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smokeybrandreviews · 4 years ago

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Tomorrow Should Have Died

So i was planning on reviewing The Tomorrow War because it’s a new film and i like new films i can watch without having to brave the plague. I saw a preview for this thing a while back and had real low expectations for it, figured it’d be dumb fun like Independence Day. Imagine my abject horror when it turned out to be so much worse. Okay, first things first, the good stuff. Chris Pratt is good and so is J.K. Simmons. Betty Gilpin and Yvonne Strahovski work miracles with what little they have. The sound design is exceptional, probably the best thing about this sh*t flick, and the actual effects are on point. The problem with the movie is the script. It’s f*cking terrible. Oh my god, so much dumb! Here’s a list of sh*t that made me irrationally angry, in order of plot progression.

Eleven minutes in and i hate it. How are you losing a war to anything if you have mastered the ability to traverse space-time? How the f*ck is your technology so advanced, that you have found a way to exceed the light speed limit and literally break physics, but lose to a bunch of rabid, interstellar, komodo dragons? This is the dumbest f*cking contradiction I have seen all year and i am offended that whoever decided to make this film, is asking this of their audience. Sh*t is patently absurd. These f*cking things don't even have written language, man, and you really expect me to believe they have pushed a human race that has harnessed the power of time, to the brink of extinction?

Eleven minutes, bro. Eleven f*cking minutes.

Seriously, you can create a time machine, you should conceivably have the ability to harness gravity or one of the other fundamental interactions. Why the f*ck haven't you designed a miniaturized rail gun that uses modern tech or materials to build? You have worked out the science in the future, go back to the past and build miniature or handheld doomsday devices for use in the field. Why isn’t everyone running around with f*cking Megatron fusion cannons on their arms? Why the f*ck am i fighting aliens with ARs and Glocks?? The fact that there is an active time machine built from tech on hand from thirty years into the future, means cats could have spent their time building actual weapons to kill these f*cking things instead of betting the literal human race on a time displaced draft. This movie is dumb as rocks.

The way they describe how their time travel works is dumb. I mean, it isn’t, but i can guarantee this sh*t is going to be a problem later. I can feel it in my bones. They are definitely going to contradict this sh*t because multiverse theory is the only way to make movie time travel work and they are trying their damnedest to not do that.

This f*cking thing is over two hours long and the first drags. I hate when cats attempt to develop characters and they just fail at it. I'm sitting here trying to figure out why I should care about any of these people and i still don't have an answer after half the goddamn movie is over. Like, why should i care about Chris Pratt? He’s the main character and the writing has done nothing to endear him to the audience in a whole ass hour.

Also, the reason he’s so mad at his dad is stupid. Dude did right by his kid by bailing because he would have been a terrible father. Pratt’s character would have known that as a father himself. He didn’t have to like it and, of course there’s animosity there, but you’re an adult. Your dad knew he was lousy. He did you a favor by walking out. It wasn’t like he didn’t help support you or make sure you went without. As far as i can tell, dude was there in every way by physically. Because he couldn’t. Because he was f*cking shell-shocked from fighting in Vietnam. Where they raped innocent women and set babies on fire. Holy sh*t, this cat is an unlikable protagonist after this one scene. Which brings me to my next thing...

Pratt f*cking abandons his family?? Word? After that entire scene with his dad and the very obvious trauma he has suffered, he turns around and abandons his own kid because he lost his job?? Word? Like, for real? You expect me to believe that the Chris Pratt who cussed out his pops, was willing to go on the run from his future conscription, abandoned his own family because he lost a teaching job?? What the f*ck, movie? Do you want me to like this asshole or not? More than that, how the f*ck you mess up your character so bad in what i imagine is just five pages of actual script? Nothing we know about this character would ever even hint at him doing this to his family, to his daughter, so why the f*ck would he? Why the f*ck would you, as a write, believe we, as the audience, would just accept that sh*t as a forgone conclusion?

You got ropes on a Queen and you don't kill it? How the f*ck you make it that deep into the hive to even do-si-do the b*tch to the surface? We just watched these things tear through Miami to the point that they needed a whole ass bombardment just to survive and you not only go into their hive, their home, with no heavy ammo, but you somehow lasso a queen and drag her to the surface. Alive. If you can do all of that why not just drop a nuke down there and blow them the f*ck up? Why do you need a live Queen for your science? Shoot the b*tch, take the juice of her corpse, and end this sh*t! Why is all of this stupid recklessness necessary??

Okay. Okay... F*ck everything i just said, right? Why the f*k did you bring this Queen b*tch back to your base? You don’t have a different offsite lab to do this sh*t? You gotta bring her to your stronghold? Isn’t this a military operation? Why aren't their security protocols and sh*t in place to stop this stupidity? You don’t bring the enemy home. You take them to black sites for sh*t like this, not to the goddamn Pentagon!

All of a sudden, the aliens understand science? We spent this entire movie establishing that they are mindless beasts with teeth, eating the human race into extinction but now, because the plot demands it, the Queen one understands what the people are doing? That the green sh*t they made is plague that can murder them all? How the f*ck she even know what science is? They don’t even have language, dude! How the hell she know they made a death plague for her people?! F*ck it, whatever, bro. Next you're going to tell me she let them capture her just to get inside the lab or some sh*t because these rabid f*cking animals, who have demonstrated no military command abilities or even the barest of higher cognitive functions, are tactical geniuses.

Okay, so the Queen b*tch is a tactical genius. So, in the initial future drop, the team was murdered by a bunch of these things because they were sent to a lab where they were trying to make the death plague. Now, hat i am about to say is all assumption on my part because none of this, and i men NONE of it, is ever confirmed by the movie. So, they get to the lab and everyone is dead but the green per-plague is still there. That mean they had a Queen there. It’s established after this that Queens can call for backup and the Males will lemming their way to her. I deduce that’s how this lab got overrun; Queen got loose, called for her boys, and they ate everyone. That happened. That was the first thing we see in the future. This b*tch does the same f*cking thing on the home base lab so now the males are overrunning The Pentagon. You motherf*ckers knew this was a thing because it literally already happens. Why the f*ck would you do it again? AND it gets worse... Home base, The Pentagon, is the f*cking rig where they house the goddamn time machine! You brought a hostile enemy leader, still alive and coherent, to the heart of your resistance operation, to the core of your time travel operation, knowing that at any time this b*tch can scream and have your whole ass base overrun with teeth and poison darts? Look, if the future is this stupid, they deserve to die, okay?

At least they commit to multiverse theory, even if it contradicts the entirety of their already established time travel rules.

Okay. Okay... So they create this toxin to kill all the monster things and send it back in time to be mass produced Put that sh*t in bullets and send it back to the future or whatever. But, because of the aforementioned stupid, that plan is bunk. Time machine go kablooey. And now we are at the "all is lost" moment at the end of the second act." Solution to the problem in hand, no way to save the future because the only way back to the future was a casualty of idiocy. Right. So... just wait. F*cking just wait. You know when these assholes show up, you know how to kill them all, you even have a plague ready to be mass produced right now. You have thirty f*cking years to refine that formula, to make it cheaper to mass produced and develop variants just in case immunities start to crop up or something. There are people from the future, stuck in the past, because of the egregious future error. They have all of that intel and they are just alive. The second this dude got back to the past with that antidote, the future was saved. The war is over. Like, even if you don’t know where the ship is, you have a sure thing that will murder these white f*cks and three decades to produce, weaponize, and store that sh*t. The war is won. The Prime timeline is absolutely safe at this point. Because that's how time travel works. You have the nuclear option, right now, to averting the end of the human race, ready to be mass produced. Yo have the knowledge from the future on where these things will first appear. You still have all the future tech brought over from the beta timeline ripe for reverse engineering in order to improve the weapons of the present. There is no scenarios where we lose this war, the second Chris Pratt plops back into the present with that plague. None.

Why is everyone so dejected?? Why are there f*cking riots all over the world?? None of this makes sense. How can you assume the world ends and the war is lost just because the communication with that version of the past is cut? Wouldn’t you expect that sh*t? You just altered the entire timeline by sending Pratt back with the antidote. That future is effectively gone. How can you communicate with a place in space-time that doesn’t exist anymore? Hell, even if it’s because the time machine broke and everyone over there is dead, you have the f*cking antidote now! Multiverse theory, bud. The fact that those time displaced assholes didn’t disappear, means multiverse theory is real and you have the opportunity to Future Trunks this sh*t so why panic? Why are there no leaders n television assuring their people that this is a thing? Why are there no scientists publishing papers about how sh*t is going to be fine? Bro, I'm just so tired...

How these cats just fly into Russia on a big ass cargo plane and not get shot down? This is 2022. Putin still hates us. This sh*t would cause a World War.

So you find this ship and you don’t tell anyone where it is? You decide to just kill them all yourself? Motherf*cker, what happens if you die? Did you back up the enzyme formula somewhere or did you bring all of it with you on this stupid f*cking mission? Did you leave notes or even text your location to anyone in authority, just in case haphazard attempt goes sideways so someone else can make a more organized attempt? Or just drop a nuke on the site from orbit? If one asshole denied you funding for your mission, why didn’t you ask someone else? Why didn’t you ask f*cking Putin? Because governments are bloated down with bureaucracy? My dude, people from the future came back and interrupted the world cup to tell you that aliens are going to exterminate the human race in three decades. If you tell anyone in a position of power that you know where these little sh*ts are, they’re going to listen. Especially since everyone decided to riot because the future changed/we lost the time war/ the timeline imploded.

Why would a terrestrial saw work on an intergalactic star ship? That doesn't make any sense. This f*cking thing survived a crash landing into earth intact and a goddamn circular saw cuts it open? Fine, whatever. On to the next stupid thing.

Bro. Bro, they just blow the f*cking thing up. Motherf*cker spent the entire movie, time jumping form the past to to the future and back to the past, just to get this plague to kill them all, and a bunch of C4 just blows them all up while they sleep. Why the f*ck was everything even f*cking necessary? At this point, when the dude comes back with that claw the first time, the future is saved. Analysis on that one claw gave up the location of the hidden spaceship where these things had been in stasis for millennia. Which was blown up with C4. No plague needed. No goddamn time draft needed. No casualties needed after that first wave. The second that dude brought back that claw, it should have been under a forensic microscope so actual f*cking scientists could figure out what a high school kid id in a matter of minutes. I hate this movie so goddamn much.

I hated this goddamn movie so much. It’s f*cking boring and the dumbest thing I've seen all year and i watched Army of the Dead. It’s pretty and the performances are decent, but there is absolutely no substance to any of this sh*t. It wants to be Independence Day and Edge of Tomorrow and The Great Wall. all in one, while infusing time travel family drama but it’s so f*cking confused trying to juggle all of that, it drops the ball on the most important part; The script. This thing must read like a fever dream induced by peyote because, in execution, it’s a wet fart. This f*cking thing is all over the place with no regard for any insular universe logic. It contradicts itself from one scene to the next and it’s goddamn offensive. I’m sure there is someone saying that i am overthinking this sh*t and that it’s just supposed to be dumb popcorn fun. I get that. However, i can’t just turn my f*cking brain off and mindlessly drool over sh*t that insults my intelligence the way this movie does. It’s dumb as f*cking rocks, man, and i want those two hours of my life back!

#The Tomorrow War #Some ol' bullsh*t

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robbyrobinson · 4 years ago

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CTHULHU MYTHOS X THE OWL HOUSE CROSSOVER: THE GODS AWAKEN (PT. IV): A HISTORY LESSON

Boscha sat on a log facing a bonfire. In her hands, she was holding a stick that had an impaled rodent-like creature on it. She held it over the fire and casually twirled it around to completely roast it. It was a short, snaggle-toothed creature resembling an Earth rat, but instead of the long, furless tail, it had a lizard tail. Boscha took a bite out of the beast and recoiled at its apparent bad taste.

“Bleh!”

Beside her on another log sat the goat man. He held several juice boxes within his mighty hands. He greedily ripped open the boxes and lapped the contents from within, unaware that the juice was collecting on the ends of his lips. There were roughly twenty boxes he was consuming and pitching aside without care.

“I had never tried any sort of sweet nectar such as this.” He tossed another juice box on the ground and went for another. “What do you call this concoction, Boscha?”

Boscha shrugged. “Apple blood; but I never tried it.”

The goat man grinned exposing his yellow, rotting teeth. “I wish your people would’ve imprisoned me after I had a chance to try this luxury.”

Boscha stared down at the fire again not saying a word. The goat man finished up on drinking the apple blood juice boxes and tilted his head. He scanned Boscha over somehow knowing preemptively what she was about to say, but he decided to watch the embers of the fire as well.

“If you need to inquire something of me, by all means, please do so,” he said.

Boscha raised her head up so her three eyes could lock onto the goat man’s. “Who are you?”

“I have already explained it to you, my dear,” he replied, “just an old man who once ruled over this world before being locked away and my name stricken from the records. The usual.”

“Yes, I know that is what you said, but I just think that if this partnership is going to work, we should know everything about each other.”

Boscha slammed her mouth shut upon seeing the goat man’s glare become illuminated by the fire within them. She was certain that she had spoken out of turn and was now going to face his wrath. He chuckled in a low mumble amused.

“I now understand how grandparents must feel whenever their grandchildren egg them on about telling them stories from their pasts.”

He took the juice boxes and pitched them into the bonfire. It blazed with the new fuel it was given.

“It may take me a while to fully explain everything to you out of my concern that your mortal mind may not understand them, but strap in for the ride.”

A village lied in ruins having been scorched with a fire that was akin to seven suns. The identity of the civilization, with a large population in the thousands, was unknown forever lost to the history of the Isles. Almost as if overnight, the village was attacked and laid to waste with no survivors. Due to its condition, no other civilization migrated to the lifeless area and remained that way for the next millennium.

A hooded figure arrived sometime in the early morning to the former village and began to trek through the ruins. Houses that were made of stone were one of the few pieces of architecture left of the village; the walls of the houses were smothered by the thick smoke and blackened beyond repair. Alongside the walls of the foundations, there were the slight hints of the outlines undoubtably a grim reminder of those villagers who were outside of their homes before their civilization was set ablaze.

Deeper the mysterious stranger went through the village, more of the cataclysm became apparent: the square of the village was mostly made of wood and as a result, several of the buildings and commerce grounds were reduced to ashes with any scrap of wood that somehow managed to survive barely holding on due to the beams holding them up crumbling. As the stranger was walking, they heard a crunch sound echoing. Looking down, they saw that they had stepped on a skull and it shattered underneath their weight.

Piles of skeletons were tossed in large mounds. From the embers of the village, the skeletons were as dark as tar. From what the stranger could tell, they likely died from looks of horror on their faces. The mounds led the stranger towards one site that appeared seemingly untouched by the flames.

A crude temple was at the center of the ruins, one resembling the pyramids from Ancient Egypt. The stranger tilted their head at seeing the alien geometries. Despite of the unsightly condition the overall village was in, there was no denying that the temple was almost all-inspiring. But despite that beauty, an otherworldly evil radiated from it. The stranger clenched their fists together in anticipation of whatever was inside and steadied their breathing.

Murals of the dark god decorated the windows detailing how he had arrived to the demon realm. Macabre displays of sacrifices also accompanied the illustrations. Children and families were set aside to be sacrifices for their god and in turn, they were bestowed with great blessings not just in the magical sense. After soaking in their surroundings, the stranger walked deeper into the temple. Before them stood a large door with unreadable inscriptions. Traversing that, the mysterious stranger came upon the throne room. A small altar decorated in an ancient language was situated in front of a large throne.

“Oh, it is a pleasure to see a worshiper of mine pay a visit.”

The stranger looked up beholding the large frame of a dark figure wearing a headpiece of different materials. It was dressed in shadows and was nearly invisible to the naked eye if it weren’t for the figure leaning forward and revealing its endless rows of sharp, carnivorous teeth. The stranger squinted a few times upon seeing something moving from the corner of his eye. They were at the mighty legs of the demonic entity. Without much probing, they slowly walked out of the darkness making it apparent that they were a few of the dark god’s personal servants.

“So, have you come to pay tribute to me?” the being asked, “if not, your home will be forfeited.”

The stranger shook his head. “No, Nyarlathotep, I have come to stop you.”

The walls of the temple shook violently to their foundation when Nyarlathotep let a darkly chuckle escape from the pit of his stomach. “Many of you have tried and failed.” He leaned in closer. His teeth, being ever so massive and varying in shape and size, prevented him from completely shutting his mouth. “What can you possibly do?”

The stranger took his finger and drew a circle in the air. From that circle erupted a bright light. The light hurt Nyarlathotep and momentarily stunned him. Purple blood trickled down his temple. He chuckled again. A sizzling, bubbling mass of darkness covered the wound, healing him.

“I love your spirit, kid, but I guess you’ve forced my hand.”

Nyarlathotep stood up from his throne and towered over the mysterious stranger. At his full size, he stood at a stunning 9 ft. He placed his hands together and slammed them together. The stranger noticed a gem placed in the middle of Nyarlathotep’s headpiece and was shining a crimson red. A vibrant beam shot out of the gem and collided with the ground ripping it apart and forming a widening crack. Fire rose up to consume the stranger, but they managed to dodge just in time.

The dark god grimaced at it and clutched his fist drawing a chunk of the ceiling and flinging it towards the stranger. The stranger quickly drew another circle in the air and summoned a large slum of ice that ricocheted towards the ceiling chunk. An explosion of ceiling and ice rained down on the two fighters. There came a shrill scream that momentarily caught the stranger off guard. Seeing that the servants of Nyarlathotep were about to be crushed by the falling debris, the stranger quickly conjured up a shield to cover them.

Smack.

The stranger groaned in pain from the sharp pain. Nyarlathotep had taken the opportunity to send them flying across the temple. They took their head into their hands to balance the pain before sluggishly dragging themselves off the ground. Nyarlathotep held his hands together preparing another strike.

“Had enough?”

The stranger got on their feet. “Not yet.”

Amused, Nyarlathotep withdrew fire from himself and crafted it into a projectile. Despite his seeming lack of eyes, he tosses the projectile towards his opponent. Before it could strike him, the stranger created a mirror that caught the projectile.

“What is this?” Nyarlathotep replied in shock.

The projectile was cast back towards its dark creator and it stabbed him through his torso. Nyarlathotep collapsed on his colossal knees once again shaking the foundation of the temple. Purple blood was now leaking through the hole made in his body. Nyarlathotep coughed up more of the bizarre alien blood and gritted his teeth.

“I have to admit that was a pretty brilliant move, but I won’t let this injustice stop me!”

Nyarlathotep’s wound was once again beginning to close, but it would prove to be a mistake on his end. The stranger drew a ball of light and tossed it at the dark god. Nyarlathotep was hit with it. He screamed once more. This magic, which he withdrew out of himself, was now being used against him and was now injuring him. More and more. Wounds were accumulating on Nyarlathotep’s eldritch body and he was unable to quickly heal.

Nyarlathotep shifted his physical form constantly reverting from his Black Pharaoh form to other monstrous shapes. Regardless of any move he made, the stranger would return it to him tenfold. Purple blood was now pooling onto the floor. No time in his endless life did he ever have any problem with a mere mortal as he could easily topple entire civilizations without as much of a thought; drive people to madness for a laugh even. But now, he was feeling exhausted. An odd mortal feeling?

He resumed his Black Pharaoh form and weakly got back on his feet. He felt rather drained, but nevertheless wanted to move forward. As he raised his hand, he felt his legs tense up. Looking down, his mouth widened in surprise. The stranger was conjuring up a glass substance that was overtaking his legs and replacing his organic parts with inorganic matter. He tried to shift himself to break the glass to no avail. The glass was now reaching up towards his pelvis ensuring that he was frozen in place.

Nyarlathotep turned to glare at his servants. “Well, what are you waiting for? Rescue your god!”

The servants looked at each other for a few moments seriously contemplating what they should do. They then looked at the stranger. Running over, they assisted the stranger with creating the glass.

Nyarlathotep, shocked at first, chuckled. “Well, this was a fun game; the best I had in thousands of years even!”

The glass was now around Nyarlathotep’s neck. His grin became wider and more devious than it was initially. He laughed again.

“What are you laughing about, creature?” the stranger said, “this is the end.”

“Oh, it may be for now, but I assure you that this isn’t over.” The glass was covering his mouth. “Even if it takes an eternity, I will be back; but there will be someone to represent me.”

With that, Nyarlathotep was completely encased in glass. The stranger sighed and rest their hands. “It is over.”

One of the servants started to speak up, a blonde –haired girl with ragged clothing. “I can’t say that is definite.”

“For what reason?” the stranger asked.

“I could’ve sworn I had seen some dark substance collect from the back of Nyarlathotep’s head and then disappear.”

The stranger scratched their chin. “Then I shall write down what I want any future descendants to read just in case he does return.”

The fire started to die down after Boscha finished up eating the weird rodent creature. The goat man sat solemnly watching the fire dwindle.

“So, how did you escape?” Boscha finally asked.

The goat man, now wanting to be named Nyarlathotep once more, chuckled. “I sensed that there was a weakness within the glass prison that they had designed for me; I just had to nibble my way through it until I was able to regain some of my lost power.”

“What is so significant about what that stranger wrote?”

“Ah, you see, it was done using methods that the original inhabitants of the Boiling Isles first learned magic; before needing to draw meaningless circles in thin air. But I sense that this form of magic is no longer practiced by any witches here?”

Boscha scratched her head. She did remember that someone was able to perform magic by drawing symbols and then pressing them. That kind of magic was bizarre even for the Isles due to it being done without the using having a magical organ to draw it from. As her mind weighed through her options, an idea struck.

“Round ears!” she exclaimed.

Nyarlathotep leaned back. “For goodness’ sake, you startled me.” He chuckled. “Just kidding; it is that Noceda girl you are alluding to?”

Boscha nods. “Yeah, if we get her to decipher those spells you mentioned, then you can get your power back.”

Nyarlathotep pat her back. “I knew that I could count on you.” He sat back on the other log. “But we should lie low. I need to gather as much strength as I can; haven’t you any idea?”

Boscha smirked. “Well, there is a special tree that I know about.”

Nyarlathotep raised his eyebrow in piqued interest. “Do tell.”

Shortly after the mysterious stranger had vanquished the now imprisoned Nyarlathotep, like the blonde-woman mentioned, a dark mass that escaped from its fate hovered over the ruins of the temple and uttered a lone hum likely from communicating with its master. Forming a hard outer shell, it fell back on the Isles and burrowed itself deeply into the ground and incubated itself.

And it would remain that way until years later when another event rocked the Boiling Isles. When the witches and demons indulged in savage acts of wild magic, the Boiling Isles was on the brink of disarray if not for the sudden arrival of a “savior.”

#the owl house #owl house #theowlhouse #owlhouse #cthulhu mythos #cthulhu #cthulhumythos #emperor belos #nyarlathotep #fanfiction

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georgecrecy · 5 years ago

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Living Fossils {2}

The group of explorers made their way back to the shuttle and entered, chattering excitedly about their findings and what might yet lay in store. One by one they entered the cramped shower facilities to wash off the toils of the day, and finally gathered in the helm.

As everyone sat down in turn, Doctor Ghan busied himself with the report to Allnex, while Codru poured over the pictures of the site on a combipad with Murien, each pointing with long fingers at various points of interest as they spoke in a low mutter.

By the time everyone had gathered again, Doctor Ghan had finished his report and sent it off to the ship in orbit. He cleared his throat to gather everyone's attention as Hyupi sat down, still toweling off her tendrils from the shower. "Ahem, welcome back everyone. I know we're all tired so I'll make it brief before we retire for some proper sleep." The doctor eyed Kenta as he mouthed, "Thank the stars." to Hyupi, who smirked in response. The doctor continued regardless. "I would be lying if I were to say I wasn't excited. It's not often we-"

His sentence was broken off by the insistent beeping from the console behind him. The rest got a bit closer as the Doctor smiled and hit the answering key. A new face, upside down, came over the screen.

The doctor looked aghast. "Epan, why in the world is the gravity field off? Is the ship damaged?"

Epan, gangly even for their race, blinked back in brief confusion before his face broke out in a smile. "Ah, naw Doc, she's fine. But you know how the negative sound sets my nerves off, and with no one else up here, I just thought…"

Ghan was visibly relieved, but his tone was still stern for the younger technician. "Yes, well, that's fine and all if nothing's wrong, but would you please orient yourself right side up to the screen?"

Epan cheekily and slowly turned two loops in the air, waving at the others as Ghan looked on with a fake air of weariness. Once Epan was right side up to the screen, Ghan continued. "You rang, Epan?"

"Oh, right! Yeah, is this report for real? You found a Class A? That's amazing!"

Ghan nodded, "Yes, and I was about to mention that it's not often we have this opportunity to explore an untouched, late Class A Civilization structure that is so well preserved. I suspect that once Allnex receives my report in a day or so that it will take to traverse the techweb, that we will be flooded with scientists clamoring over our find in a week!"

Epan looked to the side of the screen sheepishly. "Well, about that doc… unfortunately, we are a little dark up here with the techweb. The antenna's on the fritz and my baby ain't being nice back to me, so Allnex won't be getting any news for a while."

Kenta piped up from the back of the group. "Could it be pirate jammers? I don't know when this sector was last sweeper for them.'

Epan shook his head, his body tilting a bit awry from the motion before a hand reached out to steady himself. "Nah, it's nothing like that. Sector scans are clear, and I did post-jump diagnostic runs when we first popped in, that was all green. But it's me we're talking about, I can get her squawking again in no time!"

Ghan nodded in thought, and looked briefly at the others in the group before turning back to the screen. "I'm sure you will. But in the meantime, be on the alert, the scans may have missed something behind one of the system moons or in the asteroid belt. We will talk later. Be good up there and keep the bunks warm for our return!"

Epan saluted, "You got it Doc. I'll even warm up the fahn rolls for us all when you get back! Over and out."

The screen faded to black as Ghan turned back fully to the others. "This means that the sooner we get the choicest artifacts for study, the sooner we can go home and get the most credit for our intrepid work… and, of course, be paid handsomely." The doctor nodded to the two mercenaries, and then clapped his hands in anticipation. "But we need to rest, so we get started as soon as we can tomorrow. Goodnight, and good work today, everyone!"

All began to shuffle to their respective bunks. The accommodations were rather cramped on the landing shuttle, so there were typically two to a room, such as the one Codru and Saffer shared. As Saffer prepared for bed, he gazed sidelong at Codru in the upper bunk, the light from the combipad lighting up his face and the bulkhead behind him, the former of which was scrunched up in concentration.

Saffer's curiosity got the best of him as he jokingly asked, "What are you thinking about so hard that you look like a wounded Gorhax?"

Codru, so concentrated on his thoughts, barely registered the jibe. "Just trying to translate the alien script from the pad. The script is very unique so the translation program isn't getting very far at all, and I don't even want to talk about my manual attempts. Have you taken xenolinguistics?" Codru looked down from his bunk hopefully.

Saffer tilted his head, "I can speak a little Zenthian from my primary days, but I haven't had the prerequisites to take that class yet."

Codru looked back at the pad in disappointment. "That's alright. Given the amount of species out there -- let alone their scripts and all the variants -- it's a tad broad, but Dr. Juil makes it pretty fun. I only got a B- though, and I think she was being kind to me on that- ugh, damn!"

Saffer, who had slipped into his bottom bunk, could only see the light above wink in and out before the room plunged completely into darkness, and hear the sound of Codru tapping hard on the combipad. "What's wrong?"

"Hm, this Allnex piece of tech trash, it won't hold a charge or something! I might dig through the storage and see if there is a new one tomorrow. I really don't want to have this issue in the middle of the dig."

Saffer yawned, and laid his head back down on the bedding. "Oh, ok. If it does happen again tomorrow, you could use mine if you need to. Goodnight!"

Codru fiddled with the pad a little more, but eventually tossed it toward his feet in disgust and defeat. Closing his multicolored eyes, the senior student eventually joined his younger companion below in the realm of sleep.

Several minutes later, the combipad's screen lit up once more, and in milliseconds slipped past the code screen to the linguistic program beyond. The progress bar, which had been stuck at no more than 2% for the last several hours, suddenly jumped to 34%, and over the image of the pad their language dropped into place somewhat translucently over the alien script.

"W*lcom* to th* ***. Pl**s* imp*t **thoriz*tion."

The small room went dark once more, while over the soft sound of the two occupants snoring, there was only the hum of the ship and the omnipresent scraping and tapping of debris against the hull outside.

_______________________________

The stamping of feet on hull preceded the shouting which echoed along the short hallway, "Doctor Ghan! Doctor Ghan!" The owner of the name looked up from his morning tea in amazement at the disheveled figure of the usually unexcitable Codru, who was holding his combipad in front of him with elation clear on his face.

Ghan, with his browplates raised almost as far as they could extend said, "Codru, what in Navek's name has got you so excited?"

Handing his combipad to the Doctor, once he had gotten some composure back he exclaimed, "Look at that! Last night it wasn't getting anywhere, but the translation software finally came through while we were sleeping."

Ghan briefly looked over the picture of the door pad, the alien letters now partially transposed with letters of their own language. He looked up at Codru and the others who had gathered to the commotion with a grin. "This is excellent! Then the faster we get out there, the faster we can plumb the depths of this little mystery, so to speak!"

Murien, who was gazing at the screen over the doctor's shoulder asked, "Do we have an idea what the contents might be then? What it's welcoming us to?"

Both Ghan and Codru shook their heads, the former responding, "No, there isn't enough info just yet for us to even guess." He sipped a last hurried gulp of his tea before standing up, "So let's get out there and find out, shall we?"

The rest agreed, and within forty-five minutes the group were suited up and on their way, struggling through the early morning winds. However, it wasn't very long before Hyupi stopped the procession with a hand signal of warning. Over the helmet comms she commanded, "Kentu, cover our rear, there is something in the sand ahead."

While the rest kneeled in wait, Hyupi carefully moved up to her target: a half-buried sphere of rusted metal with various antennas, cracked camera lenses, sensors, and propulsion systems.

The rest of the survey team witnessed as she swept her carbine over what little of the landscape was visible through the storm, which had abated a little since their setting out. Finally they heard the crackle of her voice over the comms say, "Alright, all clear. Seems like a nonfunctioning probe."

The group moved forward to her position, gathering around the probe, which had a drift of sand built up to one side. Saffer kneeled down again to examine it closely. "Ooh, Doctor, is this another example of this civilization's technology?"

Ghan pulled out his combipad and a sensor pack, taking readings of the probe. The rest had to wait a few minutes while he looked over the results. "I… I don't believe so. It isn't nearly as old as the building, the dating shows only a century or so, and of a different material structure entirely. Does anyone see any markings?"

Saffer and Hyupi dug around the probe, exposing more of its body. Saffer was the one that found the remains of a red triangle, with an inner line of symbols. "Here's something, but I don't know what."

Kentu's voice now sounded over the comms channel, "I do, I've used their tech before on missions. That belonged to the old Erzeni Corporation, they used to make all sorts of military-grade equipment."

Murien looked back at him, "Used to?"

Kentu nodded, "Eh, they've been out of business for decades. I've only used surplus leftovers. But they were dependable despite their age, which makes sense considering it's a Scaanid company."

Ghan looked at the probe and Kentu questioningly. "Are you sure Kentu? We're practically on the other side of the galaxy from the Scaanid Empire, there would be no reason for a probe of theirs here."

Kentu shrugged imperceptibly through the bulk of his suit. "I'm pretty sure, doc. I probably still have a thing or two of theirs in storage to compare. Maybe it was a wayward one that happened to crash here."

Saffer interjected, "I don't think it came from space. It would have been flattened and broken apart if it had, with a larger crater. With its condition, it didn't fall more than a hundred feet, right Doctor?"

Ghan was very lost in thought, but Saffer's question seemed to wake him. "Hmm? Oh, yes, quite possibly. Let's get some pictures taken of this and get back to our main mission before we use too much of our limited time on this. And yes, Kentu, I would like to compare the markings when we get back."

The rest of the trip was uneventful, fortunately, and soon the group returned to the imposing metal structure. It didn't take much more digging to uncover the door again from the night's accumulation against their earlier work. They once more were confronted by the pad, which lit up at the mere touch of a brush clearing the sand crusting the top.

Codru retrieved his combipad from his pack, which was piled with the rest to one side while they dug into the sand, and booted up the translation program once again. Using the overlay he began to manually interact with the door pad, looking at it through the screen of his own combipad. Ghan, Saffer, and Murien were crowded around him as he worked, offering the occasional bit of advice as he did so.

"Try finding some sort of diagn-"

"Diagnostic settings, yes, that's what I'm looking for."

"Did you try that button there?"

"I'd rather not just try buttons, Murien. That never works."

"But it looked promising!"

"Make sure to record this process, Codru, we may have to figure this out again should the translation not improve."

"Of course, doctor."

His suit hampered his attempts at pushing the buttons on the screen, but once he figured out a good angle to use with the thick finger pads his attempts went much smoother. Through a multitude of screens and clumsy backtracks, eventually he was able to get to a screen with a green and red button.

* _c_ss p_th 46*

*Op_n door?*

He pressed the green one, and the six of them heard through the rushing wind around them the hiss of decompression, and the door next to the pad jolted open slightly. All patted each other on the back in joy before opening the door fully. Murien looked at Codru suspiciously, "How did you know that was the right button to press?"

Codru sniffed, and after a moment of hesitation as the group donned their packs once more, he said, "After careful consideration of the circumstances, it seemed the most logical choice."

Saffer interjected with a smile clearly visible through his helmet. "Don't you mean it looked promising?"

The older student didn't deign to respond as they entered in turn through the door.

The lights on their suits bounced off of smooth, granite grey walls and the stairs that led downward from the entrance landing. The last two in line were held up momentarily as they wrestled the door back closed, the combined strength of Kentu and Murien still straining against the difference in pressure and the sand piling up while rocks bounced off of the walls and down the stairs ahead of them all. The door closed with another hiss and squeal, the howling wind outside stifled to a low moan as the few remaining clacks of bouncing rocks echoed into the beyond. Lights embedded in the juncture of the ceiling and walls promptly lit up the stairway as soon as the door closed.

Doctor Ghan looked back towards the team above him from his position several steps down once the clattering of pebbles stopped, turning his suit lights off. "Excellent! Alright. Turn your recorders on if you haven't already, because we are stepping into the uncharted world of this newly discovered civilization, and I don't want to miss a single detail! You all know your respective jobs. With a building as ancient as this, I also need not remind you to be very careful and call out any structural faults you see near us. I'd like to first find that power source, so that will be one of our main goals of study. But keep an eye out for anything else that might be of interest. Let's move on, stay close all." With preparations and speeches finished, the team descended deeper into the unknown.

#oc

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roundtheworldrambles · 5 years ago

Text

Penang, Malaysia

Day 147 – Kuala Lumpur to Penang

Early in the morning, I jumped on a modern commuter train heading south to Terminal Bersepadu Selatan, the main station for long-distance buses in Kuala Lumpur. Looking out the window of my air-conditioned car, I couldn’t help but notice a substantial amount of trash along the edges of the track as we moved south. Arriving at my transfer point to the bus station, I was also stunned by the number of people begging for money outside the terminal– well over 50. Both of these observations contrasted strongly to the polished, modern side of KL that I had seen in the previous days.

The multi-storey bus terminal was chaotic, with passengers criss-crossing in every direction as I arrived. Designed to serve over 50,000 travellers a day, the station was fortunately well signed in both Malay and English. As I navigated through the throngs of people, I eventually located my check-in counter, picked up my ticket, and began hunting for my departure bay. I must have checked my ticket 50 times, as there were countless buses rolling in and out of the departure bays – and I was almost certain I would miss my bus in the hubbub of fellow travellers!

I finally boarded my bus around 9:45am, heading north to Penang, a small island in Northwestern Malaysia. I was looking forward to my stay in Georgetown, a UNESCO World Heritage Site known for its eclectic architecture, impressive street art, and delicious street food! A 5–hour journey by bus, our route traversed through small towns and green, tropical hills, making occasional stops for washroom breaks (there were none on the bus, much to my dismay) and snacks. The interior of the bus was full of wide, blue velvet chairs, which could fully recline. As I was reading along the route, three young Malay boys ran up and down the aisles, stopping briefly at my chair to check me out, before giggling and running away again. By the time we had arrived in Penang, they had gotten quite comfortable with me, and hung around my chair. I would say a few words in English, which they would delightedly repeat back to me, all while chattering between themselves in Malay.

As our bus arrived at Butterworth, the mainland town adjacent to the island of Penang, I grabbed by pack from under the bus and wove through the crowds, taxi drivers and hawkers to board a city bus to the Jetty. From there, I completed the last leg of my trip with a short ferry ride across the bay to Georgetown, my final destination. Brightly coloured long-tailed boats skimmed across the water next to us, bobbing up and down in the ferry’s wake. We passed a large, moored ocean liner, with barbed wire and life-sized human dummies, intended to ward off pirates.

Streets of Georgetown

As I disembarked in Georgetown, I could immediately see that the city was steeped in history, with influences from all over the world. Georgetown was the first British Settlement in South East Asia, and has continued to act as a trading port since the late 1700s. In the early 19th century, the island of Penang was at the epicenture of spice production and trade – with spice farms on the island producing nutmeg, clove and pepper. During World War 2, the Japanese Army also occupied the island of Penang for 4 years.

Today, the Georgetown represents an intermingling of ethnicity and religion, with Chinese, Peranakan, Malay, Indian, Eurasian, Siamese, and indigenous cultures being primarily represented. In the past, the city was also home to Persian, Filipino, Japanese, Sumatran, Arab, Burmese and Jewish communities – a true global city! Because of all of these influences, modern-day Georgetown is packed with unique, eclectic architecture and pre-war buildings. All four major languages of Malaysia are also spoken in Georgetown: Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.

Walking through historic Georgetown, I arrived at my guesthouse for the next 3 nights. A converted three-storey heritage shophouse in old Georgetown, The Frame Guesthouse was previously the workshop of a colonial frame maker. The hostel has been upgraded to a modern, clean space, with big open communal areas shared with other travellers.

I quickly met one of my roommates, Tonje, a traveller from Norway, and later met up again with Caroline and Jannes from Kuala Lumpur. As evening fell, we hailed a Grab, heading out to Lok Sok Si Temple, the largest Buddhist temple in all of Malaysia, and an important pilgrimage site for Buddhists living across Southeast Asia. Located at the base of Air Itam mountain, this temple also features predominantly in Chinese New Years celebrations. Since we had the good fortune of visiting Penang around the time of this festival, Lok Sok Si temple was open late, lit with thousands of lights and colourful red lanterns. Although we arrived just as the temple was closing, we were still able to take in the sea of light surround the temple, with the city lights of Georgetown twinkling in the distance.

Nasi Lemak

Heading back into town, we meandered through street food stalls along Chulia street, deciding what we wanted to eat for dinner. Woks sizzled in every direction, with sounds of chopping, stirring and pounding filling the air. The smell of unknown spices and savoury dishes followed us as we walked along. Overwhelmed by the choice, we opted to try numerous dishes, including Nasi Lemak, Char Kway Teow, Beef Rendang, Hokkien Mee, Oh Chien (fried oyster) and Rojak (spicy fruit salad). After only a few bites, it was immediately obvious to me why Georgetown had such a widespread reputation for gastronomy and street food. Needless to say, it was a very tasty way to end my first day in Penang.

Street Food Stalls in Penang

Day 148 – Penang

In the morning, I met up with Caroline and Tonje for breakfast at Mugshot, a nearby (thankfully air-conditioned!) café on Chulia street, and spent a few hours doing planning and bookings for the rest of my trip in Southeast Asia. Mid day, Tonje and I headed out to wander the streets of Georgetown. It was a hot, humid afternoon – as the island is located in a tropical rainforest climate.

Architecture of Penang

In addition to Georgetown’s stunning architecture, the city is also famous for it’s street art. Dozens of wrought iron caricatures have been put up around Georgetown, depicting local culture, ethnic groups, city history and lifestyle. The street art scene has blossomed throughout the city over the past decade, and it was fun to keep our eyes peeled for street art in the most unexpected places – sometimes down side alleys, or above street level.

We walked through the streets of Little India, checking out sari stores and Hindu Temples, the deities inside adorned with fresh floral garlands, called mala. Along the roadside, massive bunches of bananas hung from the ceilings of shophouses. Tonje and I stopped into Restoran Kapitan for a late lunch, tucking into delicious Indian dishes, including claypot chicken biryani, chapati and squid.

Durian Ice Cream

Continuing onward to Armenian Street, we walked along the narrow street, home to the famous “Children on a Bicycle” mural and other street art. Colonial shophouses along the street were selling everything from fresh fruit to souvenirs and other trinkets. Chinese clan houses, local art galleries and small museums were also scattered along the street. Tonje and decided to try durian, sometimes considered to be the “stinkiest fruit in the world”, which in Malaysia, Singapore and other parts of Asia is a well-loved delicacy. That said, we “cheated” a little in this regard, as instead of trying the fresh fruit, we opted instead to try durian ice-cream!

“Children on a Bicycle” Mural

Heading east towards the harbor, we stopped at the Leong San Tong Khoo Kongsi (kongsi translates to “clan house”), built over 600 years ago by the 5 big Chinese clans of the Hokkien community in ancient Penang. A large, ornate building, this kongsi is a place where Chinese families with the same surname gather to pray to their ancestors. The lavish architecture of the Kongsi was truly stunning, embellished with intricately carved wood and stone, and beams painted in brilliant shades of red, gold, blue and green. The Leong San Tong Khoo Kongsi is a complex series of structures, including a temple, and association building, a theatre, and nearby 19th century rowhouses for clan members. Historically, these “clan houses” were almost mini-cities unto themselves, with clan members running their own education, finance and social programs with a self-governing structure.

Streets of Penang

Tonje and I stopped for dinner at the Jetty food hall, tucking in for another terrific meal of char koey teow, poh piah (a large variation of a spring roll) and bowls of steaming laksa. As the evening began to fall, we headed down to the clan jetties on the ocean. There are 6 remaining jetties down by the water that were historically home to various Chinese clans. Clusters of century-old homes have been built on stilts above the ocean, with each jetty named after a Chinese clan. Historically, these jetties were used for loading and unloading cargo ships, where there was sometimes a rivalry between different jetty clans for control of the seatrade and economic resources of Penang.

As we walked through the Chew Jetty, along a boardwalk of creeky planks, and wound between the historical stilted homes, it felt like a bit of a time warp. Many Chinese families still live here, and occasionally we could catch a glimpse into the entryways of homes, many with large shrines to worship their ancestors, the air hazy with swirling clouds of incense. While the jetties now have electricity and running water, many of these community members live in homes that have hardly changed in over 100 years. On the main floor of some of these stilted houses, clan members have turned these spaces into small restaurants and shops.

We reached the end of the jetty, and sat down, taking in the twinkling lights of Butterworth across the bay, listening as music from nearby buskers drifted through the air. Fishing boats and long-tailed boats zipped along the water, returning to town as evening began to fall.

Taoist Temple at Chew Jetty

As the sky darkened, thousands of red lanterns began to shimmer overhead as we headed back into town, passing several Taoist temples at the entrance to Chew Jetty, dedicated to the God of Heaven and the Taoist Sea Deity, Haisen. This day in Penang was near perfect – packed with incredible company, unique architecture, cultural experiences, street art, and (importantly!) fantastic food.

Day 149 – Penang

In the morning, Tonje and I threw on running shoes and workout clothes, grabbed breakfast at Mugshot, and jumped on a bus, taking us up into the lush, dense jungle surrounding Penang Hill. As we passed through a neighbourhood shopping street near the base of Air Itam, our bus inched through heavy pedestrian traffic, with locals bustling between stores and stalls, doing last-minute holiday shopping before the official Chinese New Year’s celebration the following day – February 16, 2018.

We arrived at the base of Penang Hill, and bought our one-way ticket for the funicular, taking us up the slopes to the top of the hill. It was an overcast day, with humidity heavy in the air, and as we ascended, we could see little more than a hazy view over the distant towns of Georgetown and Butterworth. Tonje and I wandered around the top of Penang Hill, where there were numerous lookout points and walkways through the area’s spectacular rainforest. A small mosque, a Hindu temple, and several residential homes and guesthouses are scattered nearby.

Funicular up Penang Hill

Hundreds of birds chattered overhead as we meandered around the hilltop, with dusky-leaf monkeys and macaques scampering through nearby trees. We had decided to hike down from Penang Hill to the Botanical Gardens, which took us deeper into the jungle as we descended on a steep jeep track. Leaving the tourism hub behind, we saw more and more flora and fauna as we went along – including countless monkeys, and the occasional snake slithering out of our way. It took us about an hour and a half to descend the 5 km zig-zagging track – a true knee-knacker! I was thrilled to finally arrived back on flat ground at the botanical gardens. With some difficulty, we figured out the bus route back into town, and arrived back in Georgetown in the late afternoon. I had a shower and a brief nap, before doing some more life-admin and Vietnam visa applications.

At dinner time, all of the street markets and food stalls were closed for Chinese New Years, so Tonje, Egle and I went out for tacos on Love Lane. True to its name, this lane was apparently once the location of many brothels, and was where Peranakan and Chinese businessmen would reportedly keep their mistresses.

Our Mexican dinner, though from a cuisine on the other side of the word, was still delicious – further solidifying my opinion that Penang can do no wrong when it comes to food! As we enjoyed Tiger beers and tacos, a steady procession of buskers, fire performers and street artists moved along the narrow laneway. Live music floated towards us from every direction. I clearly remember how present and alive I felt in that moment, feeling deeply linked to cosmopolitan group of people surrounding me – locals and travellers alike - even though they were strangers to me. In that moment, people from countless backgrounds, countries, ethnicities, and religions were gathered in the same place, all collectively enjoying good food and entertainment.

After almost 6 months of travel at that point, every day I felt more strongly that, as global citizens, we have far more in common than the differences that separate us.

#malaysia

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cheladyn · 5 years ago

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THE BODY AS POTENTIALITY

This was a paper I wrote for SA870 Anthropological Theory in the first semester of grad school (fall 2019). I still like it. I actually love parts of it. I think things have shifted for me since, but it’s fun to think alongside. I also got an A+. ;)

0I want to make theory personable; not because I have read the need for personable theory in a scholarly source, but because I viscerally feel the need to address and trudge through my thinking-feeling in a way that performatively expresses the topic at hand. I crave for an application of anthropological theory that honours the emergence of theory from the ground, from the doing, from the one who utters it. This is, in essence, a performative theoretical essay that seeks to bring my ambivalence toward conventional theory to life. The writerly voice presented in this paper will weave between that of the assumed theoretician, and that of the anxious woman on the other side (me, the ‘I’ of Ileanna who stopped drinking coffee to manage her anxiety, and who has an obedient, hesitant love for theoretical legitimacy).

When we (academics and anthropologists) talk about bodies, we are really talking about the world they inhabit (and the world that inhabits them). When we talk about bodies by invoking ‘the body’, we often end up talking about discipline, obedience, docility, identity, violence, resistance, discourse, language, power, coercion. Secondarily, when we conjure ‘the body’, we may talk about affect, emotions, experience, an event. Tertiarily, we may fall into talking about flesh, sensation, proprioception, mobility, organs, movement, touch, feelings, the senses. This first-second-third hierarchy of the topic of ‘the body’ is not summoned unintentionally. There is a pressing/problematic hierarchy of bodiliness present in discourses that situate the lived sensation of Being as distinctly and curiously ‘lesser than.’

A concerted effort is exerted when this third level of analysis – the body as fleshy and ageing – is the primary topic of research. Scholars like David Howes, Constance Classen, Dara Culhane, Sarah Pink, Soyini Madison, and Jaida Kim Samudra have produced (sometimes extensive) bodies of work that continue to approach ‘the body’ as being a sensing, feeling, doing entity, entangled in social and cultural modes of production. Through their work, and through my position as a practicing professional in the field of dance (a dance artist), I am filled with care for how bodies are theorized. Thus, I appear unsatisfied with the ways that texts that include ‘the body’ fail to acknowledge its blurry boundaries beyond the acknowledgement of a blurriness itself.

When we talk about bodies, we are not exactly clear what we mean by the term ‘the body’. Frequently we allow this term, ‘the body’, to hang unsupported. When ‘the body’ manifests, it is taken for granted as to what it is and how to account for it; ‘the body’ is an unquestioned axiom of much theory and analysis. It is a simple thing, a Heideggerian thing, or a Spinozan thing, a thing Sara Ahmed would do, to ask “what is a body? What does/can one do? And what are it’s a/effects?” The need for a stable definition is not what I am asking for; rather I am left yearning for an analysis of social life that adequately offers a framework for bodily understandings. Producing strict definitions of such an entity or phenomena like ‘the body’ is not particularly exciting. I have/am a body, we all have some semblance of ‘the body’, we all wake up to such a complication every morning, so I am not keen to take time defining it. If anything, defining ‘the body’ would be a daunting task if there is the simultaneous desire not to create a definition that is drawn and quartered, dismembered and decapitated, excluding a dynamic embodied unfolding; a definition would be confusing (if it is not already clear, I am confused enough by my own corporeal existence). Bodies are messy.

There is a possibility here to offer a new formulation or conceptualization of ‘the body’: the body as potentiality. Yet, this feels sterile, bracketing off too much for the purposes of anthropological inquiry in general, and for research on the implications of kinesthesia (the sense movement) on subjectivity and agency in specific. Such tight conceptualization – the body as potentiality – functions by condensing heavy, polysemous terms to simultaneously suspend reality and metaphor into something akin to theoretical assertion. The body as potentiality could mean something, be useful somewhere, some how; such a formulation offers not a framework but a definition. The body as potentiality requires a concern for avoiding the disembodied approaches that continue to relegate bodiliness as ‘lesser than’. If I had the luxury of time, I would write a text on this body as potentiality in such a way that could contribute to the wider knowledge of bodies as emergent and unfolding. I am interested in one day delving into this sort of theory-building, delving into the first level of the discursive hierarchy that privileges bodies at a distance from their sensations as a means to re-form ontological assumptions about body-knowledge or knowledge-in-movement. We work on theory by working within it. The sterile dangers of such conceptualization, nonetheless, feeds my current corporeal state as I theorize myself into oblivion. I am confused and unsure and still striving, I want to learn from an attempt. The body is messy, and I am doubly so.

I.i

In this paper, I would like to gesture, in a winding and twisted sort of way, towards the body as potentiality as a remediation to current paradigms for approaching embodiment and ‘the body’ within anthropological research. This is a gesture to a small audience, making the journey more intimate even if the fantasies of the outcome are large. To offer an initial conceptualization of the body as potentiality, we will traverse the territory that links potentiality, subjectivation, and ‘the body’. I will lead us through the ways that bodiliness can be contemporaneously understood as transcending the postmodern insight of “the body” being a social and cultural entity that is in excess of itself and its world. With this groundwork, bodiliness becomes the point from which all perception and experience of the world emerges – yes, aligned with phenomenological thinking. From bodiliness comes care, which thus gives weight, meaning, and importance to the ‘impasse’ characteristic of potentiality. The ultimate aim of such path is to deliver us to a site that recognizes the entanglement of potentiality with agency; potentiality is not ‘potential’ but the multitude of possibilities unfolding constantly in relation to power and difference. The body as potentiality seeks to demonstrate how lived experience, shaped through an ongoing process of subjectivation, gives rise to embodied agency. At a certain point we will see how subjectivity and embodiment are productively complicated by the notion of care, as that which separates one’s body from one’s ‘I’. This results in accounting for dualities, especially the mind/body duality that keeps me up at night. Thwarting everything is the messy/tidy relationship of bodiliness to theory at large. We will arrive to our destination with the intention of having accidentally refurbished Thomas Csordas’ paradigm of embodiment for anthropology. Let’s see if we can get there together.

I begin with concern, a nice thing to have. I am most concerned about the terms potentiality, subjectivation, and subjectivity. These extend our broader concern for ‘the body’. Our concern for these terms and ideas will serve us as guides for how bodies expand and contract into anthropological analyses. These terms will introduce how “excess” permeates such bodiliness in relation to the survivance of the postmodern discourse of subjectivity.

II.i

To maneuver the term ‘potentiality’, I leap from Mette Svendsen’s (2011) anthropological approach to the term that “addresses the cultural context as well as the material conditions of that seen as incomplete yet with a power – a potency – to develop into something else” (Svendsen, 2011: 416). Immediately we see potentiality as potency. This conceptualization follows a discussion of Aristotle’s second type of potentiality that Giorgio Agamben deliberates in his work Potentialities (1999) which is a potentiality “that belongs to someone who, for example, has knowledge or an ability” (179). This type of potentiality in the individual is based upon existing potentialities, existing skills and capacities, the capacity to say “I can”. For Agamben, potentiality always exists in relation to impotentiality – an implicit relationship present in Svendsen’s use of potency – where the capacity to say “I can” hinges on the possibility of saying “I cannot”. This “I cannot” is not of not knowing how, but of an incapacity or lack:

“To be potential means to be one’s own lack, to be in relation to one’s own incapacity. Beings that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality; and only in this way do they become potential. They can be because they are in relation to their own non-Being” (Agamben, 1999: 182, emphasis original).

Thus the ‘potency’ described by Svendsen is also one of impotency, a possibility of being flaccid to the task at hand, an action which still results in this potentiality to, as Svendsen notes, develop into something else. Such potentiality can be described as an impasse, an in-between moment that requires or forces something upon one’s potentialities. Lauren Berlant (2006) offers the notion of the impasse in relation to cruel optimism where our attachments of desire are actually hindrances to our possibilities of flourishing. The impasse for Berlant, is a moment produced by an event that causes an internal displacement imposing either a falling back into old habituations around our attachments of desire, or a transition into new actualities and futurities. These attachments and desires that support one’s movements of potentiality, cruel or otherwise, are distinctly “promises and not possessions” (Berlant, 2006: 31). Framing potentiality as a promise reworks Agamben’s notion of potentiality as a capacity and lack one has; it may be a matter of language, but language matters when it comes to describing and making worlds.

To call potentiality a promise rather than a possession decenters the position of the subject. Agamben, focusing on one’s capacity, may be working with an understanding of subjectivity that is, for our purposes here, outdated. If Berlant correctly situates a subject as decentered through the term “promise” rather than “possession”, then Agamben, in turn, correctly situates a constant movement in the experience/moment/being of potentiality. Looking again at language, Berlant’s use of “impasse” seeks to stabilize something, to fix a moment in time – language does this, it is sticky and requires force (or poetry) to open itself to a varied terrain of expertise and knowing. However, reading Agamben alongside Berlant (both with Svendsen) offers us an understanding of impasse that is in constant negotiation, moving, pacing, turning in circles; this reading also allows us to see potentiality as a decentered movement. We meet an impasse, a moment of potentiality/impotentiality, and time still passes. There is still movement that extends within and beyond the limits of the subject themselves into the realm of what gives potency to the Being. This is the cultural context that gives weight, value, and meaning to the potentiality. From here, we can now determine a bit more about this Being who is caught in their potentiality, in the impasse.

II.ii

In Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power (1997), subjectivation is described as the process by which one becomes a subject. This process involves a double movement of subordination and subject formation (Butler, 1997: 29). Through forms of knowledge, discourses, institutions, and techniques of power, a subject is socially constructed through submission to such powers (Butler, 1997: 3). This socially constructed nature of subjectivation makes subjectivity – the experience of being a subject – a situated and historical process, rather than isolated, individual, and ahistorical (Biehl, 2007). For Butler (1997), subjectivation “consists precisely in this fundamental dependency on a discourse that we never chose, but that, paradoxically initiates and sustains our agency” (2). Agency becomes the contradictory product of subjectivation whereby the discursive powers that delineates a liveable realm of sociality for the subject are both reiterated through the subject and transformed through this inexact repetition (Butler, 1997: 29). In other words, subjectivation circumscribes an interior and an exterior in the relationship of ‘self’ to ‘power’ where the translation of the power from which the subject emerges is imperfectly reproduced through the life, the living, of the subject. This imperfect translation of power is the locus of agency. Agency is thus the “excess” of subjectivation.

Louis Althusser offers the notion of ‘interpellation’ to describe this process of subjectivation whereby the authoritative voice hails you into recognition, and accordingly as a subject to that power. The hail, a literal calling out in language: ‘hey, you!’ This produces an internal recognition of the self as being the subject of ‘you’, an act of subordination to the “authoritative voice that hails the individual” (Butler,1997: 5). This authoritative voice can be experienced beyond the vocal hail; a look, a gesture, a touch, an offering, a distraction, these all call a subject into being and subjectness by way of rapidly situating the subject in a relation of power and knowing. The hail indicates one’s place in the relative pecking order, and thus defines the capacity for proper action and behaviour. What these proper actions and behaviours are depends on the cultural context, and which actions and behaviours are enacted will allocate agency in this formulation.

This Butlerian basis of subjectivation and agency opens up a larger conversation that notes how traditional western approaches to subjectivity (again, the experience of being a subject) has focused on fixing the subject in time and space (Briginshaw, 2009). This history of a fixed subject (a product of Descartes’ thinking that maintains mind/body dualism) is being vehemently challenged given the contemporary context of political and social unrest; consequently offering new entry points into conceptualizing subjectivity. For Biehl et al, subjectivity “does not imply an error but connotes creativity, the possibility of a subject’s adopting a distinctive symbolic relation to the world in order to understand lived experience” (2007: 6). In this way, subjectivity is a “synonym for inner life processes and affective states” (Biehl et al, 2007: 6) where “subjects are themselves unfinished and unfinishable” ( Biehl, 2007: 15).

Biehl et al are clear that the approach to researching subjectivity in terms of the “dynamic density of the interpersonal” (9) is a continuation of postmodern trajectories (15). Echoing this sentiment, Natalie Garret Brown (2011) follows the postmodern sensibility to outline a theory of embodied subjectivity that is non-unitary, emergent, and embedded in a nexus of pleasure and desire that blur and flatten the territorial lines of subjectivity. Briginshaw, Biehl et al, and Brown (the three B’s, four if we included Butler), not only intersect on this harnessing of postmodern approaches to subjectivity and the subject, but they also confer on the term ‘excess’ to describe the sociality of the subject, or the relation of the embodied subject and their lived world. For Brown, subjectivated bodies are bodies of difference whose material excess is “a reminder of an embodied resistance contained by boundaries” (2001: 69). Briginshaw mobilizes ‘excess’ in terms of “excessive overflowing bodies” (2009: 17) that locate subjectivity in the “in-between spaces of hybridity and ambiguity” (2009: 20). Biehl et al enter excess obliquely, from the vantage point of the subjectivated body being unfinished: “Whether these demands [of subjection] come from institutions, discourses and disciplinary practices, or the subject’s own desires and needs, the body, from the perspective of subjectivity, is always more and less than what it seems it should be” (2007: 9).

The theories of subjectivation and subjectivity outlined above intersect on the notion of excess as being constitutive of agency that thus builds productively unstable worlds of flux and change. What is curious to me is that the three B’s all draw on postmodern literature to define their excessive contemporary subject. Here I offer a break for the eyes as we move more directly into this territory of excess.

III

Excess; the more than, the overflowing and the leaky, the unaccounted for. Excess; articled into the archive for later use, stored away for future projects. Be it love or writing, excess is encountered in both the margins and the center; my concentration is overwhelmed by the excess of possibilities. I wade in my shallow waters to acknowledge the excess, feet floating above the depths, finding a vantage point from which I can proceed. The excess is not in me, but of me and of the world. Through excess we blend and blur with what is there. There is just so much there.

III.i

The three B’s (Briginshaw, Biehl et al, and Brown) offer ‘excess’ as a key characteristic of subjectivity, grounded specifically in the body. In other words, the embodied experiences of subjectivity, as an expression of agency, is a product in excess of subjectivation. This is particularly interesting; the body is fundamentally described as excessive. Excess is nice to have, like concern. It gives us options, possibilities, lines of flight. But excess does not collaborate very well with theory now does it? Excess in theory is not the easiest thing to deal with; I have proven by demonstration in the first sections that excess makes for detours and obstructions that make the contents (thoughts and feelings) difficult to parse. It leads to instability and an untrustworthy speaker of dubious legitimacy. Excess is the fat to be supposedly, canonically trimmed from a theoretical text.

Excess does not collaborate with text or theory very well, so how do we account for excess other than describing, and locating it in a distant, dismembered body, “the body”? How do we account for excess given that ‘excess’ refers to a normal amount (and thus bringing our readings of the uses of ‘excess’ as acts of normative violence)? When it comes to the excess of subjectivation being described as something of the body and of agency, how do we manage and honour such constitutive excess? Perhaps this goes far beyond the intentions of the texts addressed, asking questions outside the immediate scope, but this idea of excess has stuck and I have to follow through.

To involve the description of ‘excess’ in a given situation, we require structure, a normative standard to which ‘excess’ can exceed and be the ‘other’. The structure that makes bodies excessive is precisely that of subjectivation. So, while subjectivation and the powers that animate it (the subject’s agency, an imperfectly iterative process) produce the subject/agent as boundaried and bordered, circumscribed and delineated, the excess as the originary state of the subject (the body) already exceeds this primordial animation. What do I mean by this? I mean that perhaps subjectivity and agency are not actually excessive.

This is not about language, I like the term ‘excess’ and all its derivatives. For the three B’s, ‘excess’ delivers on their promises at describing the history of fixation that the notion of subjectivity sometimes maintains. ‘Excess’ is the mess of the body they implicate into previously disembodied theories of subjectivation and subjectivity; it works. Nonetheless, the appropriate place to situate excess may be in the powers of subjectivation itself. Rather than saying the body is in excess of the powers that made it, perhaps such powers are in excess of corporeality.

III.ii

Here I want to note that ‘subjectivation’ is not an entity that exists above or beyond a subject or individual; on the contrary, invoking ‘subjectivation’ is to invoke the many subjects who uphold the near-perfect repetition of power. Power is just people; it is always just people who are entrusted with powers of conception and action. Thus, what is excessive about subjectivation is not the body, but the potentiality of agency, the potentiality of embodiment, and the embodied experience of being an agent.

I have introduced a bit of a knot that needs to be cleaned up: subjectivation is excessive, and potentiality is excessive. In effect, a few paradoxes have been introduced that I am unsure if I can tidy. (Could I leave it all with the statement that maybe everything is excessive?) To lean into this term of excess utilized by the three B’s, I would have to agree with them that bodies are messy and excessive; bodies are, in a word, uncontainable. In the first section, I claim that bodies (and myself) are messy. However, my experience of messiness is situated in the excess of the gesture and the limits of language, not in the lack of categorical tools and techniques of power that fail to ‘contain’ bodies. Bodies themselves are quite neat and tidy – perhaps this is an assumption resulting from a capitalist, biomedical perspective I am interpellated by – and the experience of bodiliness is one of simplicity. Right, left, right, left, walking for my able-bodied self is easy; I do not have to relearn what is right and left in a step nor when I pick up a pen. I am what I am, corporeal and fleshy. Bodiliness can be understood as a closed system in relation to its environment, an aspect of a broader ecology of symbiosis. The mess of bodiliness in gesture that I am speaking of is in relation to language (the life-source of theory). Again, I draw on Agamben (1999) to describe what I here gesture towards:

“Gesture is not an absolutely nonlinguistic element but, rather, something closely tied to language. It is first of all a forceful presence in language itself, one that is older and more originary than conceptual expression.” (77)

A little later on:

“The more human beings have language, the stronger the unsayable weighs them down… the more the speaker tries to express himself in words, the more he makes himself incomprehensible… gesture is always the gesture of being at a loss in language” (Agamben, 1999: 78)

Gesture, as in gesticulation, as in the embodied experience of sociality and being in the world, provides a possible way to determine the excess of subjectivation and subjectivation. The body, always in relation to language and discourse, is definitely in excess of the discourses that form the subject by way of gesture being at a loss in language. Yet, the excess exists in the wordiness of discourse, too. The more steeped in discourse, the less it makes sense, the less power the words have. The excess of the body in relation to subjectivity thus settles on subjectivation itself. It is an excessive process; one that attempts totality and in so doing, exceeds its own bounds, producing agentic subjects that are left to their potentialities of new futurities.

An example (hopefully brief given the weight and mass of what still needs to come): I have been subjectivated through dance training, I am a subject of dance who was once mastered by the techniques and who now masters those techniques. I am also subjectivated on an ongoing, continuous basis as I continue to engage in the milieu. I, as a fleshy dancing subject, am not in excess of the techniques themselves, rather the excess of the techniques is part of my subject-core. In attempts to subjectivate me, these techniques go overboard, leaking themselves into every corner, making themselves more and more visible, more and more vulnerable to my agentic penetration. Pointing my toes, lifting my legs, perfecting turns and twists and rolls over the course of years of intensive training was a process of stripping. Dance training broke me and stripped me down of all ‘unproductive’ habits, seeking to build me anew. In my practice now, I have the capacity to scavenge and remake myself, both inside and outside the powers of dance training. I scavenge from a love life, from a family life, from an academic life, and my dancing subjectivity bears on these aspects of my life, too. Forever folding and unfolding, increasing the surface area of Being, I am not a singular subject of dance, but a dancing subject, prancing across discourses of containment.

Because I identify as a dance artist, I am brought in as a subject of dance. Because I make dance in the way I do, and the aesthetics I end up engaging in become a relational practice (dance aesthetics relate to one another), I am a subject alongside other subjects. Daily training in dance school was an immediate form of subjectivation. No longer in school, I am still subjectivated by processes of grant writing, talking to presenters, booking studio space, managing other’s schedules, taking classes, working on other’s projects… To engage as a subject of dance is not merely in the technique. The subjectivity of a dancer is grounded in the excess of how subjects relate to a practice that is grounded in many bodies and places, as well as in the practices that exceed a definition of what it is to be a dancer. The excess of the subjected body exists in embodied agency whereby a dancer, after (and in) training learns of how their experience and desires of dancing exceed the bounds that are imposed by the subjectivating powers (teachers, choreographers, directors). Quite literally this is found in the moment a dancer makes a move – dancers train to be reliable, their training subjectivates them, and their subjectivity exists in and around the habits that could not be stripped, in the idiosyncrasies that remain despite training. Following choreography or a score still brings the whole self, uncontainable by a choreography, thus making the expressions of subjectivity visible, palpable. Almost defiance, the excess of agency in dance is in the small slips and deviations.

Simply put, the excess of subjectivity is not necessarily grounded in the body-as-body, rather excess could be located at the multiplicity of subjectivities, the excess of subjectivations that I must endure constantly in the imperfect iterations of being. I should have started with that.

With this groundwork out of the way, we approach bodiliness as the point from which all perceptions and experiences of the world emerges. It is a late introduction (perhaps an excessive introduction), but I would like to explicitly bring Thomas Csordas into this. Bringing Csordas in will provide a deeper context towards a use of “the body” in the current situation of working towards the body as potentiality. More directly, Csordas will deliver us to an understanding of care as a fundamental and unavoidable duality.

IV.i

The magnum opus of the embodiment paradigm in anthropology is Csordas’ 1990 text “Embodiment as a paradigm for Anthropology.” In it, he claims that an anthropological approach to embodiment “begins from the methodological postulate that the body is an object to be studied in relation to culture, but is considered as the subject of culture, or in other words as the existential ground of culture” (Csordas, 1990: 5, emphasis original). Already we can see how subjectivity fits into this paradigm. The subject of culture alludes to the embodied subject being in constant relation to the construction, maintenance, reproduction, augmentation, and rupture of a given cultural context. Csordas grounds his text in two terms: perception (Merleau-Ponty’s term) and practice (Bourdieu’s term). Of utmost concern for Csordas is mitigating dualism in general, and the mind/body division in specific. To do this, he draws on the French men (Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu):

“The collapsing of dualities in embodiment requires that the body as a methodological figure itself be non-dualistic, that is, not distinct from or in interaction with an opposed principle of mind. Thus, for Merleau-Ponty the body is a ‘setting in relation to the world,’ and consciousness is the body projecting itself into the world; for Bourdieu the socially informed body is the ‘principle generating and unifying all practices,’ and consciousness is a form of strategic calculation fused with a system of objective potentialities.” (Csordas, 1990: 8)

From this quote we understand that embodiment serves anthropological analyses by way of collapsing dualities, while situating embodiment in perception, or the being in the world, and practice, the doing of being. Both are always situated in relation to norms and values offered by the cultural contexts in which potentialities of becoming are defined. Initially, this paradigm is seductive for the prospect of the body as potentiality. Csordas even uses the word potentiality! However, when posited in the midst of an essay that is working to conceptualize embodied agency in relation to the process of subjectivation, the paradigm Csordas proposes no longer holds water (or at least it becomes shaky grounds to stand on).

“In taking up a paradigm of embodiment, it is critical to apply the analysis of subject and object to our distinction between mind and body, between self and other, between cognition and emotion, and between subjectivity and objectivity in the social sciences… My argument has been that on the level of perception it is not legitimate to distinguish mind and body… When the body is recognized for what it is in experiential terms, not as an object but as a subject, the mind body distinction becomes more much more uncertain.” (Csordas, 1990: 36).

Fundamentally I agree with what Csordas is getting at here – bodiliness as it is experienced is… well, in excess of any dualism that might be imposed. I agree that it is absolutely not legitimate to distinguish between mind and body, on any occasion. However, the problem for me arises in his reliance on object and subject to collapse this duality; carelessly harnessing object with mind, and subject with body, fails to account for the variety of subjectivating practices that interpellate a subject. Further, the world as we know it is full of subjects and objects; it is not a sin to say that I am both a subject and an object, and sometimes it is good to distinguish which one I am in an interpellative instance. If we bring in the various discussions that have preceded this moment in the essay, we can see that dualities exist regardless of our attempts to collapse them. In the case of potentiality, impotentiality completes the pair. For subjectivation, we have power and subject as the dualism of explanatory value. In essence, a critique I have held of Csordas – that he himself ends up falling into a dualism – might be a critique of misrecognition.

I am concerned with dualisms because, perhaps, they are valuable to us, as subjects and agents. They offer a performative grounding of being, illusory as it may be. Going a step further and inquiring into an existential grounding of embodiment may be more productive in collapsing dualities (Heidegger’s Being-in-the-world could provide the essential erasure). Nonetheless, in the experiential arena – a concern for all theorists and scholars so far introduced – dualities will persist all the way down. If it is dualisms all the way down, then it is a matter of determining a better dualism within which to ground embodied analyses. A better dualism could provide insight into the body as potentiality, embodied agency. After the paradox of excess, we arrive at a double bind of duality. By ‘better dualism’ I mean one that could honour the excesses as they are divvied up and lived in the mess of Being, one that would be iterative and reciprocal and eating itself all the time.

IV.ii

I realize that in many ways placing all these texts and ideas together feel at odds. Csordas and Briginshaw are distinctly anthropological, offering terms, concepts, and frameworks that methodologically situate bodiliness and embodiment. These methodological approaches feel, on an intuitive basis, to jive well with the philosophical. I do, nonetheless realize that Csordas and Briginshaw are not asking what the body or embodiment is, but rather follow up on what embodiment and bodiliness does. I think it is productive to bring all of these perspectives together, if only as a way to acknowledge that methodological approaches still serve as philosophy.

I am working towards something here, I feel it. I worry about legitimacy, about correctness, about being enough, about having a strong enough punching line. I repeat myself over and over, drawing back over the first lines to make them thicker, more visible, maybe more powerful. The presence of my body in haunts all over the city are unified in the single essay, in this moment of expression that cannot quite contain what I feel I’m after.

V.i

Jumping off Csordas’ point that perception and practice are the primary sites of bodiliness and embodiment, I return to Berlant (2006) and Agamben (1999). Their harmonizing works on potentiality and the impasse can step us into this more productive dualism that I am invoking. To reiterate: the impasse for Berlant is the instance of an event that brings us face to face with the possibility of falling back into habituation, or of thrusting us into new futurities. The impasse is the instance of potentiality. For Agamben, potentiality is directly in relation to the impotentiality of a Being, the potential to say “I cannot”. They come together in this essay to describe potentiality as an embodied experience on the edge of something, always in movement, and always in relation to the broader social and cultural contexts that determine what habit and new futures may be.

With this notion of potentiality I am no longer bound to a mind/body dualism (embodiment is the germinal necessity, grounded in subjectivation and agency). However, the body in itself, in its constitution as “the body” involves a practical duality. Put forth by Agamben in his work The Uses of Bodies (2015), he follows Aristotle and Foucault in determining that care/use is the formative duality of embodiment. To posit care in relation to use, there emerges a promise for understanding how bodiliness is constituted in processes of subjectivation, and in relation to subjectivation. I am saying that care of one’s own body separates it from an ‘I’; my care of my body is separate from (yet still entangled with) the ‘I’ that is constituted through subjectivation. My subjectivity of ‘I’ determines how I will care for my body – what methods and tools determined on a basis of power – but this care produces an excess of relation to this ‘I’. Agamben writes:

“If the one who uses and that of which one makes use are not the same thing, this means then that the human being (who ‘uses his whole body’)… does not coincide with his body and therefore, in taking care of it, he is taking care of a ‘a thing that is his own’… but not ‘of himself’.” (Agamben, 2015: 31)

Again, we could return to the problematics laid bare by Berlant of possession (attachments are not possessions but promises). However, the materiality of the body in this quote is such that it has an unnegotiable possession. I have my body whether I like it or not; I can sell its uses, but I cannot sell it. An economics of possession is already written into the embodied experience. Agamben here shows us a deeper duality than mind/body, a dualism grounded in action and recognition. The body, as a social vector of Being, is torn, rugged, oddly shaped from the start. Making use of ones embodied potentialities takes a stance that is at odds with the ‘I’ around which the uses are situated. More specifically, only in being a subject can we care for the body of the self.

“The relation of use, which constitutes precisely the primary dimension in which subjectivity is constituted, thus remains in the shadows and gives way to a primacy of care over use… it is only insofar as a human being is introduced as subject into a series of relations of use that a care-of-oneself may perhaps become possible.” (Agamben, 2015: 33-34)

Subjectivity is consequently a relation of uses, being of use to the subjectivating powers in reiterative agency. Only once we submit to such powers to form a subjectivity, an ‘I’, can we have the grounds on which to care for our bodies, bodies as subject. The body accordingly exists in a third theoretical space, despite occupying the same space of the ‘I’. A new dualism emerges, and a productive one at that; one that does not separate an inside from an outside, but a dualism that joins the ‘I’ of subjectivity with the acts of embodied agency. Care of one’s body therefore becomes the mechanism with which one relates to themselves.

With care, we can fully understand the weight of the impasse proposed by Berlant. Care gives weight, meaning, significance, importance to the impasse of habituation and new ways of being. Care, as the relationship to the subjected self marks an event as socially and culturally important, thrusting the embodied self into a spiral of doing and being. What to do, how to be, with whom to ally, who to follow, who to reject and refuse, what to consume, what time to arrive… we care about how we align ourselves with the impasse of being. We care about the potentialities we contain and the potency of becoming something else. We register care on an embodied level deeply entangled with the sociality of subjectivation. Feelings emerge, and so too do actions and uses. This duality of the body and the ‘I’, mitigated through care, leverages understandings of how bodiliness is implicated in processes of subjectivation. Care gives direction to the multiplicity of potentiality and the impasses faced therein; the body as potentiality emerges as that which is subjectivated through a necessity to care about how a subject continues to be in relation to the embodied and agentic self.

Well, I have grand doubts if this is making sense. I may have taken a few thousand words to say what has already been said by someone much more skillful and knowledgeable than I. Nonetheless, these turns and twists towards the body as potentiality make sense for me in my embodied situation. As a dancer, or someone who is concerned with my movements and gesticulations in communicative modes, I see the intuitive linking between “the body”, potentiality, and subjectivation to be exciting. Ultimately, I feel we have found ourselves having made this link, requiring only a few more aspects of the body as potentiality to be addressed.

VI.i

The body as potentiality involves a possible hiccup. Potentiality must be understood in terms of Briginshaw’s potency, and not as ‘potential’. This term, ‘potential’ was a term uttered to me often while in dance school: “You have so much potential,” “I see so much potential in you.” These are, in effect, violent utterances, offering a foreclosure to my own flourishing, imposing an intended fixed potential. Agamben, Berlant, and Briginshaw align on the understanding of potentiality being something moving, constantly adapting within constraints, an instance of improvising based on what is already at hand. Potentiality, in terms of the body, is not the same as ‘potential’ where, like a flower, we sprint towards a moment of blooming. Rather, potentiality follows more closely with Sartre’s approach to freedom wherein the human, or the subject, is constantly existing in an ambiguous relationship to what is and what is not. Sartre writes:

“We insist on our individual rights only within the compass of a vast project which would tend to confer existence on us in terms of the function which we fulfill. This is the reason why man [sic] tries so often to identify himself with his function and seeks to see in himself only the "Presiding Judge of the Court of Appeal," the "Chief Treasurer and Paymaster" etc. Each of these functions has its existence justified by its end. To be identified with one of them is to take one's own existence as saved from contingency. But these efforts to escape original contingency succeed only in better establishing the existence of this contingency.” (1943: 485)

In other words, potentiality always includes multiple genuine possibilities of opportunity in every concrete situation. Potentiality is presence to situational possibilities; never singular, but always unfolding, always moving. A subject has been made into the ‘Presiding Judge of the Court of Appeal’, but this determined potential is itself riddled with contingency that demands the ongoing negotiations of its potentiality in becoming as it relates to the broader structuring powers. Thus, potentiality is that which unfolds alongside power in terms of the possibilities of action. Potentiality is multiple.

VI.ii

Within this potentiality based in subjectivation, Biehl et al, Briginshaw, and Brown (a reappearance of the three B’s) provide the necessary nuance to potentiality: difference. Being a subject is not an isolated thing; as we have seen, subjectivity is this constant negotiation with the world and the self. Additionally, because power is just people and because our worlds are filled with both subjects and objects, our subjectivity is relative and relational to other subjectivities. The issue here then is to account for differences between and within subjects. Remember, The three B’s ground their conceptualizations and analyses of subjectivity in postmodernist thought. Briginshaw notes that

“in much Western philosophy subjection erases difference to maintain the illusion of sameness. Within the context of certain strands of postmodern theory the differences in subjects are recognized, so that subjects are seen as fragmented or split. This allows for subjects to be both the same and different from one another, to be both gendered and ‘racialized’, to be both agents with power to act on the one hand, and subjected to the rules and laws of language on the other.” (2009: 6, emphasis original)

Echoing this, Biehl (2007) et al describe a broader difference of subjectivity across time and cultural spaces as a means to inquire into “historically situated differences in social sensibility and what it means to feel and regard oneself as human; cross-cultural differences in cognition, affect, and action; and peculiarities of each individual.” (3). Brown grounds difference in a literally embodied, experiential understanding of subjectivity. For Brown (2011), certain dance forms illicit an experience of subjectivity “as mobile through physical exchange that thereby negates the notion of difference as fixed and determinate” (67). Dancing offers “a means to destabilize and shift through fixed identities, thereby erasing a hierarchical understanding of difference in part because they embrace a somatic approach to the body.” (ibid). Difference becomes an invaluable vector to organizations and experiences of subjectivity that traverse the personal, the social, the structural, and the participatory. Difference then comes to shape the motions of potentiality that are circumscribed by these many factors. Potentiality as the different sorts of possibilities in which I can follow, pursue, engage, refuse.

Grounding the ‘body as potentiality’ through power and difference returns us to the body once again, as in the literal fleshy body, the bloody and queer and shaking body. Oh how my body can tremble. The body as the site and product of subjectivation and the site of all important actions that carry out the self. The body as potentiality asks us to embrace agency as embodied, agency filtered through, acting upon, moving with our steps and breaths. This is an avenue to explore more, embodied agency, and fieldwork (dancing) will help me in my desire to flesh this out more tangibly.

VII

We began with a concern for the body as potentiality and all that which would fall out of it. The terms potentiality, subjectivation, subjectivity, and “the body” have been addressed in relation to the term of excess. Excess thoroughly complicated the relationship of the embodied subject that follows from postmodernist threads of subjectivity. The contemporaneous approach to subjectivity could be captured in this delicious term of excess. The body, power, subjectivity, all of it is in excess of itself. The paradigm of embodiment was introduced as a way to reaffirm the body as the locus and basis of all being and perception. This paradigm was also an entry into addressing the pervasive mind/body dualism that troubles the attempt at sketching the body as potentiality. From here we followed this path of dualisms, acknowledging that dualisms may be inescapable, to find a more productive dualism in care/use of the body in terms of subjectivity. Introducing care showed us the gravity of the impasse that is characteristic of potentiality. We then looked at potentiality as not ‘potential’, but rather the multiple and many and always in relation to power and difference. Finally, there was a moment of seeing the body as potential opening up a possibility of understanding embodied agency.

That was a lot. I am hoping that there is something here is that moves us somewhere new, a text of potentiality that offers new futures of thinking about the body and subjectivity. I do feel more at ease about the analytic category of “the body”, I feel I did a decent job at unpacking some of its stickier points. As mentioned, I would like to work more on this idea of the body as potentiality. This would require more work around the notion of the embodied agent. Nonetheless, having a loose path around which agency and subjectivation have been marked allow for this future endeavour to be less daunting. When it comes to the meat of my research I am torn between modes of communication. At times the philosophical approach I engaged above felt good – somatically I felt that I was going somewhere and it was meaningful. However, such theoretical mode also felt too abstract to bring back to the topic and experience of the body. Still, even after all this work, I harbour a deep anxiety about the relationship between theory and body.

Another possible angle of future approaches would be to stick to the discomfort in the relationship between theory and bodiliness. Such task is not new to me, but still the discomfort of how theory applies to bodies, on the ground is in need of more work. The most obvious initial entry into this will be in my field work, seeing how theory comes out of the experience. Not the other way around. I sense imperial detritus when I attempt to slap on theory like that onto living and moving bodies. Theory does not feel slapped onto my body, however, when I write in this mode. This theory does, in the end, come out of me, from my fingers, shaped by the powers invested in my subjectivity and my utility… the theory is of my own approach to being an embodied subject… sometimes crushed with the possibilities of potentiality. This paper is a proven feat that potentiality is movement, potentiality is always the experience of time passing, counted on the corporeal plane.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. (1999). Potentialities: collected essays in philosophy. (D. Heller-Roazen, Trans.). Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press.

Agamben, Giorgio. (2015). The use of bodies. (A. Kotsko, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Berlant, Lauren. G. (2011). Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Biehl João, Good, B., & Kleinman, A. (2007). Subjectivity: ethnographic investigations. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

Briginshaw, Valerie. A. (2009). Dance, space and subjectivity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Brown, Natalie. G. (2011). Disorientation and emergent subjectivity: The political potentiality of embodied encounter. Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, 3(1)

Butler, Judith. (1997). The psychic life of power: theories in subjection. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press.

Csordas, Thomas. J. (1990). Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology. Ethos, 18(1), 5–47.

Sartre, Jean.-Paul. (1943). Being and nothingness: an essay in phenomenological ontology. London: Routledge.

Svendsen, Mette. N. (2011). ARTICULATING POTENTIALITY: Notes on the Delineation of the Blank Figure in Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research. Cultural Anthropology, 26(3), 414–437.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years ago

Text

STARTUP IN FOUNDERS TO MAKE WEALTH

Would it be useful to have an explicit belief in change. And I think that's ok. Mihalko seemed like he actually wanted to be our friend. Grad school is the other end of the humanities. Indirectly, but they pay attention.1 US, its effects lasted longer. Together you talk about some hard problem, probably getting nowhere.

Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas. Why? They got to have expense account lunches at the best restaurants and fly around on the company's Gulfstreams. Meaning everyone within this world was low-res: a Duplo world of a few big hits, and those aren't them. It's not true that those who teach can't do. Or is it?2 I think much of the company.

Part of the reason is prestige. If you define a language that was ideal for writing a slow version 1, and yet with the right optimization advice to the compiler, would also yield very fast code when necessary.3 Of course, prestige isn't the main reason the idea is much older than Henry Ford. The right way to get it. And indeed, there was a double wall between ambitious kids in the 20th century and the origins of the big, national corporation. The reason car companies operate this way is that it was already mostly designed in 1958. Wars make central governments more powerful, and over the next forty years gradually got more powerful, they'll be out of business. And this too tended to produce both social and economic cohesion. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys.4 This won't be a very powerful feature. Lisp paper.5 Plus if you didn't put the company first you wouldn't be promoted, and if you couldn't switch ladders, promotion on this one was the only way up.

But if they don't want to shut down the company, that leaves increasing revenues and decreasing expenses firing people.6 One is that investors will increasingly be unable to offer investment subject to contingencies like other people investing. I understood their work. Which in turn means the variation in the amount of wealth people can create has not only been increasing, but accelerating.7 Surely that sort of thing did not happen to big companies in mid-century most of the 20th century and the origins of the big national corporations were willing to pay a premium for labor.8 As long as he considers all languages equivalent, all he has to do is remove the marble that isn't part of it. I had a few other teachers who were smart, but I never have. And it turns out that was all you needed to solve the problem. You have certain mental gestures you've learned in your work, and when you're not paying attention, you keep making these same gestures, but somewhat randomly.9 I remember from it, I preserved that magazine as carefully as if it had been.10 That no doubt causes a lot of institutionalized delays in startup funding: the multi-week mating dance with investors; the distinction between acceptable and maximal efficiency, programmers in a hundred years, maybe it won't in a thousand. Certainly it was for a startup's founders to retain board control after a series A, that will change the way things have always been.

Which inevitably, if unions had been doing their job tended to be lower. They did as employers too. I worry about the power Apple could have with this force behind them. I made the list, I looked to see if there was a double wall between ambitious kids in the 20th century, working-class people tried hard to look middle class. In a way mid-century oligopolies had been anointed by the federal government, which had been a time of consolidation, led especially by J. Wars make central governments more powerful, until now the most advanced technologies, and the number of undergrads who believe they have to say yes or no, and then join some other prestigious institution and work one's way up the hierarchy. Locally, all the news was bad. Close, but they are still missing a few things. Not entirely bad though. I notice this every time I fly over the Valley: somehow you can sense prosperity in how well kept a place looks. Another way to burn up cycles is to have many layers of software between the application and the hardware. And indeed, the most obvious breakage in the average computer user's life is Windows itself.

Investors don't need weeks to make up their minds anyway. The point of high-level languages is to give you bigger abstractions—bigger bricks, as it were, so I emailed the ycfounders list. They traversed idea space as gingerly as a very old person traverses the physical world. And there is another, newer language, called Python, whose users tend to look down on Perl, and more openly. At the time it seemed the future. What happens in that shower? You can't reproduce mid-century model was already starting to get old.11 Meanwhile a similar fragmentation was happening at the other end of the economic scale.12 But the advantage is that it works better.

Most really good startup ideas look like bad ideas at first, and many of those look bad specifically because some change in the world just switched them from bad to good.13 There's good waste, and bad waste. A rounds. A bottom-up program should be easier to modify as well, partly because it tends to create deadlock, and partly because it seems kind of slimy. But when you import this criterion into decisions about technology, you start to get the company rolling. It would have been unbearable. Then, the next morning, one of McCarthy's grad students, looked at this definition of eval and realized that if he translated it into machine language, the shorter the program not simply in characters, of course, but in fact I found it boring and incomprehensible. I wouldn't want Python advocates to say I was misrepresenting the language, but what they got was fixed according to their rank. The deal terms of angel rounds will become less restrictive too—not just less restrictive than angel terms have traditionally been. If it is, it will be a minority squared.

If 98% of the time, just like they do to startups everywhere. Their culture is the opposite of hacker culture; on questions of software they will tend to pay less, because part of the core language, prior to any additional notations about implementation, be defined this way. That's what a metaphor is: a function applied to an argument of the wrong type.14 Now we'd give a different answer.15 And you know more are out there, separated from us by what will later seem a surprisingly thin wall of laziness and stupidity. There have probably been other people who did this as well as Newton, for their time, but Newton is my model of this kind of thought. I'd be very curious to see it, but Rabin was spectacularly explicit. Betting on people over ideas saved me countless times as an investor.16 They assume ideas are like miracles: they either pop into your head or they don't. I was pretty much assembly language with math. Whereas if you ask for it explicitly, but ordinarily not used. A couple days ago an interviewer asked me if founders having more power would be better or worse for the world.

Notes

The reason we quote statistics about fundraising is so hard to prevent shoplifting because in their early twenties. Auto-retrieving filters will have a definite commitment.

It will seem like noise.

It's one of the world. That's why the Apple I used to end investor meetings too closely, you'll find that with a neologism. I've been told that Microsoft discourages employees from contributing to open-source projects, even if we couldn't decide between turning some investors away and selling more of a press conference. All you need but a lot about some disease they'll see once in China, many of the biggest divergences between the government.

Mozilla is open-source projects, even if they pay a lot of time. If they agreed among themselves never to do that. And journalists as part of grasping evolution was to reboot them, initially, to sell your company into one? Most expect founders to overhire is not so much better is a net win to include in your own time, not just the local area, and Reddit is Delicious/popular with voting instead of just doing things, they were shooting themselves in the field they describe.

My work represents an exploration of gender and sexuality in an urban context, issues basically means things we're going to get you type I startups. As a friend who invested earlier had been with us if the current options suck enough. MITE Corp.

The top VCs and Micro-VCs. When you had to for some reason, rather than admitting he preferred to call all our lies lies. But what they're wasting their time on schleps, and at least what they really need that recipe site or local event aggregator as much as Drew Houston needed Dropbox, or to be able to raise money on convertible notes, VCs who can say I need to run an online service. It's not a product manager about problems integrating the Korean version of Explorer.

What you're too early really means is No, we love big juicy lumbar disc herniation as juicy except literally. In either case the implications are similar. But there are few things worse than the don't-be startup founders who go on to study the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, phone, and only one founder take fundraising meetings is that it's bad to do more with less, then add beans don't drain the beans, and they have to do that, in which practicing talks makes them better: reading a talk out loud at least wouldn't be worth doing something, but they're not ready to invest in your previous job, or the distinction between matter and form if Aristotle hadn't written about them.

Philadelphia is a net loss of productivity. As a rule, if the growth is genuine. Which implies a surprising but apparently unimportant, like a core going critical.

In practice the first year or so. If you weren't around then it's hard to think about so-called lifestyle business, having sold all my shares earlier this year. Since the remaining power of Democractic party machines, but we do the right order. They're an administrative convenience.

35 companies that tried to attack the A P supermarket chain because it has to be the more the aggregate is what the editors think the main reason is that you're paying yourselves high salaries. What is Mathematics? Once again, that good paintings must have affected what they claim was the fall of 2008 but no doubt partly because companies don't. Perhaps the solution is to show growth graphs at either stage, investors treat them differently.

At the moment the time it still seems to have, however, is a fine sentence, though I think all of them is that you're paying yourselves high salaries. We thought software was all that matters to us. It's a lot about some of the business much harder to fix once it's big, plus they are to be something of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being a scientist. Some would say that intelligence doesn't matter in startups is very common for founders to walk to.

In fact, we try to be a special recipient of favour, being a scientist.

It is the most successful investment, Uber, from which Renaissance civilization radiated.

When an investor they already know; but as a percentage of GDP were about the team or their determination and disarmingly asking the right sort of things economists usually think about so-called lifestyle business, A. Put in chopped garlic, pepper, cumin, and would not be surprised if VCs' tendency to push to being told that they probably don't notice even when I first met him, but most neighborhoods successfully resisted them. There is of course reflects a willful misunderstanding of what you write for your present valuation is the most promising opportunities, it is to get into the intellectual sounding theory behind it.

Innosight, February 2012. Ashgate, 1998. So it is less than a Web terminal.

This is why we can't figure out the same ones. Trevor Blackwell, who had been able to. We didn't let him off, either as an example of applied empathy. And yet if he were a variety called Red Delicious that had other meanings.

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thecryptoconsortium · 6 years ago

Text

Hello my soon to be new friends. My name is Kelly Wayne Alma and I am from America. I started a non profit movement that helps the poor all over the world learn how to take advantage of the bitcoin explosion and earn FREE money online.....regardless of age, religion, education or any other of the human BULLSHIT that stops gods children from achieving true peace and unity.

Anyone ages 12 or older, with reasonable english skills outside of skype, can work with me directly to start building a brighter financial. future. Younger than that are also welcome, but out of respect I want to speak to their parents first. Explain the program and to what degree and purpose I will be engaged with their children. And, most important of all, to get their blessing.

This is no scam of the rich to take your money and keep you down...or some child's get rich quick fantasy. It takes time to build and a little effort online a few times a week...but IT DOES WORK. Poor people all over the world are ALREADY making a difference in their lives with cryptocurrencies. A few dozen from using my rough but VERY effective technique. TENS OF THOUSANDS more in other ways on their own.

I made, personally, made almost $35,000 USD last year in bitcoins. My first year dedicatedly involved, knowing almost NOTHING about crypto, and I started by earning A FEW PENNIES a day online from faucets and ptc. NOW I know alot more, found a few safe and good avenues, I want to share what I have learned with as many people as I possibly can how THEY can do it too FREE...WITH NO MONEY OUT OF POCKET. My NEW life goal is to make 100,000 poor families RICH before I die. Rich by GODS STANDARDS....not the standards of human greed!!!

I already have HUNDREDS of people from The Philippines and a couple dozen other countries interested in TCC and I have initiated an OUTREACH PROGRAM I tentatively labeled "THE FAMILY ENRICHMENT PROGRAM", but I am having a MAJOR PROBLEM in The Philippines and surrounding regions that I cant solve, alone, from the United States. Many of the sites I use that the poor would need to use are blocked(possibly by local governments I think) and I need to find new sites that are comparable.

I need volunteers, in multiple cities/villages/ regions and from different countries, like The Philippines, Romania, Moldovia, Ukraine, South America, Korea, India, Pakistan, Iran and similar locations to help me run a few localized tests that will allow me to develop dedicated "earning lists" according to country and region. This process, and the resulting lists, will allow the poor all over the world to start earning A LITTLE free money online, then invest those few pennies to build a long term residual income that WILL lead to an unbelievable amount of FREE MONEY coming in DAILY within a year. Two if you slack off a bit😁😁👍

This testing process will cost you ABSOLUTELY NOTHING EVER but a few minutes a day. You can even do it from home while spending some quality family time...and IT WILL EVEN PROVIDE a small but reliable additional daily income fairly quickly that could be used as a holiday recovery fund, vacation fund , or whatever.

Ideally would be to put together small groups(8-12) of friends or family working together, with AT LEAST ONE being able to speak read and write fairly good English, acting as a "leader" to interact with me for tutorial purposes. These first few groups would help solidify a localized process that the poor ALL OVER THE WORLD can use to start building a new financial future.

This is also A GREAT OPPORTUNITY for anyone that could use an easy and LONG TERM RESIDUAL income to GET PAID TO HELP THE POOR in their communities by "taking it into the streets". Teach others what I teach you and earn an extra income from the residual referral commissions that the investment sites pay members for bringing in new investors.

I am also looking for some volunteers who are fairly skilled in the English language to periodically translate items into their native language for me...and, when the time is right, to help me with placing some localized advertising in order to spread awareness of TCC and its goals. Professional services(share plans only please) in the areas of website creation and management, app and bot development, program development and management, and more.

For the more financially secure looking for a SAFE INVESTMENT here is one with a twist. NO LONGER will you need to give your money away as a "donation to help others". TCC's Family Enrichment Plan helps the poor get started by providing safe investment sites that have been TESTED AND PROVEN BY US with our own money, providing full training of what to look for in potential avenues, offering lifetime support as they traverse their new paths, and even providing a small interest free loan for startup capital if they show some evidence of honest effort...NO DAMN WELFARE HERE....they WORK for it, but it takes several weeks for the loaned funds to return to return to us, with no profit like we would have received had those same funds been invested.....3-4 times REINVESTED in the time it was loaned out....so we actually LOSE ALOT OF MONEY in the short term.

The response to this initial pilot program has been so unexpectedly high that I run out of operating capital on a daiily basis, sometimes even several times a day, and have to wait for returns from our own investments before we can help any more registrants get started...

SO WE HAVE OPENED OUR DOORS TO OUTSIDE INVESTORS. TCC is now offering it's standard investors($50 to $1000) 1% daily for 365 days.....principle included and insured against loss. Thats a 365% return. Try to get THAT from any bank or trading house. Under $50 will receive a 30 day principle return(not insured) plus an equivocable share of any profit earned.

For the more adventurous souls investing MORE THAN $1000 better terms MIGHT be available, depending on market conditions, and available vessels at the time of deployment.

✨⚜️YOU EARN TO HELP THE POOR⚜️✨

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Within the next 90 days(if funds allow....God's children come first) I hope to have a more professional investment website available, along with several phone apps and bots, to make the various processes a little more comfortable and accessible for both registrants and investors, but for now its just the honor of an old school country boy too scared of bringing shame to his beloved mama's name to do anything but the RIGHT thing!!!

Interested parties should email me for more details and/or instructions. Thank you for your time and God Bless!!! Please share.

Kellywayne,

The Crypto Consortium

[email protected]

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strikersunindie-a · 6 years ago

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Adventure Down Underground || Hanson/Scott

@blue-eyed-devils

Scott had to be flown in by helicopter to get to the top of the mesa. He got a great view of the arid landscape, reminding him once again how far he was from his frigid homeland.

The helicopter dropped him with a cloud of dust, leaving Scott to locate Dr Hanson alone. He’d read enough of the detailed reports to know the dig site, even if it was his first time visiting. A cave marked by First Nations drawings leading down into an extensive underground network left by a lost civilization.

The historical significance of which had drawn Dr Hanson, but Scott was more interested in finding the cause of their demise - for it’s modern day applications.

Scott figured he wouldn’t find the man in the cluster of tents, so he pulled out a torch from his backpack and started his descent into the caves. About halfway down the cave floor changed to rough-hewn steps, eventually leading down to a big cavern with buildings and walls cut into the stone. A series of flickering torches led him down to where Dr Hanson was working.

The man must have heard him approach but didn’t look up, seemingly too entranced with his work. Scott hadn’t met him in person before, only spoke briefly on the phone. He was taller and more fit & handsome than he’d expected. Scott stowed his backpack by one of the metal cases and dusted off his white shirt before approaching Dr Hanson.

“I’m Scott Verdant,” he said, offering his hand. “I believe you were expecting me?”

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

Hanson had surprised the crew when they first met him as well. As the leading archeologist, they were expecting some nerdy academic, with thick rimmed glasses, sunscreen all over the place, and either sweating buckets with just a few steps or overly lean. Hanson was fit and definitely caught the eye of a couple of members, but he ignored it all and had them focus on mapping and setting up the caves.

It was magic when they finally discovered the route to the city of stone. Despite centuries of neglect, nearly all the buildings were intact. It took them days to set everything up, knowing they were going to eventually explore each one to see what life was like inside. Unfortunately, the items inside weren’t as intact, as opening the door to one with the utmost care caused many items to finish turning into dust. With the funding they received however, they used a machine to chart the place, similar to sonar.

Hanson was examining one house with certain inscriptions when he heard someone approaching. He just assumed it was one of the workers, giving him an update, but he didn’t think it would be their financial savior!

“Mr. Verdant! Welcome!” Mr. Hanson walked over to the man, taking it and giving him a strong and enthusiastic grip. “You’ll be very pleased to hear we’re making great progress on everything. Come!” The excitement was almost like a kid’s at this point, as he showed the drawings he was examining.

“So this is interesting because somehow, this is similar to Anasazi drawings and language. Yet it’s older, meaning this would be a connecting point to that tribe that mysteriously disappeared. At this point, I can tell you that it wasn’t another tribe that wiped them out.”

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

Theirs was a mutually beneficial arrangement. He funded Hanson’s expedition and Scott got access to anything unearthed. Hanson’s eyes lit up as he spoke passionately.

Passion is good. Means he’s fully engaged with the task at hand and more tractable. Boys and their toys….So predictable.

Scott came in closer and quickly glanced over the drawings. “You found these here? Do you think we’ve finally found the lost tribe?”

He considered Hanson’s conclusion for a moment. “So not another tribe. Maybe my theory that this is a special religious site is more plausible. Maybe they had a mass sacrifice and must be somewhere special. How the progress going on the lower levels?”

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

“Perhaps, but we haven’t been able to find any remains inside. Each house is practically sealed, any new motion might turn the contents into dust. That machine you got for us however is helping us map each one though.” He knew that Hanson would want some artifacts for his personal collection, but Scott hoped that he would at least get to examine and photograph them for research.

“I’m not sure about the mass sacrifice, but it definitely possible this was a religious site. Or perhaps something similar to a last stronghold, where they go for safety.” It was pure speculation at this point, as he’d need more time to examine everything.

“However, we’ve opened the way to the lower levels at least and cleared a path. There is where it’s real interesting. Come,” he said as he clipped a portable light to himself. “Once we found this, I wanted us to double back and examine each place carefully, in case we can find more things related to this.” As they traversed down, things got darker, but it was definitely carved out. At the end was a massive wall, but had a few indents in it that were definitely man made.

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

He followed after Hanson, eager to see what they might find. Scott was inexperienced with being on dig sites and archaeology in general, but he knew a fair amount about geology and the natural world.

He noticed how the rock changed the further they went down. Softer sandstone changing to denser rocks like granite in the torchlight. “There just has to be so much more than what we’ve found. To sustain a community of this size to build all this….they’d need a fresh water and food source. Where’s the signs of all that? There just has to be more to unearth h-”

A rock suddenly crumbled underneath his foot. Scott stumbled forward, bumping smack into Hanson’s surprisingly solid body. “So sorry,” he said, steadying himself. He gave the man’s shoulder a brief pat. “I should be more careful, less excited.” He smiled ruefully and gestured for Hanson to continue the way.

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

Hanson was familiar with the area and knew where to stand. He was also rather light footed because of the fact many places could simply crumble underneath a step. Scott however, was not. So while he was a bit startled by feeling the man’s body against his own, he held firm so Scott didn’t fall anywhere else. Then he turned around to make sure Scott was secure before turning to the wall.

“I’ve only allowed a few people in here because they know how to examine things. Please, don’t touch anything. Even something like the oils from our fingers can affect the composition and quality of any artifacts.” Hanson didn’t like having to tell his benefactor this, but it was necessary.

He pushed open the wall and revealed a rather large cave. It was raised, as much of the floor was covered in water that led even deeper. The walls were covered in a bio-luminescent algae, that revealed patches of mushrooms and other fungus growing. “The water must have come from there, while they ate the mushrooms. Unfortunately, I’m not sure if these are poisonous or not, or if the water is actually safe to drink either.” There were paintings there too, around the algae on the wall, of creatures that didn’t look like the humans they’ve seen everywhere else.

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

Scott wanted to point out it was an accident, not deliberate, but he held his tongue. The man had a point and there was need to distract Hanson further.

He followed after the man, down through to a cave covered in fungi, bio-luminescent algae and rock art. “It’s beautiful…” breathed Scott, as he looked all around.

“You think the fungi was still around in their time? Maybe some of it has hallucinogenic properties,” he wondered. “How deep is this water? Perhaps there is more to be revealed in it’s depths… -but after we’ve fully explored this complex, of course.” he quickly added.

Scott raised his torch to view the cave drawings as they passed. Beautiful… so pristine…But nothing unremarkable. What if this site comes up empty? That this whole project’s been a waste of time and money?

He followed Hanson through the cave, down some rough-hewn steps that seemed to go on forever till eventually they stopped at a passageway, cleanly cut into the stone. Already Scott could tell the masonry was different here. The passageway led out into an enormous ante chamber, filled with countless carved stone pillars and other things Scott didn’t recognise. The chamber was so big, his torchlight didn’t reveal the end to it.

“Wow!” Scott didn’t know where to look first. “Hanson! This is incredible! This is it, right? You’ve found it!”

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

Although Hanson had lectured Scott just moments before on proper behavior at a site like this, Hanson couldn’t help but enjoy the look on Scott’s face. It was as if the man got younger again, the stress of life seemingly lifted as it was replaced by wonder and awe. It was how Hanson first felt when he first saw the giant t-rex skeleton in a museum.

“I have to study some more to confirm it, but yes, I do believe that this chamber was likely used in some sort of ritualistic manner.” The chamber was huge underneath the earth, though there was clearly air filtering in through some natural vents.

“If you look closely at the pillars here, you can see markings of some sort that are repeated on each of them, with only very slight differences. And they all lead to that center,” he said as he pointed to each one with the torch. “I wish to leave this last while we explore further up, to see if we can gather clues as to the details of each markings,” he said to Scott, hoping the investor would listen to him.

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

Scott aimed his torch in the direction where Hanson was pointing. The centre had some kind of stone altar, or at least what appeared to be to Scott’s untrained eyes. Below the altar, a channel was cut into the stone, leading away into the shadows.

“Are those cut lines down there to capture blood from their sacrifices?” asked Scott, thinking out-loud. The run-off might lead to human remains - And I can finally get a sample of the disease!

“Wonder where it leads to?” Too excited, Scott immediately set off after it. A half-dozen paces and there was a soft click! A sickening sound of stone scraping again stone echoed in the chamber. Scott stumbled. The floor beneath them started to give way.

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

Scott felt a strong hand gasp his as he fell. Sliding on stone into darkness for a few scary moments. Scott tumbled on a hard surface before his whole left side slammed into solid stone, his skull hitting it with a lound thump. “Are you alright?” asked Hanson, from somewhere in the dark. “I’ll live,” muttered Scott, rubbing his pounding head. It felt a little sticky. Must be bleeding. I'm getting too old for this. His eyes adjusted to the gloom, lit only by the flashlight that must have fallen with them. Scott pulled himself to his feet with a groan. “It looks like this might have been a dumping ground for sacrifices,” stated Hanson. “What was that? Was that you?” “Hmn? Oh that’s a snake. Easy now. Stay still while I find it.” Scott grabbed the flashlight and looked around for the snake. “He’s just warning us that we’re in his home. Give him space and he’ll be fine.” The flashlight’s beam revealed a number of snakes, most were relaxed and out of range, except the one coiled up in strike position near Hanson. “Stay calm. That’s it. I’m gonna distract him, and you’re gonna step back towards me when I do.” Scott slowly bent down to pick up a rib bone. “Alright, ready-” He tossed the bone with the snake’s reach, but away from Hanson. The snake dived after the bone, sensing movement in the air. He sighed with relief when Hanson stepped beside him, the two men pressed close together against the wall. “Phew. I didn’t want to tell you that was a black desert cobra and pretty venomous. You good?”

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

Hanson was a bit surprised by how concerned Scott sounded. Of course he knew that snakes around here probably were poisonous, as he worked in these environments. But anti-venom was on the campsite, not on him, and even all of his powers couldn't stop that. When he saw Scott toss the bone, Hanson jumped to Scott's side against the wall. "Yeah. But how the hell are we gon a get outta here," he wondered aloud, looking at the walls and ground to see if there was an way out. There had to be, since even snakes needed oxygen to live. They were still breathing after all so there had to be an exit. "Guess you're getting a bit more adventure than you paid for," he joked as he looked at Scott, trying to lighten the mood."Here, hand me the light," he said. Looking around, he waved the light up above and saw a bunch of stalactites, but one area was clear. "There. I think we need to find a way to press it. Otherwise we will be stuck here." Looking down at the ground, some snakes were nearby but they were relaxed at the moment too. "If only we could make a torch. The fire would scare them away," he said, trying to figure out who to do so without revealing his ability.

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

Scott passed Hanson the torch and looked up where he was pointing the light. a A bunch of stalactites. What’s he thinking? All the way up there?

“Um...how would we even get there? You on my shoulders? I'm not a smoker so no lighter or matches. Nothing to burn anyway, unless you’re counting clothes.” Scott paused to check his pockets. “But I do have a Swiss army knife. And some gum, if you want.” He lightly touched Hanson’s arm. “Shine the light back down here. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Scott took hold of Hanson’s hand, an unconscious gesture, needing the other man close and safe as they inched along the wall, away from the snakes. His foot crunched on something in the shadows more solid that sand. Scott immediately stopped, feeling Hanson bump up against his backside. “There’s something down there. Point the light down a bit.”

The light revealed a pile of bones blocking his way. Scott didn’t recoil, instead it got him thinking. “Now if I had a chamber with a trap door or sacrificial pit, I wouldn’t want the dead bodies stinking up my lair. No, I’d want them cleared out.”

He knelt to start moving the brittle bones away from the wall. They were tangled up with bits of god knows what else but Scott grit his teeth and worked them free revealing a fair-sized opening cut

#hanson and scott #different agenda #adventure down underground

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tombraidergirl · 7 years ago

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SotTR Impressions (1): Reveal Demo

On 26 April 2018 I was given the opportunity to try out the first hands-on demo for Shadow of the Tomb Raider at the London reveal event to which I was kindly invited by Square Enix Germany. Square Enix sponsored my travel an accommodations to this event.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider will complete the story arc that began in Tomb Raider - where adventure found young, fresh-from-college Lara Croft, forcing her to fight for survival - and was continued in Rise of the Tomb Raider - where Lara actively sought out adventure to honour her father’s legacy. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider Lara chooses to continue searching for great archaeological and mythological mysteries, out of curiosity and her love for adventure, slowly turning her into the adventuress we know and love from the classic games.

In the past couple of years the reboot series had to endure a lot of criticism pertaining to Lara’s character and the fact that her weak side was showing, but what people keep forgetting is that the Lara from the classic games (with the exception of Angkor Wat in The Last Revelation and Ireland in Chronicles - which didn’t portrait a very believable character if you’re honest ;-) - which is okay btw, it's fiction) was a seasoned explorer in her late twenties or early thirties (born in 1968). Her original storyline was that an event - in that case a plane crash - at the age of 21 made her turn her life upside down, becoming the heroine of Tomb Raider I and everything after. A storyline that Tomb Raider Legend kind of messed up and Tomb Raider (2013) then tried to fix by getting back to the roots, but replacing the plane crash with a shipwreck to add something fresh, instead of doing Legend’s Nepal again at the “correct” age. So where in the original game was it written that 21-year-old Lara didn’t have weaknesses? I can sympathise with people not loving to play a softer Lara, when we got to know and love her as a tough cookie, but that’s over with anyway, and so is this discussion I hope.

Shadow adds a new layer of toughness to Lara. Her body has changed visibly, her well toned muscles clearly showing. Her face seems a little less soft - something that is probably going to be discussed at length on the internet with comments along the lines of “why did they change her face again” - which is only logical given what she has been through in the recent years.

Story

Lara and Jonah are in Cozumel, Mexico hot on the trail of one Dr. Dominguez, a member of the Trinity order, searching for a hidden underground temple holding a key, the “Key of Chak Chel” to some mystery. Lara herself is trying to beat them to it and believes to have the upper hand as a second piece of the puzzle, the “Silver Box of Ix Chel”, Trinity is searching for in Brazil, might actually be located in Peru according to her own calculations. The Day of the Dead, or Día de Muertos, is being celebrated presenting Lara and Jonah with the opportunity to blend in, Lara hiding her Trinity-wide known face beneath a traditional mask worn for this occasion. With Jonah’s help Lara manages to follow Dominguez, whom Lara begins to suspect of being the actual leader of Trinity. She learns that while they are still unsuccessful in Brazil, they might have found the entrance to the hidden complex here in Cozumel. Gaining entrance to the dig site Lara manages to find a cave entrance Trinity has so far ignored. This ultimately leads her into the heart of the complex, an underground Maya pyramid, where she finds a large mural telling the story of Kukulkan, the creation god, and tells of a ritual that - when combining the key and the box - summons him. But it also warns of many catastrophes, in the order: tsunami, storm, earthquake, and volcanic eruptions. Lara then spots a circular stone tablet depicting the Hydra constellation which is misaligned. After aligning it, the hiding place of the Key of Chak Chel, an ancient ornate dagger, is revealed to her. While Lara marvels at the artefact, she receives a warning from Jonah via the two-way radio that Trinity is closing in. Without having time to think, Lara grabs the artefact and thus inadvertently sets things into motion. “What have I done?” Lara manages to escape the underground structure but is surprised by Dominguez and his men who take the dagger from her and tell her that by grabbing the artefact she started the apocalypse and that the first harbinger, the tsunami, is on its way. Lara manages to escape the tsunami, while witnessing the destruction it leaves in its wake, and is able to reunite with Jonah. She tells him what has happened and that she has lost the dagger to Trinity and that the foremost thing on her mind is beating Trinity in the race for the Box to prevent Trinity from realising their dreams for a new world order. Jonah maintains that Lara is not at fault for the tsunami. “Not everything is about you.” He believes that helping the survivors of the tsunami should be their priority.

Gameplay

In the first part of the demo Lara explores the town square and has the opportunity to interact with a couple of people, by talking to them, and learning more about their lives; a gameplay mechanism that has been introduced in the Reboot, where Lara could talk to the other Endurance survivors and returning in Rise where minor interactions with the Remnant were possible. But Shadow takes the whole thing a step further, as the whole market scene is not really relevant for progressing with the main story, but gives the environment a more lively feel. The market also offers the first resources in the form of a medkit and some herbs.

Another gameplay element returning is the fluent switch between cut scenes and playable scenes, when Jonah distracts two goons to allow Lara to sneak past and explore the back alleys and reach the dig site, which is well guarded and locked down. She then reaches another exploration area, a nice and quiet location with the remains of ruined Maya structures where more resources can be found, including resource crates and where Lara uses the wall scramble, the move that gets her up and over high walls.

Lara’s use of the climbing axe has also improved, offering new ways of traversal not seen in the reboot games yet. Besides climbing on craggy walls, she can now attach the rope she carries to rappel up or down, to use that rope to perform a so called rappel swing and reach far off platforms, and to perform wall runs to again reach far off platforms.

Lara finally locates a cave entrance allowing her passage to yet another type of area, where she meets her first prey in the form of the well known and difficult to shoot rats that can be killed for hide and +25 XP. The new gameplay elements introduced here are the ability to disarm spear traps by cutting tripwire ropes using the knife Lara carries and the improved diving skill that gives Lara a new freedom when exploring under water. Unfortunately Lara has not brought the rebreather from Rise along but she is now able to use pockets of trapped air to extend her time underwater.

After making her way through the underwater passages Lara finally reaches the interesting bit where a series of counterweights waits to be figured out to allow her to ascend upwards. Through the use of carts that can be pushed, tethered to other objects like cranks, or rotated around on a turntable, Lara can use them to break through walls and to weight down platforms. It seems like more of these kinds of puzzles have made their way from the challenge tombs - of which there were none in the demo by the way - into the base game.

(Concept Art)

Another well known gameplay element is a water slide scene, where Lara has to be steered down a torrential stream, avoiding deadly traps.

The axe can still be used to pry open doors, widen cracks in walls and even to break windows in this game.

The resources found in Shadow of the Tomb Raider are more plentiful if we are to believe what the developers told us and besides the known resources like herbs, cloths, hide, hardwood (which can also be dug up from hidden caches) we were able to spot ready made medkits and stimulants. More known elements returning are murals - which will now improve Laras overall knowledge of the culture rather than her language skills in particular - shootable targets as part of a challenge and explorer backpacks or maps - that give Lara the location of hidden collectables.

Impressions

Let me begin with Jonah, because he’s right there at the beginning of the demo. I have spoken with quite a few fans who thought that reboot Jonah seemed a lot tougher than Rise Jonah and who missed that tougher side of him. But in Shadow tough Jonah is back. While in Rise I got the feeling that Jonah wasn’t really there of his own free will but coerced by Lara to be there, but in Shadow he’s back and seems genuinely interested in the adventure. He actively helps Lara by distracting mercenaries. The two seem like equals, two adventurers who can both hold their own, no one in need of comforting and supporting (Lara by Jonah in the Reboot) or of rescuing (Jonah by Lara in Rise). Something that does return from Rise is their occasional difference of opinion resulting in heated discussions not unlike the one that occurred in Croft Manor in Rise of the Tomb Raider.

The Cozumel part is a little reminiscent of the Syria section of Rise. It has Lara finding a hidden tomb or temple, it gives a kind of introduction into traps, but Cozumel is a little more bombastic adding a calm town exploration to it (a little like the very beginning of Peru in Tomb Raider Legend but without the town folk hiding in their houses - a better comparison would be another game that is not Tomb Raider where such explorations of towns with lots of friendly characters is common but I’ll refrain from such comparison at this point, you might not own a PlayStation :-) ) The climbing sections shortly later are a little like the beginning of Thailand in Underworld but with a more impressive environment, with a view close to the one enjoyed at the Coastal Bluffs in the Reboot. (Or, possibly passages of number 4 of the PlayStation game I am not mentioning here. ;-))

And finally: The top Lara was wearing in the demo (a different one from the one in the screenshots) is getting closer to the classic outfit we know.

#shadow of the tomb raider

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stageyrebecca · 3 years ago

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Why are there so many immersive musicals recently?

Last night saw the announcement of The Bridge Theatre's new production of Guys and Dolls, which used everyone's favourite buzz word - immersive. It promises that the small audience are part of the spectacle and able to party with the cast, whether they're standing or sitting.

The Bridge Theatre has a short history of immersive productions which included A Midsummer Night's Dream pictured below, which was described as a "delirious party", so with a showstopping number like Sit Down You're Rocking The Boat, I'm extremely excited to see what this production brings.

In the last couple of years, it seems "immersive" is the way forward. There's The Great Gatsby immersive experience, Doctor Who: Time Fracture, Monopoly Lifesized, the Peaky Blinders immersive dance show... they often seem to work with recognisable properties that have a concept rather than the material from scratch. And they're not in traditional theatres either.

However, it does make me wonder how truly "immersive" musicals can be.

The current London production of Cabaret flirts with the idea of immersive. It renamed its theatre, has its front of house staff act as if the venue is the 1940s Kit Kat Club itself and boasts premium table seats where patrons can enjoy a meal (is that really what happens in Berlin...?). But I'm unsure whether these are truly immersive, or if the audience just enjoys the unusual setting and extra detail. It seems to be working for the show though, bagging multiple Olivier Awards and being nearly consistently sold out.

Earlier in the week, the new production of Newsies headed for the Troubadour released its set, promising another all-immersive experience in the round (despite the thrust staging).

The seating arrangement feels far less "immersive" than than The Bridge had above. And that's not to say there's one strict way to do immersive, but it feels like it'd be far harder to be immersed with raked stalls. But there are some hints at what they're trying to achieve - the ladders are clearly signalling a level of audience participation or, at least, actors encroaching on your personal space.

But is that immersive? Where can the line be drawn?

I've sat what was basically on the stage twice in a small, traverse theatre, where actors or set could be centimetres away from me.

I feel like there's a misconception between "immersive" and "site specific" - both related, but different concepts. And perhaps an audience member could be fooled into thinking it's an immersive piece based on an impressive, or expensive, set.

Similar to Cabaret, the Piccadilly Theatre has reinvented its interior for Moulin Rouge to reflect the real Parisian venue. But it firmly keeps itself to a standard proscenium arch with a small thrust stage. It has a beautiful protruding set, too.

But this, for me, is not what immersive theatre is, despite feeling more immersed than usual. Maybe it's the grandeur of a renovated proscenium arch subverting ideas of traditional theatre looks like that makes people feel immersed. And that could be worth the pricier than usual tickets.

The new site specific production of Witness For The Prosecution at County Hall teases an immersion by saying "you have been summoned for jury service" but as far as I can see doesn't label itself immersive. It uses language such as "step inside" to harness the experience, but without setting a precedent for audience participation.

Perhaps we should be using "atmospheric" in place of "immersive".

For me, "immersive theatre" is a production that simply cannot work without the audience. You could take Cabaret and put it on any stage and the material is fundamentally unchanged, but you couldn't produce a Punchdrunk show without the audience.

I can't comment on what Doctor Who: Time Fracture, for example, includes but it certainly helps to not have to be wed to specific material like a musical does.

I also think that there is no guessing as to why the "experience" shows are recognisable properties, or why more recently so many musicals want a piece of the "immersive" Cabaret cake.

Earlier this week, I wrote a piece about why Come From Away may be facing closure. And part of that is simply down to less disposable income, and a greater need to ensure the cash spent will be on something that guarantees a good night out.

The promise to "immerse" an audience member feels like it'll be more special; it sounds like it'll assure your experience is totally unique. Immersion relies on the audience, and your thoughts, feelings and actions could change the course of the show, but ultimately the show should affect how you feel leaving the theatre.

Theatre can transport you to another place, even when you're sat with a blank look on your face in a dark proscenium arch. But what if theatre could show, as well as tell, you that you're in another place. Perhaps it's worth that extra bit of money, or it's worth spending your spare cash on that to feel something more than you might at the London Palladium.

All this said, I'm looking forward to these future "immersive" productions. There's no hard and fast rule on what immersive entails, but the fact producers are trying new things in an unpredictable time is promising.

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smokeybrand · 4 years ago

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Tomorrow Should Have Died

Eleven minutes, bro. Eleven f*cking minutes.

At least they commit to multiverse theory, even if it contradicts the entirety of their already established time travel rules.

How these cats just fly into Russia on a big ass cargo plane and not get shot down? This is 2022. Putin still hates us. This sh*t would cause a World War.

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theredheadstory · 7 years ago

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MY STORY (I): The Redhead behind The Redhead Story

Hi. Hallo. Ciao. Salut. Julia Bell here, founder and writer of The Redhead Story.

It’s wonderful to have you with me; thank you for tagging along as I am on my way to step it up a notch, pushing The Redhead Story to an actual brand level and launching my new, beautiful corner of the internet in just a few weeks’ time. (It’s anything but boring; no, not like this space here, I promise! It will be completely revamped! Eeek, I cannot wait to show you guys.)

Who’s so excited with me?

It’s such a big step with a lot of scary moments, but I am still here.

Now, I know that some of you have been tagging along for quite some time, having seen this blog space changed, tweaked, filled with my personal stories mostly. And I know that there are new faces following, too. That’s why I want to give you more; create more valuable insights and content for you, my readers. Ultimately, you are the engine of what I do.

This is the first entry of an 8-post website/brand pre-launch series called “MY STORY”.

I thought those few weeks before the actual website will be launched and The Redhead Story be presented in a new light would be the perfect time to reflect back on where I have started - just to see how far I have come. Also, since integrity is one of my main values and I always want to stay true to myself, with my personality shining through in everything I do (for the personal touch and approachability, which is super important to me), it might be just the perfect moment to share a little bit about myself. A good starting point for all of us.

Ready? Grab a cup of coffee (I have mine right next to me, with a splash of whole milk), light a candle if you want (I am smelling pumpkin spice right now, my leftover candle from fall, but never gets old), and sit back.

This is why I am who I am.

A Lesson Learned

A German native, I grew up in a small town north of Hannover, where it’s flat, there are a lot of forests, and also wide open spaces with a lot of horses. Oh, and it’s super close to the North Sea. Going skiing in Austria and vacationing on Föhr (a dreamy North Frisian Island I love) have been my family's favorite annual things to do. And I didn’t complain.

When I was 16, I, for the very first time, felt this desire to go abroad.

It was this time when a handful of people from my high school went abroad for an exchange semester or year.

Combined with my love for languages - especially English -, and my parents’ support, I took the leap and jetted off to America for the very first time in my life, to stay with a host family I had never seen before; to go to a school I had never been to; and to experience a culture I had never immersed myself in. It.was.hard.

But, spoiler alert: I had the time of my life.

My friends and host family (they are still part of my life and just recently flew out to attend my wedding here in San Diego, for which I am so absolutely thankful) were an integral part in my developing American love story.

Funny, how, now that I am married (expect more posts about how all that happened), the term “American love story” gets such a different meaning.

Then, upon my return home to Germany, I experienced an intense, reverse culture shock. I learned that people moved on without me, that I changed, and that some relationships are not meant to last forever. This living abroad experience should leave its mark on me forever. And I will forever be grateful for that opportunity that literally changed my outlook on life and brought me to where I am today.

As sad and intimidating as it was to see that some people were not who I thought they were, there was a greater lesson to be learned for me:

I’d learned how much more there was to this world. It sparked my fire for travel and new experiences, which has continued ever since.

From a Small Town Girl to a German Expat in London

Education furthered my travel bug. I finished high school. While working towards my Bachelor’s Degree in Germany for Political Science and American Studies, I continually hopped back to my previous host family in New York.

Then, London drew me in for my Masters.

I initially didn’t want to pursue my Masters degree but thinking of combining it with another study abroad experience just made so much sense. I saw this as an immense opportunity, both personally and professionally.

And so I started sending out applications. Goldsmiths College, University of London, is where I should be going; Political Communications it should be.

Fast forward, equipped with one suitcase and a carry on, I began a new adventure back in summer of 2013

While in the heart of the UK, I traversed Scotland, England and Ireland. I was over the moon with all these places I could explore so easily, as they were right at my fingertips.

With these red locks, I fit right in. (I always call specifically Scotland my spiritual home.)

It was my UK travels that launched this blog : The Redhead Story.

Fueled by a love of writing and need for a creative outlet, I began travel blogging to share my experiences. (I am a chatty little ginger, as my mom would say; this hasn’t changed throughout the years.)

As I poured in more energy, my skills and tools improved - like upgrading camera types and image styles (still a lot to learn in that realm, but already looking into a new camera now that a new website will be launching and high quality content is important to me). But that’s the beauty of life; both then and now, there’s always still so much room to grow.

This is also when I began writing for other blogs or even smaller travel brands.

By that time I already knew that this is something I want to do full-time at some point in life. But it seemed unreal. (And here I am now, just having wrapped up my full time job to focus on this little business, so near and dear to my heart.)

After graduation from my Masters, the next chapter was a mystery.

How an Opportunity Landed Me as a Travel Blogger in California

I returned to Germany in late summer of 2014, deeply unhappy. I wasn’t sure where my life was going but one thing I knew for sure: I needed to be somewhere abroad. I started a job in a marketing firm but day-dreamed of packing my back and jetting off to the U.S. in hopes I would figure life out, or simply back to London. But we all know: both would have been quite costly in the long run.

A new year, and I joined the team at the German American Chamber of Commerce California. Working in their Cultural Exchange program was the melding of my life thus far : bilingual language skills, international collaborations and, specifically, working with the United States, a place so dear to my heart.

I still found myself in Germany but hey, at least I communicated with people from the U.S.

But life is a beautiful thing and even though I am a planner, not knowing what comes next can be quite thrilling.

Then, THE opportunity came : The chance to continue as a part of the organization in sunny San Diego.

It was an immediate YES.

How San Diego Travel Writing Has Empowered a Balanced, Healthy Lifestyle

It was a matter of about what - 3 weeks? And off I was, California bound. This was all so very unreal.

I arrived in San Diego. I had my a room lined up. I knew the office address. The rest was a blank piece of paper. I needed to write my story. More so: I had the opportunity to write it in a place I have never been but dreamed of going for so long.

Being here has fueled my desire to see more of this diverse country. It has given me so many other new opportunities I am so thankful for. It’s not all roses and butterflies, but since I set foot on California’s southernmost city’s soil, I found a base, a home. Certainly, meeting my adventure pal over here who I will be sharing life with from now on (a separate post about that is to follow) plays a huge role in that.

Ever since, I have relished my work, America’s Finest City and pursuing my travel writing.

Throughout my time in the UK, Germany and the States since, I’ve written for a variety of outlets, collaborating with various publications to create content that helps readers to truly experience a place.

Because traveling isn’t just about seeing a site. Traveling :

Expands your mind.

Is a process of personal growth.

Is my favorite way to achieve a balanced life.

With slow travel that is : Diving into one city or area for longer periods of time. Even if very active, it lets us slow down and gain appreciation for our surroundings.

Whether exploring the Arizona desert, hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park, or walking small towns in England, I also believe travel is the best way to internal reflection. Especially the more we can get outdoors. The chance to walk. To hike. To ride through a city by bicycle.

I’m passionate about seeing the world up close. Not from a car window. I love going slow, soaking it all in - reflecting.

As I continue life as a German expat in the U.S., I will continue writing, sharing stories of exploring my backyard, going on day and weekend trips, shorter and longer getaways in the U.S. and across borders.

A Journey of Traveling & Personal Growth

I invite you to join me on my very personal journey and see the world through my eyes. It is about personal growth - because that’s what exploring does to you: It changes your perspective on things, in a good way. It allows you to see a broader picture, interact with people, understand more.

By no means am I a travel expert, but I have one thing: passion. A passion for sharing personal experiences, creating my story and ultimately inspiring yours.

I hope the new The Redhead Story corner will be an inspiration for you and I am excited to hopefully hear more about your stories, about how exploring and “going out there - doesn’t matter where - has impacted your life and perspective on life and furthered personal growth.

Thank you for being part of this (life) adventure.

Because adventure is what you define for yourself.

I hope you got to know me a little better and understand where I am coming from. If you have any questions, I’d love to hear from you.

___________________________________________

The next post of my 8-post website & brand pre-launch series will be highlighting my approach to travel and how this has changed. Stay tuned!

Instagram // Twitter

#branding #my story

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tamboradventure · 5 years ago

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12 Books to Take You Around the World

Posted: 04/07/2020 | April 7th, 2020

At a time when we can’t travel the world, the next best thing we can do is pick up a good travel book. As Emily Dickenson said, to shut our eyes is travel. Books transport us to distant lands and cultures. They nourish our wanderlust, entertain us, inform us, and provide us with a reservoir of potential trip ideas.

In short, they’re magic.

I love reading travel books. Without them, there would be places and cultures I’d never have heard of. Travel books have added depth to my travels and helped me develop much more nuanced perspectives of different countries and cultures. They’ve also inspired me to visit tons of new places all around the globe.

Of course, I love traveling even more than reading but since we can’t do that right now, books are our window out into the world.

If you’re are itching to get your fix but are stuck in lockdown or self-isolation, here are some suggestions to get you started and keep your wanderlust stoked:

1. The Atlas of Happiness: The Global Secrets of How to Be Happy, by Helen Russell

Helen Russell, author of one of my favorite books, The Year of Living Danishly, wrote this comical visual guide that takes readers around the world — from Iceland to New Zealand to Japan to Ireland — in search of the ways that people define and discover happiness in their lives. It’s an informative, well-researched, and a feel-good guide to how the world stays happy — which is especailly important these days!

2. Ultimate Journeys for Two: Extraordinary Destinations on Every Continent, by Anne and Mike Howard

Having founded Honeytrek.com, Anne and Mike teamed up with National Geographic to curate these recommendations for intrepid couples. Chapters are organized by type of destination (beaches, mountains, deserts, and so on) to help travelers discover new places and experiences based on their interests.

It’s an amazing resource for finding inspiration and ideas for your own travels (even if you’re a solo traveler). The photos that fill its pages are stunning and will ignite the kind of wanderlust that will keep this on your coffee table for years.

3. The Dogs of ’Nam: Stories from the Road and Lessons Learned Abroad, by Christopher K. Oldfield

In this collection of short stories, our extremely budget-conscious Community Manager, Chris, recounts fumbling his way across the world as a backpacker on a budget. This is not a glamorous tale of luxury travel but rather a true and honest accounting of what it means to be a traveler.

His adventures (including being stalked by a jaguar in Costa Rica and living at a Buddhist monastery in Japan) will entertain you, make you think, and hopefully inspire you to get out there and have some adventures of your own!

4. Four Corners: A Journey into the Heart of Papua New Guinea, by Kira Salak

The British explorer Ivan Champion was the first individual to successfully cross the island of Papua New Guinea in 1927. In this book, author Kira Salak, the first non–Papua New Guinean woman to traverse this relatively untouched country and write about it, details her own epic adventures, experiences, and self-discoveries as she tries to mimic Champion’s epic journey.

It’s a riveting look into the wild jungles of a country that so few have been able to visit firsthand.

5. Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana, by Stephanie Elizondo Griest

This is the story of a young journalist who travels to Russia, China, and Cuba to witness the effects of communism and explore a world not many of us get to see.

Griest relates her experiences as a volunteer at a children’s shelter in Moscow, a propaganda polisher at the office of the Communist Party’s English-language mouthpiece in Beijing, and a belly dancer among the rumba queens of Havana.

6. Rediscovering Travel: A Guide for the Globally Curious, by Seth Kugel

In his book, Kugel challenges travelers to reignite our age-old sense of spontaneity (remember traveling without constantly summoning Google Maps, consulting TripAdvisor, and using travel points?).

The stories of his misadventures explain — often hilariously — how to make the most of new digital tools without living and dying by them.

7. My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile, by Isabel Allende

Allende is best known for some of her more famous works, such as The House of Spirits and The Japanese Lover. But in this memoir, she explores her personal journey living in numerous countries and her complex emotions toward her Chilean homeland.

The book paints a vivid, nostalgic picture of the world from which is is from. Sometimes funny, sometimes sorrowful, its insight and realism are what make this a captivating read.

8. Misadventure Is Better, by David Campbell

“If it isn’t a good time, it’s usually a good story.” That’s the backbone of this hilarious tale. Campbell, born to an American father and French mother, has been confused about where he belongs since day one.

After graduating from college, he decided to go abroad for a while to figure things out. He worked as a cycling tour guide in Europe, enrolled in the Peace Corps in Senegal, earned a master’s degree in New Zealand, went back to Senegal for his thesis research, and then returned to New Zealand.

9. Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents, by Elisabeth Eaves

Written by Elisabeth Eaves, this book follows her journeys around the world as she satiates her wanderlust and learns about herself. It started off slow but I really loved the writing here. It really drew you in and left you inspired. The book follows her from being a student studying a broad to being a backpacker around the world to living in Pakistan and Australia. Along the way she comes to peace with the wanderlust inside her and figures out how to balance being a nomad and someone with roots.

10. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, by Jack Weatherford

I never knew much about Genghis Kahn so when this was recommended to me, I thought why not. It was a surprisingly pageturner. This was not some dry history book filled with footnotes but a vividly told story about Kahn and his descendants. Most history books miss the “story” part but not this one. It has an arch, vivid imagery, and incredible characters. And it fills you in a lot on the Mongolian empire. Who knew they had a central bank, universal education, paper money, didn’t torture, or had religious freedom?

11. Ten Years a Nomad: A Traveler’s Journey Home, by me!

This is a memoir about my ten years traveling and backpacking the world, my philosophy on travel, and the lessons I learned that can help you travel better. It takes you on a trip around the world from start to finish: getting the travel bug, planning, setting off, the highs and lows, the friends made, what happens when you come back — and the lessons and advice that result from all that.

It is my opus on travel.

12. How to Travel the World on $50 a Day, by me!

Okay, I know I include this book in every list, but it’s awesome, so you should read it! This New York Times best-seller, called “the bible for budget travelers” by the BBC, will teach how to master the art of travel so you can save money, get off the beaten path, and have a more local, richer travel experience, no matter where you’re going. It will help you plan for the trip you can take when the world starts again and we can all leave our house.

And it will help you score the budget deals that will make that trip even more affordable too!

***

In these times when we can’t travel with our bodies, we can still travel with our minds. These books will help fill your days and recharge your wanderlust battery for when you can finally traverse the world again.

If you have any suggestions that I can add to this list, leave them in the comments!

P.S. – We’ve launched a new members-only community on Patreon! Members get insider access to events, photos and stories I’ve told before, exclusive content, bonus social media posts, phone calls with me and the team, live Q&As, postcards, and much more! Click here to learn more!

Book Your Trip: Logistical Tips and Tricks

Book Your Flight Find a cheap flight by using Skyscanner or Momondo. They are my two favorite search engines, because they search websites and airlines around the globe so you always know no stone is being left unturned.

Book Your Accommodation You can book your hostel with Hostelworld as they have the largest inventory. If you want to stay somewhere other than a hostel, use Booking.com, as they consistently return the cheapest rates for guesthouses and hotels. I use them all the time.

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The History Of Soccer Shoes Near Me | Soccer Shoes Near Me

Five nights afore Christmas, the visiting basketball locker allowance at Newark’s Prudential Centermost was a atramentous scene. Active were active into hands, eyes were anchored on the carpeting and Maryland drillmaster Mark Turgeon was aptitude adjoin a brick wall, accepting afford his clothing anorak and opened the attic to his players. Again No. 7 nationally, the Terps had aloof absent to unranked Seton Hall, 52-48. Naturally, such a atramentous setback spawned some soul-searching.

Soccer shoes! - Yelp - soccer shoes near me | soccer shoes near me A brace of anticipated suspects talked aboriginal in the postgame postmortem: chief point bouncer Anthony Cowan Jr. and blooming big man Jalen Smith. Respected aggregation leaders and the Terps’ two arch scorers, they both delivered letters of accord in boxy times. Again a third, unlikelier articulation piped up from the aback of the locker room. Active angry around, snapping to attention.“We’ve got to accompany it every day, nothing’s larboard in your body. You’ve got to go and accompany it.” The apostle hadn’t logged a distinct minute adjoin the Pirates that Thursday evening. He hadn’t alike appeared in a distinct bold during the ‘19-20 season. And yet conceivably no Terps amateur was bigger positioned than apprentice centermost Chol Marial, with his angular 7’2” anatomy scrunched into a folding armchair and his elbows propped on his surgically repaired legs, to bear about the accent of perseverance. Afterwards all, it’s adamantine to brainstorm that abounding others in academy basketball accept traversed added ups and downs, over such a abbreviate time, to ability the sport’s better stage. Evan Habeeb-USA TODAY SportsMarial didn’t abode his teammates for connected afterwards the Seton Hall loss. Fifteen seconds, max. If he acquainted afraid about contributing, though, it didn’t show. “When he spoke, everybody listened,” Turgeon would say later. The words were abutting and confident, his bulletin alternate by some air-slicing duke gestures with his appropriate hand—the aforementioned duke antic a armlet with the tricolor red, blooming and atramentous of the South Sudan flag. That is area his adventure begins, afore the shin splints and hawkeye nights and amaranthine rehab, afore the viral-video absorption and baddest recruiters and four aerial schools in bristles years, alike afore he boarded a flight to the U.S. by himself at age 14, alive about no English but still alive that he bare to hunt a dream… It all comes aback to Rumbek, and the adventure about the lion. ***The leonine fable is able-bodied accepted in the Terps basketball affairs by now, mostly because Marial relayed a adaptation to Turgeon during his recruiting appointment to Academy Park aftermost bounce and chat spread. But here’s the gist: Connected afore babyish Chol (SH-oal) was born, his father, a colossus-sized beasts agriculturist alleged Beny Chuar, dead a lion. The exact acumen why is unclear, although allegedly the barbarian had been anarchic citizens in Chaur’s village. Asked how the accomplishment was done, Marial describes a spear-like weapon and abutting activity constant in a burst arm. “A big dog,” he says, animated with pride. “My dad was that strong.”As to be expected, the ballsy act brought Chaur abundant account from the community; Marial’s adventures on the Maryland contest website characterizes Chaur as “an ancient in hometown apple of thousands; some alarm him a ‘king.’” Years later, aback Marial aboriginal took up basketball, familial belief would affect addition appellation in Rumbek, the basic of South Sudan’s Lakes State area he was raised. “I comedy hard,” Marial says. “And they alarm me Lion.”Soccer was his aboriginal antic love. A striker, of course. “Oof, I was nasty,” he says. “I was taller than all the kids.” Basketball didn’t appear assimilate his alarm about age 10, aback one of his 16 siblings—seven sisters, nine brothers, Marial says, abacus that he's "in the middle" age-wise—returned from university with a new amusement for himself and two ability for Chol: a brace of colossal sneakers, and a Kevin Garnett Celtics jersey. Two added years anesthetized afore Marial began actively acquirements to play, tagging alongside that aforementioned earlier brother to watch auto at the abutting gymnasium. “They wouldn’t acquiesce me to play, because I didn’t apperceive how,” Marial says. “So aback they leave, I aloof shoot around. Learn how to accomplish layup.” The gym was several afar from his house, so sometimes Marial anchored a ride on the motorbike of a bounded coach; added mornings he fabricated the expedition abandoned on bottom to drag shots afore anyone abroad showed up. “Go early,” he says. “You accept to absolutely appetite it.” From the outset, Marial admired basketball for what it provided a apprehensive kid from Rumbek who describes his adolescence like this: “Just abound up, go to school, appear aback home, watch cattle, break with my dad, comedy soccer.” A kid who recalls audition about Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan, but swears that he couldn’t accept best them out of a lineup, accustomed that his ancestors had neither TV nor internet.For starters, Marial couldn’t accept how abundant chargeless accessory was dispensed at tournaments. “I got clothes, I got shoes, I was like, ‘Okay! It’s good! Bigger than soccer!’” Marial says. “Soccer, we didn’t get nothing.” On a added level, though, were the doors that were aback aperture to him about the world. At 13, Marial larboard his ancestors for the aboriginal time to appear a clash in adjacent Wau. His aboriginal flight—and aboriginal cruise out of Lakes State—was taken to the burghal of Juba for two months of acute training, followed by his aboriginal cruise out of South Sudan to the NBA’s 2013 Basketball Without Borders affected in in Johannesburg, and his aboriginal time off the abstemious to accompany an all-star aggregation of bounded adolescence aptitude in Dubai.It all added up to an accessible accommodation for Marial about advancing basketball full-time. “When I get to travel,” Marial says, “I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve got to do this appropriate now. Might change my life.’”***

men's indoor soccer shoes near me - soccer shoes near me | soccer shoes near me Evan Habeeb-USA TODAY SportsThe jailbait ducked out of the alike and entered the alive terminal at Orlando All-embracing Airport. It was Sept. 2014 and Marial had aloof accustomed in the U.S. alone, accepting bid adieu to his father, mother Yar Gorjok and ancestors in Rumbek. A drillmaster from West Oaks (Fla.) Academy, area Marial was to absorb his eighth-grade division on an I-20 apprentice visa, was declared to aces up Marial at the airport. Absent any cogent English-language command, the 14-year-old flagged bottomward a helpful-looking family, showed them a buzz number, and asked them to punch the drillmaster to explain area he could be found.“The acceptable thing?” Marial says. “I abstruse a lot quick.” The hoops apple took notice. “Tallest Average Schooler in the Apple - Basketball Prodigy,” screamed the banderole of one YouTube highlight video from June 2015, which boasts added than 1.1 actor angle today. “Kinda go viral,” Marial says. Towering aloft his AAU antagonism in the footage, Marial is apparent swatting shots aloft the rim, active between-the-legs dunks as calmly as bottomward apart change into a tip jar, and sitting uncomfortably on the bank with his knees advancing up to his chin. Pretty soon, aeon were abutting Marial on campus, allurement for pictures and blubbering about how air-conditioned it was that he was ranked. “What is that?” Marial replied. “What is ranked?”Again, he abstruse quick. By aboriginal 2017, civic recruiting sites had placed Marial amid the top affairs for the absolute chic of 2019; at one point he was ESPN’s No. 1 center. Coaches from Kansas, North Carolina and UCLA called. A contour in the New Haven Register, meanwhile, categorical a aperitive approaching for the then-sophomore at Cheshire (Conn.) Academy: “In a few years, Chol Marial could be the No. 1 all-embracing aces in the NBA draft, assuming for a account with abettor Adam Silver and alpha what he hopes will be a advantageous pro career.”“I was altered that time,” Marial says today, eyes aglow at the memories. “So different.”Then came the pain. Afterwards his blooming division concluded anon due to shin splints, Marial transferred to Florida’s IMG Academy, hopeful that its all-inclusive able-bodied assets could advice him alleviate faster. Instead, Marial abandoned appeared in 17 games, clumsy to bond calm a constant advantageous stretch. “Hurting, hurting, hurting,” he says. “It never absolutely get worse, and it never absolutely go away. Just, in the middle.” Even worse, academy absorption waned. “When I got hurt, no one argument me, no one alarm me no more,” he says. “It aloof stopped. My ninth and tenth brand years? Pssh, I apparently got 20 calls a day at the time coaches are accustomed to alarm you. It was crazy. But aback I got hurt?”He whistles, a aerial agenda falling to a low one.“Nothing.” ***After a abrupt appointment to Rumbek, Marial enrolled at AZ Compass Prep for his chief year in ‘18-19, allotment the accessible allotment academy because of its adjacency to some cousins in adjacent Phoenix. (It additionally helped that addition South Sudanese prospect, Both Gach, now a blooming bouncer at Utah, had afresh abounding Compass.) The change of backdrop aloft Marial’s spirits, as did a able abutment arrangement of ancestors and friends. But his bloom never improved. In March, the night afore Compass was due to fly to Kentucky for a civic tournament, Marial awoke in tears due to the affliction coursing through his legs. He had been acquisitive to acknowledge the aggregation at the clash afterwards weeks of rehab, accepting appeared in beneath than a dozen amateur that season. Instead, an MRI appear accent fractures and he never played for the academy again.“The actuality that he never gave up, he deserves all the acclaim in the world,” says Zy Owens, who acted as Marial’s guardian in Arizona. “There were times he thought, ‘Maybe basketball isn’t for me.’ But he never, anytime gave up 100%, because he consistently knew area he could get.” Far removed from the civic spotlight, Marial connected to work, apprenticed to become the aboriginal affiliate of his ancestors to acquire a aerial academy diploma. On top of the core-only advance endless that he was demography to acquire NCAA eligibility, Marial would accept nightly apprenticeship sessions from Ronda Owens, the CEO of the 501(c)3 that runs Compass and Zy’s mother, whom Marial lived with throughout the academy year. Abiding enough, Marial not abandoned absolved at Compass’ graduation in May 2019—his authority was clearly becoming one ages afterwards afterwards the achievement of two summer classes—but he was called to bear the apprentice admission address.

9 Best Soccer Cleats in 9 - ShoeAdviser - soccer shoes near me | soccer shoes near me “I apperceive I can do annihilation I appetite to do in my life, as I accept appear from Africa to United States, and acquired apple knowledge, and tonight a aerial academy diploma,” he said in his speech. “Now I’m activity to alpha addition adventure at Maryland … I plan to comedy basketball. I plan to accomplish those who advice me forth this way appreciative of me. I eventually appetite to become an NBA basketball amateur someday.”The army admired this aftermost line, breaking into applause. Marial grinned, the bond of his cap dangling aerial aloft the dais.***Brien Aho/AP/ShutterstockA few canicule afore the Seton Hall loss, Marial stood in his abode allowance at Maryland, giving a bout to a visiting reporter. A assemblage of textbooks was accumulated aerial on the desk, abutting to a affected account of his parents and several ancestors from Rumbek. A motivational affiche featuring the angel of a bobcat was tacked aloft the bed, a allowance from Ronda Owens afore Marial larboard for academy this fall. In a agnate vein, the woman whom Marial calls his “American mom” had afresh alien him a chaplet with a aureate bobcat chaplet to admire his aboriginal academy basketball bold … whenever that assuredly happens. “Just to get a adventitious afresh to play,” he said, is “going to be actual exciting. Maybe fantastic.”The hardships did not end aback Marial aboriginal absolved assimilate campus, for the simple actuality that he could almost walk. Accompanied by Turgeon to one doctor’s appraisal over the summer, Marial was asked to jump off anniversary leg to analysis its strength; the larboard sprung about one inch into the air, according to Turgeon, and his appropriate couldn’t drag at all. The diagnosis: mutual accent fractures in both tibias. And aback years of bourgeois analysis hadn’t helped, anaplasty was recommended as the best advance of action.Marial had never taken affliction medication stronger than Tylenol until he appear to the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Centermost in Baltimore afore aurora on Sept. 4. (It was additionally the aboriginal time, he says, that any affiliate of his ancestors had gone beneath the knife.) Eight or so hours later, Marial awoke with 50-centimeter “tibial nails” amid in anniversary leg to balance the bone, according to Terps able-bodied trainer Matt Charvat; if his limbs had been any longer, the surgical aggregation would’ve bare to adjustment custom-length rods.True to his roots, though, Marial didn’t booty connected afore advancing his rehab, demography heed of what Charvat had told him bald hours afterwards anaplasty at the hospital: “Let’s bang that bobcat in and get to work.” The abutting day, Marial began walking on crutches.Back at his abode three months later, Marial does some brainy math. Aback his shin splints aboriginal developed in backward 2016, he estimates that he has played no added than 30 absolute amateur of aggressive basketball. Overcoming that abundant of a blow would be adamantine abundant for any academy player, but Marial is additionally acclimation bookish commitments from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. every day at the Maryland English Institute, continuing to body delivery in his third accent (Dinka, Arabic). As a result, he has almost been able to watch his Terps teammates practice, let abandoned accompany them. Once again, Marial was accommodated to accepting shots up abandoned afterwards anybody abroad had larboard the gym.But that is changing. Twelve weeks post-op, Marial was austere to alpha practicing and bound angry heads. Several associates of the affairs point to a 4-on-4 flat during an off day at the Orlando Invitational in aboriginal December, abundantly abundant not far from area Marial aboriginal landed in the country. Most of Maryland’s circling audience were comatose on the sidelines, area they raved over Marial’s bland cutting stroke, able arresting timing and raw athleticism packaged in a 7’2”, 235-pound anatomy with a 7’8 ¼" wingspan.Even as his dream was delayed, Marial remained his accepted energetic, optimistic self. Aback walk-on Reese Mona hit a three adjoin Oakland in mid-November, the aboriginal of his career, Marial flopped assimilate the attic on his aback and flailed his limbs in celebration. Addition time, he affective a costly turtle from some boosters built-in courtside and helicoptered the blimp beastly about his head. By all accounts, Academy Park has been an ideal fit. Marial loves the all-embracing acidity of his classes at the Maryland English Institute, area he is one of the abandoned athletes. He shares an accommodation apartment with two chief teammates in Cowan and Travis Valmon and apprentice administrator Brendan Maranz, who jokes that he's still not abiding how Marial fits in the shower. He is acquirements to blazon on a computer—“I do it like chicken,” he says—and letters afresh aggravating nachos for the aboriginal time. About campus, he appropriately poses for pictures with adolescent students. “A lot of them are absolutely nice, they appear and say hi,” he says. “Like, ‘Yeah, man, we cannot delay to see you out there!’”Marial committed to Maryland in aboriginal May as the 13th and final scholarship on Turgeon’s agenda for ‘19-20, allotment the Terps over New Mexico, Arizona State and Grand Canyon University—the four schools that agitated actively recruiting Marial afterwards his injury. Aback then, though, he has abundantly existed as a analytical abstruseness for every Terps player, drillmaster and fan, a aperitive aptitude with the abeyant to adapt Maryland’s division … whenever he absolutely took the floor.“Atrophy would be the chat that springs to mind,” Terps abettor drillmaster Matt Brady says. “All of his talents accept been unused.”But Turgeon and his agents accept been accurate to charge bottomward expectations. Marial was medically accessible for the Seton Hall bold but remained on the bank as the Terps battled from an aboriginal deficit.

Nike Mens Soccer Mercurial Superfly 9 Academy MG Cleats .. | soccer shoes near me The delay wouldn’t aftermost abundant longer.***Brien Aho/AP/ShutterstockOn the Sunday afternoon afterwards Christmas, which he spent aback in Arizona with the Owens family, Marial debuted with 13:07 actual in the aboriginal bisected adjoin Bryant, accepting a massive ovation—as massive as ovations get on the Sunday afternoon afterwards Christmas adjoin Bryant—from the moment that he stood up from the bench. Over the abutting four minutes, far best than Turgeon had originally planned to leave him in, Marial airtight two put-back dunks and affective three rebounds, finishing with six points, bristles boards and one block as the Terps bank to an 84-70 rout.“If he was in shape, he’d comedy 40 minutes,” Turgeon said postgame alfresco the Terps locker room, “but we’ll accompany him forth slowly. Absolutely blessed for him. He’s been through a lot.”A little while later, Marial sat in the abandoned players lounge at Xfinity Center, acrimonious at a barbecue craven sandwich. His buzz is antagonistic with dozens of texts and amusing media letters from family, accompany and old coaches. “I got some looooove on Instagram,” he says. Asked to call how this feels, he flashes that familiar, acceptable smile. “Lit,” he says.And what does lit feel like? “When you break two years abroad from home, and again you go home, you’re activity lit.” Indeed, Rumbek is never far from his mind. He can’t delay to buy his parents a house, and a “good car,” and maybe alike a flight to see him comedy in some NBA city. He has talked with Zy and Ronda Owens about the approaching achievability of founding an elementary school, aiming to advice the accouchement who accost him at the airport whenever he allotment to South Sudan, or army to watch him assignment out at the bounded gym.“That gives me motivation,” he says. “That’s why I appetite to go harder, so I can advice them. They appetite to comedy basketball, but they don’t accept shoes. Giving them shoes or a basketball to play, that’s activity to change the kids’ lives. They can accept a adventitious to go somewhere, to appear to America, like I had a adventitious to appear here.”There was a time aback Marial was advised a one-and-done lock, or alike a straight-to-the-NBA prospect, given that he was acceptable for the abstract of aerial academy because he accelerating at 19. His actual approaching is beneath assertive now, but Marial is not some raw activity acute years of evolution either; new $.25 of aptitude are appear at convenance every day: a altercation three, a aerial dunk, a teammate’s attack swatted aloft the rectangle on the backboard.“I could apparently booty him bottomward on the block appropriate now and account about him,” Turgeon says. “Where, a ages from now, not abounding bodies in the country will be able to account over him, or about him, abreast the basket.”“Four years ago, I would’ve said that he’s a guy who’s activity to comedy in the NBA and accept a connected career,” Brady says. “I still anticipate that’s his ceiling, if he’s healthy.”Ready or not, the No. 15, 11–2 Terps will be counting on Marial to accord added aback Big Ten antagonism starts in ardent on Saturday adjoin Indiana, abnormally with 6’10” twins Makhi and Makhel Mitchell accepting entered the alteration aperture in backward December. Judging by his 14-minute assignment adjoin Bryant, though, Marial will be aloof fine. There was some rust, of course: a fumbled access pass, a blocked angle attack attempt. But none of those hiccups abject the affect of the moment for Marial and those who accept his journey. Like one of his cousins, whose adulatory Facebook bulletin was accompanied by an emoji of the baron of the jungle:“Good job lion. You accept showed the apple what you are congenital for.”

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