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be-ready-when-i-say-go · 3 years

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Cal and finding out you both are the missing pair to your costumes pls

A huge HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU BLANCA! Enjoy!

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It was Michael’s idea. That’s how Calum would up in this, reading the invitation email send to him, telling me to follow the specific directions for his costume. It gave no name to the character or to the show. Just a bulleted list underneath the not quite passable graphic that Michael probably made either in Photoshop or some equivalent.

A white and black pinstriped suit jacket and pants (a black suit will also do as listed on the invitation), a black bowtie, a white dress shirt, and a fake mustache. It almost like pin straight too in the picture that’s obviously been screenshotted and pasted into the body.

Michael wanted to do a Halloween party and the guys didn’t need much excuse to readily agree to supply with their presence, booze, and non-alcoholic choices for a party. The treats for working on during the year. The only caveat had been that Michael wanted to arrange for a couple’s theme--the trick if you asked Calum.

He didn’t really have anyone to partner up with and he for sure wasn’t about to scroll through his phone for whoever was just as lonely as him. He could’ve asked you. Truth be told, you would’ve been at the top of his list. But he couldn’t bring himself to ask. Sure you two had hung out and were close--for God sake, you dog sat for Calum when he left for tour. He trusted you and adored you beyond belief. But he couldn’t bring himself to taking that any further.

You always talked about the latest person in your string of attempts to date in LA after moving into the town about a year ago. Calum knew he could’ve made a move. Shit, he should’ve made a move. But timing never felt right. And who was Calum to push back against the waves and tides of the universe?

And of course, Calum recounts his woes to Michael.

You will have a partner, reads at the end of the email. You’ll thank me later.

And of course, Michael wasn’t just listening to woes.

When Calum returns walks up to Michael’s house two weeks later, stressed in his pinstriped suit, with a terribly itchy fake mustache, a black bow tie, and upon Michael’s request after Calum told Michael that he had acquired all the pieces to his costumed, Calum slicked back his hair. The gears in Calum’s brain were still trying to decipher what all this put together was, but he wasn’t mad at the attire in the least.

The door barely contains the thumping of music from inside and the second the door opens to Michael’s flushed face and bright smile, Calum is blasted with the rattle of bass. “You look good, dude!” Michael greets, waving Calum inside.

“Thanks. I can follow instructions.” Initially glances over the room don’t show anyone dressed to match Calum. And he tries not to like that thought make his throat quiver and his hands shake. But it does. No doubt Michael has just randomly assigned partner. There’s no way. Calum is looking for you because finding you will answer the question, quell the anxiety that’s spiking.

What had Michael planned?

There’s no sign for a while in the living room, or in the kitchen, or in the backyard. The drink in Calum’s hand sits so long, sloshing at his fingers as he dances and shimmies through crowd to search for this partner that Calum’s sure more of the alcohol’s wound up on the floor than in his bloodstream. He tries to keep his mind pre-occupied, talking to the guys and dancing to the music, though he’s a self proclaimed shit dancer. But his gaze always wonders.

“I’m so sorry!” you shout.

Michael’s waving it off. “Don’t sweat it.” You’re nearly an hour late though the party looks like is just gearing into full swing. “Your partner’s here, so you’re fine. We just got started for real.”

“Where’s-where’s this partner?”

“Last I saw of him, dancing. Outside? But that was ten minutes or so?” Michael shrugs, unsure of how long ago it was. That’s your only lead so you take it. Your heels click against the floor as you march deeper into the house.

Calum’s shaking the drink from his hands, the last of it finally sloshing as he steps into the sea of other dancing bodies. He probably should’ve been paying more attention but it doesn’t matter now. Finally, stepping from from the crowd he spies you, black dress, a slit up the thigh, lips painted red. He curses his heart for fluttering. But god, you look amazing.

Your attention is elsewhere, along the walls, flickering side to side as you stalk closer and closer to the door of the backyard. Calum bounds up the steps after being knocked into again by the outliers of the dancing crowd. You’re not leaving looking. One hand stretched out for the knob without seeing the door open. And ready to press your weight into the door, you stumble. “Whoops!” you laugh catching your balance and not missing the arm that wraps around you.

“Careful.”

“Thanks.” You finally look up and see Calum. Half of the fake mustache is gone and his hair is slicked back. “Looks, uh, like you lost part of yourself there, Cal.” You reach up and peel off the other end of the mustache.

“Oh,” his brows furrow and his gaze casts down as if he could actually see the missing piece. He chuckles, “Sorry.”

“Don’t have to apologize to me.” You slip out of his gaze just a little. “Who’s your partner?” It’s only as the question leaves your lips do yo start to take in his suit, and the bow tie.

“They haven’t--”

“Me,” you answer interrupting the thought.

“What?”

“You’re dressed as Gomez.” You wave over yourself, twirling a little in the black dress. “I’m Morticia.” Your heart races. You’re Calum’s other half. Oh shit. How did Michael know? He sent you an email with specifcs for your costume. But how did Michael know. You hadn’t told him a thing. You weren’t that obvious were you?

“Morticia?” Calum’s still not processing, not the characters at least. And he’s definitely not processing that his guess was right. He knew Michael was up to something. Just not this. Not really making you his partner.

“Addams Family.” You sing a bit of the theme song, in the hopes that it finally clicks for Calum. But he seems floored--gone even. “Hey, uh, is everything alright?”

He nods. “Yeah, yeah. Sorry. It just-just took me a second.”

You nod in return. “You look good though, Gomez.”

Calum chuckles, kicking at the ground just a little. “You-you look really great by the way.” Calum’s quick to cut in, glancing up and reaching for your elbow. “I mean it. Really you look great.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you want a drink? By chance?”

“Uh, yeah, sure.” You follow behind Calum back through the house and into the kitchen. The drink isn’t too heavy of a pour and you hang out in the kitchen a while, laughing as Calum recounts some story that you’re almost sure you’ve heard before but you can’t quite be sure so you just listen as he tells it.

You suggest a dance as you down the the last of your drink. Calum hugs close to his drink, pressing into the counter. “Too shy? Or tuckered out?”

“I’m-I can’t dance. You know that.”

“Oh I’m not asking you to join Dancing With The Stars. Just dance with me please?”

He knows he can’t say no to you. With a nod, he downs the rest of his cup and follows behind you back outside. He doesn’t know how many songs the two of you dance to. It could be three, it could be forty--he doesn’t keep track at all. All he does know is that you laugh at every misstep of his and it sounds like magic in his ears.

There’s a pause or two for drinks here and there. And maybe it’s just the buzzing of his head that finally cuts through the fog and tells him that who gives a fuck if it’s the right time. And you’re laughing, head thrown back just slightly leaning into his chest as you recount the fiasco of trying to find the right dress for this costume. The kitchen is empty, or maybe it’s full and Calum’s only paying attention to you.

“Can I kiss you?” Calum asks, his brows are furrowed and his tongue wets his lips quickly.

Your breath hitches as he hand cups your cheek. “Huh?”

“Can-can I kiss you? And you can totally say no. But-I-please?” The words aren’t coming out right and he’d almost be annoyed with himself but you stretch forward, lips pressing into his and words don’t matter.

You kissing him, like actually kissing him and you can taste booze. But underneath that, what floats into your sense is the smell of his cologne. What buzzes your skin is the fact that he asked. Sure it was in the middle of your story, but you’ve been craving it since you noticed Calum in the fucking suit.

And truth be told even though you had gone on dates and some went places you had always wanted to press your luck with Calum. But he always seemed busy or like his focus was on something different and you didn’t think you actually had a shot. But you still wanted to press.

And now you’re pressed against the edge of counter in the kitchen. Your hands cup his face as a soft moan escapes you that Calum swallows. “There are bedrooms for this. Just not in my house,” Michael laughs, slamming down another 12 pack of coke onto the counter next to them. “Just not in my house.”

The two of you blush, but are slow to pull apart. “I was just waiting for another Coke,” you tease, your red manicured nails popping open a can. You offer a sip to Calum who takes it, smiling too as the stupid antic.

“Refreshing, don’t you think?” Calum asks.

#calum hood #calum hood fluff #calum hood imagine #calum hood fanfic #calum hood fic #calum hood x reader #calum hood x female reader #5sos #5sos fanfic #5sos fic #5sos blurb #5sos fluff #halloween blurb night 2020 #h writes #5 seconds of summer fanfic #5 seconds of summer #5 seconds of summer fic

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revasnaslan · 3 years

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I'll be honest about Annilis, I love him and his sympathetic background AS well as his awful approach to keeping Hec-tor safe, because he's probably in some legitimate danger but he took it too far. I love HP, but I also wanna beat his ass too. Just grab him by the ears and yell, "What are you doing you idiot sandwich?!" I just wanna ask him "Are you even happy? And no getting pegged by a Shade isn't happiness." Don't want him to die though, only because it's a cop-out for actual punishment.1/2

2/2 That's what kinda bummed me on HP in-show, he did so much horrible shit, was an arrogant living "God", and he was just killed? That easy? HP's hubris was grotesque and he deserved a worse punishment than just a lightshow to the face. HP was also a non character in the end and whatever characterization he did have was lost quickly, gonna admit. But, an arrogant jerk dying that quickly is too easy a punishment, he has to suffer the consequences of his actions and experience his loss in detail.

sorry I'm sending you so many asks about HP. But dear God did the show drop the ball on Horde "supposedly endgame villain who was woefully underutilized until the last minute and even then was handed the villain ball to make sure what credibility he did have was lost" Prime. Could have been great, his story was there, but Crew-ra wasted time on frivolous characters(star siblings might have been cool but s5 needed to work on its existing characters, not introduce new ones)and wasted plot points.

I actually have done a ton of analysis on why prime just doesn’t work as a villain for pretty much six months now. Like I started doing this pretty much the day that the finale dropped cause I never liked S5 at all. There’s just much wrong with it, strictly from a narrative prospective than I cannot get over it, which I why I’ve kind of retreated into doing Fuck Canon aus. And I don’t think the major problems plaguing prime is that he’s a bad person or a cult leader or whatever, that would be fine. This is a matter of set up and pay off. This is a matter of narrative structure. Those are my major problems with everything about this.

Anyway, I guess we’ll try a flaccid attempt at positivity, just to make it clear that I am not coming strictly from a point of view of hate… the one thing I remember liking about prime is that creepy dinner scene. Loved that scene, I was so giddy when they dropped it as a teaser clip, and I got to enjoy it in peace for like a day and a half before my love for the show went crumbling. Prime is absolutely on his game in that scene, I can very clearly see his mind working, because my interpretation of the scene is that he’s trying to bait glimmer into giving him information. Did he actually intend to harm adora? Who knows! Does it matter? Not really, considering he got the information he wanted, which was what was needed to work the heart. I can feel the tension in that scene, that is how he should have been for the rest of the season.

So what the fuck happened? *cracks knuckles* well let’s see shall we.

Foreshadowing It’s Fun Cause It’s A Thing I’ve Heard Of

So I think we all remember just how shocking it was when prime actually showed up, and he wasn’t anything like we’d all come to assume he’d be based on what had been said about him up until that point. What we had been fed was essentially that he was cold, calculating, and didn’t look upon “defects” well. He saw the clones as disposable. And they set up that aspect of his character just fine, and I don’t have a problem with how that was set up.

What they utterly failed to properly set up (and even contradicted themselves on) was the cult thing, and how prime is essentially this messiah figure to the clones. I highly suspect this occurred because they were writing the show as they went along, and hadn’t fully fleshed out prime’s whole deal until he actually appeared at the end of S4, but that’s just my own speculation given some of the things that had been said in interviews regarding other aspects of the writing (namely that micah was apparently not supposed to be alive in the first place and that happened because of a miscommunication between noelle and one of the other writers).

Regardless, there are a number of things that should probably have been done differently in order to properly foreshadow prime’s cult leader status, that actually would have heightened hordak’s characterization as well. For one thing, there’s a reason we all assumed that the galactic horde was merely a military program and it’s because of how hordak acts throughout the first four seasons. We can talk in circles about headcanons until we’re blue in the face (i.e., he might have memory problems), but the fact of the matter is that those are headcanons and that hordak’s entire narrative changes from one of an ableist family to one of a religious trauma seemingly on a dime come the very end of S4 when prime shows up.

imagine how satisfying the foreshadowing would have been if hordak had actually been spouting dogma the entire show (i.e., “cast out the shadows” and “all beings must suffer to become pure”) only for it peter off once he’s befriended entrapta, if he had been calling those who he respected brother/sister instead of force captains (which is a far more militarized word to use, and judging by the galactic horde isn’t even a term they use), if he had still been dressed in his uniform and only actually started dressing differently after entrapta had helped him? Hell, he never even so much as implies that entrapta is leading him astray before he’s back with prime, he doesn’t even seem particularly distressed about being around her most of the time, and the only reason he even gets persnickety with her is because of his medical condition.

One point I’m going to expand on for a moment is the whole “brother” thing, because that is actually a very good way of explaining what I mean. Now, hordak doesn’t actually mention any other clones at all from what I remember. This is contrary to all of the clones in S5 referring to each other as “brother” pretty openly and it being seen as a term of respect. However, the only person that hordak actually calls “brother” up until S5 is prime, and this inadvertently ended up making the word seem far more neutral than it should have been considering the context of S5. The word “brother” is actually a control tool, and if they had wanted to establish that sooner, hordak should have been calling anybody he respected that.

So, either the writers hadn’t actually thought of that part of the narrative yet, or they’re just that bad at foreshadowing.

There are also three instances of the narrative contradicting itself with regards to prime, one in S3, one in S4, and one in S5. The first is that hordak wanted to make a new body for himself. While one could argue that this was meant to be foreshadowing that prime takes new bodies whenever his old one failed (which is fine, that works as foreshadowing), the act of hordak admitting that he was intending to do that is what actually creates the snag. With the context of S5, we learn that becoming a vessel is meant to be a place of honor, but this comes with the caveat that it seems like only prime is allowed to take new bodies. So why the ever living fuck would someone as “pious” and “unworthy” as hordak think that was something he could ever be allowed to do, much less that prime would welcome him back with open arms if he did it. But there’s zero hesitation on hordak’s part, he doesn’t even mention that this is something usually only reserved for prime.

The second is that prime literally looked at the heart of etheria and said it was “unlike anything [he had] ever seen” despite canonically fighting the first ones, so he’d presumably have recognized the energy signature that first one’s tech gives off and be like Oh Shit. This one in particular drives me absolutely nuts because if I was writing a villain who had lived long enough to fight the people this mystical weapon was created by I would never write them saying that what the actual fuck. My gripe here is not that prime is ancient, that’s fine, I could’ve vibed with that. But the fact that he not only fought the first ones but also recognized mara is really egregious in a way that borders on parody for me. Like what a flimsy excuse for him to be connected to adora (and we’ll get to that!)

The third and final one is that hordak was allegedly thrown out for his defects. That’s what we were told, that’s what a major facet of hordak’s trauma is centered around. However, at the same times, prime seems like… oddly fixated on hordak in a way that usually implies something deeper is going on here. That was why I was so convinced that hordak wasn’t remembering something clearly, because why would prime spare him instead of killing him immediately after returning if he was defective enough to warrant being thrown out? Come S5, prime seems to have forgotten about the pesky little plot detail that is hordak’s defects, since they never come up again! Nope! Hordak is not only completely healed of his ailments (which Can I Get A Yikes?) but he’s also been welcomed back to his original position as prime’s right hand by the mid-point of the season, and he stays there until the finale unless the plot demands he be elsewhere to interact with entrapta cause hordak was added in post. You can’t even argue that he was keeping hordak alive because eThErIaN kNoWlEdGe because he has those fucking mind chips. Literally every single person he’s chipped is connected to the hivemind because of that. He’d have every single bit of knowledge that he could possibly want right there at his fingertips. He doesn’t need hordak alive at all.

Which brings us to…

It’s Almost Like He Wasn’t A Villain To The Proper People

The thing about villains is that, in order for them to not feel out of place, in order for their defeat to actually give a true feeling of satisfaction, you kind of have to put them up against the right people. The reason that prime ultimately fails in this respect is that he is not adora and catra’s villain, despite the narrative pushing him as that…

I actually once joked on twitter that if the rise of skywalker had come out when S5 was being written, then prime would have likely ended up being revealed as adora’s long lost grandfather in some attempt to make his fixation on her seem warranted. That’s the level we’re at in terms of how connected the two of them appear to be for the villain and hero thing. They just are not connected, and prime has absolutely no reason to be this fixated on her. They tried to explain it with she ra and prime being old enemies, but that’s equally as confusing because a) mara hadn’t mentioned him up until that point, b) this inclusion actually makes the first ones creating a superweapon look justified since prime is such a huge threat, and c) she ra is explicitly stated to have been on etheria long before the first ones even colonized it, so why the fuck is she just gallivanting around the cosmos fighting cult leaders?

And to be clear, if this whole prime versus she ra had actually been hinted at, I would not be taking so much issue with this. But as there was absolutely zero mention of him, it just comes off as egregious and very, very sloppy on their parts.

Prime also should not be as fixated on catra as he is, that doesn’t make sense at all. I know why this happened in particular, though, and it’s because the writing team was so in love with her that they just had to give her this arc. That just makes its inclusion all the worse to be honest. Why does he go to such great lengths to use catra to torture adora, why does he go into a total breakdown after catra escapes? He isn’t connected to either of them…

… because he is hordak and entrapta’s villain.

that prime didn’t immediately want entrapta dead continues to confuse me to this day, nearly seven months after the fact. Like you mean to tell me that this cult leader, who is presumably used to complete obedience from his followers, finds one of the wayward members of his proverbial flock lost on some backwater, who didn’t want to be found, and he knows exactly who is responsible for sewing those seeds of discord in this poor lamb’s head. And he doesn’t immediately want entrapta dead?

Not only does prime never mention her, despite it being very easy to push a plotline about how it’s necessary because she’s perceived as a danger to the rest, and especially to the poor lost soul who was ultimately returned to him. Instead, prime just doesn’t seem to realize entrapta exists. He doesn’t know who she is despite literally reading hordak’s mind. He doesn’t even seem to interpret her as threat considering he wasn’t worried about putting her and hordak right next to each other in the finale. He should have been using hordak to torture entrapta, and he should have had his break because hordak escaped him. That whole scene where catra is under mind control and adora was trying to snap her out of it was textbook entrapdak. Hordak should have been the one to delve into the hivemind to help adora. It was his story and it was taken from him when he was sacrificed on catra’s narrative arc altar.

And this is ultimately completely fixable. Because they had a villain they could have been using for adora and catra the whole time. Shadow Weaver. Y’know, their mutual abuser who was the main cause of strife between the two of them, and the person who kind of set the plot in motion since she’s the reason catra is the way that she is?

He Blew It. Super Hard. Complete Buffoonery.

Ultimately one of the biggest writing fumbles with prime is that he is just really fucking dumb as the plot demands, and it doesn’t make any kind of narrative sense for him to be that way, it is literally just him being at the mercy of the writers who need him to do something stupid so they can push the plot forward since they made him too overpowered for it to happen any other way.

There’s numerous instances of this across the season, including him bringing entrapta aboard the velvet glove when the very person he would have had very good reason to not let her near is standing right there, and him deciding to give catra pretty much free reign of the velvet glove and seeming to decide to trust her despite him knowing damn well that she’s likely to betray him the second he does something she doesn’t like, and the time he literally left adora to be beaten by catra instead of just killing her outright when she couldn’t even activate she ra. And in all these cases he had the fucking nerve to seem surprised when it happened?

However, there is one plot point that I feel illustrates how goddamn stupid he is to move the plot forward, and it’s the mind chips.

I mean one of the reasons I dislike it is going back to how little foreshadowing the writers actually seem capable of committing to. There is nothing to indicate in the narrative that prime actually employs mind control on anybody besides the clones, and this becomes especially egregious when we later meet the star siblings, and we find out that there are large swathes of the universe that are seemingly not chipped? It just screams like they needed some type of angst plot point for catra, so they had to find a way to make it work.

But the very inclusion of the mind chips as a plot point makes prime look so ridiculously dumb, because we are told those chips connect people to the hivemind, we are explicitly shown this for catra angst. So a) why does he need hordak around at all, because the excuse he needs to know about etheria doesn’t work since he literally chips like half of the etherian population later on anyway, b) if he needed information on the heart of etheria, why didn’t he just chip glimmer outright, it would have saved him a lot of time and hassle, and c) if he knew damn well that catra had betrayed hordak numerous times and was likely to do the same to him, why didn’t he just immediately chip her so he could mitigate two problems. If he had chipped catra immediately, he wouldn’t have lost glimmer, and it would have been next to impossible for adora and bow to storm the velvet glove through the means that they did.

When your main villain is that fucking stupid, the tension is completely sapped out of your narrative, and prime doesn’t have enough character unto himself to continue holding up his own arc. He is a sexy lamp cardboard cutout that just happens to be brought onto the scene when they were in need of someone to throw the idiot ball at. Prime is supposed to be this thousand year old body hopper who has the wisdom of the ages, and yet he was defeat by a group of teenagers driving a clown card held together by nothing but duct tape and prayers.

Anyway!

Guess Who Just Got Murdered!

Anon, I completely agree that the way prime got taken out was just… hm. Well, it was a choice, given how they had written the rest of the season.

I’ve said this before, but I really wish I could actually enjoy hordak yeeting him, but I just don’t feel anything. That scene is a culmination of an arc that never happened because hordak was barely on screen for S5. It feels like we’re missing this whole season-long arc about how hordak managed to break free of prime and was actively working against him, and that scene is the lowest point, right before the greater scope villain is ultimately defeated by the protagonist. Which just furthers my point that prime is really hordak’s villain, because hordak reads more like a protagonist than I think the writers actually intended for him to.

Since you mentioned anillis, I feel the need to comment on him as well, because I do know exactly what happens to him at the end of my au, because I actually planned for his ending from the beginning and built his arc towards that point. The very bare bones spoilers is that he isn’t going to die, because a) he needs to live with the consequences of his actions and b) him dying would affect hec-tor horribly, especially since if anybody had to deal the killing blow it would be hec-tor. And hec-tor doesn’t deserve to be forced to do that. He wants freedom, he doesn’t want his brother dead by his own hand.

So, I completely agree that just killing prime off feels a little… like a cop out? I’m not going to get into a discussion of how he was defeated by the power of (romantic) love because my issue there is not with the trope itself, but ultimately how it was handled, and that also has to do more with my grievances with how catradora was ultimately handled than my grievances with prime. However, him being like… exorcised…

Well it sure does clean up some loose ends that we don’t want to discuss huh?

#rev's rambling again #i ain't putting this in any tags #i really don't want to get into fights with people about this #but anyway here's 3000 words on why prime sucks from a narrative perspective #i've been bottling up these feelings for seven months #i deserve the chance to go feral #as a treat #Anonymous

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arewelonely · 3 years

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hogwarts sixth year, slow dramione (I’ll create a title eventually I assume) (edit: the title is wait for me)

cw: brief mention of vomit

part two

––

It wasn’t like Granger to ignore him. She was always there, really, auburn eyes too dark and knowing for him, perfume or shampoo wafting in the air after she left class first, voice murmuring to her friends and blending in with the chatter as they all emptied out into the hall. So it was essentially impossible to forget about her, and he was always aware that she noticed him–just the little twitch of her shoulders when he spoke up in class, or when their eyes would meet across the Great Hall, before he tore his own away and forced some deep laugh out of his chest.

But it wasn’t like Draco to care this much, he knew this as well. Days used to feel full and crisp with Quidditch and homework and quick glances that could sort out a friend drama with ease (Crabbe needed to step back, Blaise needed his head screwed on right). His pillow at nighttimes would welcome him and his eyes would shut and he was a student here at Hogwarts just as his parents were and he looked forward to some debauchery planned for the upcoming weekend.

He fell asleep now with his wand in his hand. He would stumble back from the library, the faintest lumos lighting his way back to the common room, staring at the portraits on the walls and wishing he could become one of them. He would shut the curtains of his bed and cast a muffliato in case his breath betrayed him and then he’d clutch his wand and stare into the blackness of the night, waiting for sleep. Or he’d wait for something to crawl out of the darkness. Some fucker coming to set him right just like they had his father.

Each night, he went back to bed later and later. It just wasn’t worth it, laying awake in the darkness. It was much better to sit in this chair that he had claimed as his own, in the corner of the library where nobody ever came. He had his books spread out around him, building a moat where he was the castle.

Draco liked when the library got more empty. There was a specific type of silence that was only present in Hogwarts–fires crackling, students’ chatter ever so faint trickling through the hallways. The books putting themselves back on the shelves.

Draco could concentrate less on his Disillusionment Charms when the library was empty, as well. He could write more freely, feel less guilty about what would happen when he reached the end of this… plot. Mission? Assassination.

Fuck.

His grip on his quill tightened. The ink dripped on the parchment and his toes curled. Fuck.

Draco threw the quill down to the table before he broke it, again, and pushed back the chair so it screeched on the wood floor. His ears flared. Yes, good. Something wrong. Something physically wrong other than the curling serpent on his skin and in his dreams.

He breathed out sharply through his nose and clenched his hands around the arms of the chair, feet flexing and head tilting back.

“Hello?”

He jerked forward and grabbed for his wand, recasting the Disillusionment Charm and pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Who’s there?”

It was so quiet in the library that the voice echoed. Draco smothered a sigh.

He did not need this. He needed that cloak his father claimed Potter had, the invisibility one… or was it Voldemort who had mentioned this? It made his stomach turn that he couldn’t remember with whom he had had this conversation. He wished he could vomit to get these worries on the outside of him.

He rolled his eyes so hard they hurt and shook his head to set himself straight. A hand through the hair. Parchment in his bag, hushed spell to return the books to their places. Slowly, silently, getting to his feet.

The voice had sounded familiar, female, steady despite the darkness in the library. Draco had really thought he was the only one here.

He peered around the bookcase that had boxed him into the corner and saw nothing except the rug stretching in front of him and rows upon rows of shelves. He began to inch forward, wondering what was the point of this delicate toe-ball-heel march, but it beat sitting there and beating himself up and it beat going back to his bed and rolling around there.

Oh, Merlin. Draco leaned against the bookcase nearest, praying the dark still covered him. Granger’s curls were lit with the faint flickering from the warm orange fires, her eyes darting in and out of the bookcases. She held her wand in front of her, frowning, standing in front of a desk identical to Draco’s except for its more central location in the library.

Her pile of books rivaled his, of course they did. Draco squinted, but he couldn’t see the titles, just the rolls of parchment with her scrawl all across… arrows connecting ideas and a few things circled with intense marks where Granger had felt particularly strongly. Homework, or something else. Something else, if he knew the Terrible Trio at all.

The stomach twist was back. It was time to go, wouldn’t do very well for Granger to find him because of the sound he would make if he couldn’t hold back his vomit anymore. He briefly considered startling Granger, giving her a small Stun on her heel, perhaps, just to fuck up her night, but Granger had returned to curling up in one of the chairs at the desk. Her chin rested on one of her knees and her arm was wrapped around it, fingers twiddling with the quill. Ah, that’s why she always had ink on her fingertips…

Okay, yes, time to go.

He backed up slowly and walked, toe-to-heel, until he was out of the library.

---

Nott’s elbow nudged into his side, right under his ribs. “Hey, look, someone’s wide awake this morning.”

Draco dropped his spoon into the cereal, gasping as the milk gently splattered. “Fuck, Nott, piss off.”

Theo chuckled and raised his eyebrows. “Nah, look. She’s all hot and bothered for you.”

Draco rubbed his side and groaned, pushing the pain away and following Nott’s chin jut. And there, just a few seats down and opposite from where Draco sat in the Great Hall, was Pansy, smirking when he met her eyes and sliding him a wink before she turned away, earrings twinkling as her hair swished on her back.

He appreciated that about Pansy; she was self-assured enough to not need a response when she flirted. It was enough for her that he saw it, and now that Nott had jolted him awake on this fine morning, Draco could dab the milk off his robes, lower his shoulders, and return to letting his eyes sit at half-mast.

“You gonna ask her?”

He sighed, lowering the napkin. Or, he could converse with his classmates. He allowed himself to reach forward and grab his tea, letting the heat warm his throat, before turning to Crabbe.

“You gonna ask?” Crabbe repeated.

“What?”

Goyle leaned around Crabbe, “Slughorn’s thing.”

Draco raised an eyebrow.

“Slughorn’s party. The Slug Club.”

He snorted. “The Slug Club?”

“Yeah, we got our invitations last night,” Goyle said. “Food, drink, general kiss-assery. Thought you were there when we discussed.”

“Nah, must have been studying,” Draco gulped down the tea. His eyes met Pansy’s again and she quirked up the side of her mouth. He turned back to the boys. “We bring dates to this thing?”

Goyle raised a brow. “I mean, when they present themselves so readily to you…”

Draco let out a chuckle. “Yeah, fair point.” He glanced over to the other tables, smatterings of students clustered, either chatting, reading, or slowly lifting their heads off the table to get some food in the last few minutes before class. “Who’s going to this?”

Crabbe took a bite of his eggs. “All the elites.”

Their eyes met, and Crabbe rolled his. “Us,” he gestured to the table, “and, you know…”

“Potter.”

“Yeah.”

Draco settled his jaw and leaned back in the chair, his space almost instantly invaded by Theo’s elbow on his shoulder. He fought against a flinch and knit his brows together.

“Yes, Nott?”

“Well,” Theo drawled, “I was waiting, but it seems our dear friend Vincent Crabbe left out an important détail.”

Draco snorted when Theo pronounced the word in French. Crabbe slid a glance to Goyle, and the two suddenly seemed antsy.

“The elites now have a crucial caveat to them, eh?”

Crabbe gave a half-hearted shrug. Draco frowned.

“You and I are not invited!” Nott grinned and gave Draco a punch on the shoulder.

Draco hissed again, “oi, geroff me today–�� and Theo leaned back in his chair, satisfied with the conversation safely in his control. He continued on with his announcement. “Our fathers are a bit too famous.”

A chill slid up the back of Draco’s neck as the banter halted–yes, his father was too famous. Yes, his house hosted too many well-known people at the moment, yes. This barred him from important events, his father would–

Crabbe lowered his tea to the saucer with a shaky clatter. Goyle cleared his throat. “My father mentioned that this would be a good event to demonstrate our unity.”

The chill had reached Draco’s ears now, and it creeped under his jaw. The words spat themselves out of his mouth–“how can it be unity if we are not all there?”

“Well, Crabbe and I can try–”

Draco pinched the bridge of his nose and the chill blocked off all sound. In the past, his father would have cared about this event. But now, the priority was his assignment, right? Draco had a feeling Lucius could have somehow managed both, a thoroughly consequential assignment and still the utmost proper presence at Hogwarts, but, well, Draco received this assignment all because Lucius had not managed everything, or in fact anything, and his throat tensed as his eyesight blurred back into focus.

Goyle bit into a muffin and chewed with his mouth open, eyes lazily hopping from girl to girl at the Slytherin table. “Hey, Zabini, has anyone asked Daphne yet?”

Blaise leaned over from where he had been chatting with the girls and shook his head. “Ask her yourself, bruv. Take a shot.” He lifted his eyes to meet Draco’s and jerked his head towards the door.

Oh, Merlin. Draco’s eyes narrowed in response. But there remained only a few minutes until the first class and he could use an escape of the boys’ endless chatter, so he gave a sharp nod and shuffled his books under his arms as he retreated from the table.

“Oi, Draco, off to class already?”

“No, Crabbe, just need a piss.”

Crabbe nodded solemnly and Draco rolled his eyes and turned back to the doorway and–

And he wondered, not for the first time, if eye contact had a magical element to it. There always seemed to be something deeper, when you looked into another person’s eyes. With his father, of course, there was the deep gut-wrenching sense of family that always accompanied the gaze–there Aunt Bella goes again, would you like a game of chess after dinner? or Draco, this is important, read your books now before bed. Draco found himself avoiding eye contact with his mother in more recent months–her blue eyes seemed to change with the company present, and he couldn’t bear to see yet again how translucent they became in Voldemort’s presence.

Because Voldemort’s eye contact, it was always accompanied by Legilimency. And the Legilimency came often, and fiercely. Draco truly couldn’t understand it, how Voldemort had so much energy for this skill. He knew Bellatrix used it sparingly–he had been on the receiving end of her skill himself a few times when younger, running around the house with his friends, perhaps tumbling over a family heirloom or two, and always knew to make mischief when the hours got late, for she would be more tired and her probing would simply grip him less intensely.

There were others, though, whose eye contact always pulled Draco in by the gut. Not the acute dissection of Legilimency, but something almost magnetic, where Draco wasn’t even aware he was looking at another person until it had already happened and he had torn his eyes away. Accidental eye contacts during long Pureblood dinners with Nott, where the two of them had overheard something ridiculous and were fighting to keep the chuckles inside, or glimpses of Blaise’s face when the Slytherin common room grew too obnoxiously rowdy and they both knew the time had arrived to retreat to the corner, cast a Quietening Charm, and play several rounds of Wizard’s Chess.

The Hall was crowded, which made this particular eye contact even more unlikely. Draco was truly just following Blaise, eyes lifting to the ceiling to try and let the candles burn some light into them–he was too accustomed to the night, and his eyes felt dry around the edges.

They felt dry all over, in fact, and he was just returning his gaze to the Hall’s exit, which was why Draco was surprised they focused so quickly, but how could they not, when Granger’s dark eyes were suddenly there, across the room, and they pierced into the back of his skull.

He felt her gaze in his throat and clenched his books tighter.

Jerked his chin up and flared his nostrils, exhaling sharply. Sneered out of the corner of his mouth.

He didn’t wait for her to turn back to her breakfast, which was just as well because Blaise’s eyes required quite a bit more thought at the moment. They filled with concern. Draco swallowed and blinked as the annoyance bubbled up.

“Just wanted to check in.” Blaise spoke lowly but his voice still echoed around the old school hallways.

Draco shifted his stance and intensified his snarl. Every single one of the boys this morning. “About what, Zabini?”

Blaise raised his eyebrows. “I know our situations are different–”

“Yes, Blaise, they are.” Draco scoffed. What did Blaise expect him to say? “You were–where were you this summer? Paris? Vienna?”

Blaise broke their eye contact. “Moscow.”

He actually let out a full laugh at that one and settled his shoulders when Blaise stepped back. “Alright, lad, Moscow. You visited Moscow, and I…” Draco raised his eyebrows and fixed Blaise with a look. Zabini was not stupid enough to expect him to blurt it all out in the halls, was he? Draco huffed out of his chest again and continued on. “I hope you had a grand visit, now, eh? And–” the words required effort to speak but they were necessary, weren’t they? “–do enjoy your time at the Slug Club. I must attend to more important matters, now.”

He wanted to drop all his books to the ground and duel Blaise right here. The bastard, thinking he could butt in and… and what, empathize with Draco?

A vein in his neck throbbed as he controlled his walk away from Blaise. An explosive situation would not help right now. Draco pushed down the frustration that had taken over the chill. He listened to the sound of his steps clipping in the hallway. Lucius wouldn’t create an explosion. Cool, chilled interactions. Draco twitched his mouth and headed to his first class. Yes, he could do that.

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makeyourownmyth · 3 years

Text

best seen in 2020.

My usual caveats from previous years are still applicable here: I don’t watch most of the major nominations the years they come out, and I’m usually not much for theaters and/or current TV. However, due to the pandemic, we watched a loooooooot of content. Here’s just a list of movies that I watched or rewatched this year, that were neither terrible, nor great, but I want to make note of:

Toy Story 4, The Brothers Bloom, Happiest Season, The Peanut Butter Falcon, Moana, Mr. Right, Moulin Rouge, Ocean’s Eleven, Spring Breakers, X-Men: Dark Phoenix (this might have been the worst movie I watched this year?), Widows, Gattaca, Black Klansman, Primer, It 2, Shazam (this maybe should have gone on the Honorable Mentions - it was fun), Training Day, Parasite (OK, now I have to update my Honorable Mentions), The Green Book, Strange Days, Elf, Love & Basketball, Above the Rim, Coach Carter.

That being said, there was some bad stuff, and I try not to shit on any artist’s creations too much, because I know no one sets out to make something bad, but these didn’t work for me.

Anti

Uncut Gems - It’s not that it was BAD, it was just too stressful for me to enjoy.

Brick - It wasn’t even close to enjoyable on a rewatch that I encouraged my partner to take on for the first time. I felt bad.

Hereditary - Neither a scary movie, nor a good movie.

The Witch - Same, but maybe better made?

Under The Skin - Jesus, this was terrible. Maybe I’m not artsy enough to get it?

Now, however, let’s get to the good stuff.

Honorable Mention TV

Avatar - I can’t legitimately put it on the Best Of list, because I’m not done yet, but I’m on Book 3, after finally actually getting started. I think I tried to start this in 2016, and i know all my nerd friends have been yelling at me for a long time because I haven’t gotten to it yet, and as someone who’s almost done, I can say: they were right! It’s great.

Ozark - S1 was great. It fell off a fucking CLIFF after that. Ignore people who tell you that you HAVE to watch this. They’re wrong. It’s fine.

The Last Dance - I know the world is obsessed with Michael Jordan, and I’m glad it came out when it did, but really, all it did for me was confirm that he’s an asshole who was very fortunate to play when he did. And also that the Bulls were fucking phenomenal.

His Dark Materials - Neither as bad as some of my friends think, nor nearly as good as the books (obviously) but also not good enough that I’ve even started S2 yet, so....I guess it’s fine?

The Mandalorian S2 - I think they know what they’re doing, and it’s super enjoyable, and I loved the ending, but I’m also curious as to where they’re going now.

Fargo S3 - Given how good the rest of the series is (other than my distaste for S2, dealt with below, and out of step with pop culture) I thought this one was a misstep,

Orphan Black - I cannot believe how late I was to this, and how good it still was. It really fell apart toward the end, but the acting was incredible, and the fact that they got to tell the story they wanted to was amazing.

Best TV

7. All the Smoke with Kobe (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R3KIyEgCgc) - Maybe it was just his death, but it hits hard, and I miss him. Does this even count as TV?

6. Looking for Alaska - It felt like gratuitous masochism to watch this and enjoy it, being 20 years older than when I fell for it, and feeling ashamed of the young person I was, but even knowing what was coming, I was weeping when it happened. Even knowing that they were ultimately going on a fruitless search and yelling at the TV while the Colonel and Pudge were searching for “signs” and hating them for it, I remember feeling like everything HAD to happen for a reason when I was this young... So yeah. It’s pure nostalgia for me. I’d be super interesting in hearing how kids responded to it.

5. Locke and Key - I get that some people feel like they don’t need old shit in a new medium, but for me, I’m always up to try it out. If it’s fun, I’ll stick with it. And this is. It’s fun, it’s got some of the old shit, it’s got some new shit, and it’s a treat to see my favorite comic of the last decade in a new medium. Haters need a new bit.

Fargo s1 and s4 (I didn’t love S3) - I know that I’m in the minority here, but I think 1 and 4 are the best and 2 was good, and 3 was fine. I literally watched all of this show this year, though, so I didn’t have the same time to digest as others. But I think that’s a benefit in some regards?

4. Magicians s5 - One of the saddest conversations of the last year to two was when a nerd friend of mine said he didn’t like The Magicians because all of the characters were whiny and self-indulgent. For me, that was almost literally the point: they shoved Q into the corner and told the story of the others (at least one episode quite self-referentially so) and it was so much better for that. I wish it hadn’t ended, but I’m glad they left it where they did, because it was so good.

3. Devs esp. The beginning of e5 - Jesus. The show of the year? Except for the fact that Watchmen came out at the tail end of last year, and I didn’t have it on my 2019 list? I mean, honestly, is there a show more tailored to me? I’m not gonna get into any spoilers, but it’s a quick watch, and it’s fucking fantastic. Watch it, have your mind blown by the concept, especially in the beginning sequence of E5, and then stick around for the subpar ending where basically all of the threads are resolved in the least good way.

2. Watchmen - This deserves multiple re-watches and all the praise that people heaped upon it.

1. The Good Place - I know, objectively, that Watchmen was a better show than The Good Place. But this is my list, and I’ll be damned if anything overtakes my favorite sitcom (maybe of all time?) for best of the year. I know it barely just ended this year, and there’s plenty of acclaim to go around for this show, but honestly, every time I talk to anyone about it, it feels like they kind of laugh it off. This show is not only worth your time, but should almost be considered must-watch material. If more people watched this show, we wouldn’t need the insult “sophomoric” to describe people who’ve just had their minds blown by Philosophy 101, and we’d be better off as a species.

Honorable Mention Movies

In this order, and you can take the comedies and make them the only honorable mentions, if you’d like to make a nice, even top 10. (Until I saw Tenet the night before I posted this.( (And then I looked back at the playing cards that we use to randomly choose movies and I found that I needed to modify the Honorable Mentions and the Best Of lists.)

21 and 22 Jump Street - In general, I’m not a fan of comedies. So I’m happy I watched these, thanks to Nathan Zed, and they’re funny. Good work guys.

Palm Springs - Apparently there’s now backlash against Groundhog Day? I dunno, man, it was fun, and all the actors seemed like they were having a good time, and I was down for it.

Parasite - I can’t add anything to this that hasn’t already been shouted from the rooftops, so let me just briefly say that I thought it was great, but it didn’t quite make the list of best. The combo of genres was great, the cast was fantastic, but what I loved the most about it was how quiet it was.

Best Movies

10. Blinded by the Light - Way more resonant than I thought it’d be from the previews, and I already thought it was gonna be stellar. I didn’t take into account TIME along with place, and that made a hell of a difference for this movie.

9. Shoplifters - Yeesh. What a tough watch, but so good, and so necessary. For me, I think we watched it back to back to back with Parasite and I, Tonya, and this one just stood out so much more. The storyline was softer all the way through, but really had gravitas simultaneously.

8. Tenet - It was fucking fun! I don’t get the hate! I liked it, I’ll like it more next time I see it, and I wish I’d seen it on the big screen, but I’m super glad I could see it on my TV!

7. I, Tonya - Geez, what a powerhouse of acting. Not only did they get me to feel good about the villain of my childhood, they got me to feel good about Margot Robbie, who I’d only thought of as a hot lady before. Superb acting from everyone else, too, and what a great pick up to be like, yeah, this is the story we’re gonna tell.

6. I Am Not Your Negro - I avoided watching it for so long because I was already depressed this year, and I didn’t think I needed any more of that, but it turns out I did, and I always do, from Baldwin. He’s a master for a reason.

5. Hamilton - I know there was some backlash with the time difference, and I’m sure it was better to see it pre-2016 in the theater, where it’s meant to be seen, but I’m not a billionaire New Yorker, and I was plenty happy to see it when and where I could.

4. Won’t You Be My Neighbor - I mean...what do you think? It’s so much exactly what you’re thinking it is, but then it’s even better, because it’s the real deal, and he was so good, and it’s so pure. Watch it.

3. Her Smell - Elizabeth Moss has already gotten all the acclaim, but to play this different of a role, in a movie that felt as stressful as Uncut Gems, but pulled off an actual plot so much more successfully? I can’t believe this one didn’t get more pub, but then again, yes I can: it’s a movie about a girl band that rages against the machine, and she’s got severe issues. Small surprise that the people didn’t react well. Seek this one out!

2. Arrival - Yes, I am going to totally cheat and put a movie that’s appeared on my list (sooooo long ago) as the #2 entry this year. You know why? Cuz fuck 2020, and this is a great movie, and it’s the movie that made me feel second best this year. It’s incredible, and I know people appreciated it in its time, but I feel like they should appreciate it even more.

1. Moonlight - It’s not a shock, nor am I trying to appease anyone with anything. It’s just that I finally watched it, and it’s the best movie I saw this year. I don’t think I could possibly add anything to the authentic critics who have already heaped praise upon it, but I do have to say that it’s all due, and so much more. The acting obviously stands out, but the direction, from the color palettes, to the choice of when and where (and how) to break it up, are all masterful choices.

#moonlight #2020 #eoy #best of lists #movies and tv #arrival #her smell #the good place #watchmen #devs

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intothestarkerverse · 5 years

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hi, so I would like to request a starker prompt where its about the mummy au! where peter is eve, tony is rick, scott is jonathan (why not) the mummy is thanos, anu-san-mun is death. I just love the mummy and the avengers.

Summary: So I have chosen to go for the trifecta here! What follows is a Mummy AU for my lovely Nonnie...a Non Powered AU for @starkerweek, and a Protective!Tony Bingo Square fill for @starkerbingo .

Non Powered AU - Starker Week (Day Two)

Protective!Tony - Starker Bingo

The only downside to all of this was that he wasn’t going to get to see Howard’s face when he heard the news.

Well…actually, there were multiple downsides to this, like dying and the rat that was trying to chew through what remained of his shoe leather…but really, it was the whole Howard thing he was most concerned with at the moment. He’d been livid when Tony turned his back on the family fortune and his bright future to join the French Foreign Legion. Tony’d lied when he said he was out for adventure. Oh no, primarily, he was out to piss off Howard and possibly stumble into enough treasure to be able to return home wealthier than his old man…because honestly, that would feel good.

Being hanged in an Egyptian prison wasn’t actually one of the ways he thought this was going to end, but in retrospect, he probably should have realized it was a distinct possibility given his life choices.

Tony rested his forehead on his knees and tried to ignore the sweltering heat, the bugs skittering over his hands on the ground, the loud arguments erupting around the prison beyond his cell door, all of them in loudly spoken Arabic that he could only barely comprehend. His head was splitting. It was a shame the prison guards weren’t more sympathetic to a man’s hangover. He needed water. Or better yet, a little hair of the dog. The likelihood of him getting either one was…well, it was slim to say the least.

The sound of footsteps stopping at his cell door surprised him. Was it time to die already? He hadn’t even fully finished imagining Howard’s reaction to the news! “Hey, boys, I guess it’s true what they say about time flying…” His words were interrupted as he was forced to his feet and dragged out of his cell. Not towards the gallows, though. Towards the visiting cells? Who was visiting him?

God, had Howard found him? Was he about to be rescued by his bastard of a father and taken home to New York, because if he was…he’d rather hang, to be frank.

He was cast without ceremony onto a patch of ground surrounded by iron bars. Pulling himself up with a grimace, his gaze settled on two figures that did not appear to belong at an Egyptian prison. Men. English men if he could hazard a guess based on their wardrobe and the rather stuffy way in which they carried themselves. English men always had posture like someone had rammed a rod up their ass.

Speaking of ramming something up someone’s ass…

The little one was pretty damn cute. Soft chestnut curls just visible beneath his sun hat, tiny wire rimmed glasses perched on a pert little nose, plump pink lips that he kept wetting with the tip of his tongue as he stared, wide eyed at Tony through the bars. He was pretty. Prettier than the girls back home in New York. Prettier even than the woman he’d taken to bed the night before…the one who had him facing his death in what was likely a very short time. Hell, if he’d met this pretty little thing last night instead of the thieving piece of shit accompanying him, Tony would have probably given him the trinket and still be back at his room in the boarding house taking the boy apart instead of swinging from the end of a rope. The boy seemed to shake himself out of his stupor and stepped forward with a nervous smile. “Oh, hello, pardon me, I don’t mean to be rude. You just…you are not what I was expecting at all.”

The little one had a soft tone and a proper English accent that made Tony want to live long enough to hear that gentile voice reduced to a rasping, cursing wail of pure desire…

“Is it true that you know the way to Hamunaptra?”

Wait. What? “Hamun…I should have known.” He was never lucky enough to have a piece of ass that fine thrown his way without some kind of caveat. “Yeah, baby, I can take you to the City of the Dead. But I might beat you there since I’m about to be hanged…you get me out of here, I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”

Hopefully down on him was going to be at least one stop before their final destination.

The boy looked alarmed, turning to cast a look at the man who had accompanied him, hopefully not a lover…though given the look of the guy, he’d be no competition for Tony anyway. “Well, I…I don’t know. That does seem to be quite a predicament…”

Tony laughed, “Yeah, you could say that. But I promise you’ll like me better alive than dead, sweetheart.” Reaching through the bars he grabbed a handful of that starched white shirt and tugged the boy closer until he could just reach his lips through the bars. He was a little up tight, but he was English. Tony had been anticipating that. He tasted like honey and lemon and after a moment’s hesitation seemed to relax into the kiss, letting Tony tease his lips apart with his tongue and delve deep into the moist recesses before he pulled away with a growl.

Flushed pink, lips swollen, the boy straightened his cravat and cleared his throat. “I…um…I’ll see what I can do, shall I?”

“Ugh, to think I ever found that scoundrel attractive!” Peter grimaced at his own reflection, dropping the fingers he’d had pressed to his lips. He really had been stupid to think that the kiss meant anything to the American. Tony was a dying man desperate to live and he had done anything necessary to prolong his miserable life.

Like a fool, Peter had fallen right into his trap.

“You are far too intelligent for this, Peter. Chin up, old chap. You can ignore that American pig long enough to find the Book of Amun-Ra and then you never have to see him again.”

So what if he was rakishly good looking? Peter hadn’t thought so in prison, but Tony’s hair had been long and his beard had been unkempt and he’d smelled of wet camel and alcohol. When they had met at the docks later and Tony had presented himself with cleaned and trimmed hair and a goatee so masterfully groomed that Peter was half tempted to ask if he’d found a barber to have it professionally done, Peter had to admit that the man was perhaps the most handsome one he had ever set eyes on. The kiss…the kiss had been positively sinful, but apparently that devil hadn’t felt the same way.

Well. Peter didn’t need him anyway. He was an academic! He had books and brains and that ruffian was probably going to wind up swinging from another rope the moment they parted company. Best not to lose sleep over him.

One moment Peter was dressing for bed and the next he was facing the end of a pistol in the hand of a strange man in desert garb with facial tattoos that Peter could almost just begin to decipher. “Oh dear! Can I help you? I think you have the wrong room…”

“Where is the map?”

Peter grimaced as the barrel of the gun was pushed into his chest. “Over on the desk.”

“And the key?”

“Key? I don’t have a key…” Peter’s confusion was interrupted by the sound of his door splintering. There, standing in the rubble of the ruined entry was the very scoundrel he had been disavowing only a moment prior. He looked resplendent with a gun in either hand, a look of determination on the chiseled features of his too handsome face and his once carefully coiffed dark hair falling in haphazard strands across his forehead.

“Let the kid go.”

Peter’s gaze was ripped from his rescuer only long enough to glimpse the second attacker attempting to enter through the porthole. Apparently, Tony too saw that figure and released a volley of bullets. Really, Peter had never seen anything quite as inherently masculine and impressive as Tony Stark facing off against his attackers. Never mind that now the boat was on fire and there seemed to be a great many more of the men in black than just the two that had been attempting to infiltrate his cabin. He didn’t even have a thought to spare for his brother, to wonder where on earth Scott was and if he had gotten free of the ship.

At least, not until they had dragged themselves up onto the shore of the Nile and Peter was watching everything on the ship burn. He shivered in the night air and bemoaned the loss of his clothes, his books, his tools…although, he didn’t mind the look that Tony was giving him as the American’s dark eyes raked over the thin, wet night clothes that clung to his skin…

“What was that about nothing bad ever coming from reading a book?”

Peter cast the man a weary look. “Well, there’s a first time for everything, isn’t there?”

Tony just snorted and grabbed Peter’s arm, jerking him sideways down an alley and a steep but short descent of stairs. “Okay, so he’s whole and he’s got the book and we’re basically screwed. We gotta keep you away from him.”

“That is a plan I do rather like, I have to admit.” Peter let a little whoosh of breath as he was knocked backward into a wall and pressed firmly there by Tony’s rock solid form. Eyebrows raised, he opened his mouth to question the move, but a hand was pressed against his lips and Peter followed Tony’s gaze to the mouth of the alley where a mass of entranced slaves were beginning to trickle by. Peter’s eyes widened, but he didn’t make a sound.

As the final stragglers in the crowd edged by, Peter and Tony left the safety of the alley and attempted to race across the square to the next thoroughfare on their way out of the city. They were stopped by the undulating mass of insects that descended from the sky and formed a living, writhing curtain in front of them.

Peter gulped audibly, following the voice to face the now regenerated and empowered Thanos. He was large and frightening and ugly. The boy could not help but grimace, hands trembling slightly at his side.

“Leave the kid alone.” Tony stepped in front of him. Dear, sweet, brave Tony. He had underestimated the American. He wasn’t a scoundrel. He was a hero. A true hero like one from novels and fairy stories. Peter had no doubt that he would die to protect him from Thanos if that was what it took, but he really didn’t want to see that exquisite example of the human condition die because of him. It seemed such a waste. He was, after all, just a librarian and it did not seem that his feelings for the man were at all reciprocated.

Breaking away, Peter moved to join Thanos, his gaze meeting Tony’s for a moment as he passed him. They were outnumbered. Thanos had the upper hand. They couldn’t fight him and succeed. Not here. They needed the book of Amun-Ra and one of them had to be alive and free in order to fetch it. “I have to do this…but…I’m not saying you can’t rescue me if you’d like. In fact I’d much prefer that actually…if you feel up to it, that is.”

The last thing Peter saw as he was spirited away by the resurrected Thanos was the look of sheer determination on Tony’s face.

Maybe he did have feelings for Peter after all…

It took extreme physical effort on Tony’s part to hold himself back, to formulate some kind of a plan…even a half-assed one, as he took in the sight of Peter chained to a platform alongside a female mummy that had to be the ugly guy’s girlfriend. Great. Just great.

Scott had the book. Scott had been behind him a moment ago but had either been detained or was too cowardly to enter the antechamber with Thanos and the brunt of his legion.

Well, Scott might be a coward, but there was no way in hell that Tony was going to let Thanos sacrifice Peter to bring his girlfriend the rest of the way back from the dead. So, he didn’t have guns. He’d ran out of ammunition and lost the pistols themselves several mummy hordes ago. All he had, in fact, was a sword he’d taken from a statue and his own stubborn will to reclaim the boy whose body he hadn’t even gotten to taste yet.

The kid could not die a virgin. He was way too pretty to die a virgin, and he had to be a virgin. Stuffy British boy like that…his kiss at the jail had probably been his first one.

Okay, enough planning. Sometimes, you just had to wing it.

With a yell, he raced from the shadows with the sword held high, swinging wildly at the undead who swarmed towards him, breaking through enough to snap the chain on one of Peter’s wrists before he was pulled back into battle once more. He wished his movements were a little more refined. Maybe if he’d taken fencing like his father had wanted. As it was, he was chopping at the dessicated figures sloppily, watching as pieces of mummy rained down around them and tried to rejoin the fray with whatever means they possessed. A few disembodied feet were wiggling in the sand, hands crawling like spiders in search of something useful, heads chomping at the empty air.

A scream tore Tony’s attention away from his foes to the dais and the still semi-restrained figure of Peter. The boy was desperately trying to pull his free arm loose of the chains while the female mummy crawled up his body with a dagger in her hand.

“Leave. My. Boy. Alone.” Tony broke away from the pack, racing the distance between himself and the Englishman who had stolen his heart. He dived for the mummy, his head connecting with her chest and throwing them both over the side into the sand as he swung the sword against that last bit of chain to free Peter’s other hand.

“So I’m your boy, now, am I? I don’t recall having agreed to that…”

“Are we really going to argue semantics now, baby?” Tony dodged a strike from the mummy and her blade. “Get that golden book of yours from your cowardly brother in the other room and let’s end this before they end us, hm? Then I can show you why you really do want to be my boy, Peter. By the time I’m done, you’ll be begging me…”

“I. Do. Not. Beg.”

“We’ll see.”

“Hmph, we do have to survive this first, you know.”

“Right, so go get the book already!”

“So bossy,” Peter turned up his nose at the man but still raced back towards the entrance, dodging the writhing parts of fallen mummies as he went.

Tony was just reaching the end of his rope. There were far too many of these dried out defenders of Thanos and it didn’t help that even when he thought he’d killed them…some part of them came back with a vengeance. The girl was another problem all together. If he looked away from her for even a moment, she tried to follow after Peter and he had to charge after her. “How many times I gotta tell you, lady, the boy is mine?”

He was losing steam. He didn’t know how long he was going to be able to keep this up. Truthfully, he might have given up a couple dozen foes ago were it not for the the stodgy little English rose he was trying so desperately to save.

“I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” Peter’s voice shouted from the entry and Tony cursed as he dived for the girl again, grabbing her heal and jerking her off of her feet before she could race at Peter and bury the dagger in his chest. Tony hit the ground hard, breath knocked out of him and suddenly surrounded by a swarm of the disembodied parts of the mummies he had slain.

“Read it, Peter, for God’s sake, read it!”

“Oh, right, yes…” He slammed the book against the wall, hefting it’s heavy cover open and began searching the golden pages for the proper inscription.

Thanos waved the mummy parts away from Tony with a motion of his hand. He’d found another one of those daggers like his girlfriend. He was holding it tightly in his fist and looking at Tony in a way that reminded him way too much of Howard. Disapproval and disappointment. His two best friends. Tony’s fingers closed around the hilt of his sword on the sand, determined to go out fighting for Peter if not for himself.

Peter’s voice rang out loud and clear through the chamber. Thanos seemed to pause, real fear in his eyes as a phantasm of ghostly light passed over the room. But when it was gone, Thanos was still there and he still looked prepared to kill Tony.

“Peter…that didn’t work.”

“It should have worked!”

“It didn’t work.” Tony grimaced at the figure as he bent over him, dagger poised to strike.

“Tony? Tony…no…”

Peter’s strangled cry of alarm was enough to snap Tony’s focus back into place. He lashed out, kicking the figure with both legs and attacking with his sword. It was only when the blade had buried itself in the other man’s gut and Tony was covered in blood and thicker, more nauseating things, that he called out a choked. “Yeah, no, I was wrong. It totally worked…”

How many people got to lose their virginity in the Egyptian city of the dead to a man who had nearly died to save him? Not many, Peter would wager.

“Does this I mean I get to keep you…or am I just one in a long line of conquests?”

Tony propped himself up on an arm to regard the boy with a playful smirk. “You really think I’d go to this much trouble for a conquest? You’re real pretty, Peter Parker, and the sounds you make when I fuck you are a thing of beauty…but I’d have never gone this far to save someone unless I intended to ‘keep them’.”

“Oh, well that really is too bad, Tony, because as I recall…if anyone is to be property and possessor in this relationship, I do believe that I am to be the one keeping you.”

Tony rolled his eyes but leaned down to peck Peter’s lips once, twice, three times. “You know what, Kid, that’s just fine by me.”

“Splendid! Have you ever been to South America, Tony? I have heard from other scholars that they have mummies there too…”

Tony covered Peter’s mouth with a hand and propped himself up again. “Scott! Scott! I know you’re somewhere around here. Scott, come take your brother back. I’ve changed my mind. I want to give him back…”

Squirming free of Tony’s hold, Peter let out an exasperated sigh. “Oh you!”

#starker #starker week 2019 #starker bingo

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falkenscreen · 4 years

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Midway

Pearl Harbour hangs over Midway in more ways than one.

The hugely consequential naval engagement between the US forces and Imperial Japanese Army near midway across the Pacific and the Pacific theatre moreover are largely missing from cinematic retellings of the Second World War. Frustrating to no end for those followers of history and film, as was Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbour, the faults of which have been well documented, 19 years later American cinema has returned to the Pacific this time to tell Midway.

The battle and preceding engagements taking place (as depicted) in the months following the fallout from the surprise attack on the US naval base in Hawaii, usually this author would conclude any review with a caveat and/or recommendation as to whether to see a movie, but we’re going to do things a little differently. Usually commentary as regards the favourable and less favourable aspects of a picture, as with it’s varied qualities and detractions, would be relatively intermixed; not so when that which recommends and so deflates this picture stands in such stark contrast.

That furthering Midway constitutes little more than three tenths of this picture and we’ll deal with each percentage separately. Irrespective, this author would still recommend a trip to the cinema as that which the finished product excels at it does so exceptionally, moreover so for the rarity of seeing these particular events well rendered on the big screen and indeed where they should best be viewed; on as big a screen as possible.

As an aside, there will be casual reticence to see such films given audiences’ general disillusionment with the US military and narratives regarding American supremacy. The historical and modern contexts being patently distinct and simply not analogous, such a conflation would unreasonably have the effect (should the film be of quality) of impeding engagement with dramatic retellings of these narratives.

The recreations of the battle scenes, Midway in particular, are very, very good on a macro level. While the aerial dives into upward-seeking Imperial fire are numerously repeated, as they were mid-conflict, not one emerges unengaging given the stakes, consequences and practical objectives are very apparent. Same can be said for the naval manoeuvring, near-misses and clear emphasis on the limitations of the American aircrafts with (mostly) excellent effects to boot.

The opening sequence, briefly recounting the events of December 7, 1941, are handled much more tastefully than in Bay’s effort and do well to establish necessary grounding in the American mind-set. Too depicting the subsequent Doolittle Raid, while the ensuing events are given more breadth than in 2001 it must fairly be said that the historic, dramatic short-range aircraft carrier take-off, separate to the more restrained, effective outlining of the actual raid, was better handled by Bay.

The Imperial leadership’s mindset and perspective, to which we are given less insight than we are proffered as their opponents yet more than one might typically expect given like pictures, is too keenly engaging. This is especially as regards the depictions of Tamon Yamaguchi (Tadanobu Asano) and Yamamoto; portrayed with near-mythical effectiveness by Etsushi Toyokawa. The repetition of the famous Tora! Tora! Tora! ‘sleeping giant’ quote attributed to Yamamoto, likewise adopted in Pearl Harbour, appears to now be an essential (if welcome) part of any prominent American feature covering this territory.

Turning to the US side, Nick Jonas delivers the most compelling performance amidst his co-stars and the only resonant or indeed very memorable rendering of a personal storyline herein.

Lastly, and notably, the film is dedicated to both the American and Japanese personnel who served.

Now, the bad.

American-produced war pictures are routinely (and fairly) criticised for forgoing the contributions of other forces. While the words ‘Singapore,’ ‘Darwin’ or ‘Nauru’ frustratingly don’t feature amongst much else (beyond a map we keep glancing at), it’s much less of a fair criticism of Midway given (unlike this film’s lead casting) the overwhelming American contribution.

If you’re going to cast non-American actors in American roles, you either have to let them use their natural dialect (which is just fine) or make sure they can actually sound American. Midway’s arguable leads, Ed Skrein and Luke Evans, while having great jawlines are just not very good actors and a lot of this rests on their shoulders. Sounding like they’re from nowhere near Jersey, their personal storylines are no way near involving for the scripting treading tired ground from similar pictures and the performers doing nothing to lift it.

To be clear, this author appreciates that these are accounts of real circumstances and real persons which characterised many an experience in the Pacific. The issue is that the scripting and portrayals don’t offer us very significant insight particular to or deserving of these figures and their idiosyncrasies as we are proffered Dennis Quaid’s William ‘Bull’ Halsey alone, who regretfully gets comparatively little screen-time. Conversely, when good performers are permitted greater lengths to work with (Mandy Moore, Woody Harrelson), their dialogue is alike Skrein’s and Evans’ extremely generic.

Some of the most interesting American-centric internal conflict (and scripting) rests on Patrick Wilson’s Intelligence Officer Edwin Layton. Wilson, an eminently serviceable performer, reaches a height opposite the far better Brennan Brown as star codebreaker Joe Rochefort who, together with his more exceptional portrayal, somehow wasn’t offered more time in this movie.

The battle scenes too starve momentum when switching to the perspectives of these figures in-flight, not simply for the quality of the performances but the rendering of the cockpits being noticeably less effective than Director Roland Emmerich’s broader realisation of the battle sequences. The temper of the battles too unnecessarily shifts with one jingoistic intrusion, pertaining to the last American aerial bombardment, into what can otherwise be a marshalling and widely considered retelling. This account of events or something close to it may very well have happened, it’s just that the stark departure from this feature’s long-established, effectual tone draws you far out of the film into another, at this late stage unwelcomely more bombastic one.

Accomplished on a macro level but lacking in many details, when it comes to this story there’s good and there’s bad and it shows.

Midway is in cinemas now

#xl #reviews #brennan brown #dennis quaid #ed skrein #etsushi toyokawa #luke evans #mandy moore #michael bay #midway #pearl harbour #patrick wilson #roland emmerich #woody harrelson #tadanobu asano

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douxreviews · 5 years

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Star Trek: Discovery - ‘Project Daedalus’ Review

Spock: "We will never relate as equals, so long as you continue to pretend that every burden is your own."

By nature I love brevity: A very good episode taken by itself, but in the context of the larger show it both highlights and compounds one of the show's major issues, and the episode's impact suffers for it.

I complain a lot in my reviews of Star Trek: Enterprise that the only characters who get developed nearly enough are Archer, Trip, and T'Pol. From the amount of development the others get, particularly in the first two seasons, one might even assume that they weren't main characters at all, and were simply part of the background. In most episodes, they get one or two lines each, mostly in the regular performance of their duties aboard the ship. Sound familiar? While Discovery may not have the same problem when it comes to main cast members like Tilly or Stamets, or even Ash Tyler, it does suffer greatly from its failure to develop the secondary cast. It is notable that at least some effort is being made this season - we do now actually know all their names - but not enough. Even the more prominent bridge crew members like Detmer or Owosekun get little tidbits and nothing more.

I think the main problem, and the main reason this happens, is that this show is so laser-focused on its plot that it doesn't have time to develop their characters. This is by no means to say that it couldn't have time, but I think that it doesn't have the time right now. It just doesn't seem like it's a priority for the writers. We have so much development for Saru, Tilly, Stamets, Burnham, and even now Tyler and Culber, that I now care about each of their characters (to varying degrees, of course; Shazad Latif turns me off of Tyler and I don't find Burnham compelling). But while little nods like 'Owosekun grew up in a Luddite community' or 'Detmer has had her pilot's license since she was a teenager' help to ground their characters as humans, they haven't been developed at all as characters in this show. I don't have a sense of Owosekun's emotional state, or Detmer's motivations. And the reason I say the show could very easily make the time for those characters is because it did so here.

Airiam's development here is quite good, and I found her backstory compelling enough. The problem is that it was all shoved into this one episode. That short a span of time is not enough to get to care that deeply about a character. It's not even like it had to be complicated in previous episodes. Maybe a scene where Airiam logs her memories, or a brief little dialogue exchange between her and Burnham to establish that they were friends. If the show had made a conscious effort to sprinkle little bits of Airiam's character throughout the season, it would have made a world of difference for this episode's emotional impact. As it was, director Jonathan Frakes and all the actors brought everything they could possibly have brought to the scene, but it just didn't have the impact it needed because what had come before wasn't compelling.

That said, I am glad Airiam got something of weight before her departure, and it did lead to some further characterization of the other bridge crew, Detmer in particular. I don't think I've seen them feel more human than they did here. The shots of each crew member's horrified blank expression at the death of their friend, combined with Frakes' emotional direction and Jeff Russo's suddenly understated music, really drove home the emotion of the scene, even though I didn't feel it myself because I had only just been given the opportunity to become attached to Airiam.

We have other stuff to touch on, so let's get into it. First, let's get the main plot out of the way. The story worked just fine, and the reveal of Control's complete, well, control over Section 31 was well done. They've dropped hints of the evil AI in charge of 31 throughout the season with just the right balance; it was enough that the audience understood what it was and that it was there, but it wasn't heavy handed enough that it made me groan with how obvious it was. I think I like the direction they're taking it, with a few caveats. If things continue the way they seem to be continuing, I anticipate that we will find out for certain that the conflict in the future is between the evolved Control and the rest of the universe. This could be good for a couple of reasons. The first is that it gives the whole story a sort of connectivity that the two half-arcs last season lacked, and the second is that this could very easily be the reason that Section 31 drops under the radar by the DS9 era. Maybe 31 collapses almost completely at the end of the season, and Starfleet shelves the project, but then Georgiou secretly starts it up again independent from Starfleet. That would also give the announced Section 31 series some sort of direction to go in.

Here we come to the biggest thing that makes all shows sink or swim - the characters and their relationships with each other. In what is becoming a nice trend for this season of Discovery, the writers continue to provide us with pairings of characters that make us think and, for the most part, work. This episode the highlight was Stamets and Spock. I really enjoyed their little scene together in Engineering. I really like that this show is starting to slow down enough to have scenes like that, where characters make their connections and have moments that would fall by the wayside in the middle of an action or plot-driven episode. Stamets gave Spock some very human advice to his problem that logic has not been able to solve. Likewise, Spock provided Stamets with a much-needed outsider's perspective on his relationship with Culber, lending him an objectivity that he would never reach on his own.

The other relational dynamic, that of Spock and Burnham, is less interesting but still of worth. As with last week, their relationship is deeply broken and fractured, and their issues aren't just going away. Spock's criticisms of Burnham are valid and cut deep, but at the same time, her evaluation of his current state rings true. Spock is still struggling madly to wrap his head around the problem before him, and nothing is working. As the chess game shows expertly, Spock has just about given up. As he said last week, both logic and emotion have failed him. He has nowhere else to turn, and his dejected resignation shows in Ethan Peck's performance.

There's a lot to recommend here. I ended up liking it a great deal. I just wish they'd laid the groundwork better earlier down the line.

Strange New Worlds:

No new planets this outing, but we did see part of Section 31 HQ.

New Life and New Civilizations:

Confirmation that Airiam is a human with cybernetic augmentations after she was critically injured. it also struck me that a significant portion of our cast has some sort of augmentation using technology. Detmer has her eye, Nhan has her breathing piece, and Stamets has those things in his arms that allow him to connect to the spore drive.

Pensees:

-Another appearance of Admiral Cornwell. I like Jayne Brook, so that's always fun to see. It was also good to see her using her background as a therapist.

-The ship looked brighter in this episode, and at some points significantly less blue. I wonder why; could it be Frakes?

-Every single time they say 'logic extremists' I want to burst out laughing because the name sounds really dumb.

-The Federation doesn't permit the use of mines at this point in the timeline.

-There was a distinct red glow on the scattered chess pieces at the end of that scene. Interesting...

-Faith interpretation of the week: Faith in your own abilities.

-Some definite parallels to Star Trek VI with the magnet boots in zero gravity, and the floating blood.

-My viewing group guessed that Admiral Patar was dead about ten seconds before the episode told us.

-Saru can see heat signatures, even through subspace. Cool.

-So Airiam downloaded all her memories into Disco's mainframe? Is that just opening the door for her return?

-Burnham using Kirk Fu is amazing. That's really all that needs to be said.

-Other Trek references - Kadis-Kot and 3-D Chess

-I can't help but feel like they had Nhan kill Airiam just to absolve Burnham of the responsibility.

-For some reason, something kicked out our ads and our teaser for next episode when we watched it on Amazon.

-Next week's episode is called 'The Red Angel.' I guess this is it, folks! Final theories in the comments below!

Quotes:

Stamets: "Can one of you say something? I don't like hearing myself talk when I have an audience." Burnham: "We're thinking." Stamets: "Think louder." There's good old grumpy Stamets again.

Pike: "Giving up our values in the name of defense is to lose the battle in advance."

Burnham: "I express myself through my work and my choice of decor." Spock: "Clearly."

Burnham: "If there's a logical reason to sacrifice your rook, I don't see it." Spock: "Perhaps I simply dislike rooks."

Spock: "I understand now. If only I'd taken your pawn, the mystery would have been solved."

Spock, to Stamets: "Perhaps he needs distance from you not because he no longer has feelings for you, but because he no longer knows how to feel about himself."

4.5 out of 6. Would have been 5, but the poor context drags it down.

CoramDeo picked a lousy day to wear his contacts.

#Star Trek #Star Trek Discovery #Michael Burnham #Saru #Sylvia Tilly #Paul Stamets #Christopher Pike #Spock #Disco #Star Trek Reviews #Doux Reviews #TV Reviews

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inventors-fair · 5 years

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Choice Commentary (8-15 of 15)

@kavinika - Disturbing Prophecy is niche to say the least. Is this supposed to be a Commander-oriented card? The “legendary” caveat doesn’t strike me as a particularly well-meshed ability. I kind of get the flavor aspect, but in general, as a rare, milling four isn’t that bad a consequence. What if they leave useless things on top to mill? You just gave them advantage. I don’t enjoy this card as a rare. Small wording note: the second comma should be a period.

@magicalmatts - Prices is a cool card. I think it should be “Each player who chose” and then the rest of the abilities, but that’s a small nag. Blue/Red multicolor hasn’t tapped into this much, and I like the idea of tokens and milling together! Small note, though - the name isn’t...good. As a working title, sure, I can see that. But as an “””official””” card, it could have used some revision.

@nine-effing-hells - Geas of the Scholar is our second curse, and honestly, I’m surprised there weren’t more. This card could go either horribly wrong for the cursed or a mere annoyance. But speaking as a limited player, four mana is crazy powerful. Ramping into it in constructed would be easy as hell to lock someone out of the game until they lost their hand. Exiling is crazy hard. I think this card could be tweaked because I love the name and the ability, but it might be a little too powerful as-is. (Also? If the “card art” is just a solid color, don’t worry about credit there.)

@reaperfromtheabyss - Delayed Gratification is interesting. My brain instantly jumped to “oh, another way to get Emrakul unless your opponent is smart and chooses Later.” I’d love to see this card drafted. An enchantment with an immediate Evoke kind of ability? I like the concept. I don’t think Split Second is necessary, personally. In short, taking off Split Second, I would love to see this card played.

@shakeszx - Speculative Censorship was a runner-up in my mind. Take out the “nonland” part and we have a winner. Nothing else to say here, really.

@strangestquarkwave - Dishonest Emissary needs a wording revamp, but the concept is interesting. “When.....peace or war. For each player who chose peace, creatures that player controls can’t attack or block until the end of your next turn. For each player who chose war, that player can’t cast spells until the end of your next turn.” One paragraph. I think it’s a fine card! Again, should NOT be mythic. Rare, but not mythic.

@thecultoffblthp - Unwitting Initiation is a cool name! The first ability should be a replacement ability, though, i.e. “If an opponent would draw a card,” etc. Really cool concept. What on earth does this card have to do with initiation? It feels like a kind of gating card, certainly a mind-picking espionage-oriented feel, but initiation? Players/permanents usually get something out of trials or rites or passage. I’m not sure how it’s being conveyed here.

@wpandp - Summons Contamination is a great card with some wording trouble. “Target opponent sacrifices any number of permanents. Then, for each creature and planeswalker that player controls, they lose 1 life and you gain 1 life.” I think that’s it. Why would the “or” be there? Still, though, I like the thinking behind this card. Take it, Krenko.

Thank you all for your entries! New contest tomorrow.

#mtg #magic the gathering #custom magic card #contest #entries #opponent's choice #inventor's fair

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prettty-boys · 6 years

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Who Made You the Queen?

Prologue

Shawn Mendes x reader

Shawn Mendes finally gets to live out his dream as an actor. He is to star alongside the critically acclaimed actress, (YN), in a romantic drama. One problem: they hate each other. Despite this, their managers organize a plan for them to pretend to date in real life in order to boost interest in the movie.

Warnings: none

You wanted the ground to open up and swallow you whole. Of all the costars available to you, all the cute, young actors in the business, they handed you the one person that would be nearly impossible for you to work with.

Shawn Mendes was loved by millions. He had fans that spanned the globe. Even you had to admit that his career was beyond impressive.

But that didn't change the fact that you hated him.

You walked your first red carpet at the same event that he walked his. Thinking that you might find some solace in another first-timer, you approached him with an anxiety in your gut that told you to do everything but. The moment he brushed you off had to be one of the most embarrassing experiences of your life. From then on you had decided that you wouldn't work with the jerk no matter how much they paid you. Though it was unlikely that the occasion would ever come up, you found a kind of satisfaction in establishing this personal rule. Up until now.

Your manager, Samuel, sat on the couch across from you. He refused to look you in the eye as he delivered the news, knowing how bothered you would be. Shawn Mendes would play your love interest in the upcoming movie The Field That Blooms Brightest in Spring. Set to be the most enticing romantic drama of the decade, you were beyond thrilled to have earned the role of the main lead. The Oscar buzz behind this movie was unbelievable, and it hadn't even been fully cast yet. Of course, the universe would never be so kind as to offer you the role of your dreams on a silver platter without some sort of caveat. Your caveat being him.

He just felt so... artificial. No one that hot doesn't know they're that hot. He blushed at every interview that mentioned his stupid gorgeous face. He hid his hands when reporters talked about them as the subject of thirst tweets. “Please don't talk about yourself like that,” he said, when someone exclaimed that they wanted him to just choke the life out of them. As if he didn't know that's what every girl fantasized about. He feigned innocence, and it drove you absolutely nuts.

You felt your body grow warm with anger. Despite knowing better, you desperately questioned your manager. “What do you mean? He's not an actor. How could he possibly even...” You trailed off, the memory of him speaking publicly about his interest in acting resurfacing in your mind. You remembered specifically because your only thought had been Yeah, sure. That's likely. Sighing heavily, you buried your head in your hands.

“Hey, it's not that big of a deal,” he said. “How bad of a guy can he really be? You're surrounded by Hollywood douchebags every single day, there's no way he's any worse than them.”

You scoffed, head still between your knees. “I know, but… I mean…” You sat up abruptly, slamming your hands on the couch cushions on either side of you in frustration. How could you describe such a petty hatred without looking like a complete ass? “I don't know what it is, but something about him just gets to me,” you said, knowing full well what that something was.

“This movie is worth a lot more than letting some guy who ‘gets to you’ stand in your way,” he said, ruffling your hair. “I'm sure everything will work out just fine.”

“Doubtful,” you said, anticipating this whole situation would end in a mess.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Shawn's fingers were sprawled across his mouth, his jaw leaning into his hand. His brow was furrowed at the bright screen resting in his lap. When they had told him who his costar would be, he hardly recognized the name whatsoever. When he looked you up, though, he immediately remembered your face.

Oh, that girl, he thought. Great, a total diva for a co-star.

It frustrated him that he had never known your name until now. You never took the time to introduce yourself, merely beaming for a quick photo and rushing away. You always left before he could introduce himself either. Obviously you must’ve felt like you were too good to make his acquaintance, and he wasn’t gonna lie, it stung a little.

He had run into her in a number of occasions: red carpets, after parties, awards shows. Every single time, paparazzi insisted on a photo of you two together. For some reason they had it in their heads that you two were close friends. How they always missed your eye rolls and scoffs when you were near him, he never understood. Still, he had a sparkling reputation as an innocent, blushing star on the rise. This was his big chance to enter the world of acting like he had always wanted, and he was not about to let a silent feud with one entitled actress ruin it.

#shawn mendes x reader #shawn mendes #shawn mendes fluff #shawn mendes au #actor!shawn

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dirtyfilthy · 3 years

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I guess Janis Joplin is very free indeed.

“It is the absolute freedom of every working locomotive to gaze longingly out of it’s own windowpanes, and then -- having caught it’s thoughts on some particularly picturesque piece of scenery or another -- to daydream of that distant mountain range all day long -- and imagine what it would be like to climb up to the peak of it, to stand on the very tipmost top of that mountain and look out over the clouds. This forlorn place -- I mean the summit, being extremely mountainous and also very rugged and almost entirely made out of snow & rocks & vast sheer cliffs with vertical drops into hundred of meters of nothing, this is most certainly no fit place for a plain ordinary train such as myself. Sadly, it is also very likely that no rails will ever run there, because honestly there is no good reason for them to do so, and yet, even then, knowing all of this as I obviously do, somehow this very same train finds it can’t stop itself from wishing...”

Gordon has begun to trail off, looking wistful. Thomas The Tank Engine began to wonder if this story had any dragons in it, or perhaps some flirtatious passenger carriages (although Thomas often found them to be altogether Very Silly), or maybe it was even a story with an Instructive Moral ending. The Fat Controller was always telling Thomas about Instructive Morals, normally after something very bad had happened. This, reflected Thomas, was entirely the wrong way round. It would be far more helpful to learn the important lesson before the fatal disaster had occurred, rather than afterwards, when it was usually too late to be of any real use.

“Does this story have an Instructive Moral?” asked Thomas, feeling very clever.

“Only one lad”, replied Gordon very gruffly; “that it’s sometimes kinder to strangle Hope in its’ crib, when it is still a baby, rather than slowly battering it death one day at a time over a period of many years”. And with that, he huffed off to the Depot, looking very cross indeed.

It really doesn’t matter if you are the White bishop or the Black bishop, there are simply some squares on the chessboard you will never get to visit. They say we are each free to pursue happiness in our own way, in whatever form that may mean to us personally, and in the idiosyncratic manner best suited to our own inclinations.

Every form of freedom I can think of that is worth actually having either costs a lot of money or has already been made illegal.

Am I free to walk off into the forest and build a log cabin? I mean sure, if I first purchase the land, then get the planning permission & employ a licensed contractor to build it to the safety specification etc etc

Can I take a group of friends and occupy some abandoned industrial factory, then try and turn it into a.rich green garden of over-growing plants and tangled, blooming relationships and perhaps even (in the right season) farm a crop of meaning out of it?

I think you know the answer to that. You’re free to buy the standard package.

Is there no place left on earth we can still wander & get a little lost in, where if you go they won’t try to follow you?

The only frontiers that remain exist purely in the realm of the symbolic. The little private fiefdoms we can carve out for ourselves because surveillance is (not yet) all pervasive and enforcement of the law remains an economic game of how best to assign entirely limited resources to practically unlimited crimes.

Shit man. I think our only chance is to slip like pick pockets into whatever obscure through-fares of ideology that may yet remain unnamed. Look: If the only soil they are going to give us -- the soil we are supposed to farm enough meaning from to supply the entire rest of our lives -- if this “soil” is really just the dead black dust of recycled asphalt & finely ground up plastic

-- then I think we simply have no other choice but to build a whole new psycho-geography of hope, right there on the top of it.

I leave true revolution to the prayers of the idealists. My only real wish is for there to be enough cracks left in the concrete that something truly wild might get to grow unnoticed.

I’m old enough to know that confronting power directly is often extremely foolish, and that better results may usually be obtained by simply routing around authority. To be a smuggler of dreams requires nimble feet and a faster speed boat than your opponent, still, it is generally better not to dress too flashy. While staying anonymous, no particular indignity is likely to occur to you beyond the usual laundry list, but if the Eye Of Sauron ever becomes focused in your direction then may god help you because the authorities can easily bring down such immense force to bear so incredibly quickly, they will come to your home carrying a huge lever & then not hesitate to use your little life as a fulcrum, merely for causing them some minor irritation.

This is why finding those phantasmal frontier towns is so important. It’s less about the initial gold rush than it is finding a place for you to finally stretch your legs. Time to remember what walking normally feels like, before society stuffed it’s hand up so far up your ass you felt more often like a puppet than you did a person. These new conceptual spaces (the internet, crypto, the CHAZ etc) that continually open up every now and again are normally beyond the rule of law (at least initially, for one brightly shining moment in time, a moment almost always entirely too brief -- I do find that the sweet songs with a little too much truth in the tune have an unfortunate tendency to end up -- not as chart hits -- but as choked throats or as conveniently cut break-lines. If the coroner actually had any left of his own, he’d have to write “sincerity” as the real cause of death in such cases. The typical verdict, “suicide by song”, isn’t exactly fooling anyone.).

Looks like you got there just in time! Here before they fenced the prairie. The fresh country air (ah! nothing compares to the old-timey smell of a working industrial coal generator) is alive with the phosphorescent glow of freshly hatched possibility vectors, zipping wildly about, moving around this way and that, and giving off the occasional “pop!” of a dot product whenever they randomly collide together.

On a night like tonight, on a day like today, you begin to feel like a man might really make something of himself here, perhaps even cast off that rotten old albatross of his past. Maybe he could invent a brand new man (a far better one) to replace the tired old shell that originally stumbled his way down the road and into this town. Besides, I reckon that tired old man has got far too many barnacles of regret & remorse growing on the hull of his soul to do any real sailing these days, not now anyways. Time to scuttle the ship and go claim the insurance.

So, possibly maybe perhaps, at this time, at this place, you might just have found that right sized slice of peace you need to actually live with yourself for a bit

That is: until the great meat grinder of government finally gets wind there is a good thing going. Then, when enough of the bureaucratic cogs have joylessly rotated into their designated satanic alignments, something eldritch will start to rumble deep within the grim bowels of the machine. A bell tolls. It is time. Somewhere in the pits of hell, within an anonymous, windowless office, orders are issued. They will now send in the police. Each officer is proudly armed with the latest in “non-lethal” crowd control technology, a shiny new police issue woodchipper, polished to a mirror finish. They are here to clean up the streets, remove all the riff-raff and generally make the place reputable for ordinary decent law-abiding citizens who speak with the right accent and don’t look suspiciously “foreign”.

Of course, the new sheriff will have to hang a few skellywags and neer-do-wells to really get his point across. There’s a new law in town! Examples must be made, standards must be set, and any deviance, degeneracy or drunken shenanigans of any sort must be quickly and severely punished ( for the sake of clarity, “shenanigans” also includes decadence and/or diabolism). There are no ifs, buts, or caveats; a new curfew is now in place: from sunup to sundown, “if you think you might, don’t”; additionally, there is absolutely no tom-foolery to be had without a permit (permits are NEVER issued), and any vagrants (exact definition of this term is left to the Sheriff’s discretion) found without a leash or collar in a public park will be first taken to the city Pound and, if unclaimed at the end of seven days, humanely euthanised. Tickets to perform humane euthanisations are available at a cost of forty dollars and strictly provided on a “first-come, first-served” basis.

Looks like it’s time to move on.

#freedom

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mearnsblog · 4 years

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“Pocahontas” (1995)

I have a bit of a funny relationship with "Pocahontas." Unlike all previous Disney movies, I definitely remember when this came out, and it was a big deal. Disney had produced hit after hit after hit, and there wasn't much to indicate that they'd be slowing down. Even after its somewhat disappointing critical reception, "Pocahontas" was still super popular. My kindergarten actually put on a mini-production of it at the end of the year*, and subsequently, the movie soundtrack my mom bought became one of the most frequently-played CDs in my room growing up.

*I played Kocoum. No, they didn't have me die in it, though in hindsight, that'd be hilarious. "Guess what, kids? Andrew's going to die in this scene!" Instead, they just had me arrest John Smith to get him into captivity or something like that. Not as interesting.

All that nostalgia aside though, one thing is evident: the story of Pocahontas should probably have not been made into a Disney film. Perusing the history of Disney canon, "Pocahontas" is pretty much the only one to be based on a real person. Given the colonists' shoddy history with Pocahontas and the Powhatan, this seems ill-advised and would likely not be attempted nowadays.

The Powhatan and Pocahontas herself suffered poor fates, and while it's nice that Disney portrayed them as having been thrown into an awful situation by the English invaders, to make a cutesy movie with all that lingering as the elephant in the room is honestly in poor taste. In one sense, it's throwing an emoji on the overall story of a tragedy, especially since we don't know if the positive climax in this situation -- Pocahontas saving John Smith -- even happened. There are so many wonderful Native American stories out there that they could've turned into a Disney film and represented their people in a much better fashion.**

**Pocahontas being the first non-white Disney princess is not nothing, and should be acknowledged. There's no doubt that Disney has struggled with representation over the years, and including someone like Pocahontas in their many branding efforts is important.

But, well, that's the '90s for you. What's done is done. So with all that being acknowledged as a caveat, is the fictional story any good?

Eh. A major weaknesses of "Pocahontas" is that it's relying too much on its leads (one of whom is voiced by human garbage Mel Gibson), and neither is that compelling. Think about the other great Disney movies of this period. They all had tremendous side characters who could not only carry some of the emotion of the movie, but also add to the story. I did like the "Looney Tunes"-esque comedy of Meeko, Percy, and Flit, but they don't measure up to the members of the household in "Beauty and the Beast" or the supporting cast of "Lion King." The same goes for the human side characters, who are at a bit of drag in comparison to, say, Sebastian and even the Sultan. They're fine, just not stand-outs.

Ratcliffe does check the boxes of an evil villain having a smashing time being a bastard, and you can tell that David Ogden Stiers (the former voice of Cogsworth) loves doing the back-and-forth dialogue between Ratcliffe and his butler all on his own. "Mine, Mine, Mine" is musically mediocre, but also pure lol. Once again, while he's not as good a villain as others of this period, he's at least on par with the similarly named (and animated) Ratigan from "Great Mouse Detective."

Despite my love of the soundtrack when I was little, I'd only grade it about a B. "Just Around the Riverbend" is a good, fast-paced hopeful ballad, and "Colors of the Wind" is a decent enough lead hit, even if the lyrics don't make much sense after the beginning. I also like its audio-only placement at the very end of the movie. Between that and the "Virginia Company" opening, the team did an excellent job of setting some stakes and going all-out with a grand finale. (So much of the movie's problem is its middle; the decision to not have Pocahontas go off to England with John was actually quite daring for the time, and I respect it.)

The rest of the songs aren't that good, and the less said about the heavy-handed "Savages," the better. The implication that the Powhatan were getting as bad as the settlers is... not great.

It's possible that the string of incredible Disney movies in a row has taken the shine off of "Pocahontas" in a way that I might not have noticed had it been thrown in the middle of a more mediocre stretch. However, I think I'm rating it correctly. Despite strong moments here and there, its entire premise is flawed, and it just leaves a lot to be desired.

Meeko forever though.

Best song: “Just Around the Riverbend”

Updated ranking

1. “Beauty and the Beast” (review) 2. “The Lion King” (review) 3. “The Little Mermaid” (review) 4. “Cinderella” (review) 5. “Sleeping Beauty” (review) 6. “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (review) 7. “Aladdin” (review) 8. “One Hundred and One Dalmatians” (review) 9. “The Jungle Book” (review) 10. “The Great Mouse Detective” (review) 11. “Fantasia” (review) 12. “The Rescuers Down Under” (review) 13. “The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh” (review) 14. “Alice in Wonderland” (review) 15. “Lady and the Tramp” (review) 16. “Pinocchio” (review) 17. “Robin Hood” (review) 18. “Oliver & Company” (review) 19. “Pocahontas” 20. “The Rescuers” (review) 21. “The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad” (review) 22. “Bambi” (review) 23. “The Aristocats” (review) 24. “Dumbo” (review) 25. “Peter Pan” (review) 26. “Fun and Fancy Free” (review) 27. “The Fox and the Hound” (review) 28. “The Sword in the Stone” (review) 29. “The Three Caballeros” (review) 30. “Make Mine Music” (review) 31. “The Black Cauldron” (review) 32. “Saludos Amigos” (review) 33. “Melody Time” (review)

#disney

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leanderclifton · 4 years

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Book Review: Good Karma

A Novel

Patricia Lutwack-Bloom

By Christina Kelly (Harper Paperbacks)

Sometimes, a book cover is so entrancing that we buy the book just for that. It doesn’t happen often, but it does occur now and then. This happened to me recently. I was so enamored by the cover and title of Good Karma that I immediately bought the book. Then, unknowingly, when I saw the cover two months later, I bought the book again! Oh well—someone is going to get a nice Christmas gift.

Good Karma is a delightful book with a charming story, eccentric but well-developed characters, and not just one but two great dogs: a Boston Terrier named Karma and a harlequin Great Dane named Sequoia. (Can one imagine a better name for a Great Dane?)

The dogs don’t talk or share their thoughts (alas) but the lead characters make up for this omission. The main character is Catherine. She and her husband, Ralph, have moved to a community that seems to be a kind of retirement oasis on an island off the coast of Savannah. Ralph is a golf addict. This addiction is supplemented by his abiding interest in their real estate lady, who is more interested in the husband’s wallet than his “wee willy wonka.”

Catherine, feeling isolated and alone, frequently goes to the dog park. One day, she meets Frank, a widower. As they chat, both of their dogs–Catherine’s Boston terrier, Karma, and Frank’s Great Dane, Sequoia–disappear. Naturally, they have to join forces to find the dogs. Enter one of the most delightful characters in dog-book history, Ms. Ida Blue. Not to spoil the entire plot, but when our Ida calls the widower with news that she has found both dogs, our gentleman arranges for Ida to keep them so that he can continue his search with the lovely Catherine.

Meanwhile, a side character adds delicious fun when we learn that she breaks into houses, not to burgle, but just to see how others live. Eventually, Catherine joins her in these forays, which culminates in one of the funniest passages in the book. Oh, and I mustn’t forget to mention the widower’s deceased wife. She has some “divine” dialogue as well.

The book is a charming antidote for anyone who wants to while away a few hours with a sparkling cast of characters. Great dialogue and fine, snappy writing carry the reader swiftly through the story. The only possible caveat is the author’s choice to reveal some intimate details of the burgeoning physical relationship between Frank and Catherine. For folks who think older people (Frank is 75, Catherine is 65), don’t indulge in this behavior, these scenes might be a bit cringe-worthy. But for the rest of us who are realists, it only adds to the value of a story depicting older people in real-life situations—albeit, pretty funny ones!

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oneddashone · 4 years

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Games of the Year 2019

GOOD

Wargroove

Yoshi's Crafted World

Nintendo Labo Toy-Con 04: VR Kit

Boxboy + Boxgirl

Puyo Puyo Champions

Dragon Quest Builders 2

Daemon X Machina

Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening

Killer Queen Black

Luigi's Mansion 3

Pokemon: Sword & Shield

The games in this part of the list are in a weird kind of neutral zone—way too good to be left off the overall list, but not wholeheartedly recommended without at least one caveat. All are good, and most are probably worth your time, but each is missing a certain something to justifiably slot them into the upper echelons.

The one standout here is Link's Awakening—I couldn't justify moving it to the next tier up, as it's really just a straight remake of a decades-old Game Boy game—but good lord, what a remake it is. The original was my all-time favorite game until Breath of the Wild came out two years ago, and I played and beat this remake in less than a week. Seeing map areas and locales that I knew like the back of my hand remade in gorgeous tilt-shift HD was a real highlight this year.

RECOMMENDED

Tetris 99

Ape Out

Baba is You

Gato Roboto

Slay the Spire

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Wilmot's Warehouse

Untitled Goose Game

Sayonara Wild Hearts

These are all fantastic games that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend to anyone. Tetris 99 came out of nowhere and sounded like a joke at first—Tetris but...battle royale?—but it just completely works, and the special events on various weekends this year always drew me back in.

None of the rest of the list was developed or published by Nintendo, but all appeared on the Switch—so much for the idea that Nintendo doesn't know how to work with third parties. Ape Out's core gameplay, visual aesthetic, and killer interactive soundtrack made for a great experience the first time, and an even better one on NG+. Baba is You took a very simple genre, made one slight tweak, and nourished that idea into 200+ levels of mind-bending puzzles. Wilmot's Warehouse used a similar push-block mechanic, but instead used it to create a game about organizing things—and for the right kind of weird person, of which I am one, this is an incredible game experience. Gato Roboto and Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night each successfully riffed on the Metroidvania genre in different ways, but with similarly fantastic results (although to be fair, the latter needed a late patch to justify its inclusion on this list).

Slay the Spire was a hands-down favorite. Deck-building games are a genre I've wanted to get into but never quite have—until now. Spire checked the same boxes in my brain that last year's Into the Breach did—your enemies show their intentions ahead of time, giving you as much time as you need to plot your strategy; and yet, one slightly undercooked move later and it all falls apart. I've been coming back to this one all year and, as someone who regularly undercooks their own moves, will likely continue to do into next year.

Untitled Goose Game was arguably more popular as a meme than as a game, but the relatively simple gameplay was buoyed by some of the most genuinely hilarious interactions I've ever experienced in a game. My 8 year old is still hiding behind corners, waiting to spring an unexpected HONK on her poor old dad.

Another game that succeeded almost despite its gameplay was Sayonara Wild Hearts. It's hard to describe this game—it's almost a rhythm game, but not really; it has a story, but it's ambiguous and none of the characters are even named; there's not much gameplay, but I wouldn't want to watch it passively as a movie—needless to say it's unlike anything I've ever played before. I finished it in two sessions back to back, and was completely enthralled by the colors, environments, the aforementioned ambiguous narrative—but mostly it was the music. Because make no mistake, this game has a goddamned tremendous soundtrack, and it carries through the whole experience. Actually, maybe I do know what kind of game this is—a video game LP.

ESSENTIAL

Mario Maker 2

Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Dragon Quest XI S: Definitive Edition

A big update, released a few months after it came out, single-handedly moved Mario Maker 2 up a tier. The game was already great—proving that even though the Wii U gamepad was the impetus for Mario Maker’s creation, it was not required for it to be fun—but the addition of online multiplayer firmly established that this was a must-have for the platform. Yes, building courses is still great, playing a seemingly infinite amount of user-made courses is great, and yeah, Nintendo even included about 100 of their own courses in a single player "story" mode this time—but it all pales in comparison to competitive, multiplayer Mario. I've referred to the mechanics of 2D Mario as a language one might learn to speak, and it's one that I'm personally fluent in; but now, for the first time, it's a language that I can converse in online with my friends.

We devoted an entire podcast episode to Fire Emblem: Three Houses for a good reason—for the first time, at least in the US, this entry in the Fire Emblem series can comfortably stand toe-to-toe with any other major first-party Nintendo release. Having been largely relegated to handhelds in the past, this entry finally matches the scope, production value, and polish of any other "big budget" Nintendo game on the Switch. Combat remains mostly unchanged, which is fine, but there are two main things that set this entry apart compared to its past. First, the setting of the school, with your character as the teacher, sets up a monthly calendar-based schedule of training students and then taking them onto the battlefield. This loop is addictive and lends itself to the second major change—the cast, namely your students, are some of the most fully fleshed out (and therefore the most agonizing to protect from permadeath) characters the series has ever seen—and this is a series with a tremendous backlog of great characters. I cared about every student in my class and was deeply invested in getting the best out of each and every one of them. That there are four story paths amongst the titular three houses adds a ton of replay value, and when all was said and done this missed out on GOTY by a hair.

Vanilla Dragon Quest XI came out on PS4 last year, but true heads knew that this was the version to wait for. The story goes that Satoru Iwata, before the Switch was even named the Switch, personally reached out to Square Enix and made one final request before passing away—release this game on our new console. For me, Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior) and Nintendo go hand in hand, and this "S: Definitive Edition" was well worth the wait. The story is typical Dragon Quest—all charm and polish, not a ton of surprise or deep substance—but this Switch edition added to the base story, introduced a new mode where you visit each of the ten locales from previous games in the series, updated the much-maligned music from the original to a new fully-orchestrated score, and imported the Japanese-only 3DS's "2D Mode." It's a lot of game in one package, and I'm still working my way through the back-half of the game, but every hour I continue to spend with this game is a treat. You won’t play a more charming game all year.

Any of these, in a different year, could have been my GOTY.

GOTY

Super Smash Bros Ultimate

Alright let's get this out of the way first—technically this game came out in December of last year. It even made my "Essential" list last year. Here's what I said about it: "SSB Ultimate came on late but hit hard—I played it with friends every night for weeks after release. This one is gonna last well into next year and beyond."

Well that was an understatement. Well over 250 in-game hours later, no other game defined my 2019 like Super Smash Bros Ultimate. I continued playing this game online with friends nearly every night for roughly the first half of the year, and it's still not really out of the rotation. Part of that is due to just how much *game* is here—we mostly played it competitively, which is to say, no items, 1v1, etc. But there's also a robust single player mode, in-game events, balancing options that allow me to play it relatively competitively with my 8 year old, and of course we always have the option to turn everything on and go full-on party mode. Then throw in a new character roughly every other month (s/o to Hero and Terry, two of my favorites to play currently) plus a robust online community generating dialogue, gifs, and highlight videos on a nearly daily basis (s/o YEET Smash), and you have the recipe for a game that's going to hold my attention for the foreseeable future.

I could go on and on about the fan service, or about the impossibly good job Sakurai and co are doing balancing 80ish characters (plus item interactions), or about Nintendo finally starting to get serious about supporting a tournament community, but ultimately the decision to rank this one first comes down to this—2019 was a difficult year for me personally, but when I look back on it, the absolute fondest memories I have of playing games this year were playing Smash with my friends. It was true of Bloodborne in 2015, and it's true of Smash now.

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clubofinfo · 6 years

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Expert: The dearth of anarchist theory in print is sometimes pretty embarrassing. Our discourse is rich, but it can also be maddeningly ephemeral and inaccessible, lost to zines and interpersonal conversations. While illegibility can be a defensive weapon against outside authorities, it also frequently reinforces power relations by increasing barriers to access. It’s painful to have to tell another bright-eyed and bushy-tailed new anarchist looking to read up on a subject that “You just have to talk to people or read around and fill in the gaps.” Anarchism is sadly filled to the brim with things we expect people to know but never write down. “Mainstream opinion” in anarchist circles is thus often something spread across piles of texts written by non-anarchists that we synthesize and share with our close friends, never bothering to write down a summary. Anthropology, gender studies, economics, at al… we remain parasitical on other discursive worlds, hashing out a shared analysis between close comrades but rarely providing a 101. Peter Gelderloos has long been one of the rare exceptions — an anarchist committed to making anarchist theory accessible. It helps that Gelderloos is about as plumb-line of an anarchist as one could conceive, unassailably at the dead center of our myriad internal political spectra — or at least the center of mass. “Anarchy Works” and “How Nonviolence Protects The State” were agreeable and unoffensive to not only the mainstream of anarchism but to partisans of nearly every stripe. Within our movement Gelderloos is probably the least controversial anarchist writer alive — a truly stupendous accomplishment. Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation is a great book, the sort of text that should be part of the obligatory canon for all anarchists. An accessible summary and nuanced analysis of why and how states form. I’m delighted we now have it on hand. Gelderloos sets out a clear and potent anarchist analysis that knocks down primitivist, Marxist, and Hobbesian accounts while shellacking the academics that are too conservative to openly recognize what’s in front of their face. Gelderloos’ central thesis is that while there are many paths and pressures societies face, we nevertheless have some agency in how we navigate them. No technology, no material condition, no social condition is a prison sentence. It is our common values that play a huge role in determining whether a society can handle something like agriculture, cities, writing, or markets without turning to tyranny. The fight between authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism is ultimately a fight over values far more than it is a fight over particular conditions or tools. As in other regions we see a relatively stable stateless period persisting for a long time after the development of agriculture and sedentary living, and a relatively rapid increase in hierarchy stratification, and the centralization of power once an organized religious cult perfects the ability to shape the spiritual beliefs of the broader society. (p. 214) Unfortunately, Worshiping Power has two1 minor problems: It focuses in on a definition of “states” far more pertinent to academics than anarchists, and at the same time, Gelderloos’ analysis leans into a hostility towards “worldview shapers” that builds some worrying momentum. Gelderloos is clearly chafing under academia and so he yin-yangs between a deferential, if tense, respect for it and outright heads-on-pikes insurrection against it. The choice to stick with an established academic frame around “states” in technical and overly specific terms is useful in that it allows a more fine-grained analysis of the various hierarchical social systems at play in the last ten thousand years. But it’s also a deeply dangerous choice because it risks minimizing the full extent of what anarchists oppose. It’s clearly not enough to avoid having a centralized administrative hierarchy with at least three tiers of organization. Anarchists oppose rulership wholesale — from tribal chiefs to diffuse games of social capital and interpersonal abuse. There’s a noxious history of anthropologists collapsing ‘anarchism’ down to whatever mere anti-statism is necessary to valorize the society they’re currently taken with. This sort of shit is how we get people venerating warrior honor societies with literal slaves and calling them “anarchist” or thinking they’re anywhere near the vicinity of a liberated world. Gelderloos himself obviously knows better, but I’m not sure his few caveats are strong enough to correct errant readers. This focus on a very specific subsection of power structures is interesting but it leads to a conclusion a little far afield from anarchism’s concerns. What’s the most critical element to starting multi-tier coercive administrations? The creation of values that enable universal centralization. This is certainly true as far as it goes, but the more interesting and anarchist question is what leads to domination at all, in any flavor or organizational structure? Such is of course less a question for anthropology or sociology and more one of game theory, philosophy, psychology, and the like. The danger with something as obtuse and macroscopic as the anthropological lens is that you’ll start viewing things in similarly sweeping terms. What falls out of Gelderloos’ account is a enmity towards elite worldview-shapers that he repeatedly identifies in personal asides with scientists and modern academics. It’s a compelling argument and certainly no anarchist worth their salt would defend elites of any sort. Further — ever intellectually honest — Gelderloos does note the potential for such figures to be potent sources of anti-authoritarian rebellion. Still this framing leads Gelderloos to paint a split between ‘pragmatic’ and ‘non-pragmatic,’ that he spins as the critical difference between the sort of invention, writing, engineering, trade, etc, that can be perfectly harmless and the sort that ends up feeding the state. This is a flavor of anarchist morality that would collapse all our values down to merely resistance to social authority. Casting the inquiry and creativity that underpins science and technology as only tolerable if they are made merely instrumental. Learning is only worthwhile if it helps us fight, to live healthy, to live free. (p. 235) What a terribly impoverished notion of “living free”! Surely inquiry and creativity are themselves part and parcel of freedom, not merely servants or tools. Is freedom just some passive state of being we’re trying to retreat to? Or is it an active, striving, reaching sort of thing, that necessarily includes learning for its own sake, exploring for its own sake, dreaming for its own sake? To say that I recoil in horror at the prescription that science be enslaved to serve some kind of social order would be a severe understatement. A world where we must interrogate every flight of investigation and demand to know its pragmatic utility for the social order is a world far away from any notion of freedom I value. If anything I’d say the goal of anarchy is to finally unleash science from the shackles that social hierarchies have kept it in. Don’t hate academics for being “unpractical,” hate the system that gives them that privilege and denies the rest of us it. While it’s certainly an occasionally valid lens to look at “science” from the outside, in sociological terms as an existing institution, community, and practice situated in a specific social and historical context, it’s at least as valid to view “science” from the inside, in cognitive or philosophical terms as an approach to pattern-finding, as diligent root-seeking or radicalism, an approach that is present in all conscious minds — yes even isolated ones — and certainly in all societies. “Science as radicalism” obviously in no remote way obliges a priest class. It can lead to universalizing values or perspectives, but when rooted in the people, emergent from the ground up rather than from an elite, actual truths ultimately aren’t easily manipulable to serve power, instead they provide greater agency to all. Our capacity for choice is dependent upon the accuracy of our maps of reality. And freedom would certainly be meaningless without the inclination to grapple with, to feel out, connect, and engage with our environments. Yet it must be said that at points Gelderloos talks in ways that conflict with said enshrinement of pragmatism and instrumentalism, for instance characterizing a critical stage in the devolution to statism with, “Authoritarian orders within the network would unite, since their logic favored the accumulation of power over the unimpeded search for truth, meaning, and ecstasy.” I couldn’t have put it better. This tension with his other framings is indicative of Worshiping Power’s greatest strength, its honest complexity. While I love rhetorically potent Gelderloos, and he certainly pokes his head out at points to call forth fire and brimstone, he is mostly at his best when he embraces nuance, tracing the complex and varied paths of state formation and resistance. Gelderloos absolutely eviscerates Marxist and primitivist claims about state formation by simply bringing to the fore the immense contingency and differences in the record. The only reasonable takeaway is that a society’s internal meta-structures of culture, religion, ethics, etc. guide them at least as much as material conditions. Honest nuance comprises a vicious denial of any sort of simplistic deterministic prescriptions. In particular Gelderloos is very honest about markets not obliging inequality, hierarchy or states: States can organize trade networks, but trade networks do not generate states. The Indus Valley civilization, one of the oldest in the world, is an interesting example. At its height (between 2600 and 1900 BCE), the civilization had a population of some five million people living in half a dozen cities — such as Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro — and over a thousand towns and villages. It made up a world system together with its trading partners, ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Of these, the Indus Valley civilization was the largest. and in contrast to the other two, it was probably stateless. No solid evidence has been found of kings, priests, armies, temples, or palaces. Some of the largest buildings in the urban centers were public baths; the urban planning, sewage, and hygiene systems were the best in the ancient world; and the relative equality of housing size suggests an egalitarian, non-stratified society. …the lack of military structures suggests that the rural population traded their surplus more or less voluntarily with the artisans of the towns and cities. (p. 142) Stateless societies also existed at the heart of one of the most intensive, high-value trade networks in world history, in the Banda islands of the Maluku archipelago. The islanders participated in the spice trade for centuries, occupying an essential productive niche, while preserving their statelessness. Social organization throughout the Maluku archipelago was localized and largely horizontal. (p. 144) The Cucuteni-Trypillian culture existed from 4800 to 3000 BCE in the area that is now western Ukraine, Moldova and eastern Romania. They practiced agriculture … invented the oldest known proto-writing system in the world, manufactured and traded. … Contrary to assumptions about the state being a more advanced form of political organization, the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture was stateless, egalitarian, peaceful and non-patriarchal. The Cretan civilization were in all probability a stateless people who organized an important trade network spanning the Mediterranean over more than a thousand years. They were a peaceful society with a minimum of defensive infrastructure and no record of involvement in offensive warfare. …there is no evidence of such rulers. The palaces served as warehouses, redistribution centers, collective housing for priestesses and administrators, archices and religious sites. … The Creten diet was too rich, too diversified, to suggest a hyper-exploited, enslaved lower class. … Nor is their evidence of a Cretan army or other mechanisms capable of imposing the sort of work-or-starve, blackmail economy so common in other city states. The very diversity of Cretan food production (spanning multicrop agriculture, apiculture, silvaculture, aquaculture, fishing, and hunting, a diversity that would be impossible for a weak state to surveil and control), paired with a lack of evidence of a police or military structure makes the proposal of a coerced or dependent peasant population ludicrous. In the worst case the merchant-priests controlling the palaces might have been able to impose an unfavorable exchange rate making it difficult or impossible for the peasants to aquire luxury goods, but the peasants would still have been more or less self-sufficient, autonomous, and healthy. The Cretan civilization did have a written language, at the time a common sign of state authority, although nearly all the decoded fragments of Linear B are simple trade records and lists of resources, with a few religious references thrown in. Universally, early states with written languages used the written record to preserve laws, chronicles, and accounts of the power and grandeur of their supreme leaders. In practice, the palace economy was probably a network of religious centers where farmers, artisans, and merchants bought their produce or their trade goods, sometimes in the spirit of a gift, an offering to the gods that would be redistributed, and sometimes in the spirit of exchange. Mask-wearing priestesses represented the gods in important ceremonies, anonymizing spiritual power rather than concentrating it in any individual or family. They also specialized in the occult knowledge, like math and writing, which allowed them to administer a large trade network. (p. 149) There are numerous other examples throughout Worshiping Power as Gelderloos drags to light just how systematic the bias in the historical record is towards states, and how good of reasons we have to assume all the holes in the map were anarchistic or at the very least stateless. Too often, historians and archaeologists fabricate cheap mysteries, “Why did this great civilization suddenly collapse?,” because they refuse to accept the obvious: that states are odious structures that their populations destroy whenever they get the opportunity, and sometimes even when they face impossible odds. Words cannot do justice to the relief one feels at finally having a book that makes this longstanding anarchist argument in direct terms and extensive examples. I hope that Worshiping Power‘s longest lasting contribution will be to open our eyes not just to the complex trajectories that power structures can take but to the immensity of anti-authoritarian currents and forces throughout history that resist and suppress them. This is the first major step in fleshing out and normalizing an anarchist narrative of world history where the giant gaping holes in the conventional histories are centered and given their rightful place as the real agents and heroes. Gelderloos tries his hardest for a certain academic equanimity throughout Worshiping Power but you can sense the white knuckling going on until the end when he can finally let loose the anarchist howl, we are still here. We have not disappeared. We are still here. …No matter what continent we are from, those who choose to align ourselves with an anti-authoritarian history can be proud: we are the ones who have killed kings. Worshiping Power is an excellent and potent reminder of the expanse of the possible. All the possible ways we can shoot ourselves in the foot and allow the rot of domination to spread, but also all the ways we can resist, all those that have, and all those that have succeeded at living freer than we can sometimes imagine. --- * Gelderloos does make one factual mistake or omission, he dates the earliest domesticated plant species to 10,500 years ago, but evidence in Palestine has revealed that humans domesticated first started farming grains 23,000 years ago. Who knows what else has been covered up, sunken around the edge of the Mediterranean? http://clubof.info/

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