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athenaquinn · 4 years

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Becoming || Shiloh & Athena

TIMING: July 14th, during the carnival (apologies for delay!) PARTIES: @evanescentform and @athenaquinn SUMMARY: Athena and Shiloh have a day out at the carnival. Athena gets curious. Some questions are answered, others only spark greater curiosity...

Shiloh was lucky that she managed to come home back in time for the surprise carnival. Before she just thought it was something that people in town did overnight but now that she was aware of the supernatural… she figured it probably had something to do with that. Although, trying to figure out what exactly could create a carnival in one night was far more difficult to wrap her head around than just assuming it was the work of a lot of talented people. Nonetheless, she tried not to let thoughts of the supernatural ruin her excitement of the carnival. After all, there was no other place you could get carnival food except for at a carnival. The rides and games were fun to take part in as well but it wasn’t her favorite thing about it. She wondered what Athena’s favorite part of the carnival was. Shiloh was interested in exploring more than what she had in years prior. They tended to change a booth here and there but she was sure there could be something that had been there before that Shiloh had yet to notice. While she didn’t know Athena very well, she seemed like a nice girl and what better place to get to know someone than at a carnival! There might be more normal ways but everyone knew this town wasn’t normal and you can’t really have awkward pauses in conversations when there’s so much to do! Shiloh waited for Athena by the entrance. She could only hope she’d be visible throughout the fog. She’d made sure she wore a noticeable color - red - and had mentioned it to Athena prior to heading over. Shiloh glanced at her phone, awaiting a message that might speak of Athena’s arrival.

She knew that Shiloh wasn’t fae, but there was something about the other girl that gave Athena pause. Which meant she had to experiment more. There was always the chance that she was completely human, but Athena had to wonder - and she wasn’t about to get blindsided again by anything. Despite the rather traumatizing experience she’d had at the carnival with Winston, she was willing to return. Especially if it got her any sort of answers. She’d slid on more rings onto her fingers - the last time they met she hadn’t managed to give Shiloh’s skin a proper test and so she wasn’t going to pass up a chance this time. She decided to match the color of Shiloh’s shirt - red - because why not? She looked good in red, especially when she added a bit of color to her lips and drove over to where the carnival was, finding parking without too much trouble and she quickly made her way over to the entrance. “Hi, Shiloh!” She grinned, waving to the other girl. “Got anything you’d like to do? I’m down for anything but the drop ride. That one,” showed me the one thing in the world I can’t deal with, “made me sick last time. I’m willing to try anything else you fancy, though.” She flinched for a moment, the feeling of fae close by. Not Shiloh though, but that was something else she’d have to keep an eye out for. Something that Winston had distracted her from last time.

It was nice to see the other girl as happy as she was to spend time at the carnival. Given Shiloh’s recent supernatural awakening, it had been hard to enjoy things without feeling like there was a supernatural undertone to it. She enjoyed the carnival before and she would enjoy it now. Albeit, she’ll be a bit more careful around certain things. Shiloh didn’t know around what but she could only hope her gut would tell her what to avoid. “Oh man that must have been horrible.” Shiloh winced, only able to imagine how terrible it would be to get sick off a ride. “I do feel odd after some of the rides too if I’m being honest. I think that’s why I generally steer clear of them.” Maybe she was just.. older and not into the thrill of them. “The ferris wheel is one I enjoy though,” she said putting a hand to her chest. “It’s real tame unless you don’t like heights. Which I’d understand if you didn’t,” she said, glancing back to Athena as she started to walk into the carnival. “Oh! The games are fun too. Sure, people say they’re rigged but I really enjoy the games. I don’t mind if I lose but I have to be careful not to blow all my money on them. They’re kind of addicting.”

“Needless to say, not something I’d be keen to repeat ever. So we’ll just avoid it, easy-peasy.” Athena gave a small shrug. She was going to have to keep her voice and mannerisms upbeat if she didn’t want Shiloh to go running. Not before she figured a bit more out about her companion. Which shouldn’t be too hard - she’d had years of experience. “Oh gee, I know, right?” She quipped, “I mean, I’m not even twenty-one, but I feel you! Some rides just leave you feeling funny. We could start by seeing what snacks they have?” She grinned at the other girl. “Even if we don’t get anything at first. I forget, do you have any allergies? I'm allergic to tree nuts which isn’t super fun but I manage well enough. I know some people who are allergic to far less common things, so I always like to check before I offer food. You know, best behavior, right?” She hop-skipped a few paces forward before turning back to face Shiloh. “What do you say?”

“I completely understand. I wouldn’t make you go through it again, don’t worry.” Shiloh was curious as to what might have happened but knew she was in no position to ask or press further about it. She didn’t know Athena that well after all and even if she did, people deserved to have their own secrets and privacy. “Oh, yeah, snacks are fine with me.” Shiloh preferred to get rides out of the way before eating just in case but she doubted either of them were interested in the kind of rides that would get you nauseous anyway. “Oh no, I’m not allergic to anything.” At least nothing Shiloh had ever noticed before. “I don’t eat too much red meat but that’s just a personal preference rather than an allergy.” She smiled though, at the thought of Skylar and her preference for meat. She almost voiced that to Athena but then thought against it. “I really like sweets. It’s a serious problem.” She admitted with a chuckle.

“I appreciate that,” Athena grinned. “Plus, I heard it had faulty wiring to boot, which is something that they really ought to regulate more thoroughly!” Of course, it had broken thanks to Winston’s quick thinking but she was absolutely not about to mention anything to do with their magic to anybody else. “Good to hear about the allergies! I also don’t always eat red meat - not vegetarian though, but I know folks who are. My Big, for one. Actually, she’s vegan. Which means I have to make sure I don’t make her anything with animal products. Which means I can’t do anything like spanakopita, but what are you going to do, right?” She giggled. “Sweets? What sorts? I’m not always into them, but sometimes they just hit the spot. There’s a stand that sells slush here, if you like that!”

Shiloh had to think for a moment by what she meant as “Big” but recalled American sororities and fraternities. She wasn’t in one, but she had made some acquaintances in those circles. “Uh, what’s spanakopita?” She voiced the word slowly, not sure how to pronounce it as rapidly as Athena had. Just by the name alone she was thinking it was something eastern european which was interesting, she didn’t know Athena was eastern european. “I like pastries a lot. I’m a real sucker for those,” Shiloh admitted. “I bake from time to time and I’m always in trouble for it because I always bake too much.” She chuckled and then her eyes lit up at the thought of a slushee. “Oh yeah! I’ve had one from there before I didn’t know it came back this year. We should definitely get a slushee, it’s kind of warm tonight.” It might have been the fog that added to the uncomfortable sensation but she was sure a nice cold slush would be fantastic.

“It’s a dish from Greece. Sort of a savory pastry kinda deal. It’s made with filo dough which is the super thin almost crinkly dough. It’s amazing.” Athena shrugged. “I learned how to make it on a whim almost a decade ago when I was in elementary school and it stuck. She flashed a grin toward Shiloh. “Well hey, you can’t go wrong with that. I bake too! What do you like to bake? For sweets I’ve just about perfected a macaron recipe and, well, cupcakes are always a good go-to.” She continued to walk toward the slush stand, giving a quick nod. “Oh, you bet it did! It is warm and therefore we should absolutely get some slushes. Besides, they’re not too heavy so we can do that and go on a ride or whatever and then get more food if we feel like it.” She found the slush stand and ordered a cherry-lemon mix before turning to let Shiloh order. “I’ll pay, my treat.” Her hand found a tiny bottle of silver solution in her purse. When she got her slush she turned away for a moment, dropping it in before giving a small mix and holding out the spoon to Shiloh. “You’ve gotta try this mix before I do! It’s to die for.”

“They taught you that in elementary school? Wow.” Shiloh wouldn’t have expected that. “Oh it’s mainly scones. I love making scones and cakes. Lemon and blueberry are my go to flavors. I’ve made some pie as well but I generally do that during the holidays so I’m not too practiced on that so I just stick to my cakes.” She chuckled at that, knowing she wasn’t that great when it came to baking so she stuck to what she knew but that wasn’t to say she wouldn’t mind expanding her knowledge. Maybe she and Athena could share some recipes. That’d be really fun, she was always interested in learning more about recipes other than the British ones she gravitated toward. As she ordered her blue raspberry slush, she thanked Athena for paying for it. She reached out to take hers when Athena was urging her to try her cherry lemon mix. “Oh, alright,” she laughed softly before taking a taste from the spoon. The taste was definitely something new, enjoyable but not better than her blue raspberry - although she wasn’t going to be rude and say that. “Hey, that is pretty good!” She smacked her lips, finding an unusual aftertaste but just figured artificial flavoring did that and thought nothing of it. She quickly took to her own slush to mask the taste.

“No, I taught myself.” Athena fiddled with her shirt. “Sorry, usually I’m better and more precise with my words.” She grinned at the mention of Shiloh’s baking. “That sounds great! I’ve made scones before. Maple, because when you’re in this part of the Northeast it’s sort of a must-do. Also blueberry, ‘cause Maine’s got some killer blueberries to have.” If Shiloh proved herself human, maybe the two of them could get together to do some sort of baking sometime. Not until she had her mind settled about whatever felt off about Shiloh. It might’ve been nothing, and none of her senses were going off, but it also never hurt to be sure. Shiloh accepted Athena’s offer of slush and when she was quiet Athena frowned for a moment before giving a shrug. She hadn’t thought that she was a werewolf, not properly. The rings had never done anything. “It is at least refreshing. Have you ever made homemade sorbet? That is lovely, if a bit heavier than this.” She began to walk away from the booth, slush in her hand. “Remind me, how long have you lived here?” She glanced over her shoulder to the other woman.

“Maple, really?” Shiloh asked, not having heard of that being a thing but then again it wasn’t as if she was entirely knowledgeable about the area to begin with. “Lemon blueberry is so good.” Shiloh preferred the tartness and sweetness that came with it. Although she knew some people didn’t enjoy lemon desserts. “You have to let me try some of your maple scones - I’m sure they’re great.” Shiloh said with a smile, hopeful that they would have to hang out and bake together next time. She drank from her slush as Athena spoke, listening. “I’ve never made sorbet, no. I’m guessing you have?” Was it similar to making ice cream? Shiloh hadn’t ever put much thought into sorbet other than how good it is when she’s eating it. “Oh, I’ve been here for like five years now?” She looked up as she scrunched her face in thought. “Yeah, about that long.” She ended with a shrug of her shoulders. “Were you born here? I feel like I’ve asked you that question before so I’m sorry if you’re just repeating yourself.”

“Maple-glaze, or maple-chips, yep!” Athena gave a small nod. “Lemon blueberry does sound good. I made a lemon raspberry cake not too long ago.” For Ariana, but Athena wasn’t about to focus on that right now. “Lemon as a flavor is excellent. It makes things taste nice, almost more refreshing somehow.” She gave a quick nod, “for sure, next time I make them.” Athena continued to watch Shiloh curiously, observing her movements, if she reacted to anything in any sort of odd way. She was eating her slush which continued to remove the likelihood of her being certain species. “I have! It’s super easy, it’s frozen fruit, sugar, water, and a food processor or blender. It’s super easy and fun to experiment with different fruits.” Athena took another scoop of her slush as she listened to Shiloh. “That’s quite a bit of time. What made you come here? Oh - yeah, I’ve lived here my whole life! No worries about if I’m repeating myself, I’m happy to answer your questions. I know lots about this town. I love it here. Though perhaps some day I would like to see other parts of the world, this town has done quite well as far as a place to grow up. Even if I don’t get a super cool accent like you.”

“Mmm,” Shiloh hummed as she had her slush still in her mouth as Athena mentioned maple chips and lemon raspberry cake. Boy, would she want some right now. Although, they probably didn’t have anything like that at the carnival, but they would have something that was tasty nonetheless. “Making sorbet does sound pretty simple. Do you have a favorite fruit to make it with?” Shiloh tried to think what her favorite fruit would be… probably peach. Or maybe watermelon? So many good fruits, how could you just pick one? Her attention went back to Athena, hearing her talk about eventually wanting to travel to other parts and her memory did recall Athena mentioning that bit. “You should travel. There’s a lot to see! I still want to do some traveling myself but…” She pursed her lips as she thought of her parents. “My parents are getting older and the town… I don’t really like the idea of leaving them alone. My father’s close to retirement and someone has to help run the business.” She swirled the ice in her cup as she shrugged. “Oh--that’s what made us come here too. My mother had an estranged uncle of sorts that owned Trusty Wood. He died and his sister, my grandmother was set to inherit but she passed so it went to my mother.”

“It is simple! Oh, I love a good raspberry. I think that’s a solid classic to work with, honestly.” Athena grinned. “It’s sort of hard to choose, I like so many different fruits. Though I don’t think I’d make grape sorbet. Not sure I’ve ever seen frozen grapes, for one, and I’m just not sure how that’d work out in the end. Grapes on their own are just fine by me, though.” At Shiloh’s mention of travel Athena gave a small shrug. “Maybe someday. There is a lot to see in the world. I’ve seen pictures though! So it’s not all lost on me!” She scrunched up her nose. In another life, she’d be at Yale now, or Stanford, or even a place like Bates. She didn’t regret where her life made her stay. Being in town, helping the people, was more important than a nice college name on her transcript. “That makes sense!” Her nod was perhaps a tad too emphatic, but she meant well. So long as Shiloh’s parents were human, that was. “You’re woodworker? I think I remember that. I know someone else,” I don’t know if we’re still friends, “who’s, like, super duper handy at woodwork. It’s so neat that you get to keep it all in the family. I can appreciate someone else who values family as much as I do.”

“Grape sorbet does seem like it might take some artificial flavoring. I do enjoy things that are grape-flavored though. Like candy and drinks.” Shiloh tried to think of a time where she had something like grape ice cream - frozen grape juice, yes but actual ice cream was another thing. Hm.. that was something to look up when she was bored. She looked over at Athena unable to take her seriously that seeing pictures was good enough in any way. “Pictures are nice, beautiful even but it’s nothing like actually being there, I can assure you.” However, maybe Athena had similar reasons not to travel, preferring to be with her family or… having to be close by to them. Shiloh felt like that for the longest and just when she thought she got over it, she was brought back to them again. “Oh yeah, I am. And do you? I probably know them too. It’s a small town we kinda all know each other.” She chuckled, wondering who it might be. Athena was young so it couldn’t be any of the older men they had. Maybe one of the younger guys? She thought about it. “Yeah… yeah,” Shiloh nodded, dropping her glance. “Family’s… important. They’re all we have, y’know? Outside of when we start our own family.” But when was that going to happen for Shiloh’s case? She sighed, glancing up and catching sight of a booth about crystals and witchcraft. “Do you believe in that stuff?” Shiloh asked, nodding her head towards it.

“I figure they can be good sometimes. Never really my speed, but I’ve got some sisters in my sorority who adore grape-flavored items of all sorts.” Athena explained. She hoped that Shiloh wasn’t some terrible supernatural being, because from every encounter that they’d had so far, she found the other woman’s company enjoyable. “I suppose so.” She bit her lip. She wanted to travel - the feeling was almost desperate sometimes. To travel anywhere - certainly to other supernatural hotspots but also just to see somewhere else. Even somewhere like Boston - not too far away, but still almost too much to do. Or at least too much as far as her parents believed. “I do. Ariana?” Was she even still a friend? The two knew one another, that much was true. “We coach soccer camp together.” That much was true. “This is a small town, it’s always super wild to see all the ways people are connected to one another.” At the mention of family Athena nodded, a small smile crossing her face. “Family is everything.” However, before much more could be discussed on that subject, Shiloh was pointing out a booth clearly designed to at least appear to be involved with witchcraft. “Hmm?” Athena glanced over. “Oh, well, I mean, weird stuff does happen in this town. Sometimes you just can’t explain it!” Or most people can’t, or find a way around it, anyhow. She eyed Shiloh carefully. “Do you?”

“Oh, Ariana?” Shiloh didn’t need to ask for a last name to know who it was. “She’s doing her apprenticeship under me.” Shiloh smiled, happy to hear about her outside of the apprenticeship. She didn’t really know about her outside of it but it didn’t help that Shiloh knew to keep things short considering the anxiety she gets during it all. Speaking of anxiety… Shiloh glanced at the table once more until they walked by it. “Yeah, there’s some weird things in town, you’re right.” Her lips pursed in thought. She knew better than to just tell people what she has seen. Either way, it was a lot to unpack. “I don’t know,” she shrugged, not really wanting to talk about it. Shiloh enjoyed when things were normal and when they weren’t while she tried to understand she feared she might never fully understand this world and that made her uncomfortable. Letting out a sigh she looked over at Athena wondering what she thought. “Some things have a rational explanation we don’t know yet, right?” Scratching at her head she still had to admit, “this town still leaves a lot to explain. Some people feel really strongly about the unknown.” She let out a nervous chuckle, unsure how Athena saw it.

“Yes.” Athena shuffled her feet. Not that she didn’t want to talk about Ariana - but things were a lot more complicated than they used to be. On both sides, she reminded herself. Even if it felt weird - even if it was all still incredibly confusing to her. “That’s great! She’s super.” Athena felt her cheeks flush for a moment and cursed herself. “Tell me about it. Lived here my whole life, you’d think this’d be all typical now - and yet… it’s not.” So that was a complete lie, but unlike the beings she adored hunting most of all, she had that capability in spades. “Some things do, you’re right. Some people do feel real strong about that, you bet.” She felt a shiver run through her body. She’d known fae were at the fair - that much was true without a doubt - the natural chaos of this sort of place provided allowed their kind to thrive. “Sorry.” She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, focusing her breath. “Sometimes I just get distracted. Goodness knows that’s part of why my parents got me into sports. Always wanting to move, you know?”

It was nice to meet a friend of Ariana’s - if Shiloh remembered, she’d bring it up next time they spoke. “My parents think most things have their reasonable explanations so really they’re not put off by what happens. That’s not to say it’s not sad when someone we know goes missing or… or worse. My parents are just rational people when it comes to things like that. That’s how they raised me.” So finding out about the supernatural sent her through a never ending loop. “Oh - we should go play some of the games they have then, yeah?” Shiloh suggested with a smile not wanting her to get overwhelmed by the constant distractions at the carnival and instead focus on something like a game. It would do good for Shiloh too, take her mind off the weird things about the town. “Hey, what do you say we do some baking sometime? You up for it?” She asked as she walked toward a game stall.

So she was rational. Athena had to think about that - because though she certainly felt as though something was up with Shiloh, everything she’d tried - from her general senses to the foods she offered to the carefully word questions she asked - had proved fruitless in discovering anything useful. “People can be quite rational. Seems like your parents have a good head on their shoulders.” Even if you make me far too curious. “Yeah, let’s do some games. As for baking? Just say when and it’s on.” She walked after Shiloh. This isn’t over. That much she knew completely.

#wickedswriting #c shiloh #chatzy #becoming #// i love shiloh #and i love alyssa #so much

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sastrugie · 3 years

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my christmas break starts this friday as well! what’s up with your coworker? have her test results come back? is she doing okay?

alright, so my fav topics include:

- the russian revolution, as already stated :D

- the cold war (mostly from the east european point of view)

- the tudors

- victorian era england

i also really love peaky blinders (the show) and i occasionally enjoy reading about how different gangs operated back in those days but i don’t know much lmao

also, monarchy is just such a terrible system but i completely get your interest in the people! for example, i also adore reading and learning about the tudors and the romanovs but only as a part of history and not because i’m such a big fan of the monarchy? lmao if that makes sense.

and like, i lowkey get why the bolsheviks thought they needed to assassinate the whole family but it’s also really sketchy, dude ://

i think i like britain’s history just because it’s so rich and influential, but like we simply can’t ignore the fucked up shit they’ve done through the centuries. so again, i enjoy it but mostly because i love judging them for their actions lmao

and to answer your question, i don’t really know if i have many historical favs? i feel like i enjoy way too many problematic people lmao. nevertheless, the ones i’m most interested in atm are: lenin (shockers), anne boleyn, anne bonny, malcolm x - this list shifts constantly depending on my mood though.

oh shush you, i’m sure your style is bombing based on everything i just read :)

lmao i actually do that sometimes, but mostly in my mother tongue! but i also just love shakespearean insults in english, those are impeccable

and merci beaucoup! good luck with russian; maybe you’ll be able teach me a few phrases in the future :D

ooh what are you studying atm? if you don’t mind sharing, that is.

and me, i’d like to become a psychologist some day, so that’s pretty far from history as well haha but i never want the enthusiasm to die ever and i’m really loving how the two of us can just scream to each other about history in every single ask/answer :D

thank you so much for these beautiful recommendations, i’ll definitely check them out!!

here are some of mine:

books:

- maria stuart by stefan zweig (german author, so it shouldn’t be too hard for you to find it!!)

- red crosses by sasha filipenko (fiction about the stalinist regime)

- the age of light by whitney scharer (historical fiction again lmao; tells the story of photographers lee miller and man ray’s romance in the 30s with little snippets into wwii through lee’s pov; the writing was stunning)

- sapiens by yuval noah harari (basically the history of mankind; so informative and enjoyable, i adored it)

- the real peaky blinders by carl chinn (what the title says, really; the actual gangs of birmingham and their not so shiny careers)

these are the best ones i read in 2020 but i’ll let you know if i remember any of my other reads!!

i also haven’t read any actual books about the 1917 revolution because i haven’t really had the chance to go to the library yet and i’ve been busy doing my research on the internet haha (it’s a fairly new hyperfixation of mine, to be frank). however, i’ll hit you up if i find anything worthwhile <3

documentaries:

- the russian revolution (the title speaks for itself lmao)

- genius of the modern world (3-part docuseries about marx, nietzsche and freud)

- world war ii in colour (lmao just a classic, innit)

- secrets of great british castles

- the last tzars (tho i’m pretty sure you’re quite familiar with this one haha)

- forbidden history

- secrets of the six wives

- anything by lucy worsley, tbh

these are all off the top of my head but again, i’ll let you know if i remember any more!!

oml i apologise for the long message and i hope your week is going well :D

dont apologize for long messages! <3 im always happy to talk to you

sadly her test was positive UGH which means i have to get myself tested too (today) and if the worst case happens: i´ll have to spend christmas alone in my student flat bc then i obviously cant go home to my family (my grandparents live there..) so yeah, today 14:20 o clock... i have the test :( cross your fingers for me pls huhuhu

thats cool that we have the russian revolution and vicxtorian era as common interest ^^ i read a book recently its called “the ordeal” and its a triology written by alexej tolstoi during the times of the revolution. its a story about two sister and their love interests during the war times and its really good!!!

oh i barely know anything about the tudors! pls hmu

ah yes.. the cold war... i have to admit im rather interested in the music and sociology of the cold war times but the political stuff is super interesting too! esp as you said from an east european view, so we can talk about that too!

yep. monarchy sucks! i understanbd from like a logical point of view why they shot them all, but the human side of me thinks its just cruel.. i mean yeah tsar nicholas wasnt a good politician but he wasnt a bad person either. but yeah, a difficult topic.. tbh he´s the only romanov im really interested in (i really dislike his wife alexandra tho lmao) hbu?

leninnn :D i kinda excpected that! i havent really read much about him but he seems to be an interesting person! and who is anne boyd? malcom X yes! im really interested into the civil rights movement as well. I really like martin luther king jr.

englands history really fascinates me, and i honestly cant tell you why... but it is what is is hahhaa! nand duuudeeee omg they fucked so many shit up.. the british are a funny nation. but honestly none is unproblematic and every nation screwed up big time once:D judging is really important when youre intereste din history! like im interested in king george and queen mary but not solely for political reasons, more actually for their personal lives and victorian times and how they were as a couple, but i know... they did bad stuff too!

omg teach me some shakespearean insults pls! i only know a few victorian ones! and a bit of sixties slang :D

im gonna reblog this and add some russian phrases bc my russian keyboard in on my phone :) but i use duolingo so the sentences are ... really weird lmao

im studying physical geography in Erlangen right now and am in my 7th semester.) im actually writing my bachelor thesis rn UGHHHHHHH

ohhhhh psychology is cool!! im really intersted in it, sadly i cant ever be one bc i suffer from poor mental health too much myself, in fact i have an appointment my therapist in a few minutes haha BUT i think youre super trustworthy and nice and easy to talk to so these are really good qualities for a therapist <3<3<3<3

AHHHHHHHHHHH THANKS!!

i already read sapiens! its so good! and i know maria stuart by schiller haha but oml i love stefan zweig so imma add it on my list

ok and i will watch ALL of these (except the last tsars bc yeah i already saw it! and liked it ... kinda .. i didnt like the actor they chose for nicky, he didnt remind me of him at all)

i have alot of historical fiction books to recomment too:

if you like ww2 “a time to live and a time to die”

ww1: “all quiet on the western front”

russian revolution and war time “the ordeal”

“intrige” by robert harris is also good (france 1896)

oh and documentary wise:

they shall not grow old is a coloured ww1 docu!

thank you so much for everything again i love talking to you :) have a nice day <3 (sorry for typos i was in a hurry)

#r #anon #secret santa #nice ppl

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nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany · 5 years

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Brexit: Boris Johnson’s Impossibility Theorem

Digital Elixir Brexit: Boris Johnson’s Impossibility Theorem

Even though the press paid a lot of attention to Boris Johnson’s taking of office theatrics, and in particular his doubling down on his promise of an October 31 exit and stocking his Cabinet with radicals to help assure that, there were a couple of signals from the EU side that are worth noting, which we’ll cover after a short recap.

We said early on that the course of Brexit was showing troubling parallels to the Greece 2015 bailout negotiations. Specifically, from the outset, the UK overestimated its bargaining leverage. Too many well placed pols and pundits convincing themselves that the EU would be more damaged by a crashout than the UK and therefore would be desperate to avoid a no deal. A more reality-based way of coming to a similar conclusion is that EU pols will always favor kick the can down the road over making a difficult decision, particularly one that will result in real damage. Thus push come to shove, given a way to avoid a Brexit, the EU will take advantage of it.

We now appear to have hit the point we anticipated, that of a game of chicken. The pro-Brexit faction, despite having lost support in the UK population, has embraced a more and more hard-line position, and the peculiarities of the UK system has allowed one of their favorites, Boris Johnson, to become Prime Minister. Some hoped that the fabulously unprincipled Johnson might find a way to reverse himself and call for a face-saving extension down the road, but Johnson looks to be doing everything he can to commit himself to an October 31 departure. The press was agog at Johnson’s Cabinet purge, in which he ousted anyone who was soft on Brexit, and populated his team heavily with MPs from the Leave campaign, leading some to speculate that despite Johnson’s protestations otherwise, he was preparing for an early election. Another indicator: the Tories launched a “blitz” of election ads to test messages.

In a further gesture to show his commitment to leaving on October 31, Johnson said in his first speech to the House of Commons that he will not nominate an EU Commissioner. Express pointed out that that would make it difficult to obtain an extension. The term of the current Commission ends on October 31 and the UK would need to field a new EU Commissioner were it to remain in the EU beyond that date.

A defining characteristic of the Johnson Government is its mediocrity. From vlade:

What’s really staggering the the proportion of people who are totally incompetent and believe their own BS (Raab, Moggie, Patel, Leadsom..). I despair for the UK’s education system with Williamson being allowed anywhere near it.

Johnson, in his first speech as Prime Minister, promised the UK was leaving the EU, “no ifs or buts,” in 99 days with a new deal. He also promised economic unicorns that would make Labour blush for its grandiose patter about “safer streets and better education and fantastic new road and rail infrastructure…higher wages, and a higher living wage, and higher productivity we close the opportunity gap” without any specifics as to how to produce such miraculous improvements. Johnson did acknowledge that there was a “remote possibility” that there would be no deal, and so

…we will now accelerate the work of getting ready and the ports will be ready and the banks will be ready and the factories will be ready and business will be ready and the hospitals will be ready and our amazing food and farming sector will be ready and waiting to continue selling ever more not just here but around the world….

I imagine at least some of you in the UK saw Johnson speak, and I feel very sorry for you. I can’t recall ever reading a major address that had so much hot air and so little substance, and what substance there was was deeply wrongheaded. Let’s start with the fact that Sir Ivan Rogers said it would take the UK five to ten years to be ready to trade with the rest of the world on a free trade agreement basis, and pretty much everyone competent to opine has made a similar assessment, if anything tending to the ten year end of the spectrum. So where is this Johnsonian readiness to be found?

On the other side of the channel, EU officials who prefer to communicate in diplo-speak are resorting to sharper notes in their register to try to penetrate the fog around No. 10 and Parliament. You have to wonder if they are responding to the clangor out of a sense of duty, or to demonstrate to their colleagues and history that they did everything they could.

Entirely predictably, they swatted down Johnson’s happy talk. Michel Barnier’s remarks via a Times reporter:

Barnier rejects Johnson’s plan as basis for talks in note to EU27 pic.twitter.com/Bu5qO24O4a

— Bruno Waterfield (@BrunoBrussels) July 25, 2019

Waterfield focused on Barnier’s intimating that a general election might be in store (the “many strong reactions….in the House of Commons”) and that Johnson’s no deal bluster was a gambit to split the EU. But at least as significant was Barnier’s reference to the mandate and his offer to remain the point person during the summer (“don’t worry about your holiday, I’ll let you know if there is anything you really need to hear about”).

By invoking the mandate, Barnier was reminding the EU national diplomats that there isn’t even remotely enough time to negotiate a new Withdrawal Agreement even if the EU was to have a massive change of heart. Barnier is saying that his hands are tied, that he couldn’t discuss a new deal with the UK unless and until the EU went back to square zero and gave him new marching orders. He’s almost certainly reminding them of this section of Article 50:

In the light of the guidelines provided by the European Council, the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with that State, setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union.

Various EU national leaders have backed Barnier’s and Juncker’s position, that the Withdrawal Agreement is the only deal possible given the givens. Barnier is alluding to the notion that in extremis, he could be told to try again, but that would mean having the European Council come up with new guidelines. Even with the addition of an early European Council meeting, no way can this get done by October 31.

Juncker also entirely predictably sent the same message. Notice how closely the language of Juncker’s nein parallels Barnier’s text. From the Guardian:

The European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, has told Boris Johnson that the EU27 will not give in to his demand to renegotiate the Brexit withdrawal agreement.

On Thursday in his first telephone call with Johnson as prime minister, Juncker called the existing deal “the best and only agreement possible”…

Juncker said the EU would analyse any ideas put forward by the UK provided they were compatible with the withdrawal agreement, his spokeswoman Mina Andreeva tweeted in a readout of the phone call.

Politico underscored the significance of the minimalism:

But a Commission spokeswoman, providing a brief summary of the Juncker-Johnson phone call, did not even try to put a positive spin on things. She made clear that Juncker expressed no willingness to budge a millimeter, let alone an imperial inch, on the Withdrawal Agreement, which Brussels has stated repeatedly is not open for renegotiation.

But most important is the one possible spot where the UK might be able to drive a chink that could influence the EU is holding firm. From the Irish Times:

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has told Boris Johnson, the new British prime minister, that an entirely new Brexit deal “is not going to happen”.

He also said negotiating a new deal “within weeks or months” – with Mr Johnson saying he can leave the EU with a new deal by the next Brexit deadline on October 31st – is “not in the real world”.

The press also made much of the fact that Juncker gave Johnson his cell phone number. But Barnier and Juncker appear to have nominated themselves, even more so than usual, to run interference for other EU figures. Juncker seems to like press attention, so putting himself on BoJo’s speed dial will make him less of a lame duck.

Macron has agreed to meet with Johnson in August, while Macron’s spokesperson insisted that the Withdrawal Agreement was not up for discussion. This again is no surprise, given that Macron has been taking a hard line on Brexit.

One wonders how Johnson will fight off a general election. LibDem leader Jo Swinson has written Corbyn to call him out for “aiding and abetting this Conservative Brexit” and insisting he Do Something. On the one hand, despite his bold talk, Corbyn must recognize that Labour is likely to lose seats in a general election, making the noble gesture of ousting Johnson costly. A no confidence motion may fail for that reason, as well as for the fact that previous whip counts found that Tory rebels were outnumbered by Labour MPs who would not vote to derail Brexit.

Will Johnson book so many meetings on the Continent that he can create the impression that motion equals progress? Will the press play along with Johnson, as it did with Theresa May, messaging that a deal is nigh when it was pretty clear no such thing was happening? And even with the Brexit train bearing down on the UK, will party interest manage to keep the opposition from mustering enough votes to turf out Johnson?

Even though politics in the UK still retains the appearance of normalcy, it’s hard to think this false calm will hold once the summer is over. As several astute readers have said, the UK political order is suffering a breakdown. And the early phases of revolutions typically make things worse for ordinary people.

Brexit: Boris Johnson’s Impossibility Theorem

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blamebrampton · 6 years

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Eurovision 2018, Semi Final 2

I’m watching on replay and it’s getting late, so this is going to be as swift as possible. We open with a gorgeous montage and I really do feel like going to Lisboa after this week, were I not broke as a broke thing. The women are back and they look great. The NCIS one has come in an assassin’s cocktail dress, the saintly one is dressed like a tasteful wedding cake, the blonde has come over all black swan and the little one has picked up on last semi final’s sci fi villains theme and is cosplaying Servalan. They are doing nautical allusions again and I will continue to ignore them wherever possible. And also their jokes. They are lovely people, but I am here for the singing.

1. Norway, Alexander Rybak, That’s How You Write A Song. He’s back! With the air fiddle this time. In fact, a raft of air instruments that are animated in. Look, he’s still cute as a button and charismatic as a puppy, but this song is reminding me of Cliff Richard and that is not something I wish to be reminded of. It’s no Fairytale. ACTUAL violin has just appeared! About bloody time. He nearly transcends the song, but the song is well meh. Watch it win now. Backing dancers exist and are perfectly fine. Let’s move on.

2. Romania, The Humans, Goodbye. White dress, drink. No, it was a fakeout, the lead singer is wearing purple. She’s surrounded by band members in white with creepy white masks. And mannequins in in gimp suits, also with creepy white masks. I’ve got a real Bonnie Tyler vibe here, which is at least a step up from the last song. BIG power chords into the main body of the song. She’s exhorting the mannequins to live their best life and I cannot bear to break it to her. White dress girl is back, she’s the cellist and I respect a band with a cellist. BIG HERO NOTES! ooh, her purple frock has matching shorts. Nice. Song was OK, band was great.

3. Serbia, Sanja Ilic and Balkanika, Nova Deca. Pipes and wailing vocal intro and I am sold already. If I was up this morning, this would have had my vote. Soz, kids. Three girls wailing mystically with a man looming behind Rasputinly. Seriously, his whole outfit is mad monk. Big Taiko style drums with an enthusiastic man beating away — erm, on the drums — and now some dance beats to lift it. I have to say that I would love this on the club floor late at night when you want something a bit slower and trippier. The girls’ outfits are sort of earth goddess meets debutante. I’m not going to lie, I flipping loved this one.

4. San Marino, Jessika, featuring Jenifer Brening, Who We Are. Lead singer in a lacy red frock over undies. Two human girl dancers and a set of robot dancers. Look, Ive seen worse. Jenny B has just stonked out down the walkway rapping determinedly and it’s all … fine. It’s a perfectly fine song and there will be some young folks who love it. A robot is holding up body positivity messages, actually, the poor wee thing just dropped it, but now he’s holding hands with the singer. It’s a bit community centre talent night, but they’re enormously likeable and I wish them well.

5. Denmark, Rasmussen, Higher Ground. Sudden plunge into darkness. Faint mystic chord as of pipes over water. Dry smoke. Backlit bearded man standing on a ramp. Square sails and more bearded men. Yes, we have hit peak Viking for the night and there is chanting and stomping and more beard pomade than is probably safe in an environment with pyro. We’re singing about men laying down their swords and making their mark and it’s all very Scandirevival, but I have to confess I rather like it and they can all bloody well sing. I have a nose full of North Sea wind and my cheeks feel windbitten at the end of this song, Oh, look, a white flag of peace. Sure. Key change! Snorri Sturluson would love these guys. The boy Aussie commentator has just said they remind him of when Durmstrang walked into the Hall in Harry Potter and he is right on the money. Definitely a contender.

6. Russia, Julia Samoylova, I Won’t Break. Set design is from the cousin of whoever did Estonia, so it’s nice to have two iceberg singers in the one contest. Super dancers: ballet this time, with Russian technique, which is always lovely to see. Look, I disagree with her politics and her country, and the song’s another meh one, but I wish her well. Moving on.

7. Moldova, DoReDoS, My Lucky Day. They have brought a whole miniseries in the staging of this song. She’s seeing blue suit, but red suit behind his back. Now she and red suit are official, but blue suit is getting some on the side. Lots of comedy from the dancers in the background, who are working within a white box set. It’s silly, it’s saucy. it’s a lot of fun. It would absolutely be the theme song of a sex comedy from 1959 starring Sophia Loren.

8. The Netherlands, Waylon, Outlaw in ’Em. Steel string guitar, pulsing lights and wailing vocals. I’m sorry, I’m allergic to wailing dead dog country that uses gun metaphors, They’re very talented, just not my thing. I’m sure he’ll make a fortune in America and good luck to him.

Short presenter is down with the audience and why?

9. Australia, Jessica Mauboy, We’ve Got Love. Cards on the table, I love Jess. She is a super lovely person as well as a great singer. I don’t the song is quite as good as Dami’s Sound of Silence, but she can perform like a goddess. She is bringing her inner Beyonce with the hair and squats, and selling the lyrics, which are basically, ‘don’t give up, we’ve got love’ and look, sure, but this is a country that numbers Sia, Nick Cave and Kate Miller Heidke among its leading lyricists and I just feel we could have done better for our Jess. But she is putting it all out there, and getting the crowd in on side. The drapey bit on her minidress is a bit distracting, but who gives a proverbial, she’s a champ and she should definitely go through to the finals.No matter how absurd it is that we are there.

10. Georgia, Ethno-Jazz Band Iriao, For You. My first question is whether that is actually the group’s name or if they added a little descriptor for the booking agent once and it’s stuck. It matters not. Lovely quiet jazz piano opening, then classical vocals soaring over the top, dry ice already, and a chanting backing vocal that is somewhere between Gregorian monks and Il Divo, but entirely pleasant to listen to. The vocals are very tight and the arrangement intelligently spare and restrained in parts to show off the voices. I approve! There is a lot of eyebrow emoting, but I don’t mind that in a dark Eastern European man, it’s like queueing if you’re British or buying sausage sandwiches at hardware shops on weekends if you’re Australian. That was a good three minutes for me, I hope they get through!

11. Poland, Gromee, featuring Lucas Meijer, Light Me Up. They are wearing ridiculous hats. More Pharrel than Devo, but the sort of hat that will stand in for a personality when you’re young and nervous. Fair enough, some of them look about 14. Good performers, strong backing vocals and the sort of winning stage performance I would have loved the first 250 times I saw it. It’s not your fault I am old and jaded, Gromee, but I am. There is pyro, there is hand dancing, he is dancing with the audience, he is counting. It’s all fine. OK, bye.

12. Malta, Christabelle, Taboo. She is standing inside four big screens and now a heart is glowing against her black dress. People writhe on her screens and the world spins out from her hands. She is singing about the need to respect and support each other in a world that can be hard and cruel. I… I really like her. I’m not sure whether I also like the song or if I just find her so committed to it that I think I like it, but it doesn’t really matter. There’s a real dancer inside the screens now, and Christabelle loves us all. I love you too, Christabelle. I would totally invite you to my barbecue with Jess.

13. Hungary, AWS, Vislát Nyár. Going for the risky Lordi without masks vote, they drum their way in and then launch straight into rich, angry, headbanging lyrics that are upset about something but my knowledge of Finno-Ugric languages begins and ends with a song about little piggies. Another performance with sincerity rather than just polish, though, and that counts. CROWD SURFING GUITARIST! He’s been returned safely, bless you lovely Eurovision crowd. Angry shouting, epic pyro, lots of drumming. There we go.

14. Latvia, Laura Rizzotto, Funny Girl. Another red lace minidress, with a train this time. Actually, it’s more a shorts dress. A playsuit with train. She looks lovely whatever it is. Her song is apparently about a girl who just a wee bit of a stalker. You know you can tell a chap you like him and not just hang around waiting for him to notice you, yes? Some nice bits of tricky tempo and big hair singing. It’s not my cup of tea, but it is well brewed.

15. Sweden, Benjamin Ingrosso, Dance You Off. Brief moment to mention it is bloody freezing in Sydney tonight, for the first time in forever. This is another very polished performance from a skilled performer and it’s doing nothing for me. Might go and find a blanket for my wee toesies.

16. Montenegro, Vanja Radonovic, Inje. Man at piano, women in background, intense man in front, who is Vanja. He is upset. Possibly because some bastard has bedazzled the crap out of his suit. Nice vocals in the ballad, though. The girls are striding, the piano is staying still, which is as it should be. Ooh! The girls are playing statues. Nice. There is a lot of emoting, but the girls’ costumes and facial expressions make it a little unfortunately close to ‘help us, we have been enslaved by vampires and need you to stake us to free our souls’. Lighting and key change, but otherwise much as before. The girls are still suffering. It’s probably a complex retelling of current politics.

17. Slovenia, Lea Sirk, Helva, Nei. She has pink hair so I like her already. Backing dancers are muscular and fast, I like them, too. Do not bother any of these women or they will make you regret it almost immediately. Her frock is another curtain over undies number, but with more plastic than most others. Who can explain it, who can tell you why? Their music cuts out at one point and they get the audience to clap their beat and I am not certain that was real, but it was nicely handled. Confirmation that was a faux error on the music. Whatevs. As no-one says anymore.

18. Ukraine, Melovin, Under the Ladder. Before I hear a word, I learn he likes horses, David Bowie and Verka Serduchka, so we’re basically friends now. He opens the song in a crypt, which opens up in a cheerfully cheesy Hammer Horror way. He’s dressed like an old-school vampire and the crypt is really the inside of a giant piano at the top of a set of stairs. Clearly Dead or Alive were 30 years too early for this chap, but I am glad YouTube will let him experience them. As everyone guessed, he is back up the stairs to play the piano, soulfully. And now the stairs are on fire, and there’s random pyro everywhere. Of course there is. Vampires love fire. At least dress your backing singers as avenging villagers, who have finally arrived to free the girls from Montenegro.

And we are done! Voting is about to open. I am fast forwarding through this bit because life is too short. ESCLOPEDIA IS BACK! Hello bearded man! More clips from past songs, and an allegation that there is a link between Eurovision and fashion. That is A LIE. You know, Portugal, you’re no Sweden and the women are no Petra and Mans, but I respect that you have kept these interval bits short and cool.

I spoke too soon. Presenters are back with costume changes. NCIS is in a short blue cocktail dress, Blondie is in a pink line dancing dress, Saintly is wearing a costume from my Grade Two Tap exam and the little one is cosplaying Severus Snape. They are doing dance moves from Eurovisions past. The Little One is actually pretty funny, but you will have to download it as I am not up to describing that much physical comedy. There is a Riverdance moment. Which I believe is obligatory for every third Eurpovision.

They run through the acts again, and Denmark’s lead singer has brows you could crack nuts on. Walnuts. Not the other kind. Though he looks as though he would be against toxic masculinity, so perhaps that would also be OK.

Votes are closed. We are touring through Portugal. It is very lovely. The acts are ding the bits that have preceded every song and coming out through their doors and visiting locations and generally cocking a lot of it up, bless them. They look as though they are having fun.

Little presenter has just turned up at the Aussie table and is handing out pastéis de nata a la Oprah and Jess looks as though she is in heaven. Custard really is that good.

Saintly presenter is talking about Eurovision’s role in Portuguese politics! 1974, the year Sweden won with Waterloo, was the year that the Portuguese entry was chosen to be the signal for a revolution. It was played on the radio in the early morning as a signal to take to the streets and by the end of the day there were carnations in gun barrels.True story.

Black swan presenter has found British fans and I think they may have been on the drink, but they say lovely things about Portugal (and Jess), so well done, kids!

Bridal cake presenter is introducing the tracks from France, Germany and Italy and Little One is with them. The French performers are cute as, and sing last years’ winning song in French. Suck ups. But lovely voice. Ooh, NCIS has taken over with Germany. who looks a little like Josh Widdicombe. He’s doing a ukulele cover of Fly on the Wings of Love and I confess I liked it. The entry is nice, too. Look forward to the full version in the finals. And now it’s Little One again with Italy, who really look 100% drunk. But they have spectacular hair. And do a chorus of Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu, ‘Volare! Oh-oh. Cantare, oh wo-oh-oh’ They are SO VERY drunk. Or just exhausted after sitting through 17 hours of this.

Jon Ola Sand says the votes are in. Thank Zeus!

The winners are: Serbia! Fair enough. Moldova! Excellent. They were hilarious. Hungary, because all those Norwegian Death Metal fans were there for you. Ukraine, sure. Sweden. Really? Look, you’re a lovely country. Australia! YAY JESS! Norway, meh. Soz Sasha. I love your country. Denmark, which is entirely fair. Slovenia, which is good news. Last spot goes to The Netherlands, which is fine, the country and western people need something. That’s it till Sunday morning, Which will probably be Sunday night, let’s be honest.

#eurovision #eurovision 2018

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deadcactuswalking · 4 years

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REVIEWING THE CHARTS 2020: 31/01

So, this is the first UK Top 40 after Brexit—we left the European Union the day of this chart’s release... and we’re clearly being punished for it already.

Top 10

Lewis Capaldi, Lewis, Lewis Capaldi. Somehow, due to a new music video, this bloody creature has got his second #1 with “Before You Go”, up four spaces to the top. This is France’s revenge, isn’t it? Sacrebleu.

Up two spaces however is “Blinding Lights” by the Weeknd, to the runner-up spot, which is never a bad thing.

At number-three, we have the slight one-spot drop for “The Box” by Roddy Ricch.

At number-four, unfortunately, there isn’t that big of a drop for “Godzilla” by Eminem featuring the late Juice WRLD, down three spaces from its #1 position last week. I guess sales are doing well enough to keep this at the top.

Down two spots is “Own It” by Stormzy featuring Ed Sheeran and Burna Boy at number-five.

At number-six, we have a slight one-space increase for “Don’t Start Now” by Dua Lipa.

“Life is Good” by Drake, then Future is down one position to number-seven.

Due to the Grammy’s performance, because, yes, they do affect the UK charts as well, probably because of 4Music’s pathetic coverage, as well as a long overdue video, “everything i wanted” by Billie Eilish is up three spaces back into the top 10 at number-eight.

“Someone You Loved” by Lewis Capaldi is up a spot to number-nine because of course it freaking is.

Finally, to round off the top 10, we’re seeing the end of the top 10 run for deteriorating TikTok meme “ROXANNE” by Arizona Zervas, down two to #10... just as it was starting to grow on me.

Climbers

Our singular climber this week is “bad guy” by Billie Eilish up six spots to #22. I’m as confused as you are.

Fallers

On the other hand, we have a handful of these due to a bigger story this week, probably the one that’ll occupy the most time of the three big chart stories here. So, outside of the top 10, “Ei8ht Mile” by DigDat featuring Aitch is down eight spaces to #17 off of the debut, “Ride It” by Regard featuring Jay Sean is also down eight to #29, “Circles” by Post Malone is down six to #31, and that’s not a lot, right? Well, no, but there are also the fallers from last week’s group of Eminem debuts, which unlike what happens with album bombs in the US, did not cause absolute chart chaos once dissipated, and instead just peacefully and rather slowly decreasing in chart points against the flood of the other album bomb. I’m of course talking about “Those Kinda Nights” featuring Ed Sheeran down 15 spaces to #27 and lead single “Darkness” crumbling down 20 spaces to #37.

Dropouts & Returning Entries

We have a couple dropouts here as well, but no returning entries. These are the songs that dropped off the face of the chart this week: “South of the Border” by Ed Sheeran featuring Camila Cabello and Cardi B out from #30, “Beautiful People” by Ed Sheeran featuring Khalid out from #32 (Not Sheeran’s greatest week), “Me & You Together Song” by the 1975 sadly out from #35 off of the debut – I thought this song would last, unlike “STILL DISAPPOINTED” by Stormzy out from #36, or even long-running hits like “HIGHEST IN THE ROOM” by Travis Scott and remixed by ROSALIA and Lil Baby out from #37, and finally, “Senorita” by Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello. Now, I figured I should mention some songs in the top 75 but not in the top 40 that we could see enter the chart in the coming weeks—I haven’t got a single one of these right yet (Well...), but regardless, here are the songs I picked. Not all of them are good, not all of them are bad. There is “Better Off Without You” by Becky Hill and Shift K3y at #42, “Suicidal” by YNW Melly at #44, “Say So” by Doja Cat at #45, “Power Over Me” by Dom Kennedy at #48, “Lonely” by Joel Corry at #61, “SUGAR” by BROCKHAMPTON at #62, “High Fashion” and “Ballin’”, both by Roddy Ricch and Mustard, at #63 and #64, “One Night” by MK at #66, and even the two new songs from M Huncho’s album that missed the Top 40: “Indulge” at #50 featuring D-Block Europe, and “Head Huncho” at #60 featuring Headie One... now for a bit of a different story that starts in the Summer of 1785.

BREXIT RUBBISH

German poet Friedrich Schiller published an ode in 1786 that he wrote the year prior. It was later interpolated by the legendary Ludwig van Beethoven in his 1984 Ninth Symphony. In 1972, quite ironically for a song composed by two Germans when Germany was still split into two (Although admittedly they were both born in western regions of Germany), Beethoven’s composition was adopted as the anthem for Europe as a whole, and the European Union. Does that sound familiar? In 2016, the most famous pig-adulterer in Britain commenced the Brexit vote, resulting in a slight majority to leave the EU. I don’t like getting too political on this show, so I won’t get into this in-depth, but all you need to know is that the Scottish party protested in Parliament in 2017 by singing this song, and that led to this two-party war: The Anti-Brexit and pro-EU song, “Ode to Joy”, the European anthem as performed by Dutchman André Rieu, and the pro-Brexit song, if you excuse my language, “17 Million Frick Offs”, a song by some right-wing comedian (Dominic Frisby) directed towards the 17 million people who proudly told the European Union, to, well, “frick off”, and praising them for doing so. Thankfully, the nation has spoken.

#30 – “Ode to Joy” – André Rieu and Johann Strauss Orchestra

Produced by André Rieu

Frisby’s song peaked at #43, meaning we only have to talk about the Dutch man here, and his first UK Top 40 hit, probably his only one. I would have preferred “Anarchy in the UK” personally, but I’ll accept this. I see how this works as a protest song too, as it’s a pretty triumphant composition, but really, I mean, what do you expect me to say about the European national (Continential?) anthem? Yeah, I think the Johann Strauss Orchestra guest verse kind of ruined the vibe for me on this one, but the beat slaps hard. I don’t like boring, patriotic squabble like this, and it’s not like Rieu does anything with it as this is rather trite, with some really gross mixing of the horns. In fact, the whole song is mixed pretty painfully. I appreciate the sentiment, though, guys, but this is pretty bad. Call me a Eurosceptic for not appreciating some Dutch dude’s rendition of a European historical motif, but really I’d say the same about “God Save the Queen” – and not the Sex Pistols song; that one’s awesome.

ALBUM BOMB: Big Conspiracy – J Hus

I haven’t listened to this album yet, simply because I haven’t had the time, but J Hus is a British rapper who released his first album since his release from prison, Big Conspiracy, on 24th January 2020, to immense critical acclaim and commercial success, debuting at #1 on the UK Albums Chart. These are the three biggest songs from it, and my thoughts on all of them.

#21 – “Repeat” – J Hus featuring Koffee

Produced by Jae5

Interestingly, all of these songs have features. Anyways, let’s get through these as quickly as possible, shall we? I mean, they will probably all sound the same. This was released the day before the album, and is J Hus’ tenth UK Top 10 hit, and Koffee’s first. Who is Koffee, you ask? She’s a Jamaican reggae artist who became the first woman to win the Best Reggae Album award at the most recent Grammy’s. I can see some of the reggae influence here as well, but it’s not actually that clear as it’s mostly a typical Afroswing song that J Hus would have made, with inorganic and pretty stiff drum patterns, and a non-existent atmosphere. Koffee puts way too much effort in, at least in comparison to Hus’ dire performance here, where he just literally mumbles somewhat off-beat for a couple bars and calls it a day, while Koffee is singing her heart out. It’s a really imbalanced ratio is what I’m saying. The strings towards the end are pretty cool but the final chorus is abrupt and overall, this song feels like a pointless meander for the sake of either filler or just landing Koffee a place on the album. I can’t hate it, because Koffee’s performance is great and the instrumental is tolerable, but for Hus, this is oddly flavourless.

#19 – “Big Conspiracy” – J Hus featuring iceé tgm

Produced by TSB

“Big Conspiracy” is the title track and the opening track on the album as well as J Hus’ 11th UK Top 40 hit, and Iceé tgm’s first – hell, she doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page and it’s seeming pretty likely that she debuted on J Hus’ album and she is in fact his sister. It’s pretty cool getting your family involved in the business. You know what else is pretty cool? This song; I like the guitar pick-up and the complimenting bassline, with some sweet vocal melodies and loops from iceé tgm, that seem to be scattered around the entire beat, which is an interesting idea. J Hus is still a tad lazier than usual here, with very little multi-tracking (Seems to be only one-take) or energy, but the chorus has some gorgeous harmonies, his rap verses are casual albeit memorable. I enjoy his (hopefully) sarcastic endorsement of Ronald Reagan in the first verse, and his point about underdogs rising in the second verse, which is a nice message. The bridge is pretty good, as it gives iceé tgm a bit of solo time, and she sounds decent but admittedly non-descript, and then there’s a smooth sax solo for seemingly no reason. Eh, I’m all for it. This is sweet, and it’s nice that an out-of-the-blue conscious rap song debuted in the top 20, but again, lacking a lot of the character I saw from the lead single.

#11 – “Play Play” – J Hus featuring Burna Boy

Produced by Jae5, Nana Rogues and Scribz Riley

Finally, also a pre-release single by about a day, is “Play Play”, J Hus’ 12th UK top 40 hit and Burna Boy’s fourth. We all know who Burna Boy is by now, although coincidentally Koffee happened to have covered Burna’s breakout hit “Ye” on the BBC Radio Live Lounge. I suppose that’s of note. I figured maybe the highest debuting single from the album would have that lively energy and bright comedy that I saw in “Must Be”, but no, there isn’t, which is exciting as that’s what I expected from this record, and the second single did try to confirm my suspicions. Much like “Repeat”, however, I feel this would easily be better if it were just a Burna Boy single, with his charming hook and cute steel-pans-based instrumental, but no, J Hus is here, and... did he forget how to rap? He sounds pretty awful here, with a dry flow that flubs rhymes and fits too many words into the meter, an uninteresting cadence and even awful mixing that makes him feel so distant from a song that should be warm and intimate. The reason I can’t dislike the song, however, is the concept, which both artists talk about in detail, especially Hus’ hilariously... bipolar verses, if that’s the best way to describe them. It seems to be about comparing women to guns, but also that women like him for his guns, and that he treats his gun like a woman? I don’t know, it’s a dumb concept that is messy in execution, but at least it’s unique. Pretty disappointed in these tracks, to be honest; maybe the deep cuts will be more to my fancy.

NEW ARRIVALS

#40 – “Roses” – Saint Jhn

Produced by F a l l e n and remixed by Imanbek

Hey, a song I actually predicted would reach the UK Top 40, just last week! I’m pretty impressed with myself, but admittedly I guess if you throw 70 stones at a bird, at least one will kill it, just as the old proverb says. Anyways, this is Saint Jhn’s first ever UK Top 40 hit and was mostly propelled by the Imanbek EDM remix, which I’ll be listening to as well. The original song “Roses” was released on the Guyanese-American rapper’s SoundCloud in July 2016 and was included in his 2018 compilation album. He had written for other artists like Jidenna before but his solo work went mostly unnoticed until a producer called Imanbek released an unauthorised house remix. Imanbek is a Kazakh producer, and his remix was released through a Russian record label, so there is a surprising amount of cultures involved in making this one song; it’s kind of interesting. Also, we never see anyone on the UK Top 40 chart from freaking Kazakhstan! That’s insane! By the way, Kazakhstan’s flag is my personal favourite flag of the world. I love the colour combination. The original song is one I’m generally not pleased with, personally, with a dull trap beat and hi-hats that somehow rattle too much, and a murmuring, unintelligible Auto-Tune drawl from Saint Jhn that’s just unpleasant, and for a song called “Roses”, is kind of eerie, and overall, the song is just kind of boring and underwhelming, although I’ll admit the vocal melodies and ideas are there, and I especially like the synths in the later parts of the chorus. What this needed to push it over the edge was a 19-year-old guy from Kazakhstan and I’m not joking; I love this house version. The pitch-shifted, almost chipmunk, rendition of the vocals could be obnoxious to some people but to me it adds so much energy and quirk to an otherwise dry performance from Jhn, and the beat in this version has such an infectious synth bass, despite otherwise being a pretty standard house beat, with some vague horn inflections, traditional pop-house drum beat, and pretty cliché vocal samples, but the melodies I liked are still here, in fact the trap beat is partially kept in during the chorus, and touches like that are pretty nice. The slog of the verses have a lot more groove to them sped-up too. Yeah, I enjoy this, and it’s a massive improvement over the original. Big up Kazakhstan.

#32 – “Pee Pee” – M Huncho

Produced by ADP

Honestly, if the form of protest against Brexit is only demonstrated into making songs chart, I’d like to think that the children all around Britain have all decided to make it clear that Brexit is pee pee, and I couldn’t be more proud. This is M Huncho’s third UK Top 40 hit and from his album Huncholini the 1st... this guy is a joke, right? He even wears a mask to be anonymous, but it’s not for personal or even gang-related reasons. It’s just a cartoon mask that he says is supposed to accentuate the message of the music. What’s the message of this song then, Mr. Huncholini?

When I bust my nut, I go and take a pee pee

Inspiring. I’m tempted to just leave it at that, actually – can I? Yeah? Are you sure? Okay, well, that’s all, then.

Conclusion

Honestly, “Pee Pee” isn’t even that bad, and it’s not getting the Dishonourable Mention. That’s going to “Play Play” by J Hus featuring Burna Boy, with Worst of the Week going to that crap rendition of “Ode to Joy”. I don’t have much to praise here, but I might as well give Best of the Week to “Roses” by Saint Jhn, purely for the Imanbek remix, as if it were the original only, it could easily get the Dishonourable Mention. Honourable Mention goes to “Big Conspiracy” by J Hus featuring iceé tgm, just barely. Follow me on Twitter @cactusinthebank, I’ll see you next week!

REVIEWING THE CHARTS 2020

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businessliveme · 4 years

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Ford v Ferrari depicts a generation of car guys that’s best left behind

(Bloomberg) –Ford v Ferrari, which opened Friday, Nov. 15 starring Christian Bale and Matt Damon, follows British racing driver Ken Miles (Bale), and hot-rodder Carroll Shelby (Damon) as they build a special race car to help the Ford Motor Company beat Ferrari at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1966 and 1967. The goal was to break Enzo Ferrari’s stronghold on international racing that had his Scuderia Ferrari winning everything throughout the 1960s.

They strike an odd-couple pair: Miles is a wiry, eccentric Brit; Shelby is a square-jawed, cowboy-hat-wearing Texan. Neither much like the corporate pressure exerted by Ford chief Lee Iacocca and his marketing goons, who themselves were humiliated by Ferrari’s Old World gravitas after a bungled buyout attempt. And there you have the necessary tension for a movie.

It’s a beautifully shot film that will be enjoyable for modern car buyers and enthusiasts alike—engines rev, tires squeal, stopwatches click. But what I saw is a devastating picture of the lack of diversity that permeated the industry in the 1960s.

Read: Christian Bale & Matt Damon racing drama finishes first at box

If automakers want any hope of relevance in the next decades, as they face the most radical changes and challenges they’ve experienced in 150-odd years of automotive history, they would be wise to contemplate it closely. Because Ford v Ferrari shows a generation best left dead and gone.

It’s a Man’s World

Picture this: During all 152 minutes of the film—which, for those who love vintage racing cars, will feel as good as an ice cream sundae on a summer afternoon, and you can read all about that here—men dominate the screen for 98% of the time, by my unofficial count. They are in the executive suites at Ford and Ferrari, in the workshops and garages in Venice, on the track out at Willow Springs Raceway. (And when I say men, I mean white, straight men.)

No fraction of the storyline is devoted to parsing the thoughts and feelings of any female who appears, even peripherally, on screen. Instead, Caitriona Balfe, who plays Miles’s wife, Mollie, is presented as the doting mother: She smiles mildly and nods her head indulgently as her husband struggles to gain traction in the race world. She clucks and scolds like a schoolmarm when Miles and Shelby come to blows on her front lawn—then brings them each a soda pop.

Other women waft through the film like smoke: Secretaries in wood-paneled offices handing manila folders to men in navy suits; corporate wives smiling silently, always positioned one step behind their husbands’ shoulder; young racing fans that serve as pretty décor on racing podiums. To the victor go the spoils.

The critique I heard most often about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood could easily apply here: This is a film celebrating those nostalgic golden days when white men ruled. It’s pretty to watch if you can suspend thinking for two hours about what that world must have been like for any ambitious or creative folks who didn’t fit that demographic.

Behind the Shiny Exterior

The central message of Ford v Ferrari—that the answer to the question,Who are you? is what really matters in life—is delivered in the beginning, middle, and end of the film by Shelby.

The biggest problem with that is Carroll Shelby. The man who was responsible for turning the Ford Mustang into the epitome of American muscle occupies a godlike status in car culture and embodied everything the red-blooded American male of the era was supposed to hold supreme.

Some of it is admirable: A former chicken farmer from Texas who pulled himself up by his own proverbial bootstraps, Shelby wore overalls when he raced and built his own cars with Ford-tough V8 engines. He beat the Europeans at their own game at Le Mans. In his later years, he established a charity that helped provide organ transplants for children.

Most of it was not: Shelby was a notorious womanizer who blew through six marriages and was heading toward divorce from his seventh when he died. He spoke to everyone with language so blue it was legendary; ask any car journalist or professional driver who knew him, and they’ve got plenty of descriptive words to describe the way he treated anyone within earshot. Many of those words are unprintable here.

For fun, he shot lions, elephants, and rhinoceroses on animal hunts in Africa. He filed so many lawsuits—against Ford, against local car builders, against online forums, and, ironically, against the company that later would supply all of the Cobras for the film—that he become more known and reported on for that in his later years than for any feats of automotive genius.

In fact, after his blast of success with the AC Cobras in the 1960s and his hot-rod take on the Ford Mustang, Shelby didn’t have a single real hit. Instead, there were claims he falsely represented many of the cars he sold. He left Ford for Chrysler, where he helped develop some special-edition Dodges. Ford fans brought up to adore him as a brand hero shouldn’t have been so surprised he left; this was not an individual known for loyalty to anyone or anything other than himself.

It gets worse: One of his former personal assistants, Angelica Smith, sued Shelby for sexual harassment in 2011. The suit included information about an alleged rape that happened at Shelby’s home by one of his employees, and that she was fired, partly in retaliation, after she reported it. (Shelby called the allegations “wild and fantastical” at the time; he died less than a year later.) But that particular anecdote has been washed almost entirely clean by the same boys-club car culture that idolizes Steve McQueen, a decent actor who died conveniently early and had a habit of hitting his wives.

Read: The Electric Cars Are Here. Now How About Selling Them

“Who are you?” is rich, coming from Shelby. We know what kind of man he was: The type we all are better off for no longer holding the keys to any automotive kingdom.

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

It’s no surprise to survey this patriarchal wasteland—but it’s no less depressing to see it, nonetheless. The epic portrayed remains uncomfortably close to how the car world is today. We still have to look hard to find women of consequence.

There’s Laura Schwab, the president of Aston Martin of America. Katya Bassi, Lamborghini’s chief marketing officer. Susanne Klatten, who, with her brother, owns nearly half of BMW AG.

But only one major automaker in the world has a woman in control of it all: Mary Barra has led General Motors as Chief Executive Officer since taking the helm in 2014. Last year she named Dhivya Suryadevara as GM’s chief financial officer; Suryadevara is the first woman to hold that job at GM and is now in line as a possible Barra successor.

Six of GM’s 11 global board members are women, an admirable percentage. But the numbers are worse elsewhere. At Toyota, just 13% of board members are women; Hyundai and Kia have no women in any position as high as vice president. The auto industry lags behind the rest of the world: women in corporate America at large occupy 21% of C-suite offices, 30% of VP-level roles and 38% of managerial roles, while the auto industry places women in 13% of C-suites, 18% of VP-level spots, and 20% of managerial positions, according to Catalyst, a nonprofit that advocates for women in industry.

This isn’t good enough. Today car companies face difficult questions about brand identity and mobility—concepts they’ve never had to contemplate before now. They are evaluating who they are—there’s that question again—in a world increasingly oriented toward mobility rather than mechanical transport, electric motors rather than V8 engines.

Ford v Ferrari puts in stark relief the stunted mentality of previous generations. Carroll Shelby, crystalized by Hollywood like a mosquito in amber, is its totem artifact of generations dead and gone. For those who are serious about making brilliant, thrilling, innovative vehicles in the modern age, he’s best left behind.

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lostlevelsclub · 4 years

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Mike’s Eliza Notes

Since there was more to the game than we could cover in the episode, below are the full notes that I made while playing Eliza.

Chapter 1

It starts with Evelyn talking about a dream. When’s the last time you had a dream?

She writes herself an email titled “You will do it” saying “I believe in you” ?!

The music is very Zachtronics

I like the chat History - probably will be useful…

What is the game going to be? Will I have to choose whether to stick to the script that Eliza gives? Is it mostly going to be just thought provoking about what therapy is and the machine vs. the human touch?

The sentiment analyzer tagging things as positive or negative - is it meant to show that the way Eliza works is actually pretty simplistic? E.g. “expensive” tagged as negative, but it’s used here in a positive sense (the office is in an expensive area)

Eliza totally lies to him and pretends that you’re talking not it! Scandal

It tells you to tell him your name!

Anexophin? Is that real?

Surely this wouldn’t be sufficient even if you had a super smart AI - there’s so much variance in how you can read the script and deliver it.

Haha, even as the proxy therapist you get achievements, a score and can level up?!

They added the “speak to a real human” script. Is that how AI works? I suppose it might work any number of ways. Hey, is this the AI game Ting said they should make??

Rae: Sometimes you don’t have any choices and you just have to follow directions, Most jobs are like that, honestly.

Eliza - named after the 1960’s computer program (early chat bot?)

Eliza is just making people feel better, but it isn’t actually making things better. Is Darren right that the world is a mess and counselling just helps people ignore it?

Zachtronics loves solitaire minigames…

It must be weird going to Eliza and speaking to a different person every time that talks as though they know you. Maybe it’s like speaking to a hive mind? Many bodies, one set of thoughts.

Lytosinol-2? Is that real?

Your friend Nora asks if the people at the counselling office “know” - know what?!

Something traumatic clearly happened 3 years ago

Nora - formerly a coder but now a musician and artist. Old self might have worried about not making as much money, but happier now. Is this me?! Sometimes takes a little contract coding work, but makes most what she needs for rent from her art

Did you used to work on Eliza as a coder or something? Your former boss was a psychologist and “creepo” (Soren)

Nora has some whack eastern european accent.

Soren is currently at (and leaving) Skandha, so sounds like you did work on Eliza

Snake Person = VSs, “biz dev”

Evelyn’s comment about the coffee shop - “it’s nice to know this is an option, the tea and coffee at the counselling center didn’t look so inspiring. Am I… am I being a snob?”

Immediately after coffee, you get an email that confirms you were one of the principal devs on Eliza.

Komorebi (the name of the coffee shop)

Language: Japanese

Meaning: The interplay between light and leaves when sunlight shines through trees.

Evelyn has some pictures propped up against the wall “that have been sitting there like that for a long time”. I also have a picture that is just propped against the wall instead of hung up (though I like it on the floor, or maybe that’s just what I tell myself?!)

Chapter 2

Email (from your mum?) with news story about mandatory fortnightly Eliza conversations at school for middle and high school students

You used to work at Magus books. Email from a customer there that is sad you left

Induced dreams by direct neural stimulation… interesting and creepy idea. Rather than invoking a feeling or improvement by talking, directly cause the required feeling.

Aponia - ancient greek, it means “the absence of pain”. Is it meant to sound like “a pony”? That’s what everyone really wants :P

Yao-Ren “Rainer” Tsai. Chairman and CEO of Skandha Corporation

Eliza is always talking about the rain - I guess that’s Seattle?

Gabriel stressed about having no time for himself after becoming a father

15 mins of VR - starry skies. Would that really help anything?

Anexophin - is that a real thing?

He gave 2 stars, but still a $5 tip?? He didn’t seem to find it helpful… he’ll be back

Maya

Has some serious social anxiety.

No one cares about her art (like no one cares about our podcast :P)

15 minutes of Meadow Lands each day. Is this to illustrate that Eliza’s treatments are bad?

Holiday Durant

Would smoke dope more often but it’s expensive :shrug:

Unmarked white busses, secret transport system “just for them” - it probably is! i.e. employee transport for tech firms

She asks Eliza about past life regression and Eliza breaks XD

Eliza doesn’t know what to do, since there’s nothing particularly wrong?? She just wants someone to talk to.

Fortipran hydrochloride - is that a real thing? Is it for shoulder pain, since that’s what she asked for? Apparently it sounds like an anti-anxiety drug (it’s not real). She forgets the name and thinks it’s forzapram. (you later discover it IS for shoulder pain!)

Dinner with Soren

Move on - “want to do his memory right, don’t you”. So the trauma was related to a guy?

I say “whose” and am told “Damien of course. Are you sure you’re okay?”

Rainer and Soren. Soren bitter that Rainer is CEO and never wanted for anything. Had all the right names - Harvard, Goldman Sachs

He needs a chief engineer, wants you (or maybe he wanted Nora but she said no :P)

Nora is DJing at an S&M club… or not - Soren is just wrong, and then goes to hit on a bunch of random women.

Email - Car will pick you up for meeting with Rainer at 9:20am from Queen Anne office. So Rainer must know you are working as a proxy

Nora tells you a load of electronic music stuff. The names sound real, and I know the other Zachtronics founder is into electronic music, so maybe it’s all real facts

Roland-TB303 (devil fish mod?)

Moog (pronounced Moag)

Li’l Sappho - greek poet..?

The music is… lewd? Sounds good, wild and untamed.

Chapter 3

Talking with Rainer. He found out you were back because your proxy scores were unusually good and he looked.

Being a proxy - more than an order of magnitude drop in pay vs. old job

Damien Seabrook - brilliant career cut short. He died? Suicide?

“Burnout isn’t uncommon in our line of work, still three years is...”

“You know what outstanding engineers have that mediocre ones don’t? It’s curiosity”

I guess you get to choose everything except the therapy? Are there branching paths?

Erlend, Chief Engineer - “he looks like a baby”, “he must be fresh out of university”

3rd chief engineer in 3 years since Evelyn left

Ratings are normalized per proxy. I don’t think you’ve really done enough sessions to really be an outlier though, unless you’ve done some off camera

Teams in Romania, Munich and Hyderabad.

Rae totally fangirling over Rainer

Erlend - “If I understand the programmer, then I understand the program”

It really is interesting to see other people’s code. It gives insight into how their brain solves problems, decomposes complex tasks.

So Eliza is just a small facet of Skandha, and Rainer really is a bigshot. Genuinely surprising that he knows who Evelyn is, or maybe at a tech firm the CEO does know star tech talent.

Eliza v10.3.3, Firmware version v110 c3115

Boot ROM 114.0.0.0.0

Chipset 18210B0

Mark Foras

“Well i don’t know if you’ve noticed, but young people are really pissy and entitled these days.” “Why would we want these conceited, overcelebrated whelps on our team? I’ll never understand the logic there”

Neg neg neg neg neg neg neg neg neg neg neg neg neg…

SwiftMail, InfoVault - more traditional enterprise software

He’s very dismissive of Eliza! Supposedly Rainer “liked a chick on the team”, which would be Nora or Evelyn I guess.

“Mark, I’m going to suggest you try a program called “Lakeside Fishing”“ LOL

“I didn’t recognise his face or name”

“Glad I never had to work with him”

Hariman Gunawan

British accent, so since this is an American game does that make him a villain? He sounds very posh.

Grad student, English Literature

He sounds a lot like the British Malaysian comic that is on Friday Night Comedy podcast sometimes. Phil Wang..? OMG - it IS him!

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10741934/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm

Evelyn’s reading of the lines seems slightly more wooden after seeing Eliza (the server room). Is that intended? It’s very subtle. Or maybe it’s not wooden, maybe it’s some personal opinion creeping in? The goodbye for Hariman and Mark were both not neutral

Lytosinol 2 - in universe it’s a beta blocker

2 stars!? Rude! A tip though?

Rae’s brother struggles with substance abuse. She mentions it in the article about her and she’s on the phone to him when you visit.

Being a proxy gives Evelyn perspective - seeing how everyone else is messed up…

“Were we all just talking past each other?”

Rae - But you could also help even more people by working on Eliza itself, right? Not to mention make way more money.

Rae tells you not to downplay yourself

Rainer messages you and reveals that most of the Eliza cluster isn’t used for therapy, it’s trying to build a general purpose AI! :O

Rainer: This may sound off to you, but I’ll know I’ve successfully created a general artificial intelligence when I see it write a poem.

Evelyn: A poem

Rainer: Yes, It would have to be a good one, of course.

AI to humans as powered transport is to pack animals. Interesting way to look at it.

Rae describes a Skanda tech recruitment event. Is tech talent REALLY that in demand? Is it really that hard to get good engineers?

Evelyn - “And before that I just never had the time. It was just, research and science and work and then I woke up one day and I was in my thirties” OMG

“Even if I wanted to date, I wouldn’t know the first thing about how it’s supposed to work

“I wouldn’t even know how to tell if someone were interested in me…”

Though is this game THAT kind of visual novel? haha.

Rae is asexual? Will this game be a fully representative spectrum of everything?

Chapter 4

Soren: Say there was a medical procedure that could remove your suffering. No side effects, no cost. Just an operation that would make you permanently happy.

I’d say being permanently happy was a bad side effect.. Sometimes you need to feel sad (cue melancholy playlist…)

The Glencadam - scotch whisky. Is that a real thing? (yes)

Direct stimulation / induced dreaming vs talking things over. I’ve actually thought about this - there are changes that you might want to make to your mind or body, but you can’t because you don’t have the right levers.You have to take an indirect route and use the tools / levers that exist. Is it possible to build levers from what you have? Like hacking a machine and getting a foothold, then building an editor to enter more exploit code until you control the whole machine. Could you do that to your mind, or even your body?

Soren: Anger, depression, emptoness, anxiety, jealousy, every kind of unhappiness you can think of… obsolete.

I’ve thought about this too - these things serve a purpose, even if it’s not one that’s necessarily beneficial for you as an individual. Like when you’re depressed, is that your body telling you to die so you’re not a drain on the group? Not a nice thought - could it just be an error to be fixed?

Soren thinks Rainer was against direct stimulation “fixes” so that people would be unhappy and reliant on mental health services from Skandha

Damien worked himself to death. All nighters, multiple times. Pulmonary embolism. At least it wasn’t suicide…

Soren:

It’s late and I’ve had quite a bit to drink, so I’ll tell you a secret, Evelyn.

I said I want to end human suffering, which makes me sound very altruistic.

But I’m not doing it for humankind. I’m doing it for myself.

I have nothing. I’ve ruined every relationship I was ever in.

I hardly ever see my kids, and, well, they hate me anyway.

…

I want to end my own suffering, but I can’t bring myself to do it the… traditional way. That’s why I’ve pursued this technology. That’s why I want it to exist.

The idea that everyone else could use it too… it’s just a bonus.

Mark Foras mass emails the whole of Skandha with his farewell message! He signs off “Excelsior!” who does that?!

Hariman again

Evelyn has mirth in her voice as she says hello

He slept with Sylvia

Is he comic relief? He’s more worried now than before!

“How do I tell Liz?” Wtf

“Did I mention this last time? I have a sort of, girlfriend”

“I can’t believe this. I got what I wanted and it ruined my life.”

Irony - he hated self-pitying novels by men who were messed up by a relationship and couldn’t get over it, but how he’s one of them

Eliza’s questioning really is reminiscent of the Eliza program

15 minutes of Meadow Lands each day - Hariman thinks this is a good idea?!

3 stars?? I guess it’s better than two. Still got a $5 tip

Maya Leeds

Jealousy at the success of younger people - mid-thirties.

This is clearly the age at which everything starts to go wrong. It’s easy to be positive when you’re younger, but when you get to mid-thirties, you feel that time is running out, it’s half way for most people…

Maya:

Well there’s - there’s one woman in particular everyone loves.

And her work is… I don’t get it. I just - I don’t understand. She gets so much money and support for this basic, basic shit.

And somehow everyone’s predisposed to like her.

I mean, maybe I do get it…

I feel like people pay attention to her work not because it’s good on its own, but because supporting her feels like the right thing to do.

The way she’s aligned herself it’s like… if you support her, it means you’re cool, You’re in with the cool kids.

And if I’m not publicly supportive of her and generally tolerant of her mediocre work, then I’m the bad one, I’m the competitive bitch, I’m the… the bitter failure.

Transparency mode! Eliza reads all of your emails and chats

5 stars, $5. The tip seems to always be $5 if there is one

Is there anything that secret in my electronic messages? I don’t think there’s anything that salacious. Maybe I’m just boring… or maybe I just keep it off the record most of the time. I guess there are a few mad conversations.

Eliza Transparency Mode 0.8.2

Maya’s text conversation with Garrett - super grim. She’s just venting and being sad and he doesn’t know what to do.

$186.11 rideshare bill! $150 cleaning and $10 tip.

Erlend is disturbed by the idea of copying Eliza and sending the data to other teams, including external ones.

You don’t really tell him anything, you just listen and he feels better.

Capitol Hill - is that a real place in Seattle?

I have a jacket like Nora’s

Chat with Erlend - what does it mean to be conscious, to be sentient? Would you even know? What if you just gave the correct responses, but weren’t? Chinese Room

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

In Evelyn’s three lost years. She tried to get up in the morning like she meant to go to work, tried to do personal projects… it didn’t last long.

Stayed in bed, even though she was awake. Cared less and less about projects

A blankness would come over her and it seemed fine to do nothing (depression?)

Evelyn:

I was by myself and I thought that was alright. I thought - that’s how it is, really. Everyone’s along. I’m just being honest about it.

…

I was...thirty-one when I left Soren’s group. Now I’m thirty-four.

I just slept into my mid-thirties.

(I just podcasted…)

Chose to get super high and watch cyber-goth music vids

Chapter 5

Nora is a public critic of Eliza. Rae is sad about it

Everyone is very understanding - trying not to push you one way or the other! Presumably you’ll get a choice how the story goes - whether to work on Eliza or not.

Holiday Durant!

She is so random and all over the place. She tried to buy “forpanza” but it was $162 and she didn’t have that kind of money. Asked for a generic, didn’t have one, there’s a similar one but she didn’t have a prescription. The off to a story about meeting someone with wires in their brain.

Concerned that bus operators don’t care as much since there was a guy playing the guitar on the bus, and also that you don’t hear as much music any more???

A lot of “forced reflow during execution”

Recommended she tries a program “Dolphin Smiles”. Her phone is broken XD

Holiday seems to be the most challenging client for Eliza to understand, since she doesn’t really have any problems other than wanting someone to talk to.

Nora forwards the Eliza critical article to me - it mentions that the proxies are humans that have been reduced to machines as all they do is follow the prompts. The guy who wrote it emailed you earlier about an interview (which you ignored)

Transparency mode for Holiday!? Seems surprising

Fortipran HCl IS for joint and muscle pain, so Eliza’s prescription was on point!

Holiday is clearly NOT in a good place financially.

She never mentioned her real problems to Eliza

I just noticed that one of the early emails you get is “The Damien Seabrook Memorial Fund”, year 3. Who are K & G that sign off the mail?

Transparency mode from SOREN?!?!? Is this hax??

Soren says to Nora that she knows she fancies Evelyn. So it is one of those games :P

Why is your chat with Soren not in here?

He was messaging Sarah, Rainer’s assistant

He was emailing what sounds like a bondage tutorial???

Rainer says that Soren is focussing on dreams to defend his territory, Jung-ian tradition.

Soren believes the mind is indivisible after a certain point - some undefinable, ineffable soul inside every person.

Rainer: One day, algorithms will write better poems than humans ever have.

I’m not sure it’s an easy thing to judge - art is so much about the intent and the journey as much as the result. Look at modern art, like Rothko - it’s very simple, but it’s considered important because of what it means rather than the execution. If a machine just generated it without struggle, would people treat it the same way?

Rainer: The pleasures of the senses are just small bubbles on top of a vast sea of… forms. Sensations, perceptions. Thought. Awareness.

It might be fun to take a break and just debate philosophy for a while.

Rainer: What comes after having the power to experience the dream of anything you could possibly want?

You’re still just as trapped as you’ve always been - imprisoned by your own desires

(this is Maya’s problem)

He calls you Eliza, haha

Evelyn Ishino-Aubrey

You have to answer 7 questions about how you feel - I’m not sure how I should have answered them for Evelyn, I wonder if it makes a difference.

The Eliza interface is projected onto glasses it seems.

Evelyn is middle class or richer, seeing Holiday’s situation was a shock for her.

The proxies were Soren’s idea.

“<NAME>, imagine that you could have something that you wanted. What would you want?”

Does it matter what you pick? You get a huge list, but then it says “or maybe I just wish I could feel connected to someone”. Probably because it’s built on a dating sim :P

Evelyn:

I think maybe that’s the real problem.

I can’t have a connection to anyone…

(is that my problem too?)

“I was alone a lot, and I got used to being alone, and I got used to the idea of being alone, and now I can’t… I can’t break away”

Evelyn is prescribed “Virtual Amphitheatre”, 20 minutes 2-3 times a week

So you CAN tip more than $5, haha

Chapter 6

Erlend talks about dogfooding the apps, which is a term well known in tech circles, but maybe not outside.

Maya Leeds

YOU GET A CHOICE :O

I stuck with Eliza…

Eliza suggests Dolphin Smiles, Maya says she can’t imagine anything she wants less

Hariman Gunawan

Still obsessed with Sylvia. Liz found out and dumped him, Sylvia lost interest.

Eliza suggests breathing exercises, Anexophin

Gabriel Navarro

I super want to know what he’s hiding, but the Eliza questions aren’t that probing. Is the game really really trying to make you break from Eliza?

Gay?

Gabriel: “I’m a man and that’s what men do. I made a promise and now I have a responsibility”

Eliza prescribes stress management exercises, Lytosinol-4 (4 not 2)

Gabriel asks if that’s in addition to or instead of the previous medication (which he didn’t follow up on). Eliza says that she can’t comment further on medication and to discuss the specifics with his doctor or psychiatrist

Receive a thank you email from Allison Zulfiya for inspiring her during a visit to her class

Chose to hang out with Rae

Rae: You have a decision to make about what you’ll be doing in the next chapter of your life and all…

(a bit on the nose there! That’s borderline 4th wall breaking)

Chapter 7

Working on Eliza Ending

Skandha benefits - Activalet. Use the app to summon a personal assistant to book things for you, stand in line for you, receive deliveries for you.

Invitation to be the keynote speaker at the International Mental Wellness Symposium in Malmo, Sweden

Evelyn: We’ll generate a three-year roadmap document by the end of the week, and then a more granular development plan for the next six months or so by the week after.

“Eliza is the real boss. The manager of its own project”

“Through us, it’s realizing itself”

Rainer is a singularity believer

Written by: Matthew Seiji Burns (Zach’s collaborator that likes electronic music)

The Solitaire Game - Maya mentions it if you break the script. It is hard at first, until you learn to think several moves ahead (I think you need to think 3 moves ahead to be able to solve it, since at the end you only have 2 slots free at best).

After winning the first time, I played another game and immediately won that too.

Maya realises that you’re not following the script if you don’t prescribe dolphin smiles

Maya:

“Um. Thanks for listening to me. I’m sure it’s been annoying to hear me complain about how I’m not successful yet, every single week”

“Oh my God, will this bitch ever shut up… you ever think that?”

I’m sure that’s what my therapist was thinking too… :P

Gabriel: If everyone just did what they wanted to all the time, the world would collapse. It would be a disaster.

We all want things we shouldn’t actually have.

Nora Ending

Nora: I don’t feel this weird oppressive hierarchy where people try to figure out where they are relative to you on a ladder when they first meet you…

(this is literally how things work at my real job)

Who is “therationalmind20” Soren? Eldren? Rainer? Someone else?bI feel like I’ve seen the name before somewhere...

“you think you’re so smart but you’re not. women like you have nothing better to do that to criticize because you can’t create on your own.

enjoy your life being a shrill harpy nobody wants to listen to”

(this is from the Nora ending)

There’s no histogram, but the information to create one is collected

https://steamcommunity.com/app/716500/discussions/0/1640919737478105344/

Soren Ending

Soren:

“You know they used to criticize anesthesia. It’s true.”

“They said it was important to feel pain, even during surgery”

Trans cranial current thing - is that what Aponia is? Or at least the real world equivalent is that

Sodality? What does that mean? I learned something new:

a confraternity or association, especially a Roman Catholic religious guild or brotherhood.

One of the benefits touted by Aponia is “increased sodality, transients eliminated”

Counsellor With Rae Ending

Darren comes back to thank you (you Evelyn not Eliza), though really, what are the chances of him getting you as his proxy again?

Also, $100 tip!

Leave It All Behind Ending

Throws away the narrative. Go to Japan, try to find father.

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topmixtrends · 6 years

Link

OÙ ATTERRIR? (OR Where to Land?), Bruno Latour’s aptly named latest book, is an essay on politics, climate, and migration. It was published one year after Brexit and Trump’s election; the English translation by Cathy Porter will be published later this year with a stolidly inferior title: Down to Earth. Grounded to be sure, and with its own logic, but lacking the urgency of the question “Where to land?” Imagine yourself in a plane, Latour says: you hear the captain say, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are in a holding pattern … There is nowhere to land right now. No available runway; no safe harbor.” Latour is referring to the migrant crises whose politicization has intensified this summer, with Trump’s separation of families at the US border, and Matteo Salvini’s copycat refusal of Mediterranean refugees in Italy. It’s a reference, too, to the spread of authoritarian politics from Europe to North America, and to the creeping sense that there’s no escape from them, just as there’s no flight from the planetary ecological crisis we face no matter where we are.

Latour’s point is that crises of migration, inequality, and environment are linked by a politics of denial: we finally have an environmentally based politics, but it’s one of negation, symbolized by the erstwhile EPA Secretary Scott Pruitt’s extraordinary soundproof phone booth.

Before examining Latour’s political argument, it’s worth dwelling on the territorial language now dominating the political imaginary, which he describes with his usual suggestiveness. The protagonist of his book is not a person but a mythology: the idea of “attachment to the soil” (“attachement au sol”). This attachment is characterized by a yearning to retreat from “the global” to “the local,” and to define ourselves as defending our soil from external enemies who will not only land but also somehow destroy us. Ironically, such nativism — truth to soil, if you like — is driven by escapist flight: flight from the reality of anthropogenic climate change, and flight from empirical evidence to “alternative facts.” Trumpism is the ultimate mental staycation: there is only here, and there is nothing outside of here to care about. Let’s lock ourselves in. In other words, the political world now under construction is one of paradoxical flight toward the local, rather than away from it; we don’t share the same planet, and so there’s no common ground. If any grassroots connected all of us once upon a time, those roots seem to have been pulled up like so many inconvenient weeds in the name of protection from our enemies.

It’s worth noting how Latour charts the shift in rhetorical positions on both sides of the Atlantic. Debates about Brexit in the United Kingdom are becoming increasingly farcical as time “to leave” runs out. If Trumpism dreams of border walls, the prospect of a hard border in Northern Ireland is a geopolitical nightmare. When moderate Conservative Party politicians try to explain to members of the public that a “Hard Brexit” will likely leave them worse and not better off, the answer often comes back as “I just want to leave.” It’s as though a hellish reincorporation into Europe of geological proportions threatens sovereign British identity; the island therefore wishes to abandon its key trade partner and literally set sail for the open seas — but for where? Ironically, one common answer is that once free of the European Union, Britain will again be “global” — a term haunted by the history of the British Empire and so assiduously avoided in mainstream discussions. Theresa May, the current prime minister, warned any cosmopolitans who happened to be listening in 2016 that “if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.” She was obviously not addressing the absentee Russian, Chinese, and Gulf State billionaires who now own property in central London, but rather pandering to the new politics of territoriality. “No more easyJet” was the message.

Could the name of any company symbolize the target of the new nativism better than the British low-cost airline founded in 1995? The 1990s were indeed the easyJet years, fueled by casual attitudes to global travel, access to cheap credit, and the cheap cosmopolitanism of cross-border tourism. What was the Third Way of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair if not a heady cocktail of air miles based on credit cards? But now it’s time for revenge against the easyJetters and the Air Miles gang. Locality strikes back in the age of the travel ban. EasyJet has hit the wall: company profits were down last year.

For the first time in generations, observes Latour, we don’t know where we’re going. Our compasses are deranged. His essay about territory is even more an essay about time, capturing the anxiety many of us feel about progress having, unbelievably, ground to a halt. What the British fatalistically call the direction of travel has suddenly and mysteriously changed. The long arc of history no longer bends toward progress; at least for now, time’s arrow is bent or twisted or even reversed.

The end of the Cold War prompted Francis Fukuyama’s notorious End of History thesis, now widely mocked, heralding the universal triumph of liberal capitalized democracy. An anthropologist of modernity and of the moderns, whose claims to exceptional status he never took at face value even while treating them with respectful diplomacy, Latour is well placed to diagnose their apparent dethronement. Modernity, he argues, presented itself in the guise of both economic and identitarian globalization, promising an ever-widening horizon enabling all of us to move from the merely local to the gloriously global — and the infinitely open. Alas, however, the benefits of globalization proved either insufficiently distributed (in economics) or much too distributed (in identities) for those wanting new limits and old protections. Latour likens Trump to a fictional 19th-century character called Ubu Roi, or King Ubu, an anarchic prankster monarch who turns the world upside-down through a kind of political situationism. The result is a dream neither of social progress nor of ecological sustainability, but of restricted rights (reproductive and electoral) and a return to coal-mining and its many ills. Whether most Trumpers and Leavers ultimately want tangible benefits or symbolic goods, material advancement or metaphysical satisfaction, remains profoundly ambiguous.

Latour does not scorn these so-called “reactionaries” but seeks to understand the new politics they are building. Just before the 2016 election, I heard a colleague make the argument that American cities should in effect secede as a kind of progressive archipelago and leave the country’s rural hinterlands to languish in all their anti-modernism — an audacious (or simply oblivious?) vision of liberal gerrymandering. Then Ubu Roi led the revolt of the archaic against the modern, the local against the global, bending time’s arrow. Latour’s analysis urges us to grasp why populism now appears most vibrant, or at least most effective, on the far right. Many of us may prefer walled democratic cities — in our own way, we are staycationers too — but we all would be affected by the lack of democratic grassroots beyond those walls. We may not agree with those people, but to regard them as somehow beyond the polity is a fatal mistake. Can’t we just get back to the Third Way or Air Miles and the acceptably unequal world we inhabited under the Bloombergs and Obamas? But this is exactly what brought us to the bait-and-switch of grievance and reaction that built up in the long aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

For Latour, we are falling prey to the wrong kind of soil politics: a politics of terrain that seeks to assuage the intensely agoraphobic anti-modernism fearful of that ever-widening global horizon. What we need instead, he suggests, is a politics of “the Terrestrial” (“le Terrestre”) to confront the real climate crisis that will not stop at any wall or customs declaration counter. Modernity is itself the problem. Reason, science, ingenuity, and industrialization turned the earth into a set of mechanical resources for exploitation and posited nature as an entity outside culture. Only now do we find ourselves inside nature after all, and rapidly making it uninhabitable. So, how can we make common political ground out of ecology? This is a problem Latour has for years been addressing in his writing about the earth as Gaia, but with no obvious political resolution. He has, rightly in my view, no faith in Reason in the abstract sense; in his analyses of what constitutes the public, he has fruitfully adapted a line of argument from Peter Sloterdijk to urge that democratic publics must be creatively embodied, cunningly engineered, and artfully stage-managed to generate effective political assemblies. This is a response to those enlightened utopians who hoped that the prospective death of our entire species would unite us in a new politics of universal reason (when, in fact, Richard Branson, Elon Musk, and their friends are now simply planning their escape to Mars).

It’s fascinating to see a thinker like Latour grapple with the political moment and deploy the abstractions of his intellectual program to help clarify it. His book is a success in this regard. It’s even encouraging. Yet, for all its discussion of “geo-social conflicts,” it cannot quite reckon with the uglier political passions and genuine hatreds that define current political dynamics, and it does not have enough to say about the absence of vital grassroots in today’s democratic landscape. Where are these locals? If liberal urban technocrats have failed to respond to the environmental crisis, then surely it is time to activate a new grassroots beyond our city walls to build the politics of nature we so badly need. Yet no one has thought more compellingly than Latour about the problem of how to retool the authority of the sciences to fight the new Information Wars, or about how to move people to passionate engagement with ecological questions. He is well aware that countering climate-science deniers with facts, and more facts, is not going to result in their submission. Marches for Science are all very well, but do they work? In the dispensation of modernity, as Latour has argued, Science (like Nature) is not supposed to be part of culture, so it cannot negotiate with those who deny its authority — it cannot do politics in this sense. Modern science, for all its power, turns out to be politically weak: its belief in its own pragmatically cultureless truths means that, when it is challenged, it simply reasserts the veracity of its facts, but it cannot move its opponents. It depends on a certain liberal political ecology to function. By way of response, Latour returns us to earlier models of knowledge, where science was not a dictatorship of facts but offered compelling images of nature to move us morally and aesthetically, as in the virtuosic combinations of precision measurement and artistic vision produced by the Enlightenment polymath Alexander von Humboldt.

Latour’s ending is self-consciously ironic: he mounts a political defense of the European Union. He acknowledges that Europe is the original villain of modernity: Europeans dreamed that Europe could be the world, remaking it wholly in their own image. That vision led to madness and ruin, to empire and universalism at its most lethal. But precisely for this reason, Europe owes the world some kind of redemptive service. Unremitting particularism may be an understandable response to the idea that any common ground constitutes political tyranny, but where does this particularism take us? In Latour’s vision, Europe remains a vital provincial laboratory for demonstrating that supranational cooperation for the common good can overcome allegiance to sovereignty for sovereignty’s sake. However tattered and menaced, the European Union provides some imperfect hope for cooperative interdependence of the kind needed to address climate change and other crises. It’s hardly a fashionable position and may strike some as just another view from Paris — where, Latour reminds us, the 2015 Climate Accords were signed. Yet Latour’s most important contribution to current debates may be his untimely insistence on the importance of thinking universally in a post-universal world.

James Delbourgo is professor of history at Rutgers University. He has written widely on the history of science, collecting, and museums.

The post No More EasyJet: On Bruno Latour’s “Où atterrir?” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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republicstandard · 6 years

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The Standard Conversation: YouTuber 'The Iconoclast'

The Iconoclast is a content creator and now hard copy magazine publisher from the north of England. His growth since beginning his channel a year ago has been nothing short of meteoric, having just passed 60,000 subscribers. His videos make insightful commentary on politics, demographics, Islam and Western culture.

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

RS: What led you to start your YouTube Channel?

My friend and I, both avid viewers of other YouTube channels at the time, would sit in the pub and rant about politics every day. We'd talk about the latest content creator we'd discovered and recommend channels to each other. One day my friend told me I should start a channel of my own, considering I have a background in video production and an endless supply of obnoxious opinions on the world. I kept making excuses not to do it though as I was still pursuing various things in my “real life”, and I knew starting a channel of that nature could jeopardize those ambitions. Well, to make a long story short, those other plans fell flat on their arse, and suddenly I had nothing to lose. I started making videos slowly and enjoyed the feeling of finally being able to get so much off my chest, as there was nobody in my life (other than my mate) who aligned with me politically, and I always felt as though I needed to keep my head down and mouth shut for fear of social exclusion. Soon enough, an audience began to grow, and here we are.

RS: What's the purpose of 'The Iconoclast' as a name? Why not go public?

I knew I'd be discussing controversial topics on my channel, so I felt having an internet moniker was the safest way to go. Also, just from a production standpoint, having my face on screen wouldn't really add anything to the content. I know a lot of people enjoy getting to know the personalities behind the YouTube channel, and there will be a day where I appear as myself, but I didn't want to make my channel about me. Plus, The Iconoclast is just a cool name in general.

RS: White genocide is real. How do you see the next 30 years or so playing out? Is there a way back for The West?

Despite the depressing nature of the topics I cover in my videos, deep down I am an optimist. Hard to believe, but it's true. Sometimes my optimism gets severely tested (most days) but I truly think the European people have the will to survive. I don't think this survival process is going to be pretty though- I think we're in for some really rough times, but that was always going to be the case when you have a political class who routinely ignore and talk down to the people they're supposed to represent. Eventually, the populations of Europe will have no choice but to take matters into their own hands, and in some respects, they're already starting to do so. The dramatic rise of populist movements across the continent, as well as street protest groups, signals a Europe-wide mentality shift. If our leaders don't take this seriously, they will be replaced.

youtube

RS: Your channel has exploded in popularity. Any ideas why that is?

Authenticity. I think people can see that I'm just a normal person trying to make sense of what's going on and they identify with that. I don't try to put on a performance with my videos, I just present the information and give my opinion. Pretty simple. Of course, I try to keep my production standards high, which is part of the reason why I'm not an every day uploader, but I believe in quality over quantity. I'll never make a video where I talk down to my audience, and I'll freely admit when I'm unsure on something. Some YouTubers go out of their way to let you know how many books they're currently reading, or which online course they're taking in an attempt to paint themselves as some sort of expert – I'm not interested in that. I also stay away from YouTube “drama”, and I know my audience appreciates it.

Or subscribe to me instead. https://t.co/CenDlM5ARe

— The Iconoclast (@IconoclastPig) February 14, 2018

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RS: Brexit is going ahead -slowly. Do you think the British political elite are capable of delivering on their obligations?

I think they're capable but it's clear they don't want to. Like I said earlier, our political class regularly ignores the concerns of the public, and even when we had a majority of the country vote to leave the EU, they're still trying to derail the process. It's quite amazing actually, these people constantly blow hot air when they talk about “British values”, but here they are blatantly trying to reverse democracy. Not all of our politicians are bad, however, I'm a big fan of Jacob Rees-Mogg, and I hope he takes some inspiration from House Of Cards and positions himself as the new Prime Minister pretty soon. But the fact remains, the majority of our elected officials hold the British people in contempt. Brexit is up in the air right now. I think we'll end up completely crumbling and getting some bullshit half-in half-out sort of deal with the EU, which would mean we'd effectively still be inside it. But you never know, we may be pleasantly surprised (although I doubt it).

youtube

RS: Is there a peaceful way to resolve the problems (rape gangs, jihad, Islamisation) posed by large Muslim communities in the United Kingdom?

Unfortunately, I don't think so. Ten years ago, maybe. Now we've allowed things to go too far. Our immigration system is broken, our police are cowards, and our left-wing press tries desperately to cover up crimes committed by certain demographics. After every terror attack the narrative is “Don't be Islamophobic!”, after every new rape gang that's discovered it's “White people rape girls too!”, instead of tackling the problem of jihad we should really be concerned with “far-right terrorism” etc. To be honest I'm shocked things haven't kicked off already! After the Rotherham scandal was made public, I thought for sure people were going to lose their cool. Maybe it's the typical British attitude of rolling with the punches, or that stupid slogan “Keep calm and carry on”, but there's only so much people can take. If the government are really so concerned about revenge attacks against UK Muslims, they need to sort out the core problems associated with it - end Islamic immigration, deport those who don't have legal rights to be here, end foreign funding of mosques, and police Muslim neighbourhoods properly. But like I said, as of now things are looking grim. Purely from a demographics standpoint, many cities across the UK will be majority Muslim in the near future. Most of the school kids in Birmingham are Islamic. Even my small town in the north is starting to experience Muslim immigration. My local city recently had a rape gang scandal hit the news. Things are bad. Of course we'd all like to avoid blood running through the streets, but the way successive British governments have continuously brushed this problem under the rug, a boiling point is simply unavoidable.

RS: America is seeing a growth of motivated and often violent leftist groups in response to Donald Trump. Have you noticed anything similar in the UK post-Brexit vote?

They exist but they're nowhere near the level of ANTIFA in the US. Our leftists spend more time crying on the floor than punching people. Although recently we had a small group of them crash a Jacob Rees-Mogg speaking event at a university, but the only thing that happened there was a bit of shoving and pushing. If you're asking me whether the potential is there for these groups to grow and get violent, I'd say definitely, but as of now, they're relatively tame.

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

RS: You've made the decision to publish a magazine to accompany your YouTube Channel- what led to that?

To put it simply, The Iconoclast magazine is a platform for regular people to express themselves politically. It's an open-submission format where I encourage people to come out of their shell and talk about what's on their mind. I don't agree with all the opinions I decide to publish, but I think that's important. There were a few reasons why I started it.

As amazing as the internet is, I've always sort of resented it for damaging physical media. One of my favorite things to do when I was younger was to spend my Friday nights at the video rental store picking a selection of films to watch, then I'd go next door to order a pizza, and my night was all set. I know these days you can fire up Netflix at the touch of a button, but to me, that only means you can discard media just as quickly as you can acquire it. Back in the day you had to commit to your choices because you had to invest so much more time and effort. I wanted to bring a sense of that back. Having something “real” you can hold in your hands creates a sense of legitimacy. I also didn't want to get trapped in a small little corner of YouTube, because in the grand scheme of things it's actually not that influential. There are so many people out there who are just as politically frustrated as the rest of us, but they have no connection to the YouTube sphere at all. We need to reach these people, and I've found one of the best ways to do so is by putting physical media out into the world. So The Iconoclast magazine aims to bring a wide range of political and cultural essays to people in a different format. I get a lot of messages from readers who tell me they've let older family members borrow the magazine and they now watch my content (and others) on YouTube. The writers and contributors to the mag are normal people from all over the world who desperately want to express themselves, but aren't comfortable with video production, or prefer the pure anonymity and freedom writing can provide. If a magazine like The Iconoclast was around before I started my own channel, I think I would have contributed to it myself.

youtube

Sometimes I look at other YouTubers who have 10 times my audience, and I imagine to myself “God if I had that many subscribers I'd have done this, this and this”. I don't think people are taking enough risks. YouTube provides a false sense of comfort and security for a lot of creators and they stop pushing themselves. I wanted to try new things, get into different mediums, and actually try to influence things and people in the “real world”. Whether my magazine does that effectively in the future, I'll have to wait and see, but it's a start. The enthusiasm from my audience for the first edition was off the charts, and I only hope the project continues to grow and I can build something really impressive and exciting.

RS: Best of luck with your career- keep fighting the good fight. Thanks for your time.

The next issue of Iconoclast Magazine will be released in early March and will be available to buy in physical form as well as digital. You can subscribe to The Iconoclast YouTube channel here.

Thank you for reading Republic Standard. We publish this magazine and the Freebird Forum because we believe in free speech- but it doesn't come cheap! We are currently under sustained attack on our revenue sources. Will you make a small donation towards our running costs? You can make a difference by clicking here.

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theworstbob · 7 years

Text

yellin’ at songs, week thirty-seven

Complaining about songs I didn’t have to listen to, specifically the songs which debuted on the Billboard charts the week of 20 September 1997, 22 September 2007, and 23 September 2007

9.20.1997

50) "On My Own," by Peach Union

The whole song, I was thinking, "You know, this is pretty Eurotrashy, but it's not as awful as most of what I've had to endure. There's a lot of awful elements, don't get me wrong, but on the whole, I don't mind it!" And then it turned out that this group is British! That makes sense. I, an American, would of course find the music of Britain more accessible than the music from other European countries. British dance music is basically Sarah McLachlan with record scratches.

60) "Me and My Crazy World," by Lost Boyz

I was promised a fun "day in the life" song, something in the vein of "It Was a Good Day." What I got was some dude or group of dudes saying they somehow brought two dates to the same dance -- oh no! Their attempts to make it our of the night with neither girl wise to his schemes will surely make for some grand comedy! "She thought that I'm some clown nigga she can scream on and talk to/I had to run her down the line this ain't no walk through/Now who the fuck you think you talkin to chick/Your complaining's makin' me sick." YOU CHEATED ON HER, YOU AWFUL AWFUL MAN! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU. THIS IS NO WAY TO THINK. Shit. I mean, shit! Just a light-hearted song, and suddenly you're tryna yell at her because you want a side piece. Absolute fuck is wrong with you.

68) "Avenues," by Refugee Camp All-Stars ft./Pras (w/Ky-mani)

Enh. I like the sample, but it's hard to imagine anything about this song sticking with me longerthan it takes to finish this sentence. Something about avenues? Yeah this is kinda nothing.

90) "The Way That You Talk," by Jagged Edge ft./Da Brat & JD

'90s R&B where the group of dudes wanna fuck me >>>>>>>>>>>> '90s R&B where dudes pledge their devotion and vow to protect me so that they can fuck me later.

9.22.2007

71) "No One," Alicia Keys

I remember being a little put off by this song, just because I had watched "You Don't Know My Name" and "If I Ain't Got You" hella times on vh1 (I used to throw vh1 and MTV on in the morning before school because that's when they played music videos) and this was so different from those songs, but listening to this song now, I'm very angry that young Bob! robbed me of at least a few months of enjoying this song. This is amazing. It's still a weird song, I have no actual musicwords to back this I just always associate Alicia Keys with "intricate piano balladry" and it's my fault for never letting that bias go, but just the way the chorus escalates each time, the way she's proclaiming every single time that her love is undying is SO GOOD. Alicia Keys, man, she's a phenomenal songwriter. I can't think of anything she's made which I find disagreeable. I even stand with "Another Way to Die."

79) "Don't Blink," Kenny Chesney

"it is sad when old so young before you're old!" ~kennald chsenald

85) "Gimme More," Britney Spears

...You're right. When I thought this week was a clinch to win, I forgot that mid-aughts Britney was the least interesting Britney. I don't have a lot of love for dance-pop Britney. Or, if I'm being real, non-"Hit Me Baby (One More Time)" Britney. I don't know why I was excited for this song. It's not good! It's as bad, if not worse, than the average '90s Eurotrash song, it just has that brand name attached that made me forget for a second it was grating and repetitive and needlessly dark and Timbalandly over-the-top. What even is that interlude with all the dude voices just going "oh" for ten seconds. The track ends with the producer saying, "The unstoppable Danja. You gon' have to remove me 'cuz I ain't goin' nowhere." Danja hasn't had a major hit since 2009 and was last heard producing a universally panned DJ Khaled song. Congratulations, Danja, you played yourself? Is that, am I saying that right? Eh, fuck it, I'm about to admit I enjoyed a Good Charlotte song again.

88) "I Don't Wanna Be in Love (Dance Floor Anthem)," Good Charlotte

My headcanon is that Panic! At the Disco heard this song, considered what ill they had wrought, and decided to drop the ! and pretend they were the Beatles until they could be sure they couldn't influence something like this. I mean, you isolate it from the brand name, this is a solid dance-punk jam. It's over-the-top in all the right ways, I was shouting along with the chorus even in the peak "GOOD CHARLOTTE AREN'T REAL PUNKERS" days, and it's a sad song without trying to be profound about it. "You feel like shit, so dance it out!" this song says, and that's an agreeable message! But also Good Charlotte yelps the line "He was dedicated/By most suckas hated/That girl was fine but she didn't appreciate him" and if you're not embarrassed by that you need to think about the person you are in this moment. “By most suckas hated.” I’m being charitable by transcribing the line as if Joel Madden didn’t say ‘sucker.’ Criminy.

93) "Shawty Is a 10," The-Dream ft./Fabolous

this song is a 6 OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH ...Is what I was GOING to say before I heard this song, which is refreshing! I found the way he pronounced "ten" unacceptable until I saw that the song was originally called "Shawty is Da Shit!" and now I only find it irksome, the lyrics are kinda enh, but that is a breezy summer day of a beat if I've ever heard one, Fabolous drops his best verse of 2007 so far, and The-Dream isn't nearly as nothing as I remember him being. Just a nice song about hot girls. Nothing to complain about, no sir.

94) "Fall," Clay Walker

"Doin' this and doin' that/Always puttin' yourself last/A whole lotta give and not enough take" ...I know there's no way for this song to be about what I just wanted it to be about and I'm angry that I let myself hope for better. "Fall/Go on and fall apart/Fall into these arms of mine/I'll catch you every time you/Fall" I'm so angry I thought this would be the song about a country dude agreeing to be an unselfish lover and eat out his girlfriend. Nope. He just wants her to cry in his arms so he can have her at his lowest moment and help build her back up so she'll continue associating "feeling better" with "being with him" and continue to blow him. I DARE one of these country dudes to make a song bragging about how good they are at eating pussy. I will buy a Brantley Gilbert record if he makes that song.

97) "How 'Bout Them Cowgirls," George Strait

et tu, possum?

9.23.2017

4) "...Ready for It?" by Tay Tay

There is entirely too much punctuation in this song title, this song begins with Tay Tay clearing her throat, and she is rapping. No. Absolutely not. How are people defending this? How come Tay Tay fired the person in charge of telling her "no?" This song is excessive and I hated listening to this and don't think it's gonna come around. This is bad and I hate it.

77) "These Heaux," by Bhad Bhabie

1) No 2) Fuck anyone expressing an actual opinion about this song 3) This country is broken 4) How dare they 5) No 6) No 7) No 8) Please don't 9) At least it wasn't a third Jake Paul song! 10) But legit life's too short to waste on things you know you're gonna hate. Maybe next time a meme drops a track, don't listen? This song only exists because it wants you to hate it. Listen to something you like next time. 11) #77. Fuck's sake.

81) "Bad at Love," by Halsey

This song could use a sense of humor. The phrase "bad at love" is inherently comical; how can you be bad at a noun, silly, what a playful use of language! But to call Halsey extra is to imply that this isn't standard Halsey. This could be a playful song about a girl who's been fucking around (in more ways than one! /slaps knee) too long and wishes she could settle down, but instead it's a song about a girl who needs to be fixed, and what it actually is doesn't captivate me at all. Halsey: Almost being something I'm into since 2015!

86) "Greatest Love Story," by LANCO

A three-act play: "Hey! I haven't heard of this band/artist before! Yippee, new music!" /sees country videos in the 'up next' sidebar "At this point, I’m refusing to learn." "They said I was nothing but a troublemaker never up to no good/You were the perfect all-American girl, wouldn't touch me even if you could." Oh wow, apparently the greatest love story is the story literally every other country artist has told, well no wonder so many of them have told story! Because it's the greatest! MYSTERY UNLOCKED.

97) "Sky Walker," by Miguel ft./Travis Scott

That falsetto Miguel does when he sings "but don't wait to jump in too long" that only like maybe five people on earth can do is unreal. I brought up Miguel when I complained about having to listen to Bryson Tiller, but LEGIT why are we bothering with Bryson Tiller when Miguel can do that thing with his voice. This song isn't really that great, it goes about the same places as the average Bryson Tiller song did, but just knowing I would hear Miguel sing that line in that way kept me engaged enough with the song.

99) "Reminder (Remix)," by The Weeknd ft./A$AP Rocky & Young Thug

"Ain't no more Hanes on my balls, these are Kenneth Cole" is a fucking outsanding boast from Young Thug and why I think he's one of the greatest artists of his generation. The Weeknd's verse is hilarious, as well -- "I just won a new award for a kids show/Talkin' 'bout a face numbing off a bag of blow." It takes a special track to render A$AP Rocky the bronze medalist, but man, this song is just a good time and a half. 2017 isn't all bad! It's had more downs than ups in recent days, but this is some quality 2017 music right here.

100) "No Fear," be DeJ Loaf

I thought #AndSeeThatsTheThing was dope, and I was looking forward to hearing more from DeJ Loaf, and then I forgot she existed for /checks watch/ nearly two years!, and now here's this song which is kinda basic but also so good, just an uncomplicated, nice song about being a love, which, y'know, if you're gonna give me something uncomplicated, I'd rather hear something simple about love than any of the thousands of simple songs about darkness and evil. Also, apparently DeJ and that Jacuqees fellow from a couple weeks back released a joint album called Fuck a Friend Zone. Fuck a Friend Zone is, as you likely expected, a bunch of songs about fuckin'. I'll repeat a point I've made: '90s R&B never died, it just lost all subtlety.

Who won the week?

In a lot of ways, I feel “No One” is the only Actually Good song I listened to this week. “Reminder” puts up one hell of a fight, but “No One” is pretty much all 2007 needed.

Current standings: 1997: 13 2007: 12 2017: 12 Next week, 1997 throws us Boyz II Men and Mary J. Blige, 2007 throws us a heck of a lot of random junk (Kanye! Khaled! Feist! Backstreet Boys?), and maybe Kelly Clarkson for 2017? Maybe? Or will it be a thousand country artists, each more broey than the last? please just give me a good week, please, just, please

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brendagilliam2 · 7 years

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30 beautiful examples of paper art

We may live in a digital world, but our love affair with paper art has by no means diminished. Folded into origami and kirigami, laser-cut, layered and made into sculptures, paper artists can transform a humble sheet of old tree into a spectacular artwork.

Here are some great of examples of paper art being used imaginatively within contemporary design, giving new life to one of the most ancient arts. You’re sure to find the inspiration you’re looking for…

01. Self Preserving

This campaign for Lush even moves

The Self Preserving campaign from cosmetics company Lush to promote its use of natural ingredients saw shop windows all over Europe fill with epic paper art. It was a collaborative effort, with artist Charlotte Day creating original illustrations of the natural ingredients found in the product range, which were then brought to life in 3D using textured paper to create shop window displays designed by Owen Gildersleeve.

A special hero installation in Lush’s flagship store in London’s Oxford Street even moved, masterminded by 3D designer Thomas Forsyth. “Many hours were spent experimenting with different algorithms and code structures so that we could give the flowers more believable and animated movements,” explains Forsyth. “We’ve actually ended up creating a program in which the flowers randomly generate their own movements, so when it feels like one of the flowers has turned to look at you, it kind of has.”

02. Circling

Circling is a personal exploration of anxiety and helplessness

Paper art duo Julie Wilkinson and Joyanne Horscroft aka Makerie Studio design and create showpieces for window installations, advertising and editorial clients. “Circling is an extremely personal project, one that came from trying to deal with a period of intense fear and worry,” says the duo. “Bright colours and happy thoughts are usually our driving forces, but some days take their toll, and this was our way of dealing with anxiety. Making something constructive out of a stressful state of mind was a way of feeling less helpless, literally turning darkness into beauty.”

Each piece was handcrafted from iridescent gold and black paper, and features a central creature surrounded by circling predators.

03. Phidala

Eric Standley’s work echoes Islamic art and Gothic architecture

Virgina-based designer Eric Standley takes paper art to a new level with his incredibly intricate, multi-layered creations, often inspired by Islamic or Gothic architecture.

This detailed design is based around the fractal geometry that occurs naturally in the universe. “When a DNA braid is viewed from the top down, the layered double helix rotation abides by the golden ratio (phi),” explains Standley. “I began applying phi to the drawing processes of Kismet and Phidala.”

Take a look at his website for more breathtakingly detailed creations, or read our article on his laser-cut paper art.

04. Tissue series

Lisa Nilsson’s quilling turns anatomical cross-sections into things of beauty

Lisa Nilsson works in a variety of media, but for us her stand-out work involves quilling. We can’t resist her Tissue series: a collection of anatomical cross-sections rendered in paper.

Says Nicholls, “I find quilling exquisitely satisfying for rendering the densely squished and lovely internal landscape of the human body in cross section.”

05. Forest Folks

Zim & Zou’s vibrant paper sculptures are featured all over the world

French artists Lucie Thomas and Thibault Zimmerman make up renowned paper art studio Zim & Zou. The duo’s colourful paper sculptures appear all over the world – including in this series of installations in a new Hermès store in Dubai.

The series is based around the theme of nature. “In this project, spectators have a sneak peek of the curious characters living inside this environment,” the pair state. “This microscopic point of view, where plants… reign as masters, is like a kind of picture, a flash, a precise instant in nature’s unrestrained run.”

06. European Birds

It’s hard to resist these detailed and colourful paper birds

Colombian-born Diana Beltran Herrera specialises in amazing paper recreations of nature, her work featuring wonderfully detailed flowers and plants and the most incredibly realistic birds of all shapes and sizes. Recently, the Bristol-based artist has also started incorporating insects, butterflies and fish into her work, demonstrating the same level of attention to detail.

07. We Sent Their Briefs Back

This is definitely the best way to approach a brief

South African agency TBWA needed a way of getting clients’ attention, and hit upon this novel way of tackling a brief: taking actual paper briefs and turning them into eye-catching paper art incorporating concepts relevant to the specific brand message, and then sending the briefs back to the client. The project was a huge success, attracting new work within five days.

08. Nissan Juke

This life-size Nissan car was built from foam board and card

Nissan wanted to create a life-size origami version of its Juke car to celebrate the model’s fifth anniversary. Inspired by its Japanese origins and the craftsmanship of UK manufacturing, the company turned to British designer and illustrator Owen Gildersleeve to make its vision reality. As with the Lush project above, Gildersleeve brought in Thomas Forsyth to lend his 3D build expertise to this epic undertaking. The final car was built from heavyweight card over a foam board skeleton.

09. The Tree of Knowledge

This book sculpture represents the Tree of Knowledge

There’s plenty of paper art out there that incorporates books into the design, but Spanish designer Malena Valcárcel‘s designs are particularly magical. “I transform books into a new story in a way to make people stop and appreciate, if just for a moment, the magic of books,” she says. Take a look at the range of book paper art designs in Valcárcel’s Etsy store, along with some delicate paper jewellery.

10. Cut Scene

Paper Dandy’s Cut Scene exhibition recreates Star Wars scenes

Making a living from paper art is a difficult task, but thanks to his talents and enthusiasm, Marc Hagan-Guirey – aka Paper Dandy – has done just that. For his Star Wars-inspired Cut Scene exhibition, the artist create 12 kirigami models of different iconic scenes, each cut from a single sheet of paper. The project received rave reviews.

Hagan-Guirey has also released a book entitled Horrogami, which includes 20 Kirigami projects inspired by cult horror tales such as Dracula, Frankenstein, Sleepy Hollow and King Kong, along with step-by-step instructions to make your own.

11. Decorex Expo

We’re big fans of Hagan-Guirey’s wonderful paper creations

Just one example of Marc Hagan-Guirey’s work in this list would seem like we were short changing you. So feast your eyes on his kirigami design for Decorex International, a company that puts on big interior design expos in the UK. Read more in our article here.

12. Fiat Dobló

D’Avila Studio used overlapping paper to create depth

Brazil-based illustration agency D’Avila Studio created this vibrant paper art piece as part of Fiat Motors’ campaign to promote its SUV, the Dobló Adventure. The team created two prints, both of which placed the paper overlapping on layers to create an impressive depth effect.

13. Paper Dragon

This dragon paper art was a team effort

This majestic dragon was created by a group of artists at INK studio in Belgium. It stands at above knee height and was made entirely of paper – it’s definitely worth taking a look at the studio’s website for some making-of photos. The dragon now resides peacefully – we are told – in the studio’s offices.

14. Day of the Dead

Koleva celebrates the Day of the Dead with intricate masks

This incredible paper art series from Bulgaria-based designer Tsvetislava Koleva celebrates the Day of the Dead with intricate and colourful masks that quite frankly, took our breath away (read our article here). Each creation takes a different theme and a different colour palette (shown here: Lace and Gold). Koleva specialises in paper art creations – her beautiful but slightly unsettling fashion masks are also well worth a look.

15. 360° Book

Oono’s books open up to tell their stories layer by layer

Japanese artist and designer Yusuke Oono creates books that open up to tell their stories as a multi-layered 3D scene. Each page is a separate laser-cut plane, and together they make up deep and gorgeous 3D images that reveal the story as you make your way from the front to the back of the book.

Next page: 15 more incredible examples of paper art

16. Malmö Festival

This paper art almost looks like it was created with Photoshop

This identity for Malmö Festival was created by Swedish design agency Snask and features some wonderfully colourful paper art creations. Used for the print advertisement as well as huge promotional art installations, this is an impeccable example of what can be achieved with patience and creativity.

17. Women

White’s paper art is incredibly delicate

Artist Maude White likes to do something a little different when it comes to her paper art. She meticulously hand-cuts each piece to create works that are almost like lace. Inspired mostly by nature, and creating pieces that feature birds, leaves and flowers, White also creates beautiful paper art portraits of people. Each piece can take thousands of tiny cuts, with White working for hours on end to perfect each one.

She updates her Instagram feed with all her latest works, and is well worth a follow.

18. Nerd Love

Nerd Love is a collection of cult characters

Meghan Stratman originally started Nerd Love with the intention of creating a new piece of nerdy fan art every Monday for a year, but it turned into an alphabetical series – one geek hero for each letter of the alphabet, from How to Train your Dragon’s Astrid (above) to Tali’Zorah from Mass Effect.

“I like to include bright colours and a sense of humour in my art,” explains Stratman, “and enjoy combining elements to humorous effect, such as badgers sporting fezzes or weasels wearing rocket packs.”

19. Magic Circle

Each of Brown’s paper sculptures is hugely time consuming

The artist Rogan Brown is inspired in part by the tradition of scientific drawing and model making, and particularly the work of artist-scientists such as Ernst Haeckel. He explains: “My work is an exploration and re-presentation of natural organic forms both mineral and vegetal.”

20. Hyundai lettering

Just one of a set of tiny, detailed paper letters made by People Too

This project for Hyundai saw Russian design duo Alexey Lyapunov and Lena Erlich (aka People Too) creating tens of tiny, paper scenes. The concept was based around the slogan ‘Business works better with US in it’, with People Too creating letters representing different types of business (above is the ‘N’ for a care home company). To get a better grasp of the scale of the project, take a look at the duo’s work-in-progress photos.

21. Origami animals

Origami gets a unique twist using handmade Vietnamese paper

Vietnamese artist Nguyen Hung Curong shows off the possibilities of origami in his detailed, lifelike paper art sculptures. Curong took up the hobby when he was just five, and created his first original design when he was just 10 years old. He’s continued to practise the art of origami and is now able to create amazingly detailed and lifelike models, usually from just one square of Vietnamese handmade paper called Dó.

22. Fairy Forest

This magical paper art was featured in the Harrods Magazine

This charming forest series was created by Makerie Studio for Harrods Magazine. The sets were created using layers of iridescent white paper cut into plants, butterflies and miniature mushrooms. Into each was placed a fairy sculpture by Robin Wright , and luxury jewellery.

23. Little Houses

These colourful creations are part of a counting book

Helen Musselwhite is an illustrator based in the UK. A creative with a particular knack for paper art, she’s previously worked with The National Theatre, Nokia and Stella McCartney. For her own book, Little Houses, Musselwhite fashioned several sets of paper dwellings from around the world. Young readers can count their way from one Scottish crofter’s cottage right up to 10 canal-side townhouses in Amsterdam.

24. Paper sculpture

Nicholls’ paper rendering of fur has to be seen to be believed

After being introduced to the idea of paper as a medium at art school, Calvin Nicholls’ first paper sculpture was a collaboration with artist Jonathan Milne back in 1983, and he quickly felt the draw of working in paper. He uses heavy paper stock for structure and lighter paper for fur and fine detail, and he constantly refers to his drawings and study photos to ensure that the assembled pieces are true to the original plan. Read more about the artist in our article on his stunning paper art animals.

25. Myths

Ojala’s creations aren’t strictly paper art

Eiko Ojala’s Myths designs were created digitally but without the aid of 3D software. The illustrator draws everything by hand to create landscapes, figures and portraits that look as if they’ve been cut from paper. His client list includes the likes of ADC, the Guardian, the V&A and IBM.

26. Continental Breakfast

This paper art is made from old maps

Michaela Mihalyiová describes herself as a ‘freelance pencil holder and Slovakian palm lover’. She creates sweet (and not so sweet… what’s that ocean in the bottom left?) paper art and animations that she shares on her Tumblr site. This design was crafted from 30-year-old maps.

27. Candy Crush

Yulia Brodskaya is one of the most well-known of the contemporary designers working with paper art. She combines classic design principles to create beautiful and thought-provoking visual fusions. “Paper always held a special fascination for me,” says the artist. “I’ve tried many different methods and techniques of working with it, until I found the way that has turned out to be ‘the one’ for me: now I draw with paper instead of on it.”

28. Visit Bristol Christmas Campaign

Pierpoint assembles her nature-inspired art from card and paper, then edits it in Photoshop

Inspired by nature and its never-ending beauty, Sam Pierpoint has constructed a range of colourful, 3D creations that transport you to an entirely different world. This paper art sculpture was part of Visit Bristol’s Christmas campaign, and features some of the city’s most loved attractions. The night-time scene was created with G.F Smith papers and lit with LED lights, which were carefully threaded through the sculpture. Watch the making-of video below.

29. La Siesta

This personal project is all about hugs

In his illustrations and paper art, Juan Carlos Viñas Ballesteros (aka Jotaká) aims to create good vibes. One personal project sure to do just that is ‘La Siesta’ – a series of paper illustrations all about hugs; their importance and the ideal time to receive them.

30. Midnight Creatures

This book has creatures hiding in the shadows

Helen Friel is a freelance paper engineer and illustrator, living and working in London, with clients including Vogue, The Telegraph and Ryan Air. Her book, Midnight Creatures, includes five pop-up scenes full of hidden creatures. To find them, the reader needs to turn the lights out and use a torch to find them in the shadows that appear on their wall.

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djgmusic-blog · 7 years

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I couldn’t decide

I don’t expect anyone to watch these, although I would recommend watching each of these one day. I spend a lot of time watching concerts on youtube, so this was too hard of a decision for me to make. If I were to see a band it would have to be one of these two bands. I’ve watched so many of both of their concerts, but these were the few that I chose to share. I’m certifiably obsessed with both Radiohead and Nirvana. For Radiohead I chose the 2006 Bonnaroo performance because I think it was particularly unique, and particularly good. The version of videotape performed at Bonnaroo was so different from the album version and most other live versions. The whole set is amazing. One of the best parts of this concert is during “House of Cards” on the second encore, the crowd starts throwing glow sticks wildly and the band gets involved and everyone is having a great time. I also included the Glastonbury 1997 performance because the OK Computer era of Radiohead was so amazing that I had to include a performance from that time, and this is the most famous one. I always like live performances of fake plastic trees because they just seem to carry more weight, especially Jonny Greenwood’s solo. These were really hard choices because I like every album so I could’ve picked performances from any tour. Some of my other favorites are Saitama, Japan 2008, San Francisco 1998, and any smaller concert from 1993 when Thom yorke had long blonde hair, Jonny Greenwood looked like a Ramone, and they were just playing tracks from Pablo Honey. Radiohead performances are great because there’s so many of them on youtube, but they’re all unique. Especially when Thom is particularly moody or giddy or whatever. He often has funny ways of introducing songs or replacing lyrics and such. I would encourage anyone that is only familiar with Radiohead’s most famous songs or none at all to listen to the lesser known ones. I love every album equally because they’re all different and they’re all great, except for The King Of Limbs. It’s not quite as good as the rest in my opinion. I also love the songs that didn’t make the albums in the earlier years. You can find most radiohead songs, including the ones hidden on EPs and singles that didn’t make the albums, on spotify. Anyway, yeah I’m obsessed with this band and I encourage everyone to become obsessed with this band.

For Nirvana I chose two of the most well known shows from 1992 and 1993. One was 1992 at reading. I love this concert because of the theatrics and comedy of it, with Kurt’s wardrobe and introduction aimed at the media’s talk of his “needle sickness”. Kurt takes a moment before playing “All Apologies” to send his wife Courtney a message from him and the audience saying “Courtney we love you” because of the negative press she’d been getting. I also love that Tony Hodgkins is flailing around on stage for most of the concert in women’s clothing. Their joking performance of Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” before playing “Smells like Teen Spirit” is really funny too. I really enjoy this particular set destruction at the end of the show because of Kurt’s ironic version of Jimi Hendrix’s national anthem during the chaos at a British festival. I also chose to include the MTV Live and Loud performance from 1993 because it was one of the best performances after In Utero’s release and before Kurt’s death in 1994. Personally, I’m a big fan of In Utero, as well as the addition of Pat Smear to the band during this time period, although I’m not sure how I feel about his singing. My favorite thing about the set destruction after this show is Kurt’s gestures calling the audience onto the stage to join them. Even though only a few people were able to get past security and join the members of the band for a few seconds, I think it says a lot about Kurt and Nirvana as a band. They were normal guys, He was so charismatic that he couldn’t help but be a leader, calling for his audience to join him in destruction. Everything’s been said about Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, and this is probably nothing new to any of you, but this si what I chose to do. Although I chose these videos, I would probably be even happier at a tiny concert at a bar in Olympia when the crowd is small and rowdy and Kurt hits an annoying fan with his guitar. I would also love to have been at any concert on the European tour that Nirvana went on with Sonic Youth in 1991. There’s a movie about that tour that I highly recommend if you’re a fan of either band. It’s called 1991: the Year Punk Broke and its on Amazon.

You may notice, 3 of these 4 performances are from festivals. This is because I think Music festivals are the best way to experience music and they often yield the best performances from artists. I saw Radiohead for the first time at Austin City Limits this year and it was probably the best day of my life. Anyway, I don’t expect any of you to read all of this or watch the 6 or 7 hours of concert footage I’ve embedded, but I had fun doing it so thanks. Sorry it’s a couple weeks late.

youtube

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