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Earl Sweatshirt: A Geography of Grief and Growth

I made myself the poet of the world. The white man had found a poetry in which there was nothing poetic….I had soon to change my tune.

—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

I suggest that we do not necessarily need to hear and know what is stated in its entirety, that we do not need to “master” or conquer the narrative as a whole, that we may know in fragments.

—bell hooks, “Teaching New Worlds/New Words” (1994)

Breakin’ ’em down to micro-fragments.

—Saafir, “Battle Drill” (1994)

What is asked of me is not to ascend but to descend.

—Robert Bly (1990)

Earl Sweatshirt’s arc, swerving and dervishy, isn’t difficult to see, as we’ve witnessed it with him—we’re either interlocutors or interlopers, both with questionable motives. So when Earl looks back on school daze, as he does on “OD,” we look back with him (though ours is often an imperial gaze [HOW COULD IT NOT BE?]). We tee-hee and titter as we hear that “somebody tooted in the student commons,” tooted being the most puerile word for gas he could have chosen. An array of scatological options were ignored. It’s a deliberate gesture toward juvenilia. He doesn’t want his expression to be too mature, ha. He wants to welcome you to the romper room, ha. Remaining a kid until the moment he expires, apparently. So he sets the adolescent scene: the student commons. “The bell rang,” and the accused student was spared the prolonged opprobrium. In about four seconds, the student will begin to post. He “went home and argued in the comments,” channeling his embarrassment elsewhere, talking shit (shit) on the internet behind the safety and quasi-anonymity of a screen—an odd facade. He can walk right up to your avi and diss you. That’s his philosophy. The public humiliation replaced with a private self-possession. The discomfort of the crowd exchanged for the solace of solitude.

2. DID AN ANGEL SPEAK?

The sonics of “tooted” and “student” are twee, giggle-inducing. We laugh along with the concatenation of m and n phonemes [somebody | student | commons | rang | went | home | then | in | comments]. The near-homophonous commons and comments scan hysterical. With “OD,” it’s easy to confuse adolescence with adulthood. That “somebody” committed this social transgression seems defensive. Maybe it was him—the subject, Earl, Thebe—seeing as how the rest of the song is delivered in the first-person. Embrace the Age of Immaturity. Channel the Fat Boys: Darren Robinson’s flatulent beatbox. Place it beside the disorderly lyrics that Bobbito spits: “I write my own shit from finish to start, / Diminish the heart, / I eat a knish and then I fart.” Like the Cenobites, Earl kicks a dope verse, and only that. “I keep my sentences short,” he says on “EAST.” Beauty is brevity, brevity beauty. A “brevity pack,” as Earl has referred to the Feet of Clay songs. He strives to be live ’cause he got no choice. He runs his own business like James Joyce. In A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man, a similar flatus incident unravels. At Clongowes Wood College (Stephen Dedalus’s Coral Reef Academy), a “stout student who stood below…on the steps” by the name of Goggins “farted briefly.” Sonically, the sentence shares much with Earl’s opening line. Dixon asks, in a “soft voice,” “Did an angel speak?” But the others react with bellicosity and name-calling (stinkpot; flamingest dirty devil). Goggins doesn’t retreat home; he simply asks, “It did no one any harm, did it?” You still bet that you can harm me, but you don’t alarm me, Goggins might say another way, reprising Del the Funky Homosapien, echoplexing Masta Ace.

Earl “watched the doppler move,” the wavelength shift—the siren song of the “toot,” something insidious—or maybe it’s just the tremors we’re feeling. Woop, woop: that’s the sound of the beast, KRS would say. The frequency shivers. The shift, the movéd doppler, means Earl is immediately older, he’s the child who “get[s] introduced to violence,” even if he acknowledges the line was inspired by his nephew on a playground in South Africa, experiencing apartheid reincarnate as a whiteboy cuts him in line for the slide. Cranly, bullying Goggins, “shove[s] him violently down the steps.” The doppler moves. It slides into violence—like the violence visited upon the MOVE compound located at 6221 Osage Avenue in Philly in 1985. Gradations of black/white. ELUCID mentions the “gray on [his] face showing age” on his Osage (2016) project. Isn’t it strange—how the youngins can turn cold, hoarfrosty, in an instant? The grayscale cover to ELUCID’s tape is graced by a photograph of Birdie Africa, the sole child survivor of the siege. The bone fragments of the MOVE children have since been used in anthropology courses at UPenn and Princeton—case studies. It’s a good trope. Fascinating stuff.

4. TRYIN’ TO TRANSFORM YOU BOYS TO MEN LIKE DAYCARE

When JuJu of the Beatnuts asked, You want pain?, he wasn’t referencing the dramatical-traumatical pain Earl negotiates—JuJu’s question posed a ruffneck and ruffian pain on “Watch Out Now.” Somewhere closer to Marcy, where Jay-Z’s streets was watching. Earl clocks minutes, anaphoric with what he watches (I watched the doppler… / I watched a child…), much like Dylan’s portentous hard rain in which he saw endless racialized visions: “I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it”; “I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’”; “I saw a white ladder all covered with water.” For Earl, the ladder is a slide. The saw is watched. Witnesses all.

In “Theory as Liberatory Practice,” bell hooks writes that she “came to theory because [she] was hurting”: “I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.” hooks says that she “came to theory young, when [she] was still a child,” citing Terry Eagleton who argues that “[c]hildren make the best theorists.” Children, Eagleton insists, possess “a wondering estrangement.” No wonder, then, that “since a jit” Earl has found no use in “giving up.” He rather make it make sense.

I beat you to the point. Having gained experience, there’s nothing you can tell Earl that he doesn’t already know, that he hasn’t already seen. He’s seen enough, had enough. He doesn’t await the mob’s pursuit; he places the noose on himself, he RE: DEFines it within his own lexicon. His noose, therefore, “is golden.” He’s a young youth, rockin’ the gold [noose], DEATHWORLD goose. He speaks with criminal slang, with a split tongue like ELUCID. Where ELUCID was “true and living, actual—no dull axes, owner of all heads,” Earl is “true and living, lonesome,” with no skulls to keep him company. He has to square up with the “pugilistic moments” on his own.

7. I AM OLDER THAN I ONCE WAS AND YOUNGER THAN I’LL BE

I’m thinking of “The Pugilist at Rest” (1991) by Thom Jones, whose epileptic protag describes a “grainy black-and-white photograph” of the bronze statue called The Pugilist at Rest. The pugilist, with a pocketful of mumbles, has “slanted, drooping brows that bespeak torn nerves” and a forehead “piled with scar tissue.” Torn nerves and scar tissue—sounds like the physical manifestations of grief. And, yes, Earl has grieved, and he continues to grieve—as listeners, we’re accustomed to his grief pedigree, as per Ka. In the past, Earl was “panicking a lot”—he just “want[ed] [his] time and [his] mind intact.” That’s a cold fact.

The narrator of “The Pugilist at Rest” readies himself for a cingulotomy—a psychosurgical procedure that will “cauterize a small spot in a nerve bundle in [his] brain.” In other words, he wants to keep his mind intact. The neurosurgeon promises the operation will lift “the heaviness of a heart blackened by sin,” which is what convinces the narrator to agree to it. Good grief, he thinks, he’s been reaping what he sowed. He “can’t go on like this,” barely living “with a deadening sense of languor,” a phrase which calls to mind Earl’s lethargic, slugabed flow. Feeling insane in the membrane, like he’s a Soul Assassinated, exploring the depths beneath his whooligan behaviors. 376 was a brothel. “Good and evil are only illusions,” Jones writes. In anticipation of the surgery, the protag considers the worst-case [so what, so what] scenario: “If they fuck up the operation, I hope I get to keep my dogs somehow.”

8. MOURNING & MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLIA

Grief carries its own antidote along with it.

—Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland (1798)

“Grief is the door to feeling,” Robert Bly says. But Earl, on “Grief,” told us he “ain’t been outside in a minute”—and that minute, whether we’re speaking with criminal slang like Nas on “It Ain’t Hard To Tell” or not, is an eternity. Earl hadn’t crossed that threshold, hadn’t kicked in that door. MIKE would realize it much later on “No Curse Lifted (rivers of love),” how you “had to walk through the grief,” even if it “was the worst feeling.” In 2015, though, Earl found these passageways distorted. Like the undulating photograph on the cover of his first mixtape. Like the blur-obscured selfie on the cover of Some Rap Songs. Like the static-scrambled cover of I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside. Earl’s dealt in fragmentary confuzzled noise for a full career. He’s been standing on the corner, red burnt, moving down alien lanes paved by GBV, greenthinking to himself. It ain’t hard to tell that Earl “don’t act hard” and yet is a “hard act to follow.” The density or opacity of his exterior notwithstanding, grief don’t come easy. “As men,” Bly says, “we’re taught not to feel pain and grief as children.” So Earl spits somnolent, numb-tongued and slack-jawed. Like he said on “Cold Summers”: muffle my pain and muzzle my brain up.

“I’ve been alone in my shit for the longest,” he spit on “Grief,” and in work as recent as “Vin Skully,” he’s still figuring out “how to stay afloat in a bottomless pit.” Bly says that “we receive something from our father by standing close to him—something moves over that can’t be described in material terms.” Bly speaks of being in a “conspiracy with his mother” from early on. Earl finds himself “thinking ’bout [his] grandmama” while he wallows and lies in a bottle. “Grief” catalogs all the things his mama taught him. Earl’s work, of late, is autodestructive. He peels away and pastes back haphazardly. He vibes with this Bly shit: “If you can deny something so fundamental as grief in the whole family, you can deny anything. And then how can you write poetry if you’re involved in that much denial?”

Bly goes on to quote Alice Miller, the psychoanalyst who gave us The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979): “When you were young, you needed something you did not receive, and you will never receive it. And the proper attitude is mourning.” Mourning is the proper attitude, not blame—mourning. Mourning makes its way through moaning and mumbling—Earl’s current intonation. On “Grief,” he “cut the grass off the surface [and] pray[s] the lawnmower blade catch the back of a serpent.” Philip Larkin’s poem “The Mower” (1979) leans more literal: “The mower stalled, twice; I found / A hedgehog jammed up against the blades, / Killed. It had been in the long grass.” Larkin’s speaker genuflects before the innocent critter, recalling how he “fed it, once.” Now, he mourns how he has “mauled its unobtrusive world, / Unmendably. Burial was no help.” Earl, of course, is less forgiving of the serpents in the grass. They’re threats, not friends. Still, a void opens up when the mower—(and let’s not forget the lawnmower is a modernized scythe)—does its mowing. Grief is the door to feeling, and on the other side:

Next morning I got up and it did not. The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time.

9. NOBODY KNOW WHO MADE THIS WELL, FOR IT WAS HERE WHEN I WAS BORN

“Come get to know me at my innermost…”

Riveting, Earl raps. Earl raps are riveting. We fix to the flow—riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s. We’re invited to know Earl, to become familiar, and his “innermost” is a constant vacillation between optimism and [afro]pessimism. The sudden switches—these switches on bitches like fixed with hydraulics—establish what Danny Schwartz, writing for Rolling Stone, called an “uneven terrain.”

Earl’s “family business [is] anguished,” and that’s recognizable. We’ve known Earl (on “Chum”) with the “pendulum swinging slow” and low. He holed up, hostage-like, in his “heart’s bottomless pit.” Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842) brand of captivity. “I was sick,” that narrator says, “—sick unto death with that long agony.” Something tells me there should be an exclamation point there (SICK!). Earl Sweatshirt was down, down, down. “I was in the fucking pits for like 10 months post my pops dying,” he said in an interview. The Spanish Inquisition ain’t shit.

But for these countless downs, “OD” tracks the ups like naloxone in the nasal membrane. “Now I need atonement,” Earl notes—he makes a case for reparations. He “sets the goal[s]” like some motivational speaker. If “half [his] wings is broken,” he can “spread the other for [his] brodie OD.” Somewhat circumspect as he’s “tiptoeing,” yet the approach is laden with “too much love.” Even when his “sister showed in a rut,” he’s joining arms with her and “getting over, sending up.” That rut she walks—like Eudora Welty’s worn path (1941)—is a path through the pinewoods, and she’s suddenly Phoenix Jackson. “She was very old and small,” Welty writes, and she moves “with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock.” Even with her pentium processing and pendulum low, she swings back up—the rise of her namesake. She screams phoenix, her feathers and flames are one skin. “Living in the moment,” Earl raps, and his craft is bars. “You been corrupt”—and, sure, who hasn’t?—but you recover with “some ginabot.” Welty’s Old Phoenix surveys a spring “silently flowing through a hollow log.” She bends and drinks and says, “Sweet gum makes the water sweet.” It’s the equivalent to Earl putting “shilajit in his sippy cup,” which is “healing cuts revealingly.” And, yes, from a “sippy cup,” so we’re back to toddling around again (“Since a jit,” he says). “I can’t give enough,” Earl raps, his last winding-sheet made of nard and myrrh.

10.

We crouch and teeter, caterwauling along the ledges, for we’ve got these clumsy feet of clay. This is the intended effect[/defect]; this is the rubble of what Earl calls the “crumbling empire.” This is us feeling the violent vibes of the “death throes” he speaks of. Why would we expect anything to resemble traditional song or rhyme structure when the earth quakes, civilization trembles, and Earl’s dungeon shakes? His chains have fallen off. The tenor is tremors. He’s living the trife life—hell on earth—but still living. Earl’s done trying to not look down—he embraces an outer appearance which scans dour; he deliberately gazes into the pit, inviting the vertigo, for it “haunts the whole of existence,” as Fanon says. But Frank B. Wilderson III promises a “vengeance of vertigo.”

11.

Gallons of rubbing alcohol flow through the strip, and Earl’s lips. He’s “refilling the pump”—his heart, yeah—but with a sawed-off shotgun, hand-on-the-pump posture. There’s “no concealing it,” not even with a concealed carry permit. He brandishes right back at “the enemy up in arms bearing snubs.” The mood swings; been down so long it looks like up to him. The turns require tourniquets. This is some Battle of Dak To torture—somewhere between Retaliation and the Heavenly Divine. Emotional turmoil seems violent by design, and Earl’s “memory [is] really leaking blood.” Fear not, the blood is “congealing, stuck.” Like Havoc says, “The Mobb rollin’ thicker.” Prodigy cites it, too: “This ain’t rap—it’s bloodsport.” But Earl has known that all along—he’s been “mobbin’ deep as ’96 Havoc and Prodigy did” since 2013.

12.

HipHopDX’s Kevin Cortez referred to listeners having to “sift through the muddle” in order to appreciate the bars, but where muddle suggests a disorderly conduct, a kaos network, Earl’s style, more appropriately, models. The woozy, wavy, and inner-conflict-war-torn vocals model an abstraction that anticipates the listener’s loyalty. This is what I’ve got, brief and cryptic as the gesture may be, the model says. Writing for NME, Dhruva Balram described Earl’s lyrics as “slurred,” but slurry is the form.

13.

If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side…

—Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (2005)

So if we’re giving ourselves over to the woozes and waves, we’ll just as well find ourselves lost. Let’s go—like those tourist books run by students—and let’s wander eastward. Follow our napkin-scrawled directions and disorientations to a somewhere elsewhere. Let’s go east for a second, for a spell, on a lark, in the dark (word to AKAI SOLO). Earl’s bloodwork contains “pieces of slums”—or more aptly, [sLUms]. He’s hand-to-hand with that Jungle Boy MIKE, but also the god Mike Davis. “[T]he cities of the future,” Davis wrote, would be “constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood.” Just the same as an Earl Sweatshirt verse is built—under the tutelage and overstanding-sharing, symbiotically, with MIKE. Davis says our cities aren’t “cities of light soaring toward heaven,” but a world that “squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay.” Smells like somebody tooted in the student commons. Smells like a slum village, something we’ve smelled before—possibly coming straight from the slums of Shaolin.

14. ACID EASTERNS

Earl trekked to the East and squinted into “one beacon in the dust weaving”—like Clint Eastwood arriving out of the hazy horizon ether of High Plains Drifter (1973). But Earl is heading to the East, blackwards. And though Brother J claimed you can’t define what’s direct from the East, Jeru told us on The Sun Rises in the East that you can’t stop the prophet either. So on “EAST,” Earl traverses a tricky terrain—it’s tricky, tricky, tricky because it’s an acid western landscape: an acid eastern.

The path isn’t direct or linear—it zigs and zags like rolling papers, and stimulates the same. “Double back when you got it made,” Earl says at the start of his journey “EAST.” The objective is to talk sense condensed into the form of a poem like Special Ed once did on “I Got It Made.” Instead, Earl’s poems—his L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poems—skew [non]sense, go form[less], and vaporize rather than condense. Lyn Hejinian in cinnamon Timbs: “constant change figures / the time we sense.” The narrative is hallucinogenic (note: “how the story careen against the bars”). Earl’s bindle contains “thirty racks and weed [with] no fat in the collard greens.” That’s how he gets funky on the mic like an old batch. That’s how he gets sincerity on the mic: “Off top it’s me—no cap, / I don’t bottle things.” That buck that bought a bottle could’ve struck the lotto, maybe. But Earl’s “canteen was full of the poison [he] need[s].” He gets where he’s going like El Topo, bereft. The “trip was long and steep”—that being an acid trip—so let me see you try to ride a horse into the chasms of the canyon.

“EAST” is a death meditation, a grand duel between Dantean and Donneian lyric voices [he damn-near well should’ve double-tracked the vocals]. In a 2015 interview with SPIN, Earl is asked about the worst thing he did that year, to which he replies: “Umm…acid?” He elaborates: “I took it at a time when I really didn’t need to be taking acid. I had like a fucking existential crisis at, like, four in the morning. But it was tight. We reeled it back.” Jodorowsky called El Topo (1970) an “eastern” in that it “incorporat[ed] ancient eastern wisdom in the materiality of American cowboys.” For Earl, it’s more a rhinestone cowboy—he holds the cold one like he holds an old gun (as evidenced in the “EAST” music video). DOOM was no stranger to grief, of course, and the rumors persist regarding the bad acid that precipitated Subroc’s early demise (“Bad Acid” also being the original title for “December 24”).

Estranged Earl, alienated—a high plains drifter (not Clint Eastwood, though) who rechristens a town “Hell” through a baptism of blood. Like the Beastie Boys’ version, Earl pulls out a pair of pliers and pulls a bullet out of his chest. He pulls through, true and living. “I’m long distance from my girl,” Mike D raps, so he’s “talking on the cellular,” but Earl is more alienated than that—beyond racking up roaming charges, immersed in dead zones. He “lost [his] phone and consequently all the feelings [he] caught for [his] GF.” Relationships can’t be sustained in these bleak and barren locations. All the blood has been drained from the ruddy faces—sanguine scenery. In his essay “On the Acid Western,” Jonathan Rosenbaum discusses how the subgenre “refuses to respect or valorize bloodshed.” Memory really leaking blood. Congealing. Stuck. To paraphrase Rosenbaum, Earl’s acid eastern “formulat[es] a chilling, savage frontier poetry to justify [his] hallucinated agenda—a view at once clear-eyed and visionary, exalted and laconic, moral and unsentimental, witty and beautiful, frightening and placid.” Earl’s “innocence was lost in the East,” and obsessives speculate whether this refers to Samoa or New York City—how far east we going? Countless spirit-questers pit-stopping at ashrams, searching for that Gifted Unlimited Rhymes Universal guide.

“I wait a beat,” Earl says. His canteen stays filled, auto-replenishes. His “cognitive dissonance shattered” and the “necessary venom restored.” Jodorowsky reportedly once taped snakes to his chest for an experimental theater performance. As if it matters if you think it matters anymore. Or, as ELUCID says, “Words mean things but don’t have to.” Acids and bases. Occident and Orient. Western and Eastern. Up is down.

15. NOTHING LIKE US EVER WAS

Earl’s “EAST” accordion beat—or whatever Orkes Gambus Al Fata instrumentation is at work—is more madcap than madvillainous. In my head is Erick Sermon, though, speaking about how “the flow slow…like a jazz player, or someone on the accordion” on “Knick Knack Patty Wack.” But I’m less concerned with the flow of air through bellows—compressing and expanding—than I am with Earl’s rendering of wind. (Somebody tooted.)

“Let the dead be dead,” Carl Sandburg says at stanza’s end in “Four Preludes on the Playthings of the Wind” (1920). Later, he reports, “The only singers now are crows crying.” And so Earl, a lonesome crow, reminds us—and himself—that “the wind get the ashes in the end” on “December 24.” The whining, wheezing consonance of /-nd/ in “wind” and “end” manages to evoke both the wind itself and the circularity of life. The bar whooshes and whips until we’re at our end, the terminus. That circularity, that full circle: ashes to ashes. “We are the greatest city,” Sandburg repeats, “the greatest nation: / nothing like us ever was.”

Global winds be blowin’—[Of the Soul]—and so billy woods cites that same line on “Haarlem”: “Thebe said the wind get the ashes in the end, bruv.” Check the configuration of the rhime:

The wind | gets | the ashes | in | the end {birth} {life} {death}

Even that get does work—whether it’s the violence of Death Grips’ “get got”; Too $hort threatening you to “get in where you fit in”; or the satirical sadism of Keenen Ivory Wayans’ I’m Gonna Git You Sucka. The wind wins out—it gets what it wants. On “EAST,” the wind—infinitely personified—“whispered to [Earl], ‘Ain’t it hard?’” It ain’t hard to tell that it is. How about some hardcore? Yeah, we like it raw like M.O.P. But those burns yield ashes. In Adrienne Rich’s poem “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” (1989), she struggles with the words she uses, knowing “[t]his is the oppressor’s language / yet [she] needs to talk to you.” I know it hurts to burn, she writes, but writing is no less ardent. “The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning.”

Let me bring it back to Robert Bly. “In the ancient times,” Bly says, “the movement for the men was downward—a descent into grief. It’s referred to in the fairytale as ‘the time of ashes.’” Ashes, he explains, is the “code word for the ‘out of it’ time.”

We know what it is like to take ashes in our hands. How light they are! The fingertips experience them as a kind of powder… Ashes, we note, find their way into the whorls of our fingertips, cling there, make the whorls more noticeable, more visible, more clear to us. We can take our own fingerprints with ashes.

Ashes, then, aren’t simply for the wind’s taking—ashes are for us, are necessary for us to transcend the grief the boys, the men, and the man-child experience. Bly points to the various cultures that have used ashes in initiation rites: “Ashes Time is a time set aside for the death of that ego-bound boy.” Ready to give up, so you seek the Old Earth. The elders cover your face—even your whole body—with ashes “to make [you] the color of dead people and to remind [you] of the inner death about to come.” Consider Earl’s ashen white face produced in the negative imagery of the “Grief” music video.” “The word ashes contains in it a dark feeling for death,” Bly says. “Ashes when put on the face whiten as death does.”

Earl Sweatshirt is a far cry from knocking blunt ashes into caskets.

16.

Feet of clay, hands of light…

—Moor Mother and billy woods, “Furies” (2020)

For Cheryl I. Harris, Earl’s mother, the feet of clay refer to a vulnerability we all possess no matter how formidable we may appear to become. Earl invokes the King of Babylon’s dream, a dream of an idol “meant to represent all the empires of the world,” echoing Sandburg’s imperious “greatest nation.” Earl believes “we at the feet of clay right now…We posted up live from burning Rome.” Imagine the ash pile. So Earl is here, ostensibly, to turn the disco into something dismal—how Mtume becomes “MTOMB” with its entombed sonics, as if he’s rapping from within a wall, the victim of some Poe immurement.

17.

“I remember woods,” Earl raps on “OD.” “I remember Endom when he wasn’t remembering much, / I remember love healing the ruptures.” I remember is also the refrain and title of Joe Brainard’s poem-memoir, a term which aptly describes much of Earl’s recent output. Brainard’s memories bum-rush into the present:

I remember a dream I used to have a lot of a beautiful red and yellow and black snake in bright green grass. I remember painting “I HATE TED BERRIGAN” in big black letters all over my white wall. I remember liver.

If Earl recalls love “healing the ruptures,” then he also likely recalls Fanon: It is essential to convey to the black man that an attitude of rupture has never saved anyone. But Fanon also speaks of young Black men “maintain[ing] their alterity. Alterity of rupture, of conflict, of battle.” Earl, “feeling rushed, grew up quick.” He echoes Biggie, who “grew up a fucking screw-up,” and Raekwon, who “grew up on the crime side” (though Earl’s mama taught him, as we know from “Grief,” how to avoid the pigs, persecution, and prosecution). Eyes on the clock, Earl acknowledges this “trip around the sun” is his “25th,” so “give it up”—his survival alone deserving of a standing [on the corner] ovation. He celebrates life with “gin and rum.” Again, notably not gin and juice—murder was never the case. The only death is the inner death, the death of the ego-bound boy, that Bly describes. Earl’s gin is the drink of be[gin]ning, of genesis (“Light them Phillies up then…”), of Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, when I was dead-broke, man… “We wasn’t supposed to be alive,” Earl says, yet here he stands.

18. RUMINANT

Stare at the Feet of Clay album cover—an evocation of folkloric imagery: a Grimm forest with gnarled tree branches—and the enchanted, diabolic goat lying in wait. Earl’s parasocial following speculate G.O.A.T., of course, but I’m more inclined to mythopoeic possibilities. The Feet of Clay goat glares like Baphomet but frolics like a faun over fractured beats. “OD,” Earl has stated, “brought [him] up out of [his] little wreck”—a wreck of wracked nerves. Adrienne Rich encourages “diving into the wreck” (1973).

I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power.

Earl’s right there with her, submerged and blacking out, but still surviving: Really leaking blood, but refilling the pump.

In her essay “Teaching New Worlds/New Words,” bell hooks invokes Rich’s struggle to navigate the “oppressor’s language.” For hooks, as a Black writer, managing that is even more difficult and historical. “I think now of the grief of displaced ‘homeless’ Africans, forced to inhabit a world where they saw folks like themselves, inhabiting the same skin, the same condition, but who had no shared language to talk with one another, who needed ‘the oppressor’s language.’” hooks explains how Black folks have “remade that language so that it would speak beyond the boundaries of conquest and domination.”

Earl Sweatshirt, especially in his later work, has “altered [and] transformed” English, just as “enslaved Black people took broken bits of English and made of them a counter-language.” The emotional wreckage is also a linguistic heap of fragments—micro-fragments, if we’ve learned anything from Saafir. Earl, in the tradition of his ancestors, “put[s] together [his] words in such a way that the colonizer ha[s] to rethink the meaning of the English language.” “The grammatical construction of sentences in these songs” by Earl, just as by the spirituals of hundreds of years prior, “reflect[s] the broken, ruptured world of the slave.” That crumbling empire Earl mentions was faulted by feet of clay.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2019, sharing a dais with his mother, Cherly I. Harris, Earl spoke to this lineage directly: “Rap music is slave music—the modern-day iteration of it. Slave communication had to be encrypted. You got a code.” He shifted: “If I know what I’m saying…I can teach it to you.” On Feet of Clay, Earl is teaching to transgress. “I’m cracking my own code,” he says to an audience member during the Q&A, “how it comes out garbled…,” and then he trails off, as if making a deliberate effort to keep his answer cryptic.

hooks always saw language as “a site of resistance.” This included the incorrect usage and placement of words—she called such practices a “rebellion.” Weaponizing syntax. hooks recognized rap music as a continuation of this fight—the latest [sound]clash, hip-hop artists as rebels without a pause—while still acknowledging the collateral damage it might cause.

Rap music has become one of the spaces where black vernacular speech is used in a manner that invites dominant mainstream culture to listen—to hear—and, to some extent, be transformed. However, one of the risks of this attempt at cultural translation is that it will trivialize black vernacular speech. When young white kids imitate this speech in ways that suggest it is the speech of those who are stupid or who are only interested in entertaining or being funny, then the subversive power of this speech is undermined.

Or, as Earl once said on “Chum,” “Too Black for the white kids and too white for the Blacks,” an axiom he’s come to loathe. Perhaps Fanon had the better bar on this subject: “The white man had the anguished feeling that I was escaping from him and that I was taking something with me. He went through my pockets. He thrust probes into the least circumvolution of my brain. Everywhere he found only the obvious. So it was obvious that I had a secret.”

Despite the pitfalls (and, yeah, the pit is bottomless), Earl’s words play [wordplay] a part in retraining minds, all while exorcizing his own demons through a steady diet of ashes and fractures. hooks promises us that “in the patient act of listening to another tongue we may subvert that culture of capitalist frenzy and consumption that demands all desire must be satisfied immediately.” Through his embrace of a language that indulges in passion and cerebral coding, Earl “heal[s] the splitting of mind and body” so common within Western metaphysical thought. Earl Sweatshirt speaks “words that do more than simply mirror or address the dominant reality”; he builds blips into a reality that is worth the rewind.

Images: Dead Man, dir. Jim Jarmusch, 1995 (screenshot) | Teen at 1990s computer photograph, Unknown (c. 1996) | James Joyce, Age 2, Unknown | ELUCID, Osage album cover (2016), photo by Michael Mally, Philadelphia Inquirer | The Boxer at Rest, bronze statue, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, Rome, Italy (330-50 BC) | Alphonse Legros, The Pit and the Pendulum, second Plate (1861) | High Plains Drifter, dir. Clint Eastwood, 1973 (screenshot) | Subroc on an Apple IIc, Unknown (c. 1987) | Earl Sweatshirt, “Grief” music video, 2015 (screenshot) | Arthur Rackham, The Water of Life, Grimms Fairy Tales (1916) | Dead Man, dir. Jim Jarmusch, 1995 (screenshot)

#earl sweatshirt #underground hip hop #rap #backwoodz studioz #elucid #billy woods #moor mother

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mockingnerd · 1 year

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Say It, Loser: A Griddlehark Playlist That Goes a Little Hard Hello I am sharing this little beast that’s been rattling around my head for a while!! I listen to metal and punk rock almost exclusively and am also a gay nerd so I kept stumbling across stuff that follows their dynamic chronologically through the first two books (and then there’s a “bonus” at the end). Gorgeous cover art by @softbrambles used with permission. Tracklist and favourite lyrics below!

1. Death To All But Us! | Blood Command Now we have to do what I say Go where I may or be gone

2. Big Shot | IRONTOM I want your fingerprints all over me Cause if they find me dead they should know who it be

3. Do What You Want | Electric Enemy Galvanisе every part of me whеnever you want You're going to do what you want

4. Wake the Dead | Fit For Rivals Wake the dead, it's time to break down Follow me until, until we waste away

5. Stunner | World War Me (this is my peak griddlehark song, i could put literally every line here) Yeah, I'm a bit of a psycho baby I'm my own worst enemy You keep me lit like a lightbulb feeding off the pain and misery Cause' you were a bad bitch I was a savage Livin' off our own extremities So wе tick like a time bomb set to dеtonate eventually Little did I know you were gonna get the best of me Goddamn!

6. Unspun | Jackie It might be suicide To mix your blood and mine But call me crazy I feel it lately You’re my new favourite thing

7. Misery | Dope, Drama Club I'd kill myself or anyone else for you

8. Blind and Frozen | Beast in Black God, I miss you like hell I was wrong, I can tell For the heart can be blind and frozen

9. Trust Fall | Pinkshift I dug a deep hole to bury you, oh

10. Liar | Papa Roach Take my secrets down to the water 'Cause I can't keep them down any longer I swear to God but he knows that I'm lying Liar, liar your world's on fire

11. Talk to Me | Scarlett O’Hara Are you still around? I can feel the air getting heavy I’ll sit on the ground Beside your hollow soul Sharing your world but I get the feeling that you got nowhere to go Losing the fight inside, locked inside your mind

12. Cynosure | In Flames Who’s at the wheel? Say a word, say anything, I will be healed Who’s at the wheel? Say a word, say something that will make it real

13. Back From the Dead | Royal Republic You, you can bring me back from the dead You just gotta use your pretty head

*BONUS Kiriona song because NtN brought the pain: 14. Exit Wound | Otherwise I'm not thinking this through Living my life like an exit wound Blow back, blown out Throwback, thrown out No more scars left to hide Thrill is gone, still in the firefight

#PLZ LISTEN TO STUNNER IF ANYTHING #there were so many contenders but i narrowed it down to this #will probably still add more as they come up because so much works for them ugh #tlt #the locked tomb #playlist #griddlehark #gideon the ninth #harrow the ninth #nona the ninth #gideon nav #harrowhark nonagesimus #kiriona gaia #fandom playlist #wow i am gay

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artzychic27 · 2 months

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Here's an idea for the Arkham AU

Could we have some notes about Miss Bustier as their teacher? I assume she works at the Asylum.

Caline Bustier is one of the top psychiatrists at L’asile d’Arkham, specializing in children and teenagers. She soon meets fifteen villainous teenagers

While she may seem unassuming, she knows how to dodge a bullet, knife, and acid hurled at her. That’s why she got hired

Mlle. Bustier: Hello, I’m Caline Bustier, and I’m your psychiatrist. *Dodge’s Adrien’s sledgehammer, Rose’s vine, Juleka’s knife, and throws one of Myléne’s fear gas grenades out of the window before it can explode* Now, let’s all go around and share our names, pronouns, and why we’re here.

She has access to very detailed files on each of the young villains, listing things such as their past home lives, psychological history, any emotional trauma, etc. to get a feel on why they’re all the way they are

For some like Marinette, Adrien, and Kim, it’s pretty obvious- chemicals warped their minds or society was just being a little bitch

She’d like to pick Nino’s brain a bit more to find out what went wrong when his mothers created him

After reading up on Sabrina, Nathaniel, Myléne, Kim, and Ivan’s files, she’s wondering if there’s any way to press charges against their respective abusers

She really wants to have a few words with Audrey Bourgeois. She just wants to talk, that’s it.

Alya has high levels of intelligence, but uses it in a destructive and rather disturbing manner when she’s bored

Also, Max clearly has some sort of superiority complex that went undiagnosed for years, leading to his robot uprising at school

When she’s not giving therapy, she’s making sure her kids patients are treated like humans by the guards. That means making sure they aren’t all doped up, getting Kim out of the basement, making sure Alya has access to twelve-sided rubix cubes, letting Juleka and Rose spend time together, helping Ivan with his ptsd, and helping Nathaniel with his anger problems

So, she doesn’t care for this Lionel Bolton character (Brownie points for whoever can guess this reference)

Bruce Wayne himself felt Bolton was right for the job, but it seems he doesn’t know what’s going on behind closed doors

When going to check the security footage, Mlle. Bustier became suspicious when she saw that any footage of Bolton was gone

So, she goes to the villains one by one to get their sides of the story

Adrien: … I got nothin’ to say.

Mlle. Bustier: But, surely, you must have something-

Adrien: Ya got a hearing problem or somethin’?! NO! Nada! Ixnay! Zero! Zilch! Bupkis! Nothing! Okay?!

—

Kim: I told you for the tenth time! He didn’t do anything! You think I can’t take care of myself?!

Mlle. Bustier: … Then, would you care to explain how you got that scratch on your arm, Kim? It doesn’t look much like an accident.

Kim: … Happened before I got arrested. Just some kids from school, alright?

—

Marinette: I ain’t. Saying. Nothing.

Mlle. Bustier: Marinette if you’re afraid of M. Bolton-

Marinette: What’s there to be scared of?! I’m the Harlequin of Hate! The Clown Princess of Crime! I scare people! Not the other way around! Got it?! He’s just some lousy do-good cop you chuckles hired! Nothing else! OKAY?!

—

Mlle. Bustier: Myléne, you’ve been sitting there quietly for ten minutes. Surely, you must have something to say, dear.

Myléne: … No.

Mlle. Bustier: And yet, yours’ was the loudest voice of protest. You must have some misgivings about his methods.

Myléne: I-I was mistaken.

When they aren’t talking, she decides to pull a page out of Batman’s book and do a gambit

Mlle. Bustier: Well, then, based on your testimonies, I suppose I’ll send M. Wayne a letter of recommendation on M. Bolton’s behalf, proposing an extension of M. Bolton’s contract for an additional eighteen months.

Alya: NO! You can’t! You don’t know what he’s doing to us!

Lila: *Slaps a hand over Alya’s mouth* Shut up! Just shut up! Don’t listen to her, she’s delusional! We’re fine!

Adrien: No, it’s all true! If we don’t speak up now, we’ll never get another chance! He threatens us, takes away our privileges even when we’re good!

Max: He says scum like us must be kept in line!That’s why he chains us down in our cells at night and electrifies the door!

Lila: He threatened to send me away to get a lobotomy!

Nathaniel: HE’S AN ANIMAL!

Ivan: A monster!

Juleka: Keep him away from us!

So, yeah. No one messes with her kids patients

#miraculous ladybug #miraculous #dc comics #mlb au #dc villains #Arkham asylum #caline bustier #ask me stuff #answered ask

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trashlama · 1 year

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Braaahhhzzzz guess what. Thanks to @yanteetle and their reblogging they've introduced me to a fabulous tumbler page @somerandomdudelmao . Their stuff is so fuckin' beautiful.

Legit initially I was just looking at the Sea verse! Rottmnt AU fanart @yanteetle had reblogged thinking how it would be dope to mix the concept with Bioshock or a Deiselpunk, Steampunk, Cyberpunk style to it. Make it a little yandere fic or somethin' anyways—

I got curious what their other stuff looked like and braahhzzzz— their shit was radical.

I really dig their art. The blog gave me waaayy too many ideas for some possible future turtle fics! Phenomenal stuff! Like with Yanteetle, I just love how unique but, still rottmnt styled their art is. The comics from Cass(@somerandomdudelmao ) are great too! The dialogue is spot on with their comics 👌 and although some may be a bit messy, I don't care. I think as Tony the Tiger says "They're great!".

I know the likelihood of it happening is slim buuuuttt— I'd die happily if I could see a collab between @yanteetle and Cass(@somerandomdudelmao ). I just have a great feeling if we got a collab between these two shit would be ✨magical✨.

Probably won't happen but, a girl 'otta have dreams.

Anyways— I know I've been repeating myself but, you guys seriously need to check this blog out. It's worth seeing it yourself.

Sorry about all the blabbering, I hope you guys have a great day!

Here's some memes I came across while at work.

Sorry this is long↓

I don't own these memes. I've never claimed to do so. I just come across them on Pinterest when I'm on break at work and think they're funny so I like to share them. If I mistakenly put one on here that I shouldn't have please let me know! I like to respect people's wishes. And if you could add the creator names too that would be great so the same mistake isn't made twice. Sorry for the inconvenience that my sharing may cause. I hope you have a good day.

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butmakeitgayblog · 1 year

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As a writer, do you find it annoying when readers comment asking for chapters? Because as a reader, I've always wondered how I could correctly phrase that I'm looking forward to reading more so that it doesn't come off as pestering and pressuring the author. Sometimes, when stories that stick with me hasn't been updated in months, I find myself back in the comments section thinking, I wanna leave something nice for author letting them know that I'm here and I love their story. Is there any particular do's and don't's we should be aware of?

Honestly? Completely honest?

Yes it's annoying when people ask for updates 😬 BECAUSE, and I can't stress this enough, no one on earth wants that story to be updated more than the writer. No one. That un-updated story haunts their dreams and taunts their waking days. We want it to be finished too, and we're painfully, excruciatingly, cripplingly aware of how long it's been since it was updated. Authors want to update their stories, so if they haven't, there's a reason why. And asking for updates only does 1 of 2 things (or usually both): makes writers feel even worse than they already do about not updating, or straight up piss them off because if they could update, they would. Because in the end all asking for updates really is is pressuring someone, whether the commentor means to or not. It's fantastic to know someone loves the story and wants to read more of it, and we DOOOO wanna know you're excited about the story and want more. So while we absolutely want to hear from you, here's 3 better ways to convey that than asking for an update:

Just tell the author you like the story! Doesn't have to be complex, just say "I love this story! I've reread it X times and enjoy it every time 😌" Boom, instant shot of serotonin for the author

Paste a line or lines of dialogue you loved. Maybe a specific scene that spoke to you or made you laugh or cry or you thought was hot. Authors love having their words thrown back at them because then we know which parts work the best, and which are reaching the audience and leaving an impression. It actually helps sometimes moving forward in the story knowing what parts readers felt were the strongest. Yes we write stories for ourselves, but we also want you guys to like them too. And feedback helps us grow.

Say how the story makes you feel. Do you like it reading it before bed as lil comfort story that helps you wind down? Maybe it's something that when you're sad you pull out of your bookmarks cuz it brightens your day even just a little bit. Maybe you like it because it hurts in the best ways, it gets emotions flowing that you can connect with and commiserate. Do you wanna squish those little dope's faces together for being too cute, or boop them on the nose with a newspaper for being dumbasses. We wanna know! Authors put their heart into these stories, so hearing what emotions they bring out in readers is like winning the fucking jackpot

Understand this isn't me saying if you've ever asked for an update I think you're a bad person or you should feel bad. What I'm saying is that it's not conveying what you may be meaning to convey, and at worst you might be actually thwarting any motivation the author had managed to gather to update.

#anon

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efangamez · 3 days

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Can I just say I'm proud of myself. I'm gonna rant a bit.

I'm also going to be using voice to text so if it gets up a bit verbose or if the grammar is off I'm sorry.

I keep forgetting a lot of the times that I'm a solo creator. I've only paid people to do art for my game twice and commissioned somebody to do the main theme for the GRIM soundtrack once.

All of the graphic design and artwork that you see in my handbooks are all done by myself. Only the covers to mourn and Riley's road trip in Neon Nights were done by artists. I've done everything else. And it's really cool to kind of understand that I put so much work into my games and I'm just one person. I'm also taking many steps to learn how to Pace myself and not force myself to work and I found my quality of games has increased almost doubly if not triply.

It's really nice to do things when I want and to have people who follow my games who understand that I'm disabled and will always reassure me that there's no pressure when it comes to release dates and stuff. I will have the Palace of eyes come out and I will have the physical editions of GRIM come out but this stuff takes time for one person to do and especially one that's disabled. And y'all know that and y'all understand that and I'm so thankful for that.

I also want to say that a lot of people who follow my games and who have done reviews have been the coolest f****** people on planet earth. Everyone that I've talked to has been pro Palestine and has been trying to do some advocacy work of some kind. I really dig that a lot. Also I've kind of cultivated a very neurodivergent and trans audience and I really dig that. I also dig the CIS people and the dudes who follow me but there's just something magical and special about having trans and queer people keep up and follow with your games.

I don't know I'm just really really thankful for everyone and I'm feeling a lot of love right now and I know that my bundle is probably not going to reach its goal but the fact that I was able to raise that much money and y'all purchased my games really means a lot to me. Like I was on the verge of breakdowns nearly every single day. My job is one that is self-employed and makes just a little bit above rent and groceries every month. With the money that I've raised I may not be able to get therapy and psychiatry but I'll be able to afford my meds and I will be able to enjoy life a little bit more. I went and saw Predator today at a local nonprofit theater and that was because of y'all. I wouldn't be able to pay for that stuff if it wasn't for you. So I promise you that all of that shmoney that y'all gave I'm not going to waste and y'all are going to get some pretty dope stuff in the near future.

I wish my trans and queer and neurodivergent and disabled people that are following me and who just may stumble across this post an absolutely magical evening and just know that rest is needed that you are worth it and that you were loved even if it's just by some rando game designer on the internet. I appreciate y'all have a wonderful night!

PS also get a game in my bundle or your transphobic / j

#ttrpg #indie ttrpg #trans #queer

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bosses-stay-flawless · 2 months

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What’s in a name? ZAHRA: brilliance," "splendor," "bright," and "flower"

Some of my ancestors wanted to honor my great- great grandmother by naming their children after her. She agreed as long as the child reminded them of her and her story. My name is Zahra, my family says that I have my great- great grandmother’s spirt. Her love of nature, justice, flowers, freedom, anything wild and in it’s natural state, my love for my ancestors and the way I allow spiritual guidance to lead me, but I also have some of her other traits, the things she learned as apart of her journey. She advised all the women in my family against involving themselves with men who placed high value on horses, she adored animals and didn’t hate horses, yet no matter how hard she tried she could never forget that her life was in the process of being bartered away by her father, my 3x great grandfather (as a 12 year old) for horses, in exchange for her role as a bride or as a form of dowery as it was called then [and nowadays} as a show and promise of good relation between two countries.

Safe to say, once she achieved her freedom, no woman (or man born from her and my great- great grandfather ‘s seed out of love & loyalty) on that side of my family, including myself really liked horses. My grandmother was bitten trying to feed one and my mom was thrown from one and my great- grandmother and I both saved one once, but though it sounds odd from a spiritual point of view, and in light of all that my great- great- grandmother went through I get it, so if you really know me, you really know I’ve never had an interest in horses.

Even as I share her story I realize that many people also have stories similar to my great- great grandmother’s life. They may even find similarities in my story. Even so this is my own unique story. I wish everyone blessings, and the courage to share their own family history. My ancestors didn’t like horses, are multicultural, and hated injustice just to highlight some of the struggles endured by one of my great- great grandmothers who managed to escape being a child bride. On another note…

My ancestors aren’t their ancestors if they were why don’t I know them or of them? Those tests are 99.99 percent accurate boo. So it’s time they tell their own story about their own ancestors, everybody’s ancestry is dope, in its own right!!!

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sonic-adventure-3 · 1 year

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can’t believe i had to hear someone call i am all of me bad. AND CALL SHTH’S SOUNDTRACK AS BEING COMPRISED MAINLY OF JUNK FOOD MUSIC WITH SOME OUTLIERS. fuck you fuck you a million times over. i can shrug off criticism of the game itself, okay. shth is. a game, to be certain. and i can completely understand a frustrating time with the game discolouring your perception of the music. BUT TO SAY ALL THAT SHIT WITH YOUR FULL CHEST AFTER SAYING YOU LISTENED TO THE MUSIC ON ITS OWN??? FUCK YOU. 100% a matter of personal taste. like i actually agree that a some of the soundtrack blends together. not every track has its own unique identity, as the whole of it is representing the one character in environments that (largely due to the strange tone of the game and sheer amount of potentialities) aren’t as distinctive as previous zones and stages in sonic games. that’s a fair criticism! BUT TO SAY IT’S GARBAGE???? TO SAY IT’S JUNK FOOD MUSIC??? TO ACT AS THOUGH THERES LIKE ALL OF 4 TRACKS THAT STAND OUT IN THE ENTIRE SOUNDTRACK??? FUCK YOU. “a lot of the music sounds like a grungy jam session” which is an epic and dope and incredibly enjoyable thing to be, not seeing the downside here.

as you may have figured from my rant above, i watched a youtube video about sonic. risky, i know. i don’t usually let myself be tempted by hedgehogs in the thumbnail, but it was about how sonic music is good and the first 5 minutes didn’t straight up say “sonic is a dogshit series, most if not every game is bad” so i thought i was in the clear. i should’ve known.

i don’t fucking understand people who treat any given piece of sonic media being “bad” or clunky or simplistic or literally any other regurgitated criticism everyone and their mother has been saying for the last 25 years as a crime against humanity. it’s a funny blue hedgehog!! laugh!! cry!! belt nonsensical lyrics and catchy tunes at the top of your lungs while you shower!! repeat poorly translated and poorer performed lines ad nauseam!! it’s funny!! it’s charming!! it’s endearing and i love it immensely!! it’s cheesy and it’s fun and it’s janky and it’s fun and it’s inconsistent and it’s FUN. ITS FUCKING FUN!!! every single piece of sonic media no matter how poor a public opinion it has has something to love about it, has something FUN about it. i truly believe this.

#not necessarily accusing the video of the last paragraph it’s just my thoughts #rambles #IM MAD #of course hearing someone hate on something you love isn’t very pleasant #but by god at least make points. give examples to your criticism. cite your goddamn sources #THE FUCKING. AUGH. HYPOCRISY LATER #trying to make it through the last 40 mins of this hour n forty minute video #i can’t do ittttttttt he’s worshipping 06’s soundtrack soooo much and like yesssss it’s fire but i don’t trust your opinion #not after saying what you did abt shth and of course he’s gotta comment on the other stuff about 06 STUFF IT #i am angry.#AIDUSYSJTSHTSUSYAYSHSIAUSGSHSHAUSHDHAHAUSHDH #AUGH. EUGHh #WHATEVER i’m gonna move on with my life now #srry for the longish post lol

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swagtastic-bougie-pompadour · 11 months

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Clive Update: Pride Edition!

'Sup', everyone! First off, the Naranja-Uva Kpop Dance Team asked me to tell you all they have a Pride performance today in the Schoolyard, where they plan to drop free swag! Sounds "dope", so check it out, yo!

Secondly, I've got our very first Pride Feature today: our very own professor of art and head of the Elite 4, Hassel!

Though he looks "rough and tough" in battle, any of my fellow students could tell you about the beautifully sensitive art and music Hassel creates and guides his own students to! Without further ado, a short interview with Hassel!

Thank you for agreeing to be our first feature, Professor Hassel! You're quite popular with the students, so I'm sure they'll be excited to see you here. Hello, er... Clive! It is a pleasure to be on the blog of somebody so "hip with the times". Personally, however, I would suggest that my students enjoy Professor Gible's teachings a bit more than my own! Ha, who could compete with such an esteemed professor? I have heard your class described as "gas" many times, however. Is that good...? I believe so. Anyhoo, on to our first question: What does "Pride" mean to you? Pride, to me, is a feeling of warmth. A sort of "you made it", if you understand? Some of my students may know this already, but I come from quite the tightly-wound family of Dragon Tamers. My path was quite clearly laid out for me--and then I ran away, saying I was going to make a living from music, of all things! And that freedom saved me. I certainly wouldn't have met dear Brassie without it! So I'm proud to be in a place where I can be myself, whether that's artistically or in love! How expressively put! Though inquiring minds wish to know: how long have you and Brassius been together? Roughly five years--which is more recent than some of you may believe, I am sure. However, even for the most artistic of us, matters of the heart can be difficult to parse! I still tear up a little, remembering that... wonderful time in muh laifh... Ah, wait, Hassel, I don't have any tissues here--aaand it appears I've set him off. Before I cut the interview, do you have any last comments, Hassel? I'b... goimg to pull it together... Right. My apologies. To my wonderful students: chase your dreams! Not a single day in my life have I regretted my decision to do so, even without my family's support! And remember: there is someone out there who loves you for exactly who you are!

#clivespiration #pkmn irl #pokeblogging #clive update

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windandwater · 2 years

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so. some notes.

all of tumblr is reading dracula, but I am not doing that, because I am reading les mis

I started doing that in 2020 but abruptly had to stop because, uh...you know.

my ability to read anything got rather catastrophically shut down, plus, in case you weren’t aware, les mis is astonishingly relevant to things going on right now and it was way too much

I can read again! I am back in full monstrous force! I read way too fast actually! I just read 4 books in 4 days (again) and the only thing that can save me from myself is classics!

I have not seen this musical don’t come for me

so, back to this...this book.

and you know I like to liveblog The Experience and in case y’all didn’t know, “rambling about the Parisian sewers for no reason” is exactly the kind of wacky nonsense I very much enjoy in classic literature, so, here we go.

things victor hugo has taken time out of his narrative to make sure I know:

jean valjean is jacked

literally everything possible there is to say about this one really dope bishop

everything victor hugo remembers about the year 1817, which somehow no one on the internet has annotated in detail (footnotes are your friend & I have them but wow did I stop caring/get tired after a minute)

that one guy who wrote a report about Parisians being lazy/harmless is a dumbass and here's why. they'll kick your ass. now back to the story.

seriously this quote (after a very long digression from the plot) made me laugh so hard (may vary in other translations): “Having scribbled this note in the margins of the Anglés report, we can now get back to our four couples.” you cannot tell me this man didn’t know what he was doing.

fuck the police

#adventures in text posts #adventures in reading #this fandom terrifies me #hopefully everyone's too distracted reading dracula to notice me in this tag?#les mis #les miserables #...in book form #and ftr 'watch [x] movie' etc goes over badly with me I'm always like sure! and never do #so just...save your energy

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cornelius-of-lykia · 2 months

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Research Statement / Introductory Post

Hey folks! As part of my work for school, I must write a research statement that encompasses who I am, what my work entails, what influences me, and ultimately what I want to accomplish while I am at the University of Connecticut. This is honestly a pretty good opportunity to take stock of who I am as an artist, and why I am doing the work I am undertaking, and so I’d like to share my research statement here.

Personal Background

My name is Christian Romero, I am a 3D artist and game designer of Ecuadorian and Irish heritage, born and raised in the Hudson Valley (NY). I first studied game design at Drexel University, and while there’s a thousand things I would’ve liked to have done differently in undergrad, my work and experiences there are ultimately what led me to becoming an MFA graduate student here at UConn. Overall, I’m pretty happy with where I am right now.

I’ve been very interested in game narratives since I was a teenager, but I didn’t know what I actually wanted to do for a career – all I knew was that I wanted to make games. I didn’t consider myself an ‘artist’ when I was starting out in undergrad – I couldn’t paint, I had no confidence in my drawing skills, and I had no idea what 3D modeling entailed. While I have my criticisms of Drexel University as an institution, their game design track got me to engage with all the major components of game design, which gave me a much better sense of what each discipline entailed. While I did a lot of work with 3D modeling at Drexel, it was only a couple years after graduating that I ultimately decided to go all-in on my 3D art. It took me a while to realize that I really had a knack for modeling and rendering, and even though I struggled for a while to find meaningful work after graduating, I look back fondly on all the art I made in the intervening years. I honestly think a lot of it is pretty dope.

I came to the University of Connecticut to learn as much as I could about 3D art and game design, but these haven’t been the only things I sought to learn about while studying here. UConn’s Deparment of Digital Media & Design has a big emphasis on projects pertaining to the Humanities, and I wanted to explore what sort of work was being undertaken in this regard. To that end, I have learned a good deal in the past year-and-a-half I have been here.

Thesis Project

For my stay at UConn, my MFA thesis project is a narrative point-and-click game called The Festival: Eastoria. In it, you play Nishma Mauranyan, a girl who is trying to put on a food festival in a country that just got out of a civil war.

Its themes and quests are about how people come together to rebuild their lives and their societies after the massive upheavals and trauma that come with war. The game’s setting and story are based on a project I have been working on since 2019, with the protagonist being based on a character sprite I made all the way back in 2015.

There is a lot I still have to unpack and explain about this game, but I will do my best to summarize several key components about it here.

Artistic Vision

While a good chunk of my artistic vision and philosophy can be summarized as “I like making art of stuff I like”, what I ultimately want to do is make art that has something to say. I want to explore complicated themes and say complicated things in the games I make. We live in a very messy world, and live very messy lives, and the stories that have stuck with me the most have been the ones that helped me make sense of it all. I know I may come up short when trying to write something meaningful, especially with The Festival, but it’s very important that I try to do what I do with as much earnestness and sincerity as possible.

Having gone through much turmoil and hardship in my own life, I want to help others make sense of their own struggles by exploring these things in the stories I write. If I help even one person understand themselves better through my works, then I know I will have done my job.

Artistic Influences

In preparing to come to UConn in December 2021, which was also the time I started formulating the concept of The Festival as a game, I fondly listed Anthony Bourdain and Guy Fieri (yes, seriously) as two of my biggest influences for conceiving the game’s premise. What inspires me about those two (Anthony Bourdain moreso) is how they chose to explore different communities, regions, and cultures through their food. While Mr. Fieri is more focused on the food itself, Anthony Bourdain (God rest his soul) used food as a springboard for talking about a region’s history, politics, and culture(s). I was always intrigued by his approach to these subjects, and it’s ultimately what inspires me to make The Festival as it is: a game where food and festivities are used as the starting point to engage with serious topics.

In a broader sense, I have always had a deep interest in history, politics, culture, and religion. I love learning about other peoples’ cultures, and the different ethnic groups found in The Festival are all based on a variety of different real-world groups that I have a deep respect for, who you don’t see often portrayed within media (e.g. you don’t see a lot of fictional portrayals of Armenian culture in pop culture). Ultimately, the titular festival that you spend the whole game working towards is itself a springboard for exploring the larger world of Eastoria and its people, along with exploring the very complicated and heavy subject matter that comes with life in post-conflict societies. To this end, I hope that the worldbuilding I incorporate into The Festival reflects my own innate curiosity and passions.

For video games that inspire me, I have three key games I would like to cite – each of which I have been liberally cribbing design elements from. Those games would be Fallout: New Vegas (2010), Disco Elysium (2019), and Pentiment (2022).

To give a very rough overview of what I am taking from each game for use in the Festival, I am inspired by how they handle their rich worldbuilding, their complex and nuanced narratives, and their incredibly well-written and relatable characters. I’m taking many notes on how New Vegas and Disco Elysium each handle their politics, how Disco Elysium and Pentiment handle their point-and-click gameplay systems, and how Pentiment handles the passage of time in its quests and stories. Lastly, I am also taking note of how each game handles moral ambiguity and uncertainty in choices – both of which I intend on being major components within the different quests of The Festival.

Themes and Subjects

The Festival: Eastoria is a game about putting on a food festival in a country that just got out of a civil war. As such, it will be exploring the complexities of post-conflict societies, and about how people rebuild their lives after suffering through major traumas. Even so, like with the three games I mentioned before, I want to tie in the large-scale political conflicts with the small-scale personal stories, and show how one influences the other. I want to show how people reclaim their lives, and how they process such heavy trauma and grief, having survived a thousand different horrors.

Expanding a little further on my last point, I want to incorporate ambiguity into both the moral choices the player must make, as well as the choices on what the player focuses on to bring the festival to fruition. While this will be incredibly difficult to pull off, and will require a lot of time and careful writing, I strongly believe it’s a critical component of the game. What may be morally upstanding may not benefit you or your festival, and you may have to do a few underhanded or questionable things to make sure you can pull off your festival.

Evolution of The Festival

The world of The Festival is based on a project I first started working on in September 2019. It first started life as a shooter based off the mechanics of Mount & Blade: Warband (2010), made in conjunction with a couple other aspiring indies like me. While I made a lot of art assets for this game, ultimately we all had to move on from it, especially once the pandemic took its toll on our lives post-2020. While I’m not against revisiting a war game in this vein in the future, I think for now The Festival is the most appropriate and achievable version of the sort of story I wish to tell. The war game I initially envisioned was also centered on the themes of people rebuilding their lives after conflict and trauma, while trying to convey the human cost of war. The premise of the game was that you would be the one to reunite the war-torn country of Eastoria by building an army large enough to topple the squabbling dictatorships that dominated the country.

However, once the war game was mothballed, I searched for other ways to explore the world I spent the past two years working on, and by late 2021 I decided it was best to focus on a story where, rather than working to reunify the country yourself, you skip right to the end where the country has already been unified, and now you must work to bring people back together in this new era of peace. While I can’t recall exactly how I decided to base the game’s story on putting on a food festival, I know that by the time I sent in my application to UConn in January 2022, it was an idea I was beginning to mentally flesh out.

And here we are today!

Creative Process / Materials and Techniques

For this portion of the statement, I will focus exclusively on the art side of things, and how I make the character models and assets I have produced. There is more I can say about my interest and research into the political and humanitarian issues of life in a post-conflict society, but I would prefer to expand upon that at a later time.

As a 3D artist by trade, my preferred art application is Blender, an open-source 3D application. For modeling characters, I have two character bases I have been using since 2020 for a variety of different characters, including here for The Festival. The male version is nicknamed “Cor Boy”, after me, and the female version is nicknamed the “Erik Girl”, after my friend NitroGlyde, who helped me produce her. I try to keep all my models in a low-poly art style using mostly flat shading, as it is an art-style I have grown very fond of since first starting on this project in 2019.

I originally used exclusively Photoshop for texturing, which I still rely on for certain textures. Ever since coming to UConn, however, I have been working extensively with Substance Painter, which I consider to be an absolute godsend for texturing 3D models. As for the game engine itself, I am making this game in Unreal Engine 5.3. These past two weeks (as of February 25, 2024 as I write this), I have been reviewing and learning as much as I can about the basics of Unreal’s blueprint system to implement the code I want, and I have gotten surprisingly far. I will be sharing a video showcasing my work on that front soon.

Course Goals

My ultimate goal for the Spring 2024 semester is to have a rough prototype of the game’s pilot quest, which I have dubbed “Hemmingward”. It is about Nishma’s attempts to solve a decade-old war crime for a village in an attempt to secure their famed recipe for her festival. If I can have a playable quest for this story by my thesis defense in mid-May, then I know I will be in a good position for my final year.

Currently, I have locked in the very basics of my point-and-click mechanics – locomotion, interactivity, and dialogue system. I will be showing those off in a future post soon; the locomotion and interactivity I was able to piece together from various tutorials, while the dialogue system is a plugin called Dialogue Tree by Unraed on the Unreal Marketplace. I’ll need to polish and experiment with the system a little more – and eventually resume work on art assets for this game – but I’m making headway, slowly but surely.

Production Timeline:

Here is a rough timeline of what I expect to have done within the coming weeks for the rest of the semester.

Feb 26th to March 8th – Polish and lock in point-and-click functionality, get very simple dialogue camera working the way I want.

March 9th to March 16th – Spring break; review Hemmingward script for further revisions. Set up levels to be explored, and begin greyboxing scenes.

March 17th to March 23rd – Finish greyboxing environments. Implement note/diary system (which will be used to review documents relevant to the quest).

March 24th to March 30th – Implement basic cutscene functionality, including transition from cutscenes to gameplay, and vice versa. Have first wave of Hemmingward script revisions completed.

March 31st to April 6th – Begin implementing the actual script into the game; set up cinematics, dialogue, and events appropriately.

April 7th to April 13th – Continue implementing the script content into the game.

April 14th to Apri; 26th – Complete implementation of script into the game; finalize alpha build of quest for presentation to committee during Thesis defense.

Closing

This is as much as I have to say for my research statement right now. Thank you dearly if you have read this far.

There’s plenty I wish to talk about more, with both The Festival and my own journey as an artist. For now though, I’m just excited to say that I’m getting a lot of good work done, and I have many exciting updates to share in the coming weeks.

I hope you have a lovely day, dear reader, and as always - Solidarity Forever!

#cor text #the festival #the festival: eastoria #game design #game development #reblogging this to The Festival server as well

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weebsinstash · 1 year

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I feel like Val is the type to get his lil pet hella hooked on some drug(nothing too debilitating…maybe) to the point they absolutely can’t leave him cause he’s able to get the purest most refined version of it and they can’t handle less.

Getting to the point that they just give up running and just start finally settling in to the pet role, or so he thinks, when he realizes they’re just constantly doping up to avoid him in their own little world. Always conveniently high off their horse during the times he usually wants to be pampered and loved by them and he’s just like “oh, well alright cunt if you like that shit more than me-“ just fucking instant cold turkeys them. Watching them get their withdrawal meltdowns and promising them just scraps to get whatever he wants. Snuggles, kisses, lick his nutsack just whatever cause he knows they’ll be desperate enough. Only to snort and grin as they look at him so pleadingly and cute and he tells them what a pathetic job they did, using any outburst as an excuse to… get rough with em.

Wrap them up, give em a lil time out or maybe set them up with a lil buzz toy to work out that frustration and give them a new distraction to get through the painful withdrawals. Only cooing at their pleading and licking up the drool from their chin.

Oh- got carried away there. Anyways he a nasty nasty man n I see him bein fuuucked like dat :>

Oh no absolutely is this something I've thought pretty intensely about. it's pretty implied in the Addict music video that Angel is addicted to whatever drug is in Valentino's cigarettes. when he is dancing but looking anxious, Valentino blows the smoke directly in his face and he goes from anxious to feeling more motivated which is probably deliberate on Val's part and also im pretty sure that unless this is just music video pizazz that Valentino has some sort of powers which would check out since dead sinners having powers is already established wirh Alastor

There is also this pretty blatant visual metaphor

and in Angel's room there are cigarettes that are varying stages of being unfinished implying he's trying to stop and he actively acknowledges through the lyrics "there's another rush of poison flowing into my veins, giving me a dose of pleasure that resides by the pain" and it's pretty clear that on top of being abused and being an addict he's also just trying to use drugs to cope with everything he's going through

So ABSOLUTELY have I thought of everyone's favorite to hate scumbag pimp taking advantage of any weaknesses or addictions Reader may have and I personally can contribute my own personal experiences to this since I have a genetic predisposition to getting addicted and have had problems with alcohol and controlling my habits myself.

I can see it now. You're all in the limo and Valentino is smoking, Angel and a few others are too, and the Overlord looks over at you and laughs because you're smoking a joint and just starts openly mocking you for "that loser little kid shit" (even though I would stake my life that Vox would love getting stoned and gaming out and probably does so). You just kind of shrug him off, saying you're fine with just weed, but Valentino can't help but notice you're drinking too. You'll sit there, toke, sip, toke, sip, until you're a little loopy and feeling good, at your preferred level of euphoria, though there's been a few times you've just straight up fallen asleep in his limo from doing too much too quickly and Angel or one of the dancers had to jostle you awake.

Valentino doesn't see you hang out with anyone. He never sees you around town. As far as he knows, you work your shifts and only leave your rented room to get food, bathe, or run errands. Most of the times he sees you, you're stoned and or getting stoned, and there's been more then once that some catty little poledancer or whomever didn't like you whispered in his ear that you've been stumbling around drunk.

I've thought of it going one of two ways: he gets you high by force, or you ask him for it. Can you imagine it? You've been smoking weed but it just isn't the same, either your tolerance carried over from your human body or perhaps you've just been doing so much you built it back up anew, but now, one of the only things that brought you joy and calmed you down isn't working as well anymore, and you're having to spend more and do more and you'll cough your throat raw and still not feel 'how you want'. This high isn't how you remember it feeling before, so do more until it feels good! It is legitimately such a helpless feeling when you start leaning on a substance for comfort and you notice the efficacy wearing off. There's a sense of fear and desperation in it, that 'your only way to be happy' isn't working. And you start wondering, maybe I should try something else, something different, something stronger?

Val's been watching you and having his employees secretly keep tabs on you and you're all at the club and you're sitting near him and you look down at your last joint that's almost finished and you still feel miserable before glancing up at him with these big sad eyes and gestures to his cigarette, "so what's even in those anyway?" And he just smirks and hands it to you, "see for yourself, baby"

Or like, the same scenario but inverted from another perspective, Val can tell you've been smoking like a chimney to the point maybe you're even paying rent late because you're spending so much on your vices, and even if he can't immediately identify why, there's something that gets under his skin at seeing you all sad and gloomy. I wouldn't put it passed him to offer his cigarette to you and you refuse, and he pushes harder for it, trying to essentially pressure you into doing it until you cave, before just grabbing your chin and shotgunning the full capacity of his lungs straight into your mouth while you hopelessly fail to try to push him away

Either way, once the drug settles, you're just sitting there all 😊 smiling and giggling and engaging, overflowing with dopamine, all but melting into the sofa or limo custom you're sitting on while you play on your phone or listen intently to one of your boss' stories from when he eas alive, which always boosts his ego when you listen and you're like "wow that must have been so scary 🥺" and making him feel all big and tough, and maybe he can even convince you to cuddle a little. What, he's not touching up on you or anything, you can't just sit beside him? He can't wrap one of his arms around your waist and just hold onto you while he's on his phone? I mean, drugs and alcohol, scientifically proven, activate a specific part of your brain, and our brains favor the more primal feelings over rational thought which is why drunk and high people can act erratic and shit. So you're sitting there feeling all hot n buzzed n horny and suddenly Oh, big Mr Valentino has his hand on your thigh and is teasing you, hitting on you a little bit, and the mindset of "fuck that man something NASTY" is overpowering your usual rational thought of "GIRL BE NICE TO HIM SO HE DOESNT HURT YOU BUT OTHERWISE DONT EVEN LOOK IN HIS DIRECTION"

Valentino just lowkey making you a sex addict because he gets you high and gives you mind shattering orgasms 😩❤️ I imagine this would be extremely effective towards those of us that have lived more isolated lonely lives lol. The first morning after he fucks you and your new favorite drug has worn off, he can tell you're embarrassed, barely making eye contact with the man you had said some reeeeal freaky stuff to in bed (which he LOVED lol but he'll tease you for it just to watch you squirm). Maybe it'll be a week, maybe it'll be a few days, but you kind of avoid him, but then, it happens: the two of you wind up sitting in the limo near each other again, or at the club, and he catches you sending glances his way, eyes flicking between either his cigarette or him himself, looking away as soon as he notices you.

He'll pull you close, putting his hands on your body, purring in your ear, "what do you need from me, baby?" with the smell of his cigarette ghosting over your skin with the heat of his breath and you shudder and he knows, he knows you're going to be his new favorite toy

#yandere stuff #sinprompts #hh #also like for angst imagine if he got you too high or you got too high and you overdose in front of him #he has his goonies come and narcan you before you can die a second time but from that point onward he literally wont let you leave his side #no drinking no drugs and maybe he even slaps you with the bill for the treatment to resuscitate you #hes looking at your smile and then suddenly youre clutching at your chest eyes full of pain and fear and you look at him for help #i imagine if he hadnt realized he wants you as his alone before that almost losing you definitely does #as a pet as a a girlfriend as property it doesnt matter #youre his and hes going to make sure you keep your stupid ass alive even if it means he has to drag you around like a purse dog

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