#not quite to the extent of interstellar & arrival but still...

[thezanyarthropleura]

The Not-March Ones (3 of 5)

Gamera 2: Advent of Legion was released on July 13th, 1996 and will celebrate its 27th anniversary later this year. This is the middle film of the Heisei trilogy, and the only one of the three that has nothing to do with Gamera’s origins and ties to Gyaos. This time, instead, Gamera takes up the role of Guardian of the Universe against an outside context problem: the fast-spreading interstellar organism that would come to be known as Legion!

Yes, this is an alien invasion movie! The only one of the Heisei era, and the only one in the Gamera series as a whole that foregoes any human aliens or speak-through-a-human scenarios and just gives us a voiceless, enigmatic, truly alien nemesis in the same vein as the tripods from War of the Worlds. Compared to the entries before and after it, Legion is less character-driven and more of a formulaic science fiction film. That’s not to say we don’t have interesting characters here, but none of them quite get a full character arc. They’re in the story to serve the roles needed for the plot, and to translate the events of said plot for the audience. But in some ways, they still excel compared to most characters in kaiju films due to a few of them being returning players from the first film whose stories will continue into the third.

One character unique to this film is probably the most audience-centric character of all, Honami Midori, an employee of the Sapporo Science Center who is overseeing a field trip in the mountains of Hokkaido when she witnesses the crash of a strange meteorite. When her insight proves valuable, she joins the investigation, and is looked to for scientific answers by the other, primarily military lead characters. She continues to notice things others don’t, propose ideas others find ridiculous but that turn out to be right, and is the first to make connections between seemingly unrelated events and start piecing together the reality of the slow alien invasion moving across Japan. She does, however, continue to be sidelined when it comes to the actual monster battles, at which point the military takes over the plot, although to be fair, the other younger male scientist Obitsu is to an extent given the same ultimatum, and them being sent away from the active combat zones usually leads them into other plot-important situations. Specifically, when Ms. Honami is sent to evacuate, that’s where she encounters Asagi for the first time, and ultimately witnesses the initial battle between Gamera and Mother Legion, which happens to take place at the airfield while their helicopter struggles to take off.

There’s a particularly chilling moment when she’s observed Obitsu’s calculations for the blast radius of the Legion pod’s space launch, and realizes it’s impossible for the two of them to get away in time. They simply stare down death, until the military delays the launch and Gamera arrives to destroy the Sapporo Legion flower for good. She gets to show off a bit of a comedic side as well, particularly with a scene in the middle of the film where she invites the two male leads to her apartment to coordinate their findings on Legion, while all the while, her parents seem to believe she’s invited them for a threesome (she shows only the faintest hint of romance for Watarase, while Obitsu is clearly, CLEARLY smitten with First Lieutenant Hanatani). She and Asagi both get sidelined for the final battle, and while their role in reviving Gamera is crucial, their absence is still felt for most of the action, while even Obitsu gets to run interference on the Legion swarm and have Watarase show up to save him.

Speaking of Asagi, she’s back here, and one of the characters that actually gets quite a bit of significant development because it’s largely in comparison to the previous film. Going entirely by where she’s left off at the end of GotU, the question is still open of whether Asagi’s entire life has been upended and irrevocably changed by her bond with Gamera. Some aspects of her personality shown off at the beginning of the film don’t quite return within the runtime, and we’re left to wonder if she can even live a normal life anymore. But in Advent of Legion, the first we’re shown of Asagi has her smiling and giggling with Yukino as she makes a phone call to her offscreen father. She still becomes her stoic, cryptic self again after she’s reunited with Gamera, but even after his first battle for which Asagi wasn’t present, she’s apparently able to enthusiastically continue her ski trip with Yukino. In fact it seems quite odd that she’s so casual after Gamera has begun a fight with an alien threat, although at this point it’s partially believed the threat is over, with the last open question being whether the ‘big one’ was actually destroyed by the military after being shot down over the ocean.

I’ve mentioned that this is the film that made me ship Asagi/Yukino, and that’s mostly because in their first scene together, Yukino is very emphatically cuddling into Asagi’s shoulder to listen in on a phone call (and because they’re YELLOW AND PINK), but there’s a lot to be said for how much having a friend probably means to Asagi right now. In the first film, she ran out on Yukino and possibly some other friends without explanation, something that was never resolved, but here we see the two of them at least are still close, and still going on trips together. Because their screentime is so brief (Yukino is still only in about two scenes) a lot is left up to interpretation, such as whether Yukino knows about Asagi’s connection to Gamera. Even during the airfield battle, Yukino’s reactions are short, wordless, and non-descriptive while Asagi directs her attention to Gamera’s approach and openly enters her trance-like state in the helicopter. Since Honami appears there and directly identifies Asagi, we can be sure Yukino knows the truth now if she didn’t already, but we don’t see her reaction to this information, nor does she appear in any later scenes (she has a broken leg from the skiing trip so one presumes she went home or was evacuated to a hospital). It’s very plausible, however, that Yukino knows or at least suspects the truth the whole time, as we’re shown here that a website has started rumors of Asagi’s involvement with Gamera that have spread far enough that some high-ranking military officials are aware of them.

Asagi continues into the later stages of the film, now joining with Honami in returning to the ruins of Sendai to take part in a vigil for Gamera, who appears in a petrified state after being caught in the Legion pod’s explosion. Asagi insists Gamera will return, and sure enough, perhaps in part because she’s focusing on her Magatama bead, the embers from the vigil fires bring Gamera back to life – but at a price. Asagi’s bead shatters, and we see the first stages of the next chapter in her story, wherein Gamera has broken his connection to humanity and Asagi is left in the aftermath with a huge part of her life torn away. In the next film, we’ll learn she eventually began studying abroad, traveling to the South Pacific to find out more about Gamera and the bond she once shared with him, but here, we just see her bleak happiness at Gamera’s return and later, her tearful goodbye as she leans on Honami for support.

I’ll mention that (former) Inspector Osako is back too, even if it’s just for a small cameo that shows the beginning of his slow decline of being scared out of jobs by encounters with monsters. Jokes from the other two Heisei film reviews aside, I actually like him quite a bit, and his character arc pays off well in what we see of him in the third film. Here, though, he really is just in it for a cameo.

The special effects in this film continue to amaze, but the Legion creature designs are especially impressive - they look truly alien, in a way most alien monsters don’t, and really sell the idea they’re a creature that evolved totally independently of earth life. One can pick out some similarities to insects and crustaceans, but the limbs are all coming out of the wrong places and have weird shapes and redundancies. Both the Symbiotic Legion and the larger Mother Legion are portrayed by people in suits, not puppets on wires, and there’s behind the scenes footage showing Mother Legion can walk around in an open, grassy field with the rear legs moving and everything. Lore-wise, ‘silicon-based life’ is brought up but not just thrown around aimlessly like it usually is, there’s some actual thought given to the science behind how they process matter and interact with their environment, and their compressed-air-based circulatory system is both a neat touch and leads to some creative moments in fight scenes involving both stages.

Out of the three films in the Heisei trilogy, this is probably the one that makes Shusuke Kaneko’s religious leanings the most obvious, as right in the opening credits, we’re presented with a gigantic Christian cross… which gets burnt and charred in fire, and its broken remains then absorbed into the katakana Gamera logo, so I can’t decide whether it shot itself in the foot or not. The other big one here is that the bible is directly mentioned and quoted when Legion is given its name, and then there are a few more subtle ones like Gamera dying and being revived. I don’t have the context to know whether they would have been noticeable to Japanese audiences, but in a western world populated by multitudes and multitudes of Christ allegories, one would be forgiven for missing most of them entirely, or brushing it off as ‘movies are just like that sometimes.’

Ultimately, the references are subtle enough that these movies can be enjoyed regardless of one’s opinions on Christianity, with so much of the true meaning being left to interpretation. Personally, when I look at the Heisei trilogy, I see a continuation and expansion of the main themes of the Showa series – Gamera may have a more defined origin and purpose here, and he may be put through darker circumstances that bring his relationship with humans as a whole into question, but throughout it all, he remains devoted to saving children, and they continue to learn to trust and believe in him despite interference from, or loyalty to the memory of, parents. With one child in particular taking a very, very roundabout path toward both. But we’re here to discuss Advent of Legion, not Revenge of Irys, so I’ll bring up the Sendai vigil, where the audience of mourners paying respects to Gamera is shown to consist primarily of children, as well as one child in another scene who expresses concern for Gamera when he is believed dead.

In the odd times when people aren’t insisting the Heisei trilogy films are better than everything that came before, they sometimes remark that they don’t faithfully respect Noriaki Yuasa’s original vision, but in execution if not intent, I tend to disagree. These films may be appealing to a wider audience than the originals, but even so, Gamera continues to be the friend and hero children need when adults do dumb things like shooting at the good monster instead of the bad one, stopping to take pictures when they should be evacuating, or shaming and verbally abusing a kid for wanting to keep the family name of the parents she lost tragically (because they stopped to take pictures when they should’ve been evacuating).

(Back to Legion…)

As I’ve stated, this film loses out on character focus in favor of a plot-focused sci-fi story. For me, that makes it the film in the trilogy I like a little less than the other two, and for some, it may make it the one they like a little more. By no means is it anything close to a trilogy low point, however – it consistently brings me joy and is probably the most fun out of the three. And if I were to rank on shipping alone, just that one Asagi/Yukino payphone scene would make Legion easily the second most lesbian Gamera movie after Super Monster, not even counting the great mlm ship we get when, as they’re preparing for the final battle, Hanatani promises Obistu (who is wearing a purple/pink jacket at the time, to set the mood here) that he’ll take him out for a drink afterward. Additionally, this is one of the only kaiju films set and filmed in winter, with deep snow on the ground for the first act set in Sapporo and the cold still felt throughout the rest with everyone wearing heavy winter coats. It’s very scenic, and a film best watched on a snowy morning with a mug of hot chocolate.

#gamera #gamera 2 #gamera 2 advent of legion #advent of legion #legion gamera #honami midori #kusanagi asagi #yukino gamera #asagi x yukino #gamera march #gamera april #a lesbian reviews all the gamera movies

[artificialqueens]

(Your Body Is) Out of this World (Shalaska) - Citrus

A/N: thank u to Mistress for beta-ing and subsequently bullying me into posting this

Summary: Dr. Sharon Needles is assigned to examine the newest alien arrival on their interstellar compound. Things do not go as she planned. Smut, 3.9k words.

Sharon had never seen a specimen like this before, and she’d been working at this facility for six years. Sure, the infinite expanse of space was filled with any number of cosmic horrors, and she’d seen quite a few of its offerings, but she’d never encountered anything like this.

Looking through the shielded glass of the MRI room for the first time, she’d been astounded. Inside was a humanoid that resembled Sharon’s own race in all of the fundamental ways, but was decidedly different in others. This alien looked like, well, what an alien in a video game would look like; a feminine figure with impossible proportions, yet still enough to appear human to an extent. She was long-legged and a little gangly, but not skin-and-bones; clearly there was strong muscle and soft fat beneath her shimmering blue-green skin. Her eyes were almost completely black, and when the alien had turned to make eye contact with Sharon, she’d looked away.

A Glamtr0nian. Their planet was shrouded in mystery, its people renowned for their incredible beauty, but not much was known about their physiology. Their concept of gender was beyond the realm of human imagination, but this particular one had disclosed an identification somewhere close to the human concept of womanhood, and had expressed consent toward being referred to as a “she.”

Now it was exam day. Sharon would be conducting a physical examination of the facility’s first Glamtr0nian specimen. She adjusted her glasses nervously as she stepped in front of the exam room door, pressing her palm against the scanner and waiting for her entrance permissions to clear. The doors slid open to reveal a second set of doors, a security measure in the event that specimens attempted to make an escape. It didn’t happen often, but it was a nice precaution to have. The outer doors would be secured by armed guards as well, if Sharon needed backup or found herself in a volatile situation.

The doors opened, and Sharon stepped inside. The alien was waiting for her, sitting on the exam table and showing no signs of distress and looking, for all intents and purposes, fairly comfortable. Her long, silvery-blonde hair was no longer piled into two buns on the top of her head like it had been when she’d arrived, but was now brushed back into a sleek, shiny ponytail. Her eyes were still black as night, but her makeup was definitely toned down, as if she was barely wearing any at all. A little hesitantly, Sharon stepped forward to conduct her first test: ensuring that the alien’s translation chip had been upgraded when she arrived at their facility.

“Can you understand me?”

Turning her head at the sound of Sharon’s voice, the Glamtr0nian looked at her and nodded.

“I was getting bored in here. It’s kind of unnerving to have all of these medical instruments around me, you know.”

“I understand, sorry about that,” Sharon smiled. “My name is Dr. Needles, I’ll be performing your examination today. Do you use a name?”

“Princess Alaska Joanne Elizabeth Thunderfuck 5000 of the planet Glamtr0n. Alaska is fine, or Your Highness if you’re kinky. So what’ll you be doing to me today, Doc Needles? That’s a fitting name, by the way.”

Sharon flushed, but tried not to let it affect her. “It’s just a routine physical exam. Making sure you’re healthy and figuring out what you need in order to design an ideal habitat.”

“You make me sound like a zoo animal,” Alaska grumped. “You’re not gonna put me on display, are you?”

Sharon shook her head, taken aback. “Not at all. This is just protocol while our engineering team works on repairing your spacecraft. It would be rude to stick you in a hotel room that was badly-suited for your particular needs.”

“Oh, that’s fine then,” Alaska said, sounding relieved. “I got kinda worried when they made me do all those MRIs and x-rays and stuff. The translation chip upgrade was cool though, I needed the newest language expansion. Thanks for that.”

“I’ll let Dr. West know you appreciate it,” Sharon smiled. “Are you ready to begin?”

“Do your worst.”

They went through a few of the simpler tests, like necessary air components and temperature preference, before moving on to diet and physical activity requirements. It turned out that Glamtr0nians were incredibly adaptable, to an extent that Sharon had never seen before, and their ability to shapeshift made it much easier to assimilate to any environment that they needed to.

“Are you comfortable if we move on to a more… private portion of the exam?”

“How private are we talking, Doc?” Alaska asked with a smirk. “You gonna probe me?”

Sharon blushed. “Not quite. If you’re comfortable doing so, I’d like to ask you to disrobe and allow me to record your body’s reactions to some simple tests.” Alaska’s robe was gone before she’d even finished her sentence, and she blushed even deeper at the sight of what was essentially a naked blue-green woman in front of her, covered only by a flashy silver thong.

“I thought you’d never ask. That thing was driving me insane.”

“Really? Was the fabric uncomfortable to you?“ That would be an interesting thing to make note of, for the sake of future patients.

“The fabric was fine, it was just so loose. I prefer to wear things with a much tighter fit, or nothing at all. Personal preference. Now you can test away.” She crossed her legs and leaned back on her palms, those dark eyes looking right at Sharon with such intensity that she thought she might melt. But she had a job to do, and dammit, she was going to do it.

Sharon took a reflex hammer from the table and checked Alaska’s reflexes, which were a little faster than a normal human’s but generally pretty normal. Taking her stethoscope from around her neck, she placed it on Alaska’s bare chest and waited, trying not to be a perv by looking at her perky breasts, though they were difficult to ignore.

“Very weak heartbeat…” she mumbled to herself, and Alaska giggled.

“It’s on the other side. Here,” she said, placing her hand over Sharon’s and guiding it to the right side of her chest. Sharon tried her hardest not to blush.

“Right. Is this a normal resting heart rate for you?"

"It’s a little higher,” Alaska answered, and Sharon looked at her, curious.

“Is this exam making you nervous?"

"Sure,” the alien replied, “Let’s go with that.”

Seemingly oblivious, Sharon continued. “I hate to ask this, but how’s your sexual health?”

“I’d say it’s just fine,” Alaska purred. “I assume this is all protocol?”

“Yeah, I have to go through this part just to make sure there’s no risk of any kind of outbreak in the compound. Who you choose to engage with isn’t our business, we just don’t want anything to spread– Not that I’m implying that you have anything,” she added, blushing. “It’s just precautionary.”

“I didn’t think you were,” Alaska said. “As far as I’m aware, I’m not carrying anything. I get tested regularly.”

Sharon copied that down in her notes. “That makes my job a lot easier. Are you sexually compatible with members of species outside your own?”

“Very.” Alaska smirked. “I’d say almost universally.”

“Really?” Sharon found herself blushing again. “You have that in common with humans, then.”

“Oh, I know,” Alaska answered, giving her gorgeous doctor a once-over. Were humans exceptionally dense, or was this one just not catching onto her advances? She was beginning to get frustrated with Sharon’s apparent lack of interest. Then again, she was doing that thing where her cheeks turned all pink and she radiated warmth, which was kind of adorable. “I’ve been told that humans are the most compatible species with my own. Sexually, at least. Especially the brunettes.”

“Why is that?”

Alaska bit her lip, gazing into the doctor’s eyes. “You know, for a doctor, you’re really kind of dumb.”

“Why would you think th– oh. Oh.” Sharon took a few steps back, blushing even harder than before. “Have you been-”

"Hitting on you this whole time? Yes. Kinda wish we’d met under different circumstances, not as a doctor and patient, because you’re very attractive and I’d like to have wildly kinky interspecies sex with you.”

This was, surprisingly, not the first time an alien had hit on Sharon during an exam. However, she’d be a liar if she said she wasn’t attracted to this particular alien, and it had taken her much longer than usual to catch on to Alaska’s flirting. Come to think of it, she’d been feeling rather warm since she first entered the room… Had she just been repressing her desire this entire time? It definitely sounded like something she would do.

“You know, I think I’ve written down everything you need to be comfortable in your section of the compound,” she said slowly, looking into Alaska’s inky-black eyes. “We could always save the regular checkup for another time.”

Alaska’s eyes widened as she realized what Sharon was doing, and her cheeks turned a delicate shade of turquoise. “You’re right. After all, they’ll probably be repairing my ship for a while…"

"I’d say a few weeks at least,” Sharon agreed.

"Right. Complex craft, that one is.”

“We have plenty of time for a follow-up exam.”

“Plenty.”

“I’m sure both of us have other things we could be doing with our time.”

“Oh, I can think of a few.”

“Yeah?”

“Mm-hmm. And if you don’t put your mouth on my mouth in the next ten seconds, I think I’ll explode.”

They had been inching closer to one another throughout this exchange, but when Alaska begged to be kissed, Sharon’s composure was finally broken. She leaned against the exam table, capturing Alaska’s lips with her own and letting out a surprised whine when Alaska’s tongue was much longer than she’d expected. Fuck, she’d give anything for that tongue between her legs…

“You’re so sexy,” Sharon mumbled against the alien’s plush lips, her hands moving from the exam table to rest on Alaska’s thighs. They were slightly cooler than Sharon’s own body temperature, and impossibly soft and smooth; her skin was almost comparable to silicone in its texture, but wondrously alive. “God, I want you so bad.” As her right hand moved to Alaska’s inner thigh, her fingertips brushed against the thin strap of her thong. “Can I touch you?”

“Fuck yes,” Alaska breathed, her dark eyes half-lidded with lust. When Sharon cupped her and then froze, she looked up at the doctor with confusion. “What’s wrong?”

“Sorry, I-” Sharon blushed and withdrew her hand. “I didn’t think to ask what… what you had going on down there. I guess I just assumed it was as humanoid as the rest of you.” She bit her lip, trying not to turn an even deeper shade of red as she looked up at Alaska. When she’d touched her, she’d felt a distinct bulge, and she was both curious and turned on by whatever was hidden by Alaska’s silvery underwear.

The alien smiled coyly. “Do you want to see?” Wordlessly, Sharon nodded and took a step back to allow her patient-turned-paramour to stand. Alaska hooked her fingers under the straps of her flimsy undergarment and pulled them over her hips, sliding her panties off completely and setting them on the exam table. She hopped up onto the table once more and spread her legs, giving Sharon full view of just what she was working with.

It was like nothing Sharon had ever seen. Confirming her suspicions that Alaska was completely hairless from the neck down, the alien was bare and wet, her dewy folds all but dripping with a bright blue fluid that seemed to give off a light of its own. It looked remarkably like what Sharon expected from an alien pussy, but the star of the show made itself obvious in the place where Alaska’s clit would be, had she been human. Though blue-green like the rest of her skin and shaped somewhat oddly with a tapering tip, it was unmistakably a penis, and it was leaking the same luminous fluid as her pussy– or perhaps it had dripped down, Sharon wasn’t sure.

“Fuck. Wow."

Alaska’s external member twitched and she bit her lip, flustered. "Is that a good ‘fuck, wow’ or a bad one?"

"Definitely good,” Sharon breathed, “Holy shit.”

“Do you still want to-"

”Yes,“ Sharon interrupted her, stepping between her legs again. "I want you. Fuck.”

Alaska smiled, clearly relieved. “Y'know, Dr. Needles, you’re wearing an awful lot of clothing right now…” She tugged at the lapels of Sharon’s labcoat, teasing. “C'mon, I showed you mine…”

Sharon grinned at her and began to undress, taking her time as she stripped down to her bra and panties. With every article of clothing she removed, she watched Alaska’s member grow a little stiffer; by the time she unclipped her bra, Alaska had grown several times her original size and was dripping all over her thighs and the exam table.

“You’re so hot, come here,” she whined, reaching out for the doctor and letting out a soft moan when Sharon moved closer, one hand skimming the alien’s slender waist. “Fuck, I didn’t think a strip tease could make me so wet.”

“That’s what that is, huh?” Sharon smirked, gesturing to the little luminescent mess Alaska had made.

“Whaaat, you’ve never seen Glamtr0nian precum?” Alaska whined, clearly desperate for some kind of action. “You wanna touch me, or are you gonna make me suffer forever?"

Sharon eyed Alaska’s pulsing member, a little apprehensive. "It’s not corrosive, is it?"

"Not to humans. I’ve been told it tastes like candy, too.”

“Well now you’re just lying to me so I’ll go down on you,” Sharon laughed. “What do you call it, anyway? Your… external part, I mean.”

“Same as you,” the alien shrugged. “On Glamtr0n we all have a pussy and a cock. It’s super easy for us to fuck,” she added with a giggle. “We’re kinda stretchy and can take a lot more than it looks like. But that’s not really relevant here.”

“And why’s that?” Sharon challenged.

Alaska gave her a look, and she withered almost immediately. “Because it’s so obvious that you want me inside you,” she answered as if Sharon had already known. And, to be fair, she had a point. Sharon definitely wanted Alaska’s alien cock to rearrange her gastrointestinal structures, but she wasn’t going to admit that out loud. Yet.

“You think so?” Sharon teased, stealing a kiss. “You’ve already made a mess of yourself, and you expect me to believe that you won’t blow your load the second you’re inside me?”

Alaska chased the doctor’s lips, running her hands down Sharon’s chest and squeezing her breasts. Fuck, she was so warm and soft and human. “I guess that’s up to you… Are you gonna let me fuck you so you can find out?” She trailed a palm down Sharon’s body to cup her over her panties, and smirked when she felt that they were wet. “You’re a bold talker for someone who’s dripping just as much as I am, Dr. Needles.”

“I think you owe me a favor for making a mess of my exam table,” Sharon breathed, her eyes dark and wide as Alaska’s long fingers pressed against her. “Don’t you?”

“Oh, you’re right, I’m terribly sorry for that,” the alien princess smirked. Just like that, her fingertips had grown talon-like nails, and she used them to slice away the straps of Sharon’s panties; as soon as the wet fabric hit the floor, Alaska’s hands were back to normal, pressing between the doctor’s folds and feeling how wet she truly was.

“Could’ve warned me before you did that,” Sharon said, but it was clear from her tone that she wasn’t upset at all, and rather more turned on because of it. “Oh, fuck.” Alaska’s fingers had found her entrance and a long, slender digit curled inside her, deeper than she’d ever been touched before. Alaska smirked, cupping Sharon’s cheek with her other hand and drawing her in for a kiss.

“You’re so warm… and Goddess, so fucking tight…” Her voice was low and sultry, even more so than before, and Sharon felt weak in her embrace. “I’ll have to be nice and slow with you… Make sure you can take me…”

“You’re evil,” Sharon whined as a second finger joined the first inside her, “You shouldn’t be able to make me feel this fucking good.”

Alaska laughed. “No? Would you like me to stop, then?”

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Sharon growled, clenching down on Alaska’s fingers and enjoying the alien’s soft gasp of surprise. “God, fuck, you’re so good.”

“You swear a lot,” Alaska grinned, feeling blindly with her thumb for the little bud that she knew resided in the place where her own cock would be. When she found it, Sharon all but whimpered, falling forward to lean against her lover’s chest for support as she worked her magic.

“Holy shit.”

“Should we change positions? I don’t want you hurting yourself,” Alaska asked, a wicked glimmer in her eye. Sharon nodded, and allowed the alien to gently maneuver her body so that she was leaning against the exam table, her legs spread just enough for Alaska to kneel between them.

“Fuck.” Sharon had wanted Alaska between her legs, and now it was happening.

The alien kissed Sharon’s thighs, remembering that humans liked it when their skin was marked up, and sucked a hickey or two into the soft flesh. Her long tongue flicked upwards, tasting the wetness that had gathered on Sharon’s folds and stifling a moan at the taste of her. “Fuck, I’ll never get tired of human pussy,” she mumbled into Sharon’s thigh, causing the doctor to giggle and blush. “You’re so fucking wet.” Her tongue slid between Sharon’s lips again, lapping at her pussy eagerly as she listened to her soft moans of pleasure. Daringly, she teased at Sharon’s entrance before darting inside and tasting her deeply, and the human woman let out a cry.

“Oh my fucking god!” Alaska was every lesbian’s wet dream, and Sharon could hardly believe she had such a gorgeous and talented woman between her thighs. “Shit, you’re so good,” she whined as that impossibly long tongue fluttered over her clit and curled against her aching pussy. If she didn’t slow down soon, Sharon was going to make an embarrassing mess of herself.

“You taste so good, baby,” Alaska moaned, taking a moment to breathe. Sharon looked down at her, brushing a silver-blonde lock of hair away from her face where it had escaped her ponytail. Alaska’s cheeks were flushed and her eyes were half-lidded, and she looked absolutely debauched, like there was nowhere in the universe she’d rather be than on her knees between Sharon’s legs.

Sharon bit her lower lip, feeling her own face heat up. “You look so good like this.”

“Hardly royal behavior, is it?” Alaska breathed with a little chuckle. “On my knees pleasuring a commoner while I’m soaked and unfulfilled.” It was clear that she was being playful, but once glance at her dick made it obvious just how badly she needed to be touched.

“Come here,” Sharon said, pulling the alien princess to her feet and immediately wrapping her fingers around her weeping cock. Alaska gasped sharply, her hips thrusting against Sharon’s touch of their own accord as the doctor stroked her carefully. “Is this good?”

“So good,” Alaska whined, and Sharon tightened her grip, moving a little faster. She learned quickly that unlike humans, Alaska had more than one deeply sensitive spot; her base was just as sensitive as her tip, and when Sharon slipped two fingers into her pussy, she keened and squirmed. “You are fucking incredible,” the princess praised her, doing her best to fuck herself on Sharon’s fingers while also thrusting up into her hand. “You’ll kill me before I can cum.”

“Who says I’m going to let you cum?” Sharon teased her, laughing when Alaska let out a pathetic whimper. “I’m kidding, I promise. Although this angle is kind of awkward, so…” She pulled her fingers out of Alaska despite soft protesting from the alien, and settled for kissing her deeply instead.

Alaska’s fingers found Sharon’s clit, and their lips met once more as they pleasured one another. Sharon came first, whining and shaking against Alaska’s delicate touch, and the princess slipped out of her grasp to kneel between her legs again and clean her up. Sharon was almost painfully sensitive, so Alaska took care to be gentle with her, and kissed her hip sweetly before coming back up to kiss her on the mouth.

“You don’t have to do anything for me,” she breathed, batting Sharon’s hand away. “I’ll take care of myself.”

Sharon frowned, her mind still a little foggy from her orgasm. “You sure? I want you to feel good…”

Alaska smiled. “It’s okay. I’m kind of messy when I cum…”

“I think we’ve made a mess already,” Sharon laughed, looking around the exam room at the disarrayed tables, piles of clothing, and little puddles of fluid (mostly Alaska’s). “I’ve never seen a girl get as wet as you do.”

The alien blushed. “It’s just how our bodies work… We’re really sexual beings, we like to be ready for anything.”

“I don’t mind the mess,” Sharon smiled, stealing another kiss. “You sure you don’t wanna finish inside me?” she asked, trying to tempt her lover into another round.

Alaska bit her lip, clearly considering the offer. “I don’t think you wanna risk an interspecies pregnancy this early in our relationship,” she grinned. “I’ll try not to make too much of a mess, I promise.”

“God, just let me touch you,” Sharon pleaded, and Alaska laughed aloud. She turned her back on Sharon, leaning against her chest as her hand moved down to begin pumping herself. “How’s this?” The question came out breathier than she’d meant it to, but she could hardly be blamed for being so fucking close already; Dr. Sharon Needles was magic.

Sharon’s hands roamed over her waist and hips before moving up to knead her breasts, peppering kisses over her shoulders and neck. One hand slid between her legs, fingers pressing up inside her and moving in time with her sloppy hand movements. “This is perfect. Cum for me, baby.”

Alaska let out a low cry, cumming into her fist and around Sharon’s fingers in an explosive release of that luminous fluid, now thicker and glowing even brighter than before. Sharon’s hand, Alaska’s thighs, and the floor of the exam room were a mess, but Sharon really couldn’t bring herself to care when she had a panting, writhing alien princess pressed against her, letting out silent sobs of pleasure as she came down.

“T-told you I was messy,” Alaska managed to say, all but collapsing against Sharon’s chest. The doctor smiled, pressing a warm, liquid kiss against Alaska’s neck.

“Yeah. You’re so pretty when you cum.”

Alaska blushed cerulean. “You think so?”

“Well, you’re pretty no matter what you’re doing. But even prettier when you’re like this.” Sharon pulled her fingers out of the alien princess and turned her so that they were facing one another. “We should probably clean up, huh?”

Alaska smiled, leaning forward to kiss Sharon deeply.

“Yeah. We probably should.”

#rpdr fanfiction #sharon needles #alaska thunderfuck #shalaska #smut #pwp #alien au #citrus #thank goodness it’s set in the future because there’d be hipaa violations left and right otherwise

[akoumi]

I can’t write dialogue for the death of me. Tips, oh wise one?

Dialogue 

So often writers, when looking back at their dialogue, realize that it feels stilted and unnatural. See, dialogue is technically the easiest part of writing. Think about it - you don’t see beautiful descriptions of places or watch epic fight scenes every day, but you do hear people talk. Authentic dialogue is everywhere around you, you just need to listen. 

1. Listen. I literally cannot stress this enough. Listen to conversations around you, learn how different people talk. Listen to accents, listen to verbal tics, listen to lApply this to your own writing. 

2. Dialogue isn’t always prose. People don’t talk in flowery prose every time. Nope. There’s an element of awkwardness to it. This depends on what type of character you have, but make sure it sounds natural. Let’s look at an example. Let’s say that James, captain of the football team and all-around good guy, has gone to his recent ex’s house to try and get her back. Which one sounds more realistic?

“Maya, I refuse to let you go! I realize that your mother doesn’t think I’m good enough for you, and it’s quite right. But please, you must listen, I love you! I also realize that it’s completely your choice. Make it, and I’ll leave, never to bother you again. But let me say only one thing - for you, I lay down my love, my heart, my life.” 

“Maya, babe - I get it. Your mom thinks I’m not good enough for you. And she’s right. I get it. You’re amazing, and I’m...not. But I love you. I love you, Maya. Please, at least think about it. I’ll give you as much time as you need, but...text me. Please.” 

That first example is definitely more romantic, more dramatic. But would a seventeen year old boy really say something like that? Probably not, unless he reads Shakespeare 24/7. 

3. Know what kind of characters you have. A faerie king and the skater boy down the street don’t talk the same way. An interstellar bandit and a peasant from 1350 Africa are not going to talk the same way. Dialogue is such a good tool for getting across personality and character! Check out these few examples and see if you can tell what kind of character is saying them:

“Hey, dude, do you wanna come to Pascal’s house Friday after school? We have pizza! Also Ashley and her friends are gonna be there, so you’re gonna wanna come as soon as possible, heh.”

“You took everything from me. My lover, my country, my home. But now I’m here. And I’m going to return the favour.” 

“Don’t worry about it! Seriously, I don’t mind it! Take the car - no, I know I said I needed it today, but it’s fine - really! I’ll take the bus.” 

“Do you feel it? That fire in your bones? I told you one day you would surpass me, but that moment has arrived quicker than either of us had expected. Rise, hero, and take your place among the stars.” 

All of these examples have character. Keep in mind, though, not everything has character. You don’t need your characters to always say “yes” and “no” in a very distinct way all the time. Now, here are a few tips to make your writing flow smoother! 

Don’t overuse tags. 

“What did you say?” Alex breathed. “I...I love you.” Tom said. Tom’s face was bright red, his eyes on his sneakers. “But...I thought...” Alex said.“I know. I know. I lied,” Tom said.“Your -” Alex began.“I d-don’t know about any of that. I just know...all I know is that I love you.” Tom said.   

That’s tiring to read. It also detracts from the flow of the dialogue. But here is a better example: 

“What did you say?” Alex breathed. “I...I love you.” Tom’s face was bright red, his eyes on his sneakers.“But...I thought...”“I know. I know. I lied.” “Your -” “I don’t - I don’t know about any of that. I just know...all I know is that I love you.”

Isn’t that better? Your audience isn’t stupid, they don’t need you holding your hand with them throughout the entire book. Even without the tags, you can still tell who’s speaking.   

Do use said. 

Literally ninety percent of writing tips on Tumblr are “don’t use said!!1!1″ It’s true, up to a certain extent. But you never use said, and then you end up with quotes like: 

“Are you sure?” she screamed.

“Yes,” he roared.

“Why not?” she wailed. 

“No idea,” he blubbered.

Seriously. Don’t be scared of using said. Not everything needs to be said super dramatically. Sometimes you don’t scream or wail or shout something. You just say it.

Be careful when using names. 

Using names in dialogue isn’t a bad thing, but just be careful. It may seem natural, but really, we don’t use names often in real life. Even when talking to friends. 

Read your writing aloud! 

This is a huge tip! What’s the best way to make sure your dialogue sounds natural? Read it out! You may not be able to kill someone to make sure your murder scene is factual, or take a trip to Fiji to see how it feels to fall into its rivers, but you can always speak dialogue. 

i really hope all of this makes sense, i may be good at dialogue but i am not good at being articulate lol 

#writing #writers on tumblr #writing advice #writing tips #dialogue #advice

[twitchesandstitches]

Firstly, because of your first inclusion of Magnus the Red, I started binge-watching the TTS series (which has been absolutely hilarious), so thanks for that! Secondly, I was wondering if any other WH40K characters (esp. the other Primarchs) play any notable roles within the setting/cosmology of CrossThicc?

now you know the joy i feel whenever Brotrip 40k gets another upload : D you are most welcome!

since 40k is one of my favorite series (if more so with a lighter tone that takes the grimdark much less seriously), concepts from 40k are all over the place: the realms of magic are more or less a gentler version of the Warp mixed with Dragon Age’s Fade (and travel through those realms is essentialy 40k warp travel), the multiverse’s versions of orcs and elves draw heavily from the Orks and Eldar, and thus important characters from those species would be highly important among their peoples here.

for the Primarchs, you have to start with the Emperor. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that he, and the Primarchs, are explicitly magical/divine here, and there’s more of Warhammer Fantasy Battle’s tones here mashed up with 40k. The Emperor himself is the God of Humanity as a whole; the part of the outer realms defined by ‘human’ being a Thing, and he’s very much like his TTS counterpart; loud, complaining and loves to swear and mess with people. he IS more compassionate, though, and has no real problem with aliens and mutants; he’s more concerned that humanity stay alive than that it is dominant or in a specific form.

it should be noted that the Imperium of canon no longer exists; something similar DID, at one point, but that was a long time ago and it has since collapsed, and spanned the multiverse as a fulfillment of the Emperor’s original plans. Similar groups (such as the Imperial Commonwealth) are disavowed by the Primarchs, who REALLY don’t like the Commonwealth. In part, the commonwealth is inspired by the worst aspects of the Imperium from canon... but then, everyone in the know is ashamed of what the Imperium has become in canon.

For the Primarchs, they are also gods who embody a fundamental aspect of the sapient mind/will, as expressed through humans. Vulkan is humanity’s compassion in all its forms, Magnus is its potential for magic and intellectual achievement, and so forth. Their canonical homeworlds are centers of cross-species society that fulfill their goals, and while their avatars may rule there, mosto ften their space marine children (who can be men or women here) are spiritual leaders to them, with varying degrees of directness. Sort of like different warrior societies throughout history; some advise the rulers, others ARE in charge. In general, they’re like knightly orders infused with the power of their god-liege to become something more than human.

All the Primarchs are still alive! This DOES mean that Horus is kicking around somewhere, as is Sanguinius and the others who died in canon.

Vulkan: my favorite primarch, and so one with a great deal of relevance to the AU; he’s largely as per TTS and canon, a big and lovable goofball who embodies the best in humanity and is a paragon of the IDEA of being a paragon; has some draconic aspects, and he has lava-like cracks appear when he powers up. Worshiped as a god of heroism by the orks, he is taking on some of their mannerisms and physical traits. His Salamanders are a core part of the Endowed Fleet, and he himself may be part of the God Squad pantheon. Is a VERY big hugger!

Magnus: Much of his character has pretty much been shown already; his exact plans are mysterious and unclear, and he has arrived at the Library of Wan Shi Tong for unknown purposes, but he probably is just trying to safeguard knowledge for its own sake, and he’s deadly afraid of another cataclysm wiping out civilization for good. Embdies the power of magical achievement, and to an extent, the idea of knowledge.

Jaghatai Khan: POSSIBLY associated with the Air Nomads, revered by him in some capacity; possibly this is what led Magnus to that world to begin with. Chogoris, beneath the leadership of his most trusted heirs, has expanded into a large interstellar empire that is prosperous and just. It’s unclear what his domain is, but its probably to do with controlled ferocity. Somehow a patron to all who revere their rides.

Leman Russ: is an actual werewolf here, as are his space wolves. (Mix them up with the Uratha of the New World of Darkness; shapeshifting man-wolf spirit guardians!) His domain is also unknown, but may involve ruthlessness; his an Magnus’ rivalry is still quite intense, though its less to do with personal vendettas and more with conflicting agendas and ways of doing things. He is likely the source of werebeast-ness in some way, a proto-typical Father of Werewolves; either as far as humans are concerned, or the modern manifestation of that particular gift.

Sanguinius: Not too sure what his domain might be, but I definitely think he has some link with the Dolorosa of Homestuck, and the two of them are somehow linked to the existence of vampires. She is the mother of ALL vampires, and he may be the father of the more recent modern strains! Perhaps they have something going on there, or are reflections of a similar primal concept? Either way, he’s basically the most fabulous and good-hearted vampire knight-ideal there ever was. HE is bitey Galahad

my knowledge of the other Primarchs in general (especially those given most of their character in the Black Library books) is a lot more spotty, so i welcome suggestions or ideas from anyone who has a thought on ‘em! same iwth any 40k character in general, ESPECIALLY the xenos!

#queued #anon replies #replies #crossthicc AU #crossthicc!wh40k #Anonymous

[nandireya]

Stranded

It’s officially Valentines Day here in the merry old land of Oz, so, you now what that means…it begins!

______________________________________________________________________

Kullara Week 2017

Day One Stranded

“I’m just saying,” Lance said, a slight whine to his voice. “Why does Keith get to go?”

“Because it’s a diplomatic mission and your flirting with everything that looks even remotely female could lead to an interstellar incident?” Pidge suggested.

“Well…okay…granted…” He conceded. “But, still…”

“Because he’s kind of our leader now and it’ll be a good opportunity for him to work on his people skills?” Hunk added.

“What people skills?” Lance scoffed.

The object of their discussion entered the hanger, shouldering a large bag, in full paladin armour, sans helmet, which was tucked under his free arm.

Full, RED, paladin armour.

Lance shot the other two a narrowed, sideways glance. “If he’s our leader why is he still wearing red?” He hissed.

“Because he’s no more ready to give up on Shiro than you are.” Keith said flatly.

“Curse you and your Galra hearing!” Lance snapped, shaking his fist in mock indignation.

Keith shot him an angry glare as he stepped past him to stow his gear in the belly of the long-range pod.

Allura entered then, defusing any argument that might have started between the pair. She was dressed in her flight suit and carrying a small bag.

Lance leaned over. “Looks like someone overpacked.” He teased, before bounding across the deck. “Let me help you with your luggage, Princess.” He offered.

“Why thank you, Lance.” Coran responded, following in her wake, burdened with several large bags and a trunk.

“Why do you need so much stuff?” Lance boggled as Coran began to transfer the numerous items of luggage not noticing the way his legs began to buckle under the weight. “You said it was only for a couple of quintents!”

“Well…” Allura began to count on her fingers. “…there’s the receiving reception on our arrival. The formal dinner…the ball in our honour…”

“You’re going to a PARTY!?” Lance gaped.

“This is no party, young paladin.” Coran shook his head. “The Natsua are a highly sophisticated and extremely particular society. Everything they do is very precise and beautifully executed. The Princess needs a different, formal ensemble for each event planned.”

“Seriously?” Lance quirked a brow. He sidled up to Keith as gracefully as his over-burdened arms would allow. “So what are you wearing?”

“We have a dress uniform.” Keith informed him, taking the first of Allura’s numerous items of luggage from the pile to stow with his own.

“We do?” Lance’s eyes widened. He switched direction, leaning over towards Allura.

“I so need to see a picture of him in that.” He whispered.

Allura covered her mouth to stifle a giggle.

“I’ll see what I can do,”

~~~~~~

Allura had started giving him a briefing on the Natsua as soon as they’d left the castle. They were a highly traditional, extremely reclusive people. That was why they were coming as a small envoy, in a pod, rather than a heavily armed battleship. The fact that they had invited them to broker an alliance was a huge honour. Or they had come to realise just what a threat Zarkon and his empire had become and were afraid to face him alone. She found it hard to refer to their enemy as ‘the Galra’ now. She had come to trust Kilovan and the Blade of Mamora to have their back. And the paladin besides her. She had come to trust him with so much more.

“They’re probably roughly Pidge’s height.” She was saying. “With similar biology to both of ours, though there skin is of a greenish hue-”

Violet eyes slid towards her.

“So…they’re little…green…men…?” He summarised.

“Basically.” She nodded, a little surprised when he let out a soft chuckle.

“The others would love that.” He smirked. “There’s this sort of stereotype back home about aliens being little green men.” He explained when he saw her frown.

A soft alarm began to chime throughout the cockpit.

“Look’s like we’re coming up on coordinates.” He said as he began to throttle back on the engines. The pod could move quite fast, though space outside hadn’t became a blur like the hyperspace travel or warp speed he remembered from popular culture.

“Welcome to Natsu, Princess.” He said in a hushed tone.

He was still awed whenever he first laid eyes on a new world. He has expected them all to be spherical, like the ones in the Solar System he’d studied since childhood. He’d never expected to see any that circled Earth’s Sun, except perhaps through a telescope, let alone visit ones he’d never known existed. And of course he still wasn’t sure how he felt about being able to call one of them home. Sort of.

Natsu was a relatively small planet of the same blue-green of Earth, though it leaned more towards the green. It was surrounded by bands of suspended rock that reminded him of the rings of Saturn, though they were more arcs, curving out in opposite directions on either side of the planet, like the graceful arms of a spinning dancer.

He was so mesmerised that he didn’t notice the approaching ship until the pod was rocked by a laser blast.

“What the hell?” He muttered, instantly on the defensive. He quickly turned the pod, a second blast flashed harmlessly across the pod’s bow.

“Why the hell are they shooting at as?” He snapped. “I thought we were invited.”

He slammed the throttle forward and the pod leapt towards the planet.

“That’s not a Natsua craft.” Allura noted as it swung about to follow them.

“I suppose that one’s not either?” Keith jerked his head towards a second craft coming in fast from starboard. He twisted the stick to avoid a blast from its weapons.

“No.” Allura confirmed as she began to strap herself in. She had a feeling it was about to become a bumpy flight.

“I knew I should have brought Red.” Keith growled. “We’ve got no weapons on this thing.” The lion would make short work of these-

Another shot grazed an engine. Now there were three of them. All very different. All with the same intent.

“They’re not trying to kill us.” He realised as he spun the pod to avoid another barrage. “They’re aiming for the engines. They’re trying to capture us.”

“They’re not Galra.” Allura noted.

“Yeah.” He agreed. “But we’ve had non-Galra willing to sell us out before.”

He was skimming the upper atmosphere now. Coming in at this kind of speed was not a good idea, but their pursuers weren’t giving them much of a choice.

“I’m sorry, Princess.” He grated. “But I may not be able to return this pod to the dealership in its original condition.”

He pushed the pod into a nosedive. He could hear the hull groaning in protest as several alarms began to blare their agreement. One hand danced over the controls as the other held fast to the throttle to hold their insane descent. The alarms were silenced, though the associated lights still glared at him. The blasts of their pursuers flashed past them. Apparently they weren’t giving up.

They broke through the cloud cover and both let out an involuntary gasp of alarm as the form of a massive tree loomed out of the mist at them. Keith quickly banked left, then right, then right again to avoid collision. He was dimly aware of an explosion off the port stern. Someone hadn’t been so lucky.

A wicked smirk lit up the paladin’s features.

“Okay, boys. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

He proceeded to lead the remaining attackers on a merry dance through the trees. The second he dispatched quite quickly when they grazed one of the enormous trees and lost an entire engine. The third however. The third was good. He matched him move for move.

Allura stared at him, her knuckles whitened as she clung on for dear life. She continually thanked the Ancients for giving her the foresight to strap herself in. She had known he was a good pilot, but she couldn’t have imagined the extent of his skill. It bordered on supernatural. She could see why the red had chosen him. He really did operate on instinct as much as skill. No wonder he was so loathe to give the lion up.

She found herself suddenly flung forward in her seat as he pulled back on the stick, bringing the pod to an almost complete stop. The pursuing craft sped past them. Keith’s eyes narrowed dangerously as he studied it. It was a fairly sleek design, close to twice their size, it had forward lasers and a rotating turret mounted on it’s underside. It had, he noted with some satisfaction, sustained a fair amount of damage already. He glanced to port and starboard as the other pilot brought the ship around. Making his decision, Keith banked to his right and slammed the throttle forward, taking off like a bullet, heading down out of the treetops and into the undergrowth.

He was skimming so close to the ground now if Allura were to focus on the blur of browns and greens that flashed by it would have made her feel a nausea of Hunk-sized proportions. So she didn’t. She did scream however when he flipped their craft onto its side to fit through a tiny gap between two giant trees. Their pursuer wasn’t so lucky. A horrible crunching noise filled the air as the belly mounted gun dug into the one of the trees, effectively wedging the entire craft between the two.

Keith let out an uncharacteristic whoop of triumphant delight. She supposed it was well deserved. It was cut short, however, when their little pod began to shudder and a metallic groan echoed throughout the cockpit. The starboard engine began to stutter and pop, thick black smoke beginning to billow from it, obscuring the trees.

“Better find a place to set down.” He muttered, bringing up a topographical scan of the surrounding area. She nodded her agreement, currently unable to steady her breath enough to speak. Favouring the failing engine he banked to port. The pod was slowing, though it had nothing to do with his piloting. The whole craft was beginning to falter. He began to flip switches, initiating the landing cycle as the trees began to thin. They came out into a small clearing, edged on one side with a cliff, a dizzying drop to a bright blue body of water below. He was just about to set it down on the rocky ground when the damaged engine gave out. The remaining engine was not enough to keep them airborne so it dropped the last few meters to the ground and all the controls went dark. There was one blinking light on the console. The automatic distress single. He doubted it would reach the Castle, but it might reach the Natsua. It would certainly reach their attackers. They couldn’t stay here.

He unbuckled his restraints and ignited his jet pack. He offered his hand to help Allura disembark, her flight-suit wasn’t equipped with a propulsion system. He landed them by the wrecked engine. It was barely even smoking now.

“Can you fix it?” She asked.

“Short answer? No.” He sighed. “I was enrolled as a pilot. We weren’t taught a lot of mechanical repairs or engineering.” He didn’t think he needed to tell her that his attitude had gotten him expelled, so even if they had those courses he hadn’t been there long enough to take them. “Hunk MIGHT be able to get it going enough to limp to the Natsua, but I don’t know if he’d even be able to pull it off.”

“So we’re stranded.” It wasn’t a question. Allura balled her fist on her hips and glared about at their surroundings.

“It certainly looks that way.” He sighed, watching as she walked over to the edge of the precipice and gave the water below an equally scathing glare. He didn’t really blame her for being angry. Things definitely weren’t going according to plan. If the Natsua were as particular as he’d been told this was not the best way to start negotiations with them.

“I wouldn’t recommend staying here, though.” He said. Logic, and training, dictated that the best course of action would be to stay with the pod, to wait there until a retrieval unit arrived. “Our new friends might be able to catch up with us.”

He brought up the computer display in his left gauntlet. Pidge had made certain that all the information pertaining to their mission had been loaded to it.

“We’re about a hundred clicks from where we’re supposed to be.” He read from it. “We can walk it in less than a day. My jet pack should get us there in half that.”

She sighed.

“I guess we better get going, then.”

He looked up as he deactivated his computer display, his eyes widening, his jaw going slack as he took in something behind her.

Allura frowned at his expression. “What are you…?” She turned to follow his gaze, her expression quickly coming to mirror his. A pair of writhing, tendril-like appendages had snaked up out if the water below, hovered for a moment, then wrapped themselves around her to drag her over the edge of the cliff.

#kalluraweek2k17 #vld keith #vld allura

[amererk]

Twilight is behind her and now she is a European arthouse darling and a hit on Saturday Night Live, says Jonathan Dean

‘Kristen Stewart is perhaps the best film actress under 30.” I wrote that last year, after an interview with her Twilight co-star and former boyfriend, Robert Pattinson — and this year, I am totally convinced I am right. But it turns out the vampire saga’s fans remain faithful, and some devotees of Pattinson, after the couple’s split, aren’t exactly fond of his ex. My social-media mentions were full of fury for a month. “Because they disagreed with you?” Stewart laughs, when I tell her all this. “Because they were, like, ‘F*** her?’” Exactly. If you have only seen the actress mope adolescently through the Twilight saga, you may think the above claim quite mad. Move on to her most recent work, though, and you will discover a 26-year-old who has evolved into a presence so self-assured, she is now an arthouse star, especially in Europe: the first American woman to have won a César, the French equivalent of the Oscars. Another preconception is that she is all surly hunch and millennial cynicism, hostile to press inquiries after they zeroed in on her relationship with a married director. Her image is kohl-eyed, cool, aloof, and it’s so entrenched that one review of her recent hosting of the satirical American television series Saturday Night Live called her “surprisingly charming”. Does she understand why? “One hundred per cent.” (That’s a chatty affirmation she uses a lot.) In truth, though, Stewart is as engaging to talk to as Tom Hanks, the actor everyone says is the best to interview in the business. On her right arm is a tattoo of the light at the top of Picasso’s Guernica, inked on to remind her that we can overcome darkness if we flip the switch. She seems to be all glow herself these days, and it’s mostly thanks to her professional achievements. “I feel so sturdy on my feet right now,” she says, at her usual fast clip, proud of a run of indie roles that has put her back where she began, and belongs

First came 2014’s Clouds of Sils Maria, in which Stewart more than held her own against the Oscar winner Juliette Binoche, in a more or less two-hander about a young woman’s challenging relationship with her older boss, a sensitive actress. That same year, with moody tenderness, she played Julianne Moore’s daughter in the Alzheimer’s drama Still Alice. Next, there was a small role as an ambitious young lawyer struggling towards greater things in Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women (just released), one of those films that starts with sad sex and never cheers up.

Best of all is Personal Shopper, the second film she has made with the French director Olivier Assayas, after Clouds of Sils Maria, and her first lead in years. It is difficult to describe. At its most basic, Personal Shopper is a darkly lit adult ghost story about a woman who borrows a lot of high-end fashion for her celebrity boss — The Others meets The Devil Wears Prada. Stewart stands in a haunted house saying “Lewis” a lot. Lewis is her recently dead twin brother, and she is waiting for his spirit to manifest itself in Paris. Both are mediums. To cope with the tension of this binary life, Stewart’s improbably named Maureen smokes lots and rides around town on a moped, looking cool. She receives anonymous texts that say things like “I know you”, which is unsettling enough, especially when you’re looking for a dead sibling. How, I ask, can the film be pitched in one-line Hollywood style? Stewart laughs and, totally believably, says she’s not one for brevity. She barely stops talking during the interview. “It’s about a girl who finds she is suddenly a foreigner, in every sense of the word, not just geographically, but in life. She’s gone through this traumatic event, and it starts an existential crisis, where she questions everything that’s real. She feels completely alone.”

Hold on. Is she still talking about Personal Shopper, or Twilight? Especially her personal experience of making that juggernaut, which brought in nearly $3.4bn at the box office worldwide and took over her life for five films. No, she says, she is not talking about the latter. “I really never felt bogged down by Twilight,” she starts and, rather than leave it at that, continues chewing it over, piling sentence upon sentence

Every step turns you into the person you are, and yeah, [Twilight] shaped me enormously. Not just those movies, but the subsequent effect. It made my involvement in Sils Maria more interesting, for sure — ironic and meta.” You mean the line when your character says, “It’s celebrity news. It’s fun”? Or when she mocks a blockbuster for having werewolves in it, as Twilight did? “One hundred per cent,” she replies. “Those lines in someone else’s mouth would have been interesting, but not, like, ‘Whoa. She really knows what she’s talking about!’” Some of the film’s backers were surprised, Assayas says, when he first chose to work with this Californian tween idol. But he emphasises her courage, shooting in the Dolomites, where it is “not exciting after sunset”, far from home, surrounded by a foreign crew.

European arthouse could be seen as Stewart’s very own panic room, the title of the breakthrough film she made when she was 11, with Jodie Foster. It provides a refuge for her. Assayas agrees that she did seem relieved to be on a film like his; he then goes on to bracket her with the greats. “I’d compare Kristen to Harriet Andersson,” he says of one of Ingmar Bergman’s favourite (and coolest) leads. “There’s no greater compliment.” The best opportunities for me are whenever I feel a little bit scared

On screen, she has perfected a bold yet vulnerable style, all tilted head and low-key murmuring. In Personal Shopper, it is employed to such a captivating extent that, when she says the mad line “She vomited this ectoplasm”, you nod along, rather than cackle. She is, simply, not a showy actress. Foster nailed it when she said: “Kristen isn’t interested in blurting her emotions in front of her.” So this career renaissance in the subtler territory of European art cinema makes total sense

“I’m used to people getting awards for extreme performances,” she says of her surprise César win for Sils Maria. “In the States, it’s rare for people to get critical attention for things that are so quiet. Sometimes, you don’t show how you’re feeling, and that actually speaks louder than shoving it down someone’s throat.” Her next project, though, is not obviously arthouse: Underwater, a film talked up as an oceanic take on Michael Bay’s Armageddon. It’s an odd fit for her, perhaps, but she compares the depth of the story to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and insists it won’t be a blockbuster that “stops with the concept, so you think, ‘Cool, that was a great concept’”. Maybe something of this scale is the only logical next step for her. This is an actress, after all, who went to the middle of nowhere up a mountain with a pack of foreigners, straight from being mollycoddled in one of the biggest franchises of all time. She wants to surprise. “I want to push myself,” she says. “In my life, when I’m emotional about something, I’m an extreme person. Subtlety is not my go-to. I just don’t want to fake anything, but the best opportunities for me are whenever I feel a little bit scared.”

Her recent SNL performance featured one sketch, inspired by the sapphic French film Blue Is the Warmest Colour, in which she romped in a kitchen with another woman. Earlier in the show, she had beamed as she told the watching millions that she was “so gay”. She came out in public last summer, and the young star who quivered through half a decade of the Twilight vampire saga, increasingly withdrawn, seemed a completely new woman — a finished painting instead of a work-in-progress. “I wasn’t hiding anything,” she says, when asked why she is now open about her love life whereas before, dating Pattinson, she stayed silent. “I didn’t talk about my first relationships that went public because I wanted things that are mine to be mine. I hated it that details of my life were being turned into a commodity and peddled around the world. But considering I had so many eyes on me, I suddenly realised [my private life] affects a greater number of people than just me. It was an opportunity to surrender a bit of what was mine, to make even one other person feel good about themselves. “If it didn’t seem like a relevant topic,” she continues, her tone both poised and passionate, keeping up a melodic flow, “like something that needed help, I would have kept my life private for ever. But then I can’t walk outside holding somebody’s hand, as I’m followed everywhere. When I was dating Rob, the public were the enemy — and that is no way to live. It wasn’t this grand statement, ‘I was so confused! Now I’ve realised who I am!’ I have not been struggling.” She laughs. “It just seemed important, and topical.” I would be hard pushed to name a more confident interviewee. In January, she screened her directorial debut, Come Swim, a 17-minute oddity that arrived with a research paper entitled Bringing Impressionism to Life with Neural Style Transfer. You just didn’t get that with Twilight. While her future will be on both sides of the camera, she also wants to go on stage one day. It was the “human energy” from the Saturday Night Live crowd that persuaded her she may be cut out for live performance. Another appeal is that theatre is the ultimate challenge for a Los Angeles native born to entertainment-industry parents and raised on that city’s business: the next big test. She has been reading Sam Shepard and loves the way that setting can be implied in his work, rather than having to be there for everyone to see. Which, in fact, rather neatly describes her acting. Imagine her in a Pinter play. She is nothing like I expected, which was that there would be periods of silence and questions unanswered. She is friends with Patti Smith and has been called the female James Dean by the actress/rocker Juliette Lewis. That sort of support and acquaintance is intimidating. Yet she is friendly, honest, humble and, perhaps most impressive, unflappably polite, especially about Twilight, despite the continued bile spat at her by fans who think, in various ways, she has wronged them. “I don’t view the whole Twilight blow-up as being generally traumatic,” she says, delicately. “It would take someone with a really unhealthy amount of ego to be upset that everyone doesn’t love them. It would be silly to say I don’t care what people think of my work and who I am, but stuff is polarising, period.” Back to that line about her being “surprisingly charming”. Does she know why people thought she was distant? “I’d definitely lost my nerve,” she replies. “I used to try too hard, because I was nervous. I felt so uncomfortable addressing the public. I’ve just grown out of it.”

[ladyquinzy]

Kristen Stewart is back from the undead

Twilight is behind her and now she is a European arthouse darling and a hit on Saturday Night Live, says Jonathan Dean

‘Kristen Stewart is perhaps the best film actress under 30.” I wrote that last year, after an interview with her Twilight co-star and former boyfriend, Robert Pattinson — and this year, I am totally convinced I am right. But it turns out the vampire saga’s fans remain faithful, and some devotees of Pattinson, after the couple’s split, aren’t exactly fond of his ex. My social-media mentions were full of fury for a month. “Because they disagreed with you?” Stewart laughs, when I tell her all this. “Because they were, like, ‘F*** her?’” Exactly.

If you have only seen the actress mope adolescently through the Twilight saga, you may think the above claim quite mad. Move on to her most recent work, though, and you will discover a 26-year-old who has evolved into a presence so self-assured, she is now an arthouse star, especially in Europe: the first American woman to have won a César, the French equivalent of the Oscars. Another preconception is that she is all surly hunch and millennial cynicism, hostile to press inquiries after they zeroed in on her relationship with a married director. Her image is kohl-eyed, cool, aloof, and it’s so entrenched that one review of her recent hosting of the satirical American television series Saturday Night Live called her “surprisingly charming”.

Does she understand why? “One hundred per cent.” (That’s a chatty affirmation she uses a lot.) In truth, though, Stewart is as engaging to talk to as Tom Hanks, the actor everyone says is the best to interview in the business. On her right arm is a tattoo of the light at the top of Picasso’s Guernica, inked on to remind her that we can overcome darkness if we flip the switch. She seems to be all glow herself these days, and it’s mostly thanks to her professional achievements.

“I feel so sturdy on my feet right now,” she says, at her usual fast clip, proud of a run of indie roles that has put her back where she began, and belongs.

First came 2014’s Clouds of Sils Maria, in which Stewart more than held her own against the Oscar winner Juliette Binoche, in a more or less two-hander about a young woman’s challenging relationship with her older boss, a sensitive actress. That same year, with moody tenderness, she played Julianne Moore’s daughter in the Alzheimer’s drama Still Alice. Next, there was a small role as an ambitious young lawyer struggling towards greater things in Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women (just released), one of those films that starts with sad sex and never cheers up.

Best of all is Personal Shopper, the second film she has made with the French director Olivier Assayas, after Clouds of Sils Maria, and her first lead in years. It is difficult to describe. At its most basic, Personal Shopper is a darkly lit adult ghost story about a woman who borrows a lot of high-end fashion for her celebrity boss — The Others meets The Devil Wears Prada. Stewart stands in a haunted house saying “Lewis” a lot. Lewis is her recently dead twin brother, and she is waiting for his spirit to manifest itself in Paris. Both are mediums. To cope with the tension of this binary life, Stewart’s improbably named Maureen smokes lots and rides around town on a moped, looking cool. She receives anonymous texts that say things like “I know you”, which is unsettling enough, especially when you’re looking for a dead sibling.

How, I ask, can the film be pitched in one-line Hollywood style? Stewart laughs and, totally believably, says she’s not one for brevity. She barely stops talking during the interview. “It’s about a girl who finds she is suddenly a foreigner, in every sense of the word, not just geographically, but in life. She’s gone through this traumatic event, and it starts an existential crisis, where she questions everything that’s real. She feels completely alone.”

Hold on. Is she still talking about Personal Shopper, or Twilight? Especially her personal experience of making that juggernaut, which brought in nearly $3.4bn at the box office worldwide and took over her life for five films. No, she says, she is not talking about the latter. “I really never felt bogged down by Twilight,” she starts and, rather than leave it at that, continues chewing it over, piling sentence upon sentence.

“Every step turns you into the person you are, and yeah, [Twilight] shaped me enormously. Not just those movies, but the subsequent effect. It made my involvement in Sils Maria more interesting, for sure — ironic and meta.” You mean the line when your character says, “It’s celebrity news. It’s fun”? Or when she mocks a blockbuster for having werewolves in it, as Twilight did? “One hundred per cent,” she replies. “Those lines in someone else’s mouth would have been interesting, but not, like, ‘Whoa. She really knows what she’s talking about!’”

Some of the film’s backers were surprised, Assayas says, when he first chose to work with this Californian tween idol. But he emphasises her courage, shooting in the Dolomites, where it is “not exciting after sunset”, far from home, surrounded by a foreign crew.

European arthouse could be seen as Stewart’s very own panic room, the title of the breakthrough film she made when she was 11, with Jodie Foster. It provides a refuge for her. Assayas agrees that she did seem relieved to be on a film like his; he then goes on to bracket her with the greats. “I’d compare Kristen to Harriet Andersson,” he says of one of Ingmar Bergman’s favourite (and coolest) leads. “There’s no greater compliment.”

The best opportunities for me are whenever I feel a little bit scared

On screen, she has perfected a bold yet vulnerable style, all tilted head and low-key murmuring. In Personal Shopper, it is employed to such a captivating extent that, when she says the mad line “She vomited this ectoplasm”, you nod along, rather than cackle. She is, simply, not a showy actress. Foster nailed it when she said: “Kristen isn’t interested in blurting her emotions in front of her.” So this career renaissance in the subtler territory of European art cinema makes total sense.

“I’m used to people getting awards for extreme performances,” she says of her surprise César win for Sils Maria. “In the States, it’s rare for people to get critical attention for things that are so quiet. Sometimes, you don’t show how you’re feeling, and that actually speaks louder than shoving it down someone’s throat.”

Her next project, though, is not obviously arthouse: Underwater, a film talked up as an oceanic take on Michael Bay’s Armageddon. It’s an odd fit for her, perhaps, but she compares the depth of the story to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and insists it won’t be a blockbuster that “stops with the concept, so you think, ‘Cool, that was a great concept’”. Maybe something of this scale is the only logical next step for her. This is an actress, after all, who went to the middle of nowhere up a mountain with a pack of foreigners, straight from being mollycoddled in one of the biggest franchises of all time. She wants to surprise.

“I want to push myself,” she says. “In my life, when I’m emotional about something, I’m an extreme person. Subtlety is not my go-to. I just don’t want to fake anything, but the best opportunities for me are whenever I feel a little bit scared.”

Her recent SNL performance featured one sketch, inspired by the sapphic French film Blue Is the Warmest Colour, in which she romped in a kitchen with another woman. Earlier in the show, she had beamed as she told the watching millions that she was “so gay”. She came out in public last summer, and the young star who quivered through half a decade of the Twilight vampire saga, increasingly withdrawn, seemed a completely new woman — a finished painting instead of a work-in-progress.

“I wasn’t hiding anything,” she says, when asked why she is now open about her love life whereas before, dating Pattinson, she stayed silent. “I didn’t talk about my first relationships that went public because I wanted things that are mine to be mine. I hated it that details of my life were being turned into a commodity and peddled around the world. But considering I had so many eyes on me, I suddenly realised [my private life] affects a greater number of people than just me. It was an opportunity to surrender a bit of what was mine, to make even one other person feel good about themselves.

“If it didn’t seem like a relevant topic,” she continues, her tone both poised and passionate, keeping up a melodic flow, “like something that needed help, I would have kept my life private for ever. But then I can’t walk outside holding somebody’s hand, as I’m followed everywhere. When I was dating Rob, the public were the enemy — and that is no way to live. It wasn’t this grand statement, ‘I was so confused! Now I’ve realised who I am!’ I have not been struggling.”

She laughs. “It just seemed important, and topical.” I would be hard pushed to name a more confident interviewee.

In January, she screened her directorial debut, Come Swim, a 17-minute oddity that arrived with a research paper entitled Bringing Impressionism to Life with Neural Style Transfer. You just didn’t get that with Twilight. While her future will be on both sides of the camera, she also wants to go on stage one day.

It was the “human energy” from the Saturday Night Live crowd that persuaded her she may be cut out for live performance. Another appeal is that theatre is the ultimate challenge for a Los Angeles native born to entertainment-industry parents and raised on that city’s business: the next big test. She has been reading Sam Shepard and loves the way that setting can be implied in his work, rather than having to be there for everyone to see. Which, in fact, rather neatly describes her acting. Imagine her in a Pinter play.

She is nothing like I expected, which was that there would be periods of silence and questions unanswered. She is friends with Patti Smith and has been called the female James Dean by the actress/rocker Juliette Lewis. That sort of support and acquaintance is intimidating. Yet she is friendly, honest, humble and, perhaps most impressive, unflappably polite, especially about Twilight, despite the continued bile spat at her by fans who think, in various ways, she has wronged them.

“I don’t view the whole Twilight blow-up as being generally traumatic,” she says, delicately. “It would take someone with a really unhealthy amount of ego to be upset that everyone doesn’t love them. It would be silly to say I don’t care what people think of my work and who I am, but stuff is polarising, period.”

Back to that line about her being “surprisingly charming”. Does she know why people thought she was distant? “I’d definitely lost my nerve,” she replies. “I used to try too hard, because I was nervous. I felt so uncomfortable addressing the public. I’ve just grown out of it.”

Other SNL favourites

Tina Fey: Sarah Palin Who could forget her killer bloopers, looking the spit of the candidate alongside Amy Poehler’s Hillary? Clinton has guested, too — as a bartender.

Alec Baldwin: Donald Trump Will his Trump appear at the irreverent White House Correspondents’ dinner next month if the prez boycotts it? Rude. Not to be confused with the real Trump, who hosted a November 2016 show.

Melissa McCarthy: Sean Spicer SNL’s new star guest, as the pugnacious press secretary who explains his briefings with visual aids, especially Moana dolls.

Al Gore: Al Gore In 2006, Gore gave a TV address from a parallel universe in which he was the 43rd president, fixed global warming and solved the oil crisis (there was too much of it).

Will Ferrell: George W Bush His Dubya appeared in the 2000 presidential debates with Gore (Darrell Hammond), answering “Pass” to tough questions. Asked to describe his campaign in one word, Bush comes up with “strategery”. Gore chooses “lockbox”.

Personal Shopper opens on Mar 17; Certain Women is reviewed in this section

@JonathanDean_

#Source: #http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/kristen-stewart-film-personal-shopper-twilight-robert-pattinson-rgfwrc76r?_=_

[ntrending]

Astronomers just made one giant leap in solving a bizarre cosmic mystery

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/astronomers-just-made-one-giant-leap-in-solving-a-bizarre-cosmic-mystery/

Astronomers just made one giant leap in solving a bizarre cosmic mystery

A view from CSIRO’s Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope antenna 29, with the phased array feed receiver in the center, Southern Cross on the left and the Moon on the right. (CSIRO/Alex Cherney/)

What comes to mind when you try to picture the most powerful object in the universe? Maybe an atomic bomb, or an ultra-powerful sun, right? Well, let me introduce you to the Fast Radio Burst: a strange phenomenon that stretches for just a few thousandths of a second, but can emit more energy than the sun does in 80 years. Thousands of FRBs flash throughout space at any given moment, yet for something so ubiquitous and so powerful, we know almost bupkis about how and why they’re formed. Much of that has to do with the fact that, since first discovering them in 2007, scientists have never been completely sure where they’re coming from. Are they expelled by black holes? Are they extensions of erratic stars running amok? Are they signs of intelligent extraterrestrials trying to communicate with us?

We’ve just taken a massive step forward in resolving that question. In a study published Thursday in Science, an international team reports the first-ever localization the origin point of a non-repeating FRB. “This was the first [FRB] where we both found it and had the right type of data to localize it,” says Keith Bannister, an astronomer with Australia’s Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and the lead author of the new paper. “We had to build what we called the ‘live action replay’ mode in the telescope to localize this FRB.”

That ‘live action replay’ system could be the groundbreaking innovation we need to finally uncover which bizarre cosmic phenomena are producing and firing off FRBs into the rest of the universe.

“It’s a really great discovery,” says Brian Metzger, an astrophysicist at Columbia University in New York City, who was not involved with the study. “I don’t want to compare them directly, but in some ways, a localization is worth 100 events where we don’t know from where they’re coming from. There’s so much context you can get.”

The focus is on FRB 180924, now the 86th FRB detected by astronomers. Such signals are notoriously transient, and this one was just 1.3 milliseconds long—barely a blip to the human mind.

Theories on what’s producing these signals include conventional explanations like black holes or neutron stars or highly energetic supernovae, along with more offbeat options like blitzars (a hypothetical version of a pulsar) or dark matter collapses. And yes, sometimes people suggest they might come from aliens. One of the most lauded theories in recent years was pitched by Metzger and a couple of his colleagues, who suggested that the FRBs were effects of hyperactive flares from young magnetars (neutron stars accompanied by extra-powerful magnetic fields).

To be fair, this is actually not the first FRB ever. In 2017, scientists managed to pinpoint the home galaxy for a repeating FRB, FRB 121102 (one of only two observed on record). While still a difficult task, the repeated detections gave astronomers clues for where to look, and they ended up tracking it down to a weak dwarf galaxy 3 billion light-years away with a high rate of star formation.

As you can imagine, a one-off FRB is even more difficult to source. “The key is to have a telescope that can both find FRBs and is big enough, in terms of distance between antennas, to localize them,” says Bannister. “Previous telescopes have had one or the other, but not both.”

CSIRO has a trick up its sleeve that makes this task possible: the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), a 36-dish radio telescope array located in Western Australia. In the past, all of ASKAP’s dishes were typically pointing in different directions, throwing a wrench into efforts to more accurately characterize the signal, including its point of origin.

Obviously, the simple remedy to this problem was to rearrange ASKAP’s dishes so they all pointed toward the same part of the sky. But Bannister and his team also took extra steps into improving the systems that make FRB data collection possible, customizing the hardware so it could make a billion different measurements per second, and creating novel software that could crunch those numbers in real-time.

The Milky Way galaxy stretches above the core group of CSIRO’s ASKAP. (CSIRO/Alex Cherney/)

So here’s how the “live action replay” system works: once ASKAP detects an FRB, data collection halts and the software proceeds to download all the raw data collected by each dish in the last three seconds. The original signal will actually arrive at each radio dish at different times, and astronomers can use these fraction-of-a-nanosecond lags to assess the position of the FRB with a precision of about 0.1 arcseconds—“equivalent to a human hair at a distance of 200 meters,” says Bannister.

The team then imaged the origin point and measured out the distance using three of Earth’s most powerful ground-based telescopes (The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, the Keck telescope in Hawaii, and the Gemini South telescope in Chile).

As a result, we now know FRB 180924 sits on the outer rim of a galaxy 3.6 billion light years away in the constellation Grus, comparable to the size, shape, and luminosity of the Milky Way. As with other FRBs, interstellar gas caused FRB 180924 to slow down occasionally, through an effect called “dispersion.” Astronomers can actually use dispersion as a way to gauge what sort of gas and how much of it an FRB has zipped through on its way to Earth, giving us some sense as to what kind of matter lies between point A and point B and what kind of journey the signal took.

“For a non-repeating FRB, we get one shot to find it and measure its position, and the ASKAP team has done it beautifully,” says Shriharsh Tendulkar, an astronomer at McGill University in Montreal who was not involved in the study.

There is some confusion arising in trying to reconcile this new origin point with the dwarf galaxy that’s home to FRB 121102. it’s hard to fathom both galaxies producing the same type of inexplicably high-energy phenomena when the difference in size and luminosity between them is 1,000-fold.

“If anything, this discovery has thrown open more questions,” says Bannister. “We now know that FRBs can happen in quite passive parts of the universe. We previously thought you needed a lot of vigorous star formation to make FRBs.” He thinks the new findings disfavor a few models: the fact that FRB 180924 is coming from the outskirts of its galaxy raises doubts about the theory that supermassive black holes lodged at the center of galaxies are the usual source. Very young stars, like young magnetars formed after supernovae, are probably counted out as well, as are any explanations that don’t require any sort of galactic body. “We have to go back to the drawing board to understand how FRBs can happen in such a wide range of environments.”

Not everyone is convinced the new findings necessitate a radical shift in our current FRB theories. James Cordes, an astronomer at Cornell University who did not participate in the study, thinks it’s still a safe bet that neutron stars, particularly magnetars, are the most likely source for FRB production. The most major implication, he says, has to do with the theory that FRBs are formed in super luminous supernovae that are preferentially formed in dwarf galaxies with low concentrations of metals. “That may still be true to some extent, but the new FRB and its galaxy present a possible counter example,” he says.

There’s also the possibility that repeating and non-repeating FRBs are simply governed by different models. “Finding a young magnetar in the outskirts of a massive galaxy with old stars is like finding a whale in the Sahara,” says Tendulkar. “It is very early in the field of course, but this might suggest that repeating and non-repeating FRBs come from completely different origins,” and that the magnetar model only holds true for the latter.

Metzger himself doesn’t think the findings exclude magnetars outright. It may just be that magnetars are more diverse and form in more cosmic scenarios than previously presumed. “There may be more possible ways to produce these FRB-producing magnetars,” he says. “And nature might have more than one way to produce a fast radio burst.”

We’ll only answer those questions once we collect more FRB data, and it’s quite clear Bannister and his team have paved a new path for probing these phenomena in great depth. Localizing the origin point provides a much narrower window for identifying what objects at the scene of the crime could fire things off. More immediately, scientists can use FRB dispersion as a more robust way to map out the distribution of matter throughout the universe—which ought to be a boon for answering some cosmological questions. “This type of approach is the wave of the future,” says Cordes.

(Just don’t hold your hopes out for anyone to come out and say it’s aliens. It’s never aliens.)

Written By Neel V. Patel

#Technology

[ciathyzareposts]

Controlling the Spice, Part 1: Dune on Page and Screen

Frank Herbert in 1982.

In 1965, two works changed the face of genre publishing forever. Ace Books that year came out with an unauthorized paperback edition of an obscure decade-old fantasy trilogy called The Lord of the Rings, written by a pipe-smoking old Oxford don named J.R.R. Tolkien, and promptly sold hundreds of thousands of copies of it. And the very same year, Chilton Books, a house better known for its line of auto-repair manuals than for its fiction, became the publisher of last resort for Frank Herbert’s epic science-fiction novel Dune. While Dune‘s raw sales weren’t initially quite so impressive as those of The Lord of the Rings, it was recognized immediately by science-fiction connoisseurs as the major work it was, winning its year’s Nebula and Hugo Awards for Best Novel (the latter award alongside Roger Zelazny’s This Immortal).

It may be that you can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can to a large extent judge the importance of The Lord of the Rings and Dune by their thickness. Genre novels had traditionally been slim things, coming in at well under 300 pocket-sized mass-market-paperback pages. These two novels, by contrast, were big, sprawling works. The writing on their pages as well was heavier than the typical pulpy tale of adventure. Tolkien’s and Herbert’s novels felt utterly disconnected from trends or commercial considerations, redolent of myth and legend — sometimes, as plenty of critics haven’t hesitated to point out over the years, rather ponderously so. At a stroke, they changed readers’ and publishers’ perception of what a fantasy or science-fiction novel could be, and the world of genre publishing has never looked back.

In the years since 1965, almost as much has been written of Dune as The Lord of the Rings. Still, it’s new to us. And so, given that it suddenly became a very important name in computer games circa 1992, we should take the time now to look at what it is and where it came from.

At the time of Dune‘s publication, Frank Herbert was a 45-year-old newspaperman who had been dabbling in science fiction — his previous output had included one short novel and a couple of dozen short stories — since the early 1950s. He had first been inspired to write Dune by, appropriately enough, sand dunes. Eight years before the novel’s eventual publication, the San Francisco Examiner, the newspaper for which he wrote, sent him to Florence, Oregon, to write about government efforts to control the troublesomely shifting sand dunes just outside of town. It didn’t sound like the most exciting topic in the world, and, indeed, he never managed to turn it into an acceptable article. Yet he found the dunes themselves weirdly fascinating:

I had far too much for an article and far too much for a short story. So I didn’t know really what I had—but I had an enormous amount of data and avenues shooting off at all angles to get more… I finally saw that I had something enormously interesting going for me about the ecology of deserts, and it was, for a science-fiction writer anyway, an easy step from that to think: what if I had an entire planet that was desert?

The other great spark that led to Dune wasn’t a physical environment, nor for that matter a physical anything. It was a fascination with the messiah complex that has been with us through all of human history, even though it has seldom, Herbert believed, led us to much good. Somehow this theme just seemed to fit with a desert landscape; think of the Biblical Moses and the Exodus.

I had this theory that superheroes were disastrous for humans, that even if you postulated an infallible hero, the things this hero set in motion fell eventually into the hands of fallible mortals. What better way to destroy a civilization, society, or race than to set people into the wild oscillations which follow their turning over their judgment and decision-making faculties to a superhero?

Herbert worked on the novel off and on for years. Much of his time was spent in pure world-building — or, perhaps better said in this case, galaxy-building — creating a whole far-future history of humanity among the stars that would inform and enrich any specific stories he chose to set there; in this sense once again, his work is comparable to that of J.R.R. Tolkien, that most legendary of all builders of fantastic worlds. But his actual story mostly took place on the desert planet Arrakis, also known as Dune, the source of an invaluable “spice” known as melange, which confers upon humans improved health, longer life, and even paranormal prescience, while also allowing some of them to “fold space,” thus becoming the key to interstellar travel. As the novel’s most popular and apt marketing tagline would put it, “He who controls the spice controls the universe!” The spice has made this inhospitable world, where water is so scarce that people kill one another over the merest trickle of the stuff, whose deserts are roamed by gigantic carnivorous sandworms, the most valuable piece of real estate in the galaxy.

The novel centers on a war between two great trading houses, House Atreides and House Harkonnen, for control of the planet. The politics involved, not to mention the many military and espionage stratagems they employ against one another, are far too complex to describe here, but suffice to say that Herbert’s messiah figure emerges in the form of the young Paul Atreides, who wins over the nomadic Fremen who have long lived on Arrakis and leads them to victory against the ruthless Harkonnen.

Dune draws heavily from any number of terrestrial sources — from the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, from the more mystical end of Zen Buddhism, from the history of the Ottoman Empire and the myths and cultures of the Arab world. Nevertheless, the whole novel has an almost aggressively off-putting otherness about it. Herbert writes like a native of his novel’s time and place would, throwing strange jargon around with abandon and doing little to clarify the big-picture politics of the galaxy. And he shows no interest whatsoever in explaining that foremost obsession of so many other science-fiction writers, the technology and hardware that underpin his story. Like helicopters and diving suits to a writer of novels set in our own time and place, “ornithopters” and “stillsuits,” not to mention interstellar space travel, simply are to Dune‘s narrator. Meanwhile some of the bedrock philosophical concepts that presumably — hopefully! — unite most of Dune‘s readership — such ideas as fundamental human rights and democracy — don’t seem to exist at all in Herbert’s universe.

This wind of Otherness blowing through its pages makes Dune a famously difficult book to get started with. Those first 50 or 60 pages seem determined to slough off as many readers as possible. Unless you’re much smarter than I am, you’ll need to read Dune at least twice to come to anything like a full understanding of it. All of this has made it an extremely polarizing novel. Some readers love it with a passion; some, like yours truly here, find it easier to admire than to love; some, probably the majority, wind up shrugging their shoulders and walking away.

In light of this, and in light of the way that it broke every contemporary convention of genre fiction, beginning but by no means ending with its length, it’s not surprising that Frank Herbert found Dune to be a hard sell to publishers. The tropes were familiar enough in the abstract — a galaxy-spanning empire, interstellar war, a plucky young hero — but the novel, what with its lofty, affectedly formal prose, just didn’t read like science fiction was supposed to. Whilst allowing what amounted to a rough draft of the novel to appear in the magazine Analog Science Fiction in intermittent installments between December 1963 and May 1965, Herbert struggled to find an outlet for it in book form. The manuscript was finally accepted by Chilton only after being rejected by over twenty other publishers.

Dune in the first Chilton edition.

Those other publishers would all come to regret their decision. Dune took some time to gain traction with readers outside science fiction’s intelligentsia; Herbert didn’t make enough money from his fiction to quit his day job until 1969. But the oil embargoes of the 1970s gave this novel that was marked by such Otherness an odd sort of social immediacy, winning it many readers outside the still fairly insular community of written science fiction, making it a trendy book to have read or at least to say you had read. For many, it now read almost like a parable; it wasn’t hard to draw parallels between Arrakis’s spice and our own planet’s oil, nor between the Fremen of Arrakis and the cultures native to our own planet’s great oil-rich deserts. As critic Gwyneth Jones puts it, Dune is, among other things, a depiction of “scarcity, and the kind of human culture that scarcity produces.” It was embraced by many in the environmentalist movement, who read it it as a cautionary tale perfect for an era in which we earthbound humans were being forced to confront the reality that our planet’s resources are not infinite.

So, Dune eventually sold a staggering 12 million copies, becoming by most accounts the best-selling work of genre science fiction in history. And so we arrive at one final parallel to The Lord of the Rings: that of a book that was anything but an easy read in the conventional sense nevertheless selling in quantities to rival any beach-and-airport time-waster ever written. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose was famously described at the height of its 1980s popularity as a book that everyone owned and almost no one had ever managed to get all the way through. Dune may very well be the closest equivalent in genre fiction.

Herbert wrote five sequels to Dune, none of which are as commonly read or as highly regarded among critics as the first novel.1 One might say, however, that the second and third novels at least — Dune Messiah (1969) and Children of Dune (1976) — are actually necessary to appreciate Herbert’s original conception of the work in its entirety. He had always conceived of Dune as an epic tragedy in the Shakespearean sense, but reading the first book alone can obscure this fact. That book is, as the science-fiction scholar Damien Broderick puts it, typical pulp science fiction in at least one sense: it satisfies “an adolescent craving for an imaginary world in which heroes triumph by a preternatural blend of bravery, genius, and sci.” It’s only in the second and third books that Paul Atreides, the messiah figure, begins to fail, thus illustrating how a messiah can, as Herbert says, “destroy a civilization, society, or race.” That said, it would be the first novel alone with which almost all media adaptations would concern themselves, so it will also monopolize our attention in these articles.

Dune‘s success was such that it inevitably attracted the interest of the film industry. In 1972, the British producer Arthur P. Jacobs, the man behind the hugely successful Planet of the Apes films, acquired the rights to the series, but he had the misfortune to die the following year, before his plans had gotten beyond the storyboarding phase.

Yet Dune‘s trendiness only continued to grow, and interest in turning it into a film remained high among people who wouldn’t have been caught dead with any other science-fiction novel. In 1974, the rights passed from Jacob’s estate to Alejandro Jodorowsky, a transgressive Chilean director who claimed to once have raped one of his actresses in the name his Art. Manifesting an alarming obsession with the act, he now planned to do the same to Frank Herbert:

It was my Dune. When you make a picture, you must not respect the novel. It’s like you get married, no? You go with the wife, white, the woman is white. You take the woman, if you respect the woman, you will never have child. You need to open the costume and to… to rape the bride. And then you will have your picture. I was raping Frank Herbert, raping, like this! But with love, with love.

The would-be rape victim could only look on in disbelief: “He had so many personal, emotional axes to grind. I used to kid him, ‘Well, I know what your problem is, Alejandro. There is no way to horsewhip the pope in this story.’”

Jodorowsky planned to fill the cast and crew of the film, which would bear an estimated price tag of no less than $15 million, with flotsam washed up from the more dissipated end of the celebrity pool: Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson, Charlotte Rampling, Salvador Dali, Mick Jagger, Alain Delon. But, even in this heyday of Porno Chic, no one was willing to entrust such an erratic personality with such a budget, and the project fizzled out after Jodorwsky had blown through $2 million on scripts, concept art, and the drugs that were needed to fuel it all.

In the meantime, the possibilities for cinematic science fiction were being remade by a little film called Star Wars. Indeed, said film bears the clear stamp of Dune, especially in its first act, which takes place on a desert planet where water is the most precious commodity of all. And certainly the general dirty, lived-in look of Star Wars, so distinct from the antiseptic futures of most science fiction, owes much to Dune.

In the wake of Star Wars, Dino De Laurentiis, one of the great impresarios of post-war Italian cinema, acquired the rights to Dune from Jodorowsky’s would-be backers. He secured a tentative agreement with Ridley Scott, who was just finishing his breakthrough film Alien, to direct the picture. Rudy Wurlitzer, screenwriter of the classic western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, wrote three drafts of a script, but the financing necessary to begin production proved hard to secure. Thus in 1981 the cinematic rights to Dune, which Herbert had sold away for a span of nine years to Arthur P. Jacobs back in 1972, finally reverted to the author after their extended but fruitless world tour.

Yet De Laurentiis remained passionate about his Dune film — so much so that he immediately entered into negotiation with Herbert to reacquire the rights. Having watched various filmmakers come close to doing unspeakable things to his creation over the previous decade — even Wurlitzer’s recent script reportedly added an incest plot line involving Paul Atreides and his mother — Herbert insisted that he must at least be given the role of “advisor” to any future film. De Laurentiis agreed to this.

He was so eager to make a deal because Dune had suddenly looked to be back on, for real this time, just as the rights were expiring. His daughter, Raffealla De Laurentiis, had taken on the Dune film as something of a passion project of her own. She was riding high with a brand of blockbuster-oriented, action-heavy fare that was quite different from the films of her father’s generation. She was already in the midst of producing Conan the Barbarian, starring a buff if nearly inarticulate former bodybuilding champion named Arnold Schwarzenegger; it would become a major hit, launching Schwarzenegger’s career as Hollywood’s go-to action hero over the next couple of decades. But the Dune project would be a different sort of beast, a sort of synthesis of father and daughter’s priorities: a big-budget film with an art-film sensibility. For Ridley Scott had by this time moved on to other projects, and Dino and Raffealla De Laurentiis had a surprising new candidate in mind to direct their Dune.

David Lynch and Frank Herbert. Interviewers were constantly surprised at how normal Lynch looked and acted in person, in contrast to his bizarre films. Starlog magazine, for example, wrote of his “sculptured hair [and] jutting boyish features,” saying he was “extremely polite and well-mannered, the antithesis of enigma. Not a hint of phobic neurosis or deep-seated sexual maladjustment.”

David Lynch was already a beloved director of the art-film circuit, although his output to date had consisted of just two low-budget black-and-white movies: Eraserhead (1977), a surrealistic riot of a horror film, and The Elephant Man (1980), a mournful tragedy of prejudice and isolation. He would seem to stand about as far removed from the family-friendly fare of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg’s new Hollywood as it was possible to get. And yet that mainstream of filmmakers saw something — something having to do with his talent for striking, kinetic visuals — in the 36-year-old director. In fact, Lucas actually asked him whether he would be interested in directing the third Star Wars film, Return of the Jedi, whereupon Lynch rather peremptorily turned the offer down, saying he wasn’t interested in making sequels to other people’s films. But when Dino De Laurentiis approached him about Dune he was more receptive. Lynch:

Dino’s office called me and asked if I had ever read Dune. I thought they said “June.” I never read either one of ’em! But once I got the book, it’s like when you hear a new word. And I started hearing it more often. Then, I began finding out that friends of mine had already read it and freaked out over it. It took me a long time to read. Actually, my wife forced me to read it. I wasn’t that keen on it at first, especially the first 60 pages. But the more I read, the more I liked. Because Dune has so many things that I like, I said, “This is a book that can be made into a film.”

Lynch joined screenwriters Eric Bergen and Christopher De Vore for a week at Frank Herbert’s country farmhouse, where they hammered out a script which ran to a hopelessly overlong 200 pages. As the locale would indicate, Herbert was involved in the creative process, but kept a certain distance from the details: “This is a translation job. I wouldn’t presume to be the person who should translate Dune from English to French; my French is execrable. It’s the same with a movie; you go to the person who speaks ‘movie.’”

The script was rewritten again and again in the months that followed, the later drafts by Lynch alone. (He would be given sole credit as the screenwriter of the finished film.) In the process, it slimmed down to a still-ambitious 135 pages. And with that, and with the De Laurentiis father and daughter having lined up a positively astronomical amount of financing from Universal Pictures, who were desperate for a big science-fiction franchise of their own to rival 20th Century Fox’s Star Wars and Paramount’s Star Trek, a real Dune film finally got well and truly underway.

Raffealla De Laurentiis and Frank Herbert with the actors Kyle MacLachlan and Francesca Annis on the set of Dune, 1983.

Rehearsals and pre-production began in the Sonora Desert outside of Mexico City in October of 1982; actual shooting started the following March, and dragged on over many more months. In the lead role of Paul Atreides, Lynch had cast a 25-year-old Shakespearean-trained stage actor named Kyle MacLachlan, who had never acted before a camera in his life. Nor, at six feet tall and 155 pounds, was he built much like an action hero. But he was trained in martial arts, and he gave it his all over a long and difficult shoot.

Joining him were a number of recognizable character actors, such as the intimidating Swede Max von Sydow, cast in the role of the Fremen leader Kynes, and the villain specialist Kenneth McMillan, all but buried under 200 pounds of fake silicon flesh as the disgustingly evil — or evilly disgusting — Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. Patrick Stewart, later to become famous in the role of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s Captain Jean-Luc Picard, played Paul’s martial mentor Gurney Halleck. In a bit of stunt casting, Sting of the rock band the Police, deemed “biggest band in the world” by any number of contemporary critics, took the role of one of the supporting cast of villains — a role which would, naturally, be blown out of all proportion by the movie’s promoters. To a person, everyone involved with the shoot remembers it as being uncomfortable at best. “I was taxed on almost every level as a human being,” says MacLachlan. “Mexico City is not one of the most pleasant spots in the world to be.” The one thing they all mention is the food poisoning; almost everyone among cast and crew got it at one time or another, and some lived with it for the entirety of the months on end they spent in Mexico.

Universal Pictures had given David Lynch, this young director who was used to shooting on a shoestring budget, an effective blank check in the hope that it would yield the next George Lucas and/or the next Star Wars. Lynch didn’t hesitate to spend their money, building some eighty separate sets and shooting hundreds of hours of footage. Even in Mexico, where the peso was cheap, it added up. Universal would later claim an official budget of $40 million, but rumblings inside Hollywood had it that the real total was more like $50 million. Either figure was more than immense enough to secure Dune the title of most expensive Universal film ever. (For comparison’s sake, consider that the contemporary big-budget blockbusters Return of the Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom cost approximately $40 million and $30 million respectively.)

The shoot had been difficult enough in itself, but the film first began to show the telltale signs of a doomed production only in the editing phase, as Lynch tried to corral his reams of footage into a finished product. He clashed repeatedly with Raffealla De Laurentiis and Universal, both of whom made it clear that they expected a relatively “clean,” PG-rated film with a coherent narrative through line for their money. Such qualities weren’t, of course, what David Lynch was known for. But the director had failed to secure final-cut rights to the film, and he was repeatedly overridden. Finally, he all but removed himself from the process altogether, and Raffealla De Laurentiis herself cobbled together much of the finished film, going so far as to shoot her own last-minute bridging scenes whilst layering clumsy voice-overs and internal monologues over the top, all in a (failed) effort to make the labyrinthine plot comprehensible to a casual audience. Meanwhile Universal continued to spew forth a fountain of hype about “Star Wars for adults” and “the end of the pulp era of science-fiction movies,” whilst continuing to plaster Sting, looking fetching in his black leather, across their “Coming Attractions” posters and trailers as if he was the star. Dune was set for a fall.

And, indeed, the finished product, which arrived in theaters in December of 1984, provided a rare opportunity for every corner of movie fandom and criticism to unite in hatred. The professional critics, most of whom had never read the book, found the film, even with all the additional expository voice-overs, as incomprehensible as Raffealla De Laurentiis had always feared they would. Fans of the novel had the opposite problem, bemoaning the plot simplification and the liberties taken with the story, complaining about the way that all of the thematic texture had been lost in favor of Lynchian weirdness for weirdness’s sake. And the all-important general audience, for their part, stayed away in droves, making Dune one of the more notorious flops in cinematic history. Just like that, Universal Pictures’s dream of a Star Wars franchise of their own went up in smoke.

Whatever else you can say about it, David Lynch’s Dune is often visually striking.

Seen today, free of the hype and the resultant backlash, the film isn’t as bad as many remember it; many of its scenes are striking in that inimitable Lynchian way. But it doesn’t hang together at all as a holistic experience, and its best parts are often those that have the least to do with its source material. Many over the years have suspected that there’s a good film hidden somewhere in all that footage Lynch shot, if it could only be freed from the strictures of the two-hour running time demanded by Universal; Lynch’s own first rough cut, they point out, was reportedly at least twice that long. Yet various attempts to rejigger the material — including a 1988 version for television that ballooned the running time to more than three hours — haven’t yielded results that feel all that much more holistically satisfying than the original theatrical cut. The film remains what it was from the first, a strange hybrid stranded in a no-man’s land between an art film and a conventional blockbuster, not really working as either. At bottom, the film reflects a hopeless mismatch between its director and its source material. What happens when you ask a brilliant director with very little interest in plot to film a novel famous for its intricate plot? You get a movie like David Lynch’s Dune. Perhaps the kindest thing one can say about it is that it is, unlike so many of Hollywood’s other more misbegotten projects, an interesting failure.

Lynch disowned the film almost immediately. He’s generally refused to talk about it at all in interviews since 1984, beyond dismissing it as a “sell-out” on his part. The one positive aspect of the film which even he will admit to is that it brought Kyle MacLachlan to his attention. The latter starred in Lynch’s next film as well, the low-budget psychological-horror picture Blue Velvet (1986), which rehabilitated its director’s critical reputation at a stroke at the same time that it marked the definitive end of his brief flirtation with mainstream sensibilities. MacLachlan would go on to find his most iconic role as the weirdly impassive FBI agent Dale Cooper in Lynch’s supremely weird television series Twin Peaks.

The Dino de Laurentiis Corporation had invested everything they had and then some in their Dune film. They went bankrupt in the aftermath of its failure — but, in typical corporate fashion, a phoenix known as the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group soon emerged from the ashes. Just to show there were no hard feelings, one of the reincarnated production company’s first films was David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

Surprisingly in light of the many readers who complained so vociferously about the liberties the Dune film took with his novel, Frank Herbert himself never disowned it, speaking of it quite warmly right up until his death. But sadly, that event came much earlier than anyone had reckoned it would: he died in 1986 at age 65, the victim of a sudden blood clot in his lung that struck just after he had undergone surgery for prostrate cancer.

Dune did come to television screens in 2000, in a rather workmanlike miniseries adaptation that was more comprehensible and far more faithful to the novel than Lynch’s film, but which lacked the budget, the acting talent, or the directorial flare to rival its predecessor as an artistic statement. Today, almost half a century after Arthur P. Jacobs first began to inquire about the film rights, the definitive cinematic Dune has yet to be made.

There is, however, one other sort of screen on which Dune has undeniably left a profound mark: not the movie or even the television screen, but the monitor screen. It’s in that direction that we’ll turn our attention next time.

(Sources: the books The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn and Frank Herbert by Timothy O’Reilly; Starlog of January 1983, May 1984, October 1984, November 1984, December 1984, February 1985, and June 1986; Enter of December 1984; the online articles “Jodorowsky’s Dune Didn’t Get Made for a Reason… and We Should All Be Grateful For That” and “David Lynch’s Dune is What You Get When You Build a Science Fictional World With No Interest in Science Fiction” by Emily Asher-Perrin.)

As for the flood of more recent Dune novels, written by Frank Herbert’s son Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, previously a prolific author of X-Files and Star Wars novels and other low-hanging fruit of the literary landscape: stay far, far away. ↩

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/controlling-the-spice-part-1-dune-on-page-and-screen/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost