#i did get to see a paradox ending ive never seen before this game is so unserious sometimes its aslkjdfaslkh | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

the-desolated-quill · 5 years

Text

Quill’s Swill - The Worst Of 2018

Congratulations dear reader. You survived 2018. And you know what that means. It’s time for another best of/worst of list. Welcome to Quill’s Swill 2018. A giant septic tank for the various shit the entertainment industry produced over the course of the year. The films, games, TV shows and various other media that got on my bad side. As always please bear in mind that this is only my subjective opinion (if you happen to like any of the things on this list, good for you. I’m glad someone did) and that obviously I haven’t seen everything 2018 has to offer for one reason or another. In other words, sorry that Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald isn’t on here. I’m sure it is as terrible as some have been suggesting. I just never got around to watching it.

Okay everyone. Grab your breathing masks and put on your rubber gloves. Let’s dive into this shit pile.

Hold The Sunset

The news that John Cleese would be returning to the world of BBC sitcoms was incredibly exciting, being a massive Fawlty Towers fan and all. Unfortunately Hold The Sunset was not quite what I had in mind. It’s one of those rare breed of situation comedies that chooses to offer no actual comedy. It’s not a sitcom. It’s a sit. Like Scrubs or The Big Bang Theory.

An elderly couple plan to elope abroad only for Alison Steadman’s son to barge in, having left his wife, and forcing them to put their plans on hold. Hence the title ‘Hold The Sunset.’ It’s like a cross between As Time Goes By and Sorry, but if all the humour and relatability were surgically removed by a deadpan mortician. The characters are weak, the plots are thin on the ground and the humour (hat little of it there is) feel incredibly dated. The middle aged mummy’s boy is something that hasn’t been funny since the 90s. It’s an utter waste of great talent and what hurts even more is that this tripe is actually getting a second series. I can only assume the people watching this are comatose. Either that or there’s an epidemic of people in Britain who have lost the remote.

Avengers: Infinity War

Yes this is one of the worst movies of 2018 and no I don’t regret saying that one little bit. Avengers: Infinity War was fucking terrible. Period. There were too many plots and characters going on, which made the film hard to follow (and what staggers me is that the so called ‘professional’ critics have condemned movies for having too many characters and plots before. Spider-Man 3, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Batman vs Superman: Dawn Of Justice and even Deadpool 2. But because this is an MCU movie, it gets a free pass. Fuck off). The characterisation was weak due to sheer number of characters they try to juggle, resulting in characters coming off as one dimensional caricatures of themselves and scenes where characters such as Iron Man, Doctor Strange and Star-Lord sound completely interchangeable. The villain, Thanos, is a stupidly and poorly written villain, but that’s hardly surprising considering what a shit job Marvel have done building him up over the course of these 20+ movies. And let’s not forget that pisstake ending. A bunch of prominent Marvel characters die and it’s all very, very sad... except all these characters just so happen to have sequels planned, which makes this ending fucking pointless and have less impact than a feather on a bouncy castle.

I don’t know which is more shocking. That Marvel and Disney think their audience are that stupid and gullible, or that their audience are actually validating their view. Fuck you Disney.

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery

I’ve always wanted a Harry Potter RPG, where you could customise your character, choose your house and actually live a full school life at Hogwarts. This year, Warner Bros and Jam City gave us just that.

That was a mistake.

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery is the epitome of everything that’s wrong with the mobile gaming market right now. The gameplay is boring and involving where you just tap images on a screen until a progress bar fills up. Wizard duels are little more than rock-paper-scissors challenges that require no kind of skill. Bonding with friends and caring for magical creatures just consist of pathetically simple pop quizzes and yet more boring tapping. Oh and of course you only get a certain amount of energy to complete these tedious tasks. If you run out of energy, you wait for it to fill up... or pay up for the privilege. So determined are they to extract your hard earned cash from your wallet, there’s actually a bit where Devil’s Snare strangles your eleven year old avatar and the game effectively tries to guilt trip you into paying micro-transactions to save them. It’s sleazy, gross and manipulative. Honestly, you’re better off just playing Candy Crush.

Agony

When the developers of this game said they wanted to give the player a trip through Hell, they had no idea how true that statement really was. Agony is dreadful on a number of levels. The design for Hell itself, while visually interesting at times, is often not very practical and gets quite dull and repetitive after a while. The stealth mechanics are a joke and the AI of your demonic enemies are pitiful. All of this alone would have been enough to put this game on the list, but then we also have the casual misogyny. Agony is a gorefest trying desperately to shock the player. We see men and woman get tortured, but it’s the women that often get the extreme end. The violence inflicted on them is often sexual in nature and the game seems to go out of its way to degrade and dehumanise women at every turn. The orgasmic cries of ‘pull it out’ quickly become a staple of the game’s experience as we see naked women raped, tortured and murdered, all for the purposes of ‘entertainment.’

I would call Agony sexist, but honestly that would be giving it too much credit. Agony is like a little child trying desperately to be all dark and edgy in a pathetic attempt to impress everyone around him, and we should treat it as such. Go to your room Agony. No ice cream for you.

Peter Rabbit

If you listen closely, you can hear the sound of Beatrix Potter rotating in her grave.

Yes we have yet another live action/CGI hybrid, but instead of something innocuous like the Smurfs or Alvin and the Chipmunks, Sony instead decides to adapt Peter Rabbit, with James Corden in the title role.

It’s about as bad as you’d expect.

Their attempts to modernise the story are painful to say the least with pop culture references, inappropriate adult humour and twerking rabbits. Plus rather than the gentle, but slightly mischievous character we got in the source material, here Peter is a sociopathic delinquent who seems to revel in making the farmer’s life a living hell. He’s unlikable and unwatchable as far as I’m concerned and the film doesn’t in anyway earn the emotional moments it tries so desperately to sell to the audience. And the worst part is it’s getting a sequel.

Wait. Do you hear that sound? That’s the sound of Beatrix Potter tearing out of the ground, ready to kill whatever idiot came up with this shit.

Fallout 76

I was excited for Fallout 76. A MMORPG where players band together to rebuild society after a nuclear apocalypse. Could have been great. Pity it wasn’t.

Fallout 76 is a dreadful game. Not only is it a buggy, glitchy mess that requires a constant online connection to play, which could result in you losing hours of progress if your WiFi went down, it’s also unbelievably tedious, and that’s because there’s nothing to do in the game. There’s no other characters to interact with, the various robots and computers you come across are really little more than quest givers, there’s no actual plot so to speak, and because of the sheer size of the world and the number of players allowed on a server, the chances of you actually meeting any actual players is remote. And let’s not forget all the behind the scenes drama. Bethesda falsely advertising Fallout themed canvas bags and players getting shitty nylon ones. Bethesda accidentally releasing the account information of various players trying to get a refund for said bag. Bethesda failing to program the year 2019 into the game code, meaning that the game’s nukes don’t work.

Maybe there’s a chance that Bethesda could pull a No Man’s Sky and fix everything over the coming years with various patches and DLCs, but the damage has already been done. It’s incredibly disappointing. The Elder Scrolls 6 is going to have be fucking incredible to win everyone back.

Mama Mia!: Here We Go Again

I can’t stand jukebox musicals anyway, but Mamma Mia was always one of the worst. Its boring, meandering story with its one note, obnoxious cast of characters screeching out ABBA songs like they’re at some drunken karaoke session at some poor sod’s hen party has always grated on my nerves. So imagine my delight when they announced we were getting a sequel. Ever wondered how Meryl Streep met her three lovers and founded her hotel? No? Well tough shit, we’re going to tell you anyway.

Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again is basically just Mamma Mia again. The actors still can’t sing, the characters are still annoying and story is still boring and meandering, completely at the mercy of the chosen songs rather than the filmmakers using the songs to compliment the story (you know? Like proper musicals do?).

How can I resist you? Very easily as it turns out. Gimme, gimme, gimme a fucking gun so I can end my misery.

The Cloverfield Paradox

A lot of people were unhappy about the direction Cloverfield was going. They wanted a continuation of the found footage, kaiju movie from 2008, not an anthology series. I was personally all in favour. Partially because I thought the first Cloverfield was a tad overrated, but mostly because I thought it would be a great opportunity for more experimental film projects and could be a great launchpad for new writers and filmmakers. 10 Cloverfield Lane was a great start. Then The Cloverfield Paradox happened.

The Cloverfield Paradox is basically JJ Abrams trying to have his cake and eat it too. Maintaining the anthology format whilst connecting everything together in a ‘shared universe’ (yes, yet another shared universe). The result was a cliched, poorly edited and idiotic mess of a film that actually took away from the previous two films rather than added to them. Everyone hated it and, as a result, 2018′s Overlord, which was totes going to be part of the Cloververse, was made its own standalone film and Abrams double pinky promised to make a true sequel to the original Cloverfield. A complete and total disaster. No wonder it was a straight-to-Netflix film.

The Handmaid’s Tale - Season 2

This is probably going to be the most controversial entry on the list, but please hear me out because I’m not the only one who has a problem with this season.

I was reluctant to watch The Handmaid’s Tale simply because of how gruesome the original book was, but I forced myself to watch the first season and I thought it was pretty good. It remained faithful to the source material for the most part and included some nice additions that helped to expand the story and mythos. If it was just a one off mini-series, everything would have been fine. But then they made the same mistake as The Man In The High Castle and Under The Dome did where they commissioned another season and attempted to tell a story that goes beyond the book.

There’s a reason why the original story ended where it did. The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t meant to be an empowering story about women sticking it to the patriarchy. It’s a cautionary tale about how fragile our civil rights truly are and how easily they can be taken away from us. It’s designed to shock, not to satisfy. So seeing a handmaid blow herself up in a suicide bombing feels very incongruous and just a little bit silly. It would be like doing a TV adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 where the first season followed the source material and then the second season turned Winston Smith into this heroic freedom fighter trying to overthrow Big Brother. It would represent a fundamental misunderstanding of what the book was about in the first place.

And then of course there’s the increased level of violence in Season 2, which many have complained about. In Season 1 and the original source material, the violence was justified. In Season 2, the motivation behind the violence has gone from ‘how can we effectively demonstrate how easily a fascist patriarchy can happen in the West?’ to ‘what brutal act can we inflict upon Ofglen to shock the audience this week?’ It’s purely for shock and nothing more. And with the showrunner (who I feel I should mention is a man) announcing that he has planned ten seasons of this, it seems that The Handmaid’s Tale is going to go even further with this depravity until it effectively becomes the equivalent of a Saw film.

The Handmaid’s Tale exists as a way of shining light on and critiquing misogyny in its most extreme form. Season 2 however demonstrates that there is a serious risk of it becoming the very thing it’s criticising in the first place.

The Predator

I love the Predator franchise, but The Predator is the worst.

People thought that this would be good because director Shane Black had actually starred in the first Predator movie back in 1987. Instead we got this bloated, confusing, obnoxious and insulting mess of a film that seems to go out of its way to ruin everything that makes Predator so good. There’s no tension. No suspense. No intrigue. Just a bunch of gore, explosions and shitty one liners from annoying and lifeless characters. They essentially took this big alien game hunter from outer space and turned him into a generic monster from a bad summer blockbuster. It no longer hunts for sport. It wants to take over the world and splice our DNA with theirs. But don’t worry, a rogue Predator doesn’t want to kill humans (even though he himself kills a bunch of humans), so he gives us a Predator Iron Man suit to set up a sequel that will probably never happen because this movie was a box office bomb and it fucking SUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCKKKKKKKEEEEEDDDD!!!

This film also has a very nasty streak towards those with disabilities. There’s a lot of jokes at the expense of a character with Tourette’s and it has an extremely ignorant and patronising view of autism, portraying the main character’s kid as being a super genius who can decipher the Predator language and even going so far as to say that he represents ‘the next stage of human evolution.’ Presumably the Predators want social communication difficulties because apparently it helps them hunt somehow.

What with Disney acquiring 20th Century Fox, the future of both the Alien and Predator franchises were very much in question. This film needed to be a success in order to make a case for Disney to keep making more of them. It wasn’t. Congratulations Shane Black. You might have just killed off this franchise for good. Thanks arsehole! :D

So those were my least favourite stories from 2018. Join me on Wednesday where we shall discuss something more positive. Yes, it’s awards season. Who shall win the coveted Quill Seal Of Approval? Watch this space...

Or don’t. It’s up to you. I don’t want to force you or anything. It’s a free country.

#quill's swill #quill's swill 2018 #worst of the year #review #opinion

18 notes · View notes

obsidianarchives · 5 years

Text

Ashley Romans

Ashley Romans started her formal acting training at Pace University School of Performing Arts. She moved to Los Angeles immediately after graduating in 2015. Los Angeles theater credits include: Celebration's Charm (Beta), Rotterdam (StageRaw and LADCC award recipients). Film/Television credits include: "I'm Dying Up Here" and "Shameless" (Showtime), "Are You Sleeping?" (Apple TV), "Hermione Granger and the Quarter Life Crisis" (Sunshine Moxie), "NOS4A2" (AMC new series).

Black Girls Create: What do you create?

I’m an actor. I create by acting. Collaborating with writers, directors, designers, and visionaries in whichever medium possible to hopefully create an honest reflection of a being’s life experience.

BGC: How do I create?

I suppose my entire creative process begins with healthy self trickery. Not quite deception but more healthy, playful, self manipulation. Naturally as creators we have a way of resisting and fearing whatever it is we most want to bring about into the world. Similar to a mother’s fear of giving birth or raising a child, we think “what if the world doesn’t receive my creation well? What if people are mean? What if it’s not healthy or ready?” I often find myself trying to bribe or trick my way out of this fear. I trick myself into going into my next audition as confidently as I can, or preparing for that day on set when I really don’t want to, or finding some connection with a character trait I find reprehensible.

I also think it is very important to stay relaxed and loose so one can reach a playful and spiritual place of creativity. So I try and keep myself healthy; mentally, spiritually, and physically by reading, eating healthy, journaling, praying, meditating, and exercising.

BGC: How did you get into acting?

I would say my professional pursuit officially began when I went to study theater at Pace University in New York City for my undergraduate degree, but for as long as I can remember I always had an interest in acting. I loved watching ‘90s action/drama movies with my father and “I Love Lucy” reruns with my mother as a child at all hours of the day. I became even more interested in theater and performance through high school choir, joining community summer camps, and doing the spring high school musical.

Even as an adolescent I felt it was best to keep my professional aspirations to myself in fear of naysayers. In retrospect, I understand now that high school is a time a lot of young people are dealing with self doubt and insecurity. Considering that I was far from the funniest, smartest, or most talented individual in the theater department, I, unconsciously, kept my performing ambitions quiet even from the people closest to me because I didn’t want to risk someone rubbing their self doubt on me. I worked up the courage to audition for a couple of acting schools but I told no one except my acting teacher Douglas Hooper and a few very close mates.

I still abide by this privacy philosophy even now and it hasn’t steered me wrong to this day. I still feel that speaking one’s dreams and aspirations among chaotic or unsupportive energy environment would most likely dissipate or poison their own source.

Eventually after graduating from Pace University through a couple months of tumbling I landed representation for acting with a management company and I moved out to Los Angeles. I’ve been able to land some great acting opportunities and gain a supportive team of people and I could not be more grateful.

BGC: What has been your favorite role so far?

I have so many favorites. The roles that stand out to me as my favorite are the ones that have most challenged me and allowed me to explore a different aspect of life, and explore and connect to the full range of the human experience. I’ve received some of my most valuable acting lessons in various roles in the theater. I played Inez, a red dressed-vixen-leading lady with a passionate, deep-seeded hatred for her ex-husband in Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Our Lady of 121st. Two years ago I played Beta, a young teenage gang affiliated boy in Chicago with a secret in Phillip Dawkins’s play Charm at Celebration Theater. This coming March I will be part of the Kirk Douglas’s production Rotterdam by Jon Brittain. Set in the Netherlands, I will play Fiona/Adrian, one half of a modern London couple who decides to make a huge change in their life. My experience acting in these productions specifically has been positively nurturing. Throughout our rehearsal process, I learned what it means to be not just a more nuanced and skilled actor but also a more supportive and capable teammate in the creative process.

In terms of film/television world, my work as Hermione Granger in Sunshine Moxie’s Hermione Granger and the Quarter Life Crisis remains my greatest acting lesson in the film/television/on-camera discipline. Eliyannah Yisrael, Megan Grogan, Alice Pierce, other writers and producers leveled up my game up. I’ve never before been number one on the call sheet and I’m not sure if I ever will again, but having that responsibility was so enlightening. It was also an invaluable learning experience getting to work with those amazing creators and seeing those women just get shit done. It was truly an honor being chosen to play such an important and monumental literary character in this version. I remember reading the Harry Potter series as a little girl in London and thinking how much I wanted to be part of and live in that magical world. Playing Hermione in the HGQLC series was by far the best artistic adventure I’ve ever had. Exploring moments, scenes and how far we can bring characters all felt like adventures. Even our trip to Dublin, Ireland this past year felt like one big adventure. I’ll be forever grateful for that experience.

BGC: Why do you create?

I enjoy acting because I love being seen and getting to disappear. It’s a paradox but it’s my truth. I enjoy exploring the range of human experience. I love that I get to feel connected to people in the safe incubator that is pretend. I love that I get to feel and say all the things I’m afraid to feel and say in my real life. I still never get bored of going to the theater, movie or stage, sitting in a dark room with other people and watching performers simply tell us a story. I hope to serve God and the people around me through my creativity and acting. I always hope to truthfully represent a human experience no matter how high or low the stakes it might seem to us at first. Losing your phone and frantically trying to find it can be as exciting and dramatic a story as losing one’s job or finding out your spouse is unfaithful. It’s all in the storytelling and truthfulness of the moment and I love as an actor I get to explore that.

BGC: Who do you hope to reach through your work?

Honestly, the most important people I aim to ultimately reach and impress are my nieces and nephews. Yes the public, my agents, and producers are all important but I feel as though they are a means to an end. Right now my oldest niece is 10 years old and she loves the Hermione series and is always pretty excited to see me act on TV. At the moment she still thinks I’m pretty cool and I hope to keep it that way.

If this was a decade ago and you asked 16-year-old Ashley the same question I probably would have said something like “I want to be a voice for the voiceless and the underrepresented… blah blah blah.” Truthfully, I don’t think I ever really knew what that meant. I mean, I knew what it meant on a superficial-runner-up-in-Beauty-Pageant kind of level but now that answer doesn’t resonate with me as the gutter truth. Whenever I’m working on scripts, deciding on content to create or post etc, I ask myself “Is this something I would be proud to let my niece see? Is this the kind of work that can help make the world even the tiniest bit better for her?” Eventually, she’s going to grow up and have a voice in this world and I hope that her seeing me embrace mine will give her the courage to embrace hers. My nieces and nephews and all the children like them are who I hope to reach.

I really love seeing how the world is changing now. Representation in the media was so limited even 10 years ago but now it’s getting more and more beautiful by the day. With so many platforms, works such as Pose, Glow, Fresh Off the Boat, Chewing Gum, Masters of None, Eighth Grade, and more, so many beings who have been underrepresented for years are getting a chance to reach their audiences and tell their stories. And we all get to identify and see ourselves in each other. I don’t have to reach out and save the world because it kind of starts with myself and our own backyard.

BGC: Who or what inspires you to keep creating?

Oh geez, that’s a loaded question. My peers are my first and foremost inspiration and motivation. Again Eliyannah Yisrael, Megan Grogan, Alice Pearce, Jessica Jenks. It’s remarkable to watch those ladies do what they do. I love being in acting class and witnessing breakthroughs or being in a really great rehearsal with a cast mate. That’s always promising when you get to be part of the creation of something honest and true. Even if it is just a great moment in a scene. Actors who inspire me are endless. Octavia Spencer is a fantastic actress and creator who I adore. I had the blessing of working with her once and she’s an even better human. Lovely doesn’t do her justice. I love watching Regina King. There’s a great example of an honest to God creator and storyteller. She’s accomplished so much in acting, directing, writing, and producing. That’s also how I feel about Shonda Rhimes, Boots Riley, Jim Carrey, Maggie Gyllenhaal. There are many more. I’m sure as soon as you publish this interview I’m going to think of more.

BGC: Why is it important as a Black person to create?

As Black people, we have such a specific and loaded way we walk through the world. The Hermione Series has such a beautiful tag line. It says “HGQLC - Write Your Own Ending.” I’ve always loved that because it gives power to the subject. As Black people it is our responsibility to take control of our story the best way we can. We must feed our communities the best and most honest images of ourselves to ourselves because images and representation matters. In the area of cinema, for years non-Black people have told their version of the Black experience and it has left us misrepresented.

BGC: How do you balance creating with the rest of your life?

It’s always a struggle to keep a balanced life. I have a tendency to obsess and quickly lose perspective but when I want to regain balance I plan my day to make sure I get everything I need in. Luckily for me in my particular art form, acting is about living so I know I can’t be a good actor if I’m not allowing myself to experience life and fun.

BGC: Have you been able to build a support system around yourself? What does that look like?

I feel so grateful for my support system. I have amazing representation, an amazing day job with super awesome and motivating coworkers who are actively pursuing their life goals. I also have super supportive family and friends who tell me they’re proud of me just for being myself. My sister is also a great support system, someone I can speak and think out loud with no fear of judgment. I could not be any luckier.

BGC: Any advice for young creators/ones just starting?

It takes 10,000 hours to be a professional at anything. So just put in the hours, however that may look. Either do it, read about it, watch a YouTube video on it, whatever you have to do to learn about your craft and get better.

BGC: Any future projects?

I’m going to be doing a remounting of the stage production Rotterdam at the historic Kirk Douglas Theater in Culver City. It’s a short run, performances run from March 28 - April 7th, but it’s such a blessing to revisit this work with such a remarkable group of people. It’s a super funny and insightful play about gender and love.

In the television world I just finished wrapping a new AMC series starring Zachary Quinto and Ashleigh Cummings called NOS4A2. I don’t know the exact date it is to be released but it’s happening soon. The series is based of the hit novel by Joe Hill and it centers around a teenager (Cummings) who uses supernatural abilities to track down the seemingly immortal Charlie Manx (Quinto), who steals children and deposits them in “Christmasland.” I play a Detective Tabitha Hutter trying to suss out the truth. This series has supernatural fantasy, horror, action/adventure, procedural, and family drama. Everything you want to see.

#actress #Harry Potter #theater #actor #New York City #London #Los Angeles #Black Woman Creator #create

1 note · View note

relationshipadviser-blog · 5 years

Text

Esther Perel: 'Fix the sex and your relationship will transform'

New Post has been published on https://relationshipqia.com/must-see/esther-perel-fix-the-sex-and-your-relationship-will-transform/

Esther Perel: 'Fix the sex and your relationship will transform'

Esther Perels breathtakingly frank therapy podcasts Where should we begin not only make for juicy listening, theyve revitalised the stale private lives of millions. Miranda Sawyer listens to the psychotherapist

Passion has always existed, says Esther Perel. People have known love forever, but it never existed in the context of the same relationship where you have to have a family and obligations. And reconciling security and adventure, or love and desire, or connection and separateness, is not something you solve with Victorias Secret. And there is no Victors Secret. This is a more complicated existential dilemma. Reconciling the erotic and the domestic is not a problem that you solve. It is a paradox that you manage.

Ooh, Perel is a great lunch date. All psychotherapists are, in my experience, but shes particularly interesting. Sex, relationships, children; she covers them all in the two hours we spend together. But also collective trauma, migration, otherness, freedom all the good stuff.

Perel is a practising couples and family therapist who lives in New York. Aside from her clinical work she counsels around 12 couples or individuals each week she has two best-selling books: one about maintaining desire in long-term relationships (Mating in Captivity), the other about infidelity (The State of Affairs). She has released two fascinating podcast series, called Where Should We Begin?, where listeners get to listen in on real-life couples having therapy with her. The podcast is where I first came across her its won a British Podcast Award, a Gracie Award in the States and was named as the Number One podcast by GQ.

On top of all this, she hosts workshops and lectures as well as the inevitable TED talks, one of which has been watched more than 5m times. I went to one of her London appearances earlier this year. Alain de Botton was the host and he introduced Perel with quite some hyperbole, calling her one of the greatest people alive on Earth right now. (Perel dismissed this afterwards, though she likes de Botton: He put me on such a platter.)

Esther Perel sometimes sings to her clients; she tells them off quite a lot, especially if they think sex should come naturally. Photograph: Jean Goldsmith for the Observer

The reason for Perels popularity is her clear eye on modern relationships. She says, rightly, that we expect much more from our marriages and long-term relationships than we used to. For centuries, marriage was framed within duty, rather than love. But now, love is the bedrock. We have a service model of relationships, she says to me. Its the quality of the experience that matters. She has a great turn of phrase: The survival of the family depends on the happiness of the couple. Divorce happens now not because we are unhappy, but because we could be happier. We will have many relationships over the course of our lives. Some of us will have them with the same person.

For a while, Perel wasnt taken particularly seriously by the therapist community: she tells me that when Mating in Captivity came out in 2006, it was only the sexologists that thought it was great. This is because her thinking went against long-established relationship wisdom, namely that if you fix the relationship through talking therapy, then the sex will fix itself. Perel does not agree. She says that, yes, this might work, but I worked with so many couples that improved dramatically in the kitchen, and it did nothing for the bedroom. But if you fix the sex, the relationship transforms.

We meet in a boutique hotel in Amsterdam, where Perel orders her food in fluent Dutch. She has a light Belgian accent (she says boat for both), and she wears some delicate gold jewellery, a bit like the Indian hath panja, on her right hand. (Both of these seem to excite American journalists, along with Perels good looks. A relationship therapist who you might fancy, shocker!)

We begin talking about her podcast series. Its an astonishing listen, partly because you get to earwig other peoples problems (always great) and partly because Esthers methods are so flexible: in the first series she got one young woman to wear a blindfold while her partner inhabited a more assertive sexual character, which he did by speaking in French. She sometimes sings to her clients; she tells them off quite a lot, especially if they think sex should come naturally: Who the hell told you that BS?

Series three, released next month, is slightly different to the last two. This time round Perel very deliberately chooses couples at different stages, because she wants to show an arc of a relationship, all the way to its end. Also, she says, I wanted to bring in the way that relationships exist in a larger, social, cultural, context. That context often gives a script about how one should think about suicide, about gender, about divorce and so forth. So we hear from a young couple coping with enforced distance in their relationship: one is US-born and the other is Mexican, without a US visa. Another is a mother and her child, who does not identify as either gender. Another couple, with a young child, have divorced, but seem to get along much better now: why?

Perel finds her podcast therapees via her Facebook page: they apply in their thousands. Her podcast producers sift through, using guidelines that Perel suggests them: this time round she knew she wanted to cover infertility and also suicide. Then theres a lengthy pre-recording interview process where its explained to the couples that, yes, this really is going on air and, yes, they might be recognised (from their voices; theyre anonymous otherwise). Are you OK in understanding that your story will become a collective story? You will be giving so much to others, as well. Its not just for you, actually. And then they have a one-off session with Perel for three to four hours, edited down to around 45 minutes for the podcast.

She loves the format. The intimacy of it, the private listening of it, the fact that you dont see them, thus you see yourself. You hear them but you see you. It reflects you in the mirror. But also, surely, its quite exposing for you? Oh yes. People can come and hear me give a talk, but theyve never seen me do the work and you cant talk about what you do. But when you write a book, that is the first part of exposure. Then comes TED and the podcast. If you ask, What does Perel do? My colleagues know how I do.

Perel is 60 now; I wondered how she found being a relationship therapist when she was younger, in her 20s. Werent clients put off by her youth? Actually, Ive always found that the age of the clients goes up with me, she says. It mirrors. I dont know why. She doesnt think lived experience is necessary, though sometimes she wonders how she had the chutzpah to counsel parents before she became one herself (now she has two grown-up sons; shes still married to their dad, Jack Saul, who is a professor and an expert in psychosocial trauma). But then I have worked a lot with addiction, and Im not an addict.

Interestingly, she came to therapy via drama. Drama and collective trauma. She was the second child of Polish Jews who came to Belgium as Holocaust survivors (Perels first passport was a stateless passport of the UN). In Belgium, they became part of a community of 15,000 Jewish refugees.

Loss, trauma, dismantlement of the community, immigration, refugees All these themes that I observe in the world today, were basically mothers milk to me, she says. Everybody had an accent, a good number of people had the number on their arms. There were no grandparents around, there were no uncles. Its all I knew. Its different than if it was just your parents. Its every home I went to. One of Perels earliest memories is of card games where her parents would talk of a friend, and someone would say, casually, Ah, he was gassed, he didnt make it.

Perels parents had her older brother in 1946, then she came along 12 years later. This was not uncommon. When people came out of the camps, the first thing they did to prove that they were still human was to have a child. They waited to get their periods back, and then they had a child. But then there was a gap of 8, 10, 12 years before they had another. Perel thinks this was because the parents needed to establish themselves in society. Hers ran a clothes shop in Antwerp. The family lived above the shop. They spoke five languages: Polish, Yiddish, German, French and Flemish. Every evening they watched the news in German, French and Flemish, to get a good all-round view.

Divorce happens now not because we are unhappy, but because we could be happier: Esther Perel. Photograph: Jean Goldsmith for the Observer

As a teenager, she was interested in psychology, mostly because she hated the strictness of school. She read Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child-Rearing, about a British school run like a democracy, and from there she moved to Freud. I was interested in understanding myself better and in people around me. People dynamics. I was quite melancholic and I was often wondering, How does one live better? How do you talk to your mother so she understands you better? Id say the primary ingredient I had was curiosity. I was a massively curious person I still am. She was also a good listener a confidante for her friends. I tell her she would have made a great journalist, and she agrees: That would have been my other career.

After school she went to study in Jerusalem, a university course that combined French linguistics and literature. More importantly, she developed her interest in theatre, which had begun in early adolescence. I assumed she was an actor, but shes talking of improv and street theatre, with puppets, of all things. Big ones, you hold them on two long high sticks, or I did hand puppets. She liked the immediate contact with people and gradually, she found herself merging these skills with her studies, doing theatre with gangs,with street girls,with Druze,with foreign students. At one point she went to Paris to study under Augusto Boal, who created the Theatre of the Oppressed. He would stage fake crises in everyday situations: actors pretending to have a physical row on the Metro, for instance. Perel found it interesting to see which passers-by would get involved and which would turn away.

She moved to New York to do her Masters. She specialised in identity and immigration How is the experience of the migrant different if it is voluntary migration or forced migration? and in how minority communities relate to each other. She led workshops for what were then called mixed couples: interracial, intercultural, interreligious. I knew the cultural issues. I knew how to run a group. I dont think I knew much about couples dynamics.

Around that time her husband, who is a few years older than her, suggested she might enjoy systemic family therapy. I ask what this is. For a long time when people looked at a problem, they thought the problem is located within the person, says Perel. But systemic family therapy thinks that a family, or a relationship, is made up of interdependent parts. What is the interactive dynamic that preserves this thing, that makes this child not go to bed? That makes this man never get a job? That makes this son be such a nincompoop? How is the family system organised around it? You need two to create a pattern, or three or four or five.

Its interesting how therapy has trends, I say, and how those trends manifest themselves in actual life. Couples therapy goes in parallel to the cultural changes and the expectations in a culture, says Perel. During the 1980s her married clients didnt come to her because their sex life was bad, they came because of domestic violence or alcoholism, not because we dont talk any more. Back then, the shame was to get divorced at all, even if one half cheated; now its not to get divorced if one half cheats. She saw clients having problems with infertility, the changing role of women and daughters, the Aids crisis. In the 90s, single mothers, blended families, gay couples with kids. Todays problems, she says, are often centred around people marrying later, after a sexually nomadic youth. Also, modern fatherhood dads wanting to be more involved in childcare and monogamy versus polyamory. Straight couples are becoming more gay, gay couples more straight.

The obvious question, of course, which she has been asked many times, is how Perels own relationship works. She doesnt like to give too many details, but what she does say is that she and Saul give each other a lot of freedom If youve had an interesting life, you have more to bring back, something that energises the couple and that they renegotiate their relationship as it changes. At the moment her husband is entering what she calls a third stage, and he wants to paint more. This means he will be away from New York a lot, while she is usually in New York or travelling herself. We need to, once again, come up with a new rhythm of how we create separateness and togetherness. Its a fundamental task.

She wants others not to copy her own relationship, but to use her work as a way to better their own relationship for themselves. And plenty do. Just the other week a young woman came up to her and asked for a selfie. She said, My boyfriend listens to you all the time, and he comes home and he says, Have you listened to this episode, we need to talk? The podcast is a transitional object, a bridge for conversation. Like a teddy bear that you hold and you say: Its OK, dont be worried.

Like when couples talk through their dog, I say.

Yes, she says. There is such disarray and such hunger about getting help on how we manage our relationships today, on navigating the challenges For the first time we have the freedom of being able to design our relationships in a way that we were never capable of doing before, or allowed to do before. So, I dont give the details of my relationship. Instead I will give you the tools to come up with your own thing.

Season 3 of Esther Perels Where Should We Begin is available exclusively on Audible from 5 October

Try this at home

Three ways to change the way you think about your partner at home

Pay attention to what is important to the other What happens in a couple is that we often give to the other what we want them to give to us. If somebody is upset, you dont talk to them, because when you are upset you like to be left alone. It isnt necessarily what they need.

Roles are often patterns rather than habits If you really want the other person to take out the rubbish, you have to be able to spend two weeks not doing it. You dont say anything. You just wait until the other person finally notices it. When youre not there, the other person sorts the bin. They can do it. Its just that when youre there theyd prefer not to.

Women are not less interested in sex than men, theyre less interested in the sex they can have What makes women lose that interest? Domesticity. Motherhood. The mother thinks about others the whole time. The mother is not busy focusing on herself. In order to be turned on you have to be focused on yourself in the most basic way. The same woman whos numb in the house gets turned on when she leaves. She doesnt need hormones. Change the story.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us

0 notes

gamerzcourt · 5 years

Text

PC 2018 Report Card: Year In ReviewPC 2018 Report Card: Year In Reviewvideo games

New Post has been published on https://www.gamerzcourt.com/pc-2018-report-card-year-in-reviewpc-2018-report-card-year-in-reviewvideo-games/

PC 2018 Report Card: Year In ReviewPC 2018 Report Card: Year In Reviewvideo games

2018 was a fantastic year for video games, a non-stop hit parade of amazing titles all over the scene–AAA blockbusters, indies, and everything in between. If you’ve got a Windows machine with the right hardware, you’re already in a good position to experience the overwhelming majority of it. The PC has continued to be an outstanding place to play video games in 2018, and with some companies making interesting technological headway this year, it’s also the place where the first steps to the next generation of games are already taking place.

The Walls Between Console And PC Continue To Fall

If you only have a PC, you might find yourself feeling left out when a major console release rolls around. That’s certainly still the case with Sony and Nintendo, but Microsoft’s Play Anywhere initiative, introduced in 2017, continued to see a small handful of Xbox One releases come to Windows 10 as well. The critical consensus was mixed on Sea Of Thieves and State of Decay 2, though both have seen continual content updates since launch. Forza Horizon continued to be a welcome asset though, so we’re looking forward to seeing what Microsoft Game Studios has in store for 2019, especially with its current focus on acquiring major developers.

Meanwhile, Japanese third-party publishers like Capcom and Sega continued to recognize the value of their PC audiences, and we saw more traditionally console-only franchises make the transition to Steam. Ports and remasters of existing games like Yakuza 0, Devil May Cry, Shenmue I & II, and Katamari Damacy appeared, but we also got significant new releases like Valkyria Chronicles 4, and the mammoth Monster Hunter: World, and we also have Devil May Cry 5 and Resident Evil 2 Remake to look forward to. With the higher potential power of gaming PCs, multiplatform titles overall continue to perform better, too, and there were few instances of dodgy PC ports this year. At least, not to the extent of Nier: Automata in 2017.

There was one incredibly notable third-party game that didn’t make its way to PC, however. Red Dead Redemption 2 released to near-universal acclaim in October, but Rockstar hasn’t made any comments about the potential for a PC version just yet. The PC version of Rockstar’s previous game, Grand Theft Auto V, was announced roughly a year after its initial release.

The Battle Royale For Battle Royale Intensifies

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds dominated PC gaming talk in 2017, capturing a lot of attention and spawning many imitators. But while PUBG hit its absolute peak popularity on PC in January of 2018, its player base diminished drastically throughout the year.

The obvious reason is likely Fortnite, which dominated the talk of 2018 to a much larger and more unprecedented scale than PUBG ever did–it’s become a mainstream cultural phenomenon. But PUBG itself is also to blame. The game had numerous bugs, technical issues, matchmaking problems, and a general jankiness that never really went away.

PUBG’s raw, early-access feel was endearing at first. When the concept felt new and exciting, it was easier to overlook its problems. But the charm started to wear off through 2018, especially since its competition was a more polished alternative. PUBG developer Bluehole eventually acknowledged that the game had numerous issues, launched Fix PUBG, a development roadmap that let everyone know that it is listening, they are working on it, and they want to be transparent about it. But that hasn’t stopped its player base from shrinking.

On the plus side, if battle royale is your jam, the PC is the best place to get access to all the up-and-coming competitors trying to make waves with their own unique takes on the popular format. Fortnite and Call of Duty’s Blackout aside, PC players also have access to SCUM, Ring of Elysium, H1Z1, Battlerite Royale, Fear The Wolves, Fractured Lands, Realm Royale, Cuisine Royale, Darwin Project, Maelstrom, and Radical Heights (R.I.P.), to name a few. How many will make it in the end? Probably just one, really.

Strategy Is Still Strongest On PC

Sure, the major consoles have their exclusive titles. But there’s one genre that you absolutely need a PC to experience the best of: strategy and management games. Statistics, spreadsheets, intricate battle commands, economies, sewerage systems–these games keep you obsessing over the smallest decisions and keep you up all night.

2018 saw the release of some exceptional new strategy titles, like the phenomenal Into The Breach, the slow and deliberate Battletech, the perilously stressful Frostpunk and the frantic They Are BIllions. These games brought engaging new ideas to the already stalwart genre roster available on PC. We also got great new releases from familiar series–Thrones of Britannia represented a successful, smaller-scale experiment for the Total War series, Football Manager 2019 once again did its thing, and Two Point Hospital was a pitch-perfect spiritual successor to Bullfrog’s classic Theme Hospital.

Meanwhile, the existing strategy heavyweights all saw strong expansions–Civilization VI received Rise and Fall, which added an interesting new dynamic to the ever-popular 4X game, and Paradox continued to roll out multiple expansions for its enduring roster, including Stellaris, Europa Universalis IV, Hearts of Iron IV, Crusader Kings II, and Cities: Skylines.

Valve Finally Releases A New Game

The company behind Steam, Half-Life, and Dota 2 among other things released its first new game in years during 2018, the trading-card game Artifact, based on the Dota 2 universe. It was designed by the legendary creator Richard Garfield (the person responsible for Magic: The Gathering and Netrunner), but its release was surrounded by heated discussion over its unique monetization model. While the base game costs $ 20USD, the only way to get new cards is to either buy more 12-card packs at $ 2USD each, or purchase them individually from other users on the Steam marketplace. This model mimics the real-world collectible card game market, but i seemed to irk players who are used to the more generous free-to-play model of its competitors. However, Artifact’s defenders tout that the relative cost of achieving a full set of cards compared to other games is comparable, and in cases better given the ability to resell on the Steam marketplace.

In more positive and less contentious Valve news, the company this year acquired Campo Santo, the independent studio behind Firewatch and the upcoming In The Valley Of Gods, so expect to see another Valve published game in 2019.

Discovering Indies And Early Access Games Is Still Best On PC

Though Xbox began experimenting with early access games in 2017, the PC is still the best place to try out a large variety of the freshest new game ideas. Wading into the early access pool naturally has its own perils (we’re talking about unfinished games, after all), but there are always games whose concepts are so enticing and executed so well that they demand your attention even before they’re finished.

Significant early access darlings that gained popularity this year included the widely celebrated Dead Cells, which finally came out of early access in August, the deck-building roguelike Slay The Spire, space survival game Astroneer, the aforementioned RTS They Are Billions, Crytek’s competitive western game Hunt: Showdown, among many others.

Elsewhere, Star Citizen is still in development, seven years later. The ever-growing spiritual successor to Wing Commander reached over $ 200 million dollars in crowdsourced funding in November of this year, and its scope continues to be almost incomprehensible. The 2013 phenomenon DayZ also reached its fifth year of Early Access, though we’re not sure if anyone is still playing that.

On the indie front, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo have all been getting better in bringing indie games to their respective platforms, and other publishers like Devolver Digital are making sure their titles get released in as many places as possible. But, if you’re interested in the independent scene, the PC is still the place to be. Certain high-profile 2018 titles are PC only, like the exceptional Return To Obra Dinn, and others, like Into The Breach, released on PC long before getting announced for any other platform. Additionally, PC-exclusive services like Itch.io are still the best place to check out smaller-scale experimental titles.

New Technology Is Here. The Future Is Here.

2018 was the year that GPU manufacturer Nvidia took its next big step and revealed the Geforce RTX 20 series of graphics cards at Gamescom, which can very comfortably run modern games at their highest detail levels in 4K resolutions and at 60fps. But even though the raw jump in performance might not seem that drastic on paper, and the cards themselves are expensive, the 20 series pushes GPU tech forward with the introduction of a couple of notable technologies that look to the future of graphics rendering.

The 20 series boasted a major advancement in the form of real-time ray tracing, essentially a superior and realistic-looking way to render lighting, shadows, and reflections, though only a limited number of games are currently able to actually utilize this technology (Battlefield V is the only one at the time of writing). The 20 series also uses a new form of antialiasing, called Deep Learning Super-Sampling (DLSS), which uses a form of artificial intelligence to perform better polygon rendering without the huge computational strain that it typically requires.

Elsewhere, Google unveiled a limited test of its cloud streaming service, Project Stream in October. The company teamed up with Ubisoft to let a selection of users play Assassin’s Creed Odyssey through the service, which streams game through the Google Chrome browser, and by GameSpot’s own accounts, this actually runs pretty damn well.

With rumors of new consoles on the horizon, these two disparate advancements in both local and remote computational technology give us some good ideas of what to expect. We know a number of major games companies are looking towards cloud streaming as an option (if they don’t already have an active service), and we know that there’s always been a bit of a hardware arms race between Sony and Microsoft concerning who gets to boast about having the better graphical quality. So, to see functioning examples of both kinds of advanced technologies this year on PC feels like we’re already getting a taste of the next few years of gaming.

Other Matters, In Brief

Valve’s annual Dota 2’s tournament, The International, once again broke its own record of the largest prize pool in esports history. The final total was $ 25,532,177

Valve’s Steam Link hardware was discontinued and run out at trivial prices during Black Friday. The company plans to continue its Steam Link technology as a software-only platform, utilizing existing smart device technology from other manufacturers.

Valve announced a new Linux initiative titled Proton, which seeks to allow Windows-based Steam games to run from within Steam’s Linux client.

Seminal 90’s PC games Ultima Underworld and Star Control saw modern successors release this year with Underworld Ascendant and Star Control: Origins. Unfortunately, neither seemed to meet fan expectations.

Blizzard fails to announce a new Diablo game at Blizzcon, to the disappointment of its most rabid series fans.

The declining value of cryptocurrency in 2018 leaves graphics card manufacturers with huge amounts of surplus inventory.

Verdict

It’s unsurprising that the versatility and open nature of the Windows PC platform continues to make it the best place to play a large variety of games. Third party publishers are continuing to support their PC audiences, and it’s the platform with the biggest variety of independent and early access games. Big console exclusives from Sony and Nintendo will continue the elude PC audiences, but Microsoft’s Play Anywhere initiative continues to be a positive idea that will hopefully pay off with their recent studio acquisitions. Additionally, the PC still sees its fair share of platform exclusive games, especially in the strategy genre.

2018 was a great year for games, and because you can play the overwhelming majority of them on your computer, it was a great year for PC gaming.

The Good The Bad An increasing number of traditionally console-exclusive games make the transition Some disappointing revivals of classic PC games A strong year for PC-centric strategy games Red Dead Redemption 2 hasn’t been announced, yet Variety of indies and early access games is still largest on PC Nvidia paves the way for Ray Tracing support in the future

GameSpot – All News

#2018 #Card #Games #Report #ReviewPC #Reviewvideo #Year

0 notes

gulescamisade · 7 years

Text

Minnesota: Day 27

JADE: -She's on the roof of the Crocker headquarters, pawing slowly through her mobile device. No updates since last night on the bulletin board... she imagines that group is travelling now. It's only a matter of time. Everything is going exactly as they thought.-

DAVESPRITE: -dutifully silent. Until he decides to shuffle and peek from his designated hiding place. Still the size of a canary.- do you often brood on rooftops

DAVESPRITE: i ask while also kicking it on the rooftop

DAVESPRITE: blame the bird part of me

DAVESPRITE: theyre pretty fond of heights i am anyway

DAVESPRITE: i am they and they are me

DAVESPRITE: (caw)

JADE: -squints down at him-

JADE: i mostly brood on rooftops when i know a little bird is watching

JADE: except consider this less brooding and more plotting J

ADE: just in case you forgot youre being held hostage

JADE: -he may or may not be in one of her coat pockets....-

DAVESPRITE: -it's a comfy coat pocket. He hangs and chills, sprite tail hanging out the opposite end.- youre one big bad jade

DAVESPRITE: a mega bad upsized to just plain Big (tm) served with a complimentary side of kickass

DAVESPRITE: cuz lets face it

DAVESPRITE: the irrefutable fact is you were always kickass(edited)

JADE: telling me things i already know isnt going to win you any points

JADE: i figured that out no thanks to you

DAVESPRITE: its no thanks to anyone

DAVESPRITE: not even gpa huh

JADE: of course not

JADE: i had to figure out everything on my own because it wasnt like anyone else was going to be there or honest

JADE: i spent way too much time taking care of everyone else instead of figuring out what i can do

JADE: its no wonder i got so depressed

DAVESPRITE: are you depressed right now

JADE: why would i be??

JADE: im not being held back anymore

DAVESPRITE: dunno

DAVESPRITE: doves gone a month without her mom

DAVESPRITE: kind of sucks someone else is having to watch out for her

JADE: and things will be better for her once i take care of this

JADE: thats what you dont get

JADE: its not enough to just say something

JADE: you have to actually do it

DAVESPRITE: i get it

DAVESPRITE: ive seen it

DAVESPRITE: im still seeing it

DAVESPRITE: im in the moment with you right now

DAVESPRITE: nothing else exists outside just the two of us having a chat

DAVESPRITE: thats how time works in your head anyones head

DAVESPRITE: small real moments that add up to something bigger than yourself

DAVESPRITE: without it were just frozen wonderin whether it was always supposed to be this way

DAVESPRITE: thats how i see it anyway

DAVESPRITE: what are you going to look like tomorrow

JADE: like someone who knows what she's doing

JADE: and stops listening to people who hurt her

DAVESPRITE: -he's quiet a long, long moment. Just listening.- did i hurt you

JADE: -Now she's quiet, too, though she shouldn't be. The mere cause of her silence just angers her more.- you lied to me

JADE: you say you think im strong but even you just think im a stupid little girl

JADE: that you have to hide everything from me

JADE: that i cant handle it or maybe just that you can get away with it

JADE: you dont trust me so why i should i trust you????

DAVESPRITE: you got a point gg

DAVESPRITE: i did hide a lot from you

DAVESPRITE: its more a reflection on my own weak game ass ass assholery than anything lets be real

DAVESPRITE: i dont deserve your trust i aint earned it

DAVESPRITE: but hey

DAVESPRITE: i never lied about why im doing this for

DAVESPRITE: cause that was always you

DAVESPRITE: and jade harleys a better reason to get my ass in gear than literally anything else that was going for me in the old au hah -The laughs sounds so dry. But it's there.-

DAVESPRITE: paradox space can go fuck itself it wasnt going to stop me

DAVESPRITE: this is what second chances are all about

DAVESPRITE: its just...

DAVESPRITE: you

JADE: ...

JADE: grrr...!!!

JADE: you cant just explain away everything like that! thats such bullshit

DAVESPRITE: how do you want me to explain it

DAVESPRITE: you want me to say we were a thing in the other universe

DAVESPRITE: me and jade

DAVESPRITE: and we were the only ones who had each other seeing as john fucked off somewhere in the peace corps

DAVESPRITE: his dad died dave was dead you never got in contact with him again

DAVESPRITE: real soon after that rose went missing didnt know what to do about that

DAVESPRITE: it was just me and you at skaianet trying to keep shit together for the rest of the world

DAVESPRITE: all until fish bitch took over

DAVESPRITE: and then

DAVESPRITE: you were gone too

DAVESPRITE: and there wasnt a single fucking thing i could about it(edited)

JADE: ...

JADE: or maybe you just decided im not good enough for you anymore

JADE: now that i know what i want

DAVESPRITE: thats a whole lot of assumptions to make

DAVESPRITE: point is

DAVESPRITE: i wasnt going to let it happen again

DAVESPRITE: i came here to try again

DAVESPRITE: and ill keep tryin

DAVESPRITE: til theres nothing left of me to try for you anymore

DAVESPRITE: so hey i guess that makes two of us

DAVESPRITE: knowing what we want

JADE: g...rrr... JADE: rrrrRrRrRRrrr!!!

JADE: -her hands rise, clasping the sides of her head and fistfuls of wild dark hair, her growls almost pained in her throat before they rise, furious.-

JADE: BARK!!!!!

DAVESPRITE: -hangs onto the coat pocket as she bark. Then reaches up to pat at her with a bird claw.-

DAVESPRITE: can i come up

JADE: you...!!!

JADE: -She can't stop growling, and all the things in her say OBEY, and her hand twitches until it's abruptly in her pocket, and because it's Jade, because it's still her, the first thing she thinks to do is wrap her hand around the tiny sprite and throw him.-

DAVESPRITE: -promptly flung and none too gently. Gravity isn't a thing he should worry about and with his equalibrium balancing out... he hovers back up in the air. A small ball of light some good distance away, eyes trained on her.-

DAVESPRITE: cant fight it on your own jade even i cant tell you to do that

DAVESPRITE: but i still want to stay with you

DAVESPRITE: til we see this to the end

JADE: RRRRRRRRR...!

JADE: -she's flashing and surging bright rays of green, and she thinks about things she hasn't for a while. SUBMIT, says her brain.-

JADE: im going to find a way to kill you

DAVESPRITE: i know what i signed up for jade -in a small pulse of orange light, Davesprite's form shifts back to his former height. Wings raised and watchful of her movements.-

DAVESPRITE: im here til then

DAVESPRITE: eye on the prize

DAVESPRITE: not for anyone but you

DAVESPRITE: lets go

JADE: rrr stop kidding yourself davesprite!!

JADE: youre not my dave and im NOT your jade!!!

DAVESPRITE: -his heart seems to pound, high with emotion he couldn't articulate. But still DS presses on, despite the way she snaps and snarls at him.- youre the jade im here for no matter how you slice it

DAVESPRITE: my jades gone shes not coming back and i never saw that coming

DAVESPRITE: she didnt

DAVESPRITE: she never got to say what she wanted

DAVESPRITE: but i do

DAVESPRITE: im not letting that happen to you again

JADE: i!! dont!! CARE!!!!!!

JADE: -Despite the words, the emotion is clearly high in her as well -- conflict, rage... but something more beneath it all. She lunges for him from the rooftop, like there isn't stories between them and the ground.-

DAVESPRITE: -lunges if she wants, Davesprite swings in the air only to fly at her. Fully intending to collide with her midair.-

JADE: -WELL SHE CERTAINLY CAN'T STOP THEIR MOMENTUM. She's going to straight up tackle him in the air.-

JADE: -DOOF!!! It would almost be hilarious if it weren't so terrible.-

DAVESPRITE: -secures arms around her as they spin in the air. All squawks and feathers and barks. DOOF IS CORRECT. Even with the force, Davesprite holds her. Burying himself with her as if he's truely afraid she'll fall. Wings flap.-

JADE: -But she doesn't. For just a moment or two, they cling together in the air, and then the bright green shocks back to life.-

JADE: -All around them is blackness and the scattered brightness of stars.-

JADE: -And then she shoves him away from her, disappearing in the same glimmer of light they came through together and leaving him in the void alone.-

DAVESPRITE: -a million miles away from Earth, he can still feel the thread of connection. She had the pendant. He would find his way back to her when she needed him to. But until then, Davesprite lets himself float. Wishing he could close his eyes and sleep.-

#growingGradience #ebrionicCrest

0 notes

retracingpoliphilo · 7 years

Text

Building In Time

Beloved Reader:

I first drafted this Oct. 27, 2012, revisited Oct.12, 2013, Oct. 30, 2015, Jan. 12, 2016. Since drafting my thought has evolved on time and dimensionality quite a bit, much of it culminating recently. I did not revise any of the below to reflect that yet, as 1 - it hasn’t synthesized for me yet, 2 - My reason for posting this has more to do at the moment with the dynamics of living and working together as humans in our larger world, ideas and directions on where we perhaps should be moving towards in terms of resources, value, supporting one another in generative abundance, doing civilization, etc ... So, aside from enjoying, do me a solid and suspend on the time/dimensionality a bit - maybe turn it around in your head and let me know your perspectives? Temporality is a fascinating beast of startling beauty ... Also: I love you, what stories we weave together. Collectively Stewarding Abundance Enjoy, with love

<3Karja Cygnus -----

See, the thing you have to understand about the fourth dimension", she begins to explain, "is that its much more than just time - in fact, time is to the fourth dimension as movement is to the third - its simple the visible interaction within its fabric. The fourth is the dimension of cause and effect, action and reaction, push and pull, give and take. Time is the surface upon which this is visible to us. Therefore, time is manipulable, there is no such thing as a paradox in time travel - if you change something, it simply nudges the decision branch you're part of in a slightly different direction than the one you came from, as you move in time, you move along potentialities/probabiliies/realities - The question is not paradox, the question is - can you return to your own line of potentiality? …"

At some point her fascinating rambling begins to register less to me, as I register more of her smell, the movement of her hair, the way she uses her entire upper body in her conversational gesturing. I'm hooked. The girl is definitely out of her gourd, but its my type of squash.

"Aaand I've lost you." She laughs. “Where? Please do interrupt - I really get going on some subjects."

"No, its ok - thats why we're here, so you can tell me more about this. But, do you mind if we walk and talk? I'm getting a bit fidgety sitting still, and its so nice out."

She grins. "Of course! Thats perfect actually, I was hoping you might have that inclination. There’s a storm front blowing in, so I need to go and check up on my building sites anyhow, and I can show you a more practical view of the fourth dimension that way."

So I clear and scrape the dishes and she settles up the bill. I'm setting the dishes onto the washrack when the chef taps me on the shoulder as he opens the cooler. "Learn well, she knows her stuff." and there he pauses, digging through the shelf looking for something that is not a carrot, leek or egg which are all that I can see him rummaging unsatisfiededly through. "But be careful - she's wild, breaks men more often than the other way around."

"Oh, thanks, but I'm just here about time-engineering …" I begin, and then stop as he smirks at me.

"uh-huh." He says disbelievingly. "Well, I've been her most common three-squares-and-coffee-a-day for some time now, so please excuse me if I feel I know the look on your face from experience. That may have been all you were after before, but not now. Just know, she's not very good at seeing it, or responding to it."

"Well, thank you for that. I'll keep it in mind." I say, and then hastily depart the kitchen. She is just gathering up her clutter of things from the table, so I join her, grabbing my jacket and leading the way out onto the street.

She stops for a moment, lost in thought, starts and glances around and then gestures me south. "We're going to visit my sites in order of progress. That way you can see the work progress along a trajectory. And, if we don't finish in the time we have, we can just start with the next house in order next time, and so on."

The grange we had met at was on a pedestrian street, with its wooden decking and slight sway of the supporting water below. We turned the corner onto a common traffic street - brick paved, the occasional bike passing through those on feet. Many food carts - I stop briefly at one selling mango.

"PreparadoVerdeSaltGracias." I strung my words together as I handed the coin to the old man and he handed back a small paper sack of green mango strips, dashing salt and giving a feeble squeeze to the half lime in is hand as he did. Walking away from the cart, we were both almost bowled over by three boys racing and chasing each other down the streets, worn canvas sacks of mangos bouncing against their hips. Looking back, I watched as my coin was mingled with others paid by the old man in exchange for the foraged mangos. Sacks emptied, the boys dashed off again to climb more trees with the inexhaustible energy of boyhood.

"So, what do you think of Veniqueno?" she asks, using the longer of the slang terms for Little, or Pequeno, Venice. Once, this area had been known as Little Havana, and before that LIttle River (what?) and before that, and before that … but, here I was, in my head again - instead of responding to the brilliant gorgeous woman at my side.

"It's impressive. I've visited so many of the historic American Cores - from those that failed to transition to those that transitioned fairly well - but ViQue, its thriving like only the better historic European Centers manage to." She gives me a surprisedly appreciative and assessing look.

"Most people don't see that of ViQ, (male name). But I agree. What shapes that opinion for you?"

"Oh, absolutely. Just … stop me if I get going. I have that same tendency with certain subjects as well." She smiles. Wonderful.

"Most places in America, focus, still, after everything we’ve come through, on the aggregate. I can guess at the reasons for that, but will not for the moment. What that seems to lead to is an ongoing struggle with moving beyond to a thriving local scale functionality." (….. continue) ---

Second day at post-wanderchat dinner she flirts casually and invites him up to her place. He begins to acquiesce and then thinks back to what the chef says, and stops.

"Hey. So, I like you. I like you in a serious way it seems and I don't want to get caught up and hopeful in a casual fling, I'd rather just keep it friendly if thats all you're offering. You don't have to answer now, or ever, but I think I'll pass on that coffee for tonight either way." He finishes with what he hopes is a warm smile.

She frowns momentarily and then looks at him with an appraising look on her face, one side of her mouth slightly scrunched up. "Okay." Her face relaxes back into its normal smile, and she tiptoes up to place a light kiss on his forehead before continuing with the half hug and a peck on each cheek which was custom here.

"Meet me at the 14th St ferry terminal for sunrise," she says, as she lets herself into the front gate of her building.

---

(Towards the end of the third visit) We're riding the ferry across the bay towards Miami proper, and she is seated next to me, face turned into the wind, watching the scene pass by. The sun is setting and the sky is glorious. Miami, from my short experience, has the most consistently beautiful skies Ive ever seen. Not necessarily the most spectacularly beautiful, that is saved for places above (pick an altitude) where the sky is more wide open and dominated by different cloud formations. But Miami, so far, has always delivered. Towering clouds which began their lives over the everglades are now marching stately out towards the ocean, lit from behind by the setting sun. The wind, which was pleasant in town, now carries with it a a damp chill which the ferry passengers are sluggishly responding to.

She pulls a light sweater out of her bag and over her head in one continuous action which I don't fully comprehend. Still staring out at the bay she edges into me, huddling against the growing wind. I can't help but heat slightly at her touch. It's been a good day, and I'm feeling hopeful for an answer that realistically may never come.

The ferry slows as the engine sounds and vibrations intensify. The boat is swinging in sideways, and people are gathering along the railing to debark. The lights of the city are just twinkling on as the sun makes its way completely below the horizon.

"I know a great place for fresh fish near here, you game?" she asks. Of course I am, and it has nothing to do with the fish. "Well, I've never really been a fish for fish' sake person - an occasional hankering for Sushi is usually the closest I come. But, if you help me order, I'm game." Is my best attempt at downplaying my willingness.

0 notes