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beomgyusmcnugget · 2 years

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warning: an actually somewhat positive 2 cents about Halloween ends

I just came back from the theater and was suprised to come on here and see everyone absolutely demolishing this film (I mean it’s hilarious and y’all do have a point) when I actually enjoyed it!

My mom turned to me, disgruntled and mumbling as the end credits rolled, and a ginger guy and his s/o were talking to us after the movie and saying how much they thoroughly detested it. But I actually found it to be the best of the modern sequels

I think the reason I liked acts one and two so much honestly is due to my utter loathing of Halloween kills. That movie spit on me and threw me in a dumpster. Holy fuck I hated it so. So much. They made Michael into a god damned chainsaw, he wasn’t even Michael anymore he just cut down everyone in sight, and it was so stupid I literally yelled at the screen in the theater (luckily I wasn’t the only one). So I think seeing a Halloween film where the body count is back to the single digits soothed my soul from a few years ago. Also bringing the killers back down to a more human level, just with a knack of surviving the impossible, was cathartic and reminiscent of the first five (except three bc who actually watches that one) films, which imo the brother Michael to Jamie niece pipeline is superior (when Paul Rudd gets added to the mix is when I start hating it and switch over to H20).

I also love next gen nonsense, and I and aware I am hereby the scum of the earth, and that’s where this movie excels for me and also majorly disappoints. Because I thought we were getting the transfer of evil from Michael to Corey, but also a what if Laurie didn’t fight for good and instead submitted to the lure of evil and it’s ease? I thought the inclusion of Alyson in that was cool, however they totally fucked it up.

Because at first it’s like oh Alyson doesn’t want to fight it anymore, or maybe she was cristened in the evil because of how she grew up and wouldn’t that be the perfect way for Michael to win if not in flesh: Laurie’s own granddaughter committing to evil. However they just didn’t do that?

All of a sudden Alyson isn’t .. dark. She’s just done with her phase ????????? Like whyyyyy it could have been so perfect why must you do this to me?

Also in the vein of massive disappointment yet mid movie satisfaction is Corey’s whole character. Because I liked how he was a mild blend of young Laurie and Michael (smart baby sitter -> killer ig is the only link lmao) and some of the set up was clever if not slightly crude in execution; i.e, him sleeping and sort of hiding in the home of his first kill, much like Michael hid in his childhood home where he killed Judith. I loved that idea, and giving him his own mask, specially a creepy Halloween one reminiscent of Michaels clown mask which I thought was cool.

But THEY JUST KILL HIM ??

I waited for the end of the credits in hopes of a scene shot from the window of Jeremy Allen’s house, with nothing but breathing for audio, and a slow shot of someone picking up the scarecrow mask and looking out at haddon field from the window.

But, no. 🗿

However I still have hope for this, idk why I guess I’m just delusional. However considering Michael let himself die imo and allowed himself to be carried to the massive meat grinder, and that Corey sat up after being stabbed in the neck, I get the impression Corey could have sat up after his neck was snapped (considering he was shot multiple times and sustained two falls from fatal heights and a fucking neck wound but what ever) and if Michael wasn’t ready to go then he could just punched the window from the roof of the car, so I figured that scene when he was over Corey was a sort of eye signal thing to take over the mantle bc the whole movie he was turning to Michael for guidance but it was his time to fully grasp the role. Therefore Michael allowed them to kill him and destroy his body as Corey became the sole owner of the form, which would explain why both of them were in mid strength throughout the movie bc evil incarnate can only fulfill one form fully.

But. No.

And if not that, I figured Alyson would then be who the evil was transferred to. Idk I guess I supposed she was going to play an actual role in the film but … sigh.

So yes while I have many complaints about how they dropped the ball with the end, what this movie could have been, and what it delivers in the first and second act make this one of the more compelling sequels imo, and by FAR the best of the new three, in my opinion at least. The last two new ones were honestly disrespectful to the franchise imo and completely misunderstood the point of Michael: he’s not like a machine gun. He’s scary cause he’s evil and stalks his prey, not because you guys found some cool and gross cgi to attach to your film and decimate an entire town population. That’s an apocalypse atp, not a slasher or killer.

So this one definitely payed wonderful homage (ty for adding the picture of Annie and Linda 🥲, the knitting needles!! Someone stabbed on the wall, and Corey standing watching Laurie like Michael in the first film) and had a decent vibe that fit in with the original imo better than Halloween kills (my genuine arch nemesis). However the ending didn’t just fall flat, it fell from an eight story building.

HOWEVER. THEY ADDED DONT FEAR THE REAPER IN THE END CREDITS. And I feel that song should get more credit as the iconic Halloween song.

And though many are upset about Michaels lack of screen time, I was honestly so pissed that they made him a terminator in the last film, I was okay with it.

And Laurie, dear, pls step on me.

Jamie was 10379128/10 in this movie. *chefs kiss*

So sorry if you read this whole thing :/

#halloween ends #halloween #michael #michael meyers #corey cunnigham #Laurie strode my actual wife #I love that woman so much #Jamie lee supremacy #alyson I expected you to be emo what happened

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nemainofthewater · 1 year

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For the fic ask game: 8, 18, 23, 29 :D

Thank you for sending as ask in!

8. Best characterisation

I found this one really hard to answer in that good or bad, I think that most of my characterisations of characters is pretty consistent? I am nonetheless going to choose Alliance, a Nirvana in Fire fic wherein Lin Chen and Jingyan meet in a marketplace (a meeting quite possibly set up by Consort Jing) because I really enjoyed writing Lin Chen in that one and I also wrote in Jingyan's POV which I definitely find harder to do (and I think it came out ok!)

18. Longest time writing

Longest time writing is 100% The Boy Who Fought Against the Stars, a post-canon Legend of Fei fic which is Xie Yun telling his future disciples the story of how he and Zhou Fei met in fairytale form. The reason that I'm putting it as the longest is that I started writing it in the period when my computer had to go and get its battery replaced for a month or so. The first few thousand words of the story were therefore all handwritten in a notebook and then - once I got my computer back - retyped into Word. Surprisingly I actually did quite well when it came to writing longhand but I lost all motivation once I'd finished retyping it back into a digital format and then it took me another month or so to finish. RIP.

Either that or Tailor Made , a Word of Honour crack!fic about Wen Kexing's tailor which I started for @thebansacredbanned 's birthday last year and only finished a year later.

23. Most excited to post

...Can I choose every single Nirvana in Fire exchange fic I wrote (all 33 lol)? Well, not post exactly, but to reveal; I was so excited for the collection to open!

If not, I think Mutually Assured Destruction, a Disguiser fic which basically is every single member of the Ming family blackmailing each other pre-canon. That was very fun to come up with and it was also a birthday gift for Thebes so I was desperate to see her reaction.

29. Most spontaneous fic

This one is easy, they warned us, a storm is coming on, again written for the Nirvana in Fire exchange fic for the prompts 'one of the main trio dies at the worst possible moment'. Written in a mad 30 minutes or so the morning before the exchange opened because I was worried that we wouldn't hit over 70 works (which @kimboo-york had pointed out was the number that were written the year before). I was literally scrolling through prompts to see one that I knew I could write in time, and I hit on this delightful chunk of angst.

Thank you so much for sending the questions, @fwoopersongs ! I always love talking about my writing.

If you want to send any asks in, please do! The relevant post with the numbered questions is here

#ask game #end of year superlatives #fic #nirvana in fire #the disguiser #word of honor #legend of fei

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shihalyfie · 3 years

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02′s influence on Adventure

You’re probably reading the title and going “...what? Isn’t 02 the sequel to Adventure? How would a series be influenced by its own future sequel?”

The thing is, assuming that Adventure was written in a vacuum and everything in 02 a retrofit runs very contrary to how both series were produced, and how this kind of anime is produced in general -- Adventure and 02 share almost identical staff members, and were separated only by a real-life single week in airing time. 02′s existence was not a sudden last-minute decision that was tacked on at the end! In fact, Adventure being extended to a second series was decided seven months into its production, right around the end of the Tokyo arc (sometime around the third cour). Despite it being a rather tonally different series, 02 is really just Adventure’s staff...writing more.

This means that by the time production had moved to Adventure’s final arc, the staff was very aware that they would be on for another year writing a sequel to this anime -- which thus likely became the fuel behind many of its creative decisions, made specifically to pave the way for 02.

The ending

Yeah, so, this ending. You know this really famous ending? The one that’s had such an impact on franchise history that a lot of later things have even tried to imitate it in some form? The one that everyone cites as one of Adventure’s most famous scenes (for good reason)? This ending only exists because of 02. You know what actually would have been Adventure’s ending if 02 hadn’t existed?

The 02 epilogue.

The ending that we now know as the “02 epilogue” was actually decided on before recording for Adventure had even started. (They weren’t even sure about finalizing the character personalities yet!) All of the most substantial details about that epilogue -- the series actually being the adult Takeru’s novel, everyone in the world having a Digimon partner, and, as it seems, even Yamato and Sora getting married -- were decided on before 02 was even in the picture. Most likely, the only material difference would have been that the four characters introduced in 02 (Daisuke, Miyako, Iori, and Ken) and their partners wouldn’t have been involved, but everything else would have roughly been the same as the “epilogue” we know now. (This especially makes sense when you consider that one of Adventure’s major influences was the movie Stand By Me, which is extremely culturally influential in Japan as a “childhood summer adventure story”, and involves a similar timeskip epilogue with one character growing up to chronicle the story as a writer.) All of this was basically intended to tie into Adventure as a narrative of “a story of humanity’s evolution”, so this ending was envisioned as the “natural conclusion” of the story of Adventure as a whole. If anything from the original Adventure ending would have been retained in this hypothetical scenario of only Adventure existing, perhaps the sentiment of “parting” at the end -- but then it would still be followed by a timeskip epilogue 28 years later and everyone in the world having a partner.

But then it was decided that a second series would be made, and at some point they decided it would be a series set three years after the first, resulting in: this.

What this means is that Adventure’s ending was only ever intended as an ending for a single chapter in the overall Adventure series narrative. A lot of people like to pose 02′s existence or epilogue as something that “undid” Adventure’s ending, as if it was supposed to be some “ambiguous bittersweet” ending about whether they ever met their partners again, but...that ignores the real-life context of Adventure and 02′s production, where Our War Game! (which depicted an easy reunion with their partners, went out of its way to cameo Miyako in advance, and, for all intents and purposes, practically spoiled Adventure’s ending by depicting them as separated at all) screened before Adventure’s last episode aired, and there’s also the Adventure mini dramas that depicted more incidental meetings (and despite the constant fourth wall breaking and absurd crack content in them, yes, they’re intended to be taken as canon).

Again: in real life, the first episode of 02 aired one week after the last episode of Adventure. Even the real-life audience was likely well aware that this wasn’t going to be the end (and if they weren’t, they certainly would be when the promotional trailers for 02 started airing right after Adventure’s last -- and that’s assuming you missed all of the promotion appearing in real life beforehand, including at the end of Our War Game!’s screenings). The production staff all knew, because they’d already been working on 02 for months now -- they postponed their originally intended ending just to make this new one, after all!

So yeah, this line isn’t supposed to be just a vague “oh, maybe they’ll meet again” in an abstract poetic sense -- it’s completely literal, because it’s hinting at said gate opening again one real-life week later.

From both a story perspective and a real-life audience perspective, this ending was never meant to be seen as ambiguous.

Takeru and Hikari’s character arcs

02 often gets an accusation of being lacking in the character development department (one that I seriously disagree with and have been working very hard to counter), but this accusation especially gets levied often at Takeru and Hikari, who are often said to be “flat” or “kind of just there” in 02 (which, again, I object to; more on this below). This is often rationalized as a theory that the writers didn’t know what to do with them because they’d already been in Adventure, but...this, again, assumes too much that Adventure was written in a self-contained vacuum and anything in 02 was just an addition done after the fact.

There’s actually quite a bit of evidence that the last cour (or at least a significant amount of it) was written with the idea that Takeru and Hikari were going to be starring in the next series in mind.

This is especially pretty apparent when you get to the last episode, where Takeru and Hikari are conspicuously the ones to leave off on the most confident “we’ll meet again” notes, compared to the other six. Of course, they do it in their own respective ways (Takeru and Patamon resolve to make it happen, while Hikari cryptically acts like it’s already bound to happen, borderline prophetically), and maybe you could chalk it up to the fact that they’re the youngest and therefore most naive of this group...but, again, remember: 02′s first episode aired one week after this one, where we would immediately be treated to Takeru and Hikari following up on this. Given that, you can basically see this as a wink and a nod: “yeah, these two have a story that’s not over yet.”

And as much as I may sound like a heathen to the fanbase by claiming this, I would actually say that it’s the opposite of the above claim: Takeru and Hikari both have pretty unresolved arcs by the end of Adventure compared to the rest of the other kids, and in fact are fleshed out more in 02. It’s honestly kind of a stretch to say that they “already got development” in Adventure -- Takeru still has a ton of unresolved issues with his family and trauma and emotional behavior that aren’t properly addressed to nearly the same degree as how the older kids have their core issues brought to the forefront, while Hikari really was only around for less than half the series, and not only is her main problem of emotional suppression told purely from Taichi’s mouth and not her own, we also get no real follow-up on how she intends to work past that.

Those are some pretty huge things to leave unresolved at the end of a series that’s known for its focus on individual character development, and considering that the premise of 02 involving an older Takeru and Hikari was likely finalized around the middle of the last arc of Adventure, it’s easy to believe that they decided to deliberately hold off on resolving Takeru and Hikari’s issues in full so that their story could be told in the next series. And, indeed, while their characters being built on “being difficult to read” makes their development not quite as visible as some of the more eccentric personalities in the 02 cast, their respective Jogress partners (Iori and Miyako) more openly discuss and get to the bottom of their issues that had been lightly displayed or hinted in Adventure but never truly been addressed.

A lot of things that were not in Adventure

Adventure was admittedly kind of written as they went along (they didn’t even originally plan to have Hikari as the eighth child at first), so it’s hard to tell exactly what was planned and what was a later addition (and at what point things were added), but considering that the 02 epilogue was one of the first things planned in the entire series, as part of “a story of humanity’s evolution” and tying into a really long theory about partners doubling every year, it’s probably at least safe to say that a lot of the worldbuilding and lore was determined very early.

02 added a lot of lore dumps about Digital World mechanics and things related to the overall state of Chosen Children, which have been said by many to be retrofits to justify a buildup to the 02 epilogue, but, again -- the 02 epilogue was supposed to be for Adventure, so it’s very likely that these lore aspects were intended for Adventure as well! This is especially because it’s been outright confirmed that there were at least certain things originally intended for Adventure that ended up in 02, or at least were in 02 because they felt Adventure didn’t sufficiently cover it:

The kids’ home lives. As famous as the Tokyo arc of Adventure is, it only covered about a quarter of it -- the rest of it was the kids stranded in another world, separated from home! It’s specifically 02 that went into all of the things like school life, family life, daily life in Odaiba, and everything closer to the real world -- basically, everything related to family backgrounds that was very likely to have been in the planning documents for Adventure but never made it.

The (in)famous 02 episode 13 (or, at least, something like it) was intended for Adventure. As much as there’s common speculation that this episode was intended to be some giant subplot that got canned, from what we’ve heard from the staff, the truth actually seems to be a lot more mundane -- Adventure was a series very big on “oddities about the Digital World that have no real explanation” (see: phone booths), and when you reframe it in Adventure’s context, it’s likely that Dagomon and the Dark Ocean were intended to be yet another of those as part of its wider lore about the multiverse, to make you think “the heck was that?” but never get any real answer to. (And while it’s unclear whether the original theoretical Adventure version of this episode would have still involved Takeru and Hikari, if you want to put a tinfoil hat on and entertain that theory, it lends even further credence to the idea that their respective character arcs were deliberately held off for 02...)

Given that, and thinking about the 02 epilogue as the eventual goal for the series, you can also easily imagine a lot of 02-introduced things leading up to it as probably also having been baked into Adventure’s lore:

You know how 02 had a subplot about Chosen Children proliferating all over the world, as a lead-up to everyone in the world eventually having a partner? This was part of a “doubling every year” formula that’s been referred to a few times in background staff testimony. If you inspect this formula, this means that there were eight other Chosen Children besides Taichi and his friends, chosen between 1995 and 1999. Now, remember how Adventure episode 52 briefly touched on the bombshell of Chosen Children existing before Taichi and co., before never addressing it again? Considering all of the above facts, it’s very likely that’s intended to tie into that formula -- and, perhaps, had 02 had not existed to continue the subplot about “more Chosen Children”, Adventure would have taken more initiative about explaining the concept of Taichi and his friends not being the only humans with partners, and led it into their originally intended epilogue.

02 episode 33 involves Miyako visiting Kyoto and learning that there may be certain similarities between Digimon and Japanese youkai, to the point where they might be related somehow, despite predating digital technology. (The concept is revisited in Mimi’s track in Two-and-a-Half Year Break and the Adventure BD drama CD, both of them having been written after 02.) The thing is, the idea that Digimon and other similar entities actually existed prior to digital technology, and that said technology only allowed it to manifest physically in the real world, also is heavily tied to the original concept of Digimon partners being a manifestation of a part of the human’s soul, and therefore having a partner being a part of human evolution -- which is, again, heavily tied to the original intent behind the epilogue. So it’s very likely that this, at the very least, was one of the original lore points behind Adventure -- and if 02 had not existed, it’s possible that Adventure might have tried to cover it as part of a lead-up to that epilogue, rather than ultimately deferring it to 02.

This is, of course, speculation -- I’m not a member of staff, so I can’t speak for them -- but I do think it’s important to consider that while 02 was a tonally different series, it wasn’t just a sequel tacked on at the last minute, and rather just (mostly) the same staff learning three-quarters of the way through that they would have more time to continue this narrative, and reorganizing things to figure out what they wanted to do now and what they wanted to touch on if they had more time. Really, this whole narrative of “02 being a bunch of random additions they came up with and retrofit” seems to almost be the opposite of what actually happened -- while some of the ideas behind 02 were certainly created later, it’s less that Adventure was some ideal perfectly crafted story and 02 an addendum, and more that they had so many things they wanted to do in Adventure that couldn’t fit and used 02 to vent more of those out:

One of the concepts behind the prior series was for us to pack in as many interesting things that we’d seen, heard about, or read about as we could into it, so for 02, we thought, what else could we put in beyond even that?, and so we looked over what we needed to have, and put in all the things we could so that they wouldn’t be left out, and the story became a multi-layered one, overlapping and accelerating. It was to the point that, after we’d gone through 02‘s story, the scriptwriters told me that they’d worn everything they had out to the ground. In any case, we put everything we had into it back then.

Which means that understanding 02 is actually very retroactively important to understanding Adventure -- Adventure’s own writing was influenced by the knowledge that 02 would be part of its story, and 02 itself carries a lot of vital facts and story points from Adventure’s narrative that didn’t fit in the first 54 episodes, and, in real life, they were both written continuously as one story over the course of over two years. It’s also because of this that I seriously warn against seeing either series in a vacuum too much -- because both series are very deeply tied to each other, perhaps more so than a lot of people want to admit.

#digimon #digimon adventure #digimon adventure 02 #shihameta

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endcant · 3 years

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aimless musings on subgenre, citypop, and internet subcultures

theres something very interesting about watching citypop become very mainstream in korea and watching that feed back into both western listeners’ opinions and also into the sometimes-cynical efforts of a variety of kpop producers

a lot of people in the youtube/kpop sphere talk about the growth of citypop as if it were a spontaneous wave that appeared out of nowhere with mariya takeuchi’s plastic love getting picked up by the youtube algorithm in like 2018 or whatever, but thats a very like online-ignorant view of the interaction between vintage japanese music and worldwide online EDM production. citypop has been used in future funk and vaporwave for almost a decade by now, and, as a result, a number of citypop songs took off on social media here and there before plastic love’s acceleration— dress down by kaworu akimoto is one of the big examples off the top of my head, but there’s likely many many more.

youtube

“Plastic Love” by Mariya Takeuchi (1984). if you haven’t heard this yet, you’d better listen to it now. The video that first went viral was uploaded in 2017

youtube

“Selfish High Heels” by Yung Bae, Macross 82-99, and Harrison (2014) is a popular Future Funk remixes of Dress Down by Kaoru Akimoto (1986)

people who haven’t been very aesthetically literate online over the years— musically or visually, since those things are tied in subcultures— treat things like they come from nowhere. there are ongoing subcultural conversations that lead to certain aesthetic choices, and when someone tries to cash in on a trend without understanding what the trend is, that leads people to call bullshit. calling bullshit is not meanspirited, in my opinion, because it very much is like somebody who can’t speak a language getting up in front of everybody and saying “hey, i’m fluent!” and then speaking some vaguely that-language-sounding nonsense. of course people who genuinely speak that language will be outraged instinctively. it feels like being mocked.

that’s why the difference between music producers picking up on a trend cynically and music producers picking up on a trend with earnest interest in that trend’s origins feels different, even if the producers are similarly distant from the original subculture that produced that trend.

youtube

“Lady” by Yubin (2018) committed hard to the 80s JP citypop aesthetic, musically and visually, down to the sets, all fairly early in the major resurgence.

i’m sure that anyone with a passing familiarity with citypop and kpop can ascertain that not all kpop producers know what citypop is and what makes it citypop. all they know is that it is on-trend and they have to make it. not all kpop listeners know what citypop is and what makes it citypop. all they know is their idol said citypop as a buzzword in their little prepared statement. all this results in some interesting moments for me as a Music Fan, Online.

here is where i get to the thing that spurred this post: loona “did a citypop” for their japanese comeback. it doesnt sound like citypop.

youtube

“Hula Hoop (Citypop Version)” by Loona (2021). It has very odd percussion rhythms and mixing for citypop, no real attempt at a citypop verse, and strangely sparse gestures towards citypop in the form of a few seconds of bass and some synthesized orchestral embellishments that were taken from the original mix …all in spite of a very disco-inspired melody that should have worked perfectly for citypop

this is not a very big deal, and im not mad about it or anything. when a kpop act i like gets saddled with an unfortunate B-Side track i dont tend to take it very hard. however, it did raise a little bit of musical discourse in the loona fandom— in the form of remixes.

youtube

“hula hoop if it was actually a citypop song” by loonahatetwinks and Olivia Soul on youtube. this one has an original instrumental that is spot-on for contemporary k-citypop

My most favorite one of these remixes is a futurefunk remix by ZSunder, one of the very best LOONA fan producers. The fact that ZSunder thought to make a future funk remix at all speaks more to an understanding of the mutually supportive relationship between citypop and EDM genres than most kpop citypop producers or fanmixers seem to care to know about.

youtube

“Hula Hoop (Future Funk Mix)” by ZSunder is futurefunk made and mixed with such love that it has the infectious summery energy of a polished, big-name future funk hit

in the comments of this video, some people seemed to get the citypop-future funk connection and some didnt. many did get it, don’t get me wrong! but also, its not all that surprising for some kpop-focused listeners to not know much about EDM subcultures and the reasons behind various trends among producers, since kpop as an institution tends to take influences from any genre and culture it likes and then decontextualize those influences by just having their names used as buzzwords in the blurbs the idols have to recite when variety show hosts ask them about their latest single. this isn’t a criticism of the genre or the fans really, it’s just a part of the kpop industry that is used to add shine to an endless firehose-like stream of polished pop tracks. there are some issues with using whole genres and subcultures with complex histories as buzzwords, but god help us if we ever want a pop industry to give its influences their dues.

anyway, the intention behind ZSunder’s future funk Hula Hoop remix happened to remind me me of why i love Yukika’s discography so much, especially the Soul Lady album. I’ve seen some reviews online baffled by parts of Soul Lady, because the album in general is an exploration of that relationship between citypop and modern/internet EDM. i’ve seen plenty of Soul Lady reviews especially baffled by pit-a-pet, saying something along the lines of “what’s with the modern-sounding dance track in the middle of a retro album?”, but i think that pit-a-pet is a futurefunk-inspired track, at least in the chorus. considering both that and the Chill Lo-Fi Interludes, it seems like estimate’s team put together Soul Lady for Yukika in a way that shows that they love citypop and understand the online-specific electronic music subcultures that led to citypop’s resurgence.

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“pit-a-pet” by Yukika (2020). the stacatto, bass heavy chorus is futurefunk enough, but the soaring orchestral part in the final chorus seals the deal for my interpretation.

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“All Flights Are Delayed (1 hour version)” by Yukika (2020). Estimate literally released an hour-long youtube mix of one of the Lo-Fi interludes on Soul Lady as part of their promotion, clearly inspired by “Lo-Fi anime beats to chill out to,” which is another example of online producers from around the world using Japanese samples as a focal point of their music

Estimate, in the end, is still a Kpop production company, just the same as BBC, so they have no inherent claim over citypop, but the way that their exploration of subgenres clearly comes from passion and interest on the part of their production staff makes it so that their work with Yukika rings true. on the other hand, i really appreciate Ryan S. Jhun’s work on LOONA’s JP comeback, as well as on Not Friends, but the citypop mix thing was so clearly an afterthought to the point where fans of Loona who like citypop seem mostly just irritated by the cynical-seeming attempt.

heres one last good modern kpop citypop MV that has nods to the internet culture that led to its revival in the form of the videography— vaporwave, future funk, lofi, and other internet genres along those lines tend to have videos consisting of looping anime and vhs clips. future funk in particular is known for this, especially since a lot of future funk music, esp early future funk, is just loops of very short, catchy segments of citypop and disco songs. it’s all about the loops

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“My Type” by Yoon JongShin ft. Miyu Takeuchi (2019). This song is so dedicated to the retro JP citypop sound that it’s almost beyond my personal taste. The singer, Miyu, was a headlining act at a seoul citypop festival and sang this song as part of her act (:

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this video of “Only One” by Conscious Thoughts (2015) has a looped clip as an example for comparison with My Type. it also has a pulsing sidechain compressor working in time with its drum beat in a way that is common for future funk and that i think is a good example for my pit-a-pet yukika comparison to future funk

i guess the takeaway here is that media is more and more online, and the creation and propagation of digital audio and video content has been in the hands of literally almost anybody who wants to do it for the past two decades thanks to garage band and fruityloops and audacity and tiktok and youtube and bandcamp and soundcloud and myspace and newgrounds and p2p file sharing and so on and so forth. and therefore like… as with all things, the consumer class more and more is also the creator class, and therefore every member of an audio-visual subculture will have the ability to discern what is and isnt made with knowledge of the audio-visual language of that subculture

#me using elder millennial phrasing for Loona Did A City Pop to imply how out-of -touch it is kfhajfhs #mine #music #long post #Youtube

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davidmann95 · 3 years

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So RWBY/Justice League is apparently a crossover that's actually going to happen. Of the little we know right now, how do you think that's going to pan out?

Anonymous said: Those questions about Superman and Batman in RWBY seem prescient, because I'm hearing that an official crossover is in the works

Anonymous said: Um, so there's a legit Justice League/RWBY crossover coming

Anonymous said: So, that official DC/RWBY crossover, huh?

Anonymous said: So, how about that DC/RWBY cross, eh?

Anonymous said: No more speculating how Superman would fit into RWBY when DC themselves are providing their own answer XD

The immediate thing that leaps out beyond the Kingdom Hearts* level of utterly out of nowhere berserk this premise is: while the RWBY comic had a couple minor sequel hooks, and I don’t know how it did in its original digital chapters or in trade, as a monthly periodical it was selling poorly enough that DC didn’t bother to print its last physical issue after the return from the Coronavirus shutdown, and while I thought it was great a lot of fans complained about its art and characterization throughout. I hoped for that sequel, sure, but I wasn’t expecting the book to be regarded internally as anything but a sales failure, nevermind not only continuing it but tripling down in the most extreme and bizarrely specific way possible that’s neither intuitive (unless you have special interests like me) nor surface-level ridiculous enough like Batman/Elmer Fudd that people will buy it just to see how it works. I don’t understand why this comic is happening when no one but me wanted this.

(* The Kingdom Hearts comparison is apt because they were similarly close to the top of things I’d love to see cross over with the DCU that would obviously never, ever happen because that’s too precise and random a combination of my interests. Even if this is legally possible where that isn’t, that would still be conceptually simpler.)

I was asked a couple times in the past about how Superman or Batman could make sense in RWBY’s setting, and it turns out I was closer with the latter than the former - that rather than a dimension-hopping traditional crossover, this is reverse-engineering what the assorted members of the League would look like if they had always been part of Remnant ala JLA/Planetary, some of the old DC/Marvel crossovers, or the more recent Batman/The Shadow. Which actually fits really well with the series regularly evoking assorted fairy tales and mythologies with their characters; this bunch is just one more set to be added. Though that raises several more thoughts and questions:

* The solicit refers to them as Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne, and Diana Prince, but will they actually be referred to as such in the story, and will people comment on them not fitting with the color-based naming conventions of that world? Or will they be renamed and evoke their sources purely through iconography, ala Ruby not literally being Little Red Riding Hood?

* How much will the origins of the assorted characters be changed? Batman, Cyborg, and Aquaman would all make perfect sense within the ‘rules’ of the setting with few major alterations, but will Superman still be from Krypton and Green Lantern a space ranger, or will they simply be ordinary humans with thematically reminiscent backstories and Semblances/weapons that evoke the classic powers? I think the latter could work, but I imagine the former is more likely (even if Bennett might keep it vague on some of the details to preserve the aura of mystique and avoid changing the shape of the world too radically) simply because everyone’s surely aware that fans would complain about being ‘ripped off’ for getting the characters ‘in name only’ otherwise.

* Speaking of changes to fit the setting, between being a Faunus and the apparent low-tech traditional armor look of his suit, is Bruce Wayne in here not operating from a position of wealth? You’d just think as a given the Wayne family would be easily plopped in as business rivals to the Schnees and Alfred would be on a first name basis with Klein, but it seems Bennett might have something very different in mind. Also, little disappointing he simply has a katana rather than those collapsible batarangs that turn into swords that Ellis always gave him which would fit perfectly here. And, as so many have already asked: how miserable is he every second of every day in a world where everything is also a gun. At least this isn’t a universe where anyone’s gonna think he’s irresponsible for training teenage sidekicks.

* And if we’re going into individual characters: RWBY Barry Allen is adorable, what the hell. He just looks so dopey and hapless, I sure hope he doesn’t ever have to die to stop the Anti-Monitor. We’re definitely getting a meeting with Harriet that retcons in that he’s the other person with a speed Semblance she mentioned running into, and if he’s tapping into the Speed Force then the jokes that that’s what Harriet does are probably gonna become at least a little bit canon.

* Are the Themyscirans magic, given all magic has a very important common root in this world?

* I don’t think there’s a dud redesign in the bunch? These are all really inspired in their own ways, which is good because unlikely as it seems this is I believe the first time we’ve really gotten any sort of official interpretation of “here’s what the DCU would look like as a Shonen”. Go ahead and say the hell with it and make it Earth 28, I’ve thought before making that an anime Earth would fit with the map.

(By Ag_Nonsuch)

* Bunch of obvious ways these characters can play off of each other: Ruby is paralleled with Wonder Woman on the cover, and I’m curious how Bennett will play that, but she makes most sense next to Flash, a super-fast fan made good, or Superman, a character she so deeply if unintentionally evokes on so many levels I felt I had to make clear when describing her that I didn’t solely appreciate her as a psuedo-Superman analogue. Weiss makes sense up against Batman either as a wealthy heir or a Faunus who’s likely faced his share of pain from the Schees who either way are cold perfectionists defined by inner pain stemming from their families, or Wonder Woman/Aquaman as fellow ‘royalty’. Yang is paralleled with Superman on the cover and that makes sense with the two country bruisers with issues regarding their lost parents, though she’d also make sense with Aquaman as the ‘temperamental’ members a lot of the time of their respective teams, or Cyborg as they both deal with their relationships with their bodies after requiring prosthesis. And Blake pretty much has her pick: like Superman she uses an article of clothing to ‘pass’ and shares the commitment to justice, she and Batman are dark children of privilege (or not in this case, though in this world they’re both Faunus), she and Wonder Woman both left the island homes where their people were safe to try and make the rest of the world better, she and Aquaman are both Faunus royalty, and Green Lantern is about overcoming great fear and in Jessica Cruz’s case specifically about the guilt of running away.

* Will this be entirely flashbacks to the pre-series/Beacon years, or will those be flashbacks set from a ‘present’, and if so when? What happened between the siege of Haven and the train setting off for Argus is the most loosely-defined period in the story and is right on the heels of the end of the original RWBY mini, so I’d imagine it fitting here. And given they apparently join together “to take on a force unlike anything they've seen before” rather than purely the character work of that previous book, what might that be?

* Hey, superhero comics/superpowers as an idea already exist in this universe, will that come up?

* If we can get one single scene in this and it’s going with a “yes they’re still aliens and magic and whatnot” premise I want Clark, who hasn’t thought of being Superman yet and therefore is still at least somewhat hiding his powers, being wracked with guilt over not pursuing becoming a Huntsman and therefore not being there at the Fall of Beacon. Which is a ridiculous thing to take the blame for, but of course he would, he’s Clark, culminating in trying to apologize to JNR for Pyrrha dying he feels in part because he was a coward (when they don’t even have the faintest concept for why he would think he should have been there or could have done anything).

* Once all’s said and done, how is their presence in the world justified as not being a factor in the series proper? It’s simple if they’re ‘ordinary’ analogues who can go off to quietly have adventures elsewhere, but if not then some of them either have to be shuffled off stage or presumably left with their stories incomplete, with a little afterward of “and they went on to be the greatest heroes of all...later, after the scope of team RWBY’s main adventures so that we never have to directly address them again” to avoid them becoming unavoidable major factors in the war against Salem.

In the end, will it be DC’s best comic? No, though I imagine one of their better ones this year. Will it be among the ones I look forward to most each month? Right up there with Yang and Reis’s Batman/Superman baby, this is a miracle freak of fate and I’m gonna appreciate the universe bending over backwards to make entertainment for me and me alone while it lasts. Given I finally checked out RWBY in the first place because I was curious about Bennett’s original comic, this is a heck of a full-circle moment.

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jordanianroyals · 3 years

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Princess Haya: Dubai ruler had ex-wife's phone hacked - UK court

By Frank Gardner (BBC Security Correspondent), 6 October 2021

The High Court has found that the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed Al Maktoum, interfered with British justice by ordering the hacking of the phone of his ex-wife, Princess Haya of Jordan.

The phones of her solicitors, Baroness Fiona Shackleton QC and Nick Manners, were also targeted during their divorce custody case, according to the court.

Princess Haya said the discovery had made her feel "hunted and haunted".

Sheikh Mohammed denied any knowledge of the hacking.

He said the court's findings were based on evidence that was not disclosed to him, and that they were "made in a manner which was unfair".

The judgments are a blow to the sheikh and a further revelation as to his treatment of female members of his family.

'Serial breaches'

The High Court judgments, which were published on Wednesday afternoon, referred to the hacking as "serial breaches of (UK) domestic criminal law", "in violation of fundamental common law and ECHR rights", "interference with the process of this court and the mother's access to justice" and "abuse of power" by a head of government.

The president of the Family Division of the High Court found that "the mobile phones of the mother (Princess Haya), two of her solicitors, her personal assistant and two members of her security staff had been the subject of either successful or attempted infiltration by surveillance software. The software used is called Pegasus software and was that of an Israeli company, the NSO Group."

The court concluded that the surveillance was carried out "by servants or agents of the father (Sheikh Mohammed), the Emirate of Dubai or the [United Arab Emirates] and that the surveillance occurred with the express or implied authority of the father".

Difficult to detect

The extent of the hack is shocking in what data it gave the hackers access to.

NSO's Pegasus software, often referred to as "spyware", is able to track the location of the individual using the phone, read their SMS messages, emails and messages in other apps, as well as eavesdrop on their phone calls and access their contact list, passwords, calendar dates and photographs. In other words, it gives the hacker complete access to all the data they want to see in their target's phone.

It also allows the hacker to activate the target's phone without their knowledge, recording their activity and even taking photographs and screenshots.

Similar spyware is alleged to have been deployed by Saudi government agents, working on the orders of the Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, against dissidents living abroad, including associates of the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

It is extremely difficult for a victim of such spyware to even detect that their phone has been infected with Pegasus.

'Very substantial amount of data'

In the ongoing custody case between Sheikh Mohammed and Princess Haya at the Family Division of the High Court, her legal team said the hacking took place with his "express or implied authority".

The president of the court concluded that "in relation to the mother (Princess Haya), it is clear that the [hacking] attempt succeeded with a very substantial amount of data (265MB) being covertly extracted from her phone".

Sheikh Mohammed denied any knowledge of the hacking and said he did not instruct anyone to use NSO "or any software in this way". His legal team said he was not prepared to enter into any debate in relation to what security systems the UAE might have.

The allegations against Dubai's ruler were supported by testimony given by an expert technology witness, Dr William Marczak, who is based in California and is a senior research fellow at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, which researches digital surveillance.

He told the court he had no doubt the phones were hacked using NSO's Pegasus software. He also concluded "with high confidence" that the phones were hacked by a single operator in a nation state. He concluded with medium confidence that it was most unlikely to be any state other than the UAE.

Alarm raised by Cherie Blair

Princess Haya's legal team first became aware that they had been hacked after an urgent phone call made by Cherie Blair QC, the wife of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, to Baroness Shackleton. Mrs Blair acts as an adviser to NSO Group on business and human rights related issues.

A senior member of NSO's management team called Mrs Blair from Israel on 5 August 2020 to inform her that "it had come to their attention that their software may have been misused to monitor the mobile phones of Baroness Shackleton and HRH Princess Haya".

The NSO staff member then told Mrs Blair that those phones could no longer be accessed using NSO software and they asked for her help in contacting Baroness Shackleton.

NSO, which has previously been accused by human rights groups of enabling autocratic states to carry out intrusive surveillance of dissidents and journalists, has insisted in public statements that it only supplied its spyware to enable governments to counter criminals and terrorists.

NSO is believed to have terminated its contract with the UAE.

'Living in fear of her life'

The hack took place during a critical phase in Sheikh Mohammed and Princess Haya's divorce custody case at the High Court in the summer of last year.

The guardian appointed for her children said it "impacts crucially on the mother and her wellbeing. It is a very pernicious experience if the mother has been subjected to surveillance of the type that she understands that she has been".

Princess Haya's legal team told the court that "the mother has been living in fear of her life frankly, and in fear of the children's security since April of [2019]".

The court also heard how Sheikh Mohammed had attempted to buy a property in Surrey, Parkwood Estate, so close to his ex-wife's home at Castlewood, that "if anyone chose to use it, it is in prime position for direct or electronic surveillance".

Her legal team said "there is a powerful objective case as to why the mother should be genuinely in fear if the father has access to a property overbearing her own".

Referring to the proposed property purchase, Princess Haya told the court: "It feels as if I am being stalked, that there is literally nowhere for me to go to be safe from (the father), or those acting in his interests. It is hugely oppressive."

Hacked during 'significant events'

Princess Haya, a daughter of the late King Hussein of Jordan and half-sister of King Abdullah II, fled Dubai in 2019 for Britain along with her two children after learning that her husband had ordered the abduction of Sheikha Latifa and Sheikha Shamsa.

She has since said she is living in fear of her life after receiving threatening messages from agents of her former husband.

Now her legal team is accusing agents of the Emirate of Dubai of acting on his behalf in hacking the phones of Princess Haya, her solicitors, Baroness Shackleton and Nick Manners, as well as her personal assistant and two members of her security staff.

The hacking took place in July and August 2020 "at a time of significant events" in the court proceedings when hearings were taking place over the welfare of the children.

The judgment concluded that "the allegations of hacking came before the court at a time when it had already made very serious findings against the father".

'Terrible life or death game'

During the long-running custody case at the High Court, Sheikh Mohammed has tried on several occasions through appeals to keep details of the allegations against him out of the public eye. But both in March 2020 and now, in October 2021, they have been made public, although he did not seek to appeal the most recent order permitting publication of these judgments.

Wednesday's ruling that, despite his denials, a sovereign ruler has interfered in the course of British justice by ordering the hacking of UK phones, including of a member of the House of Lords is both shocking, embarrassing and damaging to Sheikh Mohammed's international reputation.

Summing up the hacking allegations made by Princess Haya, her barrister Nicholas Cusworth QC told the court: "It is now clear, essentially, that the mother is engaged in a terrible game, a terrible life or death game of grandmother's footsteps in the dark. While she seeks answers about property purchases, hackers apparently get to work interfering with her privileged communications."

After the publication of the judgments Sheikh Mohammed said in a statement: "I have always denied the allegations made against me and I continue to do so. These matters concern supposed operations of state security.

"As a head of government involved in private family proceedings, it was not appropriate for me to provide evidence on such sensitive matters either personally or via my advisers in a foreign court."

He added: "Neither the Emirate of Dubai nor the UAE are party to these proceedings and they did not participate in the hearing. The findings are therefore inevitably based on an incomplete picture.

"In addition, the findings were based on evidence that was not disclosed to me or my advisers. I therefore maintain that they were made in a manner which was unfair."

Embarrassing as this is for Sheikh Mohammed, there is little or no prospect of his ever having to face any police questioning.

As Dubai's sovereign ruler, he remains a huge figure in the equestrian world, he owns extensive properties in the UK and has been photographed with the Queen at race meetings such as Ascot. The emirate of Dubai is home to around 100,000 British expatriates and both he and the wider UAE government are considered close allies of the UK.

The story is unlikely to get much coverage in the government-monitored media in the UAE, and here in London the UAE Embassy has declined to comment on the case, saying it is a private family matter.

The sheikh himself has sovereign immunity from any future potential prosecution.

#Princess Haya #Dubai Princely Family

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oneweekoneband · 3 years

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In the first cold hours of a new December morning, Taylor Swift once again revealed herself to be the primary antagonist in my hero’s journey. Weary and woebegone as I am, I will not waste strength on any attempt to deny that this latest attack has knocked me off balance, but I believe it is important that I—we, really, the lot of us who have been bloodied pitiably beneath this most brutal show of force—rebound immediately into a defensive posture so that there might be any hope at all for survival. Taylor’s second pandemic album will be released at midnight tonight, so I guess Shakespeare and his little “play” about elder abuse can get fucked after all. The album is called evermore. It was hubris, I can see in retrospect, which led me to tempt my enemy by writing all these words about her on this, the week of her birthday, knowing as I do that Taylor is one of those especially dangerous adults who make a big deal about both birthdays and lucky numbers. Icarus is my name now, covered in melted wax and tumbling to the sea. So as to steel ourselves for these horrors yet to come, I offer now, with not arrogance but the faith of the foolhardy, my best conjecture as to the content of each detestable track.

willow - Could be about a tree. Could be about a girl. More likely it is both somehow, which is extremely pervy, and not just because that’s part of the plot of the unspeakably cursed The Raven Cycle novels, which I, a full blown adult with, generally speaking, normal brain function, voluntarily read for the first time this summer because some of us, ma’am, used the pandemic for activities that hurt only ourselves, not others. Well, happy holidays, tree fuckers.

champagne problems - Whatever this is, know that I will be considering it a work after Fall Out Boy’s “Champagne for My Real Friends, Real Pain for My Sham Friends” and I’ll be right to do so and many people will say as much admiringly and they’ll smile at me with pride and doff their caps as I go.

gold rush - If this song is anything but a loving, comprehensive summation of the children’s novel DEAR AMERICA Seeds of Hope: The Gold Rush Diary of Susanna Fairchild then I’m going to walk directly out of my home and, deadly virus be damned, keep walking until I’ve entered Taylor Swift’s instead, at which point I will begin to scream out a litany of complaints at the very top of my voice, ceasing only when her security team kills me or we fall in love.

tis the damn season - Worst case scenario this is a sad Christmas song (the best kind of Christmas song) and it devastates me in the most degrading way possible. Best case scenario it’s really bad and dumb and I can live without pain.

tolerate it - Many possibilities here. Could be about white-knuckling it through a period of depression, or a breakup. Most obviously, it could be about COVID-19 lockdowns keeping us trapped in our homes, disconnected from loved ones, going slow-brained and strange, bowls piling up, and suddenly so desperate for human interaction that even memories of having drinks with somebody from Hinge who quoted Friends twice in an hour are tantalizing in comparison to the touch-starved dreamstate of staying indoors... But I kinda feel like this is Taylor replying “COPE” from on high to my tweets about how I would rather be boiled alive than have to face the existence of this record.

no body, no crime (feat. Haim) - What would be very good is if this is a homosexual romp about Taylor Swift and the one hot Haim guitar girl with the really gay energy doing a murder together a la “Somethin’ Bad” by Miranda Lambert with Carrie Underwood, but honestly, it is probably another song about Gone Girl.

happiness - Impossible to speak on this since, thanks to Taylor Swift, happiness is something with which I have no familiarity.

dorothea - Have seen chirping on the odious bird application about how perhaps this song title suggests that Taylor has written a song about Middlemarch, titling it for Dorothea Brooke, but I reject this because it implies that Taylor has read Middlemarch, which is a premise I cannot accept. Whether this refusal is out of self-preservation, being unwilling and in fact unable to face a world where Taylor Swift read and was moved to creation by the novel which was my most essential friend the summer I got dumped by a guy who I still had to work feet away from in a candle factory for another month, and about which Emily Dickinson (Emily Dickinson whose birthday it happens to be today, which isn’t to say that this means anything about anything. I am simply trying to batten down all hatches literally and spiritually in light of having been had once again by this numerology obsessed demon) once wrote "What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory.” or because I just at my core do not believe that Taylor has read a single book since Gone Girl I couldn’t possibly say.

coney island (feat. The National) : Some ungodly americana ass bullshit that is going to ruin my life. The thought of holy terror shaped like a horse girl Taylor Swift and trickster nymph in the body of a tax accountant Matt Berninger, two individuals I have allowed, separately, to cause me grievous psychic harm, having even the barest amount of one to one contact, even digitally, has made me want to peel all my skin off and put it back on flipped inside out so that I might, when I look in the mirror, see a version of myself which approximates how I feel.

ivy - Another song for the plant lesbians. That’s fine, and I’m happy for that community, but what I want to know, looking at this growing pile of songs named after women, is where, Taylor, is the song about loudmouth queen Inez, legendary gossip and, for my money, the star of folklore?

cowboy like me - Putting it as mildly as humanly possible, to slit my throat would be less cruel. I am drawing a straight line from me writing illegible sequels to perfect film An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (itself a sequel) in crayon as a toddler, to Paula Cole’s “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” on the radio in my mom’s two door Honda, to me everyday after school in third grade changing into the cowboy costume my godmother bought, to me at fourteen internalizing a sense of righteous indignation that would take years to even begin to outgrow when Crash beat Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture, to the winter I dropped half my classes out of fear and sickness and read paperback westerns on the twenty third floor of the college library for tens of hours at a go, to the profoundly gay episode of Supernatural called “Tombstone” which is, yes, named for the profoundly gay cowboy film Tombstone, to the inspired and revitalizing pause in “Space Cowboy” by Kacey Musgraves where she’s like, “You can have your space........ cowboy”, to Mitski’s Be the Cowboy, to the perfect boygenius cover of certified classic “Cowboy Take Me Away”, to whatever the hell this is going to be.That line is not to make a point at all. It’s just that there is a line and beside it there is me, incapacitated.

long story short - Just like all the other times anyone has ever invoked this phrase in the entire history of human beings expressing themselves with language, it is going to be a huge lie, because this woman never shuts up.

marjorie - After all that Taylor has put me through over the years, she should have at least named one of these wretched things “ellen” after my dead Sagittarian grandmother, whose birthday is tomorrow, December 11th, which is again, the release date of Taylor Swift’s second album in sixth months, but it’s probably for the best that she didn’t because you simpletons would immediately think it was an homage to George Bush’s friend Dory the fish, and therefore gay, regardless of the actual text of the song, and it’d be the “betty” massacre all over again. That being said, this is almost assuredly another horny song about some mid-century white lady. Only days ago Taylor was telling Entertainment Weekly that she’s been watching a lot of movies in quarantine, and while she didn’t name 1958’s Marjorie Morningstar starring Natalie Wood, I wouldn’t put it past her.

closure - God, I hope this one is another Kaylor classic so we can all act like complete raving lunatics online from the confines of our own plague quarters for a few days. It’s been a hard year.

evermore (feat. Bon Iver) - I’ll be catatonic by this point. Who cares?

right where you left me - Yes, in hell.

it’s time to go - Yes, TO HELL.

#taylor swift #folklore

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shihalyfie · 3 years

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02 and the question of “what a life is”

One topic more specific to 02 is the question of what exactly counts as being “alive”, which is initially brought up as a question when Ken discarding the Kaiser persona is directly caused by the revelation that he might have misjudged this, leading into the second half of the series where other issues reveal that it’s not as easy of a question as one thinks. In the end, 02 never gives a concrete answer about what constitutes the boundary between something that’s “alive” and “not alive” -- but, being a series that’s very much about pragmatism, gives a much clearer answer as to what one should do about it.

While it’s not named directly in the series itself (I’m not sure if this specific named concept was the intent, as it’s since expanded to become a fairly ubiquitous theme in sci-fi and fantasy overall), 02 deals heavily with a question related to a thought experiment called the “Chinese room problem”, which originated as a question related to artificial intelligence development and has since expanded into having philosophical and spiritual nuances (perhaps fittingly for Digimon Adventure, which is heavily about digital technology and sci-fi but mixes it with a lot of philosophical and spiritual imagery).

The Chinese room problem goes like this: let’s say you’re a person who has never learned, studied, or grown up with the Chinese language (or, really, any language you can’t understand or read; Chinese was only used as an example because the person explaining the thought experiment was using himself as an example and couldn’t read or understand it). You’re locked in a room that has a bunch of Chinese phrasebooks that give you instructions -- basically, they indicate common Chinese phrases, and sensible responses you can give to them (without actually translating it to a language you know). Someone slips you a piece of paper under the door with some Chinese phrases on them. You use the phrasebooks to write appropriate responses, and slip the paper back. The person outside the door reads the paper, sees what they gave you, and sees the response you gave them. It makes sense, of course, because the phrasebook told you to write an answer that made sense. But can you be said to actually understand Chinese? No, because you were just following instructions without actually understanding what they meant.

So let’s expand this to make it a bit more complicated: say you have an AI or a robot or something of the sort that accepts “input” -- people saying things to it, or showing it things -- and gives expected “responses” that seem sensible, through a bunch of complicated programs and processes in its programming. Can you say this robot is “alive”? One might say “no”, because, no matter how complicated and intricate it is, all of it is technically following a set of routine commands telling it to do certain things in response...or so you might say, but couldn’t you say the same thing about a human brain, which also takes input, processes it according to its own instructions (just caused by chemical processes instead of bytes and code), and creates output? After a certain point, this question is going to become far more of a philosophical, spiritual, and potentially even religious question than anything.

Adventure and 02 undoubtedly have a very spiritual element to it, given the heavy usage of Neoplatonic themes, the concept of “destiny” that hangs heavily over it, and the fact that Digimon themselves are heavily linked to spiritual things like Japanese youkai or other spirits and literally being part of the human soul. Digimon partners are treated as part of their partners’ human psyches, yet are also treated as individuals. And, in the end, it’s driven home that Digimon are made out of data -- but “digital technology” is treated as something that can communicate with such spiritual things. So here’s the question: At what point can a Digimon be called a living being?

Well, really, the first time this had really been brought up was the allusion to the issue in Adventure episode 20 -- when Taichi takes the revelation of the Digital World being a “digital” world a bit too literally and decides to treat it as a game, acting a bit too recklessly as a result. Koushirou himself buys into the theory of “real bodies” (which turns out to be false; this isn’t a Matrix situation where their bodies are sleeping somewhere, but they are actually being migrated here), but the point by the end of this episode is: just because everything is “data” doesn’t mean you get to treat it any less lightly. Do not treat the Digital World like a “game world” or something you can fiddle with at will.

Even if the technicals may make it seem like a computer, the reality of the situation is that everything you do has a permanent effect that you cannot instantly take back. It doesn’t matter what it’s “made” up out of; the issue is more about what you do, and the practical impact it has on what’s around you. (This will very important for later, so keep this in mind as we go.)

So by the time we get to 02, the first time this issue is brought up again is in 02 episode 20, when Ken, as the Kaiser, recognizes the kids’ Digimon Baby forms as the “plushies” he’d seen them carrying in real life during the soccer match back in 02 episode 8, which reveals a lot about his mentality in approaching the Digital World and Digimon -- he’d been under the impression that Digimon couldn’t leave it, apparently, and that they were therefore all part of a simulated game. Driving it in further is that Wormmon refers to the Digimon having “bodies” (as in, physical bodies), which trips Ken’s radar that there’s a lot more to this than he’d thought. There’s also a lot of evidence that Ken wasn’t just solely trying to buy into this concept for the sake of denial and self-justification; up until this point, he’d been noticeably hesitant to physically harm other humans, so he really did buy into there being a substantial difference here.

...But, funnily enough, we later learn in a flashback in 02 episode 23 that Ken didn’t necessarily always have this attitude of “Digimon aren’t living beings, so I get to do whatever I want with them” back during his original adventures with Wormmon in the Digital World. One could argue that maybe he “knew” that Digimon were alive back then and the Dark Seed just made him forget through trauma, but even Taichi hardly treated the Digimon badly back when he thought that everything was a “game” back in Adventure (rather, he was reckless with himself more than anything). Later in this very series, there’ll end up being a massive debate on what exactly constitutes a Digimon having a “soul”. No, the real issue is actually...

What tips Ken over the edge into discarding the Kaiser persona is empathy -- when he retroactively reflects on the implications of the Digimon being “alive” meaning that every single action he’d done had an impact on causing “pain” or “torture” on others. That’s why it didn’t matter so much to him back then, because he was willing to treat Wormmon with the respect of a living being, regardless of what he was made out of (and, really, humans are more likely to be kind to things than otherwise, even when they’re supposedly “artificial”; for an extreme example, see how people are inclined to treat their robotic vacuum cleaners like family members, or have a hard time picking rude choices in video games, and those are all things you have much less of an argument for there being any actual pain inflicted).

And, hence, the main reason why the kids rail so much on the Kaiser for suggesting the heresy of “resetting the Digital World”: because he’s treating something with the gravity of “reality” like it’s something he can just toy with for his own convenience. Who cares what it’s made up of? There are actual civilizations building a livelihood here and “living beings” that can feel pain or show emotion. Nobody ever gave the kids immediate knowledge that Digimon have souls or any higher answer like that -- it’s just that the Kaiser is a callous, unempathetic jerk who’s willing to toy with so many lives and living individuals for his own pleasure. And, most importantly, everything the Kaiser has done here is something he can’t take back, and has to accept the consequences of; this wasn’t a place where he could vent out his feelings of being unable to “take back” Osamu’s death and treat everything lightly.

It doesn’t actually matter what it’s made up of -- the fact is that they act like living beings, show obvious personal feelings and a propensity to feel pain, and thus have the right to be treated as such. If you’re practically able to observe this, then you should be respecting that.

Once Archnemon takes over the position as most prominent antagonist, the kids start dealing with her Dark Tower Digimon that she uses to indiscriminately destroy things. This initially creates a lot of confusion for the kids, especially when Ken and Stingmon so easily kill Thunderballmon and it looks to them like he’s gone right back into sadism after supposedly being reformed -- thus, this would provide an issue with Ken’s apparent lack of empathy if he’s allowed to keep going, because he (seemingly) hasn’t learned his lesson and will go on to keep hurting more victims.

When Golemon goes to destroy the dam, it’s repeatedly commented on how unusual it is for a Digimon to just go and destroy a dam for no reason except to ruin people’s lives -- even the enemies back in Adventure at least had a power-hungry motive, and the non-verbal “wild” ones back in File Island were ultimately territorial at worst, and certainly not interested in wanton destruction without reason. On top of that, in fact, only two people -- Iori and Miyako -- in this group of five are actually that vehemently in favor of trying to spare Golemon for the sheer reason of it being a living being -- Daisuke starts to consider the fact that it may become necessary to save potential victims before Ken is even brought into the picture, Takeru points out how close they are to push-coming-to-shove, and Hikari clearly laments the fact it may become possible but doesn’t take nearly of the strong “we absolutely cannot do this” stance that Iori and Miyako have. And, after all, Takeru and Hikari were there back in Adventure when killing some very sentient Digimon became necessary, and learned that it may be something you have to do if you want to prevent more victims, and Daisuke had personally been a victim of Vamdemon back in 1999 and also happens to be one of the most pragmatic in this group.

Thus, the reveal that Golemon is actually a Dark Tower Digimon confirms two things for them: firstly, that it’s very unlikely that Golemon is powered by anything but a sheer instinct of wanton destruction, and secondly, that Ken does, indeed, have a concept of empathy. The kids had already noticed that something was “unusual” about Golemon in that it seemed to be incapable of independent action, just an order to “mindlessly destroy”, and it being what the series refers to as “a Dark Tower in the shape of a Digimon” just happens to confirm that it may not actually be that capable of independent action or emotion -- which they then realize that Ken also realized, and thus that he wasn’t killing Digimon out of callousness. This is, also, effectively, the same reason they’d been okay with killing Chimeramon earlier -- because there was absolutely no evidence that it had been capable of sentient reason or anything besides “destruction on instinct”.

So, again: their judgment on the situation is based on a practical observation about whether the entity in question was capable of having emotions or independent thought, and, again, a question of empathy...

...because we learn that the same process, when applied to enough Dark Towers, is enough to create a Digimon who is capable of that kind of independent thought and doesn’t feel up to taking orders, regardless of whether Archnemon is his “creator” or not. So we’ve got a demonstration of a Digimon who’s clearly capable of independent thought in ways the other Dark Tower Digimon are not (he even voices “envy” for the other single-tower Digimon Archnemon creates for being unable to think about anything), and starts exhibiting irrational behavior and the concept of “emotions”.

Recall the issue of the Chinese room problem: if we’re talking about a room of phrasebooks that simply take one input and export output, you, in the middle of the room, can’t really be said to be “understanding” Chinese. But the more complex the inputs and expected outputs get, the more complicated and intricate and explanatory those phrasebooks are going to need to be, and at some point, given a complicated enough question you get, if you’re capable of answering that in the same way a human might be expected to, that information in the phrasebooks will have to be explanatory enough to an extent you’ll be said to understand Chinese. Exactly “how complicated” or “how nuanced” does a program get before we tip that boundary? Clearly there is some difference between BlackWarGreymon and the other Dark Tower Digimon, but what is it?

And when 02 episode 32 comes around and Agumon decides to have a little bonding chat with BlackWarGreymon, even he can't answer the question definitively as to what a "soul" or “heart” is -- nobody in this narrative can, and this series has no answer. There’s no real clear-cut rule as to the boundary as to when one can be considered sentient. But while Agumon may not be able to immediately yank out deep philosophy, he at least has a deep level of insight and understanding as to what it means -- you have feelings for others, you have emotions, you have things you want that aren’t necessarily what others expect you to do, and you can bring your own perspective to the table.

The debate over what to do with this also leads to the rift between Takeru and Iori that they have to work towards mending during their Jogress arc -- Takeru’s trauma regarding Patamon in Adventure has spiraled him all the way over into prejudice against anything related to the darkness, and Iori, who understands there’s more to the situation than that, but also happens to be on the other extreme of considering it immoral to kill anything regardless of whether it’s about to murder a ton of other victims while it’s at it.

Ultimately, Adventure and 02 is a narrative that prioritizes “pragmatism” first, and the moment it’s made clear BlackWarGreymon isn’t going to cause problems anymore, the kids all decide it’s fine to let him be. In the end, whether BlackWarGreymon is “alive” is a philosophical question, but...

...whether they should hold back in fighting just to “spare lives” really has no bearing on that question. Enemies like LadyDevimon and the other Digimon the kids are ultimately forced to end up fighting are clearly alive with their own emotions -- it’s just that those emotions do happen to be uncontrolled sadism and an active desire for wanton destruction. Miyako herself even observes that LadyDevimon is a “coward” -- but she’s also still emotionally torn by the fact they end up killing her, and the story also doesn’t give her grief for this, because there’s no sin for her to have empathy. She recognized what it meant to kill a life, but they also cannot be blamed for taking that life in the process of saving multiple others. The issue of “whether it’s alive or not” had always been a separate question from the morality of fighting said lives -- and, either way, it’s still valuable that characters like Hikari, Miyako, and the other Chosen Children aren’t necessarily doing this because they like doing it, because it’s still important to keep that feeling of “empathy” in their hearts, even if push did ultimately come to shove.

So when BlackWarGreymon does return, again, nobody has an answer for him on whether he has a soul or not, but in 02 episode 47, Agumon, V-mon, and Wormmon encourage him to embrace the concept of life by “experiences” -- happiness, sadness, pain, playing and enjoying life with those you care about. Because those experiences are “real”, and Agumon himself says that “those experiences have made me who I am”; regardless of the higher philosophical question of whether he has a soul or not, he’s still someone who’s capable of having experiences and acting based on his memory of them, and that’s what’s really important. And hence, when BlackWarGreymon sacrifices himself one episode later, it’s because he understands the meaning of “doing something for others”, and is also implicitly mourned by the other Digimon, who had never failed to see him as “someone they could have befriended”, regardless of what he had originally been made up of.

It’s also why the kids are so traumatized by Archnemon and Mummymon’s deaths in 02 episode 48 -- they had no reason to be personally attached to them prior to that, and Archnemon had even said that her personal goals were nothing but wanton destruction in 02 episode 29 (which had been the first time Iori had really considered that pacifism may not be completely possible here). All of the wacky hijinks between the two of them had largely been outside of their view. But even back in 02 episodes 36-37, the kids had understood that there was some degree that they were harmless if left alone, and in the end, they watched Archnemon die in unambiguous pain and Mummymon die in the name of true love, by dying in a suicide attack because of his despair over losing her.

Archnemon and Mummymon had ultimately turned out to be “artificial lives” on their own, created at the hands of Oikawa to be his minions, and also somewhat guided by “wanton destruction” and not entirely fully aware of what they wanted to do independent of him -- BlackWarGreymon’s existential crisis had caused them to question their place in the world in 02 episode 47...and quickly shrug it off again. Could you say anything about whether they were alive or not, or whether they had souls? Perhaps it doesn’t really matter -- whether or not they were able to fully have deep thought the same way BlackWarGreymon and the other Digimon had, they at the very least were able to feel attachment and pain, and that alone deserved to be respected.

In the end, you could say that’s 02′s answer -- or non-answer -- to the Chinese room problem. You may not be able to answer the intrinsic philosophical question of whether it’s got a “soul” or is “alive” or not, but if it’s clearly demonstrating an observable and practical phenomenon of showing emotions, acting on some degree of independent will, taking in experiences and acting on them, and being able to feel a sense of pain, then you should still treat it with the appropriate amount of empathy -- regardless of what it’s made out of.

Incidentally, we do actually get a very small revisiting of this topic in Kizuna, when Menoa creates a ton of Eosmon by “scientific” methods -- and, much like the Dark Tower Digimon, they’re not recognized as living beings by anyone in this narrative, because their behavior is clearly that of mindlessly following Menoa’s orders; Yamato won’t consider it a Digimon, and Menoa herself even acknowledges that this is in no way a real “partner” like her true one, Morphomon. What does get Menoa to recognize Morphomon within Eosmon is when it does one thing -- smile -- that’s clearly outside that view, and an obvious show of independent emotion, leading Menoa to realize that her true, living partner may be closer than she’d thought.

#digimon #digimon adventure 02 #kizuna spoilers #shihameta

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mywebfoot · 5 years

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Cyberbullying is justice...

...and other lessons from Revenge Note (Webdrama 2017).

This is a review of a drama that I am watching currently. I got sucked in via Youtube recommendations, and it made me think, particularly in light of recent events around cyberbullying. I hope you can read through till the end.

What does a member of the royal family, a member of a kpop group, and the average teenager have in common?

Cyberbullying.

Sulli’s suicide is said to be her escape from depression, created in no small part by the endless criticism of faceless commentators. Meghan Markle recently gave an interview where she could barely hold on to her composure, talking about how she was first pregnant, then a new mother while the press tore her apart. I’ve been a new mom, and fending off criticism is practically a feature of new motherhood. My heart ached to think of her every imagined weakness and shortcoming being amplified and echoed back to her.

Some say that cyberbullying can simply be switched off. A recent article in Singapore’s Straits Times has a faceless “netizen” offering celebrities this simple exit - just don’t get onto social media if you can’t “get used to it.” That position denies three things - the celebrities’ right to promote, their right to respectful conversation, and the wrongness of being cruel with words.

Which is where this drama review begins. Revenge Note is a web-drama, starring young actors and k-pop performers. On the surface, it seems to have nothing to say. In many ways, the plot is pure wish-fulfillment. A klutzy teenaged girl begins the first year of high school. She gains the attention of her high school hottie classmate and of her brother’s best friend - who just happens to be a rising kpop-star. High school social life is not all unicorns and rainbows, and the characters in this world are from a predictable range of queens, gangsters and awful teachers.

What’s different about this high school fairy tale is that Ho Goo Hee (the first two syllables of her name, Ho Gu, sounds like the term for a pushover) has a mysterious app, called Revenge Note. She is a pushover, yielding to the people who push her around. Even her mom favors her smart elder brother over her. One day, something bad happens to her, and the app mysteriously appears on her phone. It prompts her: “Will you be a Revenge Queen?”. It’s a digital, dark fairy godmother, almost as if Maleficent were an algorithm. All she needs is a name, even if it’s an internet handle, and the app sends a message to the target. Each time she enters one, havoc is wreaked upon the person’s life, and eventually they are brought to justice. The punishment is always in a poetically similar way to the original offence. One day the target is Goo Hee’s bullies. Another, it’s an act of justice, exposing the pervert school teacher who is threatening her friend.

It seemed like more teenaged wish fulfillment to me. After all, if you find yourself in highschool, where social mores are sharpened by razor blade netizen tongues, then certainly there ought to be an app for countering that.

Yet, as the show progresses, we see that Go Hee is herself turning into judge and jury. Three times, we see her hesitate before she hits the submit button, three times, she asks herself if she should not wield her power to execute the offender. Once, she comes very close to entering the wrong name.

This is where this little web drama went from fun to smart, from comedy to commentary. In the beginning, it made you root for Go Hee - clearly, eliminating the bullies is to be lauded. Then it showed that one human being can have too much power, and his or her judgement may not reflect the truth of the matter. It clearly illustrates that the judgement of a single person is not equal to justice.

Therein lies the thoughtful message of this well-written story - the root of cyberbullying is an individual’s outraged sense of justice. It is not the deliberate pursuit of “hate” that creates cyberbullies, it is instead an emotionally volatile response to an observed offence. “Hate”, as it is often characterized, is a potent concept, but strangely too simplistic. Instead, the online commenter believes that lines were crossed. He/she loves justice, and therefore there is no wrong in punishing the offender.

This reaction chain leaves no room for due process, no space for empathy, no ideals of mercy, no consideration of reformation. These are all things that need time, and space. On the internet, there is neither time nor space. Responses are instant, emotionally driven, and amplified to an incredible volume. Human beings at the other end of this loudspeaker can choose to go deaf or listen and be excoriated. There is no turning it off, because one does not need to hear a sonic wave to feel the impact. The earth shakes when millions of others listen, and respond, and join the deafening chorus.

The Revenge Note is a frightening tool. It’s similar to another incarnation of the fairy godmother, the genie, who takes your wishes literally. As you say, master. It is absolute, irreversible, and vulnerable to any turn of phrase.

So what’s the lesson of Revenge Note? I am at the 9th of 12 episodes. I am not sure where it is going with the power that Go Hee now wields. I hope it ends with Go Hee discarding Revenge Note, and relying on her empathy, her friends, and her family to help her get through high school. You know, those old, slow things that seem to have little power.

#revenge note #kim hyang gi #cha eun woo #park solomon #webdrama #sulli #meghan markle #cyber bullies

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pierrotdameron · 5 years

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On the set of His Dark Materials, Dafne Keen is about to see a bear.

With battle raging around her, snowflakes flying and alarms ringing, the young actor – who plays lead character Lyra in the BBC’s new adaptation of Philip Pullman’s acclaimed novel – sprints down a corridor, dodging enemies and fighting for freedom. And just when all seems lost, she looks up, seeing her saviour. A broad smile breaks out as she sees who’s standing above and ready to save her… a man wearing a white, faux-bearskin rug on his head.

OK, on set Pullman’s trademark armoured bears (or panserbjørn) aren’t much to look at – but over a year later, when they finally arrive on-screen, they’re an incredibly impressive achievement, realistic and filled with character, a triumph of puppetry and visual effects. If anything, they’re even more impressive than the animal dæmons that have appeared in every other episode so far. But how were they brought to life? What did the actors film with on set, and what were the biggest challenges?

Happily, after we’d suitably calmed down from all the excitement, the behind-the-scenes team were happy to fill us in…

Pre-production

While the 2007 movie adaptation of His Dark Materials (titled The Golden Compass) wasn’t exactly beloved by fans, it did win plaudits for its VFX, with the work of independent company Framestore winning the film its only Oscar. Now, over a decade later, the new adaptation would have to surpass even that achievement – which is why Framestore were brought on board again to work on the TV series, marking them out as the only common element between both adaptations.

“Framestore did the original bears in the original film, which we won the Oscar for, and we’re doing the bears again, now,” VFX supervisor Russell Wilson told us. “And what’s really interesting about that is certain things we computationally couldn’t do then, we can do now – but obviously it’s harder work.”

And the digital work on the bears didn’t begin after the shoot had already concluded, as many might expect. In fact, before a single scene of the panserbjørn storyline had been committed to film, Framestore and Bad Wolf’s in-house VFX gurus were working hard on previsualizations for the bears – in other words, plotting out scripted scenes in basic computer animation in specially-rendered environments, so they could work out how the bears would look before the directors started work.

“That was a combination of Framestore’s bear animation and our [interactive set] environment,” VFX artist and pre-vis supervisor Dan May told RadioTimes.com. “We blocked out the sequence with Russell and the stunt guys downstairs. “They animated the bears to quite a high level in pre-vis, that that pre-vis was then brought to our [digital] set with all its textures.”

In other words, basic digital bears were added onto a specially-mapped digital set, blocking out the scene before anyone had even turned on a camera and creating a “virtual shoot.” And when it came to actually filming the sequence IRL, this preparation meant that the bears could (sort of) be on set as well, with specially-prepared screens and virtual “cameras” allowing the production team to check where the animated, moving bears were at all times.

“When they shot the sequence, they were able to bring that animation and the virtual camera angles, and see them live on set,” May explained. “They were able to line up a digital bear with a real set. And that is not a first, because they’re doing that sort of thing on Jungle Book and Avatar. But we’re doing it on a more affordable, sustainable way.”

Though of course, it wasn’t just digital bears lurking on set…

Puppeteers

As with the dæmons, the bears on set were built and puppeteered by Brian Fisher and his eight-person team, with various different rigs and outfits utilised by the team for different purposes.

“There’s about seven to 10 different bear rigs,” VFX supervisor Wilson told us. “There’s one for smashing into stuntmen, there’s one for representing his face, there’s one where there’s literally a guy with a glove on putting it on his face.

For example, sometimes the bear was just represented by actor Joe Tandberg (who also provides Iorek’s voice onscreen) wearing (functionally) a bearskin costume, while other times he wore a special rig (pictured exclusively above) that allowed Iorek’s bear head to hang in front of his own.

Other times, he just wore a plain boiler suit with a light rig over his face, or stepped away in favour of a static model (pictured) to help the crew include Iorek’s scale, or was replaced by a large grey cushion for scenes where Iorek was less mobile or in a confined space. “You’re basically in a green room, with a weird grey thing which is supposed to be a bear, and with Lin singing? It’s just all very weird,” Dafne Keen, who plays Lyra in the series, told us.

And of course, a lot of the time the full-time puppeteers took over. For example, while on set RadioTimes.com was shown a large puppet version of Iorek operated by two people to impressive effect. Within the rig, one puppeteer wears an ordinary large hiking backpack, leans forward to face the ground and hoists two long poles forward, with a mesh bear head that he can control and turn at the end of the poles.

Another man behind holds two strings to control the front legs. Together they can rear the bear to his full height, stalk him around an area and generally bring him to life. In His Dark Materials episode four, another bear head – one with Iorek’s snarling teeth – was used for a scene where he attacks a foe, and generally speaking the team tried hard to keep things simple instead of using complicated mechanical rigs or creations.

“When the bear attacks – that was much more stuntman, him, us throwing him around on a mat until we worked out something that we liked,” Wilson says. “We take a very human, organic, what I call a man-tronic approach to things that you might take or do in a technical perspective. “When he’s getting dragged around by the bear it is just a guy in a boiler suit and [the victim’s] on a wire, and that’s it.”

Riding Iorek

But the fighting wasn’t the only filming challenge. In fact, a key action shot that everyone was even more keen to get right comes later in the series, when Lyra rides on Iorek’s back as the pair travel into a dangerous new area. On set, the human portion of the shot was achieved by creating a special rig for Dafne Keen to ride (pictured above) – but unlike similar ridable CGI animals like the dragons of Game of Thrones, it wasn’t mechanical, instead requiring the puppeteers to move it themselves.

“When Lyra’s riding a bear, it’s all operated by a human in a backpack,” Wilson said. “You know, we don’t bring in rigs and mechanically programme them because it’s quite slow to do, and it means you get less takes at it.” “To get the specifics, the biomechanics behind how a polar bear’s gait runs, we had to go through and, with the animators, actually break it down into segments, figure out how we can translate that into something that has movement and life but is not purely mechanical,” puppeteer Brian Fisher told us.

“The second you go into a mechanical movement, you can speed it up, you can slow it down, but it is always rhythmic, whereas we don’t work in binary movements.” As you can see in the above video, RadioTimes.com actually got the chance to try out the bear rig while on set, and can confirm it’s definitely man-powered – and surprisingly bouncy. “I loved the bear rig,” Keen herself us. “Though I was too light for it. “It was very funny. They made this rig, and they didn’t calculate my weight. So they had to then harness me, because I bounced too much off the bear. So that was really fun.” “Although I felt kind of bad because I had two human beings bouncing up and down underneath me…”

The final touches

Obviously, the lion’s share of the work done by the VFX team comes after the filming as they gradually work on creating and animating CGI shots right up until broadcast. And for Wilson and his team, no detail was too small when it came to the armoured bears. “In our version of Iorek now he has the muscles underneath [his fur] that flex as he moves, and that also drives the fat on him to jiggle as he runs,” Wilson told us. “But then the skin actually slides over the bones and the ribs, which makes the fur that’s attached to the skin slide over that as well. All of that together gives you something that feels really realistic. “So again,” he concluded “the appetite and the ability is higher – therefore the workload is higher.” Oh well – hopefully, the time and trouble wasn’t too unbear-able.

#His Dark Materials #Iorek Byrnison #Joe Tandberg #Brian Fisher

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definitely-not-an-alb · 5 years

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Magical Machines In RoL: A short Round-Up

Shortening because this is long.

There’s a surprising number of magical or mysterious devices we keep encountering:

The Pin in one of the Cat-Girls temple in Moon Over Soho

The Cunning Device in A Rare Book of Cunning Device

Lesley’s Phone-Bomb in The Hanging Tree

“Mary Engine”, (Might be related to Ada Lovelace’s design, as per Peter’s observations, might be some type of early calculator?)

“Some Type of Device” Babbage (Who worked with Lovelace) was working on for the Folly, according to Nightingale

And then there’s Lady Helena’s insistence that her tradition’s Magic Salons go back to Caroline from Ansbach, who, Peter notes, also hung about with one Gottfried Willhelm Leibniz (Who was – hopefully – not a machine, though he did write like he was running out of time and was generally low-key bonkers)

First three are kind of ??? so let’s look at the last three (+) instead

Why the fuck is Leibniz relevant for us?

Now, I’m not one for Great-Man-Histroy, but even I have to admit that Leibniz was, again, kind of off-the-Weird-Genius-charts. If you, say, want a literary or historical counterweight to Isaac Newton in Allsasser-Excentric-Genuis-Bullshit, he’s the man. Literally. Anygays. There are five(ish) things that connect Leibniz to the rest of the RoL Universe;

He’s connected with Caroline from Ansbach, as stated above

He dabbled in alchemy (well, he dabbled in everything)

He got into an academic bitch fight with Isaac Newton (Because either on of them plagiarized the other or they just invented the same Important Math Thing at roughtly the same time – we will never know ~~~)

He either invented the binary code* (aka thing that makes Computers go be-bop) or greatly improved it/anticipated a bunch of logic-probelms with it, depending on who you ask

He revolutionized early calculators by inventing the Leibniz Wheel (aka, the things that made Calculators go shrrrrrrrrrr for 200 years before things got funky and analytical)

(All of this is somewhere between the late 1660s – 1716s) (* same problem of the )

Early Calculators and Leibniz Wheels

(Aka a long and rambly part that you can skip if you don’t want to learn about Fancy Early Tech)

Early Calculators where mostly stuff like fancy modefied Abaci, but in the 1640s this french dude Pascal build an Arithmetic Machine, which used interlockign wheels to do what it says on the tin crunch numbers. This machine was both very cool and very suck-tastic; it could do math for you (yay); But it was also super expensive, hard to transport, harder to build, even harder to opperate and therefore prone to human error (boo). It was also limited to addition an subtraction. It didn’t really catch on.

Along comes Leibniz and designes the Leibniz Wheel (which, unlike the A.M.’s wheels, which needed 10 rotations per single digit, only needed a single rotation for any operation involving a single-digit number and could, in conjunction with other Leibniz wheels, carry over into higher digits more easily. He used it to build the first really usable Calculator(s). This Stepped Reckoner (which is what you get when you badly translate Stufenrechner) was easier to operate and it could perform all four basic operations. You could actually use it. Or, as this book puts it:

“The demand for Leibniz’s machines was largely for it’s help in calculating tables of common mathematical functions. In the seventeenth century producing one of these tables might have been a lifes’s work.”

Just, in case you wanted to know how rad people thought this was.

Here’s a link to a video of an animated Leibniz Wheel in use.

Babbage’s Difference Engine and Analytical Engine

Babbage’s Difference Engine (1820s/30s) and Analytical Engine (1830s), genreally considered the ‘first computer’ if they’d actually build it, was basically the attempt to stack as many Leibniz Wheel-ish Wheels (they used a variation, btu it‘s afaik the same concept) as possible on top of each other and operate them all simultaneously by using the technology of Joseph Marie Jacquard’s “programmable” Loom (invented around 1800, uses Punchcards to weave different & complex patterns) to brute-force complex mathematical problems.

The Difference Engine was supposed to use this system to calculate and print mathematical tables. It was supposed to be able to calculate polynoms and use sinus and cosinus and such (!!! I know that sounds easy when we all have a graphical calculator lying around at home like a useless math brick, but this is so cool!)

The Analytical Engine was a step up from this, as it should have functioned without human intervention and was upposed to be fully programmable. It even had something like 10 kB memory space. It was a computer, is what it is.

Now, Ada Lovelace took one long look at that and went “well, clearly this isn’t cool enough yet” because she was born a Byron and Just That Extra. She was also apparently called the Enchantress of Numbers by Babbage ... just ... like ... maybe ... okay.

Anyways, Ada, while trying to explain what the fuck this thing was supposed to do to the general science public, casually invented the analytical computer program. As you do. As you fucking do.

(Still using this book as well as this book btw)

To make this clear: Babbage is that one kid who’s always finished first in Math Class because he actually knows how to make tht Unloved Math Brick Of Ugh do what he wants; Ada is that kid who wrote her own game for her Math Brick, hasn’t payed attention since Grade 6 and is currently reading a college-level informatic book under the table. In the first row, Isaac and Gottfried are throwing chalk at each other. Well, you get what I mean.

The Mary Engine

The Mary Engine is produced in the 1840s and is small enough to fit into the store room’s shelves. It’s not a Differentiation or an Analytical Engine, and probably also not a Stepped Reckoner.

But. This thing is actually incredible. The Mary Engine is TINY.

Babbage never finished either Engine. They only build on around 1900 iirr. Second off, the Engines where fuck off huge. Things the size of the Mary Engine really only came around in the early 1900 or so. ‘Enigmas’ (aka Rotor-Crypto-Machines, which are way less complex then actual calculators), while ‘invented’ shortly after WWI all over the world, only became small enough to be moved comfortably on-person during WWII. How the fuck did they get the Mary Engine that small in the 1840s?

If there’s anything I’m missing (or that I’ve gotten horribly wrong, because I’m a computer noob in the end) hit me up so that I can amend this thing. I don’t really have a Grand Fandom Theory or anything. This is just a list (+ minor explanations) of Cool Stuff. A lot of people probably already know this stuff, but I had fun writing this and it might bring people who weren’t raised in Leibniz-Central up to speed somewhat.

Now, another thing, because someone pointed it out a while ago (and I can’t! Believe! I didn’t make that connection!); Linden-Limmer. I really should have seen that one: I fucking live here. So: Hannover, Germany is kind of a bonkers town.

#Rivers of London #meta #idk if anyone actually cares #but this has been in my drafts for ages #and i can't even properly check it anymore because i've read it so often #ugh

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str4y-k1ds · 5 years

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Thoughts on Spiderman Far From Home

So, this is a spoiler filled review/word vomit about the film, if you haven’t seen it yet, there will be spoilers for the movie underneath the “Keep reading” and you have been warned.

I’m going to try and summarize my thoughts in semi-chronological order, because the whole movie went by so quick for me that I really can’t remember the order of everything. Also, no emojis because I had to type this on my computer, so expect a lot of XD’s.

- The “in memoriam” video the school’s news broadcast thingy plays at the beginning was simultaneously hilarious and sad to me. The comic sans made it 10 times better, I bet all of the teachers silently died inside when they saw it. XD

- I was glad to see Natasha in the video, because I was worried that the rest of the world would kinda gloss over her death because of how famous Steve and Tony were compared to the rest of the Avengers.

- Peter’s plan with MJ on the plane going so incredibly wrong was really funny. That one teacher, Mr. Harrington I think, was an absolutely hilarious mess, and I loved it. XD

- I was waiting for that police scene to show up in the movie, but it never came. I wonder why they cut it from the final product?

- Peter’s face when Happy and May were backstage with him? Me too, their “fling” (poor Happy) came out of nowhere, but I loved it. XD

- The reporter scene messed me up dude, I could feel his panic and desire to get the hell out of there, I would have those feelings too if I were in his shoes.

- PETER TINGLE. I freakin burst out laughing every time those words came out of someone’s mouth. XD

- That one airport security lady? She a real one for not exposing our boy like that. XD

- The necklace that Peter bought for MJ? So pretty.

- Peter hitting his head on that bell twice was amazing. XD

- That one song that plays while Peter and his class are in the bus in the mountains? If anyone knows the name of that song, please let me know because I REALLY liked it.

- Oof, Brad kinda pissed me off a little with that whole photo stunt, ngl.

- NIGHT MONKEY. XD

- Ned and Betty for OTP of the year.

- “Even Dead I’m the Hero.” Wow. Classic Tony. XD

- Also, can we talk about how OP EDITH is? Because she has hologram tech now, not to mention like a gazillion drones, and whatever else she can do weapons-wise, that’s not even considering her having “back doors” to basically every single electronic and digital system in the world? Dude, Peter/Mysterio can basically control the world now if you really think about it. Just the concept of EDITH is scary, I’m gonna touch on that later.

- Fury lowkey pissed me off in some parts of the movie, like don’t get me wrong, a lot of what he did was “in the name of protecting the world” and all that, but when he asked if Tony had made a mistake in choosing Peter, I fumed. I wasn’t a fan of the emotional manipulation he was using there, ngl.

- I’ve avoided talking about Mysterio so far to save it for the end, but I can’t not mention that bar scene. When Peter gave him the glasses, the guy sitting next to me muttered a quiet “Oh fuck,” and I completely agreed.

- Everything that happened after the holograms faded away was expertly crafted. The stills in black and white made the audience laugh a little, but everything Mysterio said during his toast and the way he said it, just slightly unhinged but still dangerously cunning, shocked everyone in my theater into a tense silence. So good.

- “BARF, he took my life’s work and named it BARF.” Wow.

- When Peter asked MJ if the only reason she was keeping tabs on him was because she suspected he was Spiderman, and her saying yes? Damn, his face looked so sad and hurt, it made me want to hug him.

- Alright, it’s time we talk about the illusion scene. I can barely put into words all of the emotions and thoughts I was feeling. I was concerned, I was scared, I was mad, I was tripping out, I was shocked, the dread and tension was palpable in my theater. I have never been in a movie theater that quiet before. No one was eating, no one was drinking, no one moved. Literally. I can barely remember what Mysterio said while he was torturing Peter, that’s how drawn in I was by this scene. And when that tombstone appeared, and the Iron Man zombie came out of the ground? I have no words.

- When that train hit him, I jumped right out of my seat and lowkey yelped. Mysterio is an evil son of a bitch, I really hated him.

- I really thought Nick Fury had shot him at first, I really did. That’s how realistic his illusions were, and after the reveal that he hadn’t been shot, that’s when the paranoia set in.

- I was so shell shocked after all of the illusions, that I literally don’t remember anything until Happy shows up with his jet. And while we’re on the topic, Peter brokenly asking Happy if he was real literally caused me to tear up.

- Everything that happened on that plane broke me. Peter’s red eyes and hysterical word vomit during that scene and being stitched up. I was just really sad. Peter is going to have PTSD at this point, if he doesn’t have it already. So many traumatic things have happened to him, if I were in his shoes I would have given up already, not even going to deny it.

- I LOVE LED ZEPPELIN!!! Oh Peter. XD

- Happy’s fond look when Peter’s making his suit had me uwuing.

- The final battle was so amazing and tense and rewarding. MJ with that mace? Hell yes. And Happy throwing the shield and asking how Cap does it had me dying. XD

- Let’s talk about that final showdown with Peter and the drones and Mysterio. Peter radiated confident BAMF energy in that scene. And when he grabs the gun? I smiled so widely, I was so proud and impressed and happy.

- Now, here is where things get confusing for me. Did Mysterio actually die? Because Peter transferred ownership of EDITH to Quentin, at least as far as I remember. Does that not mean that Mysterio could still have been projecting a minor illusion of his own death, and have gotten away because the word transfer means giving up ownership, and therefore Peter shouldn’t have any permissions within EDITH’s systems anymore? But at the same time, Peter put on the glasses, so they couldn’t have been fake glasses then right, because Quentin didn’t have small glasses sized drones, did he? I think the rules of who controls EDITH gets a little confusing for me in this scene. Does Peter always have access? Is there some kind of fail safe? Tony surely planned for this, right? I just have a lot of questions, but for the sake of the conclusion, I’m just going to assume Mysterio is actually dead and Peter does indeed have control of EDITH again.

- Fuck, Peter lost another mentor figure, even if Quentin was a little insane, it doesn’t negate the fact that for a brief sliver of time Peter really trusted and looked up to him.

- PETER AND MJ WERE SO AWKWARD AND KISSED AND AND WERE SO SWEET AND I DIED A LITTLE INSIDE WHEN THEY REUNITED AND HUGGED, AJKSASJAKLSKLALS.

- And when MJ said she liked the necklace broken, I melted because she basically said she doesn’t mind Peter being a bit broken because she really likes him and will support him and ugh, they’re just so cute and sweet and I’m in love with their relationship.

- Peter and MJ swinging around New York at the end made me so happy.

- Those post credits scenes were amazing and forever change the landscape of the MCU going forward. How is Peter going to navigate basically being a criminal/villain in the eyes of a lot of the public? Will the government go after him? I’m sure Ross would love to get his power-hungry hands on another Accords like situation, but I don’t really know if Marvel will go there or not. All I know is Peter literally can’t catch a break, poor kid just got his normal life back, and now it’s being ruined all over again. I have so many questions/theories about how the MCU will go forward now, it’s so exciting! And Talos and his wife disguising themselves as Fury and Hill? Did not see that coming, but it made sense and my initial confusion was quickly overturned with the question of who else we know is secretly a Skrull? I like the Secret Invasion-esque route they might be going with here, but since the Skrull aren’t really evil, does it really matter who’s real or not so long as Nick Fury and Talos are monitoring everything happening on Earth and around it? Ugh, so many questions, that seems to be the general consensus.

- Now for my thoughts on Mysterio. I think he’s a close second to Thanos for best villain in the MCU so far, in my opinion. Feel free to disagree, but think about this for a second: Mysterio basically created a reality stone; if he hadn’t had his plan foiled and continued to play his cards right, he could essentially make reality whatever he wanted, and no one would be able to tell the difference. That is a scary thought. (Imagine what he could do if he combined his illusion technology with something that resembles the microbots in Big Hero 6, yikes, then he really would be able to make his illusions feel real too.) Mysterio was cunning, his intelligence and complete lack of concern for human life is terrifying in combination with his flair for the dramatics, and Jake Gyllenhaal plays him so well that you can’t help but like him even though you hate his guts. Overall, I’m very impressed, I really hope we get to see him again, because I liked his character that much.

- EDITH is genuinely scary, because essentially whoever has access to her can do anything they want, and in today’s technology dependent world, a person with that much power (not just electronically, but militarily as well) needs to be the purest and most good and responsible person in the world or else the world could literally just have unchallengable dictator rise up in a whole 24 hours. I’m just glad it’s Peter who has access to her, Tony might have gone too far with this one, but hey, maybe I’m just paranoid.

- I don’t know it was just me, but after getting out of this movie, I couldn’t shake the thought that this movie was attempting to make us rightfully fear the progression of technology and how hard it is to determine what absolute truth is in today’s world. I think Mysterio even mentions how easily people want to believe things nowadays. Hit the nail on the head with that message if it was intended, if not, then I’m just reading too much into it. XD

Wow, this was long. Sorry guys, I hope I didn’t bore you, this is coming out a whole two hours later than I said it would, I just had so many thoughts and words to vomit. XD

Thanks for reading, let me know what you thought of the movie if you want to, no pressure!

#spiderman far from home #spiderman spoilers #spiderman far from home spoliers #please don't read if you haven't watched the movie yet #spiderman

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trivialqueen · 5 years

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39. Hero

{Here’s the next section of that original story. Still currently, and creatively called, Hospital Romance Drama. As always, I’m neither a doctor, nor British. I’m just a girl who fancies herself a writer and likes slow burns, smart women, and tall men.}

“No, not to be so odd and from all fashions As Beatrice is, cannot be commendable: But who dare tell her so? If I should speak, She would mock me into air; O, she would laugh me Out of myself, press me to death with wit. Therefore let Benedick, like cover'd fire, Consume away in sighs, waste inwardly: It were a better death than die with mocks, Which is as bad as die with tickling.” Sofia Grace stopped so abruptly she almost spilled her flat white. As it was the jarring motion broke the perfect little heart Helen had made with the milk. Slowly she approached, just to confirm what she was fairly certain she was hearing. It sounded like Magnusson, baritone with just a hint of Scandinavian coloring his otherwise impeccable English. It sounded just exactly like Director of Surgery Felix Magnusson reading the part of Hero from Much Ado About Nothing.

“Yet tell her of it: hear what she will say.” A younger voice replied. Sitting up in her hospital bed was a young woman, maybe sixteen. She was focusing very intently on reciting from memory her lines. Beside her sat Felix, glasses perched on his patrician nose which was firmly wedged in a tatty script copy of the Bard’s comedy.

“No; rather I will go to Benedick And counsel him to fight against his passion. And, truly, I'll devise some honest slanders To stain my cousin with: one doth not know How much an ill word may empoison liking.” Magnusson read. He made no effort to change his voice in any way – adopt an accent or sound more feminine. Sofia couldn’t decide if that was better or not. She couldn’t imagine the man adopting a falsetto and yet just thinking about it she desperately wished he had. She honestly also wouldn’t have imagined him sitting in the middle of his day with one of his patients to help her memorize lines either. And yet here he was.

“Line?” The girl had sat quietly for a few moments, staring hard into the middle distance.

“You know it, just try.” Felix looked up at the young woman, his tone encouraging. There was something different about his voice. About him. It was the same gentleness he’d shown Addie, a sort of parental mien that occasionally popped out in unexpected places. He was capable of patience, of kindness, of all the fatherly virtues. Just not when it came to anyone he worked with. Tamara had been crying in the bathroom on Harvey earlier. She didn’t even want to cry in the bathroom on Irene, just in case. Tamara had only been out of school a few months and literally looked like she was twelve. One would think such a combination would bring fatherly Felix to the fore. That was, however, not the case, apparently.

“She cannot be so much without true judgement--” the girl began. Felix clicked his tongue.

“Not quite. The line begins, ‘Oh, do not do your cousin such a wrong’.”

“Got it.” The girl gave a decisive nod. “O, do not do your cousin such a wrong. She cannot be so much without true judgment-- Having so swift and excellent a wit as she is prized to have--as to refuse So rare a gentleman as Signior Benedick.”

“Very good.” He returned his attention to the script. “He is the only man of Italy. Always excepted my dear Claudio.”

And so they continued, ‘Ursula’ reciting from memory and Magnusson correcting her as necessary. It was not a good performance by any means, both were too flat for that and the setting left something to be desired, even by ‘random adaptations of Shakespeare’ standards. Nonetheless Sofia felt not great urge to interrupt them. Nor was she ready to walk away either. In the midafternoon sun and the overhead light Magnusson looked relaxed, almost charming. The rays glinted off the slight red gold undertone in his curls. He must’ve run his hands through his hair recently, and frequently, it was not as tamed as it usually was. The gel was broken up and his hair was almost Byronic. Adding to the image of the hero, his aubergine colored tie was slightly loosened and the top button of his pale blue dress shirt was undone.

“… I'll show thee some attires and have thy counsel Which is the best to furnish me to-morrow.” His fingers were long and slender sprawled across the cover of the script. In another context one might say he had musicians’ hands.

“She's limed, I warrant you: we have caught her, madam.” ‘Ursula’ looked up from her middle-distance staring and caught her watching. She colored brightly, her ears turning scarlet under her mop of professionally caramel colored hair.

“If it proves so, then loving goes by haps: Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.” Magnusson did not notice her, nor his patient’s embarrassment and finished the dialogue as evenly before. He slid his glasses off his nose and into his pocket. He looked up to ‘Ursula’ and then followed her gaze to Sofia Grace. Their eyes met and she could see his ears tint, yet he arched a brow as if challenging her to say something.

“What fire is in mine ears?” Ms. Hale was smirking, her cayenne lips twisting smugly and her eyes twinkling with delight.

“Ms. Hale.” He shouldn’t feel embarrassed, but her eyes pinned him.

“Go on!” Bridget chirped. She’d gone from embarrassed to intrigued in seconds. Ms. Hale smiled brightly.

“Can this be true? Stand I condemned for pride and scorn so much?” She had the delivery of a thespian, which he was hardly surprised. Her every day comportment was dramatic, why should she be anything less than theatrical when actually reciting Shakespeare. “Ummm…” And then she paused. Looked thoughtful for a moment. And sipped her coffee to buy some time. Being lefthanded logos on mugs never faced out when she drank out of them, but he could tell it was her Wonder Woman mug. As far as Felix could tell she didn’t own any other mugs. “Contempt, farewell! And maiden pride, adieu! And that’s all I can remember.” She gave a charming shrug.

“No glory lives behind the backs of such.” The script was still open loosely in his hand, so it was easy to check Beatrice’s next line. She stared at him for a moment and he read on, “And Benedick, love on-”

“I will requite thee!” She jumped in, clearly her memory jogged. “Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand: If thou love, my kindness shall incite thee to bind our loves in a holy band; for others say thou dost deserve, and I believe it better than reportingly! HA! Nailed it.” She exclaimed with a fist pump.

“Ah! Not quite.”

“What?” Both surgeon and student stared at him.

“If thou dost love, my kindness shall incite thee to bind our loves up in a holy band…”

“Oh, come on! After twenty years you’re going to ding me on two words? The spirit is the same!”

“Let’s apply to the director then.” Bridget looked between them both.

“I’d say that’s good enough after …twenty years?!” Ms. Hale gave him a cheeky smile over the rim of her coffee mug.

“I know, right?!” She preened.

“It seems like it should be longer ago, doesn’t it?”

“Hey!” Bridget dissolved into peels of laughter. Felix could feel the smile spread across his lips. It was perhaps not the best dig, but it was so perfectly set up. “Just because you’re jealous of my theatrical chops-”

“I would have you know that I made a fine Thespian in the sixth form.”

“Who were you? The messenger boy?”

“Sir Andrew Aguecheek.” Ms. Hale visibly chocked on her coffee. He couldn’t blame her; it was not the role he’d have cast himself in either. But Aguecheek was supposed to be a ridiculous man and at sixteen he had been all arms and legs and knobby, awkward angles.

“WHAT?” She chocked, thumping herself in the chest like it might help. “Was this one of those instances that it was for a class and they had to cast everyone, even if it meant combining or breaking up parts to get the right numbers?” It had been for class credit, but he would never admit that. Instead he stood and handed the script back.

“Bridget, if you need further help with your lines, I think it’s obvious who you should ask.”

“You’ve been a big help, Mr. M.”

“You haven’t forgotten our three o’clock appointment I see.” Magnusson commented as he keyed in the five-digit code to his office door.

“How could I, you’re in check!”

“Not for much longer, Ms. Hale. Not for very much longer.” They had been at this particular match for the last three weeks, ever since the machines incident and her opening move. A normal chess match should not take so long, however, they had yet to play even fifteen minutes in a single sitting. Emergencies had no concept of time so even with all the planning, getting to be in the same room at the same time was difficult. She hadn’t even realized she’d put him in check until later, she’d been distracted by her pager when she’d made the move. (Not that she’d admit that to him).

She follows him into his office, it is more familiar to her now, almost as familiar as it was when Charlotte was DOS. Over the course of their several chess moves (it’s hard to call them matches when they don’t even last as long as a cup of coffee sometimes) she and he have developed a routine. Upon entering his office he would immediately turn on the hot water kettle he kept in a discreet corner by his desk, he would then empty his pockets, carefully placing his cellphone on his desk, and then he would bring his tea set to the table. Magnusson took his fancy leaf water quite seriously, carefully choosing the tea he wanted from a selection of loose-leaf options, measuring it out precisely into the teapot, and occasionally going so far as to get up and adjust the water temperature on the kettle. The tea set would always include the tea pot, a single cup and saucer and a 350gram jar with three beautiful biscuits in it. And not the store-bought kind either, biscuits clearly made by an individual.

While Magnusson carefully matched his tea to whatever sweet treat he’d brought with him that day (florentines with Darjeeling, palmiers and chamomile, shortbread with earl grey, gingerbread and lemon tea) Sofia Grace would kick off her heels and snoop examine his artwork. All of the photos on his walls were signed works, the vast majority taken by an Ingrid Karpe. He had a small collection of sculptures as well, all contemporary looking and rather abstract, although the one on his desk was clearly a fish. Just like the photo on his desk was clearly his son. Magnusson would never say anything as she examined his small gallery, but she was aware that he was aware of where she was looking. If he wouldn’t offer, she wouldn’t ask, even if it did pique her curiosity – why did so many of the photos have seemingly the same subject? Where was that dark-haired little boy now?

Eventually, when it looked like Magnusson’s little tea ritual was nearly finished Sofia Grace would return to the sofa, curling into one of the corners, her bare feet tucked up under her as she’d lean on the arm. Rather than face off against one another over the small conference table in his office he moved his chessboard to the end table between them. He stopped offering her tea early on, since she always brought her coffee. And so coffee versus tea, black versus white faced off. She would accept his biscuits, however.

“Is that a bakery digestive biscuit?” It was. A lightly brown, crunchy-tender semi-sweet meal biscuit. It was thicker than the digestives from the store, but it was unmistakable. “Holy shit, I didn’t know you could actually makethese. You have got to give me the name of your bakery.”

“I’m allowed to have some secrets.”

“Oh, come on.”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” He gave her a smug smile over the rim of his tea. It was the sort of expression that told her he wouldn’t pressed further. At least not at the moment.

“You’ve acquired a new nickname.” They had settled into the game, digestives devoured. Magnusson had deftly saved his king for checkmate and they were now back to a nearly cat game. During her yearlong recovery she had had nothing to do but play lots of chess, learn German, and read many, many trashy romance novels. Sofia Grace knew she was good at chess, but Magnuson was something else entirely. (Not that she’d ever tell him that).

“If you going to try to get people to call me Sir Andrew Aguecheek, I’m going to have to draw a line.”

“Ooo, I hadn’t thought of that! Brilliant!” Her eyes sparkled at him, like stars dancing. It was perhaps the first time those dark eyes sparkled at him. He had seen them sparkle before, for others. But at him they only ever spat fire, or at best, flinty sparks. And now they were sparkling for him. The sight whipped through him like the first cold wind of winter – he was completely unprepared; his breath caught; senses tingled. He could feel it cut through him to the very core.

“Don’t you dare.” He felt slight pride in being able to speak like he was unaffected. Ms. Hale’s white knight retreated slightly, smartly. She smiled.

“In addition to Sir Andrew Aguecheek, you’ve acquired a new nickname.” After thoughtful deliberation he moved his bishop to C4. Felix had expected her to be as rash a chess player as she was a person. He’d heard tell that she’d once incited an abusive husband of a patient to punch her in the face in the middle of the hall so there was more concrete evidence pointing to his violent temper and to buy time for the man’s partner to finish giving their statement to the police. She had absolutely no sense of self-preservation, as far as he could tell. And yet when she played chess, her moves were anything but impulsive. He had expected this game to be over by now, but she had surprised him as an opponent.

“Don’t people have better things to do?”

“It wouldn’t be a hospital without gossip.” Her quip was only halfhearted as she studied the board. He sipped his tea and waited – for either her move or his apparent new nickname, whichever came first.

“Well, what is it?” She’d studied the board for what felt like an hour before she carefully moved her pawn. “It can’t be worse than ‘Björn the Slasher’…” A few of his monikers had made their way to his ears. None of them were good – they were both disdainful as well as lazy and stupid. A smörgåsbord of Swedish stereotypes peppered with some tortured reference to his height.

“That one’s hilarious.”

“It makes me sound like a camp horror villain.” She gave him a look over her mug that clearly said, ‘well, aren’t you?’ “If you’re going to tell me about ‘Fucking Felix’, I’m aware.” Alliterative, yes, creative, no.

“That’s hardly a nickname and more a general reaction whenever we have to work with you.” He stared blankly at her, for want of a response – other than to note that their colleagues were more than a little dramatic.

“Well what is it then? Is it the abominable snow man? The Snow King, perhaps? The Ice Giant? Felix the Herring? Hurdy Gurdy – which I really don’t get by the way. Dr. No perhaps?” And then there were the more hurtful ones like Dr. Death or the Angel of Death. But it was truly ridiculous the names he’d been called in the short time he’d been at Saint Sebastian’s.

“Don’t forget the good humor man.” She added brightly. Ah, non-literary irony. He thought sarcastically. They lapsed into temporary silence as they studied the board.

“Doctor Damocles.” Ms. Hale said after carefully removing his captured pawn from the board. It made him start.

“Dr. Damocles – That doesn’t even make sense!” He was well familiar with Damocles, the obsequious courtier of Dionysius II of Syracuse and the moral anecdote about him.

“You’re the harbinger of impending doom! Looming about, threatening everyone’s job, scaring people half to death. You’ve made five people cry since you’ve gotten here – three F1s, two F2s, plus Tamara Aquilarios just this morning!” Ah, that interpretation of the tale, he remembered it well – and paid dearly for it. Just listening he could feel the sting of his father’s hand across his cheek. His first summer home from boarding school his father had insisted that rather than make noise around the house he dedicate his time to something useful and worthwhile – translating all five books of the Tusculanae Disputationes. Every night his father had marked his translations. There had been no room for error. There was never allowed any room for error. It was one of his earliest lessons.

“But that’s not the point of the parable at all. The sword doesn’t just represent, oh, something terrible is going to happen, but it’s about realizing that what looks like an enviable life – a life of wealth, power, and luxury is, in fact, fraught with anxiety, terror, and possibly death.” She stared at him blankly for a long moment.

“God, you really are an insufferable pedant, aren’t you?”

“I’m just saying, the nickname is fundamentally wrong.”

“This would be why we call you ‘Fucking Felix’.” He had nothing to say to that and so he returned his focus entirely to the pieces on the board and his mostly consumed cup of breakfast blend (a choice he made as it complimented his biscuits, ignoring the fact it was after three o’clock). For a move they were both quiet. Focused.

Ms. Hale licked her cayenne lips, they were slightly faded, the color having transferred from full mouth to the rim of her mug in a distinctive kiss, making the cup as hers more than the motif on the outside could. There was some intimacy in seeing her without that flawless signature color, even if it was a fleeting moment before she touched it up and returned about her day.

He was distracted by the red bow of her mouth rather than listening to the words coming out of it.

“But seriously,” She was saying, “we can’t go on like the anymore. The cuts, the redundancies. Everyone in this hospital is running scared. You can’t run a hospital like it’s some company, we’re here to make people better, for God’s sake, not turn a profit.”

“You know that the hospital is not a for profit company, and I know that the hospital is not a for profit company,” She looked at him skeptically, both forgetting the chess match for a little while. “But it has been made abundantly clear to me that the Foundation Trust board does not care. They are interested in seeing healthy profit margins, strong financials in general, efficient staff, and an impeccable reputation. The austere, and only the austere, will survive.”

“Making nurses cry, terrorizing the staff, you think this is going to make Saint Sebastian’s a better hospital, this is how we achieve FT status?”

“Ensuring that the staff are fulfilling their roles and obligations, that nurses are performing proper procedures and tests and running effective bed checks will go a long way toward our Foundation Trust application, particularly since Sir Stewart Frazier, Angus Black, Tristan Guy will be looking over our shoulders for the foreseeable future. They start their on grounds audit Monday.”

Sofia Grace felt herself choke on air. Monday?! The audit starts Monday?!

“The audit starts next week, and you didn’t think to tell us yet?” She was incredulous.

“I myself did not know until this afternoon when Sir Stewart called me.”

“And you decided to read Shakespeare and play chess rather than inform us of this?!” Magnusson sat his teacup down on the table, she momentarily worried that it would have broken, the thud was so heavy sounding.

“I am not one to just fire off emails, saying whatever it is I’m feeling as I feel it. I think before I speak, and in this case, I wanted to think quite carefully about what I should put in such an email. Rest assured, there will be notification by the end of the day regarding this development.”

“You can’t just keep secrets from us!”

“I am hardly keeping this a secret.” His tone was as frosty as Lappland. “Everyone will know by the end of the day, once I have time to sit down and draft the email. Didn’t I ask you to have some faith in me?” She opened her mouth to protest, it was hardly a lack of faith when he literally said he would inform people when he felt like it. He cut off her retort, however. “Regarding Nurse Aquilarios, on the topic of having some faith in me, did you bother to find out the context in which I apparently made her cry?” His delivery was nothing like any rant she was familiar with, certainly nothing like her own style which built and built and built until she exploded like a steam engine without a valve. Instead he was cold, even, and brooking no interruption. “I asked her why a patient hadn’t had a pregnancy test performed. She had skipped the routine procedure in order to save time and because the patient had said they were not pregnant. It’s how she has been able to get such good bed check times. It turns out the patient was actually pregnant, which of course meant an entirely different treatment plan.”

“Your asking had her in tears in the women’s loo! She’s only been out of school six months you know.” Ah, to be young. She wouldn’t do it again for a million dollars. Tamara was maybe 23. It seemed so long ago now but the fear was something she’d ever forget.

“Then it should be fresher in her mind than others that routine procedures become routine for a reason: they serve important purposes and it’s not for us to arbitrarily decide what really is or isn’t important.”

“She’s a good kid, cut her some slack.” Sofia Grace was still skeptical about his just “asking” Tamara rather than yelling at her – the young nurse had been a mess of runny mascara when she had stumbled upon her in the toilet, but she was inclined to agree with Magnusson on the general point. Running a pregnancy test on anyone with a uterus was an important habit to have. There were a surprising number of otherwise competent people who nevertheless weren’t 100% up to date or correct about their current health or health history.

“She has all the makings of an excellent nurse, if she could master the basics of routine procedures and confirming what we think we know, rather than assuming or simply taking someone’s word for it.” It was perhaps the nicest thing she’d heard him say about anyone, except for perhaps immediately after she impressed him with her trick to avoid cracking the chest of a young chef to repair their punctured artery.

“Have you considered telling her this?”

“I censure when there is a need to censure and I praise when there is reason to praise. I won’t go out of my way to do either.”

“It wouldn’t kill you to be nice, you know.” Perhaps it would, it was so hard to tell. There were moments. Flashes of kindness in him. And then, well, he made grown men cry. For a long time they just stared at each other, chess match forgotten between them as a battle of wills took all of their strategic thinking. Without his glasses it was easier to see his eyes. They were nice eyes - sable colored, with long, thick dark lashes – the kind mascara companies were forever trying to replicate.

A shrill beep broke the silence – and their eye contact. Both reached for their pagers.

“Schiße.” He was grateful for the interruption, as piercing as it was. Her eyes had stopped dancing and they had taken a hard, flinty expression. They unnerved him, her eyes. He knew they could steal his soul. They were eyes that could lead a man to hell.

“I’ve got to go.” She began putting on her shoes. “Same time tomorrow?” He stood with her. In her smart heels she was still a head shorter than he was. It was noticeable when they stood next to each other, but so easy to forget given the size of her personality.

“I will have to check, there are some meetings for me to attend before the board begins their audit.”

“Well, you have my number.” She gave him a polite smile, her face a mask of professional focus. Once she was out of his office and off to Harvey, he carefully cleaned up the remnants of his tea and then sat heavily at his desk. With a sigh he opened a new message.

Dear Colleagues…

#Hospital Romance Drama #Cait writes #original fiction #Sofia Grace is Chaotic Good chaffing under Lawful Good Rules #I know nothing about Chess #much ado about nothing #Much ado about the Bard

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go-diane-winchester · 5 years

Text

New question: Why do I dislike Misha and his fans?

@super-who-loser asked the following question:

Hey, I’m not trying to come across as rude or anything I’m just wondering why you dislike Misha so much? I know Jared and Jensen have been there since the beginning and yes, there have been times where his character has been pretty useless but I don’t hate him and you’re being really mean to some Destiel shippers and like I know that it’s obviously never going to happen and Cockles is a big no no for me but I am confused about why you really don’t like him? I’m honestly just curious

Thank you for the question. Let me point out before hand, that my irritation towards Misha has nothing to do with a ship. I used to read destiel slash. I used to like Cockles AU. I don't ship wincest. I ship AUs. Its my favorite slash subgenre. So no, this is not a ship argument. Ship whatever you want, but mind your manners. There are many things that I don't like about Misha. However I am choosing to answer only from a SPN perspective because that is the primary way that we know him.

MISHA AND SLASH FICTION

You may not realize this but Supernatural has been on the air for so long that it, plus its fan base, has experienced and initiated a few changes and trends. In the space of fourteen years, filming became digitalized. Social media, which was a fledgling thing back then, is the norm now [I have a disdain towards social media]. To put it into perspective, the child actors that played Asher, the Antichrist kid [I forget his name] and Little Lillith from the early seasons are likely in their 20s now. Trends in entertainment changed. Hollywood seems poised to implode upon itself, geographically, with major entertainers moving house to outlets like Netflix. Netflix, not bound by geography, is likely to become the next Hollywood. Slash, too, has undergone change. And as far as SPN is concerned, that change has not been organic. It has been by design and at the hands on Misha Collins.

When Castiel came on board, there were already two prevalent pairings in Supernatural: Wincest and Bobby/John. There were other pairings. But these were the most prevalent. So Supernatural had slash fans already. These fans were already aware of what slash fiction was, and they were a self-monitoring group. They realized that the actors were aware of slash and didn't want it to be the focal point of their con appearances, because they didn't want the fans to think they were hinting at anything. The fans understood and ever since, they have respected the actor's wishes. When some fans liked Dean's interaction with Cas, they started shipping destiel.

Destiel's old fans were just like all the other shippers. They were treating destiel the way it should be treated. Like a fantasy. They did artwork and literature about it and kept it to themselves, as they should. Misha never knew what slash fiction was, until he looked on Tumblr and found Destiel. In his words, he used destiel to ''keep this gig for longer''. He kept talking about destiel even though he was instructed not to, and pulling the LGBT into it, to make it look like destiel was about gay rights and queer art, when it isn't. There are various kinds of destiel written by different people, from different perspectives, for different reasons. That is true for all pairings everywhere. By making destiel about the LGBT and waving the ''no shipping question'' rule in convention panels, he did two things.

He turned destiel into a vehicle for LGBT activism. Instead of being a pastime, now destiel is used to fight for LGBT representation, even though, many of the LGBT people within my own circle despise him for it. Most of the people fighting for LGBT representation are actually quite homophobic and insulting in their thinking and logic. And they are not even LGBT. They are just a bunch of straight girls for whom, their fantasy has become a drug, and they wont stop until destiel becomes canon.

He turned Jensen into the bad guy. Misha spoke openly about slash. Jensen chose not to. He didn't want any part of it, and this is true about all the pairings he is a part of, not just destiel. Because of his choice, Misha fans make negative comparisons between him and Misha, even saying that Jensen is a homophobe/biphobe because he doesn't want to talk about destiel or make it canon. They ranted about it on social media and mass media picked up on it. The University Of Sydney has an academic paper, under Celebrity Studies, dedicated to Jensen's supposed homophobia. The destiel shippers are literally Jensen's reputation.

Misha should have left slash alone. Any fan of his will know that he overindulges the slash fans. And the one thing that I noticed about slash fans, is that you don't give them excessive attention, or they will go completely crazy. It doesn't matter what they slash.

Harry Styles and Liam Tomlinson learned that the hard way, because the Larry fans destroyed their friendships when they over-emphasized the fan servicing. They did the fan servicing because Modest Management told them to, they ended up hating their fans for what the fans became. They have since severed ties with Modest. Even on a day when one of them was mourning the loss of a parent, the fans who pushing the other guy so they could have a ship moment. These two boys were very young when they entered the band. Harry was 15 years old. They had youthful ignorance to blame for making the decision to blindly follow the manager's instruction. Misha cannot make any of those excuses.

Misha got into the show at age 35. He was already a grown man. He was not a pivotal part of the show and therefore the only notes he was getting, was for his acting. He wasn't being coached by anyone as to how he should engage his fans. He was too small a fry for that. In fact, no one was sure how long he would last on the show. So these notes were only acting, including one telling him not to adlib his lines. Whatever transpired between him and the destiel fans, happened because he orchestrated it.

MISHA AND SUPERNATURAL

When Cas came on board, he was fun new character. By the end of season 5, he had run his course on the show. The show didn't need his character because [and as a writer I understand this] the presence of Castiel hampered the progress of the story. Sera Gamble dealt with that frustration during her tenure as showrunner. Cas was an angel. If he was an ally to the boys, the boys should have a more powerful nemesis. After all, they have an angel buddy to help them. Unfortunately, they couldn't keep coming up with more and more powerful bad guys and negative elements, especially on a show where the biggest bad guy, the devil itself, and the worst case scenario [the apocalypse] has already been dealt with.

During 6 and 7, they had Soulless Sam, Sam's wall, the leviathans, Metatron, the demons, Crowley, Dick Roman and even the Alphas, if I am not mistaken. So many bad guys and bad situations, because the good guys had a powerful angel. They could make him lose his power, so he wont be such a powerful ally. And they did exactly that. But Misha has very few skills to show off. Imagine if Osric was Cas. Even without power, he would still be able to taekwondo the stuffing out of bad guys. He wouldn't be useless. Cas, without his grace, didn't help the story along. He didn't bring something extra to the story. He was pointless. So they made him a bad guy and for the first time in a long time, Cas was pivotal to the story.

Eventually, she got fed up of shoehorning him into the script and just did away with the character. But, rumor has it that Singer brought him back. And he was welcome by the worst Q score measurement ever. That would tell you that he was not appreciated as an actor by everyone, just his shipping and cult fans. Since then, Cas has done nothing important in the script until recently where he made a deal for Jack. Other than that, he has been an add on, and that is Misha's fault. Every time Jensen and Misha did a scene, Misha would overemphasize the destiel aspect, either via social media or during his panels. And eventually Jensen got fed up and cut the scenes short. Basically, Misha shot himself in the foot. The DeanCas fan service made for annoying television for people who didn't want to deal with shippy nonsense while they were watching their favorite show.

If they didn't add anything shipping related, the hellers screamed. If they did, the hellers screamed canon and queer baiting. Misha's interference did that. All he had to do was stop talking, and he couldn't do that, because his fan base will lose interest in him. In order to keep that one group of militants, Misha isolated all other fans and potential fans.

MISHA AND THE DESTIEL FANS

Misha's fan have sent Jensen various death threats, the receipts of which are on my blog. A few days back, a heller was setting Jensen's picture on fire because Misha tweeted a lie that there will be a turning point for Dean and Cas in the upcoming episode. So even though Misha was the guilty party, this psycho is punishing Jensen. These fans have also discussed kidnapping Jared's children. When they bully Jensen and Jared, they tag Misha in many of the tweets. Misha randomly does Q and A sessions based on his tweets, but he has never seen a single threat and bullying remark??.....in ten years??.....really?? Nah, I am not buying that. Frankly, I think the man just doesn't care. Acknowledging them will mean he will have to stop them which means he will eventually have to stop peddling destiel which means he will not have an audience which means SPN will kick him right out. The funny thing is, I think he is wrong. He might actually have more fans if he didn't alienate them with his special brand of shippy vulgarity. I could fill a page with all the receipts of the death threats. And Jensen doesn't deserve that.

I also call out destiel shippers on Tumblr so that everyone else can block the problematic ones. Have you noticed how many names there are for the destiel pairing? DeanCas, CasDean, DeanxCastiel and recently I discovered Dastiel. Have you ever wondered why? It is because they don't want you to block them. If you filter destiel, they will use another name. Why is that? That is not a ship. That's a cult. They want to indoctrinate. They tag destiel in other fandom names. They are trying to create more fans for a ship. That is why I call out specific people. Especially the ones that tag AKF in their destiel garbage. I have no issues with the good shippers. I have done posts about them. The bad ones might do something criminal one day, which is why they bother me.

This answer, only just scratches the surface. I am not telling you everything. I am not telling you about Jared, Robert Berens, Kim, Briana, Travis, Sera Gamble, Ben Edlund, Ty Olsson etc. I am just telling you the brief basics. I hope this answers your question. Have a nice day. Apologies for the inevitable typos.

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srrrokka · 5 years

Note

WIP game: worry!

[Give me a word and I’ll quote it from my fic WIPs]

Please note that my WIPs are mostly a mess of notes, half written scenes, dialogue snippets, and so on, therefore this might look a wee bit weird.

I think this one ended up having all the good bits somehow hahaha

Tethered AU

One of the men stood up from the table and approached him slowly. He looked completely unhurried, unconcerned with his guest’s state. “Poison. Don’t worry, it’s not going to kill you.”

Ah.

Corvo tried to get up, do something, anything, but all he managed was getting on his knees before the two men. One of them pushed his chin up with the tip of his sword.

“Maybe he should worry.” He remarked, looking down on him. “After all, our client explicitly wants him alive. For what, I wonder.”

The way he said it made Corvo shiver. Couple of possibilities passed his head and none of them were pleasant.

A warm hand guides his head back up and Corvo is met with an expression he hadn’t seen on Daud’s face yet - worry, he’s worried for him.

________________________

Scratch Session

What was unusual and somewhat worrying, he thought as he got up to find some clothes, was that he couldn’t remember his current life. It most often was something that was already there, something that he didn’t have to additionally remember, not even after recalling that he was from a completely different timeline. Not like his other memories from all the other lives that would return when they so pleased. It never happened before…

He looked at his reflection critically, analysing the differences this new version of his life brought with it to his appearance. He seemed younger without his scar, without his broken nose, with skin smooth and unweathered by decades of working outside in the relentless Gristolian weather. The slimmer build of an aristocrat was something new but even as a royal he clearly didn’t let himself go. He sighed and closed the wardrobe slowly. He looked healthy, happy even. There were barely any worry lines on his face.

Was it weird to be jealous of your own life, Daud wondered, making his way through a small private library to his office.

________________________

Witch Your Single Word (Token)

Billie: Killian. Attano. Stop right this instant.

K: [curses under his breath. Corvo slowly stands up]

B: Attano, what is this supposed to be? And you better have a good explanation.

C: Might wanna ask someone that is actually required to answer you, *lieutenant* Lurk. [Spits some blood on the ground.]

B: [takes out her sword and turns to Corvo]

K: It was just a small, friendly quibble. Wasn’t it, Corvo? We just got a little carried away. We’re gonna go now, don’t worry about it. [Grabs Corvo under the arm and literally drags him away as fast as he can]

K: You. Have. Fucking. Balls. Or you’re just really stupid. She would literally shred you.

K: Now you eat.

C: [takes his mask off and grabs the knife and bread to cut a slice]

K: are you alright, man? You haven’t tried to wreck anything in a surprisingly long time. Not that I’m particularly worried. Mostly suspicious.

C: [looks at Killian with his really hazy eyes] Yeah, I’m fine. [Looks right back at his hands, making a really crude sandwich]

K: [frowns] Bullshit. Have you seen yourself in the mirror recently? You look like you’re about to keel over. You better not be getting the plague…

C: [around his bread] I’m not, don’t worry. I think the marked are somehow immune anyway.

Corvo looks up at Daud again, this time with a surprising calmness. The man looks tense, there’s a deep worry line between his eyebrows and his fist is wrapped tight around the token.

He groans and folds over himself. There is a sound of a transversal right next to his bed. But he doesn’t look up, just makes another displeased sound and rolls one of his shoulders.

“Corvo? Are you alright?” Daud’s voice is filled with worry, he sits down at Corvo’s feet.

“Yeah,” Corvo’s voice is horribly gravelly and he clears his throat. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just- everything hurts.”

________________________

Soulmate AU

Corvo: Just make me walk again and I’ll worry about the rest later.

Kieran: Oh, you mean worry about it when you’re dead? Attano, you really are one foot in the grave. It’s a wonder you got this far with this nastiness in your system.

C: [huffs annoyed] Void, I don’t have the time for this…

K: None of us have time for dying.

Daud: The amount of trust you put in me is somewhat worrying.

Corvo: Well, I wouldn’t mind being stabbed to death right about now. [when instead of coaxing a laugh out of Daud it only makes his frown deepen, he adds with a sigh:] It was a joke, Daud. I don’t know how true it is, but I like to believe you wouldn’t hurt me.

________________________

Fugue Feast Story

“Maybe next time I should order a pear soda instead, hm?” His eyes slide to the man’s hip where he can see a small dagger attached at his belt. Long fingers clad in leather wrapped around his jaw and gently turned his head back to their owner.

“Don’t worry, it’s just for protection.” The man says, small smile dancing on his narrow lips. His thumb brushes along Corvo’s mouth and Corvo has the stupidest idea yet, he opens his mouth and licks on the gloved digit. The pupils of the red masked man widen and Corvo feels a burst of idiotic satisfaction.

________________________

Blind AU

But the moment burst like a soap bubble when a trickle of blood suddenly poured out of Corvo’s nose. Corvo licked his upper lip reflexively and frowned. He touched it and looked at his fingers to confirm his suspicion. He sighed but didn’t look alarmed.

“It’s fine, it’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.” He tried to reassure both Thomas and Daud who in the meantime approached the other two and was now having a closer look at Corvo with a deep frown on his face.

Out of lack of better options Corvo put the hem of his sleeve to his nose to soak up the blood that only started flowing heavier.

________________________

Apocalypse AU

Anatole: [Picks up a small whale oil powered torch and checks the pupil reaction, while at it:] My biggest worry was that you might have a severe concussion. You’ve been unconscious for two days. But you seem to be quite fine. [She straightens with a smile] To come out of a fall like that with a couple bruises and a cut? [clicks her tongue and shakes her head] The Outsider must have a particular liking for you.

________________________

DXMD fic

Jensen: Koller, who did this to you?

Koller: Wha- oh, this? That’s nothing, don’t worry about it, Jensen. I just had a little… bar brawl, you could say.

J: Koller…

K: Listen, Adam… I trust you, I really do, but- I just can’t talk with you about this, okay man? Unless, I really want to swim belly up with the fishes.

________________________

Dark Matter

“Oh, no, no. Don’t worry. He won’t do anything.” Corvo’ s eyes don’t leave his double’s as he lifts his right arm, open palm up. A string of blackness appears in it and he closes his fingers around it. A blackness that wraps around Daud’s throat in a blink of an eye like a leash. He yanks on it hard enough to force the assassin to bow over with a startled grunt, his face now level with Corvo’s. “Will you, Daud?” He looks at him - grin too wide, eyes too black.

“Attano.” Daud barks out his name through clenched teeth. It’s a warning. It’s a reminder.

________________________

Save Game

“Em…” Corvo’s voice is gentle but full of sadness. There it goes. The cat is out of the bag now. All of them. Emily runs up to him and hugs him as she cries into his shirt. He wishes he could hug her back but his arms are bound behind his back. “Shhhhh, Em… It’s going to be okay. Don’t worry.”

#ask meme #replies #yo stuff #septemberskye

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