#*Back in the USSR plays in the background*

[wisteriasymphony]

If Felix is a high energy incel commie, does that mean Kagami will eventually become a tankie? All the same armchair energy but cosplay too!

Considering the characters are 14-15 I'm surprised we haven't all assigned them extremist political ideologies, that's one of the main things kids those age do. Girl get off of your computer you have fencing lessons in an hour

[zahri-melitor]

Thinking more about Tom King; I do wonder how much of how he’s viewed on tumblr is a result of the following two facts:-

The majority of the DC comics fandom on tumblr does not have personal memories of 2001

The majority of the DC comics fandom on tumblr is not prepared to give government security or intelligence the time of day as having a necessary purpose

It sounds a bit ‘you don’t know what you’re missing’ but fundamentally I think part of the problem is that you’re (generally) too young to appreciate many of King’s fundamental storytelling elements, because you’re too young to remember or care about the topics he keeps going back to interrogate.

And this is something that comes up in conversations I have with friends who are school teachers and university lecturers all the time, because September 11 for the majority of their students has now moved from category 1 here to category 3:

Core ‘where were you’ memory (people born early 90s or before)

Foundation of their childhood status quo (mid 90s to mid 2000s; maybe as late as 2007-2008)

History (late 2000s onwards)

They’re the ones at the forefront of talking about this with their students, and it’s moved from ‘default background for undergraduates’ now into ‘history that has an effect on the present’. They’re now too young to have soaked in the exhaustingly omnipresent US patriotism of the culture of the 2000s. And so the reaction of current students as a cohort to things heavily based or reflective on this period is fundamentally different to someone who lived through it.

A similar, earlier comparison would be writers who frame everything through the lens of the Cold War as an analogy for their writing. I’m a category 2 for the fall of the USSR, and I grew up with that dividing line; there was a lot of media made in the 90s that still premised the Soviets as existing into the future (very early 90s stuff that hadn’t been fixed in time) or that frantically had had a word find-replace for “Soviet” to “Russian” but the general attitude hadn’t changed (good comics example here is go read any of KGBeast’s appearances around Knightfall in DC comics; they’re really struggling with what to do about him). There was also even more media that still wanted to hammer Cold War themes but invented new fake countries to overlay it onto and to discuss as being the background of proxy wars, so they had the out of ‘this isn’t a real place, it’s Markovia/Kaznia/Pan Balgravia or Qurac/Kahndaq/Bialya’.

Many of these got further use for decades up until the present, partly because Central Asia has remained a hotspot for conflict for decades as a result of the fallout of the Cold War proxy conflicts, and partly because shoving extra expy states into Europe means you can play with the politics without having to be exact.

Because to me, this is what I see King doing to the present. And why it sticks out is that most people aren’t harping on the themes constantly anymore like they were 20 years ago. But for King it’s a well he keeps going back to because he was so heavily involved in it and didn’t really get the chance to start processing it until he left the CIA around 2010 and started working his feelings out in stories.

Because yes, at this point he’s beating a dead horse, but there are also incredibly successful writers of military thrillers who are STILL writing veiled ‘it’s the Soviets’ or ‘it’s the Arab Terrorists’ plots and selling. There’s clearly an audience for it. The audience just is an aging one.

And as someone who does remember the period, some of his work is extremely ‘oh god I remember’ and some of it is genuinely well thought through analogies interrogating the topic. Media and storytelling are frequently in conversation with the world and with themes the writer cares about. And I think we can all tell how large some of this loomed in Tom King’s life.

[beifong-brainrot]

honestly.... kuvira has irl parallels w putin.

I mean yeah I've compared her to Stalin and WOW IT'S ALMOST LIKE RUSSIA HAS BEEN DOING THE SAME DAMN THING FOR DECADES. Like seriously it's starting to feel like fucking groundhog day man.

And look, I don't want to be the asshole who shames people for liking Kuvira. I like a lot of aspects of Kuvira's character.

She's hot, she's charismaric (mainly due to Zelda Williams but yk) and she's a relatively compelling character. People are allowed to enjoy a villain character without endorsing the shitty stuff those villains do.

But there is a distinction between Kuvira the character and what Kuvira represents/the thinly veiled real life ideologies behind her.

Kuvira as a character is interesting, you know? Fun to talk about. Someone who was abandoned at a young age and proceeded to self sabotage her relationships and became a control freak who fears vulnerability due to that. Pretty standard villain shit. But fun, and there's a little more to her.

Kuvira as a representant of real world ideologies carries much more weight. People catch onto her Nazi imagery, but the Soviet stuff isn't as obvious. A lot of western europeans and Americans, the main demographic of Avatar won't immediately clock those influences behind Kuvira.

To those countries, Soviet occupation of Eastern Bloc countries was just the cold war, the red scare, a looming threat that could cause harm, but was at least not capable of influencing their lives too intimately.

While the countries that were under the power of the Soviet Union still have that memory fresh in their minds. Hell, my mom grew up in the PRL, my uncle was a part of Solidarność. People remember that shit it wasn't that long ago. Reading literature from not that long ago like A Minor Apocalypse or Madame feels surreal. When I read memoirs or just heard stories from my older relatives, I could taste the atmosphere of bleakness, distrust and confusion.

So maybe I'm just more primed to notice how Kuvira's actions play into patterns of Russian aggression. Maybe when Western European and American viewers are more willing to give Kuvira the benefit of the doubt, or see merit in her actions, I'm more willing to look at her through the lenses of the ideologies she represents.

Throughout most of the show, we don't actually see that much of Kuvira as a character. She's more a silent, looming villain in the background and due to her more calculated demeanour, we don't get a lot of insight into her personality until the last two episodes. So maybe it's easier to look at her more as a representant of dangerous ideologies than as a character.

Mind you, I don't think Bryke really thought through the implications of giving Kuvira the aesthetic and ideology they did. Nazis and to a lesser extent, Soviets, have become very much shorthand for "bad guy" in fiction. If they had thought this through, I wanna at least hope that they would have handled Kuvira more carefully.

Because by giving Kuvira a sense of moral ambiguity and the clumsy handling of her character, you have dumbasses ob reddit defending her. I'm genuinely shocked at the amount of Kuvira apologism in the tlok fandom.

But that goes back to the Western Bloc viewers and creators not really being familiar with the history Kuvira embodies. Not fully imagining the perspective of for example the people under her rule. Which is a perspective I am desperate to see, filling out the blanks with the history Kuvira draws from.

Most of B4 is seen through that 'outside perspective' of Korra and Republic City. Not unlike how a huge part of the narrative around the cold war and Ussr is the Cold War and how it affected Western Bloc countries.

Once again, the only characters who are actually part of the Earth Kingdom and have some experience with Kuvira's occupation are the Beifongs. But they are dismissed as biased, irrational, agressive or pushed aside when our heroic USA inserts get the spotilight. The fandom despises Suyin, derides Zaofu for not being the perfect victims. A story we see more and more of nowadays.

Suyin is depicted as "white woman liberalism" depsite being a leader of a community based, anti monarchist city which seems to allow it's citizens to flourish as artists and scientists and also refusing to seize power over a vulnerable country to hand it over to a monarchy she didn't support and then wanting to kill a fascist? But "ooooh Zaofu is culty and Suyin is a bit of a hypocrite" so I guess she's worse then the fucking Hitler Stalin lovechild that threatened to lay seige to her peaceful city.

The Kuvira apologism in the fandom does sometimes give me similar vibes to Putin dickriding from Conservative americans tbh. At least that explains it.

The reason I'm so unsettled by so many people being blind to the ideologies and history Kuvira represents is because that ideology is not dead. It seems like a lot of westerners don't really seem to care about it anymore, but Russia is still commiting a genocide in Ukraine. Hell, it seems like people from countries that aren't close to the conflict kinda forgot that was still a thing. People are fucking dying, homes are being destroyed. And you think Russia will stop at decimating Ukraine? They're already hiring arsonists to cause chaos in Poland, they're not gonna stop.

These ideologies still cause pain and death today. They're not for cheap villains who can be watered down and excused by a sad backstory. And they're certainly not to he excused and supported by edgy fans who somehow didn't realise that the previous show was violently anti fascist.

Love Kuvira as a character, enjoy her, her storylines, her personality. But for the love of God, acknowledge what she represents, who she represents and that it's bad.

Whew that kinda... got a little heavy. I apologise for the rant, I'm just very frustrated. By how Kuvira is woobified and exhonorated hy both fanon and canon, and by current events in the Ukraine and Poland and the rest of the ex-second world countries and the seeming apathy of the rest of the wider world.

Quick note: The terminology in this post may not be fully up to date, since a lot of terms have went out of usage and lost their meaning.

[gean-grey-blog]

Touching Evil Episode 9 commentary

Creegan in a suit looks so weird

Shooting the past via intrusive thoughts

Haha I had one of those soccer practice things

Is that the kid who played young Sage from Dark Angel in the episode Haven? Well it's not credited for Dark Angel apparently so we'll never know

Still in a suit and his hair is brushed and he's being weirdly focused

Methinks Creegan is gonna be a little not okay later in this episode you can only bottle up so much

LMAO he doesn't like his shoes and they're slippy

Baby Bradley Cooper is just like “bro is really out of it and idk what to do”

Oh this is not the time for Creegan for this case now is it

Still calms her down though

Fixing his tie even

even totally out of it with a hella triggering case he's still kind to the lady

“I'm fine. I shot the pool. But I'm fine. Tell them?” Branca: sir, what? this is the least fine behavior I've ever seen and you regularly take off your pants in public

Awww Branca getting him to talk at least a little

Creegan just watching the way the lady looks at the pictures, looks at the art, is horrified by the blood on the wall and being like “yeah we know what happened now”

Oh hello multilingual first gen immigrant Branca

Creegan's little head tilt is so cute

Taking his suit jacket off for the first time this episode while talking to the mom who can't be with her son who has been through hell without him and fighting every day to see him

Jacket back on next scene and back to sounding nothing like himself

Then it's off again when he's dropping her at the motel. This is either really great costume signaling or at some point she's grabbing the gun out of his shoulder holster

Nope this is a character thing she just helped take his coat off

Awww they're sweet together. like professionally appropriate but no but situationally just being two people who need connection in a moment

Also is that the background musical line for Running Up That Hill

Awwwwww Branca like no this is so sketch and there is a child at risk

“I shot the pool you wanna be next?”

And suit jacket off again to fight awww and then just losing his shit

This episode goes so real though. One of my friends as a kid was suicidal by 14 bc of being human trafficked from a former ussr country and adopted by a fairly wealthy US couple

Branca and Creegan broke the exact same rules this episode

Awwwwwwwwww Creegan just losing it holding the pool

Bradley Cooper you're not very good at this whole supporting your partners thing are you?

Oh nvm you were just giving him his moment of finally letting shit out and then taking him for support time

And he's back in his normal clothes

[weirdestbooks]

Treasures of an Unknown Past (Wattpad | Ao3)

January 5, 1978

Hungary had never been allowed to experience much outside the Iron Curtain.

He tried, fighting for his freedom until he was forced back into line, and he tried to sneak away, to find things that his government would have hidden from him, to make him more like them—bitter and controlling and wholly unlikable.

Not that Hungary hadn't achieved the last thing all on his own.

Hungary was his government. He had to be, for he had failed his people too much to be a representative of them.

Perhaps that was why he was so confused about the present situation.

For one, it was a meeting with the United States of America, the enemy of his government, of his so-called father, the epitome of Capitalism. A meeting that Hungary would be doing without his government, for it had not been invited to come.

America wanted to make a point, with his return of the Holy Crown.

Hungary didn't know why that meant America wanted him there.

The Holy Crown was so important to his nation and his history, even if it had never been in Hungary's lands for as long as he had been alive, instead smuggled out to protect it from the Soviets, ending up in America's hands.

Hungary's government and USSR had always said that America would never give back the Holy Crown and it's accompanying parts, telling Hungary that he should be angry at America about it, even as they claimed to hate the bourgeoisie, and religion, and everything that crown had stood for in his father's nation.

Hungary was never mad. He knew it was safer away from his nation, even as it burned to not have any trace of his father, to have anything that he must have held, with how Budapest had been razed and how the communists destroyed anything his father once had.

But now…it wasn't just any artifact, but the artifact, to be passed onto the Hungarian people, as America and his President Carter believed that Hungary had given his people enough right to be worthy of having it again.

And yet, Hungary was invited, when America's requests had made it clear it was to be given to the people—not the government, and that the government was not to be involved.

Hungary didn't question it, keeping his mouth shut as his government warned him of America's lies, that just because he was doing this for Hungary did not mean that he could be trusted, that it didn't excuse America's war crimes, nor his empire.

Hungary kept his head down, mouth shut, and nodded.

Submission didn't come easily to him, but Hungary knew that if he looked too rough a shape for America's arrival, America might argue that human rights were not being supported and that they could not return the crown.

Hungary's people deserved this. He wouldn't ruin it for them.

Hungary clenched his red hands, stained with the blood of his people.

Hungary was waiting for the plane at Ferihegy, knowing the Holy Crown was arriving today, before it would ceremoniously be handed over tomorrow.

Hungary's breath caught in his throat as he saw the plane prepare to make its landing, something sharp and painful burning in his chest, and only years of practice kept his expression composed.

The plane landed and taxied until it was close to where Hungary and his delegation were.

The first person out of the plane was America, who examined the crowd before smiling at Hungary. Hungary didn't smile back, worried how his government, how the Soviet troops still in his land would take that.

America disembarked the plane, followed by members of his own delegation, and Hungary almost laughed at the absurdity of the decorations of America's flags and his own.

It felt unreal.

Then, Hungary saw it, the chest that must contain everything being taken off the plane, as the Rákóczi March played in the background. A ceremonial unit took it from the Americans and placed it in the transport car, which was also decorated with flags, as the military band began to play both the Hungarian and American national anthems.

Hungary wished that the USSR could have been there, just to see the man's expression at the treatment his enemy was getting from the man that he claimed as his son.

Hungary watched as the car drove away, knowing that it was heading to Parliament, where the official handover would occur tomorrow.

Hungary was pulled from his musings by a hand on his shoulder, and, turning around, he scolded himself for not being vigilant enough to have noticed the person approaching him.

"Hello, America," Hungary said, forcing down at surprise or nervousness in his voice.

"Hello, Hungary," America responded, not in English, as Hungary had expected, but in Hungary's own language.

No one ever let Hungary's language be the one to dictate things. It was too hard, too strange, not worth it to learn, a language without a proper family.

"I am happy to finally be returning these to you. They had been in our bullion vault. We had always hoped to see them restored to you. They were very important to your father. He would be overjoyed that you and your people have them back," America continued, as if he hadn't noticed the shock his words had caused Hungary.

No one ever told Hungary about his father. It was a topic that had been forbidden.

Nazi-sympathizer. Some whispered.

Fascist bourgeoisie. Others said.

Hungary had never heard anything about who his father was, just what he represented, what he had been in those final years of his life, an enemy who hated his people and had tried to kill them all for his own power. A man Hungary could not publicly call his father.

After all, why would he need to think about that long-dead personification when he had a father in the USSR?

Hungary tried his best to hide his curiosity. Just because his government had not been invited did not mean Hungary was not being watched.

Hungary was always being watched.

"I am just glad they were not destroyed. It would be hard to lose a founding piece of history," Hungary said, hoping his answer was neutral enough.

Hungary had been hiding his grief for a long time. This could not change that.

"It was an honor to protect them. I am glad your people thought I was worthy of the task and that they trusted me to keep them safe. Victor Covey, the chief conservator of the National Gallery, has compiled documents on the history and preservation of the artifacts for the museum, or whoever it is that you are planning on giving the artifacts to. That should help them know what needs to be done," America said, his voice soothing, the accent to his Hungarian familiar, as if he were speaking with the voices of all of Hungary's people that had fled to America's country.

"Thank you," Hungary said, unable to hide how genuine his gratitude was. America just smiled back at him.

"I should see you at the ceremony tomorrow?" America asked. Hungary nodded before he shifted slightly.

"I do not feel as if I belong among the people you have invited. The government should not be involved," Hungary said, knowing deep in his heart that it was true. They had stripped the Buda Castle and turned it into a red-marbled, brutalist palace of their own.

What would they do to the crown if they had it?

"They aren't. You're the people, are you not? You represent all those who can't come. I can't think of a better person to be there," America said. Hungary knew then that America could never understand, understand having your mind taken away when you disobeyed too much, understand being taught that when you felt your people's pain, it was for the best, because the government was good, and learning to hate yourself, because you would always fail them, no matter how hard your tried.

"Yes, I just do not want too many people to think the Holy Crown is being given to the government in any way, as I am always involved with them," Hungary explained, feeling it was as good of an answer as any, without straying into dangerous territory.

"Well, maybe it's time you are associated with something else," America said with a smile, as if he didn't realize the weight behind his words, before holding out a hand for Hungary to shake, "Thank you for hosting me."

"Thank you for watching after the Holy Crown," Hungary responded.

He knew his government was still firmly in power and firmly allied with the USSR.

But this was a change. An important one.

[vstridb]

HSHQTASK059: FAREWELL !

when did you join ? what made you join ? what do you remember from the plotlines that were current at the time ? where were you in life when you joined and where are you now ?

i joined in early (?) 2017. i had a lucky blue smith fc but that lasted for a hot minute and i ghosted LMAO. then i reapplied with astrid and as a bernadotte, i had sooo much fun <3 i don't remember ANYTHING, i'm sorry i just don't. i think irenton was still in its slowburn era. i was still in high school, about to graduate. now i have a master's degree and i'm working, crazy stuff!!!!

which characters have you written over the years ?

astrid, uriah 1.0 and 2.0, vitaliya, verona, francisco / francois, arvid, a dudley o'shaughnessy fc ( for 1 sec before ghosting )... i think that's everyone ???

what is your favourite plotline that you've been part of ?

i had a lot of fun writing chimei. i think it was the height of hshq for me so it really sticks out to me. idk if the bernadottes as a whole count as a plotline ? i'm such a sucker for them. the NUMBER one plotline though would be the russian plots vitya was part of. i think it's a sign of a good plotline when a 60-year-old character's threads are interesting and have me logging in. i don't want to name every plot but i have to give a mention to italy's stuff. i picked up verona because there was a huge hole in the hshqverse since italy had no rep, and i figured i'd survive without any nephews and nieces but then you all came back and i was so overjoyed <3 verona's story became so much more fulfilling for me to write.

what about other people's plotlines ?

i know i was kinda involved but watching the basel thing evolve was super entertaining. i liked the whole thing from beginning to the end. as for smaller plots, i think the spanish fires fucking up first zhergi and the farnauld has to be my fave thing. it was so wild and i LOVED the fact that a 3 year-old-plotline still had an effect on current threads and in such a surprising way <3

who is your favourite character from the ones you've played ? why ? what made you love them ? what made them so fun to write ?

astrid.... of course it's astrid. she was my age so i mirrored a lot of problems from my own life and made them hers. obviously they were exaggerated problems and shit but through astrid i got to write about emotions that were current to me. it was therapeutic and fun. i've loved all of my characters a lot though. vitya was so special because she was a character like no other. i loved creating her backstory and i had so much fun working on her psyche. a former USSR with a modest background, now an extremely influential duchess ? i loveeed it. it was so different and writing her inner monologue was so satisfying.

if you could relive a plotline, which would it be ?

i think the beginning of chimei. there was something about it. it moved naturally. i really miss the time.

is there a plotline that you'd edit now if you could ?

i'd speed up ilstrid so that we would actually get to write them getting together. i'll take the blame for ilstrid never really taking off lmao sry about that evy. i also wanna say that ilstrid is one of my fave ships because it was so easy and not-at-all-stressful to develop. it may have not reached its end, we didn't get a satisfying ending but i think it was so much fun to portray that kind of a love story. i wasn't a fan of friends-to-lovers trope but ilstrid is still one of my fave ships <3

what's a plotline you wish you would have been able to finish before closing or just write more of ?

ilstrid akfndsjkgbsnjg but also i think i would have enjoyed writing verona as the grand duchess of austria too. i do regret never applying for an austrian. it was something that "i'll do later" and never did it. it was partly because i didn't have a plotline for an austrian and couldn't naturally come up with one :(

what is your favourite ooc memory ?

when we brought the zulus. i don't think anything topped it. we made some really fucking shady and weird online chatroom to figure out the zulus' backstory and it was so much fun. i hadn't been that excited for something in a long time!!! and i think i'll have to mention all of the late nights of chatting with people. it was a big part of the hshq experience. we were all actual friends and i loved joking around. and i'll say it here now because this is so embarrassing but honestly i've always felt so appreciated when people have used the term naomi'd. it felt like a nickname fkjsgnjkgn and i'm glad i never upset anyone with my pushiness skdgngj

where can others find you if they want to get in touch ?

i'll disappear, i'm sorry but i think it's inevitable. i've enjoyed the chats and like i said i've loved to joke around but i'm not a person who really does online relationships. hshq was an exception and it'll stay as one. if you guys ever start writing again, pls im me or @ me. if it's meant to be, i'll stumble upon the message at the right time <3

what else would you like to say ?

oh dear ! i have so much to say but not enough words to express my feelings ! seven years is a long time to be part of something and i never expected to remain here for such a long time. i've been allowed to write and plot and create complex and inspiring plotlines with you, and i think it's been exceptional. hshq was something else among rpgs. anyone who has been part of this, has to agree. i think it says a lot that even though the dash died, on the very day of closing, six or so members did the final task. and i have a feeling we'll see many 058 and 059 tasks this week. i've laughed a lot with you, i've stayed up until the little hours just to be part of the experience, i've cried at your writing... i think honesty hours will be the epitome of joy for me. they always made me laugh and the energy was unbeatable. hshq has given me so much joy and has taught me a lot ! about people, about writing, about the english language and photoshop !!! you guys have no fucking idea how grateful i am of this experience and i wish i could relive it --- and that's a really good sign. sometimes we are glad to reach the ending but i don't think that applies here. this spring will feel different and this week will feel horrible. i have to admit, i'm not exactly ready for this and it feels so silly because it was 'just rp' aksfdbjdsgs thank you everyone for these years, the late nights and the amazing experience <3

[pandabibble]

Let me describe to you a wonderfully well made videosgame to you: Workers & Resources: soviet republic

It is a more in-depth city builder game than Cities: Skyline. It is a more in-depth transport/train network game than various transport tycoon equivalents that are trying to specifically handle just that one type of management game. It is a better conveyor-belt game than Factorio. It is even, if you fuck up playing it in a very specific way, potentially a better frostpunk 2 than the frostpunk 2 we got. It has this amazingly interest twist on the usual money mechanic in any of these games too: you can buy any industrial resources or the material needed to build buildings and roads and stuff using rubles or dollars, however you don't get that money back via taxing your people, because those are your ruble/dollar currency *reserves*, which you can only get back by exporting goods to NATO or USSR custom houses at the edge of the map... so there's a nice intrinsic critique of the soft imperialism of the global trade network as you get more and more workers working and dying to slowly exploit more and more of your republic's natural resources only to then stick them on a train or truck and give them to the imperial cores.

It also unfortunately uses AI images for some art assets, a genuinely tiny amount of art assets! but still it undermines all the amazing effort that has gone into making an amazing game.

How small an amount of art assets is AI? So you know in simcity there was that panel of like advisers that also had the taxation rates for various bits of city infrastructure. And next to the various advisors representing various infrastructure sectors, there's was little portrait icons.

In fact, is there any image more iconic from Sim City 2000, the GOAT, the city management genre definer, than this one:

Imagine if that little portrait image was this:

There is maybe 20 images like this in the game, which on a modern monitor and resolution are quite tiny... they're still, even when shrunk down, notably AI looking; that weird combination of too much detail and yet no attention to detail regarding lighting or background objects is noticeable even at that scale if you look at them for more than a second... but most people won't because the context they're popping up in is that next to them is some fairly complex text trying to explain some sub-sub-sub-mechanic of an incredibly complex game.

And that invisibility is a recurring thing: It is not a game that declares it uses AI assets on steam because it came out in Early Access before that ruling and thus has been grandfathered in to not have to make that declaration, so consumers who would otherwise pass over it entirely because they have a strong stance against AI use are just tricked and not able to make that decision for themselves.

It is insidious, and it's frustrating because it is such a small thing: the devs could have found some old suits, a few bad wigs and given themselves some breznev eyebrows by taping small ferrets to their forehead, and then taken photos of that and pasted themselves onto some public domain pictures of old soviet republic infrastructure or a blackboard or whatever and it'd have been charming and a nice additional fun touch... but instead it's this annoyance.

then to make matters worse, I go looking to see if the team does make some declaration of the AI use (not in the in-game credits btw as far as I could see - there's mention of stock image companies so it might be hidden cheekily behind that, but also the loading screens have old stock images of soviet era warsaw pact cities) and find a steam thread and a reddit thread, and these both had the same weird AI bros show up to be like "what does it matter why don't you mod it out yourself it's no big deal AI is the future AI will replace all artists aren't you anti-worker because you want the devs to spend time on something other than the game's core feature" and I do wonder how much less stubborn I'd be about this if I didn't trip over these repetive arguments that miss the point that... the images look shit, there's better ways to do this and it is not unreasonable to demand your chef doesn't shit in your food and "it's only a small turd" and "isn't it better the chef spends his time making food in the kitchen instead of going to the toilet to take shits" or "why don't you just remove the turd from the food yourself and go on eating it" are not good arguments.

So at the moment, I'd advise pirating it until there's some news about them removing the AI shit if you're interested in a replacement for factorio or something that can run on your machine without causing it to melt down like city skylines 2 will.

[cyberbenb]

Young, Ukrainian, and black – a woman working out her identity in wartime

Editor’s Note from Tim: Every single issue of The Counteroffensive starts with a story about a person experiencing the news. We believe that empathy and autocracy are incompatible, which is why we are bringing a human-centered perspective to what’s happening in the war. Subscribe free or paid if you agree with our methods!

In this vein, we are so proud to feature our friend Terrell’s story today. We are able to provide it to our readers free because of our paid subscribers. Thank you!

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Alice Zuravel loves being Black, but  as a young child her little Afro gave her the fits. 

Born in 1995, Ukraine was four years removed from the fall of the USSR and hair care products designed for Black girls hadn’t made their way to her native Kharkiv. 

Zuravel’s mom did the best she could to style it, but the results were always terrible. 

“This experience with my hair was the main reason I didn’t identify myself as absolutely Ukrainian,” she told me on a video call from New York, where she is conducting research on Ukrainian diasporas. “I wasn't white and I wanted to be white and wanted to have straight hair like everyone around me.” 

A portrait of Alice Zuravel.

Zuravel doesn’t recall any major dust ups with racism during her school years, but says not having her African father around during her teenage years made it tough to navigate her identity. 

It took years of self-discovery to appreciate that she was unique. 

It was around the age of 15 that she started feeling good about being Black, she said. 

She started reading the works of Black American civil rights figures like Frederick Douglass who gave her historical insights into the power of Black leadership and self-pride. And music played, perhaps, the most critical positive reinforcement when she was unsure of how to view the Black child staring back at her in the mirror.

“Hip hop helped me to survive these periods," Zuravel told me. “That's why my time was better because it helped me reflect a lot about my own identification.” 

From that point on, the discomfort around being a Black kid passed.

Zuravel, 28, is now on a personal journey to better understand her Blackness and how that fits with a multicultural Ukraine that centers on its own history, instead of the Moscow-centric narrative that has worked for centuries to erase Ukrainian identity. 

The war really made Ukrainians rethink their connections to Russia. In the east, where Zuravel was born, Russian was the dominant language. Now, many Ukrainians are resurrecting their Ukrainian. Traditional Ukrainian folk attire known as vyshyvanka are worn now more than ever. The nation is undergoing something of a cultural renaissance that Zuravel is exploring in her own unique way.

Zuravel founded Tozhsamist last year, a social initiative that features Ukrainians telling their stories about their culture and decouple it from Kremlin disinformation campaigns. Tired of headlines in Russian propaganda accusing Ukraine of being racist, the initiative gives a platform to Ukrainians who can tell their own truth about the war and life here in general.

Of course, Africans experienced racism fleeing the war last year and, yes, there is racism in Ukraine. What bothered her then and now is that Russia has long controlled the narrative of what Ukraine is. 

So she started interviewing Ukrainians of Korean, Crimean Tatar and other ethnic backgrounds and posting the stories on the initiative’s website. In a matter of a year and a half, Zuravel went from being an unwilling subject of Russian disinformation to becoming a storyteller of her national heritage. 

A screenshot of the Tozhsamist website.

A lot of Ukrainians began revisiting their relationship with Russia after the 2014 invasion, but many will tell you it was the second, full-scale invasion in 2022 that made them realize Russians weren’t their brothers and that their bond was a product of colonialism. 

Usually, when colonialism is discussed, especially in the West, it features Europe or the U.S. targeting people of color, namely the Global South or the Middle East. People struggle to fathom Russians colonizing Urkainians because they are “white.” 

“We had to understand that same-[race] colonialism is different (from white on Black colonialism), but produces the same harmful results for people and future generations who want peace,” Zuravel said. “I didn't understand back then because it was from my childhood when I was a Russian speaker.”

Essentially, to be friends with Russia was to erase anything Ukrainian. That is the power of colonialism and its impact on her and many Ukrainians' lives, she said.

Ukrainians have had their language and culture suppressed by the Russian Empire, the U.S.S.R. that followed it and currently by the Russian Federation in occupied territories. As a child Zuravel remembers not learning much about Ukrainian culture in school. Russian literature and language were the primary courses of instruction, and anything Ukrainian felt like an elective.  

People are seen outside the cordoned off area around the remains of a shell in Kyiv on February 24, 2022, the day the full-scale invasion began. (Photo by Sergei Supinsky / AFP) (Photo by SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images)

The 2022 invasion compelled many Ukrainians to reclaim their story and share it with the world. 

That is why she is visiting New York City: to speak to Ukrainians there about their identity and how they feel as U.S. citizens of a Ukrainian background. Her month of being in the city also provided her an opportunity to speak with Black Americans about Ukraine.

When she returns to Ukraine in August, she will come with an even greater appreciation of her Blackness and a global understanding of what it means to be Ukrainian. 

Most importantly, her ambassadorial sojourn will have shown some in the U.S. that a Ukrainian can look like Rihanna and speak the language of Taras Shevchenko, the legendary Ukrainian poet. 

“I can record thousands of videos of people of color in Ukraine who were born there, who came to work or for study and are happy,” Zuravel said. “I want people to know that Ukraine is just a simple country with simple people who just want to live and be happy. I won’t want people to have the wrong opinions about my home, my country.” 

Russia wanted to crush Zuravel’s Ukraine and anything that it produced. 

But, under pressure, it produced a diamond. 

And now, she, in all of her Ukrainian Black Girl Magic, is shining.  

Terrell Jermaine Starr is the host and founder of the Black Diplomats Podcast, where he discusses mostly Ukraine and Palestine. You can find him on Twitter and IG @terrelljstarr. 

The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Good morning to readers; Kyiv remains in Ukrainian hands. 

We hope no one was planning a Crimean trip anytime soon… the now-confirmed Ukrainian strike on the Kerch Bridge by naval drones has caused havoc for Russian traffic going between Russian territory and occupied Crimea. 

A picture taken on July 17, 2023 shows a Russian warship sailing near the Kerch bridge, linking the Russian mainland to Crimea, following an attack claimed by Ukrainian forces. (Photo by STRINGER/AFP via Getty Images)

Seemingly in response to this, and noticeably after the Russians pulled out of the Black Sea Grain Deal, Russia attacked the Ukrainian port town of Odesa for the second night in a row. The attacks were more aggressive than usual – Russia seemed to be sending a message about continuing grain exports without their consent. The deal was a project brokered by the United Nations and Turkey to allow the safe export of grain through the Black Sea. 

While Russia is busy repairing the Kerch Bridge for the second time (latest reports say it is likely driveable already), Ukrainian forces are continuing a grueling offensive against firmly entrenched Russian forces in the east. 

"We'd like to get very fast results, but in reality it's practically impossible," said Ukrainian General Oleksandr Syrskyi, the man who led the defense of Kyiv and the Kharkiv offensive. He is now responsible for pushing the remaining Russian forces out. 

The east of the country is as heavily mined as parts of the south, he said. The Russians have had months to mine practically every field, and build countless defensive strongholds. Despite the firmly entrenched Russians, he believes the strength and high morale of Ukrainian forces will see the country through. 

This is in stark contrast to the state of the current Russian command, which is going through a crisis of confidence. The chaos of the Wagner mutiny has been compounded by a reshuffling of commanders at a very high level in the Russian military.

Just a few days ago another Russian brigade commander was removed from his post, bringing the known total to 13 for fired general staff.

Over the last week, the leaked audio of a Russian commander who was in charge of forces in the south has exposed tensions in Russian military leadership. In the audio, General Ivan Popov accused Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu of treason, pointing out the rising number of Russian casualties due to Ukrainian artillery fire. 

It seems the Russians are suffering far more losses than the Ukrainian side. In fact, as the Hudson Institute reports, Ukraine has lost just one howitzer weapon for every four that Russia has lost. The think tank's Can Kasapoğlu writes that "a decisive Ukrainian victory might lead to a large-scale military mutiny in the Russian Federation."

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REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK:

Hi everyone, Terrell here! I first arrived in Ukraine in the summer of 2008 while I was completing a graduate school language requirement in Tbilisi — the very same summer Russia invaded Georgia. 

So this isn’t my first Russian invasion!

During my first trip to Georgia, in 2008, with my Georgian language teacher during a cooking and language lesson. 

I was here to see if Ukraine would be a good place to study under a Fulbright grant. I was curious about the history of Black people who arrived here mostly through Soviet scholarships starting from the 1930s through the 1980s. 

Being a Black person myself, I was fascinated with the stories of Langston Hughes and other Black Americans who traveled to Russia in the 1930s to seek refuge from U.S. racism. He and a group of Black Americans traveled to Moscow to produce a propaganda film “Black And White” that never saw the light of day.

I wanted to understand how Black people born in Ukraine felt about how their own Black experiences compared to the relative reprieve folks like Hughes were seeking. 

I got the Fulbright and that experience set me on a more-than-decade journey of understanding Blackness in Ukraine that helps me to write about the very complex and diverse lives of Black Ukrainians, a subject that is almost never discussed and is in its infancy when it comes to scholarly research. 

In Rynok Square, in Lviv, Ukraine this summer.

I have befriended many Black people, both of mixed Ukrainians and African heritage and those from the Motherland who come to work and study. They are all very different and have varying understandings of their identities. Because there is virtually no scholarly research on Black Ukrainians, journalists like me are left with piecing together their experience through reporting.  

The toughest thing about telling stories about people like Aline Zuravel and those of the many Black people I am currently working on is recognizing my own cultural experiences about Blackness and not allowing it to color the story of the Black Ukrainian I am interviewing.

Being Black gives me major insights and access that many of my subjects would never grant to a non-Black person, so that default gives me an edge as a storyteller. But, as a Black Canadian politician keenly told me some years ago, “You Black Americans take up a lot of oxygen.” 

Photo of Karolina Ashion in Dusseldorf, Germany. She is one of several Black Ukrainians featured in my upcoming, “Fleeing Ukraine While Black Series.” Credit: Terrell J. Starr.

So I am careful to allow my subjects to tell me how they experience Blackness. When something doesn’t vibe well with me, we talk through it, Black person to Black person, and I end up getting a clearer understanding of that person's Black experience while giving the subject a safe space to reflect on my observations that, in the end, provide a better profile of who that person is and what they are experiencing. 

I am working on a video and audio series for my Black Diplomats podcast titled, “Fleeing Ukraine While Black,” that tells the stories of Black people who fled Ukraine during the war and their journeys leaving the country and their lives in the nations that host them.

It is a huge undertaking that has had me serve as journalist, psychologist and, ultimately, friend.

Outside of the images of Africans fighting to get on trains at the start of the war, there has been little reporting done on these people in a meaningful way. 

Photo of Angelina Diash in Berlin, Germany. She is one of several Black Ukrainians featured in my upcoming, “Fleeing Ukraine While Black Series.” Credit: Terrell J. Starr.

My series will follow Black Ukrainians and Africans to Poland, Germany, France, Portugal, England and here in Ukraine. Each subject in my multi-episode series is different. They all suffer some form of trauma from what they experienced, but the main thing is that they all have a complex relationship with Ukraine that cannot be neatly summed up as “Ukraine is racist” — even though race and racism are very much central themes of their experiences.

This is Mace (stage name),a hip hop artist in Warsaw and former student in Ukraine who fled the war in 2022. Credit: Terrell J. Starr .

Carefully relistening to hours of audio and rewatching video to tell the story of Black Ukraine requires me to lean into my Blackness to understand how these peoples’—my people’s—experience. It also reminds me not to allow my own Americanness to obscure their narrative. 

Such is the life of being a Black reporter in Ukraine telling Black stories that will be told for the first time. That has not changed since the first time I arrived in Ukraine in 2008 and have been living on and off since – cumulatively, two to three years.

It is a heavy responsibility that brings me excitement and reminds me of my responsibility to my people and my craft. I hope you’ll follow along with us at Black Diplomats, and here with my friends at The Counteroffensive.

Today’s Dog of War is this dog that Tim took outside a gas station in Ukraine. Stray dogs can often be found lingering in and around gas stations here, because the regional ethical principle is very well established: always feed the dogs when you leave the gas station register with food.

Stay safe out there. 

Best, Terrell

[fight-me-at-dennys-parking-lot]

In middle school you were either a kid that always joked about communism or was a future communist there was no in-between

[hetaestoniahq]

To join hands together

Me trying to do a short kinda SweEst thing for apheeweek with the heartbreak prompt? I don't know if it really turned out any good so take it as writing practice or something because I really did try to do something with this. Dunno if I really delivered on the heartbreaking parts either

Ever since catching wind of the news that there is a Swedish band that’s managed to get permission to be able to go perform in Estonia, Sweden with the thought of the ongoing singing revolution began to wonder if he could take the chance to see Estonia himself. The possibility of him actually finding the nation was low and a part of him tried to tell himself he’s going to be a fool for even trying. The band wasn’t even that big of a deal, not world famous or anything, the band was expected to go perform at small bars at best so what’s making Sweden think that coming with the band may give him an opportunity to seek him out?

Yet here he is among a huge crowd, the band had not expected to be performing in a large venue with thousands upon thousands of people. Everything was going well so far. With how many people that had been drawn in Sweden began to have a glimmer of hope that maybe it is possible to find Estonia, though unlikely.

Looks like fate decided to be on his side.

“You’re here, you’re actually here?”

The look of disbelief was visible on Estonia’s face, the way he was looking at Sweden was as if he was told to be dead only to appear in front of him fine and alive.

Sweden was unable to bring out words to say, how long has it been since they last were even near each other?

Estonia wasn’t unrecognizable, but he wasn’t the same as before either. The fact Sweden has grown a little as the world has advanced is clear from the fact that Estonia hasn’t, his growth has been slowed by the oppressive foreign rule. Not only that, Estonia seemed thinner and looked like he might collapse any second from weakness. His eyes looked tired, but hints of that strong stubborn spirit that Sweden has always known were still present. No matter the horrors Estonia has been forced to face, he’ pulled through it all. Now there’s a revolution so Estonia is refusing to back down more than ever. Something about that is worthy of at least a little bit of admiration.

Please never stop fighting for what you stand for.

“I’m here, I wish I could have been sooner.” Sweden admitted with a heavy heart, weight that's been getting harder to carry with each passing year as he’s remained just an onlooker of the things going on over the sea. Despite being geographically so close to the Baltics there is still so much Sweden doesn’t know simply because of the Iron curtain. What else has the USSR gotten away with without anyone knowing it? Things that will forever remain as scars on all the victims as they call for help but no one hears their cries while the world stays oblivious? The thought of that makes Sweden feel like he’s about to cry.

Estonia was silent, it’s like his ability to speak had been taken from him as he couldn’t pick anything to say. He didn’t need to say anything though. Despite how badly Sweden wanted to just keep hearing his voice and keep it close to his heart like he always has - he knew that Estonia must have so many thoughts going through his head right now to the point of it being overwhelming. At the same time, he also seemed to keep glancing around at the crowd, likely looking out for anyone who might be watching them.

Meanwhile in the background, the concert was still on going, people were cheering and living along to the band playing. This didn’t seem to affect Sweden and Estonia at all though, the crowd and the noise. It was as if they were in their own world, for the crowd around them didn’t disturb their interaction at all.

That didn’t stay for long though, because when a new song started with the first thing said being Estonia’s own name, their attention was immediately caught.

Estonia turned to look at the concert immediately, hearing his name had his curiosity and interest. As the song went on Estonia’s eyes went wide, it didn’t take long for him to look back at Sweden and for him to visibly start shaking.

Cautiously Sweden got closer, gently reaching his hands out and held back on holding Estonia’s own hands without knowing if the other would be okay with it. He didn’t have to think about it for too long because when Estonia reached out his own hands and held them right over Sweden’s, nearly brushing them together, the Swede had the courage to link them together. Sweden could feel Estonia subtly shaking, but it didn’t seem to be from fear but rather from all these different emotions striking at him at once that he must be feeling as a song about the both of them plays in the background. Every now and then Sweden would notice how the nation would glance around at their surroundings, even at a moment like this he can’t stop thinking about how they’re likely being watched.

“How’s Finland?” Estonia suddenly brought up as a small conversation starter.

“He’s doing..Okay. He misses you, we all do.”

“We?”

“Me, Finland, Denmark, even Norway and Iceland have had you on their minds.”

Estonia had a mix of shock and no shock in his expression, a part of him still couldn’t wrap his mind around the thought while another part could.

“You’ve always been on our minds, all of you have. We haven’t forgotten about you, never will, I hope you know that.”

Both of them held eye contact in silence for who knows how long as the song continued. Sweden’s grip was gentle while Estonia seemed to be the one holding on as tightly as he could, as if he'd get dragged away if he allowed himself to loosen up. Together they slowly began swaying side to side along to the song, letting themselves cherish being able to be together for once.

No matter the comfort and the feeling of safety Sweden tried to give, he noticed how Estonia occasionally kept looking out at their surroundings, caution reflected in his eyes. As the song ended and they seemed to come out of their peaceful moment together, Estonia visibly shuddered and harshly but fearfully pulled his hands away as if he had just committed a crime punishable by death. Sweden felt like his heart was crumbling from the loss of his touch, seeing the nation have to distance himself like this served as a reminder of the state of their lives.

“I shouldn’t be here. I can’t be seen with you, so much could go wrong and I can’t take the risk of losing my hard work.”

Estonia spoke, his tone firm.

“Please stay safe.” Sweden said with a soft voice. He knew Estonia had many reasons to be careful and he just had to be considerate of that. If all goes well this nightmare will finally end.

“I can’t promise anything, but I’ll do my best.” With that said Estonia took off almost in a run, as much as he could through the crowd, desperate to get as far away from him.

A small part of Sweden ached over the thought of that, but he knew it wasn’t because Estonia wanted to stay away from him, but rather that he had to. All Sweden can do is wait and hope everything goes well.

__________

In 1990 a Swedish band named Charizma wanted to take part in the Singing Revolution, they wrote a song called "Join hands" which became a hit in Estonia. It was seen as the west expressing support for them to try and regain their independence, it was important. I just really wanted to make something about that but idk if it came out any good.

[cryinginthebackseat]

you’ve got more poison than sugar - part i

AO3    part ii

Fandom: Call Of Duty 

Pairing: Russell Adler x Bell

Words: 4.009

Summary: Russell Adler should have known better that it wouldn’t take an entire nation or continent to bring him to his knees.

Warnings: just swearings, sexual tension, blood, mentions of past abuse and brainwashing. adler being that manipulative asswipe like usual. 

Author’s note: i don't know what i'm doing. one moment, i was watching the walkthrough of the new call of duty game, found myself curious, acutely curious by that guy with the scars and shades on- a younger, shadier (no pun intended) Robert Redford in Spy Game and oh my... fast forward to 2 weeks later, here we are.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

A house somewhere on foreign soil,

Where ageless lovers call,

Is this your goal, your final needs,

Where dogs and vultures eat,

Committed still I turn to go.

I put my trust in you.

A Means To An End - Joy Division (1980)

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

It's mystifying how little she talks. Or when she does, it's always in fragments. Like a crossword puzzle in your local newspaper, but several letters are missing. He initially thought maybe MK-Ultra fucked her head or worse, if it hasn't worked at all, but the more he watches her, the more he realizes it's just the way she is. And it's ironic because he named her Bell. He expected her to chime like a goddamn goldfinch yet here they are. 

But he won't be fazed. Russell Adler is a man who's stopped at nothing in getting what he wanted before, he sure as hell won't stop now for a close-mouthed science project.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

“We've got a job to do, Bell."

It intrigues him, every time, the way the words trigger something deep within her psyche, the way her eyes change, her body stands a little straighter, like a machine ready to function at his disposal. It reminds Adler of one of those cartoons he watched when he was a kid about wizards and magic words, except there are no musical dance numbers playing in the background or a talking cricket perching on his shoulder. This is his power over her, over the USSR, over Perseus. That monstrous filth. It really does take a beast to tame another. 

Although he surmises calling Bell one would be superfluous. 

She barely looks like one, but Adler knows too well than to underestimate her. Just because Bell hasn’t shown her set of claws, that doesn’t mean she’s harmless, delicate, like a miniature China Doll in his breast pocket.

Bell never offered him her reply before, but now, now, she nods, head almost bows, obedient pretty thing, and says:

“Yes, Adler.”

So it goes.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

It takes West Berlin for Adler to realize she’s left-handed. 

She wears her watch on her right hand, smokes with that same said hand only when she’s writing or moving her pieces for an impromptu late-night game of chess against Lazar. And she always wears her gloves all the time- leather, black, lined with silk and pretty, small buttons on the cuffs, covering those striking red nails underneath. Whether it is for the theatrics or an old habit of hers, he can't really tell.

He doesn’t know why he begins to take notice of these mundane details about Bell, but rationalizes because he’s never been in the same room with this version of her, post-brainwash Bell, for more than 10 minutes. And for all intents and purposes, there’s still a lot of question marks surrounding her character; who is she? Where did she come from? What is her connection to Perseus? 

Are they in a possession of a walking, breathing bomb about to destroy them all or the West’s only salvation?

He supposes he’ll find out soon enough.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Adler hears Bell from his table, typing busy on the computer- barely blinking- all soaked up in that caffeine-infused energy at 1 am. She's always like that, he learns, when it comes to working, always with that steel determination, pulling out all the stops as long as it gets the job done- that Soviet discipline at it's finest.

Reminds him a little of himself when he's young.

Adler walks up to her. 

“You done for the night?” A shake of her head is her only response. He sighs. “You should go home, Bell.” 

“You go. I’ll lock up behind you,” Bell replies, low and monotone; that youthful stubborn.

If she was any other person, he would probably commend her for such fierce willpower, but she is Bell, the walking conundrum, his ace in the hole. Call him paranoid, but the idea of her having the safehouse for herself does nothing but raises every alarm in his head.

“No, we’re going home,” he says instead, tone brooking no argument and she frowns at the screen, her fingers stop moving then looks up at him with those goddamn empty eyes. "Come on, it's late anyway."

She doesn't say anything. Adler wishes he could read her mind- or crack that lovely skull on the back of her head, dissect her brain, learn its secrets and answers. 

Adler has his gun with him. It wouldn’t take long. A quick, true shot to the heart to keep the brain intact. He’d have Hudson contact one of his people inside BND and he'd deliver the brain himself if he has to. They could do it. He heard they’ve been studying inmates' brains for decades now, anyway. 

Before he has a chance to entertain the idea further, though, Bell nods once and rises up from her seat. 

Bell walks past him. Her scent, like honeysuckle on ice, hits him like an uppercut in the face. Adler inhales, as if against his will. 

He thinks he could get drunk on it.

“Hop in. I’ll drive you back to the hotel,” he says once they’re outside, regretting the decision the moment the words left his lips, but he knows he can’t just leave her on her own at this late hour.

The irony isn’t lost on him, though, considering he just thought about unspooling her brain a few minutes ago.

Bell complies without a protest. Getting inside the passenger seat, wordless still, fingers toying with the radio. An angry, krautrock music comes blaring all over his car. Adler winces, but at least the riot is loud enough to muffle the one's brewing in his head. 

"How's your memory these days?" 

Bell shrugs. "Nihil novi sub sole." There's nothing new under the sun.

Good, he muses. The least she knows about herself the better.

Though that doesn't mean he's out of the woods yet.

"Listen, from now on, I want you to keep me informed if there's any new progress about your memory or if you've developed any new symptoms. I want to know everything." He steals a sidelong glance at her, making sure she is listening (she always does, but Adler needs an excuse)

(An excuse for what?)

"Alright, Bell?"

"Of course," replies the woman in question.

"Good." Adler shifts his attention back to the road. "Good." Taking a long drag, he considers trying to appeal to her sentimental side. It's not something you'd improvise last minute- at least not with someone you brainwashed to believe you are her mentor/confidant for the past decade, but he's itching to know where he stands with her.

"You know, I'm just tryin' to look out for you, kid."

Her lips twitch but the rest of her visage remains impassive and faraway, more like a flick knife than a woman. The correlation is uncanny.

That's when she inches closer. The space between them bridged. He freezes. Hyper-aware of just how dangerous this is, but can’t bring himself to pull back, to look the other way. Not when her hand reaches out to pluck the cigarette from his mouth, eyes still glued to his, and curls her lips around the filter. One heavy pull, and then she rolls down the window and tosses it out on the side of the road.

"Thought I'd reciprocate the sentiment."

And with that, she leans back in her seat before Adler could even process what has just transpired.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

“Welcome back to the land of the living, kid,” Adler greeted her, about a month ago. 

Park had insisted that he had to be there for her when she woke up (naturally, Adler had balked at the idea, but at the English woman’s fact-of-the-matter explanation, also because it had somewhat dawned on him last minute the logic behind her machinations- “both of you are supposed to have known each other for years now. If she doesn't see you by her side, she’s going to wonder why”- thus, here he was)

“How are you feeling?” 

Bell blinked owlishly and stared at the older man with those bottomless, cat-like eyes that had haunted him since January.

Her gaze eventually softened as recognition flickered across her face.

“Like someone just hit me in the chest with a bulldozer,” she said hoarsely. “Where are we?”

“St. Dismas’ hospital, Pittsburgh.” Adler got up and fetched her a glass of water from the table. “Although not a bulldozer, but bullets did. That, and you hit your head really hard on your way down. Thought we’d lost you there, Bell.”

Bell drank in silence. She’s still watching him, thinking. This was the first time he realized that he couldn’t exactly read her expression and somehow that threw him off.

“What happened?” she asked, one hand mid-air, like she was deciding which to touch first, hesitating and abandoned the idea. 

“You don’t remember?” She shook her head. Adler pretended to look remotely distressed about it. “The doctors warned me about this. It must have been because of the fall- heck, I could even still hear that sickening crunch from here.” He dragged his chair closer towards her bed.

“We were in Amsterdam. Remember Fohler?” she shook her head again. “Well, we’d been tracking this son of a bitch for months, but we were chasing him in Amsterdam. He was running away and climbed up some scaffolding. You were about to go up after him,” he recited the fabricated story he, Park and Hudson had crafted. “He shot you and you fell and hit your head against the pavement.”

Bell looked away first, silent. Her hand gingerly touched the back of her head and winced, albeit only slightly. 

Adler was almost impressed, if not, disarmed by how calm and composed her reaction was to all of this. But then again, after having had witnessed first-hand how the woman barely flinched under any kind of interrogation technique they threw at her- a personality built for wrestling tigers- he really shouldn’t be surprised. 

“Bell, what is the last thing you remember?”

Bell frowned. “Not much. I remember ‘Nam, but-”

“Vietnam? Kid, that was thirteen years ago.” Adler watched the way her throat bopped, like she was swallowing her own blood and the color drained from her face, just like the first time he’d seen her, and proceeded to drop the bomb:

“Bell, the year is 1981.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

"Bell dear, would you mind taking a look at this?" 

Park's voice sails from across the room. She says it like it's a compound word: Bell-dear. Like the two words belong together. Bell-dear. 2 syllables, 1 word, 9 characters and that just might be the weirdest thing he hears this year and he heard many things.

"Bell dear?" Adler asks much later, his gravel-and-smoke voice reduced to a whisper, when she delivers a document to his table.

Park shrugs as if that explains everything. "What? I like her." 

He's tempted to say you really can't put a term of endearment and someone you brainwashed into submission in the same sentence, but what else is new?

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

They wind up in a bar. It’s called Die Stube and the place’s brimmed with artists and all sorts of leather-clad, Bowie-esque dramatic, chromatic blue eyelids young people chattering over a dirty cloud of smoke.

The two of them colonize a lone booth in the back. It’s dark and the quietest. She orders a beer and he, a scotch and they drink in silence. There are moments where her head would twist to the side, as subtle as a needle and survey the phantasmagorical scene before them, like studying something from a petri dish. 

While he’s watching her.

Only to tear his gaze away to the nearest object he can find.

It lands on his watch.

"It’s almost ten. Hudson's contact should be here soon," he announces, if anything to distract himself. She nods mutely in reply, as always, and runs a finger around the rim of her glass.

"The place ain't much of your scene?" 

She shrugs, like it's self-evident. "I didn't know this was a scene, though."

"Well, that’s West Berlin for you. A worry-free playground for the hedonists, hipsters and proto-electro NDW enthusiasts with drugs on tap," Adler says, sipping his drink in practiced nonchalance. "Always makes my head spin."

"I guess I remember it differently," Bell replies, tinged with something akin to begrudging. 

That warrants his full attention. "What do you remember?”

Bell shrugs again and lights a cigarette instead, menthol, one of those long, skinny cigarettes they only market for women; biding her time, making him wait. She lets the smoke flares from her nostrils so her eyes are veiled.

"It’s hard to explain, but I suppose it’s grittier?” she gesticulates, searching for the right word like she’s skim reading the entire Oxford dictionary in her head. “Bizarrely, infinitely grittier and dimmer? Like being in an underground tunnel and there's not much to see."

Interesting. Maybe she’s recalling one of her ops for Perseus or her mind is confusing her with the world on the other side of the wall.

“Maybe you’re remembering one of our clandestine ops here. It was a few years after Vietnam,” Adler supplies, passing over the tale like bait.

She falls for it, hook, line and sinker.

“Ah, I guess that also explains my fluency in German.”

“I taught you that.” It’s only logical, he decides, that she learned from him. She’s supposed to be his protégé after all. 

An elegant brow quirk. "You did?"

"Yeah, though you were already fluent in Latin, Russian, Vietnamese and Portuguese when we first met anyway. You have quite a natural ear, kid.”

She gives him a look. He really can’t categorize it, but it makes it a whole lot harder to fight against her stare.

 “What else did you teach me?” 

If they were anyone else, the lines could have a potential to entice, to seduce, that winsome, catty-eyelashes coquette, but they aren't anyone else and Bell does not voice it like that. Yet the implication behind the question stirs something in the pit of Adler’s stomach anyway, that tight knot of confusion as it is buried with something else and he finds himself, once again, uncharacteristically speechless.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

That particular question of her stays, even hours later, unbidden. Interspersed with her scent and face. 

His emotions are a minefield whenever she’s near now. It evokes that newfound rush of terror within him, like walking on a tightrope or being thrown into the pit to face hundreds of hungry lions, bare hands. It makes Adler questions his every decision, and he can’t have that in his line of work. 

Adler lights his sixth cigarette, contemplating everything, nothing. Anything to distract him from her. It's 4 am and he’s exhausted, but his mind won’t stop whirring. This isn’t like him at all- like he's lost somewhere in a Dali-style labyrinth that is his head and he wonders if this is a byproduct of his fear or fascination or confusion for the young woman.

He fears it is all of them.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

(They're only 10 minutes away from East Berlin when he senses it, something akin to burning on his peripheral vision, pulling him like weight.

Bell is staring at him from across the seat.

He cocks his head slightly to the side.

Adler catches the quick, telling quirk of her lips, like she's about to smile but lights a cigarette instead.)

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

“Did you hear that?”

Krauss has just crossed the wall and their soles are slippery from the rain. She's panting. Her breath is white like a fog. Adler muses it must be from the running, until his iris trails down to where her hand is clutching his jacket sleeve, the leather creasing like a modulation signal.

“What is it?” Adler asks, hushed. There are no Stasis here, but even one can't be too careful.

“The TV.” She’s gaping at the broken TV next to them. Adler looks at the said object, frowning, then back to her. “Y-you didn’t hear it?”

"Heard what? Bell, the thing's dead."

Bell withdraws from him. Stepping back until her back meets the walls, her eyes seeing and unseeing, like a lens finding focus in the dark, then she closes them, as if trying to regulate her breathing. Adler has never seen her scared shitless of anything before. The sight confuses as it intrigues him. 

"Bell, what's going on?" Adler steps closer, but he dares not to touch her. 

She shakes her head, dismissive. In just a span of seconds, Bell dons that mask she likes to wear again; deadpan and frustratingly distant. A spike of annoyance drives through him. Just when he thinks he can get through her, there she goes again, retreating behind her palisades.

"Nothing." Bell turns away abruptly and she’s walking again."Let's just go. The others are waiting for us."

He doesn't pry about whatever she heard on the TV- Adler knows better than to beat a dead horse, thank you very much- not even after they save her from Volkov's clutches, after she bashes his head against the steel door and reeks his blood all the way home, it seems superficial at the time.

Until two days later.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The day starts, as it mostly does for the team, with a briefing. 

Fifteen minutes in and something like a gasp pulls his attention to her. 

That’s when he notices it; her hands are shaking, coffee spilling out of the mug over her hand. A shatter follows. Her mug smashes to smithereens at her feet. She’s swaying, near collapse, like a house of cards about to fall, a hand on her nose.

Adler catches her before she tumbles to the floor.

“Bell!” His arm around her waist tightens, trying to keep her steady. Lazar rushes to their side in a flash and helps him move her to a nearby chair. 

"Jesus Christ," he curses, more to himself than to her as he watches blood, a bead of angry red, trickling down her nose. "Sims, get me a washcloth from the bathroom."

He kneels before her once Sims returns with a damp cloth. Nicotine-stained gloved fingers tentatively grasp her chin, holding her still. 

“Kid, you alright?” Adler asks, worry bleeds into his voice without him realizing it. He firmly presses the cloth under her nose, his other thumb touches the pulse at her throat- it's almost sickly affectionate. “Bell, talk to me."

Bell looks at him, discombobulated, like he's a figment of her imagination, then blinks. Again and again until she heaves a deep breath.

"I-" she hisses. One hand flies up to her head. "Fuck. My head.”

Adler’s eyes immediately search for Park’s. A knowing look passes over her face and he knows without saying that she's thinking the same thing, like they're attached to the same brain-wire:

MK-Ultra.

There’s a fraction of pause, then Lazar asks, "Should we give her something?” 

Before Park can voice her answer, Bell beats her to it. "I already took an anticonvulsant this morning. It should have helped.”

“Wait, this has happened before?” Adler asks.

Bell looks away, a hesitating look shadowing her face. He fears the worst.

“Bell…” he tries again, a slight warning to his tone.

She sighs loudly, as if mentally preparing herself before walking into a storm. 

“Yes. Two days ago."

His mind instantly refers to East Berlin, the TV. Trying to connect the dots in his head. It seems far fetched, but now he wonders if she saw something that triggers this. Although he's never read about this on other subjects before, the correlation is just impossible to ignore.

Fuck. He heaves a breath, willing himself to calm down, to think. They can't afford complications at times like these. Not when there's so much at stake right now.

Adler snaps his attention back to Bell when she tries to scramble awkwardly to her feet, swatting his hand away. The hand on her neck immediately reaches for her waist again and pushes her back down onto the chair. His grip's tight enough to leave marks on her skin, but he doesn't care.

"Bell, for fuck's sake, stay still or so help me," he says, exasperated, not letting go of her waist. 

"I feel better now." Stubborn little shit.

He is tempted to scream at her face and grab both of her shoulders and shake. “The hell you’re not. Stop fighting it. You’ll only make things worse.”

Her face sours, if only for a millisecond before it morphs into guilt. “I’m sorry.”

Adler watches her for a long moment. It’s only now that he realizes that he’s still holding her waist and the cloth on her face. 

He backs away from her like he’s been burnt. 

“You should have told me. I thought I made it clear the other night to keep me informed regarding this,” he scolds. 

“I’m sorry,” she utters again and she looks so pliable like this, a blank canvas perfumed with obedience and lethal mind. It makes him almost feel sorry for what he has in plan for her once the shit show is over.

“Look, just go back to the hotel and take a day off.” Her mouth cracks open. He raises a silencing hand. “That’s an order, Bell.” But she merely scowls, looking more like jagged ice than a person. Hudson may have just met his match, after all.

“I told you I’m fine.”

“That’s not how it looks to me.”

“It is. It’s my body and I know what I’m feeling, and I’m telling you, I. Feel. Fine.”

His jaw clenches. “Are you disobeying a direct order, agent?”

Bell doesn’t answer, but her whole face remains challenging and hard. Undeterred.

Adler holds his breath. He feels the whole room collectively does the same. It’s like staring down the barrel of a gun and there’s an awful sort of danger to be found in that. 

Just when he thinks an imaginary bullet would dig itself into his skin, however, Bell utters, “Of course not.”

And so the woman resumes to her normal, docile self at a drop of a hat. Even when Park steps in and whisks her out of her seat, drives her back to her hotel with Lazar on shotgun. 

It doesn’t assuage his worry, though. He’s still restless throughout the day, like a roaring ocean inside a bell jar. She’s never done this before, openly rebels against him. Now, the situation is just bad. Not casually bad or almost-got-shot bad, this is the-entire-Europe-could-turn-into-a-nuclear-wasteland bad, an-armageddon-waiting-to-happen bad. 

What if this is the beginning of her old self trying to scratch her way out of the surface? Adler’s blood goes cold at the thought. He is going to have to keep a close eye on this development.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

West Berlin - 1 am, local time.

“How is she?”

“Stable. I’ve administered another dose of Propranolol before I left the hotel. She should be fit as a fiddle in the morning.”

“Tell me, what do you think happened to her?”

“My theory? Traumatic brain injury. A cumulative product of torture, trauma-based mind control and chronic stress. I've read reports about cases like these before in MI6. None of them is still alive to recount the tale, unfortunately."

Adler grips the phone. 

“How long do you think we have?”

“Theoretically, 2-3 weeks tops.”

“But?”

He hears Park sighs on the other line. “But then again, none of the subjects I’ve encountered before were like her. So, I suppose it’s still a little too premature to determine at this point."

Adler kneads his temple, feeling the start of that familiar Bell-induced headache forms in his head. Can things just be fucking simple for once? 

“We don’t have that much time anyway, Park. And if Hudson gets a wind of this, he’ll want her gone by morning. I can’t let that happen. Not…” he pauses. “Not when we are this close.”

"What are we going to do about her, then?" 

Adler sighs.

"Raise the dosages of her drugs,” he says. “And keep an extra eye on her. I think we may be heading into uncharted waters now.”

Tagging: @mvalentine cause you said to tag you with everything i write so  👁👄👁

[introvertguide]

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964); AFI #39

The most recent movie for the group to review was the Kubrick dark comedy, Dr. Strangelove (I am not writing out the whole title each time). This film has some of the most legitimately funny lines of bewilderment, with some occasions involving an actor playing across from himself. For most film goers, this will be Peter Seller’s most famous role since he plays three main characters, all with different accents, appearances, and quirks. The film was nominated for 4 Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor) but did not take home any trophies. The film did win best picture at the BAFTAs. This film was definitely in the style of Kubrick, but it was in a genre that I don’t believe he delved into again. I want to review the plot before discussing further, so let me get the usual out of the way:

SPOILER ALERT!!! I AM ABOUT TO GIVE AWAY THE WHOLE PLOT OF THE FILM!!! IF YOU WANT TO WATCH THE FILM ON YOUR OWN WITHOUT HAVING ANYTHING SPOILED, STOP NOW AND WATCH THE FILM!!! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!

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At the start, we are introduced to United States Air Force Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) who is commander of Burpelson Air Force Base. This base houses a group of B-52 bombers armed with hydrogen bombs that are constantly in the air. The planes are constantly within two hours from their targets inside the USSR in case of nuclear war. General Ripper orders his executive officer, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake of the UK Royal Air Force (Peter Sellers), to put the base on alert and to issue "Wing Attack Plan R" to the patrolling bombers, one of which is commanded by Major T. J. "King" Kong (Slim Pickens). All of the aircraft commence an attack flight on the USSR, and set their radios to allow communications only through their CRM 114 discriminators, which was designed to accept only communications preceded by a secret three-letter code known only to General Ripper. Mandrake discovers that no attack order has been issued by the Pentagon and tries to stop Ripper, who locks them both in his office. Ripper tells Mandrake that he believes the Soviets have been fluoridating American water supplies to pollute the "precious bodily fluids" of Americans. Mandrake realizes Ripper has gone insane.

In the War Room at the Pentagon, General Buck Turgidson (George C Scott) briefs President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers again) and other officers about how "Plan R" enables a senior officer to launch a retaliatory nuclear attack on the Soviets if all superiors have been killed in a first strike on the United States. It would take two days to try every CRM code combination to issue the recall order, but the planes are due to reach their targets within hours. Muffley orders the U.S. Army to storm the base and arrest General Ripper. Turgidson then attempts to convince Muffley to let the attack continue, but Muffley refuses. Instead, he brings Soviet ambassador Alexei de Sadeski (Peter Bull) into the War Room to telephone Soviet Premier Dimitri Kissov on the "hotline". Muffley warns the Premier of the impending attack, and offers to reveal the positions of the bombers and their targets so that the Soviets can protect themselves.

After a heated discussion in Russian with the Premier, the ambassador informs President Muffley that the Soviet Union had created a doomsday machine as a nuclear deterrent; it consists of many buried bombs jacketed with "cobalt-thorium G", which are set to detonate automatically should any nuclear attack strike the country. Within two months after detonation, the cobalt-thorium G would encircle the planet in a radioactive shroud that would render the Earth's surface uninhabitable. The device cannot be deactivated, as it is programmed to explode if any such attempt is made. The President's wheelchair-bound scientific advisor, former Nazi German Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers one more time), points out that such a doomsday machine would only be an effective deterrent if everyone knew about it; Alexei replies that the Soviet Premier had planned to reveal its existence to the world the following week.

Meanwhile, U.S. Army troops arrive at Burpelson, and General Ripper commits suicide. Mandrake identifies Ripper's CRM code from his desk blotter and relays it to the Pentagon. Using the code, Strategic Air Command successfully recalls all of the bombers except Major Kong's, whose radio equipment has been damaged in a missile attack. The Soviets attempt to find it, but Kong has the bomber attack a closer target due to dwindling fuel. As the plane approaches the new target, a Soviet ICBM site, the crew is unable to open the damaged bomb bay doors. Kong enters the bay and repairs the broken electrical wiring while sitting on a H-bomb, whereupon the doors open and the bomb is dropped. Kong joyfully straddles the bomb as it falls and detonates over the target.

Back in the War Room, Dr. Strangelove recommends that the President gather several hundred thousand people to live in deep underground mines where the radiation will not penetrate. He suggests a 10:1 female-to-male ratio for a breeding program to repopulate the Earth once the radiation has subsided. Worried that the Soviets will do the same, Turgidson warns about a "mineshaft gap" while Alexei secretly photographs the war room. Dr. Strangelove declares he has a plan, but then rises from his wheelchair and announces "Mein Führer, I can walk!" as the Doomsday Machine activates. The film ends with a montage of many nuclear explosions, accompanied by Vera Lynn's rendition of the song "We'll Meet Again".

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This is a pretty weird film, but it has some of the funniest lines in cinema. Discussions of not letting a Russian envoy into the war room because he will “see the big board,” the president announcing there is no fighting in the war room, a crazy general constantly talking about a plot to steal American bodily fluids, and a discussion about how the high ranking officials and generals would be hidden in shelters with a 10-1 ratio of hot women to men with the expectation of constant impregnation which everybody suddenly favors: it is all absurd. But I really love it and laugh every time I watch.

The three roles of Peter Sellers is especially noteworthy, as all of his characters are so different. He plays a very British foreign exchange officer (I am not sure this exists), an absolutely whacky former Nazi scientist, and the straight man of the film in the form of the US president. Since Dr. Strangelove was an advisor to the president, there were many scenes in which Peter Sellers was acting across from a stunt shoulder or the back of a head that was supposed to be him. He did a fantastic job of making light of total world destruction during the cold war.

One very notable thing about the acting of Peter Sellers was that he had a couple of ad libs during the movie. Stanley Kubrick is not a director that particularly cares if he gets along with his actors, often times demanding dozens of takes for even the simplest of background scenes. Long dialogue scenes are repeated over and over to the point that many actors did not want to work with Kubrick. And still, the director seemed to like Sellers quite a bit and kept a couple of the takes that were ad-libbed, specifically for the character of Dr. Strangelove. Perhaps the crazy former Nazi character was so unpredictable that random whacky outbursts (like the scream for “Mein Fuhrer” at the end) seemed appropriate.

A little side note is that this was the first film appearance of James Earl Jones as one of the bombardiers on the B-52. He was known for his work in the theatre at the time, so of course he had a bit part in which he was mostly covered in a flight suit and said very little. Now that is a misuse of talent. 

A point about the movie that I was unaware but was pointed out by a follower of the group was that the promotional material for the film shows that the plane was named “Leper Colony” (thank you @themightyfoo). This implies that this group was actually a bunch of screw ups, which is part of the overall joke that this group was given access to world ending bombing capabilities. Maybe it was assumed that the order to drop the bombs would never be given and this group was just given this detail to get them out of the way.

So does this movie belong on the AFI list? Yes, but maybe not ranked so high. It has a lot of name recognition, but I think that is more due to the very distinct naming and the titular role. Maybe the notoriety is also due to the subject matter and the time it was released. It is a fine film with great acting, but I find it hard to put above Jaws, Rocky, or Taxi Driver. I guess that is more my humble opinion, but I agree the list would be lacking without this film. So would I recommend it? Absolutely. It is an interesting story about how red tape allowed one high ranking individual to literally destroy the world. And it is a joke. It is such a well told story that they had to put a disclaimer at the front. A great lesson, even today. 

[st-just]

1 3 6 9 10 18 19 :P

1. who’s your celebrity crush?

Already answered.

3. rant. just do it

I do sometimes wonder if any of the people who go on about how feminism is a totalitarian mind virus which has wholly overtaken society (or their less rabid and more reasonable sounding counterparts) have ever, like, worked retail.

I mean, even leaving aside ubiquitous creepy managers and such – I worked in a Home Depot store for three years and let me tell you, people absolutely do not feel any sort of taboo against very explicitly stating that they don’t believe a woman could possibly know anything about hardware or power tools or carpentry and that they want to talk to a guy. Even if said guy worked in a different apartment and would just be very awkwardly asking her the same questions and repeating the same information back to the customer.

(Rarer but much funnier when someone just refused to believe that the manager who handled returns could possibly be a woman and kept asking to speak to her supervisor. That I wanted popcorn for).

6. how many pairs of shoes do you have?

After a quick count – 9, including boots and slippers.

9. favorite brand of clothing?

Look most of my current wardrobe is either from the thrift store my sister used to work at or resellers one step up form value village. If the brand logo on something is obvious enough I notice it, I probably avoid it out of principle.

10. name a dog

I always liked how Leander rolls off the tongue, and Leo is an amusing nickname for a dog.  

18. rant about your favorite musician

So I have an absolutely embarrassing lack of musical taste, I’m afraid. My spotify playlist is just several hundred songs I got stuck in my head and needed to play on repeat for several days to burn out of it now kept as a compendium of pleasant background noise. So kind of blanking on any musician I’m really able to rant about right now, I’m afraid. Sorry.

19. what’s your favorite teacher you’ve ever had?

Hmm. Probably my Russian/Soviet history prof in uni. Stereotypical soft-spoke, sweater-vest wearing academic with an incredibly understated sense of humour and a terrifyingly encyclopedic knowledge of his area of expertise. He grew up in the USSR and when we got to the ‘70s and ‘80s he also had so many interesting anecdotes.

Also, able to hold awkward silences waiting for someone in a seminar to answer a question and prove they did the readings longer than anyone else I’ve ever met.

[unibrowzz]

Mod (finally) reviews all 67 winners of the Eurovision Song Contest Part IV: The 1980s

Ah yes, the 80s. One of my favourite decades for music overall, and one of the only decades in Eurovision where I wouldn’t immediately jump at the chance to change most of the songs that won, the other decade being the 2000s. 

But at least with the 80s there was more quality songs per year, whereas the 2000s was mostly drivel.

I also count the 80s as being somewhat of a turning point in the contest’s history, and by that I mean it always seemed to me like it was the decade where the UK really began to stop caring. Most people know the song that won in 1985, but nobody knows what won in 1986. Everyone knows Johnny Logan won twice, but couldn’t name his second song. Everyone knows Celine Dion competed, but can’t remember if she won or what she sang. 

That and countries also started experimenting with more modern sounds and outfits towards the end. The early 80s is just an extension of the 70s I swear. 

But that’s enough of all that, how do I find the winning songs?

1980- What’s Another Year?

Country: Ireland

Artist: Johnny Logan 

Language: English

Thoughts: Ah yes, the song that makes every 50something woman in the UK and Ireland all doey-eyed and rosy cheeked as they remember back to when they were a teenager watching this on TV and drooling at the lovely looking sad Irishman singing his sorrows into the microphone.  Or that’s my experience with this song anyway. Another experience is that most vintage fans I know tend to dislike this song on the grounds of it beating out [insert song here] Everyone has their favourite from 1980 since it was honestly a pretty strong year, but even though this song isn’t my first place for that year I can still clearly see why it won. See, 1980 had a lot of pop songs, so a slow, sad song like this one was bound to stand out, whether it was popular or not. Luckily for this one, it turned out to be a popular choice. Other songs wouldn’t be so lucky… Back on track though. Like I said, this is a very sad and melancholy song with sad and melancholy lyrics, which not only made it stand out in its year, but also made it stand out amongst other Eurovision songs of its time. It’s strange to think, but at this point in the contest’s history there hadn’t been a winner with lyrics so solemn and personal. See, in modern Eurovision, every other song is the artist baring their soul about their horrible ex-boyfriend, or their depression, or past abuse, or whatever, so knowing there was a period where songs like that were so rare is just… surreal to me.

Is this my personal winner for this year? This or Greece tbh, I don’t mind this one

If no, what is? Greece- Anna Vissi- “Autostop”

Personal ranking (out of 67): 23rd

1981: Making Your Mind Up

Country: United Kingdom

Artist: Bucks Fizz

Language: English

Thoughts: Ah yes, the UK winner that nobody really likes, but the BBC still forces at us anyway because they’re proud they came up with a gimmick that everybody remembers. Or maybe it’s not that well remembered, but nobody would know that because we’re reminded of it every year. This song is… alright. Just alright. The first listen of this one is always the best, because after a while it just gets kind of annoying. The singing ESPECIALLY starts to grate you for a while. Even in the studio version the two girls sound unbearably shrill and whiny, and I’m not sure if that’s their fault or the songwriter’s (since if I remember correctly only one of them was a professional singer). I’m seriously convinced there’s no way for a female vocalist to pull this off without sounding terrible.  Again, this one’s perfectly fine and serviceable, but that doesn’t mask the fact it’s still the worst UK winner and the worst winner of the 1980s too. 

Is this my personal winner for this year? No

If no, what is? Portugal- Carlos Paião- “Playback”

Personal ranking (out of 67): 58th

1982: Ein Bißchen Frieden

Country: West Germany

Artist: Nicole

Language: German (Translation: “A little peace”)

Thoughts: This song gives me a really warm, nostalgic feeling, and I don’t know why. I mean, I know this one did well internationally, so it’s possible I just heard it as a kid, but given how I grew up in the early 2000s, “Eurovision is a shitty freak show full of weirdos from the USSR who gang up on the UK and don't vote for us on purpose” era Britain, that’s highly unlikely. Anyways, this is such a warm, fuzzy kind of song. It has a lovely… round-the-campfire, singalong kind of vibe, like this is meant to be sung by a load of long haired hippies with flowers in their hair and CND symbols drawn on their cheeks. And it’s… … Also kind of bland. If you’ve been reading my personal winners so far, you’ll have noticed I definitely have a soft spot for old German entries, so it’s a shame I find the one song they actually won with to be so… generic. It’s like they got tired of being unique so decided to send the same saccharine fluff everyone else was sending, and guess what, it paid off majorly, because this song was a huge hit at the time. Something about that kind of bothers me, like, out of all the entries they sent, it’s the one that’s the most “Eurovision-y” that ended up winning. And there’s something depressing in that.

Is this my personal winner for this year? No

If no, what is? United Kingdom- Bardo- “One Step Further”

Personal ranking (out of 67): 50th

1983: Si la vie est Cadeau

Country: Luxembourg

Artist: Corinne Hermés

Language: French (Translation: “If life were a gift”)

Thoughts: You want a tip on how to stand out amongst Eurovision fans? Say you like this song. Probably won’t make you very popular, but you’ll stand out at least. I will confess, I, too, was part of the hate-wagon for this song. Like most fans I knew, I’d complain about how boring and uninteresting it was and how it, ahem, “robbed” so many other entries, and how basic it was, et cetera, et cetera. But… honestly? It’s not even that bad. Sure I had other favourites from 1983 (the ones I could stand watching anyway, the host that year was so unimaginably terrible I gave up watching halfway through. I DARE you to watch the whole thing without wanting to neck yourself), but this song gets way more hate than it deserves. I honestly don’t think this song is half as bad as I made it out to be myself, or as bad as the fandom makes it out to be. It’s got a decent melody, some solid vocals, some appealingly 80s instrumental, like there’s a lot I like here. …Until you read the lyrics and realise they’re almost as half-assed and lazy as All Kinds of Everything’s, but I digress. Did I prefer other songs from that year? Of course. Am I going to complain about this one winning? Nah. It’s alright. 

Is this my personal winner for this year? No

If no, what is? Sweden- Carola Häggkvist- “Främling”

Personal ranking (out of 67): 41st

1984- Diggiloo, Diggiley

Country: Sweden

Artist: Herreys

Language: Swedish

Thoughts: Whenever I was a younger fan I used to describe this song as being drunk-dad-at-a-wedding-music performed by three sentient Ken dolls, and I still stand by that statement. And I don’t really know how else to describe this one. It certainly has its charm, and it’s still a likeable song, but it also feels very… vapid. Like if this song were a person, they’d be a bit of a bimbo. And I mean, the song’s about how the singer’s oh-so-happy and prancing down the street in his brand new shoes, so that’s probably a fair description. Part of me wonders if that’s down to old Eurovision songs being vapid in general or if it’s down to the schlager genre itself requiring songs to be kinda neutered and happy-go-lucky, but even though I do like this song, it does come off as being a bit bland. A bit by-the-numbers and playing-it-safe. And I don’t mind songs like that, but I’d rather they didn’t win, y’know?

Is this my personal winner for this year? Not really

If no, what is? Italy- Alice & Franco- “Il Treni di Tozeur”

Personal ranking (out of 67): 15th

1985- La det Swinge

Country: Norway

Artist: Bobbysocks

Language: Norwegian

Thoughts: Ah yes, the song which finally hauled Norway into first place after years of being a regular last-placer. Maybe the UK should take some notes instead of blaming Brexit. Or Russia. Or Iraq. Or anything other than their own apathy, for that matter. But this is about La det Swinge and not the UK, so what are my thoughts on it? Well it’s… It’s the kind of song I imagine my mom and aunt would sing at a wedding if they ever attended one. It’s a very fun song, a little cheesy, sure, but it’s hard to not like a song that’s this upbeat and cheery.  And yeah I know it’s because it’s schlager and that’s generally a really cheerful genre by default, I touched on that in the review above, 

Is this my personal winner for this year? This or Israel

If no, what is? Israel- Yizhar Cohen- “Olé Olé”

Personal ranking (out of 67): 14th

1986- J’aime la Vie

Country: Belgium

Artist: Sandra Kim

Language: French

Thoughts: This song is an enigma because I’m an absolute slut for 80s pop, yet, for some reason, I find this song painfully average and uninteresting. Now, I’ll get it off my chest and say that 1986 was also a painfully average and uninteresting year, and most of the time I just felt myself remembering the singer more than the song, and even then I struggle to remember what some of the acts even were. It was just such a boring blur of a year I’m surprised the juries even managed to stay awake to pick a winner. And I GUESS you could argue that this song is so upbeat and peppy that it woke them up, but that doesn’t excuse how bloody generic it is. Like, this is the most generic 80s song you can imagine, and not in a good way. It feels more like stock music than an actual publicly released pop song. Had it not won, I doubt it would’ve stood out to me at all; it would’ve just faded into the background with all the other muted, 80s-coloured mush from this year. Basically, there’s a reason the singer’s age is the only thing noteworthy about this song.

Is this my personal winner for this year? Not really

If no, what is? Luxembourg- Sherisse Laurence- “L’amour de ma vie”

Personal ranking (out of 67): 49th

1987- Hold me Now

Country: Ireland

Artist: Johnny Logan 

Language: English

Thoughts: Ah yes, the superior Johnny Logan winner.  And I’m not sure why everyone forgets this one because Mother of Mercy this song is in another league entirely compared to the other schlock Ireland’s won with. Like this is their best winner, no competition. One of their best songs overall as well. One of the best entries from the 80s, one of the best winners of the 80s, one of the best winners… Yeah, I really like this song.  I’ll admit to sleeping on this one for too long myself, always dismissing it as some boring Irish ballad to go with all the other boring Irish ballads they somehow managed to win with (we’ll get to that later), and always agreeing with people who said XYZ country (always Yugolslavia) should have won instead.  Basically I learnt the hard way to never judge a song on its country and genre. But one day I found myself in the midst of a revisiting trip, going back to winners I didn't pay much attention to, just to see if there was anything I’d missed the first time round. And something about the lyrics in this song resonated with me a lot more than I thought they would. In a strange way, it made me feel older; like I’d grown up and was able to relate to the words in a song and appreciate it more than I could when I was younger. The line “what do you say when words are not enough?” especially hits harder than it should; as someone with autism I tend to find showing emotions difficult, even in virtual conversation where I’m not using my voice or face, because… Well, what do you say when your words aren’t enough?

Is this my personal winner for this year? Yes

If no, what is? N/A

Personal ranking (out of 67): 2nd

1988- Ne Partez pas Sans Moi

Country: Switzerland 

Artist: Céline Dion 

Language: French

Thoughts: Telling people Céline Dion won this thing is a new favourite hobby of mine, just to see the confused reaction. And that’s the most interesting thing about this song because it’s… fine, I guess? It’s a perfectly serviceable 80s power ballad, but there’s no bells and whistles to make me sit up and declare it any better than just “okay”. It’s basically the ballad equivalent of J’aime la Vie from 1986, in that it’s extremely 80s and also in French, but there’s nothing to make it that memorable aside from the singer herself. And even then this isn’t the song that made her famous anyway. Even her singing doesn't make this one stand out, partially because the song doesn't do anything special with it, and partially because she just blends in with all the other good singers of this era. And that’s kinda sad to think about.

Is this my personal winner for this year? Hmmm....

If no, what is? Greece- Afroditi Frida- “Clown”

Personal ranking (out of 67): 22nd

1989- Rock Me

Country: Yugoslavia

Artist: Riva

Language: Croatian

Thoughts: So this is another song it really took me a while to get into (there’s lots of those, trust me) and one that was very briefly in my top three overall favourites. It’s slid down a few slots since then, though I would still say it’s… Somewhere in the top 15.  I don’t really have a lot to say about this one, if I’m honest. It’s just a good, fun, solid song which stood out in a very dull and ballad-saturated year, nothing more, nothing less. The lyrics are nice too, being about a bored musician who learns to love music again by teaching himself how to play pop songs to entertain his friends. That’s a unique subject and I can imagine it resonating with a lot of people who’ve fallen out with a hobby they used to love because they took it too seriously (providing they either speak Croatian or have looked up the lyrics, of course). I mean, it resonates with me at least. All in all, I just like this song for its message more than anything else.

Is this my personal winner for this year? No

If no, what is? Portugal- Da Vinci- “Conquistador”

Personal ranking (out of 67): 9th

[killingeveperspectives]

Perspective: Can redeeming Villanelle make her character less iconic?

Have you ever heard of the Codex Gigas? Also known as ‘The Devil’s bible’, it is the largest illuminated manuscript in the world according to Wikipedia. It is told that a monk made a pact with the Devil himself and feverishly wrote the entire book in one night! As an acknowledgment to his partner he drew his monstrous figure in one of the pages. Said page looks different from the others, as if touched by some malignant magic. Today we know the reason for it: the page suffered the most deterioration for being the most exposed. For centuries people could not get enough of this character: The Devil. Indeed, we have codified ways to save ourselves from the metaphorical Devil – ourselves. We invented sins and crimes to tame something deeply primal within us. Freud called it id, the origin of all that which makes us tick: impulses, instinct, drives, libido. It reckons only two things: pleasure and satisfaction. If we could strip ourselves from all inhibition there would be impulse and sensation. It would be brutal ecstasy. But what would be of the world if all 7 billion of us would uncompromisingly seek to satisfy our impulses? Hell, so we don’t.

But through art we can glimpse at what this liberation would feel like. Some sort of existential voyeurism. Aristotle would call it catharsis, but what does he know? This is how some of the most remarkable characters were born, they mesmerize us by being their id – unapologetically, terrifyingly, charmingly – like the Devil himself. Characters like Hannibal Lecter, The Joker, Alex DeLarge; they are larger than life, unbind, amoral and extremely bright (and all male). Like Hannibal brilliantly put it in Silence of the Lambs: “Nothing happened to me, officer Starling, I happened” or like the perverted childlike Alex explain in A Clockwork Orange: “What I do I do because I like to do”. As simple as that. Pure satisfaction of impulse because they feel like it. When we, uneased by what they represent, want explanations or justifications, The Joker toys with us, always giving us a different version of his tragic background, as if he knew we want to give him an excuse and, in good joker fashion, he makes a huge joke out of it. They take it very seriously to explain to us what went wrong with them, because it doesn’t really matter.

While the id makes us organic, whole creatures, many attributes of it have been culturally dissociated from womanhood. The violent, self-preserving and egoistic impulses were replaced with nurturing, self-sacrifice and compassion – not surprisingly the only impulse afforded to women is motherhood (or sexual desire for the satisfaction of another). Therefore, women cannot fully materialize their humanity. These raging impulses feel alien to womanhood, something imposed on to them by circumstance so severe that it warps the nature of the female itself. Aggressive women are sad and broken, or vengeful, or mad, or sexualized – these are the portrayals we have been conditioned to expect from fiction. When compared to their male counterparts, even mild violence in a female character almost immediately requires an explanation: how someone betrayed them, or abused them, or they were conditioned into it. Rage and aggression are never theirs to own, it is always extrinsically sourced.

On a superficial level, the character of Villanelle doesn’t seem so unique. Immediately one could think of Nikita in La femme Nikita, who was a drug junkie teen, rescued and transformed into a cold-blooded femme-fatale assassin by the shadowy government group “The Centre” after they faked her death to break her from prison (Uncannily similar?). Or the movie Anna by the same writer, where a Russian girl accepts a KGB offer to be trained into an assassin in order to escape her abusive homelife. Or Marvel’s black widow who is also a Russian spy, apparently brainwashed by USSR to become an assassin. Other female assassins include The bride in Kill Bill who set off into a revenge killing spree after being brutally assaulted and left for dead, and other movies I vaguely remember about abused women becoming assassins to seek revenge, or shallow sexy female assassins with no purpose for existing other than being the sexy female assassin. However, all these characters were made into assassins by external factors. Villanelle is set apart from the typical femme-fatale assassin trope by owning her own joy of killing, by the rejection of the broken female narrative and the rejection of the objectifying male gaze. In order to unmistakably ground these traits alienated from women – violence, disregard, cruelty, indifference, sadism, risk-taking – in her nature, the character was written as a primary psychopath. Being an assassin fits her natural talents, not the other way around    

Villanelle could occupy a very special place among a roster of remarkable fictional characters like the ones mentioned earlier. She is the female embodiment of absolute, remorseless indulgence and rage, representing the unashamed satisfaction of women’s impulses, for her own enjoyment alone, with style and wit – A truly magnetic character and fresh perspective. In psychopathic Villanelle, women are allowed to reclaim these violent impulses, which is oddly empowering and humanizing. Give us that. Brilliantly, the cathartic element is mirrored by Eve herself. Eve too sees her unfulfilled and alienated impulses incarnated in Villanelle, which in turn sparks Eve’s exploration of her own identity. Ultimately Villanelle’s seduction to embrace impulse despite its danger is at the core of their electric attraction and conflict.

Thus, by retconning Villanelle in Season 3, the character no longer represents the provoking embodiment of female drive, managing to become an elevated female assassin trope, at best. The challenging take on womanhood, instead plays into all of the expectations. Villanelle is no longer a female true to her nature that gets a kick from being an assassin; but a troubled girl, tortured into becoming a killing machine by a past of abuse. A broken woman who rejects the violence instilled into her once she finds healing. Interestingly, it is not that she merely chooses not to kill but she is unable to carry on the act, signifying the deeper alienation of the violent impulse from her own self – the same impulse that once made her so iconic. This lack of impetus to kill is but a symptom of the decreased character’s libido in general: fewer shopping sprees, less savory eating, less unpretentious playfulness, less color, less eroticism, less aggression, less danger. Unfortunately, it also means the weakening of her dynamic with Eve. Villanelle is being tamed, and its well… not her best take.

We, the audience, perceive this lack of vitality oozing into the entire show, but once you shift what Villanelle represents this is inevitable. Villanelle becomes mundane, and it brings the nostalgia of the force of nature she once was. It leaves a similar taste as the brutal transformation of Alex from despicable nihilistic hedonist into a model citizen in A clockwork orange: a conflicted perverted sadness at the loss of Alex’s authenticity despite him turning into a “better” human being – ingeniously, his redemption was to gain his despicable impulses back. 

The initial character design of Villanelle was something unique and authentic. However, In the process of redeeming her, she might become a new iteration of a trope explored several times that simply reflect the current space of female characters and lack conceptual originality. Yet, there is still room for the recuperation of Villanelle’s transgressive power: a subversive redemption. By incorporating the impulsive indulgence and violence back into the character, Villanelle’s arc can be taken somewhere new, complex and truly special. A remarkable character we can’t get enough of – like the Devil herself.

[nerianasims]

Billboards #1 1961

Under the cut.

Bert Kaempfert – “Wonderland By Night” -- January 9, 1961

It's an instrumental, but it's a sexy one. It makes me think of being alone at night in a big city hoping to find someone to go home with, if just for a night. It definitely sounds of its time, but it's still very good.

The Shirelles – “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” -- January 30, 1961

For all the innocent-sounding music and beat, this is a straightforward song about sex. In 1961. Also a great song.

Lawrence Welk – “Calcutta” -- February 13, 1961

Blargh. Lawrence Welk's music gives me a pain. To say this sounds like a German music hall song is an insult to German music halls. Whatever music hall this plays in, they have a strict no-alcohol policy and don't serve caffeinated drinks either because they're opposed to every kind of drug. You get skim milk or nothing. There is nothing Calcutta-ish about it.

Chubby Checker – “Pony Time” -- February 27, 1961

An attempt to recapture The Twist. But that was lightning in a bottle. This is some dead fireflies in a jar. Unlike the Twist, the dance is sort of complicated. More importantly, the song doesn't make me want to dance at all. Sadly, not good.

Elvis Presley – “Surrender” -- March 20, 1961

I don't feel like Elvis really connected with this song. I certainly don't. It sounds like it belongs in one of his movies. He ramps up the belting, there's a background chorus that sounds like it’s from a Disney movie of the time, and the mariachi band overwhelms it all. How do you overwhelm Elvis? He's trying to sing to someone to seduce them, and he's failing with me. An embarrassing song.

The Marcels – “Blue Moon” -- April 3, 1961

This version of Blue Moon deeply annoys me. It's like they'd be embarrassed to sing a heartfelt love song, so they sped it up and threw a bunch of silly noises in instead. Go for the one Obsidian was smart enough to put in Fallout: New Vegas instead, by Frank Sinatra. Or the Mel Tormé version. Or the Chris Isaak version. Not this one.

Del Shannon – “Runaway” -- April 24, 1961

It's about a breakup, not a runaway. He doesn't get why his girlfriend ran away from him. And it is pure melodramatic cheese, yet it works. Del Shannon commits. Also is that a slide whistle? I can't really say it's a good song, but I kinda like it anyway.

Ernie K-Doe – “Mother-In-Law” -- May 22, 1961

Hah hah aren't mothers-in-law awful. That's it, that's the song. It's a bad sitcom joke. And musically it sounds like a commercial jingle. Yuck.

Ricky Nelson – “Travelin’ Man” -- May 29, 1961

The "every woman in an area is exactly the same" subgenre is one I hate. Yes, this means I hate The Beach Boys' "California Girls." The Beatles were absolutely right to send up this kind of bilge with "Back in the USSR." So, I hate this song. The narrator travels around the world and has a girlfriend everywhere, including a "senorita" in Mexico, an "Eskimo" in Alaska, and a "China doll" in China. Really, really bad.

Roy Orbison – “Running Scared” -- June 5, 1961

I think I just don't get Roy Orbison. In this song, he's afraid his wife (probably) will go back to her ex. At the end, she tells her ex to go away and chooses the narrator. The beat is repetitive and insistent as all hell and gives me a headache. I dunno, other people seem to like it. The lyrics are fine. Orbison's singing is fine. I cannot deal with the beat.

Pat Boone – “Moody River” -- June 19, 1961

Listening to Pat Boone is like putting mayonnaise in your ears. And not good mayonnaise. The narrator's girlfriend drowned herself because she felt oh so guilty about cheating on him, and he sounds awful cheery about it. I have another theory as to how she died. But someone like Pat Boone couldn't get convicted if he tried, especially in 1961. Now, how does one get mayonnaise out of one's ears? Probably vinegar, that's the solution to everything.

Gary U.S. Bonds – “Quarter To Three” -- June 26, 1961

What an odd name. The song sounds like an impromptu recording of a band at a club. It does make me want to dance. Gary shouts the song, sounding like he's had a few Red Bulls. I kinda dig it. It slaps.

Bobby Lewis – “Tossin’ And Turnin'” -- July 10, 1961

The narrator couldn't sleep because he couldn't stop thinking about you. He's got an awful lot of energy, considering that. But I understand that kind of nervous energy. Great saxophone solo too. It's a fun dance song about romantic desperation.

Joe Dowell – “Wooden Heart (Muss I Denn)” -- August 28, 1961

The narrator says not to leave him because he doesn't have a wooden heart and he might die. The way Joe sings the song though, I think he is lying. He's made of wood and will never be a real boy.

The Highwaymen – “Michael” -- September 4, 1961

So this is a version of "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore." Sung by the most comfortable and privileged people imaginable, who may also be on valium. I'm sure the members of The Highwaymen had some kind of pain in their lives; everyone does. But you'd never know it from their rendition. They seem to have had all emotion surgically removed. Absolutely terrible. It belongs in a Twilight Zone episode. I had to listen to the Harry Belafonte version afterward to cleanse my brain.

Bobby Vee – “Take Good Care Of My Baby” -- September 18, 1961

The narrator lost his girlfriend because he cheated on her, and he regrets it. He's telling her new boyfriend to take care of her. It's fine. I think maybe it's too fast. Too much snare drum.

Ray Charles – “Hit The Road Jack” -- October 9, 1961

Ray, I love you. Also Margie Hendrix, the lead backup singer here. I hope Ray worked the same magic he did in 1960, and the rest of 1961 will be good.

Dion – “Runaround Sue” -- October 23, 1961

Not only does Sue cheat all over the place, but also "she'll love you and she'll put you down." I like the song. It's upbeat and yet the singer sounds appropriately bitter. It's obviously no "Hit the Road Jack", but it's good.

Jimmy Dean – “Big Bad John” -- November 6, 1961

Yep, Jimmy Dean the sausage guy. It's one of those baritone spoken story things. I do not like those at all. So I'm not the audience for this. As a simple folk tale about a guy everyone's afraid of because he's so big, but then saves a bunch of lives at the cost of his own, it's fine. I wish it were sung though.

The Marvelettes – “Please Mr. Postman” -- December 11, 1961

An early Motown girl group song. The narrator is waiting for a letter from her boyfriend, which isn't there and clearly hasn't been there in a long time. Not one of my favorites, as the background singers sound weirdly like beeps to me. But still good.

The Tokens – “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” -- December 18, 1961

The saga of this song seems to be a convoluted semi-accidental stealing thing, and I'm not qualified to get into it. I do like it, but I liked it more as a child; I think it's a child's song. But the song it originated from is much more interesting. Look up Zulu singer Soloman Linda's "Mbube."

BEST OF 1961: "Hit the Road Jack"    WORST OF 1961: A lot to choose from again, but I'm going with "Michael"