJ snorts in confused laughter and shifts around to find a cool spot on her sheet; she wasn’t lying about the heat.

Why would you send me the beginning of a knock-knock joke with no joke? she asks.

I thought I’d think of the rest of it in the moment. I know that’s dumb. It just felt like we were maybe in a zone there and I wanted to keep it going.

Relax. I’m not going to strike you out for one ill-conceived knock-knock joke.

What about two?

I wouldn’t test your luck, MJ counsels, still smiling.

She can see that he’s composing a reply, but she beats him to it: I was thinking about what you said about destiny. Actually, what you said about the opposite of destiny, the thing about the human element.

And?

She can practically sense his tension as she holds her phone in her hand.

I think it’s a good thought. That two people can still make a relationship theirs.

Ned said something to me today.

How unusual.

Shut up, Peter quips back. He said that confirming you’re somebody’s soulmate is like the last big step.

Oh?

Yeah, I think he’s totally wrong.

So do I.

Replying that way felt like a huge leap and yet, MJ took it. It doesn’t take long after that for her to start getting tired, blinking long and slow until she’s only opening her eyes when her phone vibrates against her fingers. Peter says he’s tired too and they wrap the conversation up. There’s a suggestion of seeing each other at school the next day. It shouldn’t have any special meaning―it’s a throwaway farewell, less than a promise―but she reacts to it with her last bit of focus. See you in the morning, are her exact words.

She cranes her phone out over the side of her bed with her arm, then lets it go just a little too far from the floor. Probably fine, though it clatters against the surface. Protected by the night and her closed eyes, MJ feels around inside her mind, looking for the taut tug-of-war rope that should be telling her that, one, she doesn’t want to meet with Peter because he’s probably her soulmate and soulmates are a lie and a scam, and two, that she does want to meet with Peter because he has a cute smile that he shows her even when she doesn’t give him much reason to. Then she thinks about how much she prefers first steps to last steps.

―

He could be a clone. He could be a clone in a programmed world, living his programmed life the same every day, but with, like, fake memories that fool him into believing in variety. Because he does believe in it. Today, Peter wakes up and change seems possible.

There’s snow on the ground outside and he has to get his socks on before putting his feet on the floor and he’s eating his breakfast too slowly and the way his aunt and Happy are dressed says it’s still spring. Peter asks about rain. May says, “Any time now,” and keeps reading the paperwork she has folded open on the table as she scratches absently at her arm.

“Amazing,” Peter replies, meaning it, as he picks up his bowl and slurps the rest of his cereal until milk runs down his chin.

His aunt glances up to give him a funny look. He’s pretty sure it’s not about the milk, but there’s no time to ask. If he hurries, he’ll leave ahead of his usual schedule, thanks to this new breakfast hack. He wants to get to school. School is such a great place to be.

Peter races out of the apartment and down the stairs like he’s 10 minutes late instead of 3 minutes early. It’s in the building’s entryway that he gets a feeling. Four feet from the glass door that he sees her standing on the sidewalk, snow she can’t feel partway up her mostly-bare legs. Pushing the door open when she quits looking away down the street and stares straight back at him instead. When MJ smiles, Peter smiles back. It could be a life-changing moment, or it might just be a reflex. Because they started to let each other in, he’ll probably never know the answer. Anyway, why does there only have to be one?

“I’ve been waiting,” she says. “I thought you’d be down sooner.”

He laughs self-deprecatingly.

“I tend to cut my timing kinda close in the morning. You wanna get going?” Peter jerks his head to the side.

“Yeah, we should. You’re probably getting cold just standing there.”

With his timing slightly off, they’re ahead of schedule for the bus he’s usually running to catch, so they decide to walk up to the next stop. As they approach the intersection, the light changes to yellow.

“We can beat it if we run,” Peter suggests, trying not to strangle himself by catching his scarf as he hikes his backpack higher on his shoulders.

But MJ goes, “Wait,” so urgently that he stops at the corner.

“What is it?”

“I thought I just…” With a puzzled expression, she extends her hand, palm up. Not towards Peter, but away from him. “…felt a raindrop.”

They lock eyes.

“You want my coat?” he offers. MJ smiles again.

“I’ll let you know.”

#my writing #spideychelleweek2k20 #spideychelle #spideychelle fanfiction #spideychelle fic #peter parker #peter x mj #peter x michelle #peter parker x michelle jones #michelle jones #May Parker #happy hogan #may parker x happy hogan #ned leeds #betty brant #ned leeds x betty brant #nettypot

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newstfionline · 3 years

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Thursday, March 4, 2021

The ‘free world’ keeps shrinking (NYT) Three-quarters of the people on earth live in countries where freedom is declining. That’s one of the grim takeaways in an annual report produced by Freedom House, the Washington-based pro-democracy think tank and watchdog. This year’s survey, published Wednesday, marked the 15th consecutive year of global democratic backsliding—“a long democratic recession,” in the organization’s words, that is “deepening.” Freedom House grades individual countries on 25 indicators that evaluate the health of a given nation’s democracy (or lack thereof). The cumulative score then enables the organization, which has been in operation since 1941, to rank a given country as “Free,” “Partly Free,” or “Not Free.” Of the 195 independent countries evaluated, 73 saw aggregate score declines and only 28 saw growth. That margin is the widest of its kind in the past decade and a half. Moreover, 54 countries are now labeled “Not Free,” or about 38 percent of the world’s population, the highest share since 2005. Less than 20 percent of the world’s population lives in countries now classified as “Free.”

Vaccine Passports, Covid’s Next Political Flash Point (NYT) The next major flash point over coronavirus response has already provoked cries of tyranny and discrimination in Britain, protests in Denmark, digital disinformation in the United States and geopolitical skirmishing within the European Union. The subject of debate: vaccine passports—government-issued cards or smartphone badges stating that the bearer has been inoculated against the coronavirus. The idea is to allow families to reunite, economies to restart and hundreds of millions of people who have received a shot to return to a degree of normalcy, all without spreading the virus. Some versions of the documentation might permit bearers to travel internationally. Others would allow entry to vaccinated-only spaces like gyms, concert venues and restaurants. While such passports are still hypothetical in most places, Israel became the first to roll out its own last week, capitalizing on its high vaccination rate. Several European countries are considering following. President Biden has asked federal agencies to explore options. And some airlines and tourism-reliant industries and destinations expect to require them.

US infrastructure gets C- from engineers as roads stagnate (AP) America’s infrastructure has scored near-failing grades for its deteriorating roads, public transit and storm water systems due to years of inaction from the federal government, the American Society of Civil Engineers reports. Its overall grade: a mediocre C-. In its “Infrastructure Report Card” released Wednesday, the group called for “big and bold” relief, estimating it would cost $5.9 trillion over the next decade to bring roads, bridges and airports to a safe and sustainable level. That’s about $2.6 trillion more than what government and the private sector already spend. “America’s infrastructure is not functioning as it should, and families are losing thousands of dollars a year in disposable income as a result of cities having to fix potholes, people getting stuck in traffic or due to repairs when a water line breaks or the energy grid goes down,” said Greg DiLoreto, one of the group’s past presidents.

Pandemic puts 1 in 3 nonprofits in financial jeopardy (AP) More than one-third of U.S. nonprofits are in jeopardy of closing within two years because of the financial harm inflicted by the viral pandemic, according to a study being released Wednesday by the philanthropy research group Candid and the Center for Disaster Philanthropy. The study’s findings underscore the perils for nonprofits and charities whose financial needs have escalated over the past year, well in excess of the donations that most have received from individuals and foundations. The researchers analyzed how roughly 300,000 nonprofits would fare under 20 scenarios of varying severity. The worst-case scenario led to the closings of 38% of the nonprofits. Even the scenarios seen as more realistic resulted in closures well into double digit percentages. “If you are a donor who cares about an organization that is rooted in place and relies on revenue from in-person services, now is the time probably to give more,” said Jacob Harold, Candid’s executive vice president.

Biden Sanctions Russia Over Navalny Poisoning (Foreign Policy) The United States imposed sanctions Tuesday on a number of Russian individuals and entities linked to the poisoning of Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny. The move was made in concert with the European Union, which issued separate asset freezes and travel bans on four Russians. The Russian Foreign Ministry has brushed off the impact of the moves, while threatening a reciprocal response. “Irrespective of America’s ‘sanctions addiction,’ we will continue to consistently and decisively defend our national interests, rebuffing any aggression. We urge our colleagues not to play with fire,” Maria Zakharova, a Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, said on Wednesday. According to White House officials, more U.S. sanctions targeting Russians involved in the SolarWinds hack, the alleged bounty program on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, and Russian interference in the 2020 election are expected soon.

Biden’s Afghan dilemma (The New Yorker) Afghanistan presents Joe Biden with one of the most immediate and vexing problems of his Presidency. If he completes the military withdrawal, he will end a seemingly interminable intervention and bring home thousands of troops. But, if he wants the war to be considered anything short of an abject failure, the Afghan state will have to be able to stand on its own.

Greece: Thousands spend night outdoors after powerful quake (AP) Fearful of returning to their homes, thousands of people in central Greece were spending the night outdoors late Wednesday after a powerful earthquake, felt across the region, damaged homes and public buildings. The shallow, magnitude-6.0 quake struck near the central city of Larissa. One man was hurt by falling debris but no serious injuries were reported. Officials reported structural damage, mainly to old houses and buildings that saw walls collapse or crack. One of them was a primary school, stone-built in 1938, in the quake-hit village of Damasi where 63 students were attending classes. “The teachers kept their cool and the pupils stuck to the emergency drill, and everyone got out okay,” headmaster Grigoris Letsios said while on a video call with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. The army set up tents and meal counters at a nearby soccer field as local officials urged people to remain outside their homes until they could be inspected. A series of powerful aftershocks of up to 5.2 magnitude kept many residents on edge.

Indian Government Regulation Squeezes Christian Charities (CT) For Christians trying to care for the poor in India, there is always a need for more prayer, more hands, and more money. Much of that money comes from donors in other countries. Recently, though, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has tightened regulations on foreign funding to nonprofits, including Christian groups that feed orphans, run hospitals, and educate children. Since Modi took office in 2014, the Indian government has revoked permission for more than 16,000 nongovernmental organizations to receive foreign funding, using the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA). “It is deliberately an assault against the nonprofit sector,” said Vijayesh Lal, the general secretary of the Evangelical Fellowship of India, “and that includes the churches.” While the FCRA is not designed specifically to target Christian groups, experts say its cumbersome regulations have been used by the ruling parties in India to stifle political and religious dissidents since the law’s adoption in 1976.

Intense preparations before pontiff meets Iraqi ayatollah (AP) In Iraq’s holiest city, a pontiff will meet a revered ayatollah and make history with a message of coexistence in a place plagued by bitter divisions. One is the chief pastor of the world-wide Catholic Church, the other a pre-eminent figure in Shiite Islam whose opinion holds powerful sway on the Iraqi street and beyond. Their encounter will resonate across Iraq, even crossing borders into neighboring, mainly Shiite Iran. Pope Francis and Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani are to meet on Saturday for at most 40 minutes, part of the time alone except for interpreters, in the Shiite cleric’s modest home in the city of Najaf. Every detail was scrutinized ahead of time in painstaking, behind-the-scenes preparations that touched on everything from shoes to seating arrangements. For Iraq’s dwindling Christian minority, a show of solidarity from al-Sistani could help secure their place in Iraq after years of displacement—and, they hope, ease intimidation from Shiite militiamen against their community. Iraqi officials in government, too, see the meeting’s symbolic power—as does Tehran. The 90-year-old al-Sistani has been a consistent counterweight to Iran’s influence. With the meeting, Francis is implicitly recognizing him as the chief interlocutor of Shiite Islam over his rival, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Pentagon: US contractor dies in rocket attack at Iraq base (AP) A U.S. contractor died Wednesday when at least 10 rockets slammed into an air base housing U.S. and other coalition troops in western Iraq, the Pentagon said. Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said the contractor “suffered a cardiac episode while sheltering” and died shortly afterward. He said there were no service members injured and all are accounted for. British and Danish troops also are among those stationed at the base. The rocket attack was the first since the U.S. struck Iran-aligned militia targets along the Iraq-Syria border last week, killing one militiaman and stoking fears of another cycle of tit-for-tat attacks as happened more than a year ago. Those attacks included the U.S. drone strike in January 2020 that killed Iranian Gen. Qassim Soleimani in Baghdad and set off months of increased troops levels in the region. Wednesday’s death of the contractor heightens worries that the U.S. could be drawn into another period of escalating attacks.

Reports: Myanmar security forces kill at least 33 protesters (AP) Myanmar security forces dramatically escalated their crackdown on protests against last month’s coup, killing at least 33 protesters Wednesday in several cities, according to accounts on social media and local news reports compiled by a data analyst. That is highest daily death toll since the Feb. 1 takeover, exceeding the 18 that the U.N. Human Rights Office said were killed on Sunday, and could galvanize the international community, which has responded fitfully thus far to the violence. Videos from Wednesday also showed security forces firing slingshots at demonstrators, chasing them down and even brutally beating an ambulance crew. Demonstrators have regularly flooded the streets of cities across the country since the military seized power and ousted the elected government of leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Their numbers have remained high even as security forces have repeatedly fired tear gas, rubber bullets and live rounds to disperse the crowds, and arrested protesters en masse.

China’s vaccine diplomacy campaign (AP) The plane laden with vaccines had just rolled to a stop at Santiago’s airport in late January, and Chile’s president, Sebastián Piñera, was beaming. “Today,” he said, “is a day of joy, emotion and hope.” The source of that hope: China—a country that Chile and dozens of other nations are depending on to help rescue them from the COVID-19 pandemic. China’s vaccine diplomacy campaign has been a surprising success: It has pledged roughly half a billion doses of its vaccines to more than 45 countries, according to a country-by-country tally by The Associated Press. With just four of China’s many vaccine makers claiming they are able to produce at least 2.6 billion doses this year, a large part of the world’s population will end up inoculated not with the fancy Western vaccines boasting headline-grabbing efficacy rates, but with China’s humble, traditionally made shots. Inoculations with Chinese vaccines already have begun in more than 25 countries, and the Chinese shots have been delivered to another 11, according to the AP tally.

Taiwanese urged to eat ‘freedom pineapples’ after China import ban (The Guardian) Taiwanese pineapples have become the latest victim of deteriorating cross-strait relations, after Chinese authorities suddenly banned imports of the fruit. The ban, which began on Monday and is indefinite, was announced by the Chinese customs office on Friday. The customs office said harmful pests had been detected in recent shipments. Taiwan’s government rejected the claim, accusing Beijing of making an “unacceptable” unilateral decision, and urging citizens and international allies to eat “freedom pineapples” in support of the domestic industry, echoing the campaign to support Australia’s wine producers after Beijing imposed tariffs last year. Beijing has a history of enacting trade sanctions during international disputes, most recently with Australian wine, coal and barley, action that can cause significant economic damage to industry and put pressure on rival governments. Relations with Taiwan are at the lowest in decades. Despite the Communist party never ruling Taiwan, Beijing considers it to be a province of China, and has vowed to unite it with the mainland, by force if necessary.

Lebanese anger at economy grows as political deadlock persists (Reuters) Protesters blocked some roadways in Lebanon for a second day on Wednesday after the currency’s fall to a new low further enraged a population long horrified by the country’s financial meltdown. In the past year, Lebanon has been through a popular uprising against its political leaders, the bankruptcy of the state and banking system, a COVID-19 pandemic and, in August, a huge blast that killed 200 people and destroyed parts of Beirut. The financial crisis has wiped out jobs, raised warnings of growing hunger and locked people out of their bank deposits. The collapse of the Lebanese pound, which fell to 10,000 to the dollar on Tuesday, slashed about 85% of its value in a country relying heavily on imports. It was the last straw for many who have seen prices of consumer goods such as diapers or cereals nearly triple since the crisis erupted. Demonstrators burnt tyres and rubbish containers across many parts of Lebanon to block roads on Tuesday night.

#headlines #news

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racefortheironthrone · 5 years

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Thoughts on House of X#2

I fell way behind on writing these even as I devoured each issue, so I thought I might as well knock these off as the HoX/PoX miniseries come to an end and the “Dawn of X” looms over the horizon. (Also I did a re-read recently and it got my mind buzzing.)

So let’s get into it!

Moira’s Ten Lives:

It turns out that, like everyone else, I was sort of right/wrong about time travel shenanigans. It’s technically a semi-stable time loop, but I’m not about to quibble. (Incidentally, on a re-read one of the things that’s been really impressive to see with the benefit of hindsight is the way in which Hickman et al. top each issue with the newest high concept or reveal, like some mad plate-spinning act.)

Here’s how the individual lives break down:

Life 1:

Because everything in this life takes place prior to the activation of her mutant gene (which, talk about a hell of an additive retcon), Moira’s first life is a romanticized, bucolic portrait of innocence not corrupted by worldly knowledge. The emphasis is strongly on family and nature (note the tree motif, which isn’t as prominent as the tower motif but still) as opposed to scientific pursuits.

On the other hand, you definitely get the sense that the perfect nature of this life is a distortion caused by nostalgia, as we’ll see in the next life.

Life 2:

Moira reincarnates for the first time with full knowledge of her previous life, which for all that HoX/PoX has been analyzed through the lens of both Christian and Jewish theology, can’t help but draw from Hindu and Buddhist thought.

One key aspect of her power is that Moira is given an enormous developmental leg up, being born with all of the skills of a grown adult. Suprisingly, we don’t actually get to see Moira make much use of some of the broader implications of her mutant power.

As a good scientist, Moira uses observation and experimentation to prove to herself that her memories are real and that she can change the future through her actions, two critical pieces of information.

Speaking of Buddhism, Moira’s “curse” concept is tied to the Second Noble Truth, that suffering comes from attachment. In this case, Moira’s problem is an attachment to her memories of her idealized first life: when she meets Kenneth Cowan for the second time, the emotional connection isn’t there because her foreknowledge of her first life changes her perceptions.

At the same time, I wonder how much of her reaction to this upheaval is due to her realizing that her first life wasn’t as perfect as she thought it was (the flaws she focuses on), or that she herself has changed and isn’t content to live and die as a rural schoolteacher.

In this timeline, Charles decides to come out of the closet as a mutant on national television, which is a different tack to how he’s approached pro-mutant activism in the past, although there is a common theme of putting his faith in public debate. Sadly a faith that will be broken.

Despite her misgivings about her own mutant gifts, Moira decides to fly to America to meet Charles...and dies in a plane crash. I wonder how much of her heel turn in life 3 is due to the Kenneth Cowan issue and how much of it comes from her experiencing violent death for the first time?

Life 3:

In Moira’s third life, she turns sharply away from Charles (nicely symbolized by her turning away on a pub stool) to try to cure the mutant gene, which brings her face-to-mask with Destiny, who is the closest thing that this issue has to an antagonist (at least in the sense an outside force acting on Moira and changing her behavior).

The conversation between them is split in two: in the first, Destiny does a good job of laying out why narrative of individual choice/consumerism don’t really work with regard to mutant cures, because of pre-existing structures of power and inequality that will turn an option into a mandate. Something that Whedon’s “Gifted” arc and X3 should have maybe mentioned.

(Incidentally, even before we got the later infographic from Powers of X #4 about mutant genocides, I thought this didn’t bode well for Wanda Maximoff.)

After setting up a Prisoner’s Dilemma situation - if you don’t change your behavior, this scenario will keep recurring - Destiny then gives us the next big reveal of the issue. Moira’s powers of resurrection only give her ten or eleven lives, that there is a way out of the cycle of endless rebirth if she makes the “right choice.” (Word is still out on the other aspects of the Eightfold Path.) I don’t know what the eleventh signifies - after House of X #5, I saw a lot of people suggesting pod-rebirth as her eleventh life, but I dunno.

However, I did spot something this time: Destiny “see[s] ten lives...eleven if you make the right choice at the end.” This may be me reaching, but it suggests that Destiny knows already that Moira isn’t going to get it right in lives four through nine, but isn’t telling her. Which, given the immense potential involved in combining their powers, suggests that it’s not just about Rube Goldberging her way to the Good Ending but rather that Moira has to experience her defeats personally in order to grow into the person who would make the right choice.

Life 4:

Having received a fiery “swift spiritual kick to the head,” Moira makes two changes in her life. First, she begins to approach the question of mutancy from a systems perspective - although I have some significant issues with Hickman’s evolutionary biology. Second, she looks deeper past Charles Xavier’s “confidence...arrogance,” to see the real Charles beneath, and the two fall in love (which makes the second time in her lives).

The result seems to be the 616, breaking down into the Gifted Years (the Kirby/Lee years), the Time of Hate and Fear (the All-New X-Men given to us by Claremont et al.), and “the lost decade,” which given the associated panel is a pretty clear slam on the last ten years of X-Men storytelling, most pointedly Avengers vs. X-Men.

This page (p. 17) has made me somewhat out of step with a lot of folks who’ve been arguing online that Moira’s sixth life must be the 616 - a trend we’re going to see repeating.

Regardless, this timeline is the first to end with Sentinel genocide, resulting in Moira for the first time seeing the dystopian dilemma. Much of what follows is a series of unsuccessful iterative attempts to solve this dilemma.

Life 5:

In her first go, Moira decides to see if accelerating the process will work, showing Charles what happened to his dream in her past lives. Hickman’s use of the term “radicalized” is key here to understanding what’s going on with Krakoa in X^1, because as Moira learns (and Charles will learn), separatism alone will not do the trick. Mutants got an 11-year head start to build up their defenses, and the Sentinels came anyway.

Life 6:

Because this life remains completely redacted, the fandom has gone absolutely nuts in speculation. One common speculation I’ve seen is that the X^3 timeline is Life 6, which I find quite puzzling. The reveal in Powers of X #1 that Cylobel is stuck in Nimrod’s femtofluid database is strongly suggestive that X^3 is Life 9, unless we’re going to say that in alternate timelines in which so many variables change, there’s always going to be a black brain hound mutant who looks identical to Cylobel and who dies in the exact same way. Which strikes me as falling afoul of Occam’s Razor.

Life 7:

Here’s where we really start zeroing in on the dystopic dliemma, as Moira tries to forestall the inevitable by eliminating the Trask bloodline. It doesn’t work because of the whole idea that AI is a discovery not an invention, and as a result Sentinels will always come about and the only thing that can be changed is the name of the person who’ll discover them.

Here is where Hickman’s obsession with mechanical vs. biological transhumanism (and/or singularities) really come into play. If you’ve read his book Transhuman (which I don’t necessarily recommend, as it comes with some rather nasty sophomoric undercurrents that have aged very badly in the last ten years), you’ll know that Hickman considers biological transhumanism to be superior to the alternative. Something to keep in mind when thinking about mutants vs. the man-machine supremacy, mutants vs. the technarchy, etc.

Interestingly, we never learn what happened to Xavier or the X-Men in this life.

Once again, Moira is “radicalized” by the seeming inevitability of robotic genocide, although it’s noticeable that her focus is shifting from humans to their creations.

Life 8:

Her solution is to go to Octopusheim and ally with Magneto, presumably because the Master of Magnetism is her first bet to go up against the mutants.

Magneto reacts to “the good news” with thermonuclear war, and gets curb-stomped by a combination of the Avengers, Fantastic Four, and X-Men.

Important note that by this point, Moira dismisses the idea of any great good beyond that only of mutants, and we go for another round of radicalization.

Life 9:

At this point, Moira decides to ally with Apocalypse out of desperation, presumably because Apocalypse is a revolutionary who can’t be killed as easily as Magneto can.

Although we didn’t know it at the time, this is X^2 (and I think X^3) as well, and while Apocalypse’s power levels allow him to prosecute a war “without end,” it doesn’t solve the strategic stalemate.

Life 10:

I don’t know what the two black panels suggest; it’s quite possible that they’re just pauses for emphasis.

In her tenth life, Moira takes a step back and focuses instead on “all the old ways of thinking.” Here, I think we see a preview of the Krakoan solution: mutant unity will unlock synergies of cooperation that were not possible while working with limited mindsets and only a part of mutankind.

Notably, we don’t know when Moira or anyone else found out about the possibilities of Krakoa and mutant biotechnology - we know some of it existed in Life 9 because we see Krakoan flowers being used, but we don’t know if Moira encountered it earlier or whether the higher order stuff was in use. I somehow doubt the resurrection system was intact, because it would seem to make Mister Sinister’s breeding program largely irrelevant.

Once more, we return to Powers of X #1, as we now know what Xavier learned from Moira’s mind.

Infographics:

The whole circle wrap-around thing is very evocative of other signs we’ve seen (on Cerebro when Xavier uses it for various higher-order stuff, on the Librarian’s face, etc.), but it actively makes the map harder to read, which I think is the point.

(Also, while I’m complaining: Comixology is not well set up for these large-scale infographics, because it keeps crashing on me when I try to zoom in. Very annoying.)

Note: earlier lives are more leisurely, things more spaced out, and then the pace accelerates as things get more intense.

One interesting difference between Life 4 and 616 canon: Moira and Xavier marry when she’s 23 and establish the Xavier School 12 years later.

Life 5 is interesting, because we’re seeing repeated themes of Moira in comas, even when it might not be necessary. For example, what’s the dramatic purpose of having the two Sentinel attacks?

In Life 7, I noticed that Larry Trask isn’t killed with the rest of his family. Is it because he turned out to be a mutant?

Life 8 is the first instance where I think the initial panelling let us down. The original one-two punch heavily implied that Magneto was defeated on his first attack on Washington D.C, but here we learn that he ruled America for eight years before being defeated and killed. (Incidentally, this suggests that the visions he’ll have of his failures don’t include this life).

As other people have noted about Life 9, Xavier and Magneto are killed in Years 19 and 21 respectively, which makes it easy to rule out their appearances as happening in Life 9. Also, it’s significant that the first horsemen aren’t on earth (almost certainly on Arakko/No-Place).

Life 10 including Moira’s marriage to Joseph McTaggert despite presumably knowing from earlier lives that he would be abusive suggests that Moira may well have gone into the marriage because she needed Proteus to form the Five. Not sure how I feel about that. Finally, I’m a bit puzzled about what the schism was and whether it was genuine vs. feigned (after all, Moira is faking her death, so there’s plenty of skullduggery going on).

#xmen #xmen meta #house of x #hoxpox

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missmudpie · 5 years

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I just reblogged a post that brings up the dangers of childbirth, and how this aspect is rarely discussed in the abortion debate. I don’t want to add to that post, but I do want to share my experience. The US has the highest maternal mortality rate in the industrialized world, and women of color are the most vulnerable when it comes to maternal care. Historically, childbirth has been extremely dangerous. I think we take it for granted that a mother is not just going to leave the birthing bed with a child, but leave it at all, but that is not the case. I was pro-choice long before I had kids, but having kids has made me even MORE pro-choice, and it’s due to the experiences I had during pregnancy and childbirth with both my sons.

I want to be very clear here. I did not almost die giving birth to my firstborn. Women do die in childbirth, and women come very close to dying. I did not almost die in childbirth.

I did, though, come very close to having a hysterectomy at the age of 30 because they couldn’t control the post-labor bleeding. My own doctor called my post-labor experience “catastrophic.” I will put the rest under the break, as I’m going to be very frank about what happened to me. When people say, “Just give the baby up for adoption!”, I want them to think about what exactly pregnancy and labor entails, and the risks that go along with growing a person in side you and then pushing it out of your body.

I learned I was pregnant in mid-June 2012. It was Day 35 of my cycle. In early July, when I was 8 weeks along, I went in for an ultrasound to confirm the pregnancy was progressing and get the first look at the fetus that would eventually become my son. During that ultrasound, they discovered I had a uterine fibroid tumor. These are basically muscular tumors, not cancerous, almost always benign. Some women have no symptoms; some can have heavier periods. The concern with pregnant women is the placement of the tumor. If it’s too close to the placenta, it can impede the growth of the fetus. If it’s too low in the uterus, it can block the passage out for the baby. Oh, and they grow exponentially during pregnancy, due to all the extra hormones floating around in there. I was sent to a specialist, who did a higher-image ultrasound, and then had frequent ultrasounds throughout my pregnancy.

The good news was the growth, while near (and, I think, ultimately under) the placenta, did not harm J’s development in any way. He was born a healthy 8lbs 5oz and was perfectly fine.

The bad news is the tumor swelled to the size of a grapefruit.

The risk of delivery with a fibroid tumor is that there is excessive bleeding. My doctor, who was not there for the delivery, later described it like this: After the baby is born, the uterus starts contracting, slowly going down to its normal, pre-pregnancy size. Bleeding is normal post-delivery. But the fibroid doesn’t clot like the other little vessels in the uterine wall. Instead, vessels the size of a pen (yes, pEn, not pIn) continue to shoot out blood with each contraction.

Think of how many pens you could fit on a grapefruit.

The hospital knew the risks. I’d been typed for blood when I arrived. They said I was bleeding a bit more than normal, but not so much as to be alarmed. I’d given birth without drugs, but now, to remove the placenta and check on the bleeding, they urged me to get some drugs.

“It would not be right to do the things we’re about to do to you without drugs.”

The drugs, I know Dilaudid was one of them, made me loopy. I couldn’t lift my head. By now it was - I don’t even know - 3? 4am? They took J to the nursery, but kept me and my husband in delivery, where they were better equipped to act if things went wrong.

Things went wrong.

They turned out the lights and Nurse Sue - who had been a godsend - said she’d be back in an hour.

And I FELT it. I felt myself bleeding. I felt the blood, too much blood, coming out of me. But I was so drugged out that I couldn’t react. My husband was asleep in the fold-out couch, six feet away, and I couldn’t wake him, because in my drug-addled mind I thought it was more important that he sleep. I tried to use the call button, but couldn’t make my arm move. And when I did, I later learned I was pressing not a button, by just a random circle I THOUGHT was the button. I kept passing out and then coming back and trying to press the button. The only thing getting me through this was knowing Nurse Sue was coming back in an hour.

And, luckily, she actually did.

Now, I was drugged up. So some things that happened I don’t really remember. The things I do remember are crystal clear.

I said, “Sue, I know I’m on drugs, but something is wrong.” And she believed me.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if my skin was a darker color.

She looked and immediately called the doctor. Lights go on, and suddenly there are a ton of people in the room. The doctor did something and I remember screaming, which seemed to piss her off, like I could help it that shoving her hand up my vagina and into my uterus didn’t feel pleasant at 5am.

They took me to surgery. I am not proud of this, but remember saying (screaming?) repeatedly, “Don’t let me die. Don’t take my uterus.” I wish I knew who was in the other delivery rooms. I’d like to apologize.

They took me to the operating room and told me to move onto the other bed. “I can’t.”

Nurse Sue said, “Throughout all this, I’ve never heard you say, ‘I can’t.’”

I got on the bed.

The anesthesiologist began to prep me. The idea of going under scares me, so, again, in my drug-addled state, I tried to bargain. “Ok, ok. I’ll take the epidural now.” I think I shocked him, because for a second he paused, then said, “Uh, I don’t think we have time to do that.” His assistant was a woman named Marzena. A Polish name. I spoke to her in broken Polish, which also surprised her.

My last thought was that I’d mis-conjugated a verb.

When I woke up, I learned they had done a D & C (Dilation and Curettage, which basically just means they scrapped all the crap out of my uterus) and inserted a balloon, which was to provide pressure on the fibroid and stop the bleeding. It was to stay there for 12 hours.

It fell out. Again, I don’t remember how soon it fell out - 2 hours, maybe? But it fell out.

To measure my blood loss, Nurse Sue, still with me, would remove clots the size of golf balls from my uterus and weigh them.

The chief resident came in and told me, quite dispassionately, that if my bleeding continued I’d be taken to radiology, where they would basically cauterized the blood vessels. “There’s not really any good research on if you could become pregnant again after that. Or we could just give you a hysterectomy, in which case you definitely won’t be able to get pregnant again.”

I burst into tears.

Nurse Sue assured me everyone hated that guy.

And then she broke protocol.

You aren’t supposed to let the new mom sleep with the baby. She could drop him or her, or accidentally smother the baby. But she took J. and put him in my arms, and told me to sleep. (My husband was still in the room.) The picture of the two of us sleeping is one of my favorites.

This is how my bleeding stopped. I’m sure of it. Holding my newborn is what calmed my body enough to let it begin to heal. I don’t care if there’s no medical reasoning to back this up. Holding J. stopped my bleeding.

We were finally transferred to maternity. They took my hematocrit, which measures the proportion of red blood cells to blood. A woman’s normal hematocrit is between 36 and 45.

Mine was 18.

I received two units of blood, and let me tell you, vampires have it figured out. I felt like a new person.

And that’s it. I went in on a Tuesday afternoon, gave birth at 1:45am on Wednesday, and went home Friday morning. I did all that for a child I wanted.

And that’s why you can’t force a woman to carry a pregnancy, why you can’t just say it’s nine months and a little pain and give the baby up for adoption. Because childbirth is not all sunshine and roses and Dads fainting and Moms giving three pushes and the baby comes out. Labor and delivery are grueling, taxing and, in spite of all our medical advancements, dangerous. I have friends whose labors didn’t progress and were forced to have emergency C-sections. I have a friend whose baby got stuck and forceps had to be used. I know one (1) woman who had a completely fine labor and delivery. Everyone else, something, be it big or small, has gone wrong.

There’s this Law and Order episode that I found here that deals with abortion. Jack McCoy says something along the lines of, “My daughter was pro-choice until she saw her first sonogram. Now...”

No. Being pregnant, delivering vaginally, experiencing massive bleeding, having a surgery to remove the fibroid, being pregnant with a toddler, having a C-section, becoming the mother of two wonderful, active, curious, pain-in-the-ass boys has made me MORE Pro-Choice. You cannot not force anyone to put their life on the line for a collection of cells. You cannot force someone to become a mother if they don’t want to BE a mother.

It is my body.

It is my life.

#Abortion #Pro-Choice #Childbirth

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sheeping-around · 5 years

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Sheeping Around Retrospective: By The Numbers

tl;dr: Scroll all the way down for the numbers.

Sheeping Around has been live on the App Store for a little over ten days now. I think it is about time I look back at the development cycle, the good parts, the bad parts and also share some sales figures while I’m at it. I’m following the trend of transparency to help other indie game developers know and understand the market of premium games, for which I gained inspiration from Eric @ Slothwerks and Arnold @ Tiny Touch Tales. I’m also inspired by the way they work: solo devs working with talented people across the world on a contract basis, and I follow the same pattern.

While I’ve worked on games in the past, this is my first official release on the App Store, and I’m really glad to have been able to reach that goal. My previous games got stuck in infinite iteration loops and never got to see the light of the day.

Inception

I have written in one of my previous posts how the idea of Sheeping Around was born. The idea began as a turn based (asymmetric) strategy game, and eventually turned into a card game that it is today. You can read more about it in the below two posts:

Sheeping Around Inception

Inspired by Card Thief and More

Inspirations of Sheeping Around and its inception as a physical card game

Development

I have around 8 years of experience as a Javascript developer. While I am familiar with other languages like Java and Objective-C/C++, my core expertise and speed of development is still in Javascript. Also, I had begun using TypeScript at work since mid 2017 and had loved it. Reminded me of the good ol’ Flash and Actionscript days.

When the physical version of Sheeping Around card game was proven to be fun enough, I began working on a web-based prototype version of it using Angular.js on the front-end and Node.js on the backend in the first week of November 2017. I deployed the system on Heroku on its free plan, and used Heroku Postgres as database of choice. (It was free upto 9000 rows, more than sufficient for a prototype.)

Initial prototype version of Sheeping Around

For the native mobile version of the game, I used cocos2d-x JS with TypeScript.

I pushed the code to GitHub as private repositories. I maintained separate repos for client and the server.

Multiplayer

Initially I had planned on Sheeping Around to be a solitaire card game, but it ended up being too similar to Card Thief. It wasn’t much fun anyway either. I decided to prototype a two player dueling game on paper, and it proved to be a lot of fun. I figured it would be much more challenging to handle a multiplayer game, but given my full-stack experience, I was confident I’d be able to do it anyway.

Architecture of Sheeping Around

Sketch, GraphicRiver and GUI

Around March 2018, I began working on the GUI of the game. I had recently switched my role to Product Design at my company Sumo Logic and had begun learning Sketch and loved it. I bought some assets off GraphicRiver and heavily modified a lot of them and put them together in Sketch.

All screen designs in Sketch

I wasn’t very happy with the initial designs, but towards the end of April things had started looking much better and professional.

Initial designs

Final designs

Google Indie Games Accelerator

The progress in the initial few months was somewhat slow. I spent time refining the balance of the game and tweaking the progression. Meanwhile I was also designing some UI for the native mobile version of the game.

By the end of June 2018, Google announced the first ever Indie Games Accelerator for games made in South East Asia. The submission deadline was July, so I started rapidly working on the mobile version for Android and iterating it really fast. By mid of July, I had the gameplay fully functional. By the end of it, I had the entire progression system and marketplace fully set up.

Some charts from the progression and reward system of the game inspired mainly by Pokemon

While I was not selected for the accelerator program, it did help me accelerate the game development process anyway and I am thankful to the accelerator program for that.

Art and Animation

I discuss a lot about art style with Rashi, and we had finalized that the characters would be anthro. Check out some concept art and final artwork for some of the characters below:

I really loved the idea of in-card animations in Card Thief, and wanted to have something similar in my game as well. I was fortunate enough to run into Robinson Millaguin in the Indie Game Developers Facebook group. He began his work on animating some of the initial cards in Spine and my mind was blown already. Check out the video below:

vimeo

You can see more of the animation GIFs on the official website for Sheeping Around.

Tragicomic Theme and Music

I had contracted someone for music, but it did not sound so fitting. It was very difficult to decide what kind of music would fit this game because it was such a unique premise. I started scouting out for tracks on AudioJungle. Farms are usually associated with country music, but I had ruled it out completely. Western style music with gut guitars and ukuleles are a close second choice associated with farm themes. Somehow that style didn’t fit either, and sounded rather cowboy-ish.

I explored all kinds of genres of music and tried to see if they fit in the game. Finally, I found that the music in Comedy genre seemed to be the most fitting. I stumbled upon the profile of AudioAgent, who had an amazing portfolio of comedy tracks. His tracks are tragicomic themed, and coincidentally, he kept adding more tracks in the genre as the game progressed.

The game now features a total of 9 comedy audio tracks by AudioAgent. (The tracks change every 10 levels.)

You can check out the tracks in the below Youtube playlists:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1Ajh9Cn23k&list=PLnTakDx63B8L0pBpjPD10VB3NJEcXj2l4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXeq713R444&list=PLnTakDx63B8IS3hr4Sd-tnZXgu5vCIoi6

Sound

I had already made a list of suitable sounds from AudioJungle, but it was from a variety of artists and didn’t seem to fit together. I was not sure if I should hire a sound designer for the project. I figured it would be a good idea to ask around anyway.

I am active on Twitter in the gamedev community, and I found Elise Kates’ profile there. She had done some amazing work in the past for games like Moss, and I thought she’d be a good candidate to help me out with the sound. And it was a great decision afterall. The sound effects added the finishing touches to the polish in the game and really brought the characters to life!

Putting It All Together

I’m glad I’ve been able to put all of this together in a single package. The pun in the name, gameplay mechanics, art, animation, sound and music all come together really well. It would be perhaps be one of my proudest achievement since it is an important skillset to have.

Translation, Screenshots, Trailer and Preview Videos

In December, I took help from the Indie Game Localization community to get the game translated in 12 languages. It was an overwhelming amount of work, about 5000 words. I maintained separate Google Sheets for each language.

But what was harder was designing screenshots and preview videos and localizing them into all languages. But it did pay off eventually because it got the game featured in most of the regions that I had localized for.

Check out the preview video below:

youtube

Robinson helped in creating a landscape trailer for the game as well, since Android needs a landscape video regardless of whether the game is landscape or not. it was more of a theatrical trailer that served as an introduction to the premise of Sheeping Around and dab a little bit into its gameplay:

youtube

Freemium, Premium or Paymium?

The hardest decision for me to take was whether to go premium or freemium (or paymium), and if premium, what would be the price point of the game. Early on I had decided that the game would be premium on iOS and free-to-play on Android, given how easy piracy is on Android (more on piracy in the Piracy section below). I had thought of keeping the game’s price to $4.99, as I had read that Card Crawl had recently upped its price to $4.99 from $2.99 and it increased their month-on-month sales by more than 2x. Turns out, it won’t work very well during release when both developer and the game are new to the market and there are no ratings and reviews. This is also why my day 2 sales were more than day 1 sales, when I dropped the price to $2.99.

My game also has in-app purchases, and most people object to the idea of IAPs in a premium game. But if you look at the top paid charts in the card game category (or even any other category for that matter), you will find that more than 70% of the games have IAPs. This model is called paymium on mobile platforms, and has only recently entered the debate alongside freemium and premium. In the PC world, most games are paid, and the concept of DLCs is fairly normal and accepted, so I don’t understand what the issue with IAPs in premium mobile games is about.

Besides, the IAPs in Sheeping Around aren’t your typical in-your-face popups that appear at the end of every game to give you a reward or to increase your life. They are subtle, just two coin packs that you can buy if need be. You probably won’t need to though.

Pre-orders and the Coming Soon Feature

I set the game to be available for preorder on 31st December 2018. That would make my first new years’ resolution to be to release this game. I set Thursday, 17th Jan as the release date. That is because App Store refreshes every Thursday and it would get greater number of days in visibility if it gets featured then. (Most features last at least a week.)

That is also when I also submitted my game and my story to Apple via App Store’s promote link, hoping to get featured.

On January 5, the game got featured in the Coming Soon section, and it started getting a little spike in pre-orders. From 1-2 per day to around 25-30 per day. On January 20, the game got featured in a lot more territories, including US, UK, South Africa, Middle East, Australia and New Zealand. I netted about 250 pre-orders from this feature. But it turns out that in some places, since Apple lets you preorder without having a linked credit card, they would fail to be billed on release of the game. Because of this, only about 200 pre-orders went through successfully. App store still shows -1/-2 net preorders days after the game’s release.

New Games We Love & Top Charts

Upon release, the game was featured in “New Games We Love” in US, China and the Greater China Area (HK, Macau, Taiwan), South-East Asia, India, UK, Europe, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. It also went on to become #3 card game in US (iPhone) during launch and stayed between #3-#5 during the first week. In China, which is the second biggest market for me, the highest it went was #9 in card games. (Competition is quite high in that category there, with most paid games priced at ¥1 ($0.15).)

I especially love the words UK editorial team used to describe the game in Games We Love.

Reception

The reviews so far have been positive, with occasional negative reviews talking about some bugs, most of which I have fixed in the week after release. Here are the current reviews and ratings stats for the game so far:

US: 4.6 / 5 (56 ratings, 32 reviews) China: 4.3 / 5 (41 ratings, 23 reviews) Thailand: 4.7 / 5 (15 ratings, 11 reviews) Germany: 4.0 / 5 (11 ratings, 6 reviews) Russia: 4.6 / 5 (8 ratings, 7 reviews) UK: 3.7 / 5 (6 ratings, 4 reviews)

Some encouraging reviews:

“I’ve only played this game for 20 minutes, and I love it already. The creativity, the idea, everything about this game is just beyond my expectations, and I can only assume how addicting this game will be.”

“It a really good game. You should make a physical card game for this game. I really like it and it’s definitely worth buying it.”

“Don’t really review apps, let alone end up playing one a day or two after I started. But this one... this one got me hooked! It’s fairly simple gameplay but sometimes it gets pretty exciting.”

“Pre-ordered it, I've played Card Monsters since release & Hearthstone for 4 years & this game is very solid & entertaining.”

“I think this game is another new twist to a card game, I can definitely see potential for this game. I can’t wait for the next update, hopefully with some new cards to use.”

“This game is family oriented and so easy to play. It has the simplicity of UNO yet with enough strategy to keep you engage but not overwhelmed. This is highly addictive and fun to play. The element of luck is always a factor but how to use the cards given is the key. The games are short but competitive. Those who love card/card battle games should download this without hesitation! Kudos! Look forward to updates to see what you guys come up with next!”

DAUs, Screen Time and Retention Rate

I use Tableau for my data visualization needs, and have custom graphs and dashboards created for all kinds of metrics. 27% of the players have played the game for at least one hour, which is quite encouraging. 4.5% of the players have been addicted and have played for more than 5 hours. I’ve been seeing an average DAU of around 750 and average total session time of over 450 hours. Not that it matters much for a premium game, but I’m tracking it anyway. In terms of retention, my day 7 retention is about 10%, which isn’t so bad. I will give it more time to see what my day 30 retention is.

Press Coverage and Critic Reviews

I had mailed a lot of media sites and YouTubers to review the game. A lot of them covered the game. Thanks to the localization effort, the game was featured in a lot of foreign language blogs.

Specifically Pocket Gamer and Pocket Tactics wrote about the game. The review from Pocket Tactics was negative with a 2.0 / 5 rating, and from Pocket Gamer was somewhat above average at 3.5 / 5 rating. Pocket Tactics review, though negative, gave me a chuckle because of their words of choice.

You can check them out here:

Pocket Gamer: A surprisingly tense, exciting and fun card battler that doesn’t quite have the tactical depth for the long haul.

Pocket Tactics: Sheeping Around looks the part, but sadly the game turns out to be as dull as you would expect for a game based on an animal that stands around in a field all day chewing grass.

The criticism though has been pretty good in these reviews, and I will add more content and depth in the future updates to address the weaknesses they have mentioned.

Piracy

One thing I wanted to point out was that about 25% of the users of Sheeping Around are using a pirated version. I was under the impression that it would be very hard to pirate an iOS game, because it would need jailbreaking and it isn’t very easy to jailbreak your iOS device. Turns out I was very wrong. There are pirated App Stores like AppEven that you can install on your device, and you can install premium iOS games for free using those stores. You don’t need to jailbreak your phone and the whole process is dead simple. Turns out these folks are abusing Enterprise App certificates for ad-hoc app distribution, and Apple hasn’t been paying much attention to them.

Within about two minutes, I was able to download a pirated version of my own game from AppEven. It even added its own ads that pop up once every few minutes that bring revenue to the owners of the pirated app store. It made me a little sad, but that’s the way it is. No matter how many attempts you make to prevent piracy in your app, the hackers will have a workaround to bypass it. They can remove the code in your app that prevents piracy, replace your ads with their own. It is their daily business.

Promotional Artwork

For games that Apple finds worthy of promotion using a banner feature or on the Today page, Apple requests developers for promotional artwork. I got this request last Monday and I submitted the artwork by Wednesday. The game hasn’t gotten a banner feature or Game of the Day yet, so I can only hope it will happen one day in the future.

By The Numbers

And finally, the moment you’d been waiting for. Sales. Sheeping Around was able to break even about 50% of its outsourcing costs (art, animation and sfx) in 10 days since launch.

The top 2 territories where the game made some decent revenue are US and China, followed by Germany and UK.

What’s next?

I’m already working on some new cards that add more variety to the gameplay. These include:

Bonus cards

Peek - Look at the opponent’s hand.

Undo - Undo the opponent’s last move. It can also potentially undo a stolen or whistled sheep.

Lucky Pendant - Draw half the number of cards in your hand (rounded off).

Shepherd cards

Fence N (N = 2, 3, 4) - Build a fence around all sheep preventing any of them from being stolen for N turns.

Electric Fence N (N = 2, 3) - Build an electric fence around all sheep preventing any of them from being lured or stolen for N turns.

Quarantine N (N = 1, 2, 3) - Cure all sheep of Infestation or Intoxication by N turns.

Vaccinate N (N = 3, 4) - Prevent Infestation or Intoxication on all sheep for the next N turns.

Thief cards

Infest N (N = 2, 3, 4) - Infest all sheep with pests to prevent them from being whistled for N turns.

Intoxicate N (N = 2, 3) - Intoxicate sheep to prevent them from being grazed or whistled for N turns.

Thrash N (N = 1, 2, 3) - Damage a Fence or an Electric Fence and reduce its value by N turns.

Termites (N = 3, 4) - Spread termites to prevent building a Fence or an Electric Fence for the next N turns.

Changes to existing cards

Rescue N (N = 1, 2, 3) - Reduce the effect of Trap, Infestation or Intoxication by N turns on one sheep.

Distract N (N = 1, 2, 3) - Reduce the effect of Guard, Fence or Electric Fence by N turns on one sheep.

You can already add an ally that unlocks at Lv. 20 to the game. Future updates may include upto 5 allies in total:

Shepherd’s side

Beaver - Jack Kim (Lv. 10)

Llama - Fuzzy Wumpkins (Lv. 20)

Sheepdog - Casper Cloud (Lv. 30)

Emu - Emily McCoy (Lv. 40)

Donkey - Muriel Miller (Lv. 50)

Thief’s side

Raven - Merlin Kook (Lv. 10)

Eagle - Cradoc McClaw (Lv. 20)

Coyote - Roxy Fang (Lv. 30)

Badger - Agent Chaos (Lv. 40)

Bear - Boris Rockpaw (Lv. 50)

Additional Features I’ll also be working on some features like: - Expressions and dialogs - Offline mode vs AI - Pass and play multiplayer - Quests

Conclusion

Sheeping Around was a fun project, and unlike my other shelved projects, it saw the light of the day, and it is a proud achievement for me in that regard. For the past 14 months, I’ve worked part-time at a consistent pace on this project (and full time for a few months). Especially as a solo developer being able to develop a PvP multiplayer game where people in US can battle people in China with servers located in London, I think it is a great feat.

Look forward to more updates in the future on this blog. Follow the blog on Tumblr or me on Twitter to keep yourself up to date on the progress of the game.

#sheepingaround #postmortem #indiegamedev #gamedev #gamedesign #ios #appstore

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ladyjenise · 6 years

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Oh look, more Star Wars thoughts...

Behind the cut (or skip if you’re on mobile)

On Rebirth, Burning Books, and Why Rey Being Nobody Scares People

I really liked the part where Yoda burns the tree.

But.

I didn’t at first. I mean, it was funny as hell and I enjoyed it, but something sat weirdly with me initially. Maybe it was because I thought he had burned the books, too, and book burning is a rather dangerous metaphor to play around with ("Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.", etc). However, I was pleased as punch to see that Rey, of all people, had actually stolen them from the tree without Luke’s knowledge. It’s a rather Promethean sort of thing to do on Rey’s part, freeing the knowledge of the Jedi from an old god stand-in (Luke) to bring it to the people (this new generation). And also it’s a great reminder that, at heart, Rey’s scavenger instincts kicked in. It’s probably a great tell to the audience that, although Yoda speaks irreverently about the books, Rey still sees them as valuable knowledge to be saved.

And they are, these books, even if they are not, as Yoda put it, “page turners”. There’s knowledge to be gleamed from them, even if it’s the wrong language. It’s valuable to know what’s been tried, what was known. Even if Rey and others find in the texts things they disagree with, it’s good to know. It’s good to keep an open mind, which is what the movie keeps bashing over our heads throughout almost every single character arc (assumptions are made by many, and no one is right about what happens).

There’s a message here, a warning, about history, and how it should be treated. And there’s an important lesson here about Kylo Ren and Ben Solo, too:

History is to be respected and remembered, but not worshiped. There is a great danger in that, one that fails to accept that all things must change in order to survive.

When Yoda burned the tree, he laughed with delight. I did, too. As scary as it was, it was also cathartic. The tree was old and dead long ago. Not so much a tree anymore as dead wood, awaiting the fire to consume it and return it to the earth. It’s no coincidence that, earlier in the movie, when Rey reaches out to the Force, she sees the natural cycle of birth, decay, death, and renewal. All things must die in order to return to the earth and be reborn. So too did the old tree, so too did Luke, and so too will Kylo Ren.

So where does Kylo fit into all of this? When he tells (yells at) Rey to forget the past, he isn’t entirely wrong. He isn’t entirely right, either. He’s also a huge fucking hypocrite too. Like Yoda, he’s not afraid to burn the past, but he wants to burn too much. Kylo would burn the books too, if he could, which is a mistake. He wants to completely obliterate the past.

Without history, we are monsters.

I’m paraphrasing a speech made by a history professor at my commencement ceremony years ago, but it stuck with me (it probably helps that my major was in history). What he was trying to say was that we don’t come from nothing. We all carry with us thousands of years of history. It is encoded into our societies. Traditions, social rules, all these things are built by history.

When Kylo gets frustrated with Rey he brings up her past, accusing her of being stuck in it. He wants her to be more like him, a man who disowned his family and cast his birth name aside to be reborn a monster. But Kylo is not the man she wants. The man she wants is the one Kylo has been trying to burn away: Ben Solo.

Ben Solo is man with a loving family, a compassionate heart, the one who chose Rey over Snoke. When Ben Solo dies, Kylo Ren -- the monster -- is born. Kylo Ren has no family, no past.

And no future, either.

When Rey rejects him, Kylo is clearly not happy. He can’t think properly. He turns all his attention and power onto Luke and the falcon instead of going into the rebel base and wiping out what remains of the Resistance. It’s almost like Ben Solo is sabotaging Kylo from within. He’s making him remember all his failures, his petty anger, his despair, and keeping him from making the decisions that would have made Kylo a deadly successful leader of the galaxy.

But Kylo can’t be what he wants to be because he can’t have everything he wants. As he did with Snoke and Rey, he must choose between Rey and being Supreme Leader. What he will choose is anyone’s guess, but there’s more pointing to him ultimately choosing Rey in some fashion. I will note that I said he’ll choose Rey but that does not mean Rey will choose him. She was going to, until he fucked it all up with his “offer” in the Throne Room (Kylo Ren: king of the backhanded compliment). His battle now is his alone. No one can save Ben Solo from Kylo Ren but Ben Solo himself. Will he? That’s a great question we’ll be debating the next two years.

Why does Rey’s past haunt Kylo Ren?

I know what you’re going to say: “Does it?” I’m going to argue that yes, it does. Even in The Force Awakens, Kylo Ren is searching Rey’s mind and can’t seem to believe she’s just a scavenger. I’ve seen it already brought up (but don’t ask me where because I have read a lot of movie impressions in the past 24 hours), but someone did mention that Kylo represents the endless debate about Rey’s parentage by fans. It’s true that this movie does seem to be filled with meta and self-awareness, but why would Kylo Ren fear Rey’s past? Why would he even care?

He cares because we care so much. Look at how much debate there has been the past two years about it. Everyone had a theory about it after the movie. And now it turns out that Rey’s parents were actually not special or important to the story beyond making Rey’s life look particularly shitty. But that’s the thing: their lack of specialness is important to the plot in that it reminds us that yes, people can be born powerfully Force-sensitive without having any specific lineage.

Rey coming from nothing would actually scare the shit out of Kylo. Why? Because he comes from a family of super-powerful Force-users. He thinks he was born to it. He thinks it’s his destiny. It makes “sense”. It makes it seem pre-arranged and orderly. Rey coming from nothing is organic, weird, makes no sense (to him). But it’s how he’s viewing the Force. I can’t remember the line, but i’m pretty sure its the discussion between Luke and Rey about how the Force isn’t some tool. It’s just there. Kylo seems to see the Force as a tool, and if he can’t control all aspects of it (including who gets to be powerful with it), then what’s the fucking point?

Kylo can’t control the Force like he thinks he can, and Rey is a reminder of that. And going forward, Kylo’s not going to forget it. He’s now Supreme Leader and possibly the most powerful man in the galaxy, and Rey, and all the other little Force-users springing up around the galaxy, are proof that that title doesn’t mean shit.

This is the past. What is the future?

Where does Kylo Ren go from here? He’s not got a lot of great options. Rey is loose, on his father’s “piece of junk” ship, flying around the galaxy with what is left of the Resistance. She’s a threat to him in many ways. And sure, you can say he was just using Rey to take down Snoke, but his super pathetic “please” to Rey sure sounded genuine. So too did his longing stare as Rey shut the door to the falcon as he sat kneeling alone in the rebel base. Everything in the story so far, across two movies, points to Rey being his obvious weakness. He wants her with him, and pretty bad, too. But he thought he could have it all: Supreme Leader AND super hot co-ruler wife? Why the hell not.

But Rey said no. And he didn’t take that too well. And now he’s alone, and that must just fill him with dread. Kylo is now Kylo’s worst enemy. His future battle will be against himself. He’s got to sacrifice to become the man Rey deserves. He’s got to let the forest burn for so that it can live again. He’s got to burn Kylo Ren to free Ben Solo.

He’s not going to like it, it’s not going to be easy, but damn will it feel cathartic to do it.

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aetherschreiber · 7 years

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Fic: Hedge Knight (notes)

So there you are! Thanks for reading! I'm under no delusions that this is going to get a lot of attention, being as the fandom is tiny at this point. So please be aware that any feedback you can give is precious as gold and will be greatly treasured.

This was the result of a very old plot bunny of about twenty years of age. So, older than most acutal bunnies. Back in the day, it was not very clearly worked out, which is probably why it didn't get written until now. This actually bears very little resemblance to the original plot bunny, since 20 years ago I was a silly fifteen-year-old girl without a clue. My historical nerding and ability to do research is what finally really brought this thing to light. It just didn't have a chance, back in the day.

And, while working on this, it bred some other plot bunnies that I might try to nuture in the future. Not sure, yet. We'll see if they come together.

Now, excuse me while I nerd this out...

Because I'm a huge nerd, I went digging around in Irish mythology for some stuff. I've made a few assumptions on stuff that was never clearly established in the show itself, so I thought I would make a few notes here.

Regarding Emain Macha...

The show never gave a name for the village that was in the shadow of Kells Castle. I wanted to have one and the Ulster Cycle calls the town that Conchobar mac Nessa rules from Emain Macha. Plus, I liked the story of the way the town got its name. So I stole it and ran like Macha in the horse race. Nothing too ground-breaking here.

I went and got down and nerdy with the characters's names and some side-stories, too. It's always kind of bothered me that none of them had full, period style names (because, like I said, I'm a nerd). Deirdre and Conchobar would certainly have had something more than just a given name, as would Ivar. Rohan and Angus are somewhat more open to interpretation, so I put my own spin on it. Plus, I'm in the SCA, so I just couldn't help myself while digging through medieval Irish names.

Regarding the name Rohan Draganta Ban Ui Meith Macha...

The conceit of Rohan's clan name is that he is descended from the war goddess Macha. This distinction would have come from his father's side of the family, ostensibly a Kellsman. Draganta I threw in there as a sort of "middle name" because it would have been in there somewhere, but I'm just not sure how it would have been lenited, since as far as I can tell it's not actually an Irish name.

When you get right down to it, Rohan is basically CuChullain, who was not born with that name and only was called that after defeating a giant hound (see Tash Hound of Temra, and may other references throughout the show). As a young boy, since no one in the village knew anything about his epic destiny, he was called by the villagers of Emain Macha "Rohan Ban" meaning "Rohan the fair" because of his hair. The moniker stuck, even after he finds out his identity as the Warrior Draganta.

Regarding the name Deirdre inghean Conchobair Ui Rudhraighe...

There isn't a whole lot here that needs to be explained. This is a straight up lineage type of a name. It basically says that she's Conchobar's daughter, who is in turn a male descendant of a man named Rudraige. This clan name is derived from a high-king of Ireland, Rudraige, whose son was a king of Ulster (or in this context, Kells). I never actually got around to actually using the name in the fic, but it's here in the notes for completeness' sake.

In my head, Deirdre's mother was named Eithne. She was killed by Maeve when Deirdre was a little girl. Don't know why that's relevant. But there you are.

The show pretty much tossed out the actual Irish mythology of Deirdre and Conchobar. Trust me, this is a good thing. The Conchobar of myth was a real creeper and what he did to the Deirdre of myth was unsettling and I'm pretty sure illegal in modern life (and no, I don't just mean killing her husband; that's DEFINITELY illegal). So I pretty much tossed out anything of the names of the characters from myth and more or less treated them as new characters with their own backstories.

Regarding the name Angus Dubh o Cumhaill...

Angus effectively equates to Conall Cernach, the best friend of CuChullain.

In my fic, he is a descendant of Cailte mac Ronain, nephew of the last king of the Fianna, through his son Oisin. In actual Irsh myth, Conall and Cailte were not related (in fact, one is from the Ulster Cycle and the other from the Fenian Cycle and here I've even reversed their time periods), but a relating of the two characters is used for story purposes, because what the hell? The show didn't care about that stuff, either.

All of this was on his mother's side of the family. His mother's brother, Cet mac Magach, was told by a druid that the baby would one day kill his uncle. Cet was afraid of this and tried to kill Angus shortly after he was born. This is based on the story of Conall and Cet from Irish myth, but around there is where the similarities end and artistic licence takes over. When Cet did not succeed, he fled to Temra. Angus' mother and father then left him with an old lady named Brighde in Emain Macha to hide him from any further attempts on his life by Cet. This is why he was basically brought up as a street urchin along side Rohan.

The old lady gave him the moniker Dubh because of his dark hair. But Angus never really liked it, so he didn't perpetuate it after Brighde died. The fact that Cet refers to him as such is the result of a very old rumor finally making its way to Cet after many years.

The story Angus tells of besting the soldier Anluan is based on the Tale of Mac Da Tho's Pig. In that, Conall wins the debate by casually tossing Anluan's freshly-severed head to Cet. I uh... toned it down, just a smidge.

Conall kind of has a history of severing heads. I pretty much left that out. It didn't exactly say "Angus" to me...

Regarding the name Ivar ibn Idris Adar as-Salar...

No, you didn't miss this name, either. Again, never got around to using it in the fic. But it was a fun excersise.

The idea for Ivar is that he is a prince in pre-Muslim Syria. He is the son of Idris, a prince, of the clan Salar. In that culture, the title of Prince has a different connotation. Ivar's father is not necessarily a king and Ivar will not necessarily succeed him. In fact, given that it was his task to guard the silver chalice, and that he was sent to retrieve it, and that he was free to pledge help to Rohan and Kells, it seems likely that he is a younger son of a local prince, under a sultan, and not likely to inherit.

Random note, Ivar is NOT a Syrian name and is most likely a derivation of the Scandanavian name Ivor. Why the show didn't go ahead and find an actual name of the type of heritage that Ivar was clearly supposed to have, I really don't know and I was rather disappointed to learn. But Ivar isn't terribly glaring in its ethic displacement, so I ran with it and chose a name sort of like it for his father in order to help it fit in.

Finally, in reference to the title of the fic...

Yes, I am aware that the term "hedge knight" first showed up in the Song of Ice and Fire series. However, that wasn't what inspired the title of this fic. Rather it was a fantastic song I heard around a campfire in the SCA. I know the bard in question as Lady Cobflaith (she's a really awesome person with a lot of talent!). The song itself has very little to do with the plot of the fic at all, but it did introduce me to the idea of a penniless knight and the idea that someone who might not seem to others to be worthy can do great things, even if only in the eyes of the few or the one.

Oh, and one more note. Mace fighting is weird and hard to write. A sword girl like me, who depends on keeping covered and breaking tempos, can't wrap her head around a weapon that works with a rhythm and leaves parts of the wielder open to thrust attacks at regular intervals. So, those bits probably kind of sucked and I'm sorry.

Sláinte!

#fanfic #fanfiction #mystic knights of tir na nog #nerdy writer's notes

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syasyaesthetics-blog · 4 years

Audio

RPG by Kehlani and 6lack is probably my most replayed song for the past year. I almost never get tired of it. In RPG, Kehlani describes her relationship as a “Role-Playing Game”, where her lover’s actions/role are what she chooses and asks him/her of. Kehlani provides the feminine perspective of the relationship to the song, while 6lack’s verse provides the masculine perspective of the said relationship to the song. Kehlani has mentioned that the major theme of this song is about insecurity in a relationship.

“You told me I'm beautiful 'Cause I told you you don't tell me enough You're lying next to me 'Cause I told you you don't touch me enough Now you told me you stay with me 'Cause I told you you've been working too much You told me you care for me 'Cause I told you you don't show me your love” The Parallelisms in the Pre-chorus presents a Binary of action/instruction. Kehlani emphasises how her partner, albeit does his best to fulfil her needs, are only doing it because he was told or hinted to do so. Like a character in a Role-Playing Game who’s controlled by the player. Since the song starts off with this pre-chorus, Kehlani sets the Tone of the song with revealing her dissatisfaction with the nature of their relationship.

“Show me your love, show me your love Show me your love, show me your love Show me your love, show me your love Show me your love, show me your love Show me your love, show me your love”

The chorus then follows with the Repetition of the phrase “Show me your love”, which talks about her massive need for her partner to show her his love, where Kehlani doubts her partner’s motives and actions. The fact that (assuming) almost all of his effort are based on her complaints and commands, she confuses them with him simply following orders, not because he really wants to do it. She feels as if her partner is insincere in his doings, which then fuels her insecurity of their relationship. Hence, the repetition of “Show me your love” represents her immense need of reassurance, specifically of her idea of love.

“Don't you think that we're too old to play your game? And we ain't go through all of this to stay the same But you can pick a player just so I can get my way (Way, way) And I think you do this 'cause you realise I won't wait (Wait, wait)”

The Erotema in the start of Kehlani’s verse “Don’t you think that we’re too old to play your game?” which really just means that she’s beginning to feel tired of how he’s acting in their relationship. Listeners learn that the partner behaves in that manner “pick a player just so I can get my way” because Kehlani “won’t wait”, she does not settle for less. She believes that he’s just doing whatever he can simply to keep her around, not because he truly appreciates her.

The tone in this part of the verse is very accusatory, in which she shifts the blame on her partner for making their relationship how it is. “I see right through every look in your eyes I hear right through every fairytale lie Won't say a word, but the stories you write They tell me enough”

It’s revealed that the partner also resorts to deception and hiding things from her, although for the cause of keeping her, but it upsets her even more and worsens her insecurity and distrust. However, she knows when he does not tell the truth. There’s not enough information from the verse to disclose how exactly, or is it just natural instinct, and there’s no way to tell exactly how she reacts to it. But the line “the stories you write, They tell me enough” hints that she takes his act of lying as the ultimatum - the fact that he chose to lie to her and hide things from her would mean he doesn’t really actually love and/or care about her. And that’s enough of a message for her.

After another round of the pre-chorus and chorus comes 6lack’s verse.

“I don't wanna make you think That I'm sayin' things 'cause you prompted me Been working with a lag, a fucked up past I want you to be proud of me It seems like day one, you was fond of me Same shit I felt for you Then I fell for you, fell in life It's embarrassing to tell the truth”

6lack starts off his verse by unfolding that the reason for his behaviour is the weight of his “fucked up past”. Nevertheless, he’s trying hard to make this right, as he fears of screwing what he has with her up like he did with whatever has happened in his past. He doesn’t want her to think that he’s only doing things because she prompts him to do so, he’s trying hard to please her so that she’s “proud” of him.

Here we see that; it’s not that the man is a bad partner, it’s just that his way of exhibiting his feelings does not resonate well to her.

“But now it's to the point where my love is up for debate And maybe it's too late to shake I think love is shown, you think love is spoken And we both comin' from the same place” The Parallelism in the third line “I think love is shown, you think love is spoken” shows how the couple in question has a conflicting idea of how love translates to each other - which sparks frustration from the both of them. Nonetheless they come “from the same place”, in a sense where they both truly love each other.

“For every song that I write is a note to self Note to God, note to you Don't count me out Besides this and my daughter, I only got love for you” This part of 6lack’s verse reassures his sincerity to the woman he loves. “note to self, note to God, note to you” and “Besides this and my daughter, I only got love for you” emphasises how he puts her as a priority - a very important part of his life. “I've been suppressed, I ain't the best Roll up the problems, smoke all the stress We got way too much shit on the line But you can't see, emotions got you blind Past life aggression, life time lessons, carryin' a message Real life angels, battlin' depression” In the last part of 6lack’s verse, he pleads his partner to understand where he is coming from and his situation - “Past life aggression, life time lessons, carryin’ a message, Real life angels, battlin’ depression” - for a change. He is already struggling with dealing with his problems, and with the combination of issues she gives him, they “got way too much shit on the line”. However she fails to see life from his side because of her own emotions. The song then ends with the chorus sang by both Kehlani and 6lack. “Show me your love, show me your love (Show you love) Show me your love, show me your love Show me your love, show me your love (Show you love) Show me your love, show me your love Show me your love (Show you love) Show me your love (Show, show) Show me your love, show me your love (Show you love) Show me your love, show me your love Show me your love, show me your love (Show you love) Show me your love, show me your love Show me your love (Show you love) Show me your love (Show, show)” The final thing they both sang is just “Show me your love/Show you love” repeatedly. This goes to show that - The feminine voice in this song will forever be stuck in an endless cycle of insecurity as she will never internalise the love from her partner, no matter how hard he tries - There is no sense of resolution to both of their own concerns, therefore no matter what they will both be implicitly frustrated with each other, despite genuinely caring for one another. which I find, overall, really beautiful. This is my first time attempting to analyse a full song and this might not be accurate, and I might miss out on a lot of other details. I’m just using my basic A-level Literature Paper 7 Unseen Texts skills and having fun :-)

#syasyaanalysesmusic #kehlani #6lack #music #songs #lyrics

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mikemortgage · 5 years

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Why central banks — including Canada’s — are finding it so hard to get interest rates back to ‘normal’ territory

Central bankers have long been crafting analogies to explain what they do — think taking away the punch bowl. Few have been as devoted to the art as Stephen Poloz.

He’s trying to steer the economy back to a place where it can support the kind of borrowing costs that counted as normal before 2008. But Poloz’s metaphors often have to do with unforeseen hardships when you’re on the way home — sailors blown off course, or drivers caught in winter storms. Because, like many global peers, he’s finding the journey hard to map out.

One reason is a feature of today’s developed economies that isn’t normal at all by past standards: their mountain of private debt. Canada has some of the most leveraged households anywhere — leading analysts to question how much higher rates can go, and even whether they’ve already gone too far.

Consumer debt stabilizing, but Canadian banks face ‘significant’ risk if economy goes south, Moody’s warns

Canadian home prices just had worst February since the financial crisis

Canada has two economies. Let’s hope the government is paying attention to both

With five interest-rate increases since 2017, the Bank of Canada is one of a handful to embark on sustained hiking. Poloz has even won international recognition for developing frameworks to manage the process. But there’s been no increase since October, and the Ottawa-based bank said last week that the cycle’s immediate future looks increasingly uncertain amid a global slowdown. Like the Federal Reserve, it’s essentially on hold, waiting to see what happens.

‘I Feel It’

Poloz acknowledges he’s getting heat over higher borrowing costs, in a country where so many households have a direct stake. People write to him. “Believe me, I feel it,” he said in an interview. “It’s not a theoretical exercise.”

That helps explain the folksy analogies — and also Poloz’s discretionary approach. He shuns the precision of models, sees data more in terms of feeling a pulse than feeding a machine, and recognizes that central banking involves mystery as well as technical expertise.

The goal is to assure as wide a chunk of the public as possible that policy makers won’t hike unless they’re sure the economy can cope with higher borrowing costs. As long as inflation isn’t a threat, they’ll put growth first.

In the global monetary debate after 2008, Poloz has often been on the dovish side — particularly early in his term.

The concern, then and now, is that cheap money is a zero-sum game. It brings spending forward, but slows it down in the future, and adds financial vulnerabilities — like high household debt and elevated housing prices in cities like Toronto and Vancouver.

Gauge of Health

Poloz counters by pointing out that the leverage already out there makes tightening risky too. Plus, he sees potential long-term benefits from frontloading demand.

Exports and investment remain below pre-crisis levels as a share of the economy, leaving Canada reliant on consumption and housing. Wage gains are smaller than in the past. The number of new firms being created, an important metric for Poloz, is lacklustre. What if Canada’s economy is on the cusp of an investment boom that may not be detectable yet, and companies are holding back because they lack confidence? Productivity typically picks up late in the business cycle, and policy makers shouldn’t get in the way of that by removing stimulus too quickly.

Yet, if the purpose of low rates has been to nurse the economy back to normal, then the ability to raise them should be the ultimate gauge of health.

With the jobless rate at four-decade lows, and underlying inflation back near the two per cent target, there were signs that the economy was nearing its capacity — which is why Poloz began to hike.

Stuck Halfway

The Bank of Canada has been envisaging a final resting place for rates around three per cent. But so far it’s only got about halfway there. And as other central banks scale back their expectations, investors are anticipating that Poloz will have to follow.

Markets no longer believe he’ll be able to raise rates any further — or that Canada’s economy, burdened by heavy debt and aging demographics, can grow much faster than the current, modest pace. Ten-year Canadian bond yields are stuck below two per cent, lower even than they were on Poloz’s first day on the job in 2013.

That raises an awkward question for Poloz, and maybe for some of his central-bank peers too: Has monetary policy already done all it can?

As he prepares to enter the final year of his seven-year term, Poloz could lay claim to be one of Canada’s most successful central bankers ever. The country is closer to a state of full employment and stable prices than at any time since the 1960s — exactly the sort of benchmarks policy makers are supposed to aim for.

It’s just that one of the slowest recoveries on record wouldn’t be a very satisfying finish line. Most economists currently put potential growth at no higher than two per cent. In the last six quarters the economy hasn’t even managed that, averaging 1.6 per cent.

As well as telling stories about journeys home, Poloz also likes to invoke “Mother Nature” and argue that economies are capable of regenerating themselves. In the interview, he expressed confidence that Canada can climb back toward the faster growth it once took for granted — if “all the ingredients work out.”

“I see no reason why we should settle for our two per cent trend-line,” he said.

–With assistance from Erik Hertzberg.

Bloomberg.com

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#IFTTT #Financial Post

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droneseco · 6 years

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Lenovo’s Watch X Is An Attractive But Terrible Smartwatch

Our verdict of the Lenovo Watch X: The Lenovo Watch X is an affordable and well-equipped hybrid smartwatch. However, given its poor overall performance, your $70 would be better spent elsewhere. 310

High prices and a lack of compelling, unique features have meant that smartwatches never really became a mainstream product. Hybrid smartwatches have begun to fill the void, combining some of the best smart features with a traditional timepiece at a fraction of the cost. Lenovo’s latest, the Watch X, is an affordable entry in the hybrid smartwatch market. So, how does it hold up?

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Read on as we take a closer look, and at the end of this review we’ve got one shiny new Lenovo Smart X watch to giveaway to one lucky reader.

Specifications

Display: 1.5 inch OLED

Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.0

Sensors: Optical Heart Rate, Pedometer, Sleep Tracking

Battery: 600mAh

Watch Casing: Zinc alloy

Band: Stainless Steel, Milanese

Weight: 0.0810 kg

Dimensions: 9.65 x 1.67 x 0.48 inches

Waterproof Rating: Unspecified

Price at time of writing: $70 from GearBest.com

Design

Based on initial impressions, you’d be forgiven for mistaking the Watch X with a regular wristwatch. The only obvious hallmark of a smart device is the stainless steel Milanese strap with a magnetic clasp often bundled with fitness wearables. However, because the watch itself has a metal back, the strap continually gets stuck to it. This isn’t a problem when it’s actually on your wrist, but is quite annoying when attempting to store or charge the watch.

The main watch face has just four hour-markers at 2, 4, 8, and 10. There are also a few significantly smaller ones for minutes 5, 25, 35, and 55. There are no second hands to be found, with two reasonably clear hour hands. These hands are shorter than usual to make way for the OLED digital display towards the bottom of the watch face.

The grayscale digital display is minimal, with a width of just 0.5 inches. Lenovo does a reasonably good job of fitting everything into that small space. The text is readable and sits alongside easily distinguishable icons. As with many wearables, the watch has a ‘raise to wake’ feature, so moving your wrist will light up the display.

Where you’d usually find the stem of the watch (the knob on the side for adjusting the time), is where you’ll find the Watch X’s single physical button. While it might look like a stem, you can’t use it to set the time. Press the button, and the display will turn on. Multiple presses cycle through the various menu items. The rear of the watch is where you will find the charging connection and the optical heart rate sensor.

Features

The Lenovo Watch X doesn’t have many of the features we now view as standard with smartwatches. There is no color screen, music playback, GPS, or SIM card support. But, for the price, the Watch X is well equipped. For the health-conscious, there is sleep tracking, continuous optical heart rate measurement, and a pedometer. Some of this data is accessible from the watch itself under the Activity, Heart Rate, Sleep, Alarm, and Run.

Activity

The first menu option on the Watch X gives a brief overview of your activity that day. Once you’ve selected the Activity option, the watch will begin cycling through your stats. Your total step count, kcal burnt, total active minutes, and distance are all displayed.

As a regular Fitbit user, I have a rough idea of how many steps I do on an average day. Rather than wearing the Watch X and comparison device at the same time, I gathered data with the watch over a few days and compared it to past Fitbit data. For the most part, the two correlated. The steps and distance of my regular walks were more-or-less consistent across both devices.

Heart Rate

Optical heart rate sensors have been a standard feature on most wearable devices released in the past few years. That said, they don’t often pop up on devices as affordable as the Watch X, so it’s a welcome inclusion. Their accuracy is debatable though, and so shouldn’t be relied on for medical decisions. The heart rate sensor on the Watch X was broadly in line with my historical Fitbit data. Although there were sudden spikes in heart rate, these were caused by a chronic medical condition, rather than an error on the device.

Sleep

The science of sleep is still in its infancy, so while there are many products out there that claim to aid or monitor your sleep, you shouldn’t rely on them as definitive. In this case, it does require wearing the watch to bed every night. I’ve used my Fitbit and phone-based apps to monitor my sleep for quite some time, and the data gathered by the Watch X broadly matched.

Alarm

Fortunately, the alarm feature is nice and straightforward. Using the app, you can set multiple alarms on your watch. The alarm syncs to the watch via Bluetooth. When it’s time, you’ll be alerted with a pulsing vibration and the text ‘Alarm’ on the watch. You can even schedule recurring alarms for getting you out of bed in the morning. Fortunately, the Watch X performs this relatively simple task with ease.

Run

Like many activity trackers, you can use the Watch X to track your run. However, as the watch doesn’t have in-built GPS, all it does it track your steps and place the run into a separate area in the app. Still, if monitoring your runs from one device is important to you, then the Watch X may be the hybrid for you.

Setup

For all the hype around the Watch X—it reportedly sold out within 15 seconds—its specifications are incredibly tough to nail down definitively. Every site says something slightly different, and the watch itself only comes with a small leaflet, all in Chinese. It’s seemingly just there to encourage you to scan a QR code to download the companion Android or iOS app. Incidentally, the site linked to the QR code failed to load, so I had to find the correct app from the Google Play Store manually.

Unlike many gadgets which are pre-charged to a point, the Watch X arrives with no charge. With no instructions on how to use the watch, it wasn’t clear if I hadn’t turned it on, it wasn’t charged, or didn’t work. After charging for three and a half hours, the watch was fully charged. Following some experimentation, pressing down and holding the stem button turns the watch on.

After powering on, the watch didn’t display the correct time. As you’re not able to manually set this on the device, you have to turn to the app. The app’s calibration settings state “When the hands stop rotating, please enter current time to calibrate.” Not only did the hands not rotate, but entering the current time did absolutely nothing.

After multiple attempts and some online research, it turns out that you don’t enter the current time. Instead, you enter the incorrect time currently displayed on the watch itself. Counter-intuitively, the watch then syncs to the correct time. It’s so obvious! Fortunately, you don’t have to set the watch up more than once. But the initial experience of the watch is less than ideal. In many ways, it is the absolute antithesis of Apple’s “it just works” philosophy.

Lenovo Watch App

The companion app is undoubtedly the weakest part of the Watch X experience. Even once you’ve managed to find and download the correct app, the on-boarding and initial setup is a mess. Every time you open the app, a full-screen advert for the Watch X Plus (a pricier edition of the watch with barometric pressure sensors and Roman numerals) displays for five seconds. A smaller banner ad is permanently placed inside the app too.

You’d expect an app named Lenovo Watch to deal exclusively with features and data generated by the watch. Instead, the app is a fitness tracking app, which also happens to include watch data. But that’s not made clear anywhere, with the Workout section prominently displayed on the first screen. Workout options include run, climb, ride, and something called Details but with a swimming icon. Run data can be generated by the watch, while the swim data is only for the Watch X Plus. The other two options are phone-only.

Under the watch settings, there is a section named Funny Function. Included under that banner are: remote shutter, heart rate, smart alarm, and smart reminder. Smart alarm is the previously mentioned recurring alarms function. The Smart reminder feature is actually about receiving notifications on your Watch X. There are options for both call and message reminders. Despite many attempts, I could get neither to work.

The most confusing options are remote shutter and heart rate. Remote shutter supposedly allows you to operate your phone’s camera from the watch, but also never worked. You’d expect the heart rate option to allow you to access the heart rate data from the watch. Instead, it activates your phone’s flash and asks you to place your finger over the light to measure your heart rate. This didn’t work either.

Performance

The Watch X is apparently waterproof, but after some research, I found that it is variously listed as: waterproof, not waterproof, waterproof up to 8ATM, and potentially IP68 rated. With no clear answer, I wore the watch in the shower to put it to the test. After total immersion, it had no apparent damage and still functioned as expected. The Q&A section on the Gearbest website even suggests the Watch X is suitable for swimming, contradicting the in-app statement that swimming data is only available on the Watch X Plus. Or perhaps it’s safe for swimming, but you won’t get any data out of it? Who knows.

Similarly, the battery specifications of the Watch X are up for debate. While some say that it includes a CR2302 watch battery, the fact that you have to charge it suggests otherwise. It’s possible that the watch battery would provide backup power to time-keeping part of the watch. However, when it was initially out of power, the watch hands didn’t move either.

Lenovo claims 45 days standby time on a full charge, but you’re likely to get closer to five days real world usage. This isn’t terrible and is a far cry from charging it every night. However, the Ticwatch S—a fully featured Wear OS device—lasts a full two days too.

Is The Lenovo Watch X The Hybrid Smartwatch For You?

On paper, the Lenovo Watch X is an intriguing device. Hybrid smartwatches dial down the tech, but bring affordability to a mostly high-price market. The Watch X is waterproof and can theoretically replace your fitness tracker with its inbuilt heart rate monitor and pedometer. Even more surprisingly the Watch X actually looks stylish. You can’t ask more of a smartwatch that only costs $70.

However, the great design is let down by infuriating and, at times, downright sloppy software. Most of the Watch X’s features are found on equally affordable fitness trackers. Until Lenovo addresses the app’s shortcomings, you are probably better off avoiding the Watch X and opting for a straight up budget fitness tracker like the Mi Band 3. That is unless you like the Watch X’s timepiece design. In which case, save yourself the hassle and just buy a normal watch.

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