#90% of my effort on this one went into getting a pose to work in CAS in a stubborn refusal to take any in game pictures for this

[thefisherqueen]

The Merry Widow (1968) with Jeremy Brett

I've not been a lot on social media lately because of the complete takeover from US'ers (which - understandable, I'm worried and grieved too, but still there are other countries and issues and the way people often neglect to specify they're talking about the US and assume all their readers are in the US too is kind of obnoxious) so I've directed my very limited time and energy towards something which has given me a lot of joy in recent years and is often freely accessable too: old media. I'm making a valliant effort to actually finish Moby Dick and Les miserables and Raffles, I've read the first collection of Arsène Lupin, I'm trying to get into Hercule Poirot (not entirely convinced yet but we'll see), and last weekend I watched The Merry Window movie of 1968, starring Jeremy Brett. It is entirely on youtube here. Not in the best visual or auditory quality, sadly (it has not been remastered yet), but still very watchable.

I went into this without any knowledge of the story or rich history of this operette, only having heard a few fragments of the songs before. And I was so, so entertained throughout, even though I did not understand everything that was going on.

A summary of my prompt research: The Merry Window (Die Lustige Witwe) was composed by Austrian-Hungarian composer Franz Lehár and first performed on stage in 1905 in Wien, running a very succesful row of almost 500 live performances. It has since been adapted both on screen and stage often, even through this very day. The Metropolitian Opera has a comprehensive synopsis on the story on their website, but more fun is this comic.

The basic story goes as follows: the embassy of a small Balkan country (fictional, but likely to be inspired by Montenegro), situated in Paris, is thrown into merry chaos as they learn that a very rich widow originally from the same Balkan country also is residing in Paris. Shenagans and plotting occur to try and convince her to marry one of their countryman, so her sweet sweet money won't leave the country, which is in dire need of it. There's only a problem: the proposed candidate, a count played by Jeremy Brett, already knows the widow, and the two of them have a History. Avoidant behaviour, sassiness, misunderstandings and other delicious drama ensue.

I did not expect the amount of music and songs in this movie. I think 80% or 90% of the script is in song rather than dialogue. Entire performances are shown, during which the plot just stands still, and honestly? I loved it. Modern movies/shows often move too fast for my sluggish autistic brain to keep up with, and this languid tempo just worked well for me. The folk and, I imagine, quite scandalous can-can dances are a joy. I'm usually not that fond of the more classical technique of singing but I found the music here quite gorgeous, too, a delightful mix of classical sound with fun folk elements. Jeremy Brett's rich voice really stood out of me. You can listen to the entire soundtrack here.

Jeremy Brett is a treat to watch in his role as a bit of a playboy, avoiding responsiblities and commitment and feelings of heartbreak by dancing and drinking at a local nightclub each night instead. Not suprisingly for everyone who has seen him in Granada's Sherlock Holmes: he's really excellent at dramatic posing, lounging on surfaces not meant for that, and 'trying to look cool but actually besotted'. There's a lot of humour in the dialogue and performances of the entire cast, too. For example, there's an entire extramarital affair going on right under the nose of an antirely oblivious baron's nose, and it's pretty hilarious. Further example of some funny lines: "What have you been doing lately?" Absolutely nothing!" "Excellent!" Jeremy's rivalry with the widow (played by Mary Costa) is especially a lot of fun, both really sell that part. I really got quite emotional by the final "Love unspoken, faith unbroken..."

There's an interesting background of historical social context to this operette, too: widows in that time enjoyed an amount of financial freedom denied to either unmarried or married women, and watching high class men competing for a woman's money was, I suppose, a nice bit of social commentary. I also really enjoyed a song by a group of men all wondering what they have to offer women if it isn't money - a question, in my opinion, that may be asked more often. The widow using her relative freedom to protect another woman from scandal at the end was rather sweet, too. The story ends, of course, by not upsetting the status quo too much. But it's such a fun ride.

All in all, very much recommended.

[sweetmage]

I was asked by @x-littlemoth how I do my VGP and I explained the basics here! This is a continuation of that tutorial with my own personal methods! For this tutorial you'll need this mod (in addition to the ones mentioned in the last post):

CharLi This is an excellent lighting mod that allows you to spawn individual lights and adjust their color, brightness, rotation, etc.

And here are some other mods I recommend, though they aren't necessary!:

Additional Portrait Presets I can explain more about why adjusting FOV or rotating the camera 90 degrees is useful below, but these presets save you the effort of tweaking yourself! Photomode Expression Megapack No tutorial needed, this just adds extra facial expressions you can select in photomode! Works exactly the same as the vanilla one and doesn't replace anything.

Appearance Creator Mod (ACM) I won't cover this one here because there is already a wonderful tutorial by PinkyDude who explained it way better than I ever could which you can check out right here! Briefly, this allows you to swap/toggle clothes, accessories, etc. on NPCs.

If you'd like any additional suggestions for pose mods, clothing mods, etc. or wants to know any mods I'm using I am very WCIF (where can I find) friendly so anyone can free to ask me any time! Additionally, if anyone would like a tutorial on my editing process, I pretty much just use my phone and a free app (and sometimes a paid app but that's not necessary) feel free to ask, I'd be happy to share :)

Let's get into the tutorial under the cut! ^^

Okay, let's continue editing our photo of Viktor and V using CharLi! So, open your CET menu and look for the CharLi menu and open it up. First thing I tend to do is go over to the settings tab (the gear) and shut off chromatic aberration and volumetric fog. This is all up to personal taste though, so do what looks best to you! Now, return to the main tab (click the light bulb) and let's spawn a light! Personally I always prefer to start with 1x as the others tend to be way too bright for most scenes. Play around with choosing whichever type of light you like.

In the end, I went with the type called Favelas as my main light source. Go ahead and play around a bit with the rotation, intensity, and other sliders.

Here's what I ended up settling on! I try to make sure that the character's aren't washed out or too dark and I try to make my first light light the characters fairly evenly. Now, for depth and flavor, let's add a second light! This time I chose spotlight and I adjusted the colors until I achieved a relatively blue color.

One last thing, for each of your lights go ahead and toggle these two badboys off. That will hide both the physical light object and the pink tracker so they don't clutter up your photo.

Adjusting the angles a bit more to my own tastes, here's what I'm left with without any external editing!

Now, let's try and outdoor photo! Following the steps in the last tutorial, I am going to teleport to my location of choice (I am using a teleportation preset found in PinkyDude's Roadtrip Through The Badlands AMM location addon). While here, I switch my Nibbles replacer to Fem because I'm gonna take some pics with Panam! Now that I'm here, I notice that the lighting out here could be better! I tend to adjust my weather and lighting outside of photomode because it doesn't always shift correctly in it. To make sure everyone is lit correctly, I tend to pick the character with the darkest skin or clothing that will be in my scene and spawn them from the spawn tab. I'll choose Panam, of course!

Note: Going to the tools section and selecting freeze target can help keep your spawned companion from walking away but I forgot to do that here lol For weather conditions, I like to choose light clouds. This makes the sky look nice and it also softs harsh shadows. This is up to personal taste and the mood of your scene though! Additionally, if you want more weather states and deeper control, you can use the Nova City mod. For now, let's just play with the vanilla weather settings.

I tend to prefer the look of early morning the best, but again this up to taste! I would definitely recommend avoiding middle of the day though as the harsh lighting can greatly overexpose your image while also muting colors. Now that we've got all that set up, let's banish her just like we did Viktor in the first tutorial. Unlike Viktor, this Panam clone won't respawn (the real Panam is safe and sound, this won't affect her). Now let's return to photomode (and ignore my boy's goofy Us Cracks pose). Follow the steps to set up your replacer just like in the first tutorial. Now that I have my replacer swapped out to Panam, I am going to remove her jacket using one of the built-in presets (for swapping outfits with ones not listed in AMM see the AMC tutorial linked above). To do this I am going to go to tools > target replacer > scan and then scroll to the drop-down and list and pick the one I want to use. Let's keep the harness but remove her jacket!

From here, choose whatever poses you like, set up CharLi however you wish, and now let's try taking a portrait shot! This is where those presets come in handy. If you downloaded them, go ahead and flip through to the portrait ones at the end and select the one you like best. Otherwise, let's set this up ourselves! To do this, I will go to Camera tab in photomode and set my rotation to either 90 or -90 degrees. This allows you to fit more into the shot while also allowing your portrait to be higher quality because it fills up the whole screen instead of being a tinier image with a lot of empty space on the sides. Next, I'm going to adjust the field of view. The lower the field of view, the less your image is distorted. While distortion can be nice for some styles and atmospheres, I tend to prefer a lower FOV for my portraits. I tend to prefer to set my FOV lower then 20 but higher than 10. Here I've chosen 15!

Now you can play around with the angles and take your photo! Here's the unedited one I got in the end:

If you have any questions definitely feel free to ask! This is certainly not the only or even the "best" way to do it, this is just my personal way :) Have fun!

[abimee]

As someone in a very similar boat cosplay wise I really understand where you are coming from. Its easy to want to not give a shit and try to just do what you want but that nagging feeling that you're just gonna get judged or compared to others and you can't do anything about it can really easily run your whole day.

But I wanna believe that if enough of us cosplay what we want within our own means and support each other it could be stronger than that. You only get one shot at each convention and regrets suck. Whatever you do I hope you have an excellent time.

YEAH 😭 i always wanna brush it off but especially since im Really New to conventions and havent really done any other big-attendance type outings before being around so many people and seeing all the technical skill and work on display can really make me feel like i shouldnt have even tried/ill just be made fun of for showing up in what ''looks like'' a ''cheap halloween costume'' even if i made it myself

i always try to like tell myself that the cosplay seen is just heavily dominated by people with years of experience and with the money/means/time to make these things because they do cons often/do it professionally, and when im really feeling like shit i usually go back and look at like, photos from conventions in the 90s/2000s back when cosplaying wasnt as heavily monetized/mainstream and just like. look at all the cosplayers in plastic wigs and off the rack clothes altered into video game clothing and remind myself that this is a hobby first and foremost and im not trying to win any awards or become a cosplay creator/influencer online, i just wanna dress up when i go to a con and maybe make someone happy. and when i see others in their homemade costumes or just in a wig or anything i myself even go omg how fun!!! and getting to see them have a fun time makes me happy and reminds me that this is what its meant to be about!! having fun!!!

i also try to remind myself of last year when i went in a pretty ''OKAY'' hythlodaeus cosplay with a lot of shortcuts due to money and it being my first time ever sewing an outfit (i only did toy sewing beforehand), i didnt consider it all that good, but when i went to the con a guy stopped me with a gasp and said ''oh my god, can i take your photo?", and after i struck a pose for him he told me I ''made his entire con experience'', so i just gotta remind myself that someone out there is going to love my costume whether they get brave enough to tell or not and that all that matters is im having FUN

we will rise up and win against the evil thoughts that we are not good enough and are cosplays are not good enough, because no matter what the best cosplay is always the one that we have the most fun in and it doesnt matter the amount of detail or effort put into it, its about the experiences we have while cosplaying and i just gotta remember that [throws my hands in the air]

[dreamingmachines]

First post!

I started out my exploration of AI art by downloading easydiffusion, a beginner-friendly UI for Stable Diffusion, which is an open source (read: free, but bring-your-own-compute) AI image generator. There's a more popular and full-featured UI called AUTOMATIC1111, but I figured quicker & more basic was better to start off with.

I didn't change most of the defaults, and just plugged in a few phrases and waited for the images to generate. With default settings, it takes about a minute and a half per image on my machine.

The first few images were cool, but very amorphous and blobby, not really what I was looking for. Adding a few more steps produced better results, but still not good enough.

After skimming through the easydiffusion wiki, I found out about LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) models. Basically, this is a very small model focused on a particular concept, like a character, or pose, or art style. You can add it to your image generator to help guide the creation process towards a specific result.

There are some sites where people share the LoRAs they've made, but that's like 90% anime waifu stuff, and I thought it would be better to make my own for exactly what I want anyway.

For my first LoRA, my theme was up-close photos of Japanese wagashi, which are beautiful little sweets that look a bit like polymer clay or decorative soaps. I thought the textures would work well with the AI's tendency towards blobbiness. I grabbed 31 images from web search results, wrote very basic text descriptions for each, uploaded the pictures and text to a google drive, and used someone's colab to train a LoRA based on them.

The results with the LoRA were much better than the ones without it! Still not as crisp or consistent as I would like, but overall quite good for the amount of effort that went into it.

The next thing to play with would be stuff like inpainting (where you select a portion of a generated image to redo/refine further) or using image inputs (I want to try plugging in a very basic sketch and letting the generator make a highly-rendered output based on it). But before I get to that, I want to train a few more LoRAs, because it's fun!

[fluorescentsummer]

The Barbie CAS Challenge

Days 15: Mermaid

[realcube]

CELEBRATING YOUR BIRTHDAY 

characters ♡ bokuto, tendō, matsukawa & suna

tw ♡ gn! reader, timeskip! bokuto (all sfw tho), swearing, reader wears makeup (matsukawa), swearing, mentions of death & food 

cred ♡ thanks to anon for this request <3

KŌTARŌ BOKUTO

♡ he was literally counting down the days to your birthday, he even took the day off practise to celebrate it with you so imagine his surprise when the special day finally rolls around and he wakes up to an empty bed

♡ at first, he thought that perhaps you were just around the house somewhere but nope, the place was completely empty and even worse, all signs pointed to his theory that you had gone to work/school on your birthday 

♡ outraged. he was absolutely outraged. 

♡ firstly, he tried calling you but you wouldn’t pick up, even after his many attempts so his next resort to call your place of work/school reception 

♡ obviously he managed to get a hold of you then-

♡ he was originally gonna yell about how you lied to him about taking the day off on your birthday but there was no way he could be angry at you — almost ever — so instead, he made the quick decision of telling you to have a nice day before hanging up 

♡ you were kinda pissed that he wasted your time like that but how could you stay mad at him? he’s fkn adorable! he blew you audible kisses over the phone for good luck!

♡ you laboured your way through the day, putting in great effort yet through it all, the only thing on your mind was how much you wanted to just pass out on the couch with bokuto as soon as you got home. you weren’t even sure if you had the energy to change into your pjyamas.

♡ however, when you finally did arrive home, there was no need to put yourself through the onerous task of changing clothes as the first thing you were greeted by when you stepped foot in your own home was a chorus of cheers of ‘surprise!’ followed by people spilling out into the foyer from the kitchen and living room 

♡ then there was bokuto, the loudest of them all leading the crowd, blowing into the party horn while dashing up to, throwing his arms around your shoulders to pull you into a tight hug, ‘happy birthday, sweetie!’

♡ a light gasp escaped your lips at the sudden hoots, and the unfamiliar — and frankly uncomfortable — sight of many friends swarm towards you had you on edge but when you felt bokuto wrap you in his warm embrace, you knew you were home

♡ he held you close until you were forced apart by many guests tearing you away to personally wish you a happy birthday

♡ now that the initial shock had died down, you noticed that there wasn’t as many people present as you thought, it was a humble gathering of all your closest friends 

♡ there was a massive pile of bright-colored gifts lying on the stairs, and it was hard not to immediately acknowledge them as the sheer mass and number of the presents scattered across the steps prevented anyone from being able to go upstairs

♡ the following day, you were made aware of the fact 90% of those presents were addressed from ‘your best ace husband ;)’ which was pretty straight-forward considering you only have one husband; kiyoomi sakusa. 

♡ jokes, you married bokuto but sakusa was also at the party. he originally just wanted to drop off his gift then leave but bokuto persuaded him to stay, though he seemed to be regretting it now as almost everyone at the party now shared an unspoken goal to slam sakusa’s face into one of the cupcakes that decorated the circumference of your cake

♡ speaking of the cake, bokuto remembered what type of cake was your favorite from the wedding planning and he was so chuffed with himself. in fact, he was so confident in his cake picking ability that he ordered a massive 3-tier monster of a dessert 

♡ neither of you would be able to finish it before it goes bad so you ended up cutting it up into pieces  and sending each guest away with a little goody-bag with a slice of cake inside lmao 

♡ once you had finished your goodbyes and everyone had filed out of your home, you flopped onto the couch and let out a deep sigh of relief. well, it was only a sigh for a few moment as it became a wheeze when bokuto laid down on top of you 

♡ ‘happy birthday, (y/n). i’m sorry if i tired you out.’ he hummed, fiddling with your fingers as his lips curled into a shaky smile

♡ ‘i’m a bit sleepy but i had an amazing time. thank you so much, kō.’

♡ bokuto smiled, his heavy lid falling shut as he finally rested his neck, being able to fall asleep comfortably now that you’ve told him that you had fun

SATORI TENDŌ

♡ unlike bokuto, he’ll actually mention your birthday a few weeks prior to the celebration so he can plan the perfect date :3

♡ ‘so do you wanna go to the aquarium or the theme park? because i know we’ve went to the park before but they remodelled it apparently. plus, maybe the aquarium is a bit underwhelming for such a special day, but it’s up to yo--’

♡ ‘we won’t really get to spend much time in either. if you consider the time school finishes, the train ride and the time the aquarium and park closes so maybe we could just chill at my house instead.’

♡ tendō deadpanned for a moment, the most unamused look taking over his features until he suddenly burst out laughing, cackling as if you just told the joke of the century, ‘seriously, (y/n)? you’re gonna go to school on your birthday.’

♡ ‘yes, of course.’ you replied in all seriousness, resulting in tendō awkwardly beginning to stifle his chuckles.

♡ he frowned, slumping back into the seat beside you, ‘c’mon, it’s your birthday, though! you deserve the day off.’

♡ you shook your head, kindly declining his suggestion, ‘i have a test on that day.’

♡ ‘all the more reason to ditch!’

♡ now it was your turn to deadpan

♡ tendō tossed his head back while letting out a sigh  of defeat, draping his arm around your shoulder to lovingly pull you to his chest, ‘alright, then. whatever you want, dear.’

♡ you smiled, glad that you didn’t need to disagree with him any longer — and you were even happier on the day. even though you insisted that he keeps things small on your birthday, he still managed to find a way to make things extra asf by getting you a massive plush that was about half the size of your stature and a hamper of homemade chocolates ><

ISSEI MATSUKAWA 

♡ honestly, he’s never been the best at giving gifts but he tries extra hard for you 

♡ like if you off-handedly say that you are cold during class, he’ll buy you a bunch of new jackets, jumpers and gloves

♡ or if you say you need more mascara, he’ll buy you exact same one you usually wear 

♡ he’s observant enough to notice and remember the exact shade and brands of all your cosmetic products but he’s not observant enough to pick up on the subtle hints you drop as to what you want for your birthday 

♡ you can never guess what he’s gonna get you and that adds to your anticipation for the day 

♡ if your birthday is on a school day, he’ll bring in a batch of homemade cupcakes (which hanamaki helped him with) and stick a candle in one of them for you to blow out 

♡ he offers you one but they are all pretty stale- just smile and nod while your teeth feel like they are being shattered trying to bite down on the cupcake 

♡ it might set off the fire alarm but oh well, just count that as another present

♡ oikawa will probably get you something like a bouquet and try flirt with you so at that point, matsukawa and hanamaki begin using the cupcakes as weapons 

♡ they are a two for one deal so you’re going to be spending the day with both of them tailing you like lost puppies

platonic RINTARŌ SUNA

♡ (requester specified) your birthday is on the same day as his so ofc he’s going to be a little salty abt it 

♡ you both created a game to see who receives the most birthday wishes and whoever won gets ¥1500 from the loser’s birthday money

♡ for the past few years, he’s usually been the winner by just a few but this year, you made it a point to befriend all him teammates in order to ensure victory 

♡ having to pretend to be friendly with atsumu — who wasn’t very good at hiding his massive crush —was definitely a challenge but you powered through 

♡ in fact, you may have played the role too well as both the miya twins gave you a gift 

♡ osamu gave both you and suna a plastic bag filled with some food he made and water bottles

♡ as for atsumu, his gift to you was a massive hamper filled with an assortment of many different luxury confectionary which didn’t look cheap at all but it didn’t feel appropriate to question the price so you simply took it from him with a bright smile

♡ of course, suna was excited (and very hungry) as he expected the same gift but he was more than disappointed when all he received was a bag of chips and a slap on the back

♡ he goes out of his way to tell every teacher it’s your birthday in hopes that they’ll make the class sing happy birthday to you 

♡ but it pisses him off to no end when you add that it’s his birthday too so he ends up getting roped into your misery 

♡ also your thumbs are going to be sore at night swiping through all the various candid pics that suna took of you throughout the day (in less than flattering poses) which he uplaoded to almost all of his social media stories with stupid ass captions 

♡ but dw bc he’ll eventually post a nice photo of you with a sweet message

♡ ‘happy birthday to @(y/n) . i would die for you, bitch (even though you annoy the hell out of me every single day 🤠).’ 

[themurphyzone]

This post is a combination of the 90s PatB alongside the reboot’s Ep 13. Spoilers below. 

So...I was certainly not expecting a flashback in this ep. Great usage of the ‘everyone asks how, but no one ever asks why’ question by Pinky. 

No matter the adaptation, Brain is always presented as a mouse with a pathological need for control because he sorely lacked it as a young mouse. When he loses that control, whether in this episode with being locked in a car and taken on a road trip against his will, or in other episodes with different situations, he’ll lose control of himself, the very thing he’s trying to avoid. 

Anyways, the flashback presented in this episode can reasonably fit with the origin episodes in the 90s PatB, so I’m gonna try and present these in an order that can fit together, so let’s start off with Leggo My Ego, shall we? 

Anyway, Brain starts life as an innocent field mouse. Ain’t he the cutest little thing you’d ever see? 

Um...hey guys, maybe we could let the cute mouse baby blow a feather around and be happy? 

Nope...oof. Time to begin a life of trauma. 

He’s a babey.... He needs hugs! How do you people not have sympathy for him??????

So basically, the 90s cartoon presents several origins and some of them are more contradictory than others. I believe Leggo My Ego and The Visit are the only episodes that mention Brain was originally a wild mouse captured by humans, but it’s generally the most widely accepted origin for him.

In Leggo My Ego, Freud notes that Brain’s desire for world domination appears to be a subconscious desire to return to the simple life he once led. 

So..let’s bring in Snowball now. 

In this post, I’m trying to be chronological here. In this flashback, Brain describes how he and Snowball were once very close and how he could always make Snowball laugh. 

Brain and Snowball grew up together, and Brain genuinely cared about Snowball, even into adulthood when the two became enemies. 

They went through the gene splicer together after an experiment gone wrong. The gene splicer exploded and supposedly messed with Snowball’s mind. 

Snowball did something that caused him to get kicked out of ACME Lab. The rift became permanent, though what was the exact cause or if clashing ambitions fueled it is unknown. 

This event left a permanent mark on Brain, and Pinky himself had never heard about Snowball until he tried to steal one of Brain’s schemes. 

But anyway, the exact timeline of the splicing and the break in friendship is unknown. So...I think this flashback in the reboot’s Ep 13: Roadent Trip might fill one of the blanks in on an event that might’ve occurred during Brain’s time with Snowball, before he met Pinky. 

Alright, so for this post’s sake, I’m going to present the new flashback as if it took place shortly after Brain’s splicing with Snowball. I’m also going to disregard the 90s PatB episode Project BRAIN, because there’s stronger canon evidence that Brain was born in the wild and that he grew up with Snowball. However, I do enjoy keeping that Brain named Pinky. 

Anyways, that’s enough for the introduction. Grab your tissues if you haven’t already. 

Pinky: “You’re always trying to work out how to take over the world, but you’ve never told me why you want to take over the world, Brain.” 

*moment of silence*

Pinky: “Brain?” 

Brain: “If I answer this, you’ll let me expire in peace?” 

Honestly, a GIF would do Brain’s reaction justice, because he doesn’t outright dismiss Pinky’s question. He’s more hesitant because he realizes this moment is going to lead to a heart to heart talk, something he’d rather not engage in. And you know what? I can’t recall any instance of Brain admitting to Pinky about why he wanted to take over the world, just how or that he was going to do it with this particular plan. 

I think this correlates well with Leggo My Ego above; that Brain doesn’t reflect on the ultimate driving force behind his actions, just that he wants it and he’s going to somehow get it. If he does have a moment of clarity, he always dismisses it and goes right back to the drawing board. 

And most importantly, that he just wants love and respect. Does he create his own misery? Yes. But at the same time, he’s sadly a product of the combination of human curiosity and ignorance. 

So...I deeply apologize for this tangent real quick before I move onto the rest of this post. 

*takes deep breath* 

LOOK AT THIS BABY HE’S SUCH A CUTIE I WANNA HUG HIM SO BAD HE DOESN’T DESERVE THIS CRAP YOU WILL LOOK AT HIM AND YOU WILL LOVE HIM 

Okay, so like I said before, due to his head shape and how he seems to display early cognitive abilities here, I honestly think the best timeframe for this would be sometime in the 90s, just after his and Snowball’s splicing. Again, Brain was ultimately a child in Snowball, but since he’s the one narrating, we’re led to assume he set his sights on the world right away. 

Actually, it seems more likely that while Brain’s capacity for knowledge was enhanced, he still had to make the effort to learn. What he knows as an adult didn’t come all at once. So here, he has cognition, but he’s still fairly optimistic because the weight of the world truly hasn’t set in yet. 

Alright, so my explanation is that Snowball was elsewhere in the lab, and that they’re simply separated for the day. Brain was lifted out of an experiment with other mice, and placed directly into a solo study. 

The scientists place a huge slice of cheese on a stun plate, with the intention that Brain will be shocked if he tries to go for the cheese. Of course, who would be able to resist having this much food placed in front of them? I certainly wouldn’t. 

But the moment he tries to go for the cheese, he gets shocked. But since he’s very much learning, he doesn’t understand why he gets shocked if he steps on the plate. 

It’s this pose that makes me believe he’s spliced at this point. Brain adopts that thinking pose well into adulthood. However, he doesn’t really have a plan. He just thinks he’ll succeed if he goes for it enough times, much like the world. 

Also, compare his tail shape between this photo and the one above it. Rather fitting for it to be a lightning bolt, is it not? Mice tails do get kinked in real life if handled improperly, which is very much the case here too. 

Scientist 1: “The idea is that once we remove the electronic stimulus, he still won’t go for the cheese.” 

Scientist 2: “Learned helplessness.”  

And sadly...their hypothesis is proven correct. 

And the thing is, Brain does recognize that the shock is turned off. He does learn that he shouldn’t touch the plate. So he tries once more...

And stops. 

Even with the cheese’s proximity, it’s still unattainable. The only thing that holds Brain back is himself. He wants the cheese, but he’ll get hurt if he tries to go for it. So...despite there being no obvious danger, Brain doesn’t go for it again. 

Learned Helplessness Wikipedia Page Link

This could potentially be the moment where Brain finally loses his innocence. He has to control everything because the moment he doesn’t...he’ll get shocked. 

Notice how everything Brain’s ever wanted at any stage is always in close proximity to himself? In Leggo My Ego, he was extremely close to his parents and the tin can upon capture. In Snowball, he clearly desired companionship, but he and Snowball were never in the same cage. In this flashback, the cheese is ripe for the taking with the shock turned off, and he doesn’t try again. 

Brain is able to learn. And he learns that the world is cruel, that he’s only an interesting specimen for science with no autonomy of his own. He learns that he has to be in control to stop hurting so much.  

“From that day hence, I vowed I would be the one in control. Of myself, of my surroundings, of the world. Yet again, here I am, totally helpless.” 

Okay, I swear this wasn’t intentional and I didn’t notice this until I made this post, but look at how similar the final pose in the flashback and Brain’s pose in this shot are. 

That in some ways, Brain is still that child with simple desires. Maybe he phrases them differently, but that’s what it ultimately boils down to.  

And from Brain’s emotionally charged delivery of the above line, this experience was so traumatic that he kept it hidden for two decades. 

And while the cheese is supposed to represent how he can’t obtain the world despite living in it, I think there’s another thing that went unstated. It also happens to represent: 

Pinky is the cheese. Brain won’t step on a stun plate if he tries to touch Pinky. Rather, Pinky will welcome any affectionate gesture with open arms. 

But Brain believes he’ll be hurt if he tries. The humans set the precedent. Desire affection, desire love, you’ll get hurt, they taught him. 

The only thing holding Brain back is himself. 

And it’s absolutely tragic.

Be like Pinky. Give Brain a hug.   

If you’ll excuse me, Imma go cry. 

[northernindigenousbeautyhailey]

TAMRA JEWEL KEEPNESS.

FEW CHILDREN IN CANADA JUST VANISH. Fewer still stay gone for longer than a couple of days. Some are found alive, others are hurt or killed, but rarely does a child simply disappear. The RCMP’s National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains database lists 147 missing children, in a country of more than 35 million people. Of the sixty children under the age of twelve, a quarter are thought to have been abducted by their parents. A large portion of the others were lost to apparent accidents or misadventure, falling through ice or swept away in the pull of wild rivers, their bodies never recovered. The database shows twenty-four children in the past sixty years who have inexplicably disappeared. Because there are so few, we know them. In Edmonton, there is Tania Murrell, six when she vanished while walking home from school for lunch in January 1983. In Toronto, Nicole Morin, eight when she disappeared from a condominium building in July 1985. Michael Dunahee was four years old when he went missing from a playground in Victoria in 1991. In Regina, there is only Tamra Keepness.

THE LAST TIME anyone saw Tamra, she was five years old, with bobbed black hair and soft, round cheeks. In one picture, she wears a T-shirt dotted with flowers, standing against the colourful collage of a classroom wall. Her smile is broad and open, her eyes lively. She was so smart that her mother called her “my little Einstein,” so feisty that when a little boy pushed her once, Tamra shoved him right back, and harder. She liked playing Mario Kart on Nintendo and climbing her favourite tree, down the block from her house.

July 6, 2004, was the first time Sergeant Ron Weir would hear Tamra’s name. He was getting ready to leave on vacation that day when he got an urgent call back to the police station. Weir was a veteran cop with the Regina Police Service and head of emergency services, which included search and rescue. In a meeting, officers from the major crimes unit laid out what they knew: sometime between the night of Monday, July 5, and the morning of Tuesday, July 6, a five-year-old girl had gone missing from her home in central Regina.

Weir had been a police officer for twenty years. He knew that kids often went missing and turned up safe a short time later. Sixty-five percent of missing children and teens are located within the first day, and almost 90 percent within the first week. But Weir also knew that Tamra was too young to get far as a runaway. Patrol officers had already checked the neighbourhood to make sure Tamra hadn’t wandered away or ended up at the house of a playmate or relative, as was often the case with missing children. They’d found nothing. Even in the early hours of the investigation, Weir suspected this case would be different.

TAMRA LIVED with her mother, stepfather, and five siblings at 1834 Ottawa Street, a shabby brown-and-white two-storey with a windowed porch at the front. The house stood between 11th and 12th avenues, just east of downtown Regina. The neighbourhood was a mix of long-time elderly residents, young families drawn by low prices for heritage houses, and ramshackle homes where residents struggled with poverty and addiction. The area was sometimes known as the “low stroll,” a place where women and girls sold their bodies for drugs or booze and men drove around looking to buy them, circling the neighbourhood in trucks and station wagons. Many of the women and girls who lived or worked in the area were First Nations, like Tamra. Long before calls for a federal inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women would dominate the political conversation, women were going missing from those streets. It was from that same area that nineteen-year-old Annette Kelly Peigan disappeared in 1983, followed by eighteen-year-old Patsy Favel in 1984 and Joyce Tillotson in 1993. Two years later, two young white men picked up a woman named Pamela George, sexually assaulted her, and beat her to death.

The last public development came in November 2014, when a Reddit user posted to the website a scrawled map with the words: “Location of Tamra Keepness, check the wells.”

Tamra’s house was less than a block from the Oskana Centre, a halfway house for federal parolees, and not far from the Salvation Army’s Waterston House, a residence and shelter inhabited by former inmates and men struggling with drugs, alcohol, and psychiatric issues. Residents of both facilities had been responsible for serious attacks in the past. Just four months earlier, convicted violent sex offender Randy Burgmann had lured a woman into his room at Waterston House with alcohol, before violently sexually assaulting her and leaving her beside a dumpster to die. The Oskana Centre had previously been home to both serial rapist Larry Deckert and Billy John Francis Whitedeer, who began committing violent sexual offences on children when he was ten years old. A few blocks farther was the Ehrle Hotel, one of the worst bars in town, from which patrons spilled soggy and staggering onto the sidewalk, and which appeared regularly in police reports and court testimony.

Police also had serious questions about what was happening at 1834 Ottawa Street. There was a broken window and blood spatter in the porch. Social Services had been involved with the family since not long after the oldest child was born in 1993, and there had been more than fifty reports made to crisis workers, most often about Tamra’s mother’s use of alcohol and drugs, and neglect of the children. Her mother’s boyfriend had a history of violence and domestic assault. In most cases, investigators knew, children are hurt by people closest to them.

POLICE STARTED with a thorough search of the area immediately around the home, then cast their efforts outward in an expanding grid. As the sun rose on the morning of July 7, 2004, the search effort intensified. First, there were ten officers, then twenty, then more. Some officers accompanied trained volunteer search teams; others questioned family members and potential witnesses, going door-to-door gathering leads or chasing down tips. The RCMP training academy provided cadets, and members of the public soon began arriving on their own to help.

Police set up a command-centre bus in the parking lot of a nearby church, from which Weir co-ordinated the search. Though it was an urban environment, the terrain posed serious challenges. The area was filled with overgrown yards, empty houses, piles of garbage. Tamra weighed forty pounds, and stood three foot five. There were so many places a child could hide or get trapped or be held, where a child’s body could be concealed or dumped. Searchers in orange vests worked in grids, knocking on doors, inspecting junked cars and crumbling garages, peering under discarded mattresses and piles of wood, looking down manholes. Police stopped garbage pickups, checking all the bins in the neighbourhood, the trash putrid and reeking in the summer heat. Some bins had already been emptied, so plans were made to search the dump as well.

And what if she had been taken farther? Not far away were industrial areas, large abandoned lots and buildings, Wascana Creek, and beyond that, the vast Prairie. With a thirteen-hour head start, someone in a vehicle could have had Tamra in Vancouver before she was reported missing.

When they were not speaking to police, members of Tamra’s family waited anxiously on the fringes, watching the searchers, eyeing the growing assembly of reporters and news crews holding out microphones and pointing camera lenses. “It’s not like her to go off by herself,” said Tamra’s father, Troy Keepness, sitting on the front steps of his ex-wife’s house, his voice tight with worry. “We’re trying to do our best to get her back.”

Weir worked in the command-centre bus, surrounded by maps and whiteboards. A scribe logged every aspect of the search in real time, recording ideas and progress. No one wanted to break, not for food or rest. Everyone knew the situation grew more serious with every passing hour. As the heat of the day gave way to evening, Weir stood outside and looked up. A strong wind had come in, and storm clouds were spreading, darkening the Prairie sky.

The next day, police strung crime-scene tape around Tamra’s house and the one next door, drawing it through the back alley and across six garages, long slashes of yellow dividing the street. Officers guarded the perimeter while forensic investigators went in and out of the house in boots and masks. “While we don’t have any direct evidence that Tamra has come to any harm, we also don’t know where she is,” police spokeswoman Elizabeth Popowich told reporters. “And if, in fact, this comes to a point where we determine that she’s come to some harm and it’s because of a criminal act, this location could potentially be the scene of some evidence.”

THERE WERE three adults in the house that evening: the children’s mother, Lorena Keepness; her boyfriend, Dean McArthur; and a family friend named Russell Sheepskin, who had been staying with the family. All three had come and gone during the night, and investigators were starting to question their movements. There were no signs of forced entry to the house, and there were gaps, inconsistencies in their timelines that didn’t make sense to investigators.

The story the three told publicly, compiled from various interviews, was that Lorena and McArthur got into an argument while watching a movie on Monday evening, and McArthur and Sheepskin left the house around 8:30 p.m. to go drinking. The men returned briefly to drop off a bottle of formula for the baby, then left again. Lorena went out around 11 p.m, kissing Tamra goodbye before she went. The oldest child in the house was ten-year-old Summer, the youngest was Lorena and McArthur’s nine-month-old baby. Lorena returned briefly to check on the children and then left again around midnight. At about 3 a.m., Sheepskin returned home drunk and saw Tamra sleeping on the couch. Not long after, McArthur got back to the house and assaulted Sheepskin on the porch, punching him through a window and then stomping on his head. (Both men later said the fight had nothing to do with Tamra.) Sheepskin walked alone to the hospital to get stitches, and McArthur went to stay at his aunt’s house a few blocks away. Though it should have been a short walk, he said he got lost and kept passing out as he walked there. He didn’t arrive for at least two hours, until 5 or 5:30 a.m. Meanwhile, Lorena got home around 3:15 or 3:30 a.m., climbed in through a window, and passed out on the couch. She said that she got up to undo the latch on the door for her mother around 8 or 9 a.m. and that the two eldest children, Summer and Rayne, left on their own in the morning to attend a summer day-camp. Lorena didn’t realize Tamra wasn’t there until about three hours later, when the five-year-old didn’t come downstairs. At 12:16 p.m., a family member called the police and told them Tamra was missing.

Rayne, who was eight, said he had gone to bed squeezed into the space between the wall and mattresses piled on the floor in an upstairs bedroom. He told his mother he felt Tamra get up at some point, the slight movement of a child’s weight. All he could remember was that it was light outside.

FRIDAY WAS hot again and wet from the previous night’s rain. An odour of decay hung in the air around Ottawa Street. Tamra had been gone three full days and become national news. Her picture seemed to be everywhere, hanging on street poles and store windows. In news stories, she became “missing five-year-old Tamra Keepness,” but more often she was just Tamra, as if we knew her. The front page of the Regina Leader-Post spoke directly to her, asking, “Tamra, Where Did You Go?”

Tips flooded in to police. On the street, there were rumours that Tamra had been seen at a dollar store with an older woman. Business owners in the neighbourhood said detectives had been looking for a middle-aged white man named Roch or Rocky, but police wouldn’t confirm whether that was related to the search. Lorena and McArthur said they gave police the names of five people they thought could be suspects, including a man who had befriended Tamra and later been discovered to be a pedophile. For a while, there was even a theory that Tamra had never existed at all, that she had been a scam to get extra money from Social Services. (Hospital records proved that was not the case.)

Searchers were coming from around the province to volunteer, streaming into the city from towns and First Nations communities, motivated by the faces of their own children or grandchildren to help in whatever way they could. “I’ve got a boy, and he’s twenty-one,” said Jerry Scott, one of the volunteers who joined the search. “And if he left, I’d go nuts, too.” Around the city, people organized vigils and barbecues, brought water and snacks for the searchers, wrapped ribbons around trees to show their support. Some left teddy bears and angels on the steps of Tamra’s house. Days of intensive searches had turned up lots of items that seemed as though they could be connected—clothing, a child’s shoe—but none of it belonged to Tamra. “I’m starting to go on different conclusions, like maybe someone took her, I don’t know,” Troy Keepness said. “I just hope nobody would hurt my daughter.”

WHEN Tamra had been gone a week, police announced they were suspending the ground searches. At a press conference, Regina police chief Cal Johnston announced a $25,000 reward for information and vowed, “We will find Tamra.” Police questioned sex offenders living in the area and obtained surveillance tapes from convenience stores, bars, gas stations, and the Greyhound bus depot nearby. Johnston confirmed that “criminal interference with Tamra is a distinct possibility” and drew attention back to Tamra’s house and family. “There were comings and goings from the house that night that remain not fully explained to our satisfaction, and we continue to ask those questions,” he told reporters. He would not elaborate.

Tamra’s family was growing increasingly angry at the police, and the strain of the situation was starting to show. Lorena told reporters she’d signed consent forms for police to search her house and had given her DNA, but still she felt as if they were focusing too much on her family and not enough on trying to find Tamra. She was angry that police hadn’t closed the highways out of the city and that there was no Amber Alert because police said it didn’t meet the criteria. “I’m fed up,” she told reporters. “They are wasting time. This is my little girl we’re talking about.”

The family was growing frustrated with the media, too. Lorena’s mother yelled obscenities at reporters one day, and on another, members of the family nearly came to blows with a TV reporter doing a live update from the front lawn. They had been watching the news inside the house when they heard the reporter imply what many in the city were already wondering: If not someone in that house, then who?

On July 19, two weeks after Tamra had been reported missing, police charged McArthur with assaulting Sheepskin the night Tamra disappeared. McArthur told reporters he had been interrogated for twenty hours, not about the assault, but about Tamra and about what had gone on inside the house that night. “It was always the same questions, and they were assuming that I knew the answers to those questions, but I didn’t know the answers, and I still don’t know the answers,” he said. “I would never hurt a hair on that little girl’s head.”

Two days later, Tamra’s brothers and sisters were removed from the home by child-protection officers. Tamra’s twin sister wore messy pigtails and clutched a colouring book and a yellow blanket as two women led the children away down the front steps of the house. Neither government officials nor police would say whether the children’s seizure was related to Tamra’s disappearance. When the children were gone, police searched the house again.

One night late that summer, Tamra’s father, Troy, showed up at the house with a baseball bat and confronted her stepfather, McArthur. Troy was charged with assault, though McArthur later said police “got things misunderstood.” “Everybody’s looking for answers,” he said. “We more or less talked.”

LORENA KEEPNESS was fourteen years old when she ran away from her home on the White Bear First Nation, 200 kilometres southeast of Regina. She had been in residential school for about three months, but that wasn’t what did it. For her, it was the same ugly stuff at home. She found her way to Regina. When her mom tried to take her home, Lorena wouldn’t go. She lived on the streets instead.

She had her daughter Summer Wind when she was twenty, her son Rayne Dance not long after. It was after the ultrasound for her third baby that she walked home in a daze and told her husband, Troy, “We’re having twins.” She kept repeating it until it sunk in, and then they just stood together in the kitchen and laughed. Her mother said “Way to go!” but Lorena told her, “They came from God. Not like I planted those in me.”

The babies were born on September 1, 1998. Fraternal twin girls, each weighing more than six pounds, carried almost right to term and curved around one another like pieces of a puzzle. Lorena and Troy split up when the twins were little, and after that, the girls stayed sometimes with their mother, sometimes with their father or with other relatives. Lorena and Troy each struggled with substance abuse, and their lives were sometimes too troubled and unstable to have the children with them. At five, Tamra was bold and courageous, and protective of her twin sister. Once, Lorena heard a soft knock in the middle of the night and opened the door to find the twins standing there. The children had left their father’s house and walked four blocks back to Lorena’s in the middle of the night, Tamra leading her sister by the hand as they found their way through the dark. REGINA POLICE received more than a thousand tips in the first six weeks after Tamra’s disappearance. At one point, a Volkswagen van that had been stolen the night Tamra disappeared was found burned outside the city. A jail guard told police she and a former inmate had stolen it, picked up Tamra, and then dumped the child’s body in a ravine on the Muscowpetung First Nation. Ron Weir led a week-long search on Muscowpetung, draining multiple beaver dams with compressor pumps, while searchers slogged through water up to their hips. The jail guard later confessed she had made up the story. She was charged with mischief and wrote a letter apologizing to the police. In court, her lawyer said she had been trying to get her abusive boyfriend locked up again.

Returning from medical leave to the police department in the fall of 2004, superintendent Troy Hagen could feel how Tamra’s disappearance was weighing on his colleagues. Hagen noticed it in everyone he spoke to, from the police chief down, whether they were involved with the case or not. Sergeant Rod Buckingham, one of the lead investigators, was among those who felt the growing frustration. “It’s a mystery,” he would say. “And I don’t like mysteries.”

Officers had spoken with more than 6,000 people by then, but there had been no arrests, and leads were drying up. Shortly after, a special task force was struck to re-examine the case, to see whether anything had been missed. The name of the project was iskwesis ayishowak e mamayahi, a Cree term meaning “little girl bring people together.”

TWELVE YEARS LATER, Lorena Keepness spends her days doing odd jobs and picking bottles, trading them in at the depot for cash. She is forty-three and lives with her eldest son in a rundown shack of a house on Victoria Avenue, a fifteen-minute walk from Ottawa Street. Lorena’s children were never permanently returned to her custody after the disappearance, and the three babies she had after that were all taken by Social Services, too. Tamra’s twin sister is seventeen now. Lorena says she is an athlete, smart and beautiful. Lorena lost her family pictures when someone threw all her stuff in the garbage a few years ago. The only photos she has of Tamra now are the ones on missing-child posters.

Tamra’s twin and her older sister, Summer, don’t want to be interviewed. Neither does Tamra’s father, Troy. McArthur couldn’t be reached. Lorena needs a six-pack of Black Ice beer to talk. She doesn’t really want to be interviewed either. She has never liked reporters or their questions, and it hurts to talk about that time. “But part of me wants to,” she says, as her face crumples. “Part of me needs to share what the fuck happened. Someone stole my child.”

Lorena has heard many theories about what happened to her daughter. Some believe Tamra wandered away and was abducted by a driver cruising the area or that she got lost, then crawled in somewhere so small she has never been found. Other theories focus on the adults in the house that night. Some officers will say off-the-record that they think Tamra is in the dump but that they just couldn’t find her in the mountains of debris. Many in the city believe that Lorena and McArthur sold or traded Tamra to pay off a cocaine debt. Lorena has heard that one the most. One night, she was at a bar and heard some women talking, loud enough so she could hear. “Yeah, she sold her kid for dope. She has a whole bunch of babies. She has kids just to sell them for drugs.” Her friend told her not to listen, but Lorena couldn’t ignore it. She swore at the women, promised she would get them for even thinking she could do that to her child. They met at the same bar again the next day, and that time they fought, a tangle of hair and fists. One of them had a knife and slashed her twice on the back of her arm. More scars to wear for life. It wasn’t the only time. One night, she was attacked in Moose Jaw. Not long ago, a woman shouted “Baby killer!” at her across the street.

Lorena and Dean McArthur are still together, on and off—“more on than off,” she says. Police tried hard to turn them against each other, but she always believed him in the end. He may be all kinds of things, she says, but he’s not a baby killer. “If I thought he did something to my daughter, I would have killed him myself,” she says. “I think the police were just so sure. They figured, ‘These guys are a bunch of nobodies. She did her own child.’ They already had their conclusions drawn before they even tried to look for anything.”

The suggestion she could have had something to do with her daughter’s disappearance still pushes Lorena to the point of violence. You can see her eyes flash, her muscles tighten at the question. But she holds back— it’s not worth going to jail. She’s had enough of the police, has grown used to the accusations. In the past twelve years, she’s repeated her story publicly many times, and it has never really changed.

REGINA POLICE have never released full details about the investigation into Tamra’s disappearance, on the grounds that it remains an open case that they still hope to solve. In an interview, Troy Hagen, now Regina’s police chief, would not speak about any working theories or confirm any specifics of the investigation, including whether one of the people questioned about Tamra’s disappearance had failed a polygraph test. Instead, Hagen echoed what police have said since the beginning: That there remain important unanswered questions about the comings and goings from the house on Ottawa Street that night. That they will continue to investigate every tip. That they won’t stop looking for Tamra until they find her. He pointed to cases in the United States where children have been gone for years, sometimes decades, and then been found alive. In Canada, twelve-year-old Abby Drover was held in an underground bunker in Port Moody, British Columbia, for six months after being abducted by her neighbour in 1976. There was an intensive search of her community—including by her abductor—but she had been only feet away from her house the entire time. She was found alive. It seems impossible, but it happens. “I refuse to lose hope,” Hagen says.

The years since Tamra’s disappearance have exposed the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. Suspected serial killers are facing charges in the Prairies, but there has been no public indication that Tamra’s disappearance may be connected to any of those cases. Hagen said police have also explored a possible connection with thirteen-year-old Courtney Struble, who disappeared from Estevan, a city 200 kilometres from Regina, four days after Tamra was last seen. Investigators initially believed that Struble was a runaway, and she had been gone for seven years before RCMP announced that her case had become a homicide investigation. No one has ever been charged, and her remains have never been located. Hagen says it’s strange to have two unsolved missing-children cases linked so closely in time and geographic proximity. He says the possibility of a connection was “very much” explored by police, but there doesn’t appear to be a correlation. The police investigation into Tamra’s disappearance is one of the largest and costliest in Regina’s history, but Hagen says it has never been about the money. If there were more leads or work for investigators, the police chief says he would reconvene the task force “in a heartbeat.” But the flood of tips has slowed. The reward for information that leads to finding her, now $50,000, sits unclaimed. The last public development came in November 2014, when a Reddit user with the name MySecretIsOut posted a scrawled map with the words: “Location of Tamra Keepness, check the wells.” The person later wrote that the map belonged to their grandmother and had come from a great-aunt who had visited an inmate in Alberta. “We, like many others, haven’t forgotten about you, Tamra, and continue to search and hope you are found,” the person posted. Police searched twenty-one wells around Muscowpetung but found nothing.

Sheepskin died on January 1, 2009, “with his family by his side,” according to his obituary. Many of the police officers who worked on Tamra’s case have retired or moved from the department to other jobs. Hagen says he thinks of Tamra whenever he is walking through the forest, not looking for her but always half expecting to see her there. Sometimes he looks at people he passes on the street, examining their faces and imagining what Tamra might look like now.

THROUGH THE YEARS, Lorena has developed her own theories about what happened to her daughter. These days, she mainly wonders about a drifter who used to stay with them, a woman Lorena knew from when she was a girl. A woman who sometimes told people she was pregnant even though she wasn’t, who Lorena knew by one name but whose medical documents said something else. The woman was around so much that Lorena’s children called her Big Auntie. Big Auntie had been staying at the house before Tamra disappeared, but left after she and Lorena had a falling out. Lorena says it took a long time to realize Big Auntie wasn’t coming around any more. When she did, she put word out on the streets, but no one there had seen her either. Big Auntie didn’t even show up for her own sister’s funeral in Regina a few years back. Lorena says she told the police about Big Auntie many times, but doesn’t know whether they ever found her, or whether they even looked. “She’s just gone now,” Lorena says. “Same time as my child.” Maybe it’s something. Or maybe Big Auntie is missing, too.

When I ask Lorena whether she thinks Tamra will ever be found, she struggles for an answer. “I don’t know,” she says. “But can I tell you about a dream I had?” There are two, both so vivid it’s as if they were real. In one, Tamra is inside a big house in a city Lorena has never seen. There are silk clothes draped around, and broad windows, and Tamra is upstairs, sitting on the edge of a bathtub putting on stockings. She is grown, with dark, shiny hair like her mother’s but cut straight all around. In the other dream, Tamra is still a little girl, running into her mother’s arms. “There you are!” Lorena says. “There you are!” She picks up her child and holds her, until Tamra wriggles free and is lost again.

[franeridart]

Anon said: How are you just like "Oh these are just some warm up sketches" and post a full finished piece, while I'm over here sketching a triangle person and calling it a finished piece.

I dunno if this was a legit question asking for a legit answer, but I do happen to have a legit answer so I might as well give it! If I wanted to go into detals with it it’d take me forever though, so allow me to separate it into two points to make it easier

I learnt how to be very fast in putting down my lines and trained myself into not overthinking every single dot I put down. This took about five or six years of drawing daily and a whole life of drawing occasionally before then, because to do so you need to reach a point where you’re drawing something you’ve drawn so many times that by now your hand sort of goes without you needing to think about it much, so it’s not a fast process, but boy is it worth it. Mostly learning how to not overthink it, overthinking it used to be 90% of my time spent on a drawing and dear god did it suck the joy out of everything I drew

I have two very distinctive ways of approaching a drawing, one where I actually put effort in it and the other where I just want to let the squiggles out of my pen, and warm ups are the second one - the lack of effort I’m putting in can have different forms and show in different ways, so a warm up could be a fully colored piece as it could be just a pencil doodle, depending on where and on what exactly I’m being lazy: it could be the type of tool I’m using that allows me to draw without having to line, it could be a very tiny canvas that lets me avoid a ton of details a big canvas would demand. I might be cutting the time I usually put in making sure my anatomy is correct, I might be using a shading technique that takes a tenth of the time my usual one would, I might be using a style that’s just easier and faster to draw, or drawing characters I’ve drawn a trillion times in extremely generic poses and clothes. There’s a lot of things that I can do to make things faster for me! It’s skills you gain as you draw a lot - you learn how to draw things the hard way, and then you realize that along the way you learnt how to do them the easy way too

hope this actually answers your question! If it was a question at all lol if it wasn’t then sorry for rambling, please pretend I didn’t say anything hahaha

Anon said: I love your newest comic!!! So adorable!! I noticed Bakugou's mom does the affectionate hair rustle thing to him in the manga/anime, do you think Bakugou subconsciously does the same to show affection cause of it? I love the way you draw faces and poses, it's so expressive!!

Ahhhhh thank you so much!!! And yeah, it might be! After all we do take a lot from the people we live with even without realizing, and he’s already so similar to his mom!

Anon said: I saw your bakushima comic from October 9th (2019) where Bakugo falls asleep studying and Kirishima sets him down on the table properly and it was so soft my heart is crying

;;;;; !!!!!!!! I’m glad you liked it!! <3<3

Anon said: If it not to much, could I possibly get a Ochamina doodle pls? I just love some sweet lesbeans 👉👈

Awww I’m not taking requests right now, but I’ll keep it in mind for next time I want to doodle and don’t know what!

Anon said: I love your art! I envy you.

Please don’t! There’s a lot of reasons why being me isn’t a lot of fun - if it’s just my skill you envy, then all you gotta do is draw a lot! 

Anon said: i just went through your entire kiribaku tag and omg it was beautiful seeing the progression in your art skills but still keeping the same funny/cute/heartwarming/etc traits you thought up for their dynamic!! i hope that makes sense haha !! love your art keep it up

It does make sense!!! Thank you so much both for looking through the whole tag and for thinking so, it means a lot to me!! ;;; <3<3

Anon said: Hey fran! I hope you're doing well(especially with quarantine and all)!! I really love your anatomy and how fluid and stylistic it can be! It's super fun to look at! I wanted to ask you if you ever did any in depth studies on anatomy? Like muscles and bones. I've heard a lot of artists mention the necessity of studying bones/muscles, i'd really like to know your opinion on the subject

Ahhh god thank you so much!! And... hmm let’s see if I can word this properly and have it make sense - always keeping in mind that this is just my opinion, of course!

If all you want to do is to draw, then all you need to do is to pick up your pencil and draw - it’s really that easy as far as I’m concerned. You don’t need to know anatomy in depth to just draw, everyone has seen a person, everyone knows how a person looks. That is, if all you want to do is to draw for the sake of drawing. If you want to draw an anatomically correct looking human being, though, you do need to know how anatomy works - and the deeper you’ll go into studying it the more correct your people will look. It’s kind how everyone can draw a bicycle, but if you want to draw a realistic bicycle you’re gonna need to look up references for it, you know? It’s all on the level at which you’re interested in drawing, the more technically skilled you want to be the more you’ll have to study

As for my personal experience with this, I hate studying with a passion. Studying puts a damper on my enjoyement of everything, and drawing isn’t excluded from this - you put a book in front of me expecting me to study it and suddenly I never want to pick up a pencil again. This means that I never sat down and studied anatomy in depth and all in one go just to learn how to draw a human being, but it doesn’t mean that I didn’t, slowly and now and again and in bits and pieces, study parts of the body to get a better understanding of it. I know better about the skeleton than I do about muscles, and I still have enough to learn about everything that anyone who’s studied anatomy properly would find a trillion mistakes in everything I draw, but my way of going about drawing has always been and always will be putting my enjoyement of it first and foremost, so I’m not interested in putting myself through a tour-de-force to learn everything there is to know about anatomy just to make my doodles look appealing to someone with a medical degree haha I’m just doing me, and when the mood is right I look up how to properly draw something, but until then I just do it as best as I can with my limited knowledge, being fully aware that what I’m producing is far from accurate but being willing to make that compromise for my own comfort

So that’s my opinion on it lol it all boils down to how important it is for you to know how to properly draw the human body - of course it’s gonna look more professional and better if you’ve studied it, but everyone has their own priorities, you know?

Anon said: Thank you for your hard work, seeing an upload from you is so nice, and the colors are so pretty

Thank you so muuuuccchhhhh!!!! TTATT <3<3<3

Anon said: Opinions on Tokoyami Fumikage 💕

One of my top faves in the whole manga, actually! I have a drawing in the making of him, I should get back to it..........

Anon said: HOLY SHIT FRAN THE TOES HOW YOU DRAW THE TOES SO WELL FEET ARE THE DEATH OF ME AND YOU’RE OVER HERE DRAWING TOES THEY’RE SO GOOD PLEASE TEACH ME YOUR WAYS!!! -❤️

Thank you!!!!!!!! So pretty much my way of learning this specific skill was being obsessed with elves when I was fifteen and wanting to draw them all the time  and also for whatever reason being convinced that they were not supposed to wear shoes so I just drew a lot of feet with references and tutorials and stuff till I could draw my elves properly. Which isn’t necessarily what you need to do to learn how to draw feet, but, I mean, it worked for me lol

Anon said: I love ur Bnha ships and all but what would u do if some of them didn’t become canon??

Oh, I actually don’t care about that at all? I don’t expect most of them to become canon anyway - like, ochadeku sounds reasonable and kamijirou seems to be getting there, but everything else I never even considered it as an actual possibilily. I don’t really ship because I want to see my ships become canon, I just like the potential in what I can make with them? If that makes sense? They’re just fun to think about and I like making fancontent, that’s all there is to it really haha honestly if I had my way no ship would ever be canon ever ha ha ha

Anon said: Slep is for the wek

No actually sleep is for Frans who want a chance at getting up tomorrow morning without an headache for once, so I should do that and go to sleep already lmao

[rockhopsblog]

Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN-- A New Hip Hop Legend

Whether tall tale, truth, or somewhere in between, 13 time Grammy Award winning rapper/songwriter Kendrick Lamar Duckworth’s rise to immortality is nothing short of a cosmic wonder. To go back to the beginning, let’s first take a look at his most recent solo project, 2017’s Album of the Year nominee and Best Rap Album winner “Damn”. The very last track of the album, “Duckworth”, tells of a saga that took place during the rapper’s infancy. The mythic-like storytelling follows the journey of his father, mother, and what would one day become the owner of the record label that propelled Kendrick into stardom. Kendrick’s father, “Ducky” supposedly worked at a chicken fast food restaurant, which “Top Dawg” Anthony Tiffith, proprietor of Top Dawg Entertainment, frequented. Tiffith was a notorious gangster on the block who aspired to be the first one from his neighborhood to reach the life of luxury. Tiffith went on to plan and subsequently rob the chicken place Ducky worked at, but spared his life because he had always given him an extra biscuit with his meals. Because of this decision, Kendrick grew up with his father around, helping to keep him out of the L.A. gang wars and keeping Tiffith out of prison so he could go on to found a record label. Things obviously could have gone very differently, but they didn’t. As Kendrick himself puts it: “Whoever thought the greatest rapper would be from coincidence? Because if Anthony killed Ducky, Top Dawg could be serving life, While I grew up without a father and die in a gunfight”.

Growing up in Compton, CA and making it out to be a success is no small feat. Throughout the years, one of Kendrick’s closest collaborators has been a rapper/blood gang member, Jay Rock, who too came from the neighborhood that Kendrick grew up in. Also a close friend of theirs- Schoolboy Q, a crip. Kendrick Lamar has been on the forefront of using his voice to unify people involved in gang violence and deterring those who may later fall into it. In 2015, Kendrick designed and released his signature shoe with Nike, aimed at the unification of people divided by the lifestyle that many of his friends and family became victims of during the tribulations of his youth. In 2007, a friend of Lamar’s called “DT” was gunned down by police for reportedly posing a threat, an event which seemed to Kendrick was all too common in his life. The silver lining, however, seems to be that there’s no shortage of the tales in Kendrick Lamar’s rap repertoire to depict the dangers and deeper meanings about the reality of gang activity, giving those steeped in that side of life hope for betterment and success. 

In the early stages of Kendrick’s career, he was selected to be in one of the first XXL freshmen, an annual group of rappers recognized by the hip hop publication as up and coming artists. XXL’s freshman freestyles were new at the time, and Kendrick Lamar’s verse in the cypher was prominently featured online and the cypher itself is often looked back on as a classic among those available on YouTube. Those who initially viewed the freestyle session may have come looking for other, better known rappers, only to find themselves stumbling upon the discovery of a young Kendrick Lamar. Around this same time, he released his first official single, “HiiiPoWeR”, which was produced by the now prolific J. Cole. These two, in their own rights, have become widely regarded as today’s best hip hop lyricists for their hard hitting and meaningful bars. Rubbing elbows too with Kendrick was the now superstar pop sensation and rapper, Drake. Drake, a Toronto rapper, has helped launch several careers through featuring on their music because of his viral popularity. When Drake and Kendrick collaborated on Kendrick Lamar’s “Good Kid M.A.A.D. City”, Drake’s career was still in its early stages, but their song together certainly helped garner a mainstream appeal for the release at the time. All in all, it is clear to anyone doing some digging that not only did Kendrick work hard at refining his craft to become prolific, but that he was also met with great fortune in making the correct moves early on in his career to find the notoriety that he now enjoys. 

Fueled by artists such as Tupac Shakur, Ice Cube, Kurupt and Eminem, Lamar has carried the torch forward from the 90s into the modern age of rap. During the famed “California Love” music video shoot featuring Dr. Dre and Tupac, Kendrick has claimed a small piece of hip hop legend by saying he was present in Compton, on the scene for the shoot. As a child, seeing such an idol and icon propelled his drive to follow in the footsteps of the greats of yesterday. In 2015, Kendrick sat down for an interview with the group N.W.A. who’ve had such classics as “Straight Outta Compton” and “Express Yourself”. In the conversation, Lamar said: “anything that I do, it always comes from what y’all done, I wanna get y’all take on my generation today and what we have as far as music”. In response, DJ Ren retorted “I like a few, I like you”. The metaphorical hand-off is evident, from O.G. approval to the strong impact in waves that Lamar has been able to produce from just four major label solo albums. From Anderson .Paak to Roddy Ricch, Kendrick has set out and proved more than he’d ever dreamed of.

Currently, Lamar has two triple platinum records as well as one platinum record which was maybe the most adventurous and critically acclaimed album, not only of his career, but of that decade. Rolling Stone magazine journalist Greg Tate called “To Pimp a Butterfly” a “masterpiece of fiery outrage, deep jazz and ruthless self-critique”.With songs like “The Blacker the Berry” and “Hood Politics”, the fabric of TPAB was woven to reflect the attitudes of a movement of racial justice and equality in a time of great struggle and oppression. Aside from exposing the brutalities of life as a black man in the United States, Lamar also presented the album as a platform to uplift and celebrate the accomplishments and great artistic devotions of black people from around the world. Many consider this album to be Kendrick Lamar’s magnum opus. He has shown that his work has staying power, and that his albums stand out among the formulaic pop-trap that reigns supreme on the radio. Perhaps TPAB has gone the farthest out of any other thing to help cement him as the king of hip hop and the greatest rapper of the generation. 

With a back catalogue so insanely successful you’d expect Mr. Kendrick Lamar to be universally beloved, right? Well, not so fast. No inspection of Lamar’s career would be complete without the mention of his ground-breaking verse on the song “Control” by Big Sean. Kendrick decided to seize the moment coming off of his first platinum album by going after 11 of the biggest names in rap at the time, including: J. Cole, Meek Mill, Drake, Big KRIT, Wale, Pusha T, ASAP Rocky, Tyler The Creator, and Mac Miller. Many interpreted his lyrics in which he called out these artists to be a diss, but we now know that it was, in fact, Lamar’s intent to light a flame under these artists to create higher art. The people named on the verse were people Kendrick truly believed had the potential to create truly classic works, and his bar “I got love for you all but I'm tryin' to murder you” was aimed at them because of the intention to hype them up to work harder and realize that they weren’t inherently owed the popularity bestowed to them. The so-called “Control verse” made such a splash that even rappers who weren’t even named in the song made counter-disses to the single verse in the form of an entire song. Most notable out of these songs were Joe Budden’s “Lost Control”, Joey B4Da$$’s “Killuminati Pt. 2”, and Lupe Fiasco’s “SLR 2”. Despite the negativity spawned from this verse aimed to do good in the hip hop community, Kendrick Lamar’s twitter saw a 510% increase in followers just days after the dropping of the single. If there even was any “beef” to be had regarding this song, it is clear who the real winner was.

From the president of the United States claiming his favorite song was a Kendrick Lamar song at one point, to winning a Pulitzer Prize for 2017’s “DAMN”, the mile-high accolades of Kendrick seem almost too good to be true. However, of all accomplishments, perhaps his greatest is his influence on music. Not only has he single handedly put on several label-mates to the mainstream, but he has risen the bar of what it means to write a good rap song in this day and age. Not content with people who churn out 30 song albums as a money grab, Kendrick has shown that effort is important, that careful construction of art is important. Lamar has also been credited as reviving the importance of the hip-hop music video. It is clear during a listening session on Spotify or YouTube that so many troves of artists, young and old, are attempting to emanate the same X factor that Kendrick Lamar Duckworth has been so highly praised for, and rightfully so.

[blastoisemonster]

Kodomo No Omocha’s Sticker Album Highlights (Merlin, 2001, Italian)

Let's keep talking about retro japanese cartoons, shall we? I've done some posts lately in which I reviewed Game Boy games based on comics or animations from Japan, with the intention of covering series that I either used to watch as a kid or recall being popular during the GB and GBC eras. A lot of these games have never been released outside Japan, so it's also an occasion to gather up some imports and see what Italy has missed on. There's actually a particular cartoon I wanted to talk about since the start of this research, but unfortunately it seems it has never recieved any videogame adaptation. But hey, this is my blog, and I can talk about whatever I want! >:C Also I suddenly remembered my Fandom tag has been created purposely for non-gaming objects. >.> So, let's look at some stickers while I tell you the tale of Rossana.

Rossana can be best described as the soap opera that spawned a second wave of nipponic hysteria among every single italian person under 20 during the very last period of the 90s. It's like The Bold And The Beautiful looked at Pokèmon and said "yeah, I want something like that.". Its popularity hit even harder my personal view of the world as the plot starts with the protagonists attending the last year of elementary school... which is exactly what me and my friends were doing, multiplying the relatable factor tenfold. This cartoon took everyone by their necks since its first episode: it was broadcasted on what was, at the time, the best and most popular italian channel for children entertainment, and heavily advertised before starting, so we knew exactly when to tune in to catch it. The day after the first episode, school looked like a different place. Everyone in class was chanting the opening at the top of their lungs; boys were acting like the male protagonists, all girls mimicked the main role Rossana, the more artisticly inclined ones started doodling the characters anywhere possible, including textbooks and homework. Teachers were in tears. I had watched the first episode and found it amusing enough to keep me entertained, so for some period I fully partecipated in the general enjoyment of the cartoon. Then, I started missing episodes (when you missed something on TV during the 90s... it was gone!) and upon returning to it, I found the plot had become much more complex and centered on sentimental intrigues, of which I never gave a toss about, so I jumped off the hype train while others still followed it until the end.

As it is usual for these productions, Rossana was another anime based on a manga series; the original work is titled "Kodomo No Omocha" (which literally means "Children's Plaything"... yeah, I too find it a tad creepy), drawn by mangaka Miho Obana and serialized by Ribon from 1994 to 1998. It tells the story of Rossana Kurata, a child actress (an idol in the original story) trying to balance her career with a normal kid's life by going to school and having normal friends: however, her class is anything but normal and she finds herself often fighting against the biggest bully of the school group, Hayama (translated as Heric in italian). As the story progresses, though, Sana understands Heric's complex and at times completely inappropriate attitude is a result of a troubled childhood, having lost his mother at birth and being bullied by his older sister and completely ignored by his father. Willing to help him out, Sana befriends him and starts to develop even deeper feelings, also sharing her own troubled past: she had been actually abandoned as a newborn and adopted by Misako, a famous writer. New characters are introduced along the way, among which the child actor Charles, Sana's schoolmate but also colleague which the girl will work alongside during a trip to the States, and Funny, an extremely extroverted kid that will at first become close friends with Sana, but that will, at some point, steal Heric's heart, leaving Sana to deal with heartbreak and jealousy. Despite the story being drawn in an energetic shojo style and the episodes showing many hysterical/demential jokes along the way, Kodomo No Omocha is a dramatic story centered on overcoming past secrets, venomous feelings, and describing the difficult shift from childhood to adolescence.

The original 10 manga volumes got adapted for animation in 102 episodes, which broadcasted on TV Tokyo from 1996 to 1998. In Italy, the anime got imported first with the direct title "Rossana": it was aired in its entirety during all of the year 2000, and yes, all the 102 episodes got translated! Unfortunately, the channel wanted to make Rossana completely targetable to little kids, which meant that many plot elements had to undergo heavy censorship. The result was a comedy/demential series that at times showed a sentimental route, and for the rest felt very cut, like it was hiding something. This was no Chou Gals!-styled localizaion effort: scenes were edited or completely deleted, names and terms translated losing all context, graphics and objects concerning japanese culture got zoomed out, some episodes even aired randomly without following the original order, and finally the ending got cut, leaving it as an open cliffhanger. Kodomo No Omocha is, originally, marketed towards an adolescent audience, but kids are a much more profitable target, so a lot of the original plot points went away: Sana no longer thinks of Rei (her adult manager, called Robby in italian) as his boyfriend; it's never mentioned that her actual mother abandoned her in a park after giving birth at only 14 years old; and many instances in which some kids (Heric, but also Komori in later eps) practice self-harm or have suicidal thoughts are cut in their entirety. And yet, despite this general mangling, the story managed to become popular anyway, gaining three reruns, some video distribution on VHS and DVD (both cut, for unknown reasons, after the 20th episode), and an opening with lyrics that will never leave the minds of an entire generation. The manga got translated only after 2002, getting marketed instead for its actual audience and going for a literal translation of its original title: "Il giocattolo dei bambini - Rossana" got published by Dynit in its entirety, however I'm not sure wether it underwent the same censorship measures of the cartoon or it was left to a more faithful state.

The hype about Rossana was interestingly lacking of any substantial, original merchandise imported from their origin country; instead, every gadget we had about the anime was produced by italian companies and it consisted in the usual cheapish stuff sold in order to cash a quick buck on popular media. We had school supplies such as bags, pencil cases and diaries, decorated stationary, and the never-missing sticker album. This last merchandise, aptly featured in this post, is what I remember most since everyone was trading doubles at school; the blindingly hot pink package has also burned a permanent image in my mind. Published by Merlin in 2001, Rossana's abundantly pink album could contain 204 stickers; be them glossy, holographic, single or combined, it adds up as quite a large selection considering that all images shown were nothing more than screenshots of the cartoon, with album pages filling up a description of episodes shown, or giving a little more insight on the general plot. At least my previously reviewed Pokèmon album showed interesting action poses by Sugimori and doubled up as a Pokèdex, but I do recognize the latter can count on a much more substantial franchise. What Rossana's album excels in, though, is its value; remember when I said a completed Pokèmon album was only worth a few bucks? Well, a completed Rossana album goes instead for nothing less than a hundred euros on secondhand markets. Even the single stickers, if sold in lots, can become a pretty penny, and still sealed booster packs can range from 30 to 70 euros depending on how many you're selling. I can already picture italian readers going through their cupboards to see if they still have this relic intact! As for me, I was too focused on Pokèmon during that period to care about filling up another sticker album, so I had completely skipped that. And no, I'm not gonna spend 100+ euros on an album just to make a Fandom post: what you're seeing here are all images collectors have shown to the net.

It's interesting to notice that Merlin tried to cash in on the anime's popularity even beyond the sticker album itself, by advertising even among the album pages an upcoming periodical (monthly I suppose?) magazine almost all centered on the cartoon, but trying to double up as a typical girls' magazine with pictures of boybands, various articles, and the always present and equally emberassing mail section. For some reason I have very vivid flashbacks of me going through the pages of the first volume: probably some friend brought it at school, they had it lying about at their house, or I may have bought it along with other girls then left it to them. This mag was nothing particular and doomed to be shortlived: you can't keep a single anime series relevant forever, and it was apparent that arguments tried to always pull Rossana into context when in reality it had nothing to do with the articles. It seemingly disappeared after its second issue, and got buried under the sheer abundance of more relevant girly mags, among which the legendary Cioè.

All in all, Rossana’s shout of livelyhood was probably short, but loud enough to have shook the heart and soul of many of us, especially in this country. It’s apparent that companies wanted to keep the profit margin as high as possible by not importing any substantial japanese gadget about Sana and opting instead for printed publications or cheapy stationery; however, apart from dolls, plushes and general toys, even Japan didn’t seem too keen on releasing actually peculiar stuff dedicated to the franchise. The most technological gimmick I found is a toy audio recorder, of which I can only find a few images online and not even one single listing so I can get and review it. Maybe I’m just sour no one ever thought about doing a Game Boy adaptation, because I’m sure it would’ve been a major hit among girls here. Oh well, can’t change the past... but surely you can remember it. :)

[fyexo]

200925 Key Tracks: SuperM’s ‘Super One’

The members of SuperM - Taemin, Baekhyun, Kai, Taeyong, Mark, Ten and Lucas - are amongst the most skilled and experienced dancers, rappers and vocalists in the South Korean pop industry.

Dubbed by their label upon debut as the ‘Avengers as K-Pop”, ostensibly for this formidable combination of talents, Super M went on to prove equally powerful on the charts. Their eponymous debut EP, released last October, landed at No.1 on the Billboard Hot 200 and No.19 in the UK album chart.

Out in a matter of hours, their first full-length album, ‘Super One’ (preceded by the singles ‘100’ and ‘Tiger Inside’) brings with it, says the group, a message of unity in a time of pandemic and uncertainty.

Earlier this week, SuperM partook in a global, roundtable interview live from Seoul, unpacking the elements that lie within their sound and behind their teamwork. Here’s everything we know about K-Pop’s latest supergroup, and their brand new record.

Key track 1: Infinity

Beloved by Mark and Ten’s for its “dynamic and storytelling”, ‘Infinity’ is nothing short of a space opera, fired up with choral bursts and a demanding wub-wub bass that twists beneath the harmonies. “Like a blaze of glory, going overdrive / Going to live my story, everything I do to feel alive,” they declare, more victorious than defiant.

Even a supergroup needs motivation and, no matter how long they’ve spent being pop stars, SuperM are still constantly learning and honing their craft Rapper Mark calls reaching No.1 on the US charts an “honour. To have our fans combine their strength to help us really felt great. It motivated us and we put in double the amount of effort [on this album], so we believe the quality went up that much as well.”

If there’s any pressure on them to repeat the success of their EP, then they’re not outwardly displaying it. Instead, Baekhyun, the group’s eldest at 28, looks at their growth as performers. “One of the things I learned in preparing for this album is we were able to stretch our limits even more. We’ve released ‘100’, ‘Tiger Inside’ and now, the title track ‘One’. Each of these songs has such a great concept and choreography and putting all that together was really challenging.”

Key track 2: Big Chance

“I personally like taking big chances and opportunities so this song, just the title itself, captured my attention,” says Baekhyun. “It’s a good song that showcases our individual charms.” Sung in English, this western radio-friendly cut is frothy with a falsetto hook and bouncy instrumental, triggering a yearning for simpler times, fun summer nights and the press of a warm hand into your own. One key ingredient to SuperM’s appeal is their yin and yang charms - consummate professionals on stage, the epitome of chaotic good off stage.

Though only just clear of a year as a group, their connection is infallible; during the 40-minute roundtable they cheer like sports fans after their every reply and so frequently get the giggles mid-answer that, at one point, they’re hushed by their staff and sit scolded like naughty schoolboys. Hong Kong-born Lucas, whose Korean isn’t fluent, sends his bandmates into fits of brotherly laughter as he enthusiastically attempts to summarize their “different but connected” aesthetics but there’s a telepathy between all seven and Kai and Mark patiently, warmly, elucidate for him.

Taeyong, in halting but near-perfectly inflected English, recalls Taemin’s detailed work on their choreography and calls their performances “really dope and great, and untouchable”, and Mark and the group’s second English-speaker, Ten, beam.

But SuperM’s funniest moments are unintentional, often born from juxtaposition: Kai politely discussing his love of the “energising” ‘Tiger Inside’ but there’s Mark and Taemin distractingly pose like circus tigers, or Baekhyun revealing their sonic maturation as - “We wanted to relay the message of positivity rather than just focus on the performance” - even as Taemin thoroughly amuses himself by practising the severed thumb trick.

Key track 3: Better Days

The ballad with underrated beginnings, according to Ten. “When I listened to that song, I was like, ‘does it sound kinda old, seriously, it sounds like [from the] 90s’,” he says. Although the verses are perhaps more Macklemore than Mytown, its sweet, retro chorus blooms over a simple piano line, and the message, adds Ten, “is healing. When we’re together, we can make a better day.”

From tanks to supercars, SuperM are known for their use of vehicles in their videos, but there’s more to it than being a petrolhead Their debut single, ‘Jopping’, featured a helicopter and a tank, ‘100’ gave us CGI cars and a futuristic train, and ‘Tiger Inside’ sported a garish fur print motorbike but, according to Kai, this affinity for things that go vroom-vroom isn’t merely an aesthetic. “We can’t really travel right now because of the pandemic but we really hope that, just like these modes of transportation [can] take you somewhere, that our songs and music and album can take you to a place of hope, that higher place where everyone can be happy.”

Key track 4: Together At Home

The aim of ‘Super One’, says Mark, is to bring hope and unity to a world gone dark. “For ‘Together At Home’ (Taeyong’s favourite track), we really felt, like, ‘we’re all staying together at home so what are the ways we can connect through our songs?’” It’s one of the album’s finest moments - joyous, high gloss synth-funk with a chorus that steals the show with pure panache. Making an album that not only highlights each member’s skills but also creates a definitive SuperM is not an easy task.

The members’ respective groups - SHINee, WayV, NCT and EXO - already have such defined sonic identities that creating an entirely new one for SuperM would have been wildly ambitious. Instead, SuperM is a lake into which four rivers flow, and ‘Super One’, which takes an individual leaf out of each group’s playbooks (EXO’s glorious harmonies, NCT’s bonkers bass lines, and so on) and wilfully sews them together, is that aspiration realised.

For SuperM, their album is a leap forward; Taemin points out that ‘Super One’ harmonises the member’s skills “way better than we did initially [on the ‘SuperM’ EP], with this album we’re able to experiment more and try out different genres and see how it comes together.”

Key track 5: Wish You Were Here

“This would have been a great title track,” says Taemin, who chooses it as his favourite. “It’s one that’s kind of unexpected because audiences expect performance-heavy songs and the message within this brings the whole album together.” Faintly tinged with the flavour of steel drums and 80s percussion, the longing woven into the rhythms is dream-like and hypnotic.

No matter how successful you appear, there’s always seemingly wobbly career stepping stones… and you just have to take them, one haircut at a time Between them, they possess over 40 years of experience as performers yet Taeyong admits that not everything they work on feels clear cut. “I’m sure everyone feels the same way but, when we started our careers, a lot of the moments we go through feel like we’re still trying to get there. We’re not fully there yet.

There’s a lot of moments where it might have felt like a failure but everything was a step to build up to what we have now.” Such pragmatism means that their keenest regrets are, quite fortunately, follicle related. “When I debuted,” recalls Mark, “my hair was very short so my bangs were above my eyebrows and I honestly hated it. But coming back to it now, it was cute, it was appropriate for that age, that time of my life.”

Ten agrees wholeheartedly: “Like [for] ‘7th Sense’, when I saw my hair, I was like, ‘this is not going to work out’ but now I miss it so much!” It has to be said that it’s just hair but Mark, his own faded from being magenta into a cotton-candy pink, and as a K-Pop veteran, cheerily protests such a claim. “Hair is an important factor!”

Taylor Glasby @ CLASH

[yodawgiherd]

Collared

Rating: E

>>>Read on AO3<<<

After a lengthy discussion with me, myself and I, the council have decided to cut this chapter into two parts, one covering the foreplay and the other doing the dirty. This was done mostly to prevent the chapter from being too long and also other reasons. This is the foreplay one. I believe that there is still more than enough dom!Mikasa to be found here, but explicitly explicit happenings will be done in the next chapter. The last part was strongly inspired by the "step on me" meme. I blame certain people.

Enjoy!

For Eren to wake up alone on a Saturday morning felt weird, eyes slowly opening to the sunlight. Mikasa wasn’t an early bird if she got the choice, so for her to just leave the warm bed on her own was unusual. With a groan, he rolled off himself, standing up in dire need of some coffee. Down the stairs to the machine, Eren pressed the right button and turned around with the sigh, facing the place where he knew his fiancé would be.

On the pole, doing a nearly flawless flag pose, her body in a perfect 90-degree angle to the pole itself. He sighed, again, rubbing his forehead. This really shouldn’t be physically possible. Mikasa had a look of concentration on her face, which was sweaty, a clue suggesting that she’s been going at it for some time by now. As she was also wearing her sleeping clothes, which meant formerly Eren’s shirt and panties, she probably went to the pole first thing in the morning. Why yes, his girlfriend was indeed quite a gym enthusiast, how could you tell?

The machine beeped behind Eren, signaling that his drink was ready, and also unintentionally breaking Mikasa out of her focus. Snapping into reality, she quickly located her boyfriend, the concentration melting into a huge grin. Sliding down the pole, she padded over to him on her bare feet, standing on her tippy toes so she could kiss him without Eren bowing down to her height. The kiss was a bit salty, considering the sweat and all, but overall pleasurable as always.

“Oh, you made me a coffee?”, brushing past him before he could say it was in fact supposed to be his drink, Mikasa claimed the cup, taking a sip, “You’re so considerate baby.”

Not only a fry thief but a coffee taker as well. Why was he dating her again? Making himself another one, he leaned on the counter, popping the morning stiffness from his neck.

“You know what day it is, right?”, came her voice.

“Saturday?”, he guessed, not opening his eyes.

“That’s right. Which means…”

“Means that I’m yours to command.”, opening his eyes, he smirked at her, “Anything you wish of me, mistress? You already stole my coffee so I’m not sure what else I could give.”

“Good to see that you’re so eager puppy, but I’m fine. For now.”, the tip of her tongue appeared, licking her bottom lip as she watched him over the rip of the cup, “I do have plans tho, big plans…”

“Such as?”

“First, we take a bath, then we go to the city.”

That made him arch an eyebrow.

“You wanna go out?”

“Correct.”

Knowing that today was Mikasa’s dom day, Eren wasn’t sure why would she ever want to leave the house, but he didn’t need to question it. She was in charge, which meant that all he had to do was follow orders and turn his brain off, and he was more than fine with doing that. Shrugging, he took another sip of his coffee, waiting for the inevitable to happen.

In the bath, Mikasa washed away the sweat from the workout, and after that spent a long time thoroughly cleaning Eren. She made him stand still as a statue while she shaved every hair from his body, including those few that managed to appear between his legs. Mikasa even took the cage off for the treatment, leaving only the cockring on, very thorough in her efforts. The razor whispered as it slid over Eren’s skin making him shiver a little. Her hand was steady, but those little looks she threw his way made Eren worry, just a little bit. She wouldn’t hurt him. Would she? No, of course not. Unless?

She didn’t.

After that, Mikasa washed Eren’s hair, humming a happy melody to herself. It felt good, being cared for like this, but Eren had the feeling as if he was a prize stallion, being groomed by his owner to be shown off. From how much attention she paid to his crotch area, both front and back, Mikasa was likely simply shining her toys before the evening would come.

“It’s been some time since I played with your ass, isn’t it?”, she said, hand rubbing the upper part of Eren’s thigh. Not really waiting for an answer, she went on.

“It’s a very nice ass, don’t get me wrong, I quite like it.”

She was the one to talk, with how flawless her butt was, but Eren had no problems accepting a compliment.

“Thank you, mistress.”

“Hmmm…”, done, Mikasa gave his ass a light smack, standing up from the water.

“Wait here,”, she said, “I have a gift for you.”

Remaining where he was, Eren simply watched her climb out of the tub. It gave him a prime view of her own ass, with the water running down the pretty shape, so he wouldn’t say that he minded too much. Retrieving something small from one of the drawers, Mikasa walked back, slipping back into the tub.

“Here,”, she said, holding it up “Like it?”

It was a ring. Big ring. Too big to fit on his finger. Which meant…

Of course.

“Hold it for a moment,”, Mikasa didn’t really care about his opinion, it looked like, as she handed him the ring and kneeled before him, hands going right between Eren’s legs. While she worked on removing the old ring, still in place, he took a moment to inspect the new one, looking for differences. The most striking was the color, as this new one was gold, not silver. Next, there was something on the surface, which upon closer inspection became an etching, words to be exact.

“Mikasa’s Pet,” it said.

Right.

“It’s great, isn’t it?”, taking the ring from his hand, Mikasa quickly put it in place, her movements already practiced by how many times she used such devices on Eren, “Now everyone will know that your cock is mine.”

“I…Uh... I don’t really take off my pants in public.”, Eren countered, feeling the familiar tightness return after being freed from it for a few seconds.

“It doesn’t matter,”, she went on, “It’s the thought that counts.”

Reaching down to retrieve the cage, she snapped it on top, once again returning her puppy to chastity.

“And I made sure that it's compatible with the cage. I’m so generous.”

“Incredibly so…”

“Look,”, Mikasa extended her hand, showing him her engagement ring, “Now we match!”

Her ring was a simple golden circle, Eren knew that she didn’t like stones that much and acted accordingly when he was picking it out for her. It didn’t have any ownership claim engraved on it either, as that thing between his legs did, but other than that, it looked similar. Now anyone could see that he was owned by his fiancé, how romantic.

“I have one more gift for my puppy, come on.”

With that, she left the bathroom, leaving Eren to stare after her. If her first gift was a new cockring, what in seven hells would the other one be? Carefully climbing out of the water too, mindful of the cage, he followed her, ideas spinning.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Yes, yes you will.”

“Mikasa I…”

“Puppy…”, her voice was low, sexy and threatening at the same time, “Your opinion does not really matter today, right?”

Sexy because Mikasa wearing nothing but lacy black lingerie was a damn sight to behold, dangerous because the way she looked at him made Eren shiver. Even in a strapless bra and panties that made Eren drool a little bit, Mikasa managed to look like a full-time dominatrix. It was written in her face, her posture, the confidence in which she held the collar. With an expression that didn’t allow any discussion anymore, she held up the second gift in her hand.

“You will put this on your neck, you will wear it when we go out, and after we get home..”, her lips curved upwards into a sadistic smile, “I’ll punish you for talking back.”

Not that long ago, Eren had that great idea to make a personal collar for Mikasa, have it fitted specifically for her neck and have her name put on it in huge silver letters. The second gift turned out to be nothing but a very similar collar, the only difference being that it was made for him. And it was a good gift, Eren liked it, but the problem was Mikasa’s request that went right along with the gift. She wanted him to put it on, now and wear it when they go out, have it on in public. Having written that he’s Mikasa’s pet around his cock was fine, none could normally see that, but having it around his neck in the form of a dog collar, with his mistress right next to him was a step Eren wasn’t sure he was willing to take. But from how things looked, it would come down to what Mikasa wanted, not him. As usual.

“You should be glad that I’m not making you get a tattoo of my name,”, she continued, voice dripping poison, “Now, stop resisting and…”

Mikasa held up the collar in one hand, pointing at the ground with the other.

“On. Your. Knees.”

Eren’s legs buckled beneath him before he could consciously react, and suddenly he was staring upwards to see Mikasa’s face. Oh, she liked that, seeing how her smile turned from dangerous to genuinely happy one, she liked seeing him submit to her. She took a step forward, putting the collar around Eren’s neck. It was a perfect fit, of course. Once he was collared, Mikasa ran a single finger up and down the side of Eren’s face, smirking.

“You don’t have to worry, puppy, I have it all thought out. But first…”, turning around, she walked to the wardrobe, throwing the doors open, “I’ll pick some nice clothes for you. Be a good boy and sit on the bed, yes?”

Defeated, betrayed by his own body, Eren slumped down as ordered, waiting how his mistress will humiliate him further. Which… didn’t happen? Mikasa didn’t pick anything weird for him, to match that collar, instead, he was given a normal dark suit, she even allowed him to wear a tie to partly cover the leather hugging his neck. Dressing quickly, before she changes her mind, Eren was soon left with nothing to do but wait, so leaning back on the bed, he engaged in one of his favorite activities. Watching Mikasa dress. If he was asked, he’d probably say that he liked watching her undress more, but even this had a certain ring of intimacy to it. Enjoyable.

On her part, Mikasa wasn’t rushing anywhere. While Eren managed to put on all his stuff, Mikasa just fastened a garter belt around her hips and was now pulling up her fishnet stockings. She knew that he was watching, moving slowly, giving Eren a little show. It wasn’t really a secret that he had a thing for Mikasa’s legs, and the goth was apparently feeling generous. Dragging the material over her leg, Mikasa took her time with hooking the top to the garter belt, winking at Eren over her shoulder. With her stockings on, she turned towards the mirror, readying her makeup. The sheer amount of eyeliner she decided to put on gave Eren a little pause, It was more than usual, but he wouldn’t protest. The dark shades she created nicely highlighted the exotic shape of Mikasa’s eyes. Moving on, she painted her lips black to match. As Eren could see through the fishnets, her toenails were already black, and now she painted the nails on her fingers too, completing the usual makeup routine.

It would be fair to say that Mikasa was never big on make-up, most of the time she didn’t wear any, because why would you ever bother with painting yourself before a workout, are you nuts? But when she did put it on she had a very good hand, most likely gained from watching the professional makeup artists work on her during the photoshoots at the studio. When Mikasa put in the time to brush up her makeup skills, it signified something, a night out, a dinner, a special occasion where she wanted to look her best at, and today certainly fit those requirements, having her puppy to play with without any restrictions was a treat. Eren saw her go through the same movements for what felt like a hundred times but still wouldn’t get bored of it. There was something hypnotizing about the way Mikasa did her short beauty treatment.

Makeup done, black lacy lingerie on, stockings fastened to the garter belt, she stood up, moving over to the wardrobe again, this time in search of her own clothes. Hands moving through her collection, which grew substantially since she started working as a model, Mikasa had a certain dress in mind for her plan. There it was. Black, obviously, tight around her body with a see-through section at the neck, at the sleeves, and seamlessly changing into a nicely flowing skirt at the bottom, ending in the upper part of her thighs. Putting it on herself, Mikasa was nicely surprised when Eren zipped it up for her without the need to order him, his good boyfriend instincts taking over.

“Good boy.”, a little praise falling from her lips, making him smile.

Dress in place, Mikasa moved on the jewelry. Rings, one for each finger, choosing from the big collection that she had nowadays, most of them gifts from her fiancé. Classic cross earrings and a leather choker that was nearly as thick as the collar around Eren’s throat. Necklaces, not missing the chain with the key to Eren’s chastity cage and the silver crucifix Levi gave her, all those years back. Probably her favorite jewelry alongside the earrings. Basically done, all she was missing were her boots, and when Eren watched her pick those massive leather ones with thick soles and many buckles that went all the way to Mikasa’s knees, her strategy finally clicked for him. In this outfit, Mikasa was the archetype of goth gf, as if she literally just stepped out of someone’s wild dream. That normally wouldn’t be that unusual, as she was stubbornly loyal to being goth all the way from high school to this day, not caring in the slightest that the style moved from being cool to being just kinda weird. She liked it, and that’s what mattered. But while Mikasa enjoyed dressing like this, she usually toned it down, because she simply didn’t want to draw attention. Not tonight, however, tonight she was going all out. With this beautiful and strange visage next to him, who would ever pay attention to Eren? Who would ever notice little thing like a collar around his neck when Mikasa was shining like a dark sun, drawing everyone’s eyes to herself?

“Well, puppy,”, she began, standing up from the chair and turning towards her smitten fiancé, “Ready to go?”

Seeing Mikasa bring out the goth inside her like this, full-on out, how comfortable and smug she was in this handpicked outfit of hers, Eren had one of those snap moments where he just looked at her and thought: ok but what the hell. He wasn’t stupid, Eren knew that she’s pretty but damn, how can a woman be this perfect. God, Mikasa was beautiful, and Eren would have no problem with staring at her for over five hours.

Standing up to match her, Eren noticed that while the massive boots gave her height a little boost, she was still shorter than him. When Mikasa wore those killer heels of hers, their eyes were roughly at the same level, but not now, the gothic queen was smaller than her devoted servant. Reaching out, he took her hand into his, intertwining their fingers.

“You know,” he said, looking her up and down, taking in the whole getup, “You kind of look like a superhero in this.”

“I do?”

“Yea, like… hmm… the super gothic… dark princess of….hmm.. darkness?”

“Dark princess of darkness? Wow, how expressive.”

“Your attempts at mockery are not needed, vampiress.”

That made her smile, black lips curving up.

“Well, if you are a good boy today, and I might suck something else than blood.”, she gave him a wink, taking a few steps towards the exit and tugging him right along with her.

“Come on, baby,” she said.

“Let’s go save the world.”

Mikasa’s plan worked, that was for sure. While they drew looks, as a pair, it was only Mikasa who the attention was centered at. With miss goth 2020 on his arm, no one paid Eren much attention, especially when his clothes were simply a suit, nothing as interesting as her dress-up. The only one who knew about the collar was the woman who put it there. And no one would know. Eren was just a smudge of black suit next to the dark goddess next to him, radiating beauty and confidence with each step. He really was not much more than a servant, being taken by his mistress out of a nice walk. Eren heard them, heard the few whispers that praised Mikasa, heard the people saying how beautiful she is, and he couldn’t agree more. And the fact that this divine being was holding his hand, her attention almost solely focused on him made Eren feel all warm and happy inside.  Mikasa was a supermodel, she could wear anything she wanted and pull it off perfectly. And the world just stared. It’s called fashion sweetie, look it up.

Overall, this day out was an otherworldly experience. Mikasa was in the lead, completely, Eren simply followed her like a dog on a leash. First, they just walked around the city for a spell. After that, she took him to a cinema, but not for the movie. Sure, they bought tickets for something, Eren couldn’t even remember what, enchanted as he was. Sitting next to her, Mikasa kept the contact between them light, just the tips of her fingers tapping away at his skin, and Eren was touch starved before he realized it. Not for long.

As soon as the lights went down Mikasa confidently climbed into his lap and angling his head up, she claimed his mouth. Whatever the movie was it must have not been very good, as they were alone in the room, fact that Eren was grateful for, considering that he spent most of it by having his mouth ravaged. Mikasa kissed him, bit into his neck, did anything she wanted to her pet while all Eren could do was groan, head swimming from her intensity. Of course, the cage turned from dismissible thing into a small inferno, his body attempting to react as it normally did to being kissed by his goth gf. And couldn’t, his attempts at erecting cut short by the metal bars of the chastity. Her weight on his lap, her tongue tracing his teeth, Eren moaned into her mouth, in paradise and hell at the same time. Mikasa was wearing a dress, which meant that the only barrier between his caged pride and her heat was Eren’s jeans and her lacy panties, the way she slid against his crotch made him go close to losing it. And she knew perfectly what she was doing, of course, stirring her hips a little, mimicking those movements she did while riding him, driving her puppy insane. A film never felt this long in Eren’s life before.

After the “movie” they both had to visit the bathroom, Mikasa to reapply her lipstick, as she left most of it littered over Eren’s face and neck, and him to wipe away the said stains. Despite his best efforts, some residue remained, dark spots littering most of the skin above the leather collar. Holding the sink, Eren stared at himself, at the ravaged face that looked back at him from the mirror. Mikasa was doing things to him, things that were beyond his power to explain, she was wrapping him in her spells. The black smudges on his face and neck, the collar, still visible even beneath his tie, the cage, tight between his legs, those were all little stamps of her ownership and Eren couldn’t help but wonder on the long way she came. From an insecure blushing, silent, weird goth girl at school to this. A smug and beautiful goth dominatrix who had no problems with using her pretty boy in any place and any way that she saw fit. And from the way his eyes were unfocused, how red his face was, Eren knew that he was loving it, loving when Mikasa displayed her confidence and beauty like this. She was sexy, she was hot, and she knew it, wearing it out in the open without a care in the world. Eren was glad that he was partly the reason why she could do this, he and others have together chipped away at Mikasa’s made-up insecurities, bringing out the inner goddess. It was high time that his fiancé realized that she is indeed a queen. Eren was just lucky that he was allowed to accompany her.

The next stop of Mikasa’s grand tour was a small restaurant, saying that she’s hungry. And nothing even happened, for a long time, she just played with the key around her neck a lot, obviously teasing her puppy. When the dessert came, she turned up the heat.

“Spread your legs.”, she ordered out of nowhere.

“W-What?”

“Spread your legs.”, Mikasa repeated, eyes completely serious, “Now.”

Choice was an illusion, he couldn’t say no to her. Obeying, Eren soon discovered why she wanted this. Under the table, hidden from view, Mikasa lifted her leg and pressed her heavy boot against Eren’s crotch, putting some weight behind it. Shaking it a bit, literally rattling his cage, she smiled oh so sweetly at him at the same time, her black lips curved upwards.

“Are you okay, baby?”, she said out loud, faking the concern in her voice perfectly, “Your face is all red.”

How was it supposed to be not red, when she went on with her little torment underneath the table, the thick sole of her boot perfect for the teasing.

“I’m…I’m okay.”, Eren squeezed out, managing a smile, “I’m okay.”

“Are you sure?”, the intentionally dragged out the word, increasing the pressure.

Eren’s fingertips dug into the table for the sides, his legs shaking. It would be a logical course of action to close them, to force the pressure away from his crotch, but his mistress ordered him to keep them open. And her word was more important than self-preservation, it looked like. She went on, moving her leg a bit, increasing and decreasing the strength of the push, while all the time keeping eye contact with her pet. You’re mine, her dark eyes said, you let me do this to you because you know that I own you.

“I’m fine, fine…”, breathing was difficult, as anytime Eren drew breath the collar made its presence known, tight around his throat.

And he was basically panting at this point, as Mikasa went on with her fun, toying with his helplessly restricted cock using the toe of her boot.

“Thank you for your concern,”, eyes meeting hers, he forced himself to smile back, “Mistress.”

“That’s good, very good, because when we get home…”, Mikasa leaned over the table, her lips brushing Eren’s ear when she whispered, “I’ll make sure that you won’t be okay or fine anymore.”

As quickly as it appeared, her boot was gone from his crotch, and Mikasa stood up, a radiant smile on her face.

“Let’s go, we have a long night ahead of us.”

This whole day, everything Mikasa did, Eren didn’t even realize that she was slowly but surely enchanting him. All the little touches, the teasing, the smiles, she was weaving an expert web around her puppy, drawing him into it. The audacity of the things she did to him, how nonchalantly she ignored any chance of them being found out, it shocked Eren and turned him on at the same time, exactly as Mikasa planned. The goth witch had him under her spell completely by the time they reached their house. Eren belonged to her in body, mind, and spirit too, broken and ready to be ordered around. Mikasa wanted an obedient pet tonight, not a bratty one, and molded her puppy just the way she wanted to. They surely didn’t save the world today, but Mikasa positively wrecked Eren’s. Now, he was ready to serve her.

“Maybe next time we do this, I’ll put a leash on you too.”, she was saying as they entered, “What do you say, Eren, would you like me parading you around on a leash? Maybe on all fours too, like a good dog.”

“Anything for you, ma’am.”, came from behind her in an unfocused voice, as Eren was too busy staring at her legs and ass as she walked in front of him, hips swaying, hypnotizing.

While Eren removed his shoes and jacket, as they usually did before entering the living room, he noted that Mikasa didn’t take off anything, keeping even the massive leather boots on. She’s most likely going to order him to take them off for her, not wanting to bother herself with all those buckles, he deduced, following his queen. Walking into the living room, Mikasa sat down, graciously, on the sofa, eyeing her prey. There was plenty of room to sit next to her, the furniture was massive, but Eren knew what she wanted him to do, and sitting wasn’t it. Coming to stand next to the goth, he sank down to his knees, keeping his back straight as he looked at his mistress with a glint of adoration in his eyes. Judging from her smile, he passed the test.

“You’re a good boy tonight.”, she said, appreciative.

“Thank you, mistress.”

“But I’m damn tired,” she drawled, stretching her body, all that walking….

From the corner of her eye, Mikasa could see how hungrily Eren eyed her legs, giving her an idea.

“What do you say, pet, do you want to make me feel better?”

He nodded, rapidly.

“Perfect. But before you can serve me, I need to see you better.”, she gestured with one finger, “Take off your shirt and tie, I wanna see those pecs.”

But when Eren moved to obey, she held up a hand.

“And do it slowly, I want a show.”

Button by button then, Eren undid his shirt, letting it hang open. Mikasa almost immediately took advantage, reaching out to place her hand over his chest, tracing the muscles there with a light touch. Oh yes, this felt good.

“I like it when my slaves are in good physical condition,”, she mused, “Then they can serve me for a longer time. And you do have some nice shapes here.”

The edges of her rings scratched along his heated skin when Mikasa dragged her knuckles over the exposed patch of it before reluctantly pulling her hand back.

“Continue.”, she ordered.

Completely under her spell, Eren moved automatically, shrugging off his shirt and folding it neatly next to him. The tie came next, unwrapping the knot and pulling it from his neck, fully exposing the collar that was there. The large letters caught the light, nicely shimmering, spelling out her victim’s name. Now naked from the waist up, save for the leather collar, Eren once again resumed his kneeling position. Back straight, hands behind his back, one holding at the wrist of the other, eyes only for his mistress, waiting for her to order him, to tell him what to do. On her part, Mikasa was in no rush, reaching out to run her fingers up and down his firm stomach, over those nice abs and between his legs, feeling up the metal of his caged cock. The way her slow exploration made him groan was completely worth it.

But it was about time that her puppy felt some pain too, she knew how much he enjoyed it. Back up, Mikasa arched her fingers, changing her hand into a claw and digging her nails into the firm muscles of Eren’s abdomen. Mercilessly, she dragged her hand, creating a nice red path behind her hand. Eren’s eyes widened as he took a sharp intake of breath, but didn’t make a sound, even as Mikasa took her time in scratching his skin. He didn’t question it, didn’t protest, didn’t do anything to stop her. After all, Eren was Mikasa’s property, and if she wanted to mark him, then who could say no to her. To test her puppy further, Mikasa moved her hand again, this time all the way up to Eren’s chest. With delicate movement, she reached out, tweaking a nipple between her black fingernails. The sudden surge of pain made him curse, a muttered word said between clenched teeth, but it didn’t escape her attention.

“What was that?”, she said with a grin, “You said you wanted more? But of course…”

With a rustle of her dress, Mikasa leaned forward. Her every move carefully tracked by Eren’s eyes, who was just a little bit nervous about what she was going to do to him. Mikasa could get creative if she wanted to. Noticing his nervousness, her mouth moved up to his ear, whispering.

“Aww, poor baby, are you scared?.”, her tone dropped lower, “Good. You should be.”

Gently, she kissed his earlobe, the tip of her tongue playing with that sensitive body part, all fun and games, until she decided that Eren relaxed enough. And then she bit it, forcing another groan from her abused boy. With an evil giggle, Mikasa pulled back, one hand snaking behind Eren’s back and taking hold of his overlong hair, yanking his head back. Forced to stare at the ceiling, he could only feel as her lips descended to nip at his neck, abusing that little part above the collar’s edge. When her teeth sunk into it, adding another lovebite to the collection from the cinema, all he could do was groan. Again. Far from done, Mikasa moved her head down, kissing and nipping all over his skin, down until she reached her prize. Sealing her lips around Eren’s nipple, she flicked it with her tongue, lashed it with small kitten licks, loving how it made him shiver. Mikasa couldn’t wait to put the clamps back to work, as his nipples were very sensitive, same as hers, and she knew firsthand just how intense the metallic bite can be. For now, her teeth would do. Grazing the peak lightly, she used her hand to play with the other one, tips of her nails scratching lightly around the skin.

It was the anticipation that was the worst. Eren knew what was going to happen, sooner or later Mikasa would bite down, make him writhe in pain again, abuse his body, but all she did was featherlight, pleasurable, and the waiting was killing him. It used to be alien, weird, to derive pleasure from having his nipples played with, but he and Mikasa had long since crossed that bridge. Nowadays, they were up to some much darker stuff. At exactly that moment, she bit down, and her fingers that till now were only lightly tapping at his other nipple twisted it, making Eren’s whole body tense up from the sudden lash of pain. But he managed to remain silent, much to Mikasa’s delight. She did enjoy training her puppy, after all. Easing her hold, she once again returned to the nice treatment, as if that sharp sting was simply Eren’s imagination.

Taking her time with it, Mikasa developed a routine. Alternating between both of the sensitive peaks on Eren’s chest, she moved her mouth between them, but never let the other one rest, using her hand to play with it. Sometimes, her lips completely abandoned that area, choosing instead to nip at his collar bones, neck, everywhere she wanted to. She had two hands to use, didn’t she? Her mouth was an addition, she could very well handle her boy without it. His body was her playground, a canvas which she was slowly but surely painting red. Only here for now, but Mikasa had plans for the rest of it later, no rest for the wicked. Always unexpected, she was gentle before being rough, fondling and licking before biting and scratching, turning pain into pleasure and pleasure into pain on a moment’s notice.

Eren was taking the abuse or training, rather well, although groans and shivers moved his body anytime Mikasa got rough. It doesn’t really matter how much do you prepare mentally, having one of your nipples bitten into and the other tweaked by strong and nimble fingers just have certain effects on your body.

“You like pain, pretty boy?”, she murmured, “Do you like it when I torment you?”

As if she didn’t know the answer to that by now, as if his cock wildly straining against the cage wasn’t a proof of how much he craved it.

“I..L-Love it… Miss-“, Mikasa chose just that moment to bite again, “F-Fuck… Mistress..”

Eren wanted to touch her so bad, his hands straining where they rested behind his back, fingers digging into his own skin to keep himself from moving. There must have been red spots from how tightly the fingers of his left held his right wrist, and vice versa, effectively cuffing himself without Mikasa tying him up using anything physical. Her word was more than enough. The collar bobbed around his neck, when he swallowed, sweat beading on his skin, the abuse Mikasa was enjoying rather difficult to endure. Yet he did so, suffered it without moving a muscle, and that impressed his mistress enough to consider this part of the training as complete.

Pulling back, Mikasa returned to a more comfortable position at the sofa, her half-lidded eyes watching her toy. His own eyes were darkened, pupils dilated, breathing heavy and skin covered in sweat, beads of it running down over those pretty firm muscles. It made Mikasa hungry for more. And seeing his face, somewhat devoid of any marks, she got an idea.

“You’ve been eyeing my boots before.”, she said, turning her leg to give him a better look, “You like them?”

Eren’s eyes flickered down, taking in the glory that was her calf encased in tight leather.

“Of course, mistress.”

“Tell me, how would you reply if I said that they make me want to step on you?”

Oh god.

“I…Uh… I mean….”

The slap was hard, ringing Eren’s ears while his head snapped to the right with the strength of the blow. The rings didn’t make it better, surely leaving their marks on his cheek. Automatically, his head moved back to its original position, ready for more punishment if his mistress decided that it was necessary.

“When I ask you a question,”, another slap, “I expect only one answer,” another one, “Do you know what it is?”

“Yes.”, his jaw ached while talking, “It’s: Of course, mistress.”

“Good. Now get on the fucking floor.”

Immediately obeying, Eren lay down on his back, presenting himself in front of his mistress. Standing up, Mikasa loomed over him, looking down at her slave, the hint of sadism back in her eyes.

“Now, ask me for it.”, she drawled, “Beg.”

Not like Eren had a choice.

“Please, mistress, step on me.”

With a huff of satisfaction on finally being given the appropriate respect, Mikasa lifted her leg before slowly setting it down against Eren’s chest. His hands balled into fists as she increased the pressure, muscles clenching. Deeming that he’s ready, Mikasa let go of solid ground, fully moving to stand on Eren, his chest broad enough to fully accommodate her, looking down at him, the hint of sadism evolving into a full-blown grin. Mikasa could say that she was standing at the top of the world, or better yet, had the whole world beneath her feet. Funny.

The boots may have seriously been made for walking on people, the massive platform soles cushioning her feet very nicely, making even standing on such even terrain quite easy to do. For Eren, who was apparently turned into a human carpet, a footrest, it was rather hard to endure, although it gave him a little bonus. Lying under her, it gave him the perfect place from which he could peek under her dress, to see not only her beautifully strong pale legs in all their endlessly long glory but also the part between them, covered by the black lace of her panties. You know what, for this view, the suffering was worth it. That was until Mikasa took a step backward, planting on of her boots right on his crotch.

“Do you think your cock is feeling neglected?”, she thought out loud, increasing the pressure of her foot, “All alone in the cage, while we are having so much fun….”

Fishing between her necklaces, she pulled out the key, looking at it thoughtfully. Wiggling her leg, Mikasa forced more of those delicious sounds from her captive.

“Maybe I should unlock it…. Hmmm…”

Eren couldn’t really answer. Mikasa was not light, her athletic build made sure of that, so speaking was impossible with all her weight settled on his chest, pushing out any air he managed to squeeze into his lungs. He wasn’t really expecting to be let out this early into the play, but if she was offering, then maybe….

“No, not yet.”, she decided, letting go of the key and it vanished right back among the collection around her neck.

There goes that hope.

At least she lifted her foot back from his crotch and moved it to stand once more on his chest. It’s the small victories that count. The moment of triumph didn’t last long, as Mikasa once again lifted one of her legs, this time using it to turn Eren’s head and step on the side, squishing his face into the floor.

“You look so good under my boots, puppy, beneath me, it’s where you belong.”, the pressure increased again, making Eren’s eyes water, “It feels amazing to put you in your place.”

Having Eren endured all this shit she threw at him without a word of protest, the fact that he literally let her walk all over him made her so aroused that Mikasa had to hop off, otherwise she might just not be able to hold herself and fuck him here and there, which would be a waste of all her evil plans. Breathing hard, she stared at his devoted face under her foot, loving this moment of dominance so much. When Eren gave himself to her this willingly, when he absolutely followed orders, it never failed to make her wet between the legs. Regaining control from her primal side, Mikasa closed her eyes for a second, searching that lost composition before forcing herself to stop and get on with it. Fuck, but this was hot.

Just as soon as it appeared, the heavy boot was gone, allowing Eren to turn his head back up, just in time to catch Mikasa stepping down from him and returning to her place on the sofa. Reaching out, she crooked a single finger in the well-known gesture of Come here.

Able to breathe freely after what felt like an eternity, Eren slowly picked himself up from the floor and back into the kneeling position by her side. To say that she was harsh would be an understatement, Mikasa was really letting her cruel sadist side run free tonight. Aside from all the scratches left behind from before, his chest now had boot prints from where his cruel mistress deemed his body to be worthy of being stepped on by her divine being.

“That was fun,” she said, awfully cheerful, “I’m definitely doing it again, soon. But now…”

Stretching her legs, Mikasa smirked.

“Those boots are heavy to wear, and I’m growing tired.”

She tapped the top of one with her finger, her nail lightly touching the black leather. Eyes looking straight at Eren, her voice changed from the normal one back to her dominatrix tone, giving orders and not taking no as an answer.

“I want your mouth on my boots, puppy, I want you to kiss and lick every part of them. I want you to show just how devoted you are to serving me. After that, I’ll allow you to take them off and you will give a similar treatment to my legs, and massage my feet too, it was a long day of walking after all.”, smirk once again curved her black-painted lips, “What do you say, pretty boy, up for the task?”

Taking a wheezing breath, Eren tore his eyes away from those sexy shoes, meeting her gaze. Was he up for it? Damn, that was not even a question. Not only was he completely under her control, but from the way she worded the order it was clear that Mikasa wanted Eren to help her relax, to feel good, and that was always high on his priority list, doesn’t matter if she was domming him or not.

“I would love to do it.”, he said, “To worship you, mistress.”

“Good boy.”

Relaxing once again into the sofa, Mikasa lifted her leg, letting Eren take hold of it. Seeing how eager he looked, how his eye darted all the way over the knee-high boot and up to the for now forbidden garden of Mikasa’s stocking covered thigh, it did things to her, to the place between her legs which was getting more and more aroused by the second. For now, however, the dominatrix would just sit back and enjoy the show. Seated comfortably, she nodded at her puppy, ordering him to start with a single word.

“Begin.”

[thedeaditeslayer]

Running Time Restored Interview: 1997 Josh Becker and Bruce Campbell Indie Gets a New Life in 2K.

You can read the full interview on the upcoming release With Josh Becker, Bruce Campbell, and Don May Jr. from Diabolik Magazine below. 

In 1995 on New Year’s Eve, Josh Becker had an idea. Born out of a session pondering Alfred Hitchcock’s legendary, true crime classic, Rope, he decided that he was going to improve upon the master of suspense’s legendary concept of shooting a film in real time. A daunting task but Becker was up to the challenge.

What resulted was perhaps one of the most ambitious efforts to ever grace the silver screen, Running Time. This neo-noir thriller about a heist gone wrong and a small-time criminal who rekindles his love affair with his high-school sweetheart was a hidden gem that didn’t get the recognition that it deserved. Written expressly for Becker’s childhood friend and Super 8 cohort, Bruce Campbell, the pair were once again, doing gonzo-style filmmaking just like when they were growing up in Michigan with the likes of Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert.

Josh Becker was and is an adventurous soul who does things his way, just like the director gods of old. When I think of his work, the names of John Ford, William Wyler and John Huston readily spring to mind. There is something admirable about his driven determination that was the heart and soul of this black and white throwback to another era which is ultimately endearing. Yes, I have a special place in my heart for Running Time because it is honest and not filled with “tentpole” tendencies. At the core of it is the written word. The end result is one of the most overlooked masterpieces of both Becker’s and Campbell’s careers.

What is truly amazing is that this flick was shot in two weeks and that everyone went home early. It was like having a 9 to 5 job. No 18-hour-days, just fast, efficient, run and gun style filmmaking that resulted in a production that could stand toe to toe with noir classics from a bygone era like The Petrified Forest and Desperate Hours.

Prior to Running Time, Bruce was known predominantly for his work in the horror and science fiction genres which can sometimes be limiting for an actor. Becker gave him an incredible script to work with that really showcased his range as a thespian. Behind the smart-ass quips and bravado lies a talented individual who takes his craft seriously. He is capable of creating complex characters and he is most assuredly fit to be a romantic lead.

I had the chance to sit down with the major players in the restoration of Running Time (Josh Becker, Bruce Campbell, Don May, Jr. and Gerry Kissell) to reminisce about the journey of this film from its humble beginnings to preserving this indie classic for future generations.

The Director and His Muse

Diabolique: Bruce, I have to start off by telling you that Running Time is my favorite out of all of your films.  

Bruce Campbell: It’s a cool, little flick. Too bad it sort of escaped, it wasn’t released as the old joke goes.

Diabolique: What I like so much about it is the neo-noir aspect. It’s a throwback to the 40’s and 50’s. In Josh’s book, Rushes, he talks about how he convinced you to be in the film. You weren’t getting paid and you invested in it. What was his pitch, how did he sell the concept to you?

BC: The pitch was that it was NOT McHale’s Navy. I just spent 11 weeks in Mexico just sort of bullshitting our way through that film where we would make up our lines of dialogue because there was nothing written for us. In the script it would say things like, “McHale and his guys get off the boat,” “McHale and his men go to Cuba.” Which means they hadn’t thought anything up for you. I did it because I liked the show as a kid. It was a very popular thing; it was from Universal. It made sense at the time. It was just a case of when something is underwritten, the problem that it causes actors. I had just come off of that, and Running Time was very ambitious, low budget it was meant to be this conceit of being done in one shot so it was cinematic. So, I was like, okay, yeah. It was like the anti-studio movie, small crew, fast moving and yet no money. Basically, I invested the money that I was paid back into the movie in order for them to make it. It was definitely for a love of the movie type deal.

Josh Becker: I’ve known Bruce since we were twelve and I’d seen him in a number of plays. I knew that he had a much bigger range as an actor than he’d had a chance to show at that point. Plus, he’s a pleasure to work with. Once I pitched him the idea, he was all for it, partially because the long takes are a way for an actor to really show their ability.

Diabolique: Thinking about your filmography, Bruce, you haven’t played a traditional romantic lead. Do you see Running Time as a love story of sorts?

BC: What’s funny is Josh had Carl come back. In a proper film noir, he would have gone, you would have heard the tires squeal and she would be sitting there crying and the credits would roll and that would be it. It would be bleak, but Josh deep down is a sentimentalist and I think I am too. We had no issue with the happy ending. We wanted to make the audiences think for quite a long period of time that it’s going to be a sad ending. She packs her bag and then she unpacks it. The whole thing is quite an extended piece but I thought it was well worth playing just to kind of throw a little wrinkle in it. Maybe even in a criminal story you can have a happy ending.

Diabolique: In terms of the storyline, Josh, we all know that Rope was the blueprint for Running Time. You hadn’t made a film in 7 years. What was it about that production that captured your imagination besides the challenge of the “long take”?

JB: Part of my inspiration was simply getting another feature film made after seven years of working in television, which was never my goal.  But as I thought about Rope, I wondered why the continuous, real-time concept didn’t really have any impact on the story. Then it occurred to me that there was no time element involved.  Two young men—ostensibly Leopold and Loeb—have killed another young man for the fun of it, put the body in a chest, then invited people over for a party, including a cop. Well, if the chest was spring loaded and had a timer on it so that at some point it would pop open and reveal the corpse, that would be a time element. So, I thought, how do you use the real time technique and add a ticking clock? The first story that came to mind was a heist which generally has a time element—we’ve got to get the money and get out of here before we’re caught.

Diabolique: Running Time was shot in sequence like a play. Did it pose any challenges for you as an actor?

BC: I liked what Josh was trying to do. These long uninterrupted takes from an actor’s point of view, you know stuff can get really choppy these days. My complaint from Burn Notice is they wouldn’t let a full sentence stay on camera; they would have to cut away to somebody else. It felt like they had to keep cutting, cutting and cutting. This movie was no cutting for like ten minutes at a time. It’s great from an actor’s perspective because you can feel the juices flowing. It’s like a play. You can work on the pacing; you can have something build over a period of time and minutes to play out in literally real time. It’s a real time crime drama. I liked it conceptually and it was challenging. There was a fair amount of dialogue because my guy, Carl is calling the shots. I thought it was a good premise. Guy gets out of prison turns right around and robs the prison because he knows how the prison laundry system works. I thought that was pretty sound. I am always sympathetic for the low budget independent movie. I always will be.

Diabolique: Were there any other films that influenced you and your writing partner, Peter Choi? The entire concept is very noir and the desperate situation that Carl finds himself in is reminiscent of any number of films from the 1940s.

JB: My main inspiration was Straight Time with Dustin Hoffman, an overlooked movie from 1978. And though I didn’t think of it at the time, several folks brought up Joseph Lewis’s Gun Crazy after it came out, and I do see that. The film has one long take in it during a bank robbery, and even though the camera stays in the backseat of a car, it has that same feeling of a real time event.

Diabolique: I know you are a fan of classic movies, Bruce and in a sense Running Time reminds me of Desperate Hours or The Petrified Forest especially when the robbery is botched and the situation is escalating in the enclosed office. Did you find any inspiration from the noir genre for your portrayal of Carl?

BC: No, but the classic tough guys were always awesome. We loved them all, Bogart and Robert Mitchum…the fact that Josh shot the film in black and white was perfect. Because it really helped lend itself to a look of that time period when Jack Palance was a leading man.

Diabolique: In your book Rushes, you talked about your decision to shoot in 16 mm Kodak ASA 64 black and white stock. You get sharper images due to the finer grain of the film, but did that pose any problems in terms of showcasing your work at that time since most people weren’t shooting in black and white?

JB:  I didn’t think of it regarding showcasing my work. I thought it was appropriate for the subject matter and that it would be visually striking.  Also, moving the camera from inside to outside in color posed the problem of adding or removing filters which would not be an issue with black and white.

Diabolique: You shot over a period of 10 days which was unheard of even back in the 90’s. How were you able to keep things moving along?

JB: It was based on pre-planning. I knew exactly what I wanted. We rehearsed the film and the actors were all very comfortable with the dialogue. Then it was just an issue of getting the complicated camera moves in regard to the actor’s blocking to work right, and that didn’t turn out to be all that difficult.

Diabolique: As an actor, did you enjoy working on an accelerated timetable?

BC: It was exciting to do and so different. The toughest thing was the technical demands. It wasn’t like there were explosions and stuff like that. But in order to do blocking inside of an apartment, the camera is moving in circles, well, the crew had to move every object behind the camera before it got there and then had to put it back before the camera saw it again. So, there was a lot of voodoo, a lot of magic. We would rehearse and rehearse and rehearse and we could never get it right. Finally, we were like fuck it. Let’s just start shooting because everyone gets a little more alert when you shoot. That did it. That allowed us to conquer the impossible. After 3 or 4 takes if we got it, we were done even if it was 10:30 in the morning. I don’t think we spent more than two thirds of a day getting that particular shot. The end result is cool. I’ve seen the cleaned-up version without all the scratches and the dust marks. You can’t even tell what year it is. It almost seems like its videotape transferred like those teledramas of the 60’s that were done on TV. There were moments in the film that weren’t perfect, and that’s okay.

Diabolique: When I revisited Running Time recently, I was impressed with how well it holds up because some efforts don’t. With the 2K restoration, Bruce, this will give your fans a chance to see it. For some, it might be their first time. Do you have a scene that you are particularly fond of?

BC: There’s some scenes that are fun to do. After I get shot, I am in Janie’s apartment and she’s trying to put me together, that fainting on the toilet while she’s trying to patch me together it felt kind of real, playing shot and being delirious. Stuff like that. Just fun to be able to take the moment to do it.

Diabolique: Josh, do you feel shooting in black and white made the 2K restoration more challenging?

JB:  Slow speed black and white film stock has a lot of silver in it which creates an inordinate amount of static electricity. When I did the initial film transfer back in 1997, the negative kept getting covered with dust, causing us to have to stop and clean the film every 30-60 minutes. Since the transfer was $375 an hour—in 1997 dollars—I could only stop so many times before it became financially prohibitive.  Dust on a black and white negative shows up as white dots. Using the newest technology, Don May was able to remove all of the dust digitally. Therefore, the film has never looked as good as it does now.

Diabolique: What excites you the most about Running Time getting restored, Bruce?

BC: I am always happy when something gets re-released which means in this case, it gets preserved. It will look fantastic in 2K. That’s why with all these reissues fans are like, “Why should we care?” Like well, if you care about preservation, this means it will be the latest version of a movie that is fairly obscure. Sometimes a movie can die on the vine because no one will pay the money to keep it current. Now, we can show the sucker, hopefully, anywhere.

Diabolique: Josh, do you have any plans to showcase Running Time once the restoration is completed? This is a great film that fans should definitely see.

JB: We have no plans at the moment, but then the film isn’t out yet. When it’s done, we’ll see what happens.

Breathing New Life into Running Time: The Art of Restoration

Don May, Jr. along with Jerry Chandler and Charles Fiedler created Synapse Films in 1997. Known for their work in preserving unique genre classics, May had previously collaborated with Josh Becker when his company restored the director’s 1985 production, Thou Shalt Not Kill…Except.

Gerry Kissell was the official artist on Running Time and will be reprising his role for the 2K restoration. He has been friends with Josh since the Freaky Film Festival where he and Bruce premiered the film on the University of Illinois campus.

Both gentlemen were kind enough to take time out of their busy schedules to talk to us.

Diabolique: Were you able to obtain the original negative for Running Time?

Don May, Jr: Yes, thankfully. Josh Becker is a true movie fan and loves the filmmaking process, so we were fortunate to work with him. He kept everything stored properly in a climate-controlled vault, as a man who cares about his movies should.

Diabolique: Can you talk about the scanning process for 2K?

DMJ: The 16mm negative was separated into A/B rolls, so we had to scan a lot of reels separately at Prasad in Burbank, CA. Luckily, because of the actual nature of the “one-take” aesthetic Josh utilized, there were only a total of about 30 cuts in the entire film… hidden in editing, of course. So, we basically scanned the 30 separate shots, and then assembled them digitally using DaVinci Resolve. We had to be VERY careful the way we put the 30 cuts back together, making sure the shots were frame accurate and of the proper length. Unlike a film that has a conformed negative separated into 10- or 20-minute reels, Running Time was all in separate pieces, with each shot edited on separate reels. It was a challenge, but we were able to use a previous master as a reference and most of it went together without a hitch. Being shot in B&W also helped in color correction to hide the edits properly to make the real-time aspect as seamless as possible. Once the film was properly assembled, we were able to ship everything off to India for restoration. Because Josh had everything stored properly for decades, the negative itself was fairly free of a lot of dirt and scratches, but we did carefully sonically clean all the pieces before scanning commenced.

Diabolique: How long does it take the digital artists to fix debris or scratches on the original negatives?

DMJ: There’s a lot of data wrangling involved. Copying data for safety. Making backups, etc. But we have a great working relationship with Prasad. They have worked on such classics as Lawrence of Arabia, How the West Was Won, A Fistful of Dollars, Gandhi, The Red Shoes, etc. They do the lion’s share of my output, and I put a lot of trust in them. They’ve never failed me. We do ship the film scans to India and that takes time. I think Running Time took about 4-5 months. I let them take their time, though, because I don’t want to have to keep sending things back for fixes. With Running Time, they did an excellent job, right from my first restoration test reels. But, again, Josh had taken very good care of his materials, so it wasn’t much of a challenge.

Diabolique: Gerry, what artwork did you originally provide for Running Time and what can we expect from you for the 2K restoration?

Gerry Kissell: I did promotional art that ended up on tee-shirts. It included the shot of the three main characters, which I called Tres Hombres, on one, Jeremy Roberts aiming the pistol at the camera on another, and the last, which you’ve seen of Bruce’s mug all heroic and chinny. All of the art was done on Bristol cold press illustration board. The new painting for the Synapse release is me, 20+ years later, a tad bit better at drawing and painting, lol.

Diabolique: Besides the idea of preserving Running Time, Don, what attracted you to the project?

DMJ: We had worked previously with Josh on Thou Shalt Not Kill…Except, and we had a lot of fun with that one. I like working with Josh. He’s a great guy, and I love that he’s so passionate about film. He loves movies, and he loves MAKING movies. It’s so great to see people like Josh doing things like Running Time, back when using computers to do a “one take” approach was non-existent. You see things today like the film 1917, which is a fine film in its own right, but they cheated a lot of its “one take” aspect using computers. Josh did Running Time, but used his brain, and actual organic film splicing and editing to achieve the same result. He’s smart, funny, talented and I love working with people like him. It also doesn’t hurt that Running Time stars Bruce Campbell, so… yeah… of course, we jumped at the chance to do it.

Diabolique: When can fans expect to see the Running Time 2K restoration?

DMJ: I would imagine late summer/early fall 2020. We’re wrapping up extras and artwork now.

[mysticsparklewings]

Ziggy Crossing

Still not quite sure I'm 100% back into the swing of things (posting regularly and being more present) yet, but time will tell. For now I'm testing the waters. Anyway. In the time I've been away, I ended up talking to some friends about (to the surprise of absolutely no one) Animal Crossing, and in that conversation, the idea of drawing my cat, Ziggy, as an Animal Crossing villager came up. I'd toyed with it before after seeing some other people draw their pets as villagers, and that conversation more or less sealed the deal for me to at least try it, even if my attempt didn't pan out and see the light of day. Obviously, things went pretty well because here I am posting this. The first step, as it is 90% of the time for me, was to come up with a sketch and go from there. I primarily used Olivia and Lolly [pre-existing Animal Crossing cat villagers] as my references--Olivia for the pose and eyes, Lolly for the stripes and some details regarding the ears and face--but I also checked certain things across the various cat villager models so that details could be consistent where they needed to be. I think if I missed the mark anywhere, it's probably in the proportions. Namely the size of the head and length of the body. But I think it's close enough that unless you compare it directly to Olivia's model that I referenced for the pose, the proportions aren't so off that it's distracting or off-putting. I did originally have trouble figuring out what pattern to put on her shirt though because the real Ziggy doesn't really have anything I could pull a pattern from. These days she does wear a white and silver collar, but that's not a whole lot to work with. So I left that alone while I pondered how I wanted to go about coloring the whole thing. My plan at the beginning was to use this sketch as a test piece for some acrylic paint markers I recently acquired (which you will be seeing me talk about in the future), but once the sketch was finished and I went back to check the colors I had (you know me; gotta have a swatch chart for everything), it was pretty obvious that if I want this to be my dear Ziggy and not just a random tabby cat, I needed to figure out a different coloring method. I could have just done regular acrylic paint, but that sounded like a chore and thus I was not interested. Same with gouache. Colored pencils were on the table, but the main problem I have with those is that they can be pretty slow and personally I think their texture really lends them better to replicating the 3DS/Animal Crossing: New Leaf style, as opposed to the look of New Horizons, and that's not what I was going for here. That left me with two main options: Watercolor, which was a hard pass for this kind of art (at least for Ziggy herself), and alcohol markers, which I did use quite a bit on the last Animal Crossing artwork I made, and they had worked out fairly well. Alcohol markers it was! Of course, even after that decision was made, there was the issue of how to handle the lines of the drawing. When I was planning on using the paint pens/acrylic markers/whatever, that seemed a lot simpler because, in theory, I could just use the same pen I wanted to color with to do the outlines and then fill them in. And because that would be using mostly opaque paint, if I needed to I could just cover up any overlap with relative ease. Alcohol markers don't play by the same rules though, so I had to re-think all that. In the end, I pulled out a pale warm gray Polychromos pencil close to the main color of alcohol marker that I had picked out that I figured would also be light enough to blend in everywhere else. That way I could have the defining lines that I needed without having to worry too much about them being visible in the final product. [For clarification: I picked a Polychromos because once sharpened they tend to hold a point longer and better than the other colored pencils at my disposal and I really needed to keep a sharp point as long as possible to do the lines here.] In retrospect, I do think it might have been to my benefit to pick out a pink for doing the inner ear lines, but the end result there isn't so awful that it single-handedly (paw-ed-ly?) ruins the drawing for me. It's just something to take note of for next time if there is a "next time." Once I had my lines (including doing the eyelashes and mouth with one of my usual black fineliners), the next challenge was the actual coloring. Mostly because I had to be very careful around the edges so that the marker ink didn't feather out too far (as alcohol markers do on any paper that isn't marketed as "bleed proof" because that's what bleed proof in paper actually means--not that it won't bleed through to the other side, though that is less common with that kind of paper, but that it won't "bleed" across the page), and I also had to be a little careful and choosy about how I did any blending or shading. Again, my blending and shading plan was going to be different had I used the acrylic markers. The main thing I ended up doing here was trying to find areas that needed to be layered so that the one-color shading could act as a line/barrier between sections. Best example: Where the ears meet the head, I shaded the bottom portion of the ears. You can also see this a little bit where Ziggy's tail meets her body and where the legs intersect at a few different points. By no means did this turn out perfectly, considering that I really wanted to stick to use as few colors as possible (which means pretty much all the shading is just layers of one color to darken it) which means there isn't as much distinction or variation as there could be. And I feel it necessary to note here that I was worried when I first finished the lines that the eyes looked wonky, but after coloring pretty much everything else in that concern dissolved because 1. It's harder to tell and 2. Even if they aren't exactly the same, it makes visual sense because it looks like her head is slightly turned, meaning the eyes wouldn't be identical anyway. Never underestimate the power of coloring your work in! Speaking of which, you might be wondering about her shirt by now. Well, after toying around with some ideas I got it in my head that a good way to tackle that problem might be with washi tape, as I've used it in this manner before and worked out pretty nicely. Even though it wasn't a lot to work with, I did like the idea of the base color for her top being white like the real Ziggy's collar, and that narrowed down my tape options considerably. Of the options I had that I thought would be suitable, I ended up having a choice between one with small rainbow-colored polka dots and the decidedly less vibrant small triangles that you see here. The polka dots seemed a little too peppy for Ziggy, so I went with the triangles. And this, I must say, is one of those artistic decisions that I feel even better about the longer that I see the end product.   The main issue I have with using washi tape, and thus why I don't use it in this way that often, is because cutting the washi tape to fit a specific shape is a process that doesn't get much easier even with practice.  And even if it did, that wouldn't eliminate the very real possibility of cutting or indenting the paper underneath while you're cutting the tape. Of which, I have not yet figured out how to totally avoid short of forming the washi tape on a separate piece of paper, cutting it there, and then moving it to the final piece. But that method comes with its own problems too, so... Still, I made the decision to go through with it here and just accept the rough edges/lack of precision and all that. Before I put the tape down though, I did do a little shading with some light gray markers that I was counting on showing through the tape to give it a little more dimension. Seeing it now, I do think I could've stood to go a little darker, but again this isn't something that totally ruins the end result for me. Just something worth noting. After all of the above, I was left with one lingering problem: The background. Which I've noticed seems to normally be a "problem" area for me in that I don't always have a solid idea for what to do with it. I did consider what exactly I wanted to do earlier on in the process, before I started on Ziggy on the final paper, even. Briefly, I thought I might cut her out and put her on a separate background as is sort of a go-to background method for me. Something just didn't feel right about doing that here though and it feels like I've done that a lot lately (you know, when I've not been drowning in mandalas for NaPoWriMo...). So it was at this early stage that I locked in the idea of adding in the background in later, probably doing something kind of loose to give a general idea that hopefully wouldn't take too much time or effort. We've already established that I wasn't super keen on the idea of using acrylic paints or gouache for this drawing, and that remained true for the background too. Although, I don't really like using alcohol markers for backgrounds either because it can be tricky to keep things smooth and consistent. That left me with colored pencils and watercolor. Colored pencils are usually hard pass for backgrounds for me for a number of reasons. So! Watercolor, hmm... I drew Ziggy here on my darling Strathmore 400 series mixed media paper because I love how it handles markers and it has enough weight and texture to it that it handles a lot of my other go-to options with little fuss. Watercolor is really the only thing I have trouble using on it, the main problem being that sometimes (not always) the paint doesn't like to blend out super smoothly and certain watercolor techniques don't work the same on it. This doesn't mean it's useless for watercolor (at least not for me), that just means I have to be more careful about how I choose to work with watercolor on it. In this case, the blending issues lined up with the idea I had of letting the background have more texture since Ziggy came out a lot smoother by the very nature of alcohol markers. Somewhere in all this, the idea struck me to use my Gelatos to leave behind some crayon-like texture. That idea seemed fitting to me since Animal Crossing is a fairly light-hearted and child-friendly game, themes that crayons go along with. The gelatos are water-soluble but not every color dissolves completely when activated with water. This should be pretty evident here because I didn't try to hide it. I wanted quick and easy, and without a doubt just letting the texture do whatever it wants is the quick n' easiest method to use with the gelatos. Once I'd done a bit of back and forth with two greens and two blues to give me the solid suggestions of a sky and ground, it still felt like it was missing something. Ultimately, it seemed like a good idea to me to try and mimic the triangle pattern/texture that New Horizons features. (In past games you could get squares or circles for a grass pattern at random.) And while I as per usual I had to think on how to go about this, in the end, the best solution I could come up with turned out to be drawing the triangles in with alcohol markers. Truly, I'm surprised to be reporting this because I fully expected the creamy nature of the gelatos to make using alcohol markers on top feel disguising and unproductive. But not so! At least not with the limited gelato use here. The creamier areas do soften the color of the marker, but I think that worked to my advantage. Although, I did end up using a little bit of my yellow Moonlight gel pen because I felt like I needed some yellow triangles for balance and I knew transparent yellow markers wouldn't do what I wanted. But that brings us to the final product. I'm happy with it. And I do really like how the grass ties in with Ziggy's green eyes. It's just a nice little touch of visual cohesion in my book. As I always say, I'm sure it's not perfect and there are some missteps here and there or things that could be improved. Nevertheless, it was a fun experiment and serves as good encouragement for me to continue playing with the lineless look, among other things. I do have to note though that it feels super weird to just leave the eyes like this with no indication of shine on them! I made the choice not to since it's not a common trait with the official character models (at least not for eyes in this same style) but part of me still feels like it's incomplete. As I've said before recently and I'll probably say again, I can't promise I'll be getting back to a regular upload schedule now, but it's on my mind. I want to get to that point soon. I do have the acrylic markers I mentioned to talk about and another supply in the mail, and some other art in my backlog. So if you can be patient with me a while longer, there will be more from me to look forward to. In the meantime, please be kind to yourself and others. ____ Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings ____ Where to find me & my artwork: My Website | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram 

[angelofberlin2000]

by Natalie Finn | Fri., May. 17, 2019 3:00 AM

When Keanu Reeves was asked the other night, "What do you think happens when we die?" interviewer Stephen Colbert probably wasn't expecting such a deep—or assured—answer from the movie star.

"I know that the ones that love us will miss us," the 54-year-old actor said sagely, rendering the Late Show host unusually speechless.

It was a sincere, thoughtful response—vintage Reeves, really—from someone who's had reason to think about such things.

"I haven't really thought about my career future, or what was going to happen, until really recently," he also told GQ in February. Asked why he started thinking about it, he replied, "Death!"

Watch https://www.eonline.com/videos/289305/how-keanu-reeves-training-for-john-wick-3-compares-to-the-matrix

How Keanu Reeves' Training for John Wick 3 Compares to The Matrix

The still eerily youthful-looking Reeves, who's back in theaters Friday in the third installment of the blockbuster John Wick franchise, has become a brand unto himself, the name "Keanu" signifying not just movie stardom but also a certain kind of performance and even a state of mind: chill, zen, blissfully checked out ("Sad Keanu" meme notwithstanding). His name—which has lent itself to a comedy about a cat and a recent hit song by Logic, and which of course a studio exec wanted him to change when he first came to Hollywood—does mean "cool breeze over the mountains" in Hawaiian, after all.

But still waters run deep, and despite being in the public eye for more than 30 years, he's one of the least-known people whose chiseled face you would recognize anywhere. Few play it as close to the vest as Reeves, who, though he does the occasional interview and shows up to fulfill his side of the bargain in promoting his films, does not talk about his personal life. And not in the way that most celebrities don't really talk about their personal lives.

As in, it's entirely unclear if he even has one, although—look at him—he must.

"I came to Hollywood to be in movies," Reeves told Parade recently. "I feel really grateful that I've had that opportunity, but I'm just a private person, and it's nice that can still exist."

He doesn't even publicize his charity work, but his causes include children's hospitals, fighting cancer, the arts and the environment. 

"I always find it surreal that complete strangers come up and ask me personal questions," he told Parade back in 2008. "I don't mind speaking about work, but when the talk turns to 'Who are you?' and 'What do you do off-screen?' I'm like, 'Get out of here.' I've been in situations where people have felt they had a relationship with me or something and I didn't even know who they were."

Not that Reeves is an anti-star. He lives in the hills above West Hollywood, spent plenty of time enjoying the local nightlife in his youth and has starred in countless quotable action movies—and gets paid handsomely for them, enough so that he can take off and do passion projects like his first (and only, to date) directorial effort, 2013's The Man of Tai Chi, or show up unheralded on a Swedish sitcom (Swedish Dicks, now on Pop) or in any indie film he so desires, like the recent Destination Wedding, an acerbic comedy that reteamed him with Bram Stoker's Dracula co-star Winona Ryder.

He's perfectly congenial yet usually looks somewhat serious, but not because he's taking himself seriously—more as if he wants to answer even the most lighthearted of questions with respectful gravity. But hey, as Stephen Colbert just found out, if you ask Reeves a potentially loaded question, prepare to get an answer.

Asked by Parade in 2008 if he believed in aliens, because he was playing the alien Klaatu in a remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, he replied, "Some days I do. Some days I don't. There's so much unexplained and unexplainable phenomena that's presented to us. But beyond that, the cosmos is so vast. We can't be the only sentient entity. It might not look like us, but it's going to be out there."

His signature Keanu cadence used to be mistaken for a sign of vacuity, but Reeves attributed however he came off in interviews to his overall discomfort with talking about himself.

"I've never played stupid to keep someone distant," he told Vanity Fair in 1995. "I don't play stupid. Either it's been a failure on my part to articulate, or my naivete, or ingenuousness, or sometimes it's the nature of the form... And you know, I find myself more able to give an explanation of a project five years later than in the middle of it. It's so present-tense! I can tell you how I feel, but its context is harder to explain... Sometimes when I'm interviewed I'm not ready to do that. So you say...'excellent!' And you know what, man? It's OK."

It certainly was.

Ted Theodore Logan, Johnny Utah, Jack Travern, Neo, John Wick: all characters that had to be played by Reeves. He's done everything from Shakespeare to sports flicks to A Scanner Darkly, and soon you'll be hearing his voice as Duke Caboom, a motorcycle-riding stuntman with a wistful backstory, in Toy Story 4, which will probably sneak in to top The Matrix Reloaded, which made $742 million worldwide, as his single highest-grossing movie.

"So I made Duke a little more gravelly but still tried to give him energy and a big personality," Reeves shared with Entertainment Weekly in March. "I just thought that Duke should love what he does. He's the greatest stuntman in Canada! I wanted him to be constantly doing poses on the bike while he was talking, to have this great extroverted passion."

He turned down Speed 2 to play Hamlet onstage in Canada. He was one of the first big stars who memorably jammed on the side with his own band, Dogstar, in the '90s and now he co-owns a custom bike shop called ARCH Motorcycle in Hawthorne, Calif, because he loves motorcycles as much as you think he does.

"Riding can be a place to think and feel. It's a way to work things out," he recently told Parade, noting that inclement weather doesn't stop him. "I like riding in the rain. It's a little more sketchy." He rides mainly alone, but he and the ARCH crew cruise Pacific Coast Highway on Sunday mornings.

And if motorcycles provide one soul-soothing salve for Reeves, acting provides another.

"In acting, you're constantly discovering new feelings and thoughts and exposing yourself to them," he told Parade in 2008. "I guess it could be considered psycho-therapy. All I know is that, as an actor, I can tell you a story that you'll listen to. Maybe it won't just entertain you, it might also teach you something. I think film has the power to change your life if you want to let it.

Combine his real-life inscrutability with his is-it-genius-or-does-he-just-do-the-same-thing-every-time approach to acting, and he's become more myth than man—and that, too, is a huge part of his appeal. He's just so Keanu.

"I don't own a computer and I don't e-mail," he said in the 2008 

Parade

interview. "I'm fascinated by people who freak out when they don't get an instant response to an e-mail. It's like they expect as soon as they send an email to get the answer back and if they don't it's like awful. I just hope people won't totally lose the ability to write letters because it's a good way to communicate."

He preferred typewriters, Reeves said—and we can only hope he and Toy Story star Tom Hanks had a chance to talk about typewriters together.

"I only have good things to say about him," Swedish Dicks star Peter Stormare, who met Reeves doing Constantine in 2005, which led to the actor's role on his show, told GQ. "Once a year, we'll have a beer together and talk about life and things. He's very private. He leads his life the way he wants to lead it. And I guess it can be lonely sometimes. But I think he's just like me. There's a comfort in being alone sometimes, especially when you're working on something."

"We bonded over motorcycles, bass guitar, and Harold Pinter," Alex Winter, the Bill to his Ted, also told the magazine. "Reeves had a really good book collection."

Reeves was born in Beirut, to a Hawaiian father and English mother, but they divorced when he was about 2. Mom Patricia remarried in the US., but after that didn't work out she settled with a 7-year-old Keanu and his younger sister, Kim, who was born in Australia, in Toronto. Reeves reportedly hasn't spoken to his dad since he was 13. 

"We were latchkey kids," he told Esquire in 2017. "It was basically 'leave the house in the morning and come back at night'. It was cool." But, he told Parade, "Even for a runaway English girl, my mother gave us a proper upbringing. We learned manners, respect for our elders, formal table settings. I also learned a nonprejudicial, nonjudgmental acceptance of other people."

His favorite part of school was doing plays and studying Shakespeare in English class, so he dropped out at 17 to try his hand at acting.

"My attendance record was very bad. I was lazy," Reeves told Vanity Fair. "I knew I wanted to act when I was halfway through grade 11, I guess, and school wasn't important."

His first acting job came on the Canadian series Hangin' In in 1984. Then he moved to Los Angeles and made his big-screen debut in the Rob Lowe-starring drama Youngblood in 1986. Later that year he won his first major role in the gritty teen crime drama River's Edge, which went on to win Best Feature at the Independent Spirit Awards.

So it was off to the races for Reeves, who in the next five years made a wildly diverse array of movies, including the very-'80s comedy The Night Before, Dangerous Liaisons, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (and its sequel, Bogus Journey), Parenthood, Point Break and My Own Private Idaho.

He was very much living the fast Hollywood life, and it wasn't all charmed.

In 1993, River Phoenix died of an accidental drug overdose—another painful thing Reeves didn't want to talk about, but he spoke fondly of his friend and My Own Private Idaho co-star.

"I enjoyed his company. Very much," Reeves told Rolling Stone in 2000. "And enjoyed his mind and his spirit and his soul. We brought good out in each other. He was a real original thinker. He was not the status quo. In anything."

As for Phoenix's death, "It's something he thinks about all the time, something he never really talks about," a friend told People. "Friends know not to go there with him."

In 1994 his estranged father, Samuel, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for drug possession in Hawaii, but was released in two. "Jesus, man. No, the story with me and my dad's pretty heavy. It's full of pain and woe and fucking loss and all that s--t," he told RS around that time. In 1995, he told Vanity Fair, when asked why he didn't want to know more about his dad's case, "Why would I want to find out what I didn't know?" He called the situation "pretty incredible," and that was that.

Reeves has a massive scar on his abdomen from when he suffered a rupture spleen in a motorcycle crash while riding in L.A.'s Topanga Canyon in 1988. He went into a hairpin turn going about 50 mph.

"I call that a demon ride," he reflected to Rolling Stone. "That's when things are going badly. But there's other times when you go fast, or too fast, out of exhilaration...I remember saying in my head, 'I'm going to die.'"

"I remember calling out for help," he continued. "And someone answering out of the darkness, and then the flashing lights of an ambulance coming down. This was after a truck ran over my helmet. I took it off because I couldn't breathe, and a truck came down. I got out of the way, and it ran over my helmet."

Also while his star was on the rise, his sister Kim battled cancer for years starting in the late '80s. "He helped me through," she told Vanity Fair about her brother. "When the pain got bad, he used to hold my hand and keep the bad man from making me dance. He was there all the time, even when he was away."

Actor and Dogstar bandmate Roger Mailhouse told Rolling Stone about Reeves in 2000, "He's a really giving person. He'd give you his last shoe. Really smart, too. He's incredibly booksmart. He's a really interesting person who doesn't talk a lot of s--t."

Asked how his friend had changed over the past decade, i.e. the '90s, Mailhouse said, "I don't worry about him as much. I used to worry about him. Because I think of him as one of my best friends in the world, was he going to crash his motorcycle, or this or that. We did some wild things. I guess it's just growing up. I don't know—maybe it had something to do with River Phoenix, maybe. Losing someone close to him. But now I'm just proud of him. He's getting to do it the right way."

For years you'd be much more likely to see Kim or Patricia on Reeves' arm at a premiere or other big event—such as when he got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2005—than any girlfriend, and the actor hasn't been publicly involved with anyone for years.

Not that he hasn't been linked to a bevy of his co-stars, including Sandra Bullock and Charlize Theron, but if he's in a serious relationship, it's not with a celebrity.

On The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in 2013 he was wearing what anyone would take for a wedding band on his left ring finger, but no revelations ever sprang from that accessory choice.

When Parade asked recently if he remained a bachelor, Reeves replied (squirming a bit, according to the magazine), "Well, I'm not married."

Through the interviews he's given over the years, a theme running through them is the visible discomfort he starts to evince when the conversation veers toward the too-personal. And some topics are just off-limits altogether.

Reeves started dating actress Jennifer Syme after meeting her at a party in 1998 and they were expecting a baby together—but the child, a girl they named Ava, was stillborn at 8 months. They laid her to rest in January 2000, according to People, and broke up weeks later.

Read

Sandra Bullock Almost Starred in The Matrix Instead of Keanu Reeves

They remained close up until Syme, who suffered from severe postpartum depression, died in 2001 when she crashed her Jeep Cherokee into several parked cars on a L.A. street and was thrown from the vehicle. In 2002, her mother, Maria St. John, sued Marilyn Manson, who had thrown a party that Syme attended that night, for wrongful death, alleging he had given Syme  the cocaine that an autopsy found in her system. 

"After Jennifer was sent home safely with a designated driver, she later got behind the wheel of her own car for reasons known only to her," Manson, who knew Syme through filmmaker David Lynch and had worked with her on Lost Highway, said in a statement.

The rocker continued, "This lawsuit, which is completely without merit, will not bring back Jennifer's life. It serves only to reopen the wounds and the pain felt by all who loved Jennifer. It is a pity that St. John sullies her own daughter's reputation by filing this baseless claim."

They reportedly reached a settlement out of court, but Manson maintained he had nothing to do with Syme taking drugs that night. 

Reeves has never spoken publicly about his relationship with Syme, which certainly fits right into how he was before, let alone since. But he grieved. And he eventually had something to say about that.

"I think, after loss, life requires an act of reclaiming," he told Parade in 2006. "You have to reject being overwhelmed. Life has to go on."

The actor continued, "Grief changes shape, but it never ends. People have a misconception that you can deal with it and say, 'It's gone, and I'm better.' They're wrong. When the people you love are gone, you're alone. I miss being a part of their lives and them being part of mine. I wonder what the present would be like if they were here—what we might have done together. I miss all the great things that will never be."

So he knew exactly what he was talking about when he told Colbert, "I know that the ones that love us will miss us."

Calling it "unfair" and "absurd," Reeves told

Parade

, "All you can do is hope that grief will be transformed and, instead of feeling pain and confusion, you will be together again in memory, that there will be solace and pleasure there, not just loss."

"Much of my appreciation of life has come through loss," he concluded. "Life is precious. It's worthwhile."

He said at the time that he would like to have a family, and reiterated the sentiment a couple years later, but Reeves told Esquire in 2017 with regards to "settling down": "I'm too… it's too late. It's over." Asked to clarify, he added, "I'm 52. I'm not going to have any kids."

Famous last words from a litany of 50-something men, and he was reminded of that. Reeves just said, "That's a whole other… But no. I'm glad to still be here."

"I'm every cliché," he continued. "F--king mortality. Ageing. I'm just starting to get better at it. Just the amount of stuff you have to do before you're dead. I'm all of the clichés, and it's embarrassing. It's all of them. It's just, 'Oh my God. OK. Where did the time go? How come things are changing? How much time do I have left? What didn't I do?' I'm trying to think of the line from the sonnet… 'And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er / The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan / Which I new pay as if not paid before.'"

"So, yeah," he added, reportedly with a smile. "I'm that guy."

In turn, Reeves can't help but come off as the solitary figure he so often plays in his films, from Constantine to The Matrix to John Wick. Heck, even Duke Caboom sounds a little melancholy.

At the same time, you're just as likely to see him in a romantic tear-jerker or a quirky comedy as a shoot-em-up. He's played heroes and hustlers, sweethearts and cruel villains, teachers and  slackers, doctors and lawyers.

"For me, it's just continuing to be able to work with great artists and tell stories that people enjoy," Reeves told Parade. "I was always hoping, even when I was young, that I could do different things," he says. "I'm really grateful for that. I'm

Though he had no idea John Wick would be such a hit, Reeves was in top form in the 2014 action extravaganza as a retired hit man who goes on a revenge spree after gangsters kill the beloved dog that was a gift from his late wife.

It made almost $89 million on a reported $20 million budget. Sequel time!

"You hope and you dream but the reality is even sweeter," he told E! News in 2017 about the first film's surprise success when he was promoting John Wick: Chapter 2. "It's great to be involved in a project that has so much affection."

Chapter 2 made $172 million worldwide.

Now back for John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum, Reeves has revealed that he started training heavily about three months before filming began to get back into dynamo shape, and he still goes whole-hog (or horse, in this movie's case) in the action sequences, right up until a car runs into him.

"I'll do some fight scenes and then John Wick will get hit by a car," Reeves explained to Colbert on The Late Show, "and that's Jackson Spidell, who's an amazing stuntman." Spidell has been Reeves' stunt double in all the John Wick movies. "He gets hit by the car, then I'll get up from the car, then I'll do a whole bunch more of, like, gun-fu and whatever, jujitsu, judo—and then, if I get thrown off something, Jackson does his thing."

Even more exciting for some fans, however, depending on whether you like your Keanu dark or more dude-like, is the news that he and Alex Winter are finally set to start shooting Bill & Ted Face the Music, the much-discussed follow-up to 1989's Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and sequel Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, which came out in 1991. The years-in-the-making comedy is tentatively due out in 2020.

And so on his latest press tour, Keanu Reeves left his usual trail of breadcrumbs. They may not lead you straight to his door, but they'll definitely keep you on the path.