#so there's tons of obscure stuff to dig up

[low-po1y-princess]

i can't get into things that are new i need them to be at least thirty years old so i can dig for content of them like i'm a miner

[trans-luis-serra-navarro]

I remember there was a headcanon about Luis attending a school that had secret connections with Umbrella. Now I can't help but think if Leon and Luis have a kid, they would do extensive background checks on schools their kid would attend, because they'll want to make sure none of those schools were associated with Umbrella/have ties to corrupt companies/organizations.

Thank you so much for sending in an ask!!!!!!! But yesyesyesyesyes I know the headcannon you’re talking about!!!!!! From memory I think either @geddy-leesbian or @hamartia-grander made some pretty extensive posts going into this idea??? Either way its really fascinating to think about!!!!

For those of you who don’t know, the headcannon/theory basically revolves around the fact that Luis was able to graduate school seemingly pretty quickly/was considered a ‘child prodigy’, and that in-universe theres a few characters who attended schools created specifically by Umbrella to essentially indoctrinate them; one of the most notable being the Umbrella Executive Training School that William and Wesker attended.

Umbrella has a few random facilities like this (like the Rockford Prison) And considering the fact that Europe seemed to be a relatively big hub for Umbrella, it DEFINITELY wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say that they’d have a similar school with the intent of training/indoctrinating ‘child prodigies’ to work for them in the future, and it’d be even less pf a stretch to assume that Luis, who came from a VERY sheltered religious background, would be a very easy subject to pick (cuz! yippee!! capitalist grooming am i right or am i right!!) It’d also absolutely lend a hand to why Luis grabbed as many items as he could and just BOOKED IT immediately after finding out what their plans for Nemesis REALLY were (I could talk about that part of his life/that realisation for HOURS oh my GOD)

EDIT I FORGOT TO ADD: Umbrella on some level does work quite like a cult. I’ll link a post that does a MUCH better job explaining it than I could in the replies of this post, but creating facilities for the sole purpose of indoctrinating already vulnerable young people into being on board with your project and isolating them from friends and family is like. Cult behaviour 101 BFNEHENDJDJ which is VERY painful to think about how Luis got roped into cults THREE times. Valdelobos before Saddler showed up wasn’t EXPLICITLY a cult, but considering it was isolated from modern society and heavily Catholic theres a strong argument to be made- then of course theres Umbrella- then of course he was blackmailed into working with Los Illuminados. I’ll make a post going deeper into that SOMEDAY, but like,,,, just the tragedy of his life being one big cycle he cant break is just. So devastating man are you KIDDING ME

I’m not like. SUUUUUPER knowledgeable on super obscure lore stuff like locations/facilities etc, so if you have a question about that specifically @highball66 would probably be a better person to ask!!!!

But again we know like. NOTHING about the inbetween time between Luis running away from Valdelobos as a child and him popping up as one of Umbrella’s top scientists other than the fact that he was a child prodigy and he excelled in college- hell even the dates/ages get kinda wonky at times BHFNEHENEUDNSIS but also this is Resident Evil where things get wonky a lot of the time so!!! Eh!!!!!!!

I have my own personal theory on what he did during that time inbetween I would be SO MORE THAN HAPPY to ramble about HDNEHENDJDN

BUT TO THE POINT OF YOUR QUESTION!!! YES!!!!!!!! ABSOLUTELY!!!!!!!!!! Plus just in general with Leon having a lot more enemies than friends, doing background checks on teachers or whatever would probably seem like paranoia to an outsider but to them?????? Nah you can NEVER be safe. Plus Leon’s like, a government agent- he obviously doesn’t have a TON of autonomy but I can imagine he at least has SOME power to dig up information on people. AND, the both of them literally went through hell and back to save Ashley, who was kidnapped right under the presidents nose- So like!! Hell yeah they’d be paranoid abt where their kids going man!!!!!!!! Rightfully so I think!!!

[rygabe]

Ideas For Future Posts

Hello, everyone! This blog has been up and running for about a week now, and in that time, I’ve been happy to see a few followers start coming in! It’s also been great to get questions and comments from you all. I would be posting this stuff anyways just for the sake of archival and the love of the game, but knowing that it’s being appreciated and enjoyed definitely makes a big difference :)

I still have a ton of photos and a few older videos to queue or upload in the coming days, and then whatever material I can scrounge up from my old blog to properly source and reupload here. But aside from those things, I wanted to see if there’s anything in particular you all would like to know about!

I’ve been toying with the idea of writing some longer, more text-heavy and source-cited posts about some of the band’s deeper lore or trivia. For example, I’ve had the idea for a post exploring original keytarist Elisa Jordana’s firing from the band and the controversy surrounding it, or a post talking about the origins of Ryland’s alter ego Guy Ripley. I could also talk about some of the more fandom-related events of the day— did you know that Gabe once wrote and posted his very own slash fanfiction between himself and The Academy Is’s William Beckett? Do you know about the 2009 Suavarro Holiday Stream? Does the phrase “basement Gabe” mean anything to you? I can talk about all of this and more!

I was also pretty active during the final days of the band, between Ryland and Alex’s departure and the band breaking up. I unfortunately don’t have as many professional or secondary sources for these stories, so it’s all very “source: dude trust me,” but I used to attend a lot of the band’s and Ryland’s Periscope streams. I’ve found video recordings of two of these streams, and I also have old text post summaries of at least two more, if those would be of any interest.

Almost all of the band members, both former and current, have been in at least one side project aside from CS. (I’m sure it’s common knowledge that Gabe was/is in Midtown, but have you heard about Ryland and Alex’s folk-indie project, or their electronic project GRVRBBRS? Did you know that Nate was the drummer for Armor For Sleep? Or that Victoria had a short-lived solo musical endeavor?) I could certainly talk about some of these!

Finally, I’ve been able to find at least one obscure text-based interview with the band still archived on the Wayback Machine, and if I did some digging through my blog and my brain, I could probably find at least a bit more. These types of “recovered old media” posts are harder and take more time for me to find, but I do enjoy sharing them when I’m able to!

[saltineofswing]

Hello! I'm the person that made the rant post about my dislike on the lack of natural dichotomy of the Pyramids and Traveler since the introduction of the Veil that turned into a whole thing. You mentioned a lack of pulp in your reblog and it's stuck with me since then. I wasn't familiar with the term and did some research on it, but I still don't think I get what it is. I tried looking it up but a lot of articles and videos I could find explain the history of pulp and its influences in modern day sci-fi but not necessarily what it is, especially in a way that would give me context to better understand your reblog. If it's not too much trouble, can you explain a little more what the "pulp" is that destiny is lacking?

I’d be happy to try and give you a little more insight into what I feel are important tenets of pulp as a genre/concept! I decided this might be a good opportunity to talk a little about it generally because I am really feeling its absence generally in the past couple years, so I included some historical backing which you’re probably already familiar with – hope that’s OK.

I did a little digging personally, for some good places to familiarize oneself with the basics of pulp as a concept and/or genre. It was nice to re-affirm some info that I’ve felt secure in holding as true without a ton of evidentiary support, and I also learned some cool new stuff as well! I think a good place to start would be to link to the TV Tropes page about pulp magazines, which does a pretty good job of explaining the origins and foundational aspects of the concept in a way that is easy to digest. It also has a lot of examples available to peruse. I also found this cool article on the golden age of pulps, which is an interesting read.

This got long, so below the cut!

To reiterate, the original ‘pulp’ terminology and vibe comes from early/mid-20th century magazines, which were cheap and easy ways to access genre fiction and action/adventure stories before comics, paperback novels, and TV/movies were really on the scene. Pulp magazines spanned a very wide array of genres, but because of a lack of appreciation for the medium, a majority of pulp magazines and aspects of what I would consider to be pulp as a genre have been allowed to fall into obscurity. There are places where I feel it is particularly obvious, especially the superhero genre (don’t get me started we’ll be here all week) but also in fantasy and science fiction – a term which was, in fact, coined by Hugo Gernsback, an editor for pulp magazine Amazing Stories.

They were cheap to make, cheap to buy, and easy to serialize; they could be really schlocky, crass, and unpolished. They could also be fucking incredible! The Shadow is a good example of an early pulp property with screaming highs and frankly peat-bog lows. Lovecraft published a lot of what is considered to be his ‘best work’ in Weird Tales! Conan the Barbarian, too! They kind of came out of the gate with a somewhat negative connotation associated with ‘low-brow’ forms of literature like dime novels, but where other magazines of the time tended to incorporate non-fiction articles and photography, pulp mags tended to be fiction stories only – short stories, or longer stories split into serialized chapters. Early on, not many of them had art, though with the advent of comic books that changed (you could argue that books like Creepy and Eerie are direct offspring of early pulp mags). Similar to what Weekly Shonen Jump does with manga.

If you think of a genre as a toolbox, pulp is a box full of tools that function fine alone, but excel at assisting the function of other toolboxes. I would almost liken ‘pulp’ to the concept of ‘camp’, which are also two concepts that can and do overlap with a high degree of synergy. Pulp has its own foundational attributes that are distinct from camp – for example, camp is gay relies a lot more on its self-awareness, at being able to wink at the viewer or participant, and telling you ‘yeah, we know it, but isn’t it fun?’ Pulp, on the other hand, is the (no pun intended) straight man counterpart to this aesthetic sensibility; pulp is at its best when it is being completely earnest. The quippy lines and dramatic proclamations are meant to be taken on their face. Nowadays it’s the kind of stuff that memes are made of – ‘That Wizard Came From The Moon’, ‘I don’t have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain’, ‘Whether we wanted it or not, we’ve stepped into a war with the Cabal on Mars’. Saying shit that has no explanation with your whole chest. Trying to be cool on purpose, the ultimate cringe move.

Nowadays I think that this kind of thing has mostly died out of modern media, but the counter-motion is still prevalent in mainstream superhero movies. A good example is the ‘Would you have preferred ~YeLlOw SpAnDeX~’ line from the OG X-Men movie. Hey dickhead! The yellow spandex is cool if you, the guy making the movie, believes its cool! Crucially, while a lot of modern superhero stuff is quippy and irreverent, it often uses these tropes in a self-aware or cynical manner – afraid of being earnest, committing the aforementioned cardinal sin of trying to look cool on purpose.

(God damn it, I’m talking about superheroes again. Sorry. Before I get back on task this is why I loved the recent Moon Knight run so much; Jed MacKay is NOT afraid to have the characters say some absolutely batshit thing but it comes off as so, so cool. And yes, a little cheesy.)

And then, where modern sci-fi typically has an ultra-detailed explanation on-hand, I think a lot of early pulp stuff just… didn’t. Ask a sci-fi property for an explanation on, oh I don’t know, ‘where did these super-humanoid sapient machine warriors come from’ and it will likely have a molecule-deep explanation of how those unnamed machine people were created. Ask a fantasy property for an explanation on the same and it might say, ‘no’. It’s not that a pulp-leaning property won’t give you the answer to that question… it just might not have it. The ‘why is it/how is it’ is not as important as the ‘what is it’ and ‘how is it relevant’; a writer had a limited amount of page real estate, as multiple features were typically crammed into a single magazine. Even if a feature was serialized, much like television episodes (before the binge trend), one had to keep information digestible, and not too reliant on a prior or later edition that a reader might never see.

Explanations tended to be in service of an emotional beat, or to a theme, versus as a grounding agent to immerse a reader in the world. For the record I don’t necessarily think of either method as being better or worse, and heavy worldbuilding can still utilize pulp as a veneer or filter to engage audience expectations in different ways. Pulp stuff relies a lot on suspension of disbelief without utilizing a rigid lore-based framework to – though, you know, your story/setting still has to have its own internal logical consistency.

(I feel that it is important to note, as a partial consequence of the time period in which these magazines were being made, and when pulp fiction was most heavily consumed, xenophobia and racism are also heavily present in pulp works. I think everybody knows at this point about how much Lovecraft sucked but it’s a valuable example of how a lot of ‘fear of the unknown’ in that time was transliterated into ‘fear of the different’, in general but especially relating to genre fiction. If you decide to explore material in this genre, in this time period, be forewarned! Some of it was pretty glaring!)

So, let me tie some of this stuff to my previous statements about Destiny. I think that Destiny is an excellent example of how pulp tropes, aesthetic, and genre conventions can be used to enhance and streamline a setting… and how stripping too much pulp away can have a detrimental impact on the depth of a narrative.

The original narrative and worldbuilding of Destiny drew very heavily on pulp aesthetics to create a foundation, both in its appearance and its lore. The ‘Golden Age of Science Fiction’ was a period of time in the mid-20th century that sort of transitioned sci-fi out of pulp magazines and into its own thing, but the foundational structure of science fiction at this time was still heavily pulp-influenced. I think this is very well-represented by the portrayal of Venus as a ‘garden’ (jungle) world, very lush and with sulfurous and sometimes acidic rains. Before advancements in astronomical technology went and fucked everything up for us writers, Venus’s opaque cloud-covered atmosphere was impenetrable enough that there could be anything under there – and a popular portrayal of Venus was a muggy, humid, rain-heavy world that sometimes also included lush jungles. In Bradbury’s short story The Long Rain (WHICH ran in Planet Stories, a pulp mag, by the way!) this portrayal is a central obstacle to the narrative; it’s also used in Heinlein’s novel Space Cadet.

The color scheme that Destiny uses for Venus also matches a common color scheme for Venus in this era – see this cover for Fantastic Adventures. Visually, I think that this comparison between the postcard that went out with the D1 limited/collector’s edition and this Planet Stories cover for The Golden Amazons of Venus demonstrates the influence, at least regarding terrain and biome.

In fact, I think that you can see from this Eververse postcard – which could have been peeled off of any era-appropriate paperback novel – that the influence goes bone-deep. Destiny even refers to humanity’s halcyon age as ‘The Golden Age’.

(Below: Is this image from Destiny dev, or a science fiction paperback from the 60s? Who knows! I know. It’s Destiny.)

In the modern era of Destiny storytelling, though the visual elements of the universe remain largely rigid relative to this early framework, the pulp underpinning of the narrative has been largely left behind. The original game’s story, and the stories of subsequent DLCs, felt very pulp-inspired – this ranged from ‘sort of effective’, like in House of Wolves, to ‘game-savingly effective’, like in The Taken King. Pulp lends itself to straightforward conceptual executions, and brisk narratives, because of its roots as short-form literature. The narrative of D1 was simple and to the point; Light good, Dark bad, humanity is in the shit, think you can kill a god? The surrounding world scaffold was rich but not deep. As I like to say, sometimes a river can be wide but shallow. This is not a commentary on its quality – something can be good but not complex, and IMO, sophistication is not necessarily synonymous with complexity. Destiny managed to pull off a trick that many high-quality pulp stories employ: it made the river look deeper than it was. This is the whole reason that Lovecraft’s oeuvre has the staying power it has: other writers got to play in the space because it felt very deep, even though the stories themselves were fairly straightforward.

I also don’t mean to say or accidentally imply that ‘morally grey storytelling cannot exist within pulp stories’, because that would probably get me torn apart; that’s just not the kind of straightforward foundation that the original Destiny was built on. ‘It is what you see, but what you see could be anything’, you know? The problem that began to muddy the waters in the Destiny narrative is that they started to say, ‘You know, actually, it ISN’T what you see’.

Tentpole narrative additions to the Destiny 2 game employ varying levels of pulp. As I said in the other post, the Hive have a potent pulp influence built into their foundational coding, and so subsequent portrayals of the Hive as a main antagonist have higher degrees of pulp genre naturally present in the narrative – it’s hard to separate the two of them. Shadowkeep and The Dark Below draw strongly on the ‘sword and sorcery’ convention, a subgenre of fantasy that is a heavy (perhaps 1:1) blend of fantasy and pulp; think Conan, or Elric of Melniboné (who, hey! Showed up in a novella feature, in an issue of Science Fantasy magazine, named… THE DREAMING CITY). The Witch Queen leaned away from pure sword and sorcery and more towards noir/detective pulp – though, I think, TWQ is a good example of the pulp slippage in its narrative, resulting in some more bland moments and things that feel ham-fisted in a bad way. Part of it, I think, is the need to make these expansions ‘long’ and complicated without making the player feel like they’re slogging; in a more pulp-forward TWQ narrative, the reveal that Savathûn is actually NOT evil-aligned and is a potential ally would come much earlier in the story, and the central mystery would be MORE about ‘what the fuck is she trying to do/prevent’, leading to the Witness reveal as the centerpiece of the finale and the ‘solution’ to the central mystery.

The decision to start retroactively appending more complex connections between disparate pieces of content naturally leads to a reduction of pulp prominence, in my opinion. If you imagine Destiny as a vessel that is mainly full of three component liquids – Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and Pulp – you can say that adding more of one genre pushes out another to make room. You can always pour more of one genre in to re-balance, but in response to increasing levels of sci-fi the narrative seems reticent to reintroduce pulp back into the mix, instead favoring fantasy. But another problem is that once you take it out, Pulp is really hard to put back; once you solidify and unionize world-lore, every subsequent retcon risks diluting and destabilizing that world-lore until a) nobody cares about it anymore and b) it stops being mutable at all, and becomes sludge.

The lore behind the existence of the Exo was originally very pulp, with no real explanations given for exactly what they were and where they came from, and how they attained sapience. Early hints that Cayde and a few other Exo having once been human didn’t preclude other Exo from having other origins – for example, implications that Exo war-frames eventually achieved sapience as a result of the ‘Deep Stone Crypt’, and that they were originally simple AI-equipped warriors designed and overseen by Rasputin to minimize human casualties. This early mystique around the origins of the Exo is classically pulp: we don’t need to know how the hyper-advanced robots were made, we just need to know what they are, why they are relevant to the story. It allows You, The Player, to engage with it at whatever level you want. In a game where You, The Player, are also being asked to step into the role of You, The Protagonist, this is beneficial to engagement for people (like me!) who like to think too much about the backstory of the your-name-here protagonist on-screen. It is also beneficial to not distracting the player with conflicting information, or accidentally contradicting previously-established lore.

Enter Big-Head Bray. The Beyond Light-era explanation of why Exo were created and how they were made is a retroactive nuclear strike on the Exo lore; it strips away a lot of flexibility and thematic richness from the concept of the Exo, shoehorns them into a single narrow use case, and directly conflicts with early-game Exo lore implying their connections to Rasputin (which they then had to go back and hastily shoehorn back in later) or existence as war machines for the Collapse. If D1 lore is wide but shallow, the D2 lore is narrow but deep. Just because something has a lot of ‘depth’, I.E. many layers to traverse before you reach foundational bedrock, it doesn’t make it good.

Same thing with the Fallen. Season of Plunder felt to me like an attempt to reintroduce pulp genre back into the setting, but it fell flat because of two reasons: it didn’t really want to be pulp, and it was more concerned with its tethers to the science-fantasy exterior world than it was with creating its own cohesive narrative. Why was Mithrax doing evil pirate shit when he was young? Because he comes from a race of fucking evil space pirates! It Does Not Need To Be More Complex Than That! But the exculpation of pulp from the D2 narrative means that if Mithrax doesn’t have a good enough reason, WRT the larger narrative, it would be a glaringly obvious plot hole. By Plunder, Destiny had already undertaken the task of filling out the Eliksni lore with sympathetic science-fantasy excuses for why they were trying to exterminate humankind – the more earnest, pulp-forward explanation would just be that desperate, hurt, suffering people will do desperate things, hurt people, and may perpetuate the cycle of suffering.

Oy. There’s a lot you COULD get into. How the Destiny macro-narrative seems to be decaying the rigidity of good and evil in its original lore vs. how the micro-narrative is obsessed with trying to recapture that good/evil dichotomy in order to give players a reason to like the main characters. How the determination to connect and explain everything has resulted in a general flattening of the background lore, and the subsequent trivialization of many things the game included in earlier iterations of the narrative/lore. How the narrative has basically nothing to do with the Vex because they wrote themselves into a corner by trying to explain them too much while simultaneously not altering the foundational lore of the race, meaning there were too many things they can no longer do without retconning again.

Overall, I guess I will just end by saying that many of the things that Destiny is CURRENTLY doing, feels like the game is straining to rip the part of it out which proudly asks its audience not to think too hard about sweeping, dramatic statements that built a lot of the things people love about the game’s setting and narrative… and in doing so, is just ripping itself to pieces.

[hamlets-bootycheeks]

A handful of random obscure musicals that no one talks about but they're some of my favorites ever:

Frankenstein

Based on Mary Shelley's book of course. It changes some stuff but is generally very faithful to the book and the music is excellent. I just really like it. (Best songs: Modern Prometheus, Coming of the Dawn)

Treason

Based on the gunpowder plot. To my understanding (I'm American and hadn't heard about this until I started listening to the musical), it's pretty accurate to the general history, but fills in a few gaps if you will to make it work better as a story. In the musical, the wives of the plotters are the ones who tipped people off about the whole thing, while I believe that we didn't actually know who wrote the letter. (Best Songs: The Day Elizabeth Died, Burn, Digging Down Deeper, Caught in the Crossfire)

The Clockmaker's Daughter

Not based on the book. I have no idea what the book is about. There is no relation. But it's set in this little town in Ireland. There's this clockmaker whose wife and daughter recently passed away (he's played by the wonder and amazing Ramin Karimloo), and he tries to recreate his daughter out of clockwork. And he ends up creating a sentient clockwork girl whom he names Constance. It's genuinely one of my favorite musicals ever but NO ONE knows about it which is so sad. The music has a ton of piano and strings and it's incredibly rhythmic and I love it so much. (Best songs: You're Still Here, Impossible, Fear and Whispers, Clockwork, also all of them they're just so good)

I also thoroughly enjoy The Count of Monte Cristo musical and The Scarlet Pimpernel (haven't read this book so I dunno how accurate it is), but not enough for them to get their own spots. :p

[sendmyresignation]

hii if u don't mind, any metal bands you'd recommend for someone wanting to get into slightly more obscure stuff but doesn't know where to start digging? any subgenre/time period idc. asking u this bc i trust ur knowledge

i truly truly love getting asks like this, thank you for trusting me and it's awesome to hear you want to dig deeper!!

it's hard for me to give specific recs because i don't know what you've vibed with so ill meet you half way and give you a list as well as some places to learn more just in case i end up in the wrong direction.

these are some bands that clicked for me when i was first exploring outside my comfort zone, as well as some stuff from my aoty from the last few years:

Possessed - Seven Churches; this one is the least obscure but i feel like possessed are easy to miss. important band bridging the gap between thrash and death metal. love crazy maniac shit like this

Satan- Court in the Act; classic new wave of british heavy metal with a bit of edit. type of band that had enormous pull in underground power and speed metal scenes- this is a blueprint for a lot of great obscure heavy metal with the soaring vocals and the tappy solos. i love chastain (american, mid/late 80s response) if you want to see that lineage in effect

Mystifier - Goetia; brazilian metal is a huge huge historically important metal phenomenon. sepultura are more well-known and sarcofago are cult classic black metal pioneers (seriously, inri is one of the greats) but mystifier is a band that opened up the scene for me a little more and is incredible in their own right

Autopsy - Metal Funeral; slow, gripping death metal carnage!! also one of the few legacy bands continuing to release actual good music which is fun. also, if you like the autopsy you'll love derketa, dream death, mythic, winter, all of whom make their own twist on a similar crushing brand of doomy death metal goodness

Sabbat- Envenom; long-running old-school japanese black metal. has that thrashy-punk first wave flavor along the lines of celtic frost, root, bulldozer (also sarcofago) and sodom at their most brutal.

Sacrilege- Behind the Realms of Madness; crusty thrash that had a huge influence on early bolt thrower. good if you're into punk already and want more of that in the metal (their later records lose the crust but gain doom- I almost like them more. killer band)

Vastum. any of their records seriously maybe the best active band on the planet rn.

Warning- Watching from a Distance; if you got to metal through my mcr blog then i think you can handle the whiny vocals on this and get a legit transformative experience out of Warning. seriously love this album, delightfully heavy doom in an emotional package. and doom is easy to rec, satisfying and not to extreme: Pentagram, Candlemass, Trouble, and Saint Vitus are all must must listens

Chevalier- Destiny Calls; combination of speed and power i really love in the classic heavy metal fantasy and knights vein. newer band too with a lot of similar listening to bigger bands in that scene. and if you like this style at all manilla road (the band) is a requirement if you aren't already familar

Some eclectic newer stuff I've enjoyed lately: Vicious Blade, Tyrann, Reverend Bizarre, Nekromantheon, Firmament, Svalbard, Vampirska, Ares Kingdom, Messa

but i really recommend checking out r/metal- their essentials is good for a beginner but they also have a ton of primers that can give you overviews of niche genres. the fenriz metal spotify playlist is also fuckin killer. For new music, look into reviews from sites like angrymetalguy, no clean singing, heavy blog is heavy, invisible oranges. helpful to know how your taste aligns with the writing staff (like i know if angrymetalguy dislikes something, im almost guaranteed to like it). shreddit has a release tracker on spotify; there's also a constant update of new releases on the metal archive!

[randomvarious]

1996 Paris Playlist (YouTube)

Man, I really love putting together these city-based playlists, because while they give people a sonic taste of what a specific location was up to at a certain point in time, they also have a chance to be *very* eclectic too. And if you've been following me long enough, you know that I am one hell of an eclectic motherfucker when it comes to all this music 😁.

So, bienvenue à Paris, gens! Today, I've got a brand new playlist that'll take you back to the year of 1996 inside of this vibrantly bustling metropolis. We're starting out all electronic, but we've got a little bit of an array within that scope, with some downtempo and trip hop, some house and deep house, and a little bit of techno too; and it's all pretty lightly treaded underground stuff as well!

Now, while some people on this playlist are pretty well-known entities when it comes to Parisian electronic music—like DJ Cam, Pépé Bradock, and Dimitri From Paris—the artist who currently has the most tracks on this thing is someone who is far more obscure: the versatile Chaotik Ramses. On this 1996 Paris playlist, Ramses has three separate songs: a dark and intense, synthesizer-heavy, psychedelic downtempo pupil expander called "On the Way to Paris," which only has a little under 3,800 YouTube plays and has only ever appeared on a compilation called Musiques Pour Les Plantes Vertes (Music for the Green Plants); "No Way Out," a piece of downtempo/trip hop with a little under 1,000 plays that really seems to reflect a uniquely French feeling of deep isolation and ennui, and is topped up with some sweet blues guitar; and a live techno performance of "Crying 202," which was recorded from a set that Ramses played in the Swiss border city of Lausanne, at a venue called MAD Club. That one comes with some lusciously cinematic strings laid over acid pulses and ticking hats, and it currently has over 900 plays.

And ultimately, it's hard to pick an absolute favorite among this set, but at the risk of sounding repetitive—because I posted about this song just last week in an update on a French deep house playlist too—I think it's probably Dimitri From Paris' "Free Ton Style." The fullest version of this song is kind of rare, because it's only ever appeared on an unmixed triple-vinyl release of Dimitri's brilliant 1997 mix, Monsieur Dimitri's De-Luxe House of Funk, but thankfully, a YouTube channel called Classic House & A Little More uploaded it 10 years ago so we could all experience it in its extended glory. A spectacular deep house tune with some really satisfying sections of jazzy synthesizer improvisation 😌. Currently at under 3,800 plays.

This playlist is ordered as chronologically as possible.

Norma Jean Bell - "Baddest Bitch (Motorbass Mix)" DJ Cam - "Life" Chaotik Ramses - "On the Way to Paris" Shazz - "Le Marais" Chaotik Ramses - "No Way Out" DJ Deep - "Signature" Dimitri From Paris - "Just About Right (Full Length)" Chaotik Ramses - "Crying 202 (Live at the M.A.D. - Lausanne)" Cheesy D - "Broken House (3 At Mosco's)" Bradock - "Last" Dimitri From Paris - "Free Ton Style (Monsieur D's Classique Extension)"

And this playlist is also on YouTube Music.

So with the inauguration of this playlist, we kick off with 11 songs that come in at a total of 79 minutes.

Next week we'll be digging into some house jams!

Enjoy!

More to come, eventually. Stay tuned!

Like what you hear? Follow me on Spotify and YouTube for more cool playlists and uploads!

[sburbian-sage]

I'm curious. Let's say that the Grace of Time from that ask you got were to find this blog, and realize that all their coplayers were conspiring to kill them. What should they even do?

Go into hiding? Try and talk everybody down? You can't just kill them all first, because the game would probably become unwinnable (among myriad other obvious reasons). What the fuck do you do if you're in a session full of lunatics like that?

Now that's a difficult question. There really isn't a "court of law" you can appeal to as a replayer. Outside of the replayernet, of course. If you get found out as a PKer, that's a permaban from not only most self-respecting forums, but entire servers as well. Considering that this cuts you off from tons of archived content (player-made and from worlds destroyed by the entry process) and from most of your online connections, that's a fate worse than death for some. If I got banned, I couldn't survive out here, that's for sure. But of course, the only way to enforce a penalty like that would be through doxxing. If I were the Grace of Time and I figured out what was going on, I'd consider leaving them a little message. "Just so you guys know, if you kill me, I have a ~ATH program which will leak all of your handles online, and a notepad telling everyone what you did". Mob justice isn't pretty, but it's hard to get any other kind of justice out here.

This is one half advice, one half threat. Just in case the anon asking this question is the same anon with the conspiracy to commit murder from earlier, acting coy, asking me what I'd do so they can cut their target off at the jump. Information spreads surprisingly easy on the replayernet, and your entire online presence can be traced back to that dongle implanted only inches away from your heart. You're not as clever as you think you are, so maybe pick up some more common sense at the corner store, unless you think you can pull the trigger faster than it takes your prey to hit the enter key.

Roleplaying as a hardboiled noir detective was fun, I should do that more often. Anyway, if I was still concerned with my safety after that, there's other stuff I would do as well. A Grace of Time specifically benefits from their Time powers, able to flit hours or weeks ahead/before to escape strifes (ideally before, in case they set a trap that goes off once you arrive in the future), in addition to being able to convincingly fake your death with a doomed timeclone. To say nothing of how vital the Time player is to surviving any session (that information alone is potent, if you go down so does the entire ship). If you don't think every player is in on the conspiracy, you could ally with known friends or check to see who is in the clear. Not to win the fight with numbers, but to scare off any attempts at attacking a group. A friendly Law player would be splendid, setting a rule forbidding any PKs under threat of exploded body parts. And of course, the unspoken final resort is justified self-defense.

In any case, the big thing you would do is just laying low on your Land, taking refuge in consort villages and ruins, and boobytrapping your own house (but maybe not treating it as your go-to digs, sitting duck behavior). The Skaian Magicant is another good safehouse, assuming you can find it before they do (and perhaps obscure the entrance). In the case illustrated by the ask, you probably only have to survive until the catastrophe happens. Even a lunkhead who thinks you can avert a catastrophe with a PK will probably understand that once it happens, any bloodshed is meaningless. The big downside is that those guys are probably 100% assassinating your dreamself. If you can ascend though, before or after that point, you're golden as I struggle to imagine any scenario in which their attempts at murder would qualify as just or heroic deaths.

[shanie]

Hiii Shanie! (is that what I should call you? 🤔) I'm the guest from ao3 that sent you that long ass comment 😆😅

Just wanted to start of by saying how extremely sweet it was of you to do this and also how much I appreciated you taking the time out not once but twice to write back! Tbh yes my dumbass did not realise what "noodle incident" meant till you explained it so thank you for that 😊 clearly I'm a bit new to all of this. 😅

Honestly I'm extremely late to the party. I discovered zowens only a little after they won their tag titles last year. I had no idea who they were before that. I took a break from wrestling for about 13 years and only got back into it by accident because of Sami, then Kevin, then zowens. I was switching channels and stubbled upon zowens who happened to be on screen at the time.

So I've had to go back and do a bit of digging and now and then I'll find something that everyone already knew about yearsss ago 🙄😂 and I'll get all excited over it, but everyone else has already been there done that 😂 (also absolutely no one I know likes wrestling or really even knows about it 😭)

I know I've missed out on a LOT with these two (their "glory days") 😭 and I get only glimpses of the past here and there, but I guess as they say better late than never 😁 So I'm enjoying your stories so so much. It's pretty incredible the way you write and the journey you take us on through it.

Ta

🐨

PS. the draft this week..zowens..😌

Hello again, nonnie! 

Glad you could make it! 

I was hoping to hear from you. This mess of business with AO3. Bleh. Hope they get it straightened out soon. 

First off, don’t feel bad for not knowing what “noodle incident” meant. I don’t know if a ton of people do these days. TV Tropes as a website has sort of fallen into obscurity in the past decade or so and that’s where I got the term from. Looking it up, the definition on the site (found HERE) apparently comes from Calvin and Hobbes. Of note: The way I use the term isn’t exactly correct because I have explained the pneumonia incident a little, and will do so in upcoming writing more, but I use the term improperly anyway because it makes sense to me. 

Regardless, stay tuned for more info about the pneumonia incident!  I will warn you though, the current story it’s being written into, “Never Say Goodbye”, is VERY dark. I’m probably going to have to up the rating on it. I use my writing as therapy and I’m going through some stuff right now, so this is how it is manifesting. Hope this doesn’t make you or anyone else hate me, but just know that writing it is helping me cope with my pain and getting me to a better place. 

So yeah. Forgive me. 

Second, don’t feel bad about just discovering Zowens in 2023. Some of the best people just discovered Zowens in 2023! I don’t know how much of last year you’ve managed to see but there is a fair amount of stuff just between summer of 2022 and fall of 2023 that is epic. If you haven’t gotten to explore it yet, I recommend starting HERE. It’s an episode of The KO Show from back in May of 2022 that planted the seeds of the entire Zowens storyline that would go on to them becoming tag champions. That said, as another video reference, that episode of the KO Show would actually be followed up on in August 2022 to properly start the storyline... in a post-show segment after Smackdown in Montreal. Finding video of that post-show segment can be difficult, but HERE is a fan video that has most of the encounter, minus the section that involved Matt Riddle (and the Zowens hug he spurs on) 

Really though, if I had to offer some key highlights, just in WWE, I’d recommend the last ten minutes or so of NXT’s R-Evolution PPV, their match at Battleground 2016 (DEFINITELY Key viewing), The very end of Hell In A Cell 2017 (and the Zowens segment from the next episode of Smackdown), the 10/31/2020 episode of Talking Smack, The leadup and immediate aftermath of their WrestleMania 37 match, the clips I linked above from May and August 2022, Royal Rumble 2023 main event (OMG THAT), and most of all, the ENTIRTY of the 3/17/23 episode of Smackdown which, telling you now, as a Zowens shipper was like a friggin fever dream the night it happened. Cannot understate how that was some Joker Origin Story stuff that night, but the payoff was AMAZING.  

All that said? Like Kevin said at WrestleMania 37. They met, at this point, almost 22 years ago, and the journey has been nuts. If you want a good, easy-to-absorb rundown of those 22 years or so, I highly recommend Mithen’s substack Ring the Bell. It has so much information that starts from the beginning and goes step by step along the path. They’re writing a book too! Keep an eye out for that. 

Anyway, it’s great to see you here and if you need any more tips about how to dig further into the story, let me know. I know you said “Their glory days” but the truth is, in their own words, they’re “Destined to do this forever” and the glory days aren’t over yet. The story has been going on for over 2 decades but it hasn’t ended yet and I don’t believe it ever will. The Sami and Kevin show, and by extension, The Kevin Steen and El Generico show, will never end. 

Over 20 years and counting.  Long live Zowens/Steenerico 

Enjoy the ride. 

[elminx]

Random April Planty Update

Success - we hit 70° yesterday! Spring is finally here to stay! And my plants know it.

Let's start with indoor stuff first: all of my faster-growing plants are actively growing, giving me so much life! I have been pretty on top of my spring repotting, so only a few are left. I'm dreading tackling the giant chewed-up spider plant (my cat's favorite chew toy) because it will need a ton of soil. I've also decided to combine my neon pothos with my biggest basket of golden because I'm running out of windows to hang plants in. My partner's strange coleus plant def needs an up pot and my two newest babies will need repotting in a couple of weeks.

I've been contemplating the transfer to outside - I want to use the front (covered) porch for my more delicate plants since we get some crazy wind here. The porch gets excellent morning light (likely the best light in the house since the west face is obscured by a line of trees and my neighbor's garage).

We took our Fuschia plant out of deep storage (see also: overwintering in our attic) and now it's out on the porch acclimating.

I think it could go in the ground now - nighttime temps for the next week don't drop below the low 40s so I suspect our threat of frost SHOULD be passed. (it did frost in the third week of May elsewhere in my town but we're at the low point in the valley so it didn't here). We got reclassified as 5a from 5b so the times (and temperatures) are changing.

My garden is awake now, too. The crocus have come and gone and the daylilies, bearded iris, and peonies are all making themselves known. My Rose bush will have full leaves by the end of today. I can see that the parsley survived the winter which is a lovely surprise and I am seeing my Rue and Sage bushes come back to life as well.

I want to get in there and dig and clean out last season's stalks but, not yet. The temps haven't been consistent enough for the natives that might be overwintered there.

Soon though...soon.

[berserkchip]

I read through your Noel route fic a few days ago and had a lot of fun going through it! I've always been really fond of this kind of full-length canon divergence AU that explores an alternate timeline in detail and it's neat seeing yours come together. You do a great job mimicking the prose of the original Tsukihime

Some thoughts

Digging into the stuff with Tokie is a really smart choice for this. It's an obscure bit of canon that rarely gets touched on but it absolutely should have implications for Shiki's character. By its very nature a Noel route is going to involve pairing Shiki with an older woman leveraging a position of power to take advantage of him so it makes perfect thematic sense to spend some time thinking about Shiki's previous experience with that kind of thing and the ways in which it is and isn't the same. You do a good job grappling with it

You write an excellent Akiha. She's got ice in her veins her verbal lashings are delicious. Your Arihiko is great too

I'm a little confused about the sequence of events that leads to Akiha selecting Noel as Shiki's tutor. Noel sends home a fake report card with arbitrarily lowered grades for Shiki on the first day in the hopes of getting his family to hire a tutor for him and then Akiha attempts to hire one and Noel does something to prevent any other female candidates from applying? But a lot of it seems to rely on Akiha taking actions that Noel has no control over - deciding to hire a tutor at all, agreeing to hire Noel when she’s the only candidate instead of just getting someone from farther away, etc. I’m also quite surprised that Akiha seems to actually like Noel here - I would have thought her flighty unreliable personality would be something Akiha can’t stand

The original Tsukihime mostly used its (consensual) sex scenes as an emotional climax close to the end of a route cementing the main relationship after spending a long time with Shiki and the heroine slowly growing closer. It’s kind of neat reading a route that takes the opposite tack - a ton of sex scenes early on while the characters still know almost nothing about each other. Noel’s a sexually frustrated adult woman hitting on a student, not a teenage girl looking for love so I think this makes a lot of sense for her

If I’m tracking things right Arc should have resurrected, went to look for Shiki, and gotten chased by Vlov’s minions while Shiki stayed at Noel's apartment. Without Shiki to push her into confronting Vlov sooner I imagine she’s going to lay low for a while to build up her strength and then show back up in a few days at full power unimaginably pissed off. I’ve been liking this whole alternate sequence of plot developments a lot and I’m interested in how far it’s going to diverge by the end. It’s very funny that Arc’s initial assumption that her killer is a church agent will turn out actually be true by the time she catches up with him in this timeline

As a sidenote, writing fanfiction for an incomplete canon like this is an interesting writing challenge. TsukiRe sets up a ton of mysteries for the far side and while we can assume answers to some of them (Arach being the spider DAA is obvious) there are others where it's a lot less clear what's going on and any fic is forced to choose between carefully skirting around the plot point and just making up something while acknowledging that in a few years it may be invalidated by the other half of the game. You've done a solid job handling it so far

Noel’s relationship with Ciel is by far the most interesting and complex part of her character and I’m really excited that the next part of the story looks like it’s going to start exploring it. So far Noel has managed to mostly hide the stuff that’s really wrong with her from Shiki but the further in he gets the more he’s going to realize how broken she is

Ending things here with Shiki’s vampirized classmate calling Noel out for her bullshit and getting stabbed by Shiki for it is fun. She’s really speedrunning stuff - it’s been under a week since she got hired as a teacher and she’s already fucked the student she went on an undercover mission to investigate in the first place and dragged him out at night to help her hunt vampires. Zero professionalism. It seems unlikely that she has any real feelings for Shiki either - he’s cute and she’s fond of him but at this point she’s just using him for sex and professional advancement

I’m interested to see where you’re going with all the Nanaya stuff. It’s not quite a full alternate personality but Shiki changes a lot when he swaps into that mode - the narrative voice becomes a lot more masculine, aggressive, and misogynistic, Shiki’s actions become much more aggressive and dominant, etc. You do a good job distinguishing the two. One thing TsukiRe does with this that hasn’t come up here yet is that when Shiki swaps into this mode in combat he starts doing a lot of numerical computation, counting times, speeds, distances, like his brain is automatically calculating the most efficient route to kill

This is less writing feedback and more copyediting but you should do a pass on the earlier parts of the story to edit for tense consistency. You shift back and forth from past tense to present tense a lot (this is actually relatively accurate to how VNs are written in japanese but it sounds wrong and is disorienting in english)

Some minor canon accuracy nitpicks that don’t matter but I’ll bring up anyway: The Tohno mansion is at the top rather than the bottom of a hill, Shiki only returned to the mansion once after the incident and it was so Makihisa could dismiss him, Makihisa’s study and Akiha’s study are separate rooms at opposite ends of the mansion

This is very much a matter of personal preference but the erotic scene that stood out the most to me here was actually the makeout scene at the lockers near the beginning. The tension of being desperately attracted to each other but knowing that you shouldn’t act on it and forcefully tearing yourselves apart is very hot. In comparison the later scenes where they get to actually have sex relieve tension rather than building it and aren’t as impactful to me

As a final note you should put this fic up on Ao3 so that it’s easier to find! That’s the first place most people looking for english language fanfiction will check (tragically the community of people writing english language fanfiction for Tsukihime isn’t very large to begin with but some readers is still better than no readers)

Thank you so much for reading and thank you so much for the feedback!! It brightened up my day!!

I definitely see what you mean about being confused as to why Akiha would choose Noel in retrospect, I don't think I explained that well enough. I might have relied too much on coincidence actually, since it's supposed to be Noel's plan, and the main reason Akiha picked someone from Shiki's school is because of his anemia attack during dinner. It makes sense that Noel could narrow things down on her end, but it makes less sense for her to have been able to get Akiha to pick someone from his school in the first place. Hopefully I can come up with something lolol

And as for Akiha getting along with Noel initially, it's more that Akiha was interested in embarrassing stories about Shiki, which Noel happened to have, and less actually liking her as a person. Their relationship will get really rocky as the story goes on.

It's not much of a spoiler to say Arc does indeed resurrect. I'm gonna do some interesting things with her but she unfortunately won't get too much of the spotlight this time around. Not for a while, anyway.

For writing for incomplete canon, yeah Part 2 is definitely going to have some Fullmetal Alchemist (2004) moments where I'm going to purposefully deviate from canon, and if I feel like it, I may go back and retroactively change things as new entries come out, or maybe I'll just leave it as is and have it be an AU. That's definitely going to apply to Saiki Gotou, but despite there already being some evidence of what Dr. Arach is, I'm actually going to purposefully do something different with her as well.

With Noel, she has the unrealistic and unachievable goal of "a normal life" which, to her, means getting back the old life that she had. Barring that, she at least wants something that resembles what everyone else has, so everything else is just a means to an end. You are entirely correct that she doesn't have real feelings for Shiki, but I think the fact that she took being called stupid 'so' hard because it was coming from Shiki shows that she's 'starting' to see him as more than just a pawn.

Plus, she did ultimately choose to save Shiki by calling Ciel, rather than leaving him to die or risk trying and failing to save him by herself. Noel's arc is going to center around what it even means to have a normal life, which is a big part of why I used that song to close out the chapter. She's realizing at that point just how incompatible she is with the life that she wants for herself.

I really should do like 7 or 8 more once-overs, lol. I had a deadline and I wanted to meet it, but when I started, I was doing past tense just because that's kind of the default, but I eventually realized that doing present tense reads better for Tsukihime, and went back and retroactively changed as much of the past tense stuff as I could find, and even still there were times when I'd accidentally slip back into past tense and be like "wait DAMNIT" and go back and change a bunch. It doesn't surprise me that I missed some, lol. I also notice that I have a really bad habit of repeating words either in the same sentence, or one sentence apart. Like "it's time, now. We're going now." or something like that. very bad habit, lol.

I was wondering what you thought of the extra chapter with Noel at the monastery. I put it there to try and build tension for the eventual reveal of what actually happened when Shiki's memory was blocked out that night, like "oh no did he..." But also I wanted to portray an idea of what it must've been like for Noel growing up after the French incident. There's a throw-away line where Noel thinks about what'll happen if she gets discharged, and that they'll send her back to the chapel, and she says something along the lines of "I can't survive there anymore." So I figured I'd flesh that out to make Noel a bit more obviously sympathetic, instead of having readers infer what her life must have been like based solely off of the things she says.

I also wanted to define Noel's "powers" more. In the source material, it just says she uses "sacraments" but that can be one of two things, either equipment the church gives you, or literally just magecraft that the church conveniently calls "miracles" or "blessings from god" or whatever. I wrestled over whether I wanted Noel to actually be considered a "magus" especially since that whole dichotomy technically works differently in Tsukihime, but afaik it's not as well defined as it is in Fate, so I'm actually leaning more towards Fate lore for how her powers work, and hoping it's not 'that' different from TsukiRE. I mean Melty Blood Type Lumina literally opens every round with "Open Your Magic Circuits" sooo, lol

As for AO3, I'll give it another look, but last I checked they didn't have an option to embed word/pdf files, which might mean I'd have to axe the images, which I'd really rather not. Also I think there was a 50k word limit so I'd also have to split it up into multiple chunks.

But yeah again thanks so much for your feedback!! It means a lot!

[saint-soap]

hi im the girl that obsessively keeps up with new music releases. lemme drop some 2024 stuff

cakes da killa makes insanely hype dance-rap influenced by ballroom & runway music, constantly calls attention to house's origin as black music. this dude is Gay and this music is Gay and it bops unreasonably hard. his new album Black Sheep owns

nia archives is a UK artist blending pop & breakbeat, sorta like if pinkpantheress went harder on both the pop elements and the breakbeat elements. catchy as hell & very straightforward

1010benja is a kansas city weirdo whos music is rap & r&b influenced but takes a much stranger angle at it, my partner described him as "singing like an anime protagonist" and i do get it. reminds me of hearing frank ocean for the first time, it sounds expensive and well put together but also really out there. also his voice kinda sounds like justin timberlake

she popped off earlier this year so idk if she counts as obscure anymore but rachel chinouriri just put out her debut album and it's absolutely killer guitar pop that throws it back to uk stuff from the 2000s

lustsickpuppy is a new york artist who straddles lines like industrial & breakbeat & hard electronic & rap & hardcore, their stuff isnt for the faint of heart but if you love to go stupid & crazy to stuff like machine girl or black dresses or death grips or ministry then you will dig on this for sure. they shouted "dont forget to always kill your rapists" when i saw them live

baltimore synth-funk wizard dude nourished by time just put out a new EP on xl recordings, synth funk has sounded the same for so long that its super cool to hear somebody like them pushing the genre forward in DIY ways. this is dance for ur soul

baby rose is an r&b/soul singer with the smokiest, bluesiest, prettiest voice, it's so unique in the current landscape. the instrumentals for this EP were done by jazz group BADBADNOTGOOD so if you want pretty singing over lush sax and piano this is where to get that

uk rapper john glacier is hit or miss for me but her whispery, ice-cold style is really identifiable and a ton of people i know love her. this new EP is her best work yet imo, lots of very different instrumentals on here

brittany howard, formerly of southern rock band alabama shakes, has her second solo album out and its AMAZING i cant rec this enough. crazy mix of soul & psychedelic rock

like black people are present in every single fucking genre and scene and popularized and straight up created several but people are so fucking hell bent on finding every possible excuse to not engage with their music because its easier than trying to confront their own racism. like okay well if its truly just a disinterest in most rap music then surely you listen to black artists in other genres right? who am i fucking kidding. of course you dont.

[jasmancer]

diving back into reading comics so here are some tips from a former comic store employee:

There is so much more than superhero comics out there. Seriously. The comic book format has been host to groundbreaking autobiographies, subversive fantasy and sci fi, experimental horror, mysteries, romance, barbarian babe booby comics, you name it

If u do really want to get into Marvel or DC superhero comics I'd recommend that you pick a character with a smaller catalogue to get started, and/or find some writers you like and look through their catalogue. A lot of comic writers for the big 2 have great original stuff that gets overlooked. There's also a good chance an author you like has written a comic series!

If you want to read a certain character and don't know where to start just look up (character) reading guide !! a lot of comics Tumblr make them and you'd be surprised just how obscure our blorbos can get.

If you can think of a property, there's a 90% chance a comic of it exists. I have stocked Three Stooges comics before. The industry knows no bounds

If ur USAmerican your library probably has access to the service Hoopla which has tons of comics on it. Seriously you can read them for free in a legitimate way on your phone or computer and all you need is a library card. The app is even set up so you can read panel-by-panel instead of having to zoom way in on text boxes and speech bubbles

KEEP TRACK OF WHAT YOURE READING. I seriously cannot tell you how many times I've started a comic and really enjoyed it only to leave it unfinished because I found another series and got so excited I forgot about the other one. I personally use a spreadsheet I found by looking up a book tracker on Google sheets and modifying it to suit comic books.

If you want to buy comics, I'd recommend you get them in TPB (Trade Paperback) volumes AKA ~Graphic Novels~ instead of individual issues. Typically these will collect a series and each book will be 5-6 issues of a comic apiece, and you can even find some that collect important appearances of certain characters or events that arent necessarily held together by one series. Saves money, time, and space

Good places to get secondhand comics in any format include thriftbooks(dot)com, secondhand book stores with comic bins and graphic novel sections like Half Price Books or Vintage Stock, and mycomicshop(dot)com. Looking through comic bins can be kinda daunting, especially if they're not well organized so I mostly recommend going to the graphic novel shelves instead. If you do want to go digging it's definitely fun though and I'd recommend bringing a buddy so you can show each other weird obscure comics you find and giggle

9/10 times comic books are NOT the investment you think they are. The industry takes advantage of this misconception a lot to try and boost sales that have been falling for decades at this point. I personally wouldn't recommend buying individual issues of series unless they're like a short miniseries or oneshots. I could get into what actually makes a comic book go up in value but this post is already long as hell so I'll just leave it here

Now go forth and read!!!

[classic80sand90smovieloves2]

Spending Halloween with Lydia Deetz would include~

(Not my gif)(Requested by anonymous)

- If there was ever a perfect person to spend Halloween with, that person would undoubtedly be Lydia Deetz. Not only is she just generally strange and unusual but the entirety of the world she lives in, outside of your relatively normal private school, is also strange and unusual. It’s like stepping out of the real world and into a gothic version of wonderland.

- The most haunted and horror filled day of the year is nothing short of fantastic when you spend it at her house. You think a regular haunted house is scary? You’ve got a real one all to yourself, and the occasional ghostly prank you experience during your weekly visits is nothing compared to the way the entire house comes alive on Halloween.

- Haunted hijinks are sort of just something you’ve gotten used to as the green around the gills girlfriend of the resident goth girl in town, but you’ve never really grown tired of them. It’s why the idea of spending Halloween with Lydia is so exciting. You never know whats gonna happen on a normal day: let alone a day that’s already wrought with horror, blood and gore.

- Lydia’s parents are undoubtedly going to some kind of avant-garde Halloween party; and her ghostly parents probably have business elsewhere, so you’ve got the entire house to yourselves: meaning that the two of you get to have a private and supernatural sleepover without any interruptions; at least not ones that aren’t fitting for the holiday.

- Because of this, you take your bikes to school and ride home together, pointing out all the amusing kids costumes you come across while taking in the seasonal atmosphere of your autumnal small town. That bike ride becomes a well loved core memory: one you can remember in detail like the back of your hand.

- If you’re anything like me; or her, this one will occur days before Halloween, but nevertheless: once you get home, you’ll dig through a multitude of boxes up in her attic or the various closets that litter the house, trying on different dated accessories and clothes in an attempt to create whatever idea for a costume you came up with in your head.

- She’s absolutely going to dress up as something pleasantly morbid or really odd and obscure: like Joan of Arc mid execution or some long dead poet that went mad; either that or a really subjective concept that you’ll just have to smile and nod along to while she awkwardly holds out her arms and explains.

- Speaking of oddness: she’s got a ton of weird clothes and makeup/hair tricks that she can let you borrow for the night; unless the two of you want to go as table cloth ghosts in order to avoid the “aren’t you a little too old to be trick or treating” questions. That is, if you are keen on trick or treating.

- If you aren’t interested in gathering candy from your neighbors, then Barbara and Adam will be extremely happy to have you at home so they can watch the two of you pass out candy to all the little kids that come to the door. It’s a lot better than just watching from the window as they take from a bowl on the stoop; even if the two of them only end up sticking around for a little while.

- Although, Barbara and Adam would make pretty great Halloween night chaperones. They’re like your cool aunt and uncle/grandparents who let you do all the fun stuff while acting vaguely protective over you and bashfully showing you their scary ghost tricks. They might get a little worried while watching you go to town on a jack-o-lantern or go out late in the night but they still let you do it because they know better than anybody that you only, truly, live once.

- Before her real parents head off to their party, they probably have dinner with you; or at least tell you that there’s something in the fridge/oven, and while Delia’s cooking doesn’t taste awful and certainly visually fits the horrific aesthetic of Halloween, you might just order a pizza and call it a night.

- You guys definitely go out late at night and walk the streets alone together: enjoying the crisp night air and looking up at all the stars in the sky, occasionally stopping to rate all the different Jack-o-lanterns and decorations that you see.

- Photos are her love language and though she has a strange taste in aesthetics, she’ll still wind up with an entire photo album full of pictures she took during your day; and night, together. Don’t be surprised if she stops you or directs you to do strange things at random throughout your time together: you’ll see the purpose when the film is developed; even if you don’t quite understand the “artistry”.

- Making a pillow fort/nest. Even though you’re undoubtedly in her bedroom; and have access to her large enough bed, you’ll still wind up on the floor; most likely with a bunch of lit candles which are undoubtedly a fire hazard but that’s besides the point.

- Trading candy. Lydia either has a total sweet tooth or despises 90% of sweets; there is no in between, so you spend half the night sliding over different types of treats and smiling at each other between tugs of licorice and caramel strings.

-  Any time you sit down to watch a film with Lydia, she’s bound to pick a horror movie and Halloween night is no exception. Even if you hate scary movies, you appreciate the fact that you can watch her and the way she smiles at the screen instead.

- The two of you definitely fall asleep on the floor after your sugar highs crash and you wake up in the morning with your costumes still on; hair sticking straight out and makeup smudged, and it’s still considered to be one of the best sleeps of your entire lives.

[beardedmrbean]

IIRC you're from California, right? Do have any recommendations for cool and/or fun places to go besides the popular ones (eg the San Francisco bridge)? My aunt is planning to travel through the state and talked about wanting to see the less mainstream touristic stuff, and neither she nor I don't know any Californian personally to ask about that (we're not American, for bigger context) - so I'm asking you cause I remembered you said somewhere you lived in Cali

I'm in the central valley, pretty close to the geographic center of the state.

I'm gonna kinda stick with a similar geographical location if I can.

Less visited but still notable places we've got Hearst Castle that's a cool place to visit William Randolph Hearst one of those more money than God types from the gilded age, Citizen Kane was a thinly veiled dig at the man, beautiful place they do tours and such. His publishing empire still exists so still money coming in, great-granddaughter and I think at least heir is a model, but we don't talk about her mom Patty.

Hopefully I can ramble less now.

Winchester Mystery House is another cool one, widow of the Winchester of firearms fame, not supernatural. Oddly enough the mystery is because of the supernatural, weird thing she couldn't stop building it and it's supposed to be set up so ghosts and spirits get confused. Hallways and stairs to nowhere all kinds of weird stuff.

MC Escher inspired interior design

Here's their twitter

I always like going to the Jelly Belly factory

California Factory - Jelly Belly Fun little tour go see how they make the jelly beans get a little history and they give you a little bag of jelly beans at the end, free tour afaIk.

There's the Charles M. Schulz Museum if you like Snoopy.

@montereybayaquarium world class operation, great place to visit check out their tumblr here. I enjoy their page, also in Monterey is Cannery Row which if anyone is a John Steinbeck fan might be interesting thing, and the pier is always nice I suggest the Clam Chowder in a sourdough bread bowl anytime it's available anywhere.

They have em all over the place, yum soup and then eat the bowl.

Little further down the road is Santa Cruz, there's the boardwalk there touristy spot with fun rides and stuff, but that's a way off from the bay area Monterey might be a bit much.

There's still a bunch of Missions from when Spain was in the process of attempting to colonize the area, most are gone now since they used to have on every 20 miles, still some here and nice for a visit history and such.

There are oodles of different types of museums in San Francisco,

Exploratorium, has a description I like "mad scientists penny arcade" always loved going there as a kid, plenty of adult stuff too

The Walt Disney Family Museum, fairly new one neat place to go

Antique Vibrator Museum because why not add that one

Tons of interesting museums, just google san francisco museums stuff will pop up.

SF also has pier 39, and Ghiradelli Square basically the same place good bread and chocolate there.

Alcatraz does tours too.

Trying to keep it to a closeish geographical area, SF itself is just full of wild neighborhoods with their own history and things to see, their Chinatown is probably the only place I can say I've have fairly authentic Chinese food, very different stuff, tasty.

Just certain neighborhoods to avoid too.

I gotta log off and get wound down for the night, but if you feel like sending me a touch more info on what they like to do and any details about "general location" I could probably be more helpful.

But I hope this is a good start at least, I'm trying for off the beaten path but not wildly obscure, cept maybe the jelly belly place.

[cat-mermaid]

this is how I found out there were a ton of these "exclusive places" nestled all around my home town: google street view

few years ago I was trying to find a road my highschool teacher took us on to the top of a hill over looking my town. I kept trying to find a way but every road that lead up there seemed to terminate and become an "invisible road" that OP mentioned

turns out? All of that up there in the hills had turned into high class ranch getaways and fancy spas, it didn't look like it from satellite view but doing little digging told the truth

And even more wild? So theres this tiny road down below by my old house, one that I literally walked/drove by throughout my childhood, this tiny obscure fork right? All my life I'd just walk past it because it was at the end of a sort of corridor houses at the end of a really rural foresty road, and it was marked but two ancient stone pillars (theres lotsa that stuff around there) with really old wood signs saying keep out and private road right? And theres plenty of those around, so who cares right?

So surprise google street view don't go down it right? But the satellite imagery shows that its just a narrow road that should just take you out to the middle of nowhere? Out away from any towns or amenities? Seemly just a few ranches?

NO. Turns out that furtive pygmy of a fork in the road leads to a bunch of exclusive getaway joints that don't even have websites that normies can access, but I found enough forum posts about people who had driven out there on a lark and found out they were gated rich people ranches out there with security that won't even let you drive up to the gate unless you have authorization

That and posts from people who had gone up there to do plumbing work or electrician stuff and had an escort with them the whole time to make sure they do their job and leave immediately

fucking wild man, these places really are just right around the corner, like the op said, look for the silence!

The secret of the 0.1%

I grew up in Connecticut, not too far from Greenwich and all those super expensive places. And it was really formative; as to how I saw class and economics.

It's back on my mind lately - with politics being what it is.

I used to dumpster dive behind the malls around Greenwich, in the early 2000s, before they installed trash compactors that crush everything inside. And the waste, from designer brands, was insane. All sorts of luxury fashion, spray painted orange or slashed to destroy it, and thrown in the trash. Well, I was a grungy bitch who had paint thinner, and a needle and thread. So I pulled out anything I could find made of real leather. (Because, luxury or not, pleather and fake fur are trash IMO)

Even the designer shit made its way back to the trash; them shoes hurt and I was too young and dumb to know how much they would have sold for.

Anyway - it really painted a picture of a group of people too afraid to let their status indicators fall into the hands of someone poorer. And ironically, made me see designer goods as trashy shit, because I couldn't shake the feeling of "That looks like some crap you'd find in the dumpster" when I see it.

As I got older; I started to see that the predominant way the ultra rich reacted to me was fear and discomfort. Not that I was doing anything wrong (or not tooooo much :) ) - other than being in their spaces with a non-normative look.

Who are you even talking about?

I think the idea of the 1% as the exploitative class is all wrong; it's a misdirection. Look at this graph of the average person's wealth per percentile. (source) (And just to frame this graph; this is just talking about the US, one of the richest countries.)

The top 10%, middle 40%, and bottom 50% all blend together into one line, that is so negligible that none appear to even diverge from the X axis. I'm an engineer and I'm solidly in the middle 40% for reference.

The 1% is the orange line, sliiiightly above. People like successful small business owners, dentists and doctors, etc... They have a chance of landing here.

The purple line is the top 0.1 %, and the 0.01 is magenta. They have the kind of money you can only get by being in the owning class, and gatekeeping access to resources IMO.

And their wealth is increasing exponentially. (hi compound interest. you make it real easy to turn money into more money, if you start with a lot)

Billionaires aren't even plotted on this graph; they're rarer than 0.01% of the population.

It seems like even references to the top 0.1% often get scrubbed from the internet; see this since-deleted article for an example.

So what's the big secret?

Rich people are really fucking scared of us. They know they're the country's biggest minority, and are utterly terrified of the rest of us noticing they exist.

No, not even afraid of us doing anything. Just speaking of their existence or looking at them is enough to freak them the hell out.

The word "Exclusive" is thrown about a lot; and to be blunt about what it really means? You need a certain level of wealth (or highly invasive background checks, for staff) to gain access to an exclusive space.

I think that exclusivity is often seen as snobbishness. But as someone who grew up very close to it, and yet outside of it; I think I saw it for what it was - fear.

I'd often pull up to 'exclusive' towns because fuck it, I like the beach, I like nice things, and I'm creative enough to find a way around quite a few barriers to entry. (Or, lacking creativity, sporty enough to just leg or bike it in to places that were designed to be car-centric and access-controlled.)

And my being working class, and being there terrified them. I grew up in a hunting community, and the biggest secret of the ultra rich? They're used to going unseen. If you do see them, they look at you with the eyes of a prey animal. Real deer-in headlights ass looks.

How do you even find these exclusive places?

Look for a void. Look for the places on Google maps that are unlisted. Look for the areas on Google maps that have no street-view. Their presence is exposed by their silence.

None of this crowd have social media, or at least not under their real names. Their homes aren't registered under their real names, they're registered to trusts or businesses. Often, many layers of them, to obscure their presence.

Look for where you can't easily get to. Look for hostile infrastructure, and look for a way over it. Look at how highways are used to red-line neighborhoods and render areas inaccessible.

Look for where private jets land. Then look for how the 'help' gets to work. Look for golf courses, grab a drink at their bar.

And if you go, and you want to freak out a 0.01%er?

All you gotta do it look at them.

Gonna make this super clear; not advocating for violence or breaking and entering. I am advocating for going to fancy places even if you aren't rich, and enjoying a peaceful day of people watching. It's fun, and it's informative. And credit where credit's due; the food slaps.