#oh man can you believe I make a whole separate blog for art and yet post the first art post in the year here still lol

[thormanick]

Was going to bed, got possessed for an hour and a half

Bon appétit!

Happy Birthday to Alhaitham, living rent-free in my mind

May your new books be plentiful and may your roommate be always by your side

#genshin impact #afinna explores teyvat #genshin impact alhaitham #Genshin impact kaveh #kavetham #haikaveh #Genshin impact art #genshij impact fan art #oh man can you believe I make a whole separate blog for art and yet post the first art post in the year here still lol #anyways enjoy I guess #I have no idea how to draw birds. birds are hard.

[accio-victuuri]

The GG & Li-Ning & Xianjiang Cotton Situation

I was asked to give my opinion. This is also for other bxgs who may have the same sentiment. You don’t have to agree with me but i hope you respect whatever it is I choose to share here. This is my blog and my space. I maintain this out of my pure enjoyment of the fandom and all the good it has given me. So let me address some of the points.

Li-Ning boasts their use of XinJiang Cotton

My simple answer here is, of course they will. This is not something new. Li-Ning is a celebrated olympic medal winning gymnast. A billionaire. You don’t get to that place in CHN w/out supporting the government’s agenda. In this case, that there is no injustice and persecution going on in Xinjiang. This brand, boasting about China made cotton, in their terms, shows patriotism and support for their country. This brand’s literal goal at first was to provide a local brand for Chinese athletes to wear in the Olympics. This is also not the first time that Li-Ning had been called out along w/ other international brands due to questionable ethical practices.

I find it very hard to believe that the timing of GG’s massive Li-Ning ad campaign, coinciding as it has with these Western brand boycotts, was a coincidence.

Let’s get this out of the way. Whether the boycott happened or not, Li-Ning is guaranteed an insane amount of sales because they hired Xiao Zhan. This is the same man who always sells out products in seconds. Who took KXZ to 200% growth and so on. I can talk about stats all day but this massive campaign for him is a no brainer. GG is expensive and a guaranteed success. Any brand who hires him will be stupid to not launch an all out campaign across all cities. Li-Ning knows what they are doing by hiring him. For years, they have been trying to appeal to Gen Z. Especially now that youth in CHN are more and more into the “guochao” (国潮) - National trend. Integrating traditional chinese culture and fashion w/ domestic brands. This ties in with the whole movement of erasing the connotation that made in china is of inferior quality. GG was a good choice. He appeals to the younger generation (19-25) and the working class ( 26 and up ) who buys goods. I would imagine even GG’s team did their research and knows this trend is going on too. This will not be the last you will see of this type of endorsement from him or Web. The rumors on this collaboration was going around as early as, March 15 I think? I was literally asking another bxg if GG’s ad will be pushed back a day or two because of what was happening. or what will this all implies. He was always gonna come out and endorse this brand boycott or not.

I am not removing the possibility that these local brands have a hand in the boycott. It’s a very valid concern. or that, it was a convenient perfect storm for them. A perfect storm of EU, US & CAN sanctioning CHN. The sudden attack on brands’ statements against Xinjiang cotton from a year ago. The whole agenda of controlling the people’s view on what is happening. All of these are connected. sure. There are many things behind the scenes that we will not know but we can make an educated guess of. Li-Ning is not the only domestic brand that had a positive push because of this.

On 3/25 Li-Ning’s stock closed with a high of 10.74% , plus an added 9% on the 26th when GG was announced as ambassador. The same thing happened with Anta and others.

I find it very hard to stomach seeing Li-Ning ads on my dash, regardless of GG’s presence in them. Without condemning him for taking this endorsement deal, and without judging what he is or is not personally aware

I will just be addressing GG’s alleged part in all this. I say that cause we don’t live in his brain and won’t know what he’s thinking. You can all try and project your values on him but he is a whole person of his own. I have hopefully given some view on why GG accepted to endorse this brand in the previous point. GG has spent most if not all, of his life in China. He has repeatedly said that he was brought up traditionally. Tho his father was very encouraging in him participating in the arts and widening his knowledge. He had Foreign professors at CBTU. He is part of the generation that knows what’s going on outside by using the internet. He’s smart. I would guess that he is aware of the country he is living in vs what it’s like outside of it. But at the end of the day, his loyalty will always be with his country. I hate to break it to you all but he will continue to live and thrive as an Actor even without international support. Tho it is great that he is a source of National Pride with how people outside of China love him.

Now, about his support for Xianjiang Cotton. I wanna start by showing this:

It’s a post from People’s Daily wb which boasts all the c-ent top stars that voiced their support of XJ cotton. The sense is, hey people look at your idols supporting the cause. Look at their Patriotism. What do you think will happen if GG was not on this list? Knowing that he is a top star in CHN. Knowing he was just in hot waters post 22*? Knowing that he is actively being endorsed in CCTV which is a National Channel. Are we still surprised that he posted that support? I was just honestly waiting for him to post if anything. I talked before about how C-ent celebrities are expected ( and actually it’s in their law ) to be more morally upright than the lay people. This is prime example of that.

Another one is this from CCTV Wb. I’m including this for you all to have an understanding of how this whole thing is being played out in CHN. This is the type of online narrative that is going around and I would think GG is seeing. The sentiment is,

“No matter what hardships, ups and downs and blows go through in our country, her people will always come from all directions and stand up to speak justice and do just things.”

It’s also showing all the hot searches that is related in support of XJ cotton and defending CHN’s innocence.

Also this video that was heavily circulated showing mechanized picking of cotton vs the allegations of manual.

This is the kind of narrative that is going around, as expected. I don’t really fault GG or condemn him for doing what is best for him. What is the best for an individual does not always mean it’s the best for all. In talks like this, I always try and put myself in their position. I mean, who the hell are these people trying to attack my country? the country that has provided for me. I wanna say I understand where they are coming from but understanding does not mean agreeing. I see these A LOT. ALOT ON WEIBO. The China vs. Everyone story. It’s the notion of, they are attacking us and we must protect the country. Also keep in mind that news is heavily regulated.

You know what type of news the CCP would love for them to get a hold of? The rising attacks on Asians in the US. Oh boy they would fuckin love that! Making America the big/bad asian-hating boogeyman in the eyes of their people yet again.

Okay, now we’re down to the final part of this. Why do I share the promo pics for Li-Ning. Where do i draw the line.

To me it’s simple. It had GG in it. I was waiting for this to come out, and tbh, would you all even know about this brand’s practices if the boycott didn’t happen? No. This is a bjyx blog where i share things about them. That includes ad, dramas, pictures and videos. I understand if people don’t feel comfortable w/ Li-Ning ads and others, so just don’t like those posts. Did I buy anything from the collection? No. Did I buy multiple copies Web’s single Youth in Times ( like i do with his other singles )? No. That’s where I draw the line in this. I know we’re all gonna be put on a tight spot again once Faith Makes Great comes out. Once I saw that leaked pic, Ooohhh! I just know. Also if BAH adds some propaganda about CHN’s war on drugs. I am just waiting. I am ready. I know what my values are. I will not allow other people to dictate who I am. I know what type of content I’m only gonna be sharing.

I see this very forceful air of asking bxgs to take a stand on this ( always bxg, never the other side. always us of course even if we are the minority) and it really puts me off. I read someone say that they will not say anything because they don’t owe strangers on the internet an explanation. Which is true. I have separate spaces that I share my views on world/local issues. Accounts that show my actual name and around people I know in real life. That’s what I choose to do for myself. I started this blog for myself and i still find it very bizarre that people follow this account. I am not some sort of KOL, let’s get that straight. This is just a blog where I talk about things if i want to and SCREAM about GG and Web too much. I will probably not answer any follow up questions on this cause i feel like I have addressed a good chunk of it.

Just know that whatever I post on here in support of GG and his projects does not equate to my entire political/moral stand regarding this event or any. It’s really good that we have conversations like this cause it’s an important one.

Whew! That was a long post! 😅

#ask response

[soldrawss]

Ok, this morning I opened Tumblr, found your blog, started checking all your rottmnt tagged posts, found your big brother Mikey AU, CRIED FOR ALMOST AN HOUR as I red every post about it, drooled all over your gorgeous art, smiled like a crazy person reading all your Human AU posts, got up with the sun in my chest and more energy than I know what to do with and have been productive since then. I don’t know what to ask (or if you take asks) but I crave more infos about your big brother Mikey AU❤️

WOAH OK this was such an incredibly sweet ask and I’m SO HAPPY that my BBM au could bring you so much joy and ahhhh!!! Just thank you so much, this ask made my night <3 Here’s one of the many little stories I’ve written for the AU that I’ve sent to my friend @zacharandom (thanks for always reading my little emotional blurbs about these kiddos Zach~) Enjoy!

(I haven’t gotten into it yet (I will, it’s a separate ask I’m working on) But Leatherhead is a BIG part of the BBM au. Zach had asked if any of the kiddos had ever been to LH’s place, since LH always stays over at the Hamato’s, and I said yes, but only Donnie, and then this mini fic was born.)    Donnie and Mikey get into a 'fight'. And I say 'fight' because Donnie doesn't really know what else to call it. Because he doesn't pick fights, not really, not with Mikey. He doesn't go looking for them with Mikey like he does with Leo. Leo, who can take the worst of Donnie’s shitty teenage attitude and come out of it alright, wearing the worst of Donnie’s temper and anger like a bulletproof vest. Donnie can afford to hurt Leo cause Leo won't break because of it. He's safe to hurt. But it's different with Mikey. Mikey, who's so tired he can barely stand straight most days. Who has bags under his eyes like dark stickers, that not even doe-eyed and ever adoring Raph can peel away. And Donnie KNOWS better than to pick a fight with Mikey about it, it was mostly why he was trying to avoid the conversation altogether. Why he had hidden all the school letters and hacked into Mikey's phone to block all the emails and texts and phone calls from the school about it. He didn't expect Mikey to run into one of his teachers after work and basically blow everything Donnies worked so hard to avoid. He didn't want to skip a few grades. He didn't care what his teachers or his GPA said. He didn't CARE if they thought he was ‘wasting his potential’. He wasn't, and they had no right to complain about it to his big brother like they did. Donnie had TOLD Mikey that he didn't want to. Had gone all the extra lengths to take as many of the AP classes the adjacent high school offered, bargained and pleaded and BEGGED them. He’d do whatever it took, but he didn't want to move grades. He didn't want to quit the robotics club. He didn't want to go to school with a bunch of kids older than him and be the butt end of every baby freshmen joke in the book. He didn't want to be separated from Leo. He really, really, really didn't. And he had explained this all to Mikey. And he knew that Mikey KNEW this. But the teachers wouldn't stop hounding him, and Mikey was already so tired anyway, the weight of the world always seemed to be a weighted pressure on his shoulders that looked physical, with the way Mikey’s whole body sagged. Like every move he made was a conscious effort and pain. Donnie knew this, and he still yelled at Mikey about it anyway. And Mikey didn't yell back, cause Mikey never yelled back at them, but his voice was stern and tired and it just begged Donnie to at least consider talking about it. But Donnie’s 13, and the biggest jerk in the world because he doesn't want to talk about it anymore. And Mikey didn't deserve the one sided shouting match that was all Donnie, he didn't deserve the pointed "I can't believe you would take THEIR side, you NEVER listen to me!" And Mikey DEFINITELY didn't deserve the front door slamming in his face, the last words Donnie said hanging in the air behind him. "I HATE IT HERE!" It wasn't raining, but there was a misty cold hanging in the November air as Donnie sat at an empty park bench, somewhere in Flushing, feeling like the biggest loser in the world the second he ran away and oh,,, oh God. He ran AWAY. How could he run away? He didn't want to run away! He didn't want to run away from anything, especially if it was away from Mikey. Mikey, who deserved more than Donnie’s cold shoulder and heated words, but took it anyway, and he didn't even flinch as Donnie practically screamed at him. He just looked tired. More tired than ever. And accepted Donnie’s temper tantrum like he accepted every other bad thing that has ever happened to him. Like he thought he deserved it. And he was sad. Sad in a way that made Donnie want to throw up. Because he was one of the people who were NEVER supposed to hurt Mikey like that. But he did. He did and he ran away like a little kid and he felt so STUPID about it, jumping on the first bus he could and taking it to God knows what neighborhood and now he was sitting alone on some random park bench, the November cold sinking into his skin and thin shirt cause he didn't have the mind to grab a jacket on his way out and GOD what was he doing? He was cold and alone and probably lost and Mikey probably hated him and now- "Donatello?" Came a voice from behind Donnie, and Donnie whirled around on the park bench because he'd recognize that low and gentle voice anywhere and... Yup. There he was. Lieven Heather, or Leatherhead as Mikey always affectionately called him, standing tall and curious like. His long black hair pulled into a low bun, his green eyes leaf-like and bright, piercing through the dark park like fireflies, looking at Donnie like he was searching for an answer before he got the chance to ask the question and WOAH was Donnie not the emotional type, but he could have cried when he saw the familiar face.

Actually, he was already crying before, but crying because you’re happy to see someone and crying because you’re a jerk to your big brother are two completely different types of emotions, and Donnie tried to hide it either way by rubbing at his face with the back of his wrist. LH’s namesake leather jacket is HUGE on Donnie, but the 12 year old takes it without a fight because LH does NOT look like he's willing to negotiate, as he holds a bag of groceries in one hand and holds an umbrella over the both of them in the other, saying that his apartment is just a few blocks away, and it'd be best to get out of the cold. The tall man doesn't press Donnie for details, doesn't ask why his friend's kid brother is out at 8pm on a school night, all the way on the other side of the city, eyes red with something between tempered anger and grief and skin pale with November cold. Donnie is thankful for it. He doesn't feel like explaining himself quite yet. The second hand hurt from before is still raw in his chest, and even though he knows he's the one at fault, he can't really shake off the sinking black hole feeling in his chest. So the 10-minute walk is mostly silent. LH lives in a grey bricked building, on the third floor, and his apartment is exactly what Donnie would expect if he really thought hard about it. It was a simple studio, minimalist and uncluttered, but that seemed more because the place felt untouched rather than because LH was a particularly clean guy. All the electronics on in the kitchen where stainless steel and spotless, Donnie half suspected they were untouched because of the garbage can filled with dollar store Ramen noodle cups and forks in the sink. His grey walls were bare, and he didn't have a TV,  but there was a large bookshelf that covered the expanse of one wall, filled to the brim with thick books that looked like they belonged in the reference section of a library. There was a little queen-sized bed shoved in the corner, neatly made, and looked rarely slept in. The only sign of life in the little apartment that felt much too small for the nearly 7-foot man was the little desk that sat beside the bed, which was covered in astrophysics textbooks, notebooks filled with scribbled notes and a few orange study note cards that had Donnie's older brother written (metaphorically) all over them. Lh motioned to the chair at the desk with a nodded, "you can sit there if you want. I'll make some Valerian tea." "Valerian tea?" "Helps with stress." "I'm not stressed." "Right, of course not. Still tastes good." And Donnie doesn't really like tea, he'd much prefer coffee, or one of the energy drinks Leo sneaks him during school lunches because Mikey doesn’t buy them, but he knows better than to ask for that. He knew about LH’s anxiety disorder and underlying PTSD, from a past that Donnie didn't know any details about except from snippets he'd overhear here and there from the hushed late-night conversations LH and Mikey would have when they thought that Leo and Donnie and Raph were asleep, and he knew that caffeine wasn't something LH indulged in often because of it. The tea tastes fine though. It's hot, and burns his throat a little, but Donnie doesn't care enough to wait for it to cool down to enjoy it. Because it hurts, and Donnie figures he kinda deserves the pain. It's after a few quiet minutes, Donnie sitting at LH’s desk while LH leans against his kitchen counter, that Donnie reaches for a courage he doesn't usually possess and tells LH everything.

About the extra AP classes, and the nosey teachers, and the way it feels a bit too suffocating trying to be everything everyone wants him to be.

And how it all feels too lonely. He barely remembers his mom. He’s starting to forget dad. Mikey works all the time and Raph goes to a completely different school. If he moves up a few grades, then he loses Leo too. And he just can’t deal with that. He can’t deal with everyone, some way or another, leaving him. And how in some, backward, twisted way, it sometimes feels like people are trying to get rid of him. And he just can’t take it anymore. Donnie likes LH. He's smart and collective and cool and he's super nice to Mikey and he’s pretty much everything that Donnie wants to be when he grows up. And he's friends with LH. LH gives him pointers on his science projects and he teaches Leo how to punch a bully like its nothing and he's patient and understanding and helpful with Raph's temper and he's a godsend of a friend the Hamato clan didn't know they could afford after April had came into their lives and Donnie LIKES Lh. But he didn't think they were good enough friends for Donnie to deserve THIS. LH listened to him patiently and quietly. Nodding at the appropriate moments in Donnie’s tearful and half-hysterical rambling about his school and his GPA and how he didn't mean to take it out on Mikey and he didn't mean to run away but GOD he was so sick of everyone looking down on him like a little kid and like HE didn't know what was best for him and didn't have a choice in deciding HIS future. And he expects LH to get mad at him too, cause he was Mikey’s friend first before Donnie’s, and Donnie YELLED at Mikey, and Donnie WASNT going to sob like a child about it, but his head lowers and there's a stupid stinging in his eyes and he sniffs once or twice anyway when he mutters "God, I'm so stupid. Mikey probably hates me right now and is so mad at me." And he can hear LH sigh, and put his own cup of tea down, before walking over to where Donnie sat and crouching before his chair. "That's funny you think that, because when I texted him earlier, he sounded nothing short of scared out of his mind and relieved." "You texted him???" "Well yeah, of course. He called me shortly after you ran out, singing the same tune you are about how you're so mad at him and he didn’t mean to fight with you and that you probably hate him. That’s probably the only reason I even saw you, I wouldn't have known to look out for you if he hadn't told me to keep a lookout for you." And that, woah, Donnie felt a million times worse now because of COURSE, he didn't hate Mikey! Donnie wasn't even MAD at him. He was just being a stupid stubborn teen who took out all his frustrations and insecurities on the last person in the world who deserved it and boy oh boy, this whole thing was so stupid anyway.

“How about he finish our tea, wait for you to get a little bit warmed up first, and then get you back home so that you can tell everything you just told me to your brother. Because I think we both know how much he’d want to hear how you truly felt about this situation.”

And that... that sounded good. Because after his entire mini-rant, it felt like a shadow had been cleared from over Donnie’s heart, and now he wanted nothing more than to go home and hug his big brother for all his worth and apologize about a million and half times. Maybe more. Donnie hadn’t decided yet.

After they had finished their cup of tea, and LH had given Donnie one of his warmer college sweaters to wear before they took the subway back to the Hamato residence, where Mikey stood in front of the building, red-cheeked and shivering from the cold in a giant puff jacket and pajama bottoms, waiting for them.

Donnie didn't even wait, he ran the second he saw the familiar orange jacket that belonged to one of his favorite people on the planet and broke into a breakneck sprint, colliding into his older brother’s chest and waiting arms, and breaking into a choked cough when Mikey’s arms instantly wrapped around him like he always belonged there.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to run away!" Donnie rushed to say because he didn't want a second to go by without Mikey knowing that, but Mikey was already running a gentle hand through his hair and hushing into the crown of his head.

"Shhhh, shhhh it's ok, buddy. I know. I'm just glad you're home." And Mikey still had bags like bruises under his eyes, and looked on the point of breaking if Donnie hugged him too tightly, but he still smiled at Donnie with all the affection and warmth of the world when they pulled away, and Donnie couldn't fight the urge to spit out, "I don't hate it here! And I don't hate you. Ever! I'm sorry I said that. I didn't mean it. I'm sorry Mikey." And Mikey replied with a soft smile and an "I know, kiddo. It’s ok." But there was relief like a balloon losing helium in his eyes and shoulders, like he would have believed differently if Donnie hadn't said anything, and Donnie made the promise there and then that he’d do everything in his power to make sure Mikey never thought that way, even for a second, again. LH hadn't stayed over for the pizza movie night that Mikey offered as a silent ‘thanks for bringing my kid home’, so Mikey and Donnie saw him off at the subway station, and made the few blocks back to their waiting apartment and waiting little brothers with their arms around each other in a side hug. Neither one of them wanting to let each other out of their grasps. And there had been a promise to talk about it later, because Donnie was feeling a little more up for negotiation even though Mikey swore up and down that he’d back whatever Donnie decided to do 110%, but it could wait till another day, when both of their nerves and hearts weren't so tender and raw with emotion. Tonight, they would just sink into the weathered old couch that was softened by a million quilts, and out on a Mothra vs Godzilla movie, and squeeze themselves between an over-excited Raph, who couldn't stay still and just HAD to act out all the Godzilla fight scenes, and a relaxed Leo, who sprawled his legs over Donnie's lap despite Donnie complaining about it, but Donnie didn't make any effort to push him away because Leo kept keeping a wary and watchful eye on his two older brothers, probably knowing more about both sides than either one of them, and keeping his legs over Donnie was half for familiarity and half to keep him from jumping up and running out again and huh, maybe he wasn’t so relaxed after all. Guess Donnie had more than a million and a half apologies to make. Better round it off to a good 2 million, just to be safe. Because Donnie couldn't rightly blame him for keeping a careful eye out, but Donnie had learned his lesson. He wasn't running away again. He wasn't running anywhere if it was away from his brothers. Away from the only family he’s ever had. Because donnie was stubborn and stuck in his ways. And he wasn't going to quit the robotics club, and he wasn't going to skip grades and he wasn't going to leave Leo behind and he wasn't going to be left behind. Donnie wasn’t going to run away. Because Donnie wasnt going anywhere.

(one of the doodles I did for this particular story)

#my fic #big brother mikey au #bbm au #rottmnt human #rottmnt human au #rottmnt #tmnt #tmnt human #i have like 10 stories already written that i've shown zach about this au #and i'm just waiting for the excuse to post them because I don't want to spam you all #unless asked to #but anyway yeah #donnie's the one one who's ever ran away or has seen lh's place #and it's a tiiiiime

[helahades]

The Goddess and the Grocer

(Steve Rogers x Fem!Reader)

Summary: Sappy and hopelessly romantic, the part time art student, part time grocery bagger, and full time fantasy creator Steve Rogers lives in his head, with you as his muse. Making puzzles out of your groceries, and portraits of your every curve and edge, he fears and craves every interaction, while living with you as a lover in his mind.

A/N: Well. I have struggled with motivation for the longest. Something hit me though, and by something I mean other supportive writers and great friends. Hugest shoutout to @threeminutesoflife for being a darling and @imanuglywombat for making TWO beautiful mood boards I stare at more than Steve stares at the Peggy compass.

Warnings: creepy, obsessive Steve. ideation of creepy thoughts. food focused talk. mention of overeating. dub-con concepts. two mentions of alcohol consumption.

New blog, new me! I’ll take this moment to say I’m taking requests, and I love feedback even more than Steve loves you! hope you enjoy

Word Count: about 3k

-

Now rain slicked, the sheen of oil and water twists the reflections of the tonights red, red, green—-“can I make the turn, no too late” on yellow—now red traffic lights into a twisted rainbow on the city streets.

Down those streets, and across a barren parking lot, parents, lovers, businesspeople and more squeak and clack and slap their rainy shoes on the old speckled tile at the entrance (that Steve had just mopped) as they do every week.

At the Potts Grocery Store, nothing ever changes. And never in the night.

It isn’t just night though, it’s dead night. The odd time after things have slowed for sleep, after the rush in between when people bumble in (promising themselves promises they won’t keep about doing the shopping sooner next month), after the ten minute period within which Dr. Banner wordlessly picks up the same array of bland teas.

The night has crawled beyond all the events that happen as they do, and entered the dead night.

Maybe Steve is too poetic—like his dad says he is—too tied up in fate, and hope in life’s mystique, but he holds hope for what happens where the night is dead.

When the night dies, and most are asleep, with it, facades die too. The only people to come in the dead of night, are drunks, doctors, various night shifters, and… you.

He hasn’t yet questioned your reason for showing up so late. Hasn’t really, technically, spoken to you at all, really.

Some part of Steve thinks, maybe if he startles you, says something that clangs too loud or awkward, all your pieces will blow away, like some agitated dandelion, and he will never know you again, if he ever even knew you at all.

No, Steve’s job isn’t to startle you, or to take up your space. It’s to try and meet your eyes as you hand him the reusable bags. It’s to try and figure out what meal you’re planning from what he’s bagging, and what he already knows lies unused in your kitchen. It’s to put the bags in your cart if you’ll let him.

He hasn’t seen you yet. It’s getting late, where are you?

Somewhere between cold fluorescent and neutral warm desk lamps, the lights of the grocery store seem to exist both to chase shadows on tired shoppers' faces, and to mock him, like a candle finally blown out by a stood up date.

Had he done something wrong the last time? If he had, that couldn’t be helped. You were wearing those shorts and looked like you had just gotten ready for bed and you had your hair pulled back, but just a little fell into your face anyway.

And your scent. It always wraps around him like the saccharine spice of pastries when he swings open the bakery door for his morning shift.

The moment you breezed by him after checkout was almost too much to bear. He caught the fresh damp scent of your tied up and deep conditioned hair. You smelled like fresh linens and a life he can only imagine having when he’s chasing orgasms alone and twisting up his sheets.

He could have devoured you.

But he didn’t.

Not even when your shoulder accidentally grazed him while you were rushing out in a frenzy.

“Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry,” came your frantic whisper.

He dreams of making you that delicate again. He thinks he could shape your unsure apologies in his hands like clay, or spread you thin on a canvas when you whisper so soft. But he didn’t do those things at all.

Steve being Steve, he tried to make his large frame slouch, your aura wrapping him up into a double life Clark Kent shyness, despite your gentleness.

He didn’t say a word.

A wordless, mirthless stretch of his lips. An “It’s okay, walk all over me” grin. You regarded him with a flicker of an odd glance, and then you were out the door.

As he finishes up with the last shopper in his lane, his worn Converse squeak as he leans his frame against the bagging station at checkout.

-

Last class, last week, his art teacher dropped a big assignment. Stuffy and sadistic, the man seemed to only eat the pain of lovers kept from expression, so of course, he relished in the moment he told the class to try a new medium, with a subject they hadn’t previously captured.

He seemed to look directly at Steve as he delivered the blow.

Steve's problem certainly isn’t creativity. It isn’t talent or lack of effort. He surely is adaptable, he rarely tells on his love!

For the still life project, he captured the tree that blocks your kitchen window. Heavy strokes in his sketchbook.

He even painted the park in blooms on a paper towel—yes a paper towel—when you justified to a cashier one day that all the crackers and deli meats were for a picnic.

So he has a muse. But he’s not a fool. Sometimes he spends so much time trying not to look like a fool, and paints so much around you instead of you, that it’s a self portrait of his own obsession.

Your face. Your curves. The many separated sections where he tried to master the texture of your hair. All those traces of you live in his sketchbook. Only twice has he turned in a portrait of you.

Being told he can’t have you makes Steve feel like he’s been too obvious. You’re his little secret. And he is no fool. He’ll have to be more careful. So here he is.

The canvas is as bare as the walls of his studio apartment.

Three jobs and a potted plant from his mom just aren’t enough to decorate life. He wishes he could capture sleep in a picture frame and hang it on the wall. When he got too tired and caffeine stopped working, he thinks he’d pick up those frames and absorb the sleep in the way he can absorb nostalgia when looking at a real picture.

Then, he thinks, that’s the sort of thing art majors say when they haven’t slept in three weeks.

The canvas is still bare. It isn’t like Steve. He always knows where to go, what he feels, what he wants.

His teacher told him to try something different. Had the nerve to clap Steve on the back after class and say something about stretching creative wings and finding a new muse.

He thinks the guy should have punched him in the face instead.

There’s nothing stuck about Steve. He knows what he wants and how to get there.

He also knows that schooling ruins the intent of art, he knows how to put love into colors, that art teachers know the least about expression out of everyone on earth, and that he works two night jobs a week to barely afford to be taught by that man anyway.

Life is full of oddities.

-

Some of life’s oddities are right there in your cart as you approach. Steve notices the rain has frizzed your hair, the lovely heart shaped curve of your lips as they stretch into a smile, and the way you yawn before you say hello to the cashier.

He makes a mental note that your hair might have a warmer tinge when illuminated by the sun. You’re already his sun. His stars too. Maybe even his whole universe.

You’re always warm in his paintings. Anything to separate you from the dreadful scheme of this commercial death trap.

What’s for dinner this week?

Your groceries thump onto the counter in practiced succession. Perishables together at the front, and non perishables as neatly as possible following behind.

So thoughtful, my sweet darling.

Your produce today mostly consists of fruit. It reminds Steve of how practiced he is with a knife. How he’d slice up your apples just right for you. He has the practiced skills of an artist. He’d take care of you.

Bucky likes to tell him that cooking is the art and baking is the science. That’s meant to mean that it’s no surprise that Buckys got a perfect little life with a perfect little baker who smiles like the sun and only trusts Bucky in her kitchen.

...And it’s no surprise that Steve’s artsy streak has led him here. Thinking about folding mandarin slices between your perfect lips and letting the flavor explode across your tongue.

He thinks about kissing you. How you would taste tangy and sweet as you try not so hard to push him off so he gets back to cooking and doesn’t burn the house down.

The house. A house with you. A home.

He sees you’re wearing a sundress, and tries not to pity you for the irony. In the closet of some cookie cutter three bedroom, you might ask him how you look in it. He would beg you to wear it just for him a little longer, but ultimately, he would have been able to warn you about the rain.

You wouldn’t have listened though, my stubborn angel.

He thinks about your thighs beneath your dress, and the heat between them.

Sometimes, his dreams betray him, and he steps through the threshold to your shared home, not an artist, but a “Honey, I'm home” suit wearing prisoner.

He fears the simple life, but with you, he believes simplicity could be enough. Maybe he would be rich enough to buy you a million sundresses.

But without his art, he’d be powerless to show you how rich you look, bathed in color, divine from his perspective.

Without his art, he has no outlet for imagination. The only thing that gets him off these days is imagining what you look like under your clothes, and how it might sound if you spoke his name.

When you buy lotion, or a candle, he makes a mental note of the scent, and uses it to color his experience later. You like warm sugary scents, or natural outdoorsy ones, with no in between.

As you small talk with the cashier, your card slips from between your fingers and clatters onto the unswept floor. Finishing a thought, you delay in retrieving it, but by the time you’re leaning down, Steve’s already handing it back.

Eyes flitting up to meet the baggage boy standing up at full height, you melt into an easier smile.

You notice first that his eyes are incredibly blue behind the dark window frames, and second that his hands are incredibly warm as he hands your card back.

Frazzled, and just a bit smitten, you smile kindly.

“Thank you,” you say sweetly, regarding him fully, perhaps for the first time, and pausing only to let your eyes drift to the knitted cotton polo stretched across his broad chest—no, to the name tag resting on it…

“Steve,” you finish with a smile that makes it ring like an exclamation point. To hear you finally pronounce his name… it’s like church bells. But they’re muted because now he can only consider your eyes locked on his.

He’s never wanted to escape somewhere and go home with someone so badly. And would it be so wrong?

He could slice up fruit for you. He could bring sausages and deli meats and blocks of cheeses whole from the market where they slipped him things free. He’d slice them up nice and wrap them in cloth and surprise you with an old fashioned wicker basket picnic in the mountains.

He’d let you eat yourself round. And after you were full, he’d still offer to feed you grapes, to pour you more wine.

Steve never understood why the rich ate bread with olive oil, but God he wanted to be rich enough to give you that. All the things that sound ridiculous to people who work to live. He wanted to work so hard you’d never work again.

He wanted to kiss you dizzy, bunch up the fabric of your dress on your hip and tell you he loves you while you’re wine drunk. He’d carry you back to the car and surprise you with wildflowers in a bunch.

Later, he’d paint you nude with them in your hair, and he’d feed you more grapes.

He would tuck you in and wrap you up for later when you woke up missing him. Maybe he wouldn’t leave at all. Maybe you would want to spend the whole day with him too.

He’s got a twinkle of charm in his eye and just a bit of sadness that looks every bit like the starving artist people believe him to be. Bucky hasn’t stopped bringing him the leftover rolls at closing since he found out Steve spends more money on paint than meals.

And is it so wrong? As Steve looks into your eyes, he musters all that charm his mom said he was born with. He blinks brighter the twinkle in his eye.

“You’re welcome,” comes Steve’s gentle, but sure reply.

You pause at that, because really it’s nothing... But people always seem to say “Don’t worry about it!”, “It’s nothing”, or maybe nothing at all.

You pause at how the reaction seemed genuine, in a world of practiced replies, and on a day that you’re feeling shitty because the rain ruined your hair and happiness.

You smile at him again, grateful for a pocket of truthful kindness, and turn back to the cashier, effectively ending the interaction.

Steve’s mind is spinning in ways he just can’t bring himself to understand. So he bags your groceries. You forgot the reusable bags, he doesn’t pause to wonder why.

Click. Click. Click. Beep!

Tomatoes. He bags them with the apples. Double bags for good measure.

Beep.

Spaghetti. The good kind that most people overlook in favor of a more common brand. New bag.

Beep.

Frozen garlic bread. He adores you. You’ve got garlic and basil and more herbs than you’ll ever need at home. You’d probably make the spaghetti noodles and parmesan yourself if you could. But you love five minutes at 400 garlic bread.

He imagines your pretty little kitchen, with all its various knick knacks, smelling like garlic and tomato sauce. He can’t help thinking you’d be impressed with his chopping skills too. Just how his mom taught him.

He imagines cooking with you in the dead of night, instead of being here. He imagines you bending over with your legs straight and your back curved and the oven mitts on to get garlic bread out of the oven. You put the tray on the cold burners Steve’s not using.

Maybe he would ask you to try the sauce, he’d hold the spoon to your lips after blowing off for you. Your eyes always flutter closed to process the taste of things, and sometimes he swears he could read your mind.

Then they would open. Wide. The same way they did when you tasted the new product double chocolate brownie sample last Tuesday. You would tell him how perfect it is and praise how he finally isn’t shy about using garlic anymore. Turning off the burners, he’d pull you into his arms, he’d kiss you til you saw stars…

-

Walking you backwards, still entangled in the breathless kiss, he wouldn’t stop until you bumped the padded kitchen bench. Then he’d fall to his knees.

“Steve, honey”—

You’d cut yourself off with a breathy moan because he’d already be under your skirt.

Kissing up your thighs, flattening his tongue against you, kissing you gently, before sucking your clit, while working it with the tip of his tongue, he’d show you again, like always, how passionate of a lover he is.

You’d moan like heaven, because you are.

You’d lean back, propping yourself up on an arm and pushing the other hand through his golden hair. You just can’t stop your hips from rolling against his tongue that’s still worshipping you.

He won’t use his fingers. It wouldn’t be proper, he’s just been cooking. So instead, he uses those hands to pull your thighs up onto his shoulders.

Still swirling his tongue around your clit, Steve is drawing you closer, your body seeming to know it’s own ways to pull him to you too.

It’s electric. You can’t stop and you’d never want to. He’d make love to you every single—

-

That’s not where he is though. He grabs the paper bags he’s bagged up with your ingredients and some other oddities, and he places them in the cart you’ve pushed forward.

He tries not to think about the fact that you’re going home alone. He tries not to think about how he’ll be sleeping alone, and in cold colors. Tries to skip forward to later when he has all the time in the world to imagine the way things should be.

A quiet goodnight and you’re on your way. You’re careful not to graze him as you walk away, and he’s careful not to be obvious watching.

The cashier leaves the station, and Steve puts his head down as he passes, before looking up in your direction as he always does.

Except… when he looks up to see your sundress swishing, it isn’t. And you’re turned back looking at him with this funny little look.

You smile. A twinkle of embarrassment, nervous to have been caught looking. He tries not to chuckle for all the irony.

He watches you as you watch him just a bit longer, before your sundress swishes out the door, and the light of your halo fades into the distance, consumed by the rain.

-

By the time his shift is up, the rain has stopped and the sky is colored like a bruise. The sun knocks at a threshold unseen, just slightly feathering light through the sky.

Steve is dead tired, but he won’t sleep a wink. Once he arrives at his apartment, he begins the project.

A mixed medium piece. Acrylic paint, charcoal shadowed details. It’s a wicker basket, full of apples, grapes, and wildflowers.

-

Later, as the sun rises, and the painting is half done, he flops into bed, finishing up a stale roll from the bakery, and dreams about waking up to you.

He pretends there’s no job to be at in three and a half hours, but instead, that it’s a quiet Sunday, and he’s waking up to you in his arms...

Soft and ethereal.

-

Thank you for reading!

Whether or not this is your type of writing, or you liked it at all, I just want to tag some authors who generally inspire me and helped in some way to motivate me posting my first piece: @threeminutesoflife @imanuglywombat @sherrybaby14 @jtargaryen18 @heavenbarnes @tropicalcap @allaboardthereadingrailroad @thotty-tatertot @sapphirescrolls

#dark!steve #steve #steve rogers fanfic #steve rogers #steve x reader #dark!steve x reader #dark!steve rogers #steve au #steve rogers au #civillian!steve #artist!steve

[ziracona]

also i believe the realm rules were quite different for this one? seemed like legion wasnt one person, and quentin was somehow really unafraid of napping.. also the way entering other people's realms worked, and man jesus poor quentin with that default wound..oh! right, the way healing works also seemed different? like it didn't feel like in ILM their healing processes kept being reset, i think it was also said they're slightly accelerated even :o (2/2)

Yeah! You’re very correct.

So, for most of the things I write for myself (or as gift or commission if unspecified), I use the world building I did for ILM (IE: trial realms only exist while the trial is going on, and killers all have their own little base areas, survivors the campfire [although more than one campfire exist because the default is not for all survivors to come/stay together], and all the areas connect to the Entity’s core somewhere, and they are shifted in location regularly, like an atom with its nuclear, or a solar system model [kind of]. In practice it’s kinda a shell game, because the randomization of locations makes it harder to organize or work or even /feel/ centered. It’s meant to discourage working against the Entity, finding answers, and being organized in general).

This one used a totally different layout system (traverse by walking through the fog, which metaphorically is like a hopping into a whirlpool with many islands stationary inside it [realms], and your determination/focus is what allows you to ‘swim’ to them, your familiarity with the location let’s you find them faster), because I wrote that fic as an art trade with @speckeltail , and about an event referenced in his ask blog @badham-bedhead — So, for the fic, I used his world building for the realm/realm rules and characterizations etc. We have very different Entities (or Birttanys, thanks the world’s best dyslexia moment for me yet 🤣) and since the Entity kind of morphs how the whole world would be made, they’re p different in some ways! It was really fun to explore some of the possibilities. I think the biggest overal difference between the world building systems is how death works and how rules work (ILM Entity is very particular in how it expends energy and doesn’t like to constantly insure everyone bc it’s a waste of fuel almost never actually necessary, so you die for real if you die outside a trial unless it is paying attention and intercedes in time, it works hard to keep people separated and isolated and is /very/ harsh towards interactions between killer and survivor if caught, accelerated healing outside of trials partially bc it doesn’t totally understand real world happenings, and partially because it likes people to be healthy enough to have a fighting chance in trials (if they have no shot bc they break their leg, for instance, they’ll lose hope /really/ fast and become useless to it). Speck’s Brittany is more casual/relaxed and does things for enjoyment more, so it’s rules are less meticulous and strict (survivors can easily go to killers’ home realms to scavenge and killers aren’t supposed to kill them, will be punished if they do—doesn’t care if they talk so long as it gets fed, will sometimes let people get away with stuff for amusement. Insured everyone always so there just /is/ no permanent death period, for killer or survivor. Pays less attention in general, and thus survivors can end up with permanent injuries between trials like Quentin has, because Entity is just like ‘oh how do you look again? Open chest wound? Got it’).

It’s a very different system, and I loved getting to explore how that would feel to exist in—death is a huge and fearsome stake, and losing it period loses some tension, but it also presents this fascinating reality of what does that mean? How do you assign meaning to death and suffering if there just /is/ no long term cost, no higher stakes fear? It’s just pain, and permanent stacking cognitive damage. And the dichotomy between people who would be like “it doesn’t matter then” (especially killers not wanting to feel guilt) and survivors struggling to carve out meaning by treating it like it does even if it feels like it doesn’t because it’s all they have, is such a cool idea, and I’m glad I got to play w it a little. If you’re interested, I’d totally ask Speck about his world building, because I got a few dive from him before writing that fic to make sure I did it right, and it was super fascinating! He’s even got a chart made for how the realms are laid out geographically.

#ask #ct5597-jesse #not that kind of person who #not that kind of person who (fic) #dead by daylight #i love ILM & the system i built / normally use but its super cool to write in another system too #and to hear about. it makes me sad but also happy. bc the lax system might be less dramatic but u know what it facilitates??? 😏 #good times - wild shit - and the best one—canon joeyquen 😏 SPECK. fix things!!! make them happy! #i love i keep being like ‘plz do this’ when youre already doing it 🤣 im just impatient

[scrawnydutchman]

Why ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’s Animation is So Amazing

So those followers of my blog may know that I posted a full film review of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse rather recently. You’re welcome to go check it out if you haven’t yet, but the short version of it is that it’s my favorite movie of 2018 and is, in my opinion, the best comic book film ever made. But I wanted to address something about the film that I keep seeing coming up. I’ve been watching a handful of reviews for the film online and in a great deal of them I hear people bring up how they were skeptical of the animation style when they first saw the trailers because it “looked choppy”. One film critic in particular by the name of Roger Moore actually still held that critique against the film even after seeing it when he posted his review of it. Most people have come around to enjoying the films animation and have put the idea of it being choppy at the backs of their heads. But what did they mean initially?  The problem with a lot of film critics when it comes to judging an animated feature is that sadly they can come from a misinformed place about the medium and create this negative stigma around a film that isn’t justified. Animation is already fighting a number of prejudices (people saying it’s only for kids, saying it’s a genre and not a medium and any other amount of reasons why they may think they are above it) so this added one does not help what is easily the most spectacular animated film of 2018. But I myself am an animator, so I feel I can come from a place of explaining the visuals in a way that may make the still skeptical viewers more appreciative of what the film is trying to accomplish. With that in mind, here’s why the films animation works so well.

Animating on 2s, not on 1s

When it comes to animation, whether it be 2D or 3D, audiences are typically used to a consistent and fluid motion where there is virtually no break in the motion of a character or object. Simply put; it’s as fluid as fluid animation can be. In these cases, this is because the animation was done on “1s”. But what does that mean?

With a few exceptions, it’s a universal rule that animation runs at 24 frames per second. That means every second of footage you see of an animated film can have as many as 24 unique drawings or adjusted poses in them. That’s a lot of work, but animation legends like Richard Williams (director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) are famous for having classical animation of this stature. However, just because you CAN fill each second with that many drawings doesn’t mean everybody does. Alternatively you could have 12 drawings in each frame and just double the amount of time you see them go by. When you do this, it’s called animating on “2s”. It’s half the work for a result that may not be quite as fluid as animating on 1s but still looks convincing enough to deceive the human eye. You could even go as far as animating on 3s and animating on 4s, but the higher you go the more you increase the risk of your animation looking “choppy”. Spider-Verse in particular has most of their frames on 2s, with a few exceptions being when the characters have to keep up with complex camera work and so they go back to 1s. So that would explain why a lot of people initially thought the animation was “choppy” . . . .but are there any advantages to doing animation this way aside from having less frames to fill? Indeed there is. When you increase the exposure of any frame, the layout and composition of said frame as well as any small details has a greater chance of sticking out in the viewers mind. Spider-Verse takes exceptional advantage of this fact because every little action in this film is like a beautiful work of pop art. There can be other ways you can inject great appeal in your animation besides making it “fluid” like making every drawing crisp and full of detail and if you’re a skilled enough animator you can make your animation deceive the eye through a number of other tricks which we will go into in a bit. I can’t think of a finer example of this point than Legendary indie animator Bill Plympton.

Bill Plympton is famous for having his drawing exposures in the 3s and 4s, having every drawing have vivid detail with complex shading and sketchy lines, but he still manages to create believably moving and behaving characters and set pieces in spite of this limitation.

So how is it done? How does an animator make convincing and appealing movement with a decisively limited amount of drawings? Let’s start with good posing.

Posing

I’m of the opinion that Spider-Man lends himself to good animation more than any other superhero. Because of all superheroes, nobody has as many interesting poses, weight shifting and as much natural progression between actions as the web slinger. His main mode of transportation is swinging around, using his weight distribution and kicks and lunges to propel himself in any direction he wants and as he tries to make a turn he has to push himself into another direction, fighting the force that pushed him the other way to begin with. Contrast this with Superman who can just fly right over to where he needs to be without much movement of his arms and legs and without much struggle with incoming obstacles (fun fact, the whole reason Superman can even fly in the first place is because it’s easier to animate than have him leap everywhere). But anyway, back to Spidey. In most animation you develop key poses. Key poses are the main storytelling positions a character may have just to communicate the idea that they’re doing whatever it is they’re doing. So for example if you were to animate a jump, you would start by drawing the position of your character bending their legs to launch themselves up, then you would have them in mid air, then you would have them land again.

Once you create poses that tell the story well enough, you would fill in the rest between. But the key poses are VERY important to get right. To make sure there couldn’t possibly be any confusion as to what the characters are doing or even who they are, animators often ask themselves “would I know what’s happening here even if I put it in silhouette”? To add to the fluidity of the animation in a way that doesn’t compromise the chosen amount of frame exposure, poses also tend to follow a “line of action”. Basically the whole body follows the direction of a drawn line and maintains it’s course in order to really sell the action. It helps for exaggeration and for developing after aspects like arcs.

Now as I said before, Spider-Man is a particularly advantageous character when it comes to this stuff. Because he’s acrobatic. He’s shifts his weight a lot. His most iconic poses as a character lend themselves greatly to silhouette. Also, he happens to be very easy to draw. Even if all you did was draw a red stickman with spider eyes we could instantly tell who it is.

The animators for Spider-Verse knew exactly what kind of beast they were dealing with and MAN OH MAN did they have fun with it. Not only did they perfectly capture the way the classic Spidey moves, but they also gave every different Spider-Person their own take on it. Spider-Gwen moves with the grace and elegance of a ballet dancer, Noir Spidey has a less ambitious and more straight forward way of moving around (kind of “old school) if you will. Then of course you have Peni Parker recreating the anime aesthetic and Spider-Ham with all the elasticity of a cartoon.

*here’s a little Spidey animation I did a while ago.

Squash and Stretch, Anticipation, Overlapping Action, Follow Through

If anybody takes an animation class or tries to learn animation on their own, chances are Squash and Stretch will be the first animation principle listed. It’s exactly what it sounds like. Animators will often contort the model of their character to give whatever is happening more elasticity and to fill the gaps of an arc if drawings are a considerable distance away from each other. It helps the human eye track where an object is going and it can also help with principles like anticipation and follow through. Anticipation is the build up to an action. Think bending your knees before you lunge yourself upward for a jump. Because that momentum has to come from somewhere. Then there’s overlapping action, which is when dragging items on a character’s design such as clothes, capes, long ears, tails or what have you, are trailing along and need to catch up to the rest of the body. Spider-Verse does great with both these principles, especially with Spider-Ham and Noir Spidey. Spider-Ham is obviously influenced by Looney Tunes and other cartoony inspirations so he’ll be prone to doing a lot of squishing and stretching, where as Noir Spidey has the long trenchcoat and hat and you can bet that they’ll always be the last part of him to reach his destination (as well as be the most susceptible to wind). And of course, every character in Spider-Verse has great anticipation  . . . as well as what I think of as anticipation’s opposite, follow through. When an action stops, the body needs a moment to adjust itself into the resting position. Think catching yourself with your legs after a jump, crouching down and then standing back up again. Just like how momentum has to come from somewhere, it has to go somewhere when the action is over.

Appeal

So everything I covered thus far is stuff that’s universal across all forms of animation. But What does Spider-Verse do that makes it special? What separates it from other animated films in the theater? The answer is appeal. Appeal is just having a style and aesthetic that’s pleasing to look at . . . and man does Spider-Verse ever cover that. The film goes so far out of it’s way to look like a comic book that every texture has ben-day-dots so it literally looks like a comic print. Every Spider-Person has their own way of moving, their own way of behaving, their own sets of priorities when it comes to the 12 principles of animation. But the film also has a lot of really clever cheats. One of my favorite examples of this is how the film cheats forced perspective. There are many shots in the film where Miles is falling through the city as the buildings rush past him. The animators actually skewed the models of the buildings for these shots to imitate depth, as when they tried it without the skewing it didn’t looks like they were falling fast enough. They also implemented more classical cheats like smears, basically an animators method of imitating motion blur.

I could go on and on with the animation lecture, but honestly, I covered what I wanted to cover. I just wanted to showcase to anybody who may not be aware that animation is more than just “fluidity” and a seamless framerate and that there’s more ways to create appealing visuals than just that. If you haven’t seen it yet, go see Spider-Verse. It is a masterpiece.

#spiderman #spiderverse #spidergwen #miles morales #peter parker #spider ham #animation #cartoons #film

[nbapprentice]

there’s so, so, SO much nonsense surrounding this game that i’m gonna do my best to separate it into digestible bits, with its own categories. even then this is... wow. it’s big.

Warning tags will be added at the start of every section, but the general gist is: incest, pedophilia mentions, fetishization of rape and abuse, fetishization of mlm, fetishization of people of color, racism, ableism, nb erasure and transphobia. aside of the warnings, this post will also touch upon Scummy Business Practices

let’s get going

Dana Rune’s and Elle’s lack of moral fiber: #incest #pedophilia#rape and abuse fetishization #homophobia

tl;dr: dana loves incest porn, elle loves guy on guy rape, and the both of them are friends with at least one pedophile

dana rune has run, is still running an incest zine (please visit my faq on what i think about “thats not really incest” and “it’s just fictional!”). The Arcana, as a dev team, clearly does not care, as shown in their e-mail responses.

dana also very much doesn’t care and has reacted to any criticism on this by dismissing people and blocking actual incest victims who tried to contact her about it claiming it was for her “mental health”

in some tweets she claims she “interprets” the characters as not siblings, but she never really cared enough to cover her ass when it all began (she happily admits she’d “cross the incest line”)

dana has commissioned artists who also ship incest, draw near-pedophilic art that’s supposed to pass as acceptable because the character involved is supposedly not a minor despite looking like a child down to wearing pigtails (the character is also wearing a racist-ass belly dancer outfit), AND even made white-washed fanart of The Arcana.

dana follows twitter user kapymui who also produces incestuous Fire Emblem art

dana has retweeted omocat long after it came out that omocat is, at the very least, consuming pedophilic content (on “omocat didn’t know what shota meant!”: yes they did)

moving on, elle has a long, long, LONG history of fetishizing mlm and the rape and abuse that comes with yaoi and had a rich, RICH “yaoi” tag before they deleted their tumblr

they curiously deleted their tumblr right after i made this reblog

shortly after that, tumblr user thalassiq remade and started attacking and insulting any blogs criticizing them - even people providing support in IMs. Since this doesn’t match Dana and Elle’s normal pity parties I’m personally willing to believe they were just a person wanting to start shit - but it’s so telling how Elle used this chance to dismiss everyone who disagrees with them by calling them “children” and did not even bother to offer a kind word to people who were harassed and even had their trauma mocked by this person. It costs 0 dollars to say “that was not me but I’m sorry about people who were hurt.”

Dana and Elle are close with Ava’s Demon creator Michelle Czajkowski aka that one person who endorses child porn of her characters, and even had her draw a promo image for the game. Michelle has been creating highly sexualized content of her minor characters for a while now.

ok so elle and dana are gross freaks, how is that related to the game?

oh it’s very very related

Dana Rune’s and Elle’s lack of moral fiber that’s Actually Inside The Game or The Game’s Blog: now with more #racism #fetishization of poc and mlm #whitewashing #fat hate #pedophilia #nb erasure #transphobia

tl;dr: the arcana is filled to the brim with racism! so much of it! haha holy shit! and that’s not even where it ends!!!

their game is rated PG-13 but includes incredibly sexual situations such as Julian making this fucking face while getting off on pain. This isn’t the only time Dana and Elle use their videogame aimed at young teens to showcase their kinks and fetishes. I have no issue with NSFW or titillating content, as long as it’s rated accordingly. This content is NOT and it’s a blatant disregard for their audience just to have a larger, more pliable demographic and have more money sent their way.

if you start your argument with “well, teenagers look at porn” 1. shut up 2. theres a HUGE difference between teenagers going after adult content aimed at adults, and adults creating content they know will be seen by kids barely starting puberty

as pointed above, dana has 0 qualms literally commissioning people who make whitewashed fanart of her own fucking game that’s supposed to be all about the inclusivity and safe spaces

thearcanagame blog has a pattern of reblogging whitewashed fanart (before you come in swinging with the good ole “ITS THE LIGHTING”: 1. no it isnt 2. the artist should’ve picked better lightning then 3. i draw and post shit online too so dont come telling me i just dont understaaaand),

fanart of their fat characters showed skinnier than they are in their sprites (although to be real for a moment - Portia is curvy at most and them behaving she’s fat rep is HILARIOUS).

going back to NSFW content: nadia and asra are overwhemlingly sexualized in the game, and were the first to have sexualized CGs and sprites introduced.

CGs: Asra’s here, here aND HERE, Nadia’s here with a NSFW warning because she’s just got her whole fucking ass out. Sprites: Asra’s thank god for whoever compiled it all in one image, Nadia’s and once again, NSFW warning lmfao!

Julian’s sprites on the other hand are noticeably tamer, including the one where he’s fucking strapped in leather. His only sexual (NSFW warning because its literally softcore tentacle porn WHICH, ONCE AGAIN, SHOULDN’T BE PUT IN A GAME AIMED AT 13YOS) CGs were also included months after Nadia and Asra received any of theirs.

Through all of the updates, people have constantly requested that Asra and Nadia’s sexualization be toned down, and time after time The Arcana just churned out fetishistic, hypersexualized content at an absurd rate, especially when compared to the one white love interest.

Oh, speaking of the one white love interest: Julian is based off of Jeff Goldblum (this is not spectulation - they p much bring it up at any given time) but like. If Jeff Goldblum was white. They base their favorite love interest off their supposed favorite man in the world but casually leave his skin tone behind. Lmao.

they also play favorites very obviously - in the prologue, Nadia and Asra have a romance paid scene each. Julian has a scene... that requires no coins. Julian was also the first LI to receive three CGs, two of them requiring no coins, while both Asra’s and Nadia’s first CGs were behind a paywall

Dana and Elle have been notoriously skittish about confirming or denying their characters’ ethnicities. After hyping for weeks on thearcanagame that they would confirm the character’s races they basically made a post that amounted to “well they’re not white lol!”

they only relented after the perfectly understandable outrage... and posted a thread about it on Elle’s twitter. Nothing on the actual thearcanagame blog. Anyway, here’s the thread. Note how there’s mention of Julian being Jeff Goldblum... but nothing about him and Portia being Jewish (or “fantasy Jewish” as it were).

The one time they did confirm their jewishness dana then backpedaled and said she shouldn’t have done that lol.

another fun tidbit of how well The Arcana handles race and how much it cares about feedback from fans: an ask was sent about an anon begging for Nadia to step on them. The blog, with the finesse of a bunch of horny dumbasses, didn’t just publish the ask, but approved of it (even though the fans of color had long, long, LONG been telling everyone not to fetishize Nadia into a “step on me kween” wet dream). People were outraged, of course, and the blog ~apologized~ and said they were still learning.... then a new chapter included a scene of Nadia stepping on the Apprentice. 🙃

not to mention elle, on their twitter, made a passive aggressive “women can be doms?” tweet, trying to twist it into a “yr oppressing women” angle (when the issue is that women of color are always constantly portrayed as aggressive and domineering)

Now for a wombo combo of racism and Elle’s fetishization of mlm:

the devs have spoken at length of how Julian’s and Asra’s relationship was quite unhealthy. In a paid scene in Asra’s route, they’re depicted as Asra being disgusted w Julian touching him+Julian following Asra to his shop when Asra refused his offer to go with him (aka julian... stalked him lmfao).

.......... this scene is promptly followed by a highly sexual scenario where Julian’s pain fetish is played up. Remember how this game is rated PG-13? Me neither. Asra’s previous disgust with Julian is also forgotten, for some reason (and by some reason i mean Elle wants to make them fuck w/o buildup or logic).

Then Asra’s route has yet another paid scene dedicated to Asrian, even though he’s supposed to not even like Julian! And be head over heels with the Apprentice! But Elle just has to make these two be entangled despite insisting their relationship was not good for either of them!

Now here’s the kicker: Julian doesn’t have any paid scenes related to his romance with Asra. Note how it’s one of the brown LIs whose route is highjacked by the white LI, but not vice versa. Hmmmmm.

Now, on the topic of Asra: thearcanagame has said repeatedly that he’s nb and uses he/him pronouns, and promised (since last year) that there would be dialogue where he speaks about his gender

as of the making of this post such dialogue still does not exist

so basically asra is the nb to dumbledore’s gay: anyone who just plays the game w/o keeping up with the official blog has no idea of what asra’s gender is supposed to be.

aka he’s not nb. he’s just a cis guy. the arcana just doesn’t want to put its money where its mouth is, i dont care if elle is nb themself. the team made a promise which has not been fulfilled yet and i suspect will not be.

instead, our introduction to canon nb characters is... these two.

By “these two” i mean neither vulgora nor valdemar are even fucking human, and stick out like sore thumbs with their monstruousness.

so our nb rep is... non-human villains. a few books later one of Nadia’s sisters with they/them pronouns shows up, but that’s too little too late on top of the fact that we should’ve known Asra was nb from the first to begin with. It’s a fucking embarrassment and an insult.

at least two villains are visibly disabled (Lucio’s missing arm and Volta’s blind eye+intentionally asymmetrical face). Julian’s eye doesn’t count because, spoilers, he’s not lacking an eye and even if he was it’d still be hidden behind a dashing eyepatch instead of grotesquely displayed as a sign of his lacking morality.

BUT WAIT! IT DOESN’T EVEN END THERE!

The Arcana Exploits The App Business Model To Price Their Full Game at $500, $1000 if the three extra routes make it out, and they never delivered their Kickstarter rewards:

tl;dr: you heard me

the original price per route was planned on being $1.99

they took that “subject to change” really seriously, it seems, because now each route, once the game is fully out, is estimated to cost around $170 each.

both those screenshots are taken from this post which explains in detail just how truly scummy all of The Arcana’s business model and decisions are: https://mysticmicrotransactions.tumblr.com/post/174308723344/dishonesty-from-the-arcana

the tl;dr is basically what’s listed in the beginning of this section, but other highlights from that post are: the use of addictive gambling mechanics such the Wheel of Fortune, and the dazzling calls to action in the new mini-game.

something that The Arcana supporters forget (or choose to ignore) is the fact that for a long, long time the game did not have the mini-game or the log-in rewards for coins. Players depended only on the gambling of the WoF or paying absurd amounts of money for the new chapters.

the devs went from playing the victims who were unable of controlling prices to (as spoken of in the link from mysticmicrotransactions) saying the making of the game (a pathetic little app game backed by a studio and a kickstarter) justifies the prices

they also gave people false hope about maybe changing the prices in the future, all while bleeding money from loyal players in “micro” transactions

the arcana literally added a $99.99 coins option on their latest update

in case it hasn’t sunk in yet: you can pay a hundred dollars upfront to the arcana, and you still will not have access to the whole game

there is no defense to this

none

“it’s free stop whining” let me explain:

“spend months on end accumulating fake currency or pay hundreds of dollars up-front to be able to play” is a scummy business model no matter how you look at it

if i can spend $60 upfront to play an AAA game there’s no excuse to demand more than that for a game with much smaller and, honestly, inferior content

the combination of there being already far and few games featuring lgbt characters and characters of color AND the little cult of personality set up by Dana and Elle makes people feel that spending money to support them is an acceptable expense.

it’s not

manipulating people into spending ridiculous amounts of money and then claiming “it’s their choice” is just scummy business, baby, and thats all the arcana does

the devs are brats who instead of admitting $500 is absurd for a game instead write petty little caricatures into their game - like, lbr: dana, elle, if i could afford diamonds in my hair i wouldn’t have even bothered with your shitstain of a game

despite bragging that ppl would get the full story w/o needing to pay, the paid scenes are pretty much required - the first few books of julian’s route have no romance without accessing any of the paid options. you dont even get so much as a kiss in without handing coins over. many, many people were baffled when julian had a teary break-up scene when from their perspective they hadn’t even started building a relationship.

wow that’s more than i ever thought it’d be

and i’ve been aware of their bullshit for near a whole year now!

i don’t have much of a note to end this on, other than: the arcana just isn’t even that good. it suffers from weak writing, pathetic character development and above all actually harmful content. do not try to argue with me on any of these points unless you’ve read all of that, because whatever you have to say i’ve likely mentioned before. if you still are that determined to yell at a me on the internet, please preface your argument with the phrase “I’m a pee pee poo poo man” so I know you’ve read everything in here. thank you!

#the arcana #the arcana game #julian devorak #count lucio #asra #HAHA HOO BOY

[fadinginfluencerblaze]

Fallen Dreams

 Disclaimer~ Art is devised by me and all editorial work is a solo operation. “Fallen,” will be my last publication before my vacation: https://adventvoice.newgrounds.com/news/post/1057611 If you would like commissions or requests for art work done please visit my patreon  account   https://www.patreon.com/AdventVoice  https://adventvoice.newgrounds.com/news/post/1057550      https://adventvoice.newgrounds.com/news/post/1057522

From several authorities of art and creativity, I’ve heard something after completing “Loving My Dragon,” something I’ve not heard since I was sixteen. My ability in the arts is worth more than a few hearts, likes and the endorsements of a few passerbys. It is better than what people have been forced to digest in the past twenty four years. Could be longer really. Depends on your tolerance for main stream media.

Forced to settle, due to never being exposed to minds similar to my own. Which there are a lot of us. I’ve realized as I dig deeper into the internet, blogs, and journals of other dreamers.

There was a study, a social experiment really, given by Facebook and other online platforms, seeking to gauge how to rate worker performance by emoji. Wanting to reward creative minds who earn the most accolades and applause of the people. It can become rather addictive and I find I may be falling into that same trend. Advertising more or less for the approbation of people and not so much for pay.

I explained this to a few supporters and they were shocked. Believing me to be worth far more than the few seconds of increased impressions on twitter and the level of dinner table conversation I can influence with a few well directed bards and illustrations of the latest trending topic.

Now if only I could find a paying sponsor that believes the same thing. Then me and the Dream Weaver would really go places. Here’s the thing about me, that is different from your average ambitious and dedicated creator. I don’t want to go anywhere my friends won’t be invited to reap the benefits.    

I’ve seen too much in this life to believe I can do anything on my own and be a success at it. You know I remember a time when people could have 500+ Facebook friends and no one spend a dollar with or on each other. On anything that could turn a profit. Nearly a thousand people talking, interacting, mingling and no money is made on the effort. Oh there is a lot of sexy talk, a lot of people locked up cause the girl is underage and the guy is enthralled with her pictures. Oh there was a lot of room fo shows like “Cheaters,” to corner a market in tracking people via location recognition devices on the broadband signatures, but for nearly ten years, no one was making any real money that would put them on the Forbes list as the best entrepreneur, besides those buying out all of the larger retail stores and Disney. Could be why I spend so much money on everyone else and not on myself. Makes me feel like I am saving the small business owners world, one click at a time.

The loss of Tina-Raze  on the                                         internet and access to her work has really made me appreciate the gift of visibility attributed to my own work. Sure I desire a physical gallery, but that cost money and you need dedicated staff. An online gallery is a one man show that will last as long as I have material, drive and an interactive audience. But when outside forces wage against one’s output and you are forced to erase everything and the years put into a showcase are no longer accessible; there is something daunting in the realization that everyday I have a chance to present anything, it should not be wasted on the trivial.

That is a sharp word because I highly doubt any of us have the authoritative right to define what is relevant or trivial to a creator. We can choose to interact with a product of not but we can’t say what someone was seeking to share has no value and thus erase them from existence. Not if we have any respect for the sanctity of the culture of art and the freedom in which we universally share this gift.      

~ I can never say enough of how much I appreciate the time we shared and I hope you return to the creative scene soon Tina-Raze.~

 I was reviewing “The Action Bible,” published by David Cook and illustrated by Sergio Cariello. It is an extensive publication that sought to illustrate the entire Bible, without the mistakes seen in previous renditions. It really took that whole group a while to find the best method to bring the Bible to life for young and old readers. I enjoyed their expressive illustrative skills and dedication to keeping to as much as can be had with a book as fantastic as the Bible.

What surprised me was the decision to eliminate the wings of angels and go with the ‘golden locks,’ signature.  For years the wings of angels and demons played a big part in aiding people in separating the two worlds. Without the wings, we are no more than disembodied spirits, ghosts of our formers selves and have a long journey yet to that pinnacle of glory that awaits the faithful. So it was taught to me at least.

There were a lot of ideas shared with me as boy that I spend little time contemplating now, because I am a man and more than assured of where I will be regardless of the mistakes in this life.

Others may doubt. Others may seek to clip my wings as I ascend. Others may project their insecurities and through bitter imaginations suggest that because of the curse of Ham, and Nimrod, the black race will never have a place in heaven. Some may build a whole world of fantastical proportions and place compartments, as zookeepers, locks and doors upon the gates, with signs that say, “If you never drank yourself into oblivion while on earth, you go here, you never loved anyone but God you go here, if you never where tempted to fuck a woman in the ass, though she begged for it, you go here.”

Another sign reads, “Collect your white wings for perfect attendance on the earth, to every Sunday meeting.” In this corner of heaven, you should have received a notice in your casket upon death, we were sure to send Gabriel, who after years of working for God, never got his golden winged promotion.

All who have been the black sheep of the family and have been to prison more than once in their life time be sure to collect your “black wings,” down isle five. Five is the number for grace and that is the only reason you’re hear, so don’t be cute and try to steal the ‘white wings,’ from your betters, who happen to shine a little sharper in hue and have more gold flakes in their hair.  

Those who were on earth and always fought for a righteous cause but failed to achieve any victory and remain angry behind the loss, you will receive your ‘red wings,’ in the dust falcons chamber. Some of you were clumsy on earth. Always bumping into things. Could never walk in heels or win a fashion show. Never turned the heads of men or appealed to women. Had a haunch in you back from never learning poise and posturing. Be sure to pick up your set of ‘spotted owl,’ wings, found in the east gate.

God is a god of order and angles never complain about their lot in heaven. There in whatever state they are in, there, they are to be content. There is a hint of a karmic code in association with the hue and colors of heaven and I was never one to believe in eastern influences when it comes to what my place in heaven would be like. I bend so far on earth, doing what I am told, I will go to heaven with white skin, white wings and all curse will be lifted from my body upon death and the curse of the previous life that marred me and made me black, while I was alive.  

I don’t think so. No, I’ve believed for a long time now that even black angles deserve to fly.   https://avproductionsblog.wordpress.com/2017/11/03/even-black-angels-deserve-to-fly/   https://avproductionsblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/18/you-read-it-here-first-black-amethyst/

I know I am not one to be denied.

Those of you that know how to twirl and twerk and shake your tail feathers, to win the Twerk Team Auditions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rba9Z0CcWwQ&list=PLxwfHzPeMrG0N0E5Q3hBI_vRjXl-BqJAR or hang out with DJ UNK https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeLdCPINh6M and earn 15 minutes of fame for being a video vixen with a phat ass, you can gather your eagle wings in the North tower. You should notice the Notorious BIG Smalls in the butlers uniform, set to serve and assist you wonderful ladies in fitting for your wings. He was always so good at zipping up Faith Evans dresses, we thought he’d like doing that for eternity.

Just stand there and zip wings.

He was way too dark and ugly so he never earned his own, but Puff Daddy sand and danced enough to ensure he’d make it in.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LHyvFryW2M

What a joke, eh that might have been a cheap shot to bring Puff Daddy and Biggie into this conversation, it’s just, I am so sick of color being a barrier for people I guess. But as long as there are people, it will play a part in the minds of men and women that hold their minds hostage and will build politics and kingdoms centered around it. We will split God into figures of hued stone that resembles us in some fashion and suggest if he looks like me, then he is the one that created me. Odd considering how I can create characters of different races, backgrounds and love each with as much joy as the next. Why would I doubt God would love me less because my hair is not wavy or red and ruddy and my skin is not peached or pinked, but bronzed and red? Why is my tolerance for people and the curves, shapes and hues greater than that of a god and I am a mere man?

King Solomon, black but comely: I am glad I’ve never heard it taught, due to Solomon’s hue of skin the temple came down. Why are we so caught up with color that we would actually base our safety on it, risk our lives for it? When in the middle of turmoil, pain, upheaval, or simply in a moment of benign joy during an annual parade in the city, color should be the last thing discussed.

Ever since I was a boy, I’ve held a rigid position on color talk. I had to be set because all of my friends where white. My first love was a gothic princess, that used to put a cat collar and a leash around my neck. I lived in New Jersey and traveled to upstate New York and Ohio all the time and had so much fun playing video games, poker or reading comics with white people. Lived in Kansas where they tried to make me where a confederate uniform for the JROTC program. I did not know if it was a joke of if they really felt I would be honoring someone’s death by wearing that uniform.

I sought to be above the barriers poised by classification and color because I am an artist.  Because I am a storyteller and find relevance in people and can’t deny anyone based on my insecurities. I would not want someone to look at me and deny me access to anything. A communicable discussion, a forum, anything political, or my own comfort and what I believe to be good for me because of my color, because  their preconceived beliefs  denotes I should be marginalized.

I laughed myself into stitches, when during my junior year of highschool I realized all of the black children expected me to eat my lunch on the wall and away from the ‘preppy-white,’ children because they decided to self-segregate. Because they felt they did not have a life style or come from a family that could afford to play golf at the local country club. That they would not and were not admitted to be  apart of a society setting our grandparents and great grandparents were conditionally denied. I was infuriated by the idea of having to defend my home and right to existence, from people of my own color, if I ever married an Asian, white, Indian, Arab, anything besides a black woman. Especially to look at me, you’d never out right believe I was of African decent until I grew out my hair, which I would wear proudly, long and wild.

Fredrick Douglas had nothing on me in my desire to topple the walls the youth of my generation would build around themselves for the sake of traditions that should have been long dead. I would have loved to ignore this conversation, but it is all over the conservative radio, it is misdirected or used callously on liberal stations and it’s become too easy to degrade someone you might disagree with on a benign social discussion, as a racist.

It is too easy to believe I don’t attribute credibility in the claim when you call me an Uncle Tom because I speak well and try very hard not to curse when it would be so much more convenient to do so.          

https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/730095

Honestly in the world of art this should never be a discussion and if life truly imitated art in this dynamic the world would be a better place. At least confrontation and schisms would not be as prevalent as it is today. To me it is like we begin the topic of hues and what is beautiful or seen in heaven, because we don’t have anything else to talk about.

I illustrated “Fallen,” as a response to how ridiculous of an idea of not being accepted by God or anyone would feel that way, because they are black. That someone would use the Bible to teach that and we would stop illustrating wings when talking about angels, in order to unify the spectrum of colors that make up our world into the kingdom of Zion.

Hard to imagine; in some aspects we still can’t agree on a marketable environment that unites black, white, Asian, and Indian dreamers.      

[mysticmarlowe-blog]

Pyschotherapy Doesn't Work

A few years back I trained as a person-centred counsellor. Unlike psychodynamic psychotherapy, person-centred doesn’t get into the unconscious stuff. It works on the basis that healing will occur spontaneously in the client, as long as the therapist embodies the three core conditions (unconditional positive regard, empathy and congruence). Clients would pour their hearts out, I would smile warmly, nod sagely, ask no questions, just “hold them in a space of non-judgement”, and they would all leave feeling much better, (or much worse, or exactly the same except slightly annoyed to have just wasted an hour of their time …difficult to tell really!) During supervision I would discuss the various challenges I encountered with my clients, who I felt safe with, who I felt wearied by, and how amazingly well I felt my counselling dovetailed with my ordination training. Oh, it was all going so well. Until Holy Spirit barged in on me one day whilst I was doing the washing up (he does this a lot) and quite unexpectedly proclaimed “Give up counselling!”

You can argue with Holy Spirit, and a lot of us do, but it’s an argument everyone loses in the end. Jesus lost an argument to Holy Spirit once, and he’d be the first to admit now, he never stood a chance. (Satan in the desert didn't phase Jesus half so much as Holy Spirit in Gesthamane!) So, I learned from Jesus and gave up counselling, without a battle but without really understanding why. It was only later, at the end of my ordination training, that I understood why any sort of counselling doesn’t work with A Course in Miracles.  (In fact, I would dare say that any sort of counselling doesn’t work, full stop, but then it depends what you mean by “work” I suppose).

A person-centred counsellor on a fast-track needs to undertake two years training, usually one day per week in college and a few written assignments, and then I think it’s a hundred hours of counselling practice, before he can hang out his shingle. I think the weekly time commitment over the two years is something like twenty hours. So, in twenty hours per week for two years, the candidate is expected to do thousands of years (if not thousands of lifetimes) of work in the transcendence of his ego, so he can show up in front of any client that is thrown at him and feel nothing but unconditional positive regard.

I could really bring out the big guns here and say terrorist, drug dealer, wife beater, paedophile, but, the clients who triggered me were just ordinary people who I projected my own stuff onto. Well, of course I did. I hadn’t done the work yet. I still haven’t now for the most part. It was a long time after I’d given up counselling that I really got this.  Person centred counselling for me was sitting in front of a client, projecting my stuff onto her, and pretending to hold her in a space of unconditional positive regard when actually, I was privately judging her as beneath me, and setting rigid boundaries to keep us separate. No wonder Holy Spirit told me to get the hell out, although I couldn’t see it at the time.

I have a student, Kerry, who channels Holy Spirit a bit like Helen Schucman or Mari Perron. She doesn’t do anything with it yet other than email it to me, and I sometimes quote it in my blog posts. Recently she asked Holy Spirit about this question of therapy and here’s what he said to her:

“Holding a space for someone to find their own solution, to crash and burn or to rise as a Phoenix is an art that the ego does not have a brush stroke for. Yet give it to Holy Spirit and a canvas can be created that is painted by a touch so delicate and perfect that only the perceiver can understand what is meant when taking in (seeing) the frame from a distance. To try and analyse the details of each stroke with a magnifying glass can only give one a very limited understanding of the creation, one has to step back and see the canvas from a broader perspective and only I have that ability. For without the Vision of Christ Consciousness one is limited to that which is not real. It would be like looking through muddy water or the glass darkly, but whilst still trying to focus with your magnifying glass on the minutiae of the detail”.

Carl Rogers, the founder of the person centred approach, seems like he was a very kind and authentic  man to me. I’ve seen him on youtube a few times and he has a beautiful aura about him. But Lordy was he ever mistaken to believe he could achieve unconditional positive regard in his lifetime, and train his students to do so too. Ironically, Bill Thetford hung out with Carl a bit whilst he was developing his theory, he may even have had a hand in it,  but it was twenty years too early for Bill to point out to Carl this elephant in his consulting room. 

The unassailable fact remains, Jesus couldn't do "UPR",  (at least not the pre-Easter Jesus). Sure, he sat down to eat with the tax collectors and prostitutes, his famous table ministry,  but he had plenty to say to plenty of people whilst pouring the wine, not all of it very nice. When he appeared in Galillee after the resurrection, he built Peter a charcoal fire, but during the last supper he was pointing the finger directly at him. And as for  poor Judas…

As Holy Spirit says, “Only I have that ability”.

I went to see the Shaykh of my Sufi order in London the other day, and he gave me a new meditation to do, for 45 minutes a day, in the morning before my kids get up. It’s a little bit complicated, and it changes after a month into something even more complicated, and then there’s different stuff to do at night, (Darud, or Blessings on the Prophet). I don’t really understand any of it, but when the Shaykh asks me to do something , I tend to do it. I’m not saying he’s like Holy Spirit, but Sufism’s been around a lot longer than 50 years and the lineage holders do seem to have at least some clue, unlike anyone I know of in the ACIM community, where there no lineage to speak of. In 500 years time, a guru may emerge, but this person isn’t amongst us yet (Sorry Hoffy!) So I do what the Shaykh asks of  me (concerning my practice I must make clear, he doesn’t involve himself in any other aspect of my life) and I ask no questions.

This afternoon I noticed an amusing facebook post from a British stand-up called Mo Gilligan. If you draw “-2 -2 + =“, with your fingers, on your pillow, your jeans, your desk, your bag, wherever, it sounds like “Chim Chimini”. So, for the next half hour, I downed tools from writing this article to concentrate fully on this incredible phenomenon (Try it, it really does work every time!) And strangely, this brief foray into inanity gave me the answer to the question I would never, EVER, have asked the Shaykh. Giving 45 minutes a day (or twice a day even better) to a higher power I don’t understand or even try to understand, is my current practice in willingness, that elusive quality I need but haven’t got yet. It brings me back, once again, to my favourite quote in the whole of the ACIM text:

“It takes far longer to teach you to be willing to give Him this [instant] than for Him to use this tiny instant to offer you the whole of heaven”. (T.15.I.11.4)

For me, no amount of therapy, giving or receiving, has taught me willingness. It has only taught me fear and separation. Meditation teaches me willingness, and anything I do, anything at all that fully absorbs my ego (so anything except meditation really, from washing up, to reading ACIM, to playing Chim Chimini on my pillow with my fingers) will give Holy Spirit the gateway he needs to tell me what I need to know. Which is never very much anyway!

[mousedetective]

Never Will I Forget The Deep Shadows, Never Will I Waste The Moon’s Light (1/15 or 16)

So yes, I did not finish it last night. ::hangs head:: I will finish it today, though, mark my words! This is a very Sherlock-centric story, but there is also a ton of Molly (though not Sherlolly...we’ll leave that for a possible sequel, as I wanted to leave this semi-S2 compliant) and an epic magical confrontation with Moriarty and...

Oh. Did I mention that Sherlock is a magician? Because he is.

Anyway, I’m reposting the existing chapters leading up to the reveal on WIP Big Bang, along with the new chapters, so it’s all starting over on AO3 so new people can discover this story.There is also pretty art by Red Bess Rackham that I will have properly linked on the first chapter hopefully soonish, so please enjoy!

~~~

Never Will I Forget The Deep Shadows, Never Will I Waste The Moon’s Light - The Holmes brothers come from a long line of powerful magic practitioners, but they are forced to keep their skills a secret. When Molly accidentally finds out about Sherlock’s powers and doesn’t turn away from him he slowly realizes that this pleases him, but soon enough he gets careless and is put in a position he would rather not be in, especially when others find out that she knows and attempt to use her as a pawn in their own games and machinations.

Read Chapter 1 @ AO3 | Buy Me A Coffee? | Send Me A Prompt

Mycroft stood regally by the fireplace in his study. ”You know you have to keep it a secret, Sherlock. No mortal can know.”

He was lounging in the chair he favored, his leg over the arm. Only when he really wanted to annoy his brother did he toss all sense of decorum and propriety out the window, especially since the chair wasn’t that comfortable to begin with and the position made it less so. ”Easy enough for you to say. Your assistant who’s tied to you nearly twenty-four hours a day is one of us.”

“Well, that’s what you get for going and getting attached to a mortal army doctor, a mortal pathologist and a mortal inspector at Scotland Yard,” Mycroft said, a hint of snideness in his tone.

“And a mortal housekeeper,” Sherlock said, rolling his eyes. “Yes, I know. I set myself up among mortals. I purposefully chose to live among them. It’s my own fault for that. Etcetera, etcetera. You’ve had this tune for years.” He couldn’t stand the position anymore so he put himself to rights and then simply slumped to the side, resting his elbow on the arm of the chair and settling his cheek on his knuckles. “At least I didn’t become a hermit like Sherrinford.”

“Sherrinford had no other choice,” Mycroft said quietly, gazing into the fire. “Not after the incident.” He lifted the snifter of brandy in his hand and took a sip. “And if you aren’t careful, Sherlock, with your continued pushing yourself to your absolute limits, you might be next.”

Sherlock bit back a sigh. His brother had always felt himself his keeper, ever since he was young. It appeared that would never change, not in a million years. He wondered when he would ever get out from under his brother’s thumb. Possibly never, he supposed. Perhaps if Sherrinford…no, it didn’t do to dwell on that. No one in the family talked about it. No one admitted that Sherrinford existed, for the most part. He was an afterthought these days, as though he had never really been a part of the family.

He supposed if he wasn’t careful, one day, he might be an afterthought as well.

The world knew he was different. They knew he was a genius, a man who could solve the trickiest of tricky crimes. The ones that were deemed unsolvable by most. His reputation had grown steadily larger as time had gone by, ever since John had come into his life and started keeping the blog. The Detective and the Blogger, the Crime Fighting Duo. Oh, there were so many monikers for them, so many names. He was someone the world thought they knew every fascinating tidbit about, and what they didn’t know they wanted to learn.

But there was one secret they absolutely couldn’t know, as his brother was just now reminding him.

He, William Sherlock Scott Holmes, had been born with the ability to do magic.

Not the cheap parlour tricks that stage magicians could do, the illusions meant to wow and mystify and audience, the type of stuff that could be easily debunked. No, he knew real magic. Old magic. The kind of magic that traveled through bloodlines as old as time immortal, the stuff Druids talked of long ago. He could do almost anything, really. For one as young as he was, for someone who honestly didn’t study ancient texts half as hard as his brothers had or practice anything near as much he was twice as powerful as they were.

He just…didn’t care. It made him different, even more different than he already was. His brilliance had set him apart in many ways; being able to do magic, being something separate than mere mortals had been icing on a cake he had simply not wanted. When he had been a young child he had reveled in it, but when he got older, when Mycroft pressed the importance of hiding his abilities, hiding the truth about himself, when he saw what happened when someone trusted the wrong person…he was more than eager to do so. Being seen as just a cold, egotistical genius was fine by him.

And yet when Donovan had called him a freak he’d hated that term so much. He’d always kept that icy demeanor when she said it but the words hit like a blow to the gut. It was the worst thing to hear, the one insult that actually hurt. When the children he’d been around growing up had called him that, he’d held back tears until he had absolute privacy, then let tears fall. When he’d heard it as a teen, and later in his university years, he’d turned to heroin to numb it all away. By the time he was an adult he’d swallow it down and let it sit there, cutting on the way down, making him hate the world just a little more.

But his friends had healed those bits of him. It was true they didn’t know they whole truth, they could never know the whole truth, but over time, John and Molly and Lestrade and Mrs. Hudson had made him feel…normal. Or at least more normal than he had ever felt in his life before. He appreciated that more than he could tell them. He wasn’t great at showing it, unfortunately; the Christmas party had made that abundantly clear, but he was willing to try harder. He supposed he could say it was a New Year’s resolution, if he actually believed in that type of twaddle. They had done some good for him; he supposed he should be better at showing them that they were important to him.

Even if they were mortal, and that meant he had to listen to his brother make snide commentary on the fact.

Mycroft turned to him. “You can’t afford to go into withdrawal, Sherlock,” he said. “I do not have the time, energy or resources to bring you out of it without questions being raised.”

Sherlock rolled his eyes. “You’re worried I’ll get careless and get caught because I’ve surrounded myself with mortals,” he said. “Mycroft, it’s not as though I spend my evenings in the sitting room. I do happen to have a bedroom, which is fitted, if you might recall, with a very good lock. Even you have trouble picking it.”

Mycroft glared slightly. “Still. You have a tendency to be reckless.”

Sherlock shook his head and stood up. “One day, brother dear, you’ll realize I am fully capable of living a life without your constant observation and interference. When that day comes, I’m sure I can have a list handy of other hobbies to catch your interest.” He made his way to the door of Mycroft’s study. “Good night.”

Mycroft said nothing and Sherlock opened the door and let himself out. He glanced at the large clock in the foyer and saw that it was only eleven thirty. So. It was still the old year. At least he didn’t begin the new year listening to his brother berate him for sins of the past and mistakes he’d never be able to fully make up for. That would have been tiresome. Anthea stood by the door with his coat and he took it from her, slipping it on before leaving Mycroft’s fortress and going out into the night.

He was not one for celebrations, not one for good signs and good omens, but the fact that he could start this new year on his own, breathing in the relatively fresh air of the city, taking the essence of London into himself led him to think that, perhaps, 2012 would be better than he had expected. As bad as some of the glimpses of possible futures he’d been given indicated it very well might be, there had been good things as well, images of laughter and love and warmth, and that had given him hope. After all, no one’s future was writ in stone. That was something he had been taught from a very young age, when he first learned about the art of divination. There was always room for interpretation.

And as he had decided at a very young age that no one was going to decide what happened in his life other than himself, he was going to be damn sure that if there were bad things to come, that their impact was far less than the good things.

Mark his words.

#Sherlock #sherlock holmes #mycroft holmes #fanfiction #fanfic #my stuff #Multipart: Never Will I Forget The Deep Shadows Never Will I Waste The Moons Light #wip big bang #sirro134

[bambamramfan]

1/2 I know you frame many of your critiques in terms of "ideology", but you seem to use the term in different ways depending on the post. Sometimes you talk about abstract values: caricatures in media, nebulous culture iconography. Sometimes you're separating broad familiar political groupings and specifying their traits (this comes up when you talk about socialism). And sometimes you seem to be talking about communities (or demographics, but it's important to make a distinction between those).

2/2 I see these situations as different enough that I would prefer to use different words. Why do you use the one? Do they all reduce to one concept for you? If so, how?

So let’s start with why we are having these conversations. If you’re reading this blog I assume you’re familiar with the claim “both sides do it,” when you notice both sides of a political fight are acting badly. Ignoring evidence, name-calling, cognitive dissonance, even harassing members of the other political side, or obsessively focusing on a few instances of terrorism to prove the entire other side is bankrupt. You’ve probably been in the situation where you agreed with the fundamental beliefs of one political side, but didn’t know what to do about the fact that it felt like they were acting badly and betraying their beliefs, but the other side wasn’t really any better. Scott has certainly written about this dilemma a lot.

And we recognize “a lot of the way people talk about politics fails, and it fails in the same way.” That’s why politics is called the mindkiller. Now many people will say “Oh I just guess political discussion is terrible, lets just not talk politics or morality.” But that can’t be right either - we can easily imagine good political discussions - based on evidence and ethical principles, with respect for our opponents as human beings even when they disagree with that.

So to critique ideology is trying to find “the ways these political dynamics keep failing, what the whole system has in common, and how we can avoid that.”

I for instance am strongly opposed to dehumanization. It is the bedrock principle of this particular blog. The left wing side of American politics has policies more in concordance with this, but it must be admitted that liberal discourse has increasingly embraced dehumanization of its enemies. So why doesn’t American liberalism resist dehumanization, and how can you have a politics that consistently follows your ethical principles, without being seduced into thinking “your greatest values are worth violating as long as it hurts your enemies.”

That’s the aim. Let’s talk about why it’s all one big system, and not separable parts.

******

Question for you. What is the Republican Party? Especially if you’re looking at it from the question of “if there was one thing I could control, to thereby control the whole party with, what is it?”

(As with my previous post on Republican dynamics, you can say all these same things for the Democratic Party if you prefer to think of it that way.)

It’s not the Republican National Committee, or any other institutional organizations. They can’t really drive policy or discussion. Most voters or radio talk show hosts just complain about them.

It’s not individual politicians. Many of them are very different from each other - look at the passage from Dubya to Trump. But the torch passed with most of the same voters and supporters intact (despite a hostile takeover. Something was taken over. What was it?)

It’s not “the collection of all the voters or office holders.” These are many different demographics - rich bankers, white farmers in Idaho, oilmen in Texas, Cuban families in Florida. And what more there’s very little demographic test. While their policies are bad for black people and gay people and hispanic people, by and large individuals of those demographics are enthusiastically embraced as converts, to say “Republican policies ARE better for black people!” Just look at their love of Tim Scott and Colin Powell. By the same token, loyalty to current Republicans is very shallow - if you step out of line and disagree with the popular line of the day, you get labelled as a RINO, attacked by radio talk shows, possibly even harassed and driven out of the party entirely.

Are they defined by their particular values then? Well on a policy level, their lock-step-heel switch the Individual Mandate solution for health insurance, or Cap-and-Trade, showed alarming rapidity in how a favored policy can become an opposed policy. There wasn’t even cognitive dissonance really, just complete disavowal. Even on policies we think of as very fundamental to Republicans, like lower taxes, were not negotiated on by federal Republicans so long as President Obama was part of the deal. Any presence of any Democrat in the deal could ruin its purity.

You could say they are committed to certain philosophical principles in the abstract sense, but what are they? Would all the factions agree with those? Do they even consistently predict what policies will be proposed and voted on?

As I said before in the Senate Republicans post, I wouldn’t even identify this system within individuals. As individuals many Republicans believe sensible, similar object-level things like you or your liberal friends.

We could go all nihilistic here and say the Republican Party isn’t a real thing we can understand. But it seems like there are a lot of predictions we can make based on our knowledge of something called the Republican Party. We know the way all the Senators will vote, we know which candidate will win Georgia and by what percentage within ten percent, and we know what bills they will try to repeal.

How do we identify this ideology?

******

So you read my post on terminology: the Big Other, the Dark Other, and joissance.

Arlie Hochschild spent five years talking to various conservatives of different class levels that helped him understand the populist uprising that we eventually saw last year. They had a lot of different life circumstances, different politicians they were supporting of, and their expression of abstract political values was vague at best.

When I asked people what politics meant to them, they often answered by telling me what they believed ("I believe in freedom") or who they'd vote for ("I was for Ted Cruz, but now I'm voting Trump"). But running beneath such beliefs like an underwater spring was what I've come to think of as a deep story. The deep story was a feels-as-if-it's-true story, stripped of facts and judgments, that reflected the feelings underpinning opinions and votes. It was a story of unfairness and anxiety, stagnation and slippage—a story in which shame was the companion to need. Except Trump had opened a divide in how tea partiers felt this story should end.

...

What the people I interviewed were drawn to was not necessarily the particulars of these theories. It was the deep story underlying them—an account of life as it feels to them. Some such account underlies all beliefs, right or left, I think. The deep story of the right goes like this:You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black—beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you're being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He's on their side. In fact, isn't he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It's not your government anymore; it's theirs.I checked this distillation with those I interviewed to see if this version of the deep story rang true. Some altered it a bit ("the line-waiters form a new line") or emphasized a particular point (those in back are paying for the line-cutters). But all of them agreed it was their story. One man said, "I live your analogy." Another said, "You read my mind."

Hochschild thinks this a sympathetic way to describe their beliefs, because it shows they don’t actually hate black people or whatnot. I think it’s abhorrent. And it precisely fits that triptych to define an ideology: the Big Other is whoever at the front of the line giving things out, the Dark Other is the people cutting, or rather leaders like Obama helping them cut, and joissance is the “American Dream” that is being handed out.

The story isn’t even a very effective way of handling problems. It’s about resentment at that Dark Other, and not what sort of compromises you could make to reduce line-cutting, or increase the amount of “American Dream” to hand out. These are fantasy concepts after all, and people’s feeling about them. Some policies or individual politicians will not reduce their impact on you nearly as much as “Someone speaking out against them!” feeds your sense of injured anger.

So that’s the best way to define it. What is the Republican Party? It is the system that follows this explanation for “what is wrong with the world” and everything that builds up around it. It’s the system’s memetic efficiency, and the people acting as a group to execute it, and the cultural artifacts they surround themselves with that share the same ideological message. (Art does have political messages, even the most inoffensive stuff.) But none of those epiphenomenon are responsible for the ideology itself, nor should they be held accountable for it.

Twenty-Four is a highly ideological show that talks about the need for harsh violence that offends our intuitions about virtue in order to defend our freedoms. That doesn’t make it responsible for the perpetuation of neoconservative ideology, more a reflection of what’s going on under the hood.

So you can’t really separate the “abstract values: caricatures in media, nebulous culture iconography” because I’m not even objecting to any of those on their own. The values, media, and cultural icons can all be good in different contexts. But as part of an overall system, I want to understand them and fight them.

[kung-fu-dennys]

July 22nd, 2019/Freak Out! (Pt. 1?)

I write now because I think I might lose my marbles if I go any longer without writing in this form. I’ve done the physical diary a bit, very helpful for shorthand business. Anyway, I need to reflect on the past week and a half, because they have been dizzying, to say the least. It’s times like this that I appreciate having a blog that is utterly private.  First thing is first, update: I’m in Florida now, resting off meatballs and penne. It was delicious, I will have you know. Counteracting all the negativity of last year by buying sweets and generally being as lazy as possible. It’s not bad, if a little surreal. This may be my last year down here for a while, but I’ll get to that in a while, yet. Last week and a half was Maine time. Truthfully, I sat down to write this bit here, because I have a fair bit to say about it. I’m not so sure where to start, so I’ll guess I’ll go over the whole experience. The first half, with Layne and Katelyn, was seriously amazing. I think they are a pretty perfect couple.  Ahhh, fuck, I’m not going to bother with overviews. I’ll write what interests me most. To start, we’ve gotta get going with the day before.  Act I: Alex Walter’s house. I was back from teaching martial arts (mem: Remind me to bring up my conflict about this, Mina), and all of Core was there. We jammed with Ben, flaming head that he is. Not an amazing technical player, but he’s got a feel for chords/music in his own way, and I like what he can bring to a jam session. Anyway, we were done jamming, and we were out on his back porch. A girl Candice, was there, Alex’s co-worker/girlfriend(?). Gavin was a week from Tian, while I was a week from the North Country. It was an interval between passages, travelers sitting a spell together before shipping out. Naturally, we were getting rip-roaringly drunk. I was off it, with a capital bug spray, generally appreciating the people in my life. Many things happen, which don’t seem too important to reflect upon. Just understand that we were at a crossroads of sorts, a nexus, a terminus - all of these terms are appropriate.  Chatter all around, discussion abound, when suddenly to my left, Katelyn is saying something about a geeb. With shame, I admitted I had never had one. “You must try”, she says (or words to that effect), “it’s an absolute ball.” (I’m having fun, this isn’t really how we speak.) I decide to, but before I do, Layne does. Immediately, or a minute after, he’s throwing up in bushes past the porch, and everybody is laughing. Gavin is about to leave. I hit the beast, the swirling vortex inside the water bottle, and immediately regret it. Alex and I walk Gavin out, and I am under the sudden and direct impression that my feet are moving faster than the rest of my body. Uh oh, I think, I’m in it and I can’t get out.  Gavin, Alex and I chat a while (I forgot to mention, that son of a bitch had already taken a hit of the geeb and was walking around like nothing - iron lung man), while I try to maintain my cool. I manage, up until we are back at the porch, and the sky is becoming too dark to see the stars. I can feel my heart, coursing through my body. I must have leaned back in my chair then, trying to play cool. It doesn’t work - I am a pile of jitters, and it’s maybe 10:30. A hundred thoughts, terrible thoughts (spiked weed, separation, cannot relate to peers, cannot relate to family, trapped in a cycle, trapped in a place full of fear), all racing. I whisper to Katelyn (in the pseudo-stoner whisper, the rattle of a ghost that’s just realized the interstice it’s living in) “I think I’m a little too high.” Nobody hears but her. “Drink some water, don’t even worry about it man,” she assures me. I nod, play cool a while. Lean back. Layne says something about yaking I believe, or maybe that’s a bit later. It throws me off to think about vomiting, I think. Whole world becomes a cardboard tube, and I’m on the other end of it. Everything is falling into a black hole, it feels, and the time is slipping into something deeper and lower. I am going to be like this forever. They are talking about Ginyu Force and I will be like this forever and ever. I didn’t know just what to do (I was rapidly losing motor control, or so I seemed to believe), so I leaned forward, put my head down. Nobody was noticing! I put my head down mooooore. Nobody!!! I tap the table, ---...---, ---...---, ---...---, nothing nothing nothing. Eventually, I realize I have to stoop to it, that lowest of low, the peon in the inebriation hierarchy: I have to vocalize a freak out. I must have whispered it in that same ghost rattle, but eventually I was heard. The cardboard tube turned inwards, and the whole world was watching me. Candice (FUCK me I am embarrassing myself, this is a bad impression), Josh, Alex, Layne, everybody... Josh speaks up first.  “You alright, bro?”  I nod. “I think I’m a little too high”, I mutter, still nodding. Then Layne and Katelyn, flanking my left, two goddamned angels at the time. I have never felt more appreciation for two human beings in my life.  “You’re okay man, I know what you mean, I’ve been there,” she says. “This happens to everybody, but you’re literally okay. Like, physically, you’re okay. Bring your knees to your chest, everything is alright.” I did these things. Grounding. Very grounding. Around this time, I see the clock on the wall. 10:35 (It’s been five minutes, somehow this is a dear comfort).  Layne: “Don’t worry about it, dude. It happens to me, but you’ll be okay. Just think, tomorrow we’re going to be in Maine.”  That was the real Homer. I thought of pine trees, dark pine trees in the breeze of a dark evening, cool and away from the heat lightning. I calmed down then. God. Ever so appreciative.  This is really all I needed to say about that freak out, but of course, it didn’t end there. We left some time after - I calmed myself by considering the clock on the wall - I would feel better by 11:00, and if not 11:00, 11:30. It was a matter of riding waves. I slept in their basement, woke up early the next morning. Waffle House in Maryland, than off to greener pastures. The experience was, in its own way, a perfect primer for my time up there, with those wonderful people.  I wish I could tell you that was the last panic I had this vacation, but prison is no fairy tale, and it’s not to be. The day they left, the same day I found out I was leaving soon, I fell into a two-day streak of feverish thinking and sleepless nights. It was a nightmarish 48 hours. I felt like my brain was on fire, for some reason. It was coupled with, spurned on by, the eating disorder - without my friends, I felt too small for it, Atlas under the Earth. There were a lot of things that caused it, a lot of creeping thoughts, about my mom and my dad and Marcel and divorce and love and Bipolar disorder and whether or not I had it or whether or not I had something wrong with me. Rehema really helped in this time - she is so very supportive of me.  One day, I will write down every panic attack I’ve ever had, every mental explosion I’ve suffered, I’ll shore my ruins along this website, and everything will make sense. For now though, I just want to say, my time with Layne and Katelyn was amazing and wonderful. Layne is like a brother, we are so similar (I think, in some ways, this helped with the ED). The situation with Katelyn is odd, considering the crush I had on her in 6th grade, but all I would ever want now is for them to be together. They are both amazing friends, could not ask for better. Really, that’s the way it is with all of my friends. I’ve been trying for a long while now to articulate all the ways they comforted, and every time I feel I fail. I think the polaroid I have in my wallet is the best illustration of it, so I’ll shut up about all of it now. I just want to leave off with saying I’m so glad it all happened.  I might write more, later tonight, about Maine. For now, break...

[michelemoore]

Takhuk

October 23, 2018

Michele Moore Veldhoen

Raven Feathers, Raki, and Risk

An Anecdotal Travelogue in 3 Parts Part 2 Rocks and Raki

The raven feather I wrote of in last week’s blog did, as the Beefeater proclaimed, bring me luck. For the two weeks we spent on Crete, Greece’s largest island, the sun shone, the air was calm, and not once did a goat or crazy Cretan driver force us over one of the many cliffs along which we drove. Which is entirely possible in the hills and mountains of Crete, I can assure you.

I loved Crete. Punctured with caves and strewn with archaeological sites where Greek Gods such as Zeus and Europa were born and their son King Minos reigned, ancient myth and mystery is present in every stone, street, and building. Crete is considered the birthplace of western civilization itself, so on that score the island stands alone as a place to visit if you are a history buff.  

There is so much to say about Crete. I could write of the fantastic gorges (canyons) we hiked, the thousands of goats that kept us company, the omnipresent olive groves, the pretty pomegranate, lime and lemon trees growing out of cobblestone streets and shading freshly painted wooden doors, the wild and cultivated herbs that scent the air, the pristine beaches and waters of the south coast, and oh, the cheese! I give the Cretans first place on cheese, but I will stop there or this blog will become too cheesy….hehehe Instead, let me tell you about the rocks and the raki.

Rocks

Crete is an island of stone. Rock and rubble. Since I love anything to do with stone, landscapes dominated by rubble and rock appeal to me. But when you picture the island, don’t imagine our Rocky Mountains or the stone slabs of the Canadian Shield. Imagine mountains and hills of crumbling rock. Bare mountains of, bare, crumbling rock. Most of which to me looks really, really, old. As are the castles, forts, and churches, also made of stone. Occupied and abandoned stone villages and structures are all around, and sometimes blend so well into the rocky hill or mountain upon which they stand you can walk past or even over them without always realizing they are there, but still, you will be surrounded by fields of weather beaten, time worn, sun bleached, stones.

(Side note:  Crete was not always such a bare rock pile, and it does still have pockets of natural pine and cyprus forest. A bit of research tells me that for centuries the island has suffered deforestation. Trees were cut for firewood, and swathes of forest were removed by occupying cultures that used the wood for shipbuilding, for example. The island is devoid of significant populations of wild animals and this I think would be due to loss of habitat, and hunting. Herds of domestic goats now dominate the terrain and eat everything in sight, so very hard to re-establish the forests).

Yet this rocky landscape supports the production of an abundant array of delicious food. Much of which is grown by small producers and families who work with hand tools and basic machinery their olive and orange groves, their potato and eggplant fields, and also their grapevines which grow so easily they can be found casually planted along sidewalks where you can help yourself as you go by.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this anecdote about rocks but the picture of the stony Cretan landscape dominates my mind. We stayed in old traditional villages built with rock and in the case of Kritsa, right into the rock of a mountain, slept in homes built of stone, explored these villages walking on stone street by cobblestone street, climbed and wandered through stony canyons, along ancient donkey tracks built of stone, up mountains of rusty rock spread over chunks of brilliant marble, across pebbly beaches and fine ground sand. There was a lot of rock featured in this trip. You could say we rolled through rocks. We rocked and rolled.

Stone speaks to us, if we listen. The next time you’re on a beach, notice how your feet feel in the sand. The next time you put on your makeup, realize the minerals in the makeup come from stone. (Likely the same kind of stone from which Cleopatra got her makeup minerals.) When you are running a cloth over your granite counter top, wonder at which mountain in the world gifted to you that slab of art. Look at the diamonds or other jewels in your wedding ring. Now doesn’t that rock speak to you!

Stone is speaking to us every day because it is the earth itself. Earth gives us an array of gifts in stone that, in the words of Van Morrison, stones me to my soul.

Raki

Raki is Crete’s white lightning. Made from the skins, stems and seeds of wine grapes, every family, village, and taverna seems to have their own supply. Like any other raw distilled liquor it requires fortitude to consume.  

Raki can be flavoured with a variety of herbs such as aniseed, but in Crete they seem to like it straight. It is standard in the tavernas to receive after your meal some complimentary raki as an aperitif. Served  chilled in a small clear glass bottle along with shot glasses and some kind of sweet. The quantity of raki in the bottle is enough for two people to each have at least 5 shots. Rogerio and I left a lot of raki in the bottle.

When you walk around a village on the island, you will frequently see in front of tavernas a scene similar to the photo above –  for decoration small tables are positioned at the entrance to the taverna,  displaying a generous bowl of oranges, and a pretty glass bottle of raki. (The string of beads in this picture are‘worry beads’ which in Greek culture is a secular object used for relaxation. According to Wikipedia, they can also be a status symbol – expensive strings of amber and other valuable stones. (There’s those rocks again.)This might explain the long elaborate string hanging around the neck of a black robed priest I saw in a delegation of VIP’s accompanying the President of Greece to lunch in a taverna in a village we were visiting. The President was there to commemorate a WW II hero and it seemed every man in the village who owned a suit, along with at least half a dozen Greek Orthodox priests were in attendance. The one I studied the most manipulated his beads at the same slow and deliberate pace at which he walked, separating himself, I noted, somewhat from the rest of the entourage.  With his head at a slight upward tilt and his lips tightly drawn, he appeared to investigate the scene around him in a way that made me feel he was either making some private calculations in his mind or was a most arrogant man.)

Now that was a rather long digression but it does relate to raki because the priests also drink the stuff. In one village where we ate dinner at the same taverna every night for almost a week, we observed the local priest every evening gathered with a few locals that always sat at the same out of the way table, drinking raki, smoking, and talking. Such is the pervasiveness of raki.

On another evening in another village in which we stayed for a week, we were walking back from dinner when we were offered raki by a family celebrating a birthday. These old traditional villages are made for social connections. Like a rabbit warren, the homes are all part of one structure, and the doors to each home open right onto the narrow cobblestone passageways through which everyone travels on foot. To sit outdoors, people tuck into chairs set along the walls of the buildings, or gather in a lovely intimate corner or cubbyhole under a giant fig or cyprus tree. Even the most unsociable, solitary soul would have a hard time not saying ‘yassas’ when passing by, and once you greet someone, they always greet you back and if a party is going on, offer you raki and invite you to join them.

So where am I going with this anecdote?

Well, we’ve all heard of the Mediterranean diet. Lots of vegetables, fruits, legumes, whole grains, nuts and seeds and olive oil, and moderate quantities of meat and dairy. For years we have been reading about the health benefits of this kind of diet, which is definitely enjoyed by the people of Crete. But nothing is ever said about the raki!

I have a theory about this. I believe the ever present raki is not there to be consumed in great quantities on a regular basis, (although this certainly happens according to one village woman who, after a long day of work in a bakery, was minding the family store because her husband was at the taverna drinking raki instead of doing his job. Again.) I think the raki is there to make regularly available the opportunity for social connection. Alcohol is a social lubricant. Raki is very strong alcohol, it doesn’t take much to feel warm and cozy sitting on a stone bench next to people you’ve just met.

Many people we met in Crete that are eating the traditional Mediterranean diet not only eat well, but live well, by which I mean, they are socially connected. The physical layout of these villages are designed for close connection. They are also designed for walking. Cretan villagers walk everywhere, and exercise is the third pillar of the triangle of good living – diet, exercise, and social connections.

I know this is very idyllic and as my son-in-law recently pointed out, these same countries that support this lifestyle are also struggling with severe economic problems. However, that observation can say as much about their leadership, and the western economic model their leaders have tried to participate in, as it can about the country’s economics.

In any case, I don’t think I could give up a cold craft brew for a cold shot of raki. But I’m grateful to those Canadians with a Mediterranean heritage who introduced us to olive oil, and eggplant baked with tomatoes, zucchini and potatoes topped with soft creamy cheese, and Greek yogourt topped with honey, and greens sautéed with garlic, and…..oh, that’s right, I said this blog was not going to be about food.

[veervr-blog]

VeeR VR: Are VR Games Worth Buying Yet

If you were to ask a random person about Virtual Reality (VR), the first thought they’d have in mind is probably games. VR is particularly suited for gaming because of its power of immersion. In a way, no art can better utilize the potential of virtual reality than Gaming itself (yes, Gaming is an interactive art) – an experience that’s meant to be both immersive and interactive.

Looking at the greater picture, the whole VR gaming industry is, very much, at an early stage. We see loads of games on PSVR, OCULUS, and VIVE (hundreds, big or small). But as Ian Birnbaum from Motherboard put it over a year ago, “buying a new headset is a decision that should be justified by great content, which isn’t really here yet.” Frankly, most VR games are interesting developer experimentations… but errr (how do I put it elegantly)… disappointing consumer products. Sometimes, controls aren’t great, other times graphics are horrible, and worst case scenario, people just get bored from playing them after messing around for 20 minutes, thinking “well, that was enough of VR gaming.”

After investing hundreds of dollars on a VR headset, customers expect a completely new sort of experience made possible only by virtual reality. Plain and simple, but a hard measure to reach. It’s very promising, though – as of December 2017, we have many cases where the games have really stood out because of their VR capabilities.

Here, we break down (VR) games into six notable categories with selected examples. And I really mean to ask you guys this question –

Are VR headsets backed with enough interesting games to be worthy of purchase?

I think, from a pure game consumer point of view, these ‘categories’ are also important factors for game developers to consider in designing games. Often games combine elements from multiple categories. Since each factor brings a different experience to the table, what sort of mixed experience are you trying to create? and how should every detail (plot, character, visual, audio, control…) help to realize that?

I. High Sociability

If we assume VR gaming will become a common household activity, which likely will, games that are specifically targeted to fulfill a basic social need certainly has a market. Now, if you are thinking, “Oh! I’ve always liked getting on COD with my buddies,” then you are thinking wrong. There are games that are more fun to play with friends, like COD, but there are games considered fun only because it’s a social game (can you have fun playing King’s Cup, or Hide and Seek by yourself?… well if you still can, you should probably see a psychiatrist).

The main selling point of this kind of game, simply put, is to really just hang out with friends. The environment, character, and objective are there to support the “hanging out.”

Star Trek: Bridge Crew

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=romB8e5nMp8?start=82]

Apart from being a “Star Trek thing,” this game is all about sitting back with a circle of friends. You can follow the objective, sure, OR, why not just mess around and make each other laugh?

Werewolves Within

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxKy2lrGBBQ]

Werewolves Within is based on the old party game Mafia. Instead of meeting up physically, you can just “teleport” into a virtual world together and have a fun game night.

II. ‘Superhero’ Experience

By ‘superhero’ I really mean a badass main character in a reasonably engaging story. And in some cases, you are a known superhero, like the Batman. Superheroes sell as comic books, movies, TV series, and now, VR games. It not old because you can actually become a superhero in VR. It sounds like a simple concept but to make the experience realistic is a big challenge, especially with the locomotion options and control schemes currently available for VR.

Batman Arkham

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRfxn_WjDKE]

Batman Arkman has done a really good job in the details to bring the Batman experience to life – the visuals, sound effects, and just cool things you get to do as the man himself. Wait till you try it to make up your mind about this game because the trailer doesn’t quite deliver the awesomeness.

Another noteworthy game in this category is Arizona Sunshine, not exactly a “superhero,” but you do get to be a cowboy in a zombie apocalypse story.

III. Skill-Based/Competitive Gaming

Some games are better in VR because of the immersion it brings, others are better because a regular PC or console setup cannot achieve or utilize certain skills. Competitive games usually have a rank/stats system installed to help players motivate themselves to get better. PC/console games can try to be as realistic as they can, but certain actions simply can’t be done on those – checking what’s going on to your left but point the gun at an enemy on the right, and peeking around the corner, for instance. These are either natural or calibrated human actions in competitive situations. Sports games, too, fall into this category. When crosshair and line of sight controls are separated (sight by head movement, crosshair with controller), players can multi-task like never before. I genuinely believe that VR will come to establish a competitive gaming culture in the near future, like how CS: GO and League of Legends are to the PC world.

Eve Valkyrie

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bdp-KW83a78]

In this live stream recording, notice how the player can check a certain direction before making a commitment to move. This movement is very much natural and it makes a big difference in action-packed competitive gaming. It’s a true test of player’s skills.

IV. Appeal To Exploration

We have seen plenty of games alike – from the good old Minecraft to massive productions like No Man’s Sky. These games speak to the audience because players get to be excited about the exploration itself. It is not for everyone, I suppose, since these games provide no apparent objective to ‘win’. In the case of VR, players get to be completely immersed in a new world – think ‘Oasis’ from Ready Player One.

Elite Dangerous

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaE16Ldpel4]

This game has been around for a few years, and the VR version has seen a lot of improvements. Comparatively, Elite Dangerous has quite a steep learning curving, inasmuch it throws some people off at a first try if easily discouraged by the ‘complexity’ of it all. But if you like space explorations, this game will not disappoint you after just putting in a little more patience. The graphics and sound effects are simply astonishing. And you have got a whole Universe to explore. Additionally, if you do not mind paying a little extra, HOTAS controller is most definitely worth the investment – it’s a controller that mimics the in-game spaceship controls. See a HOTAS demo here.

V. Horror

There are things you wish to never experience in real life, but the idea of having a try, in VR especially, can be appealing.  Horror game has been more or less a genre of its own since the start: 1) they are usually built for a one time experience, not worrying about replayability. 2) like theater, each moment, scene needs to be well-choreographed. 3) almost exclusively single player. 4) a good horror game employs various psychological trickeries rather than excessively use jump scares. VR can only help to amplify that horrifying experience.

Paranormal Activity

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qsna1ChGt0E] As a big fan of P.T.(Silent Hills Playable Teaser) myself, a highly acclaimed horror game that has been canceled, I see many resemblances to P.T. in Paranormal Activity. P.T. is just a brilliant game with hardly any jump scare. With masterful plays of visual and audio effects, it overwhelms players with fears they’ve created in their own head, but not so much to the point you’d want to just quit. In a way, paranormal Activity feels very much like a VR upgrade of P.T.

VI. Experimental

Let’s scratch everything, and create an experience that’s not-of-this-ordinary-world, original, interesting, never seen before, and totally unique. In VR, developers can focus on creating a world based on their own ‘laws of physics.’

Stifled

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6FlnZGWk3M?start=225]

Stifled is a voice-controlled horror game. As the player, you are stranded in a bizarre world where everything’s seen through voice and echo. The intricacy lies in finding a balance between staying hidden from the enemy while having no idea of what’s around you, and taking the risk of attracting unwanted attention to have a better sense of your surroundings.

Are you tempted to buy a headset? I guess it’s your own decision in the end. I will say, however, if you haven’t gotten one, now wouldn’t be a bad time to start looking. Many new games are in development for 2018 release. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im_l8fIvwb4]

Interested in Promoting Your VR Game?

Games or movies, a VR/360° trailer is a powerful way to engage your audience:

The Conjuring 2

This was made to promote the home-entertainment release of Conjuring 2.

VeeR is a free global VR community where many companies have used for marketing/promotion, including Warner Bros. Pictures, Associated Press, CCP Games, LinkedIn, EuroNews, RussiaToday, CNBC, PintaStudios and etc.

originally from VeeR VR Blog: Are VR Games Worth Buying Yet

#vr games #virtualreality #vr video