#(and then once i hook you in via this THEN I can spring the trap of save data also streams a dnd game which is popping OFF rn)

[bookshelfpassageway]

I am once again asking people to consider the Ace Attorney playthrough by Save Data Team

Featuring: an actual lawyer, a group of 3 friends who genuinely like the game/story and at least one is playing blind, so many running jokes, my new headcanon Miles Edgeworth voice, unhinged questions from Ohio's bar exams, genuine interest in the context of the original Japanese version, increasingly absurd stream funding goals, canon Narumitsu, and much more

it starts off like a standard "that's not how law works!" series but do not be fooled. It's very good

Here's a fun highlight reel comp, or, this one from Case 5/Rise From the Ashes to see the gang in full swing of things

[shemakesmusic-uk]

Alt-pop artist Caroline Romano shares the official music video for her new single, 'PDA of the Mainstream.' 'PDA of the Mainstream' is an anthemic, punk-influenced pop number that gives the middle finger to the internet and all its toxicity. For the video, Caroline worked with director Justin Key to develop a visual concept that captures the familiar feelings of chaos, anger, joy, entertainment and excess that the internet invokes in all of us. “The music video for ‘PDA of the Mainstream’ was my chance to yell directly at the internet,” Caroline says. “I wanted to visually create my own little version of the internet and how I see it, and I think I did that. There’s kittens and confetti and destruction, along with a whole lot of screaming. If that’s not representative of applications and the digital age, I don’t know what is. If I can’t beat it, I figured I might as well smash it with a hammer.”

Following the release of her recent single 'Do This To Me', Manchester-via-Italy singer, songwriter and guitarist Julia Bardo has shared new single and video 'No Feeling', taken from her eagerly awaited debut album Bauhaus, L’Appartamento released on September 10 via Wichita Recordings. 'No Feeling' is a dreamy alt pop song, which builds with a teasing guitar riff to a soaring melodic chorus of earnest and relatable lyrics about the everyday need to do things you don’t want to do and having ‘no feeling’ for them. The video, directed by Georgie Brown, features Julia role-playing different life tasks interspersed with a neon-tinged glam live performance. Julia says; “‘No Feeling’ is about doing things just because you exist, not because you want to actually do them. Because we are trapped in a cycle of rules in society; you must have a job, go out, drink, talk to people, be sociable, believe in something, and do what other people do in order to survive in the world. Sometimes even the most mundane tasks seem too much to handle. For the video, I wanted to portray this idea and set the scene in a white, sterile space, showing how these actions can make us feel stuck in an endless loop of time - going through the same motions every day without feelings or emotions, and how that can build and eventually become out of control."

Nightlife is finally beginning to shine again — especially in New York City where the industry is life blood — and Ariana and the Rose wants to spotlight all the colorful personalities that are bringing everything back, post-lockdown. The synth-pop artist's new single, 'Every Body,' is an electric invitation to the dance floor, recruiting a host of iconic faces for its official music video: Amanda Lepore, Kandy Muse, Cakes Da Killa, CT Hedden, Ryan Burke, Merlot, Rify Royalty and way more. Because "this dance floor is for every body," as she sings, almost like a call to action. "Feel your body on my body." "I wanted to highlight the incredible people and the spirit of the NYC nightlife and LGBTQ+ communities," Ariana says. "Clubs and nightlife have been a home for people who otherwise felt displaced for decades. It is about a chosen family and a sense of community rather than an individual. These are the places that have been a home for me, personally and professionally." In early spring 2020, Ariana had an entire album with tracks she'd planned to release throughout the summer, but COVID forced her to start from scratch and create a body of work that felt more reflective of that bizarre moment in time. The artist then wrote music she dreamt of hearing once the world eventually reopened, capturing "the bigger picture of what the collective feeling was," she says. 'Every Body' is the first official taste of that period, with a relentless hook and powerhouse production that sounds like it could've been conceived while On Top! at The Standard, Meatpacking. Euphoric and aggressive, her single embodies the energy of a year spent bottled up inside, fantasizing about sweating next to strangers and freeing your mind until sunrise. "I want to be the kind of artist who creates space for other people," Ariana says. "Space to connect, either with other people or with themselves, space to feel seen, space to feel uninhibited and to feel safe to do all of those things. 'Every Body' is a mission statement for my project and for the audience to get lost in. No matter who you are, how you identify or where you're from, my musical world and my shows are for everyone to lose or find themselves in." Watch the 'Every Body' music video for some serious "dance music catharsis," filmed at Brooklyn's House of Yes and directed by the Emmy-winning Jason Sherwood. [via Paper]

After introducing her new solo project Flossing with last month’s debut single ‘Switch’, Bodega’s Heather Elle is now sharing her latest Flossing single ‘Trap’. Inspired by the “double binds of both technology and gender”, she notes, “Humanity’s fear of anti-mattering mixed with surveillance capitalism’s psychological warfare is quite the dirty martini to sip on every day.” Accompanied by a video directed by Brooklyn video artist Ali Yildiz of Analog Nation who, during the lockdown, began experimenting with circuit-bent AV gear, video synthesizers, CCTV and VHS cameras, and televisions. [via DIY]

BXB LOVE — the nom de plume of Canadian-born, Los Angeles-based singer, songwriter and artist Natasha Pheko — shares the official music video for her second single, 'IGNORANCE SONG'. 'IGNORANCE SONG' is a bold, gritty alt-rock number that celebrates the shedding of one’s prescribed labels in a world that encourages us to define ourselves before fully understand who we are or all that we can be. Landing somewhere between telling a story and visually expressing a vibe, the 'IGNORANCE SONG' music video represents LOVE’s experience of bursting out of the constructs she had created for herself. Finding herself wandering the streets of LA, wanted by the constructs she had escaped, LOVE throws a big F*CK YOU to the powers that be as she refuses to succumb to the fear that would encourage her to hide, blend in, or run. Instead, we see LOVE displaying an uninhibited expression of play, rebellion, and freedom. “One thing that I’ve loved about creating and sharing this project thus far is that it's allowed me to tap into dreams, ideas, and modes of creative play that I hadn’t really connected with since I was a kid. Making this music video was literally an opportunity for me to live out part of my childhood rockstar fantasies” LOVE says. “Smashing shit, shouting into the camera, riding in the back of a sick car with beautiful people, jumping around in the sunset, guitar solos, clothes that made me feel like a bad ass… I mean…. come on! It was a blast!”

Indigo De Souza shares a joyous video for 'Hold U', the new single and a stand-out moment from her much-anticipated upcoming album Any Shape You Take. Of the song and video, De Souza says: "I wanted to write about a really simple kind of love that isn’t necessarily romantic, but that is just about holding space for other people to fully express themselves and to feel celebrated. Just simply seeing someone in their humanity and loving them. We are constantly evolving and we only truly have space to process our lives openly if we feel safe and are encouraged to love ourselves and celebrate our bodies. I am really blessed with the sense of community that I have in my life, and I wanted to highlight that in this video. Community is the purest kind of magic and can heal so much trauma and pain. We all just want to feel truly held by the people around us!"

A lush, swirling guitar tune that gently encourages listeners to face their unconscious bias, Canadian duo Softcult have shared their latest single ‘Spit It Out’. “The song is about rejecting harmful ideologies that we’ve come to accept as normal, even though they perpetuate our own oppression," the band say. "Most people understand that misogyny, sexism, racism, etc are wrong, but don’t often notice when it occurs in our every day lives, in the media, or how we’ve been conditioned to perceive the world. We can even unknowingly become part of the problem because we’ve internalized these ways of thinking. We wrote the song about resisting societal standards which only serve to benefit those that hold power over others. By simply refusing to accept these ideologies, we can weaken the pillars in our society that allow oppression and injustice. It all starts with questioning them in the first place, and then deciding that we aren’t going to continue to contribute to them.” [via Get In Her Ears]

Lazy days in the park, sun-soaked vacays and bike rides around the city: summer is in full effect and we’re living for it. The only thing missing is that perfect soundtrack and singer Devon Again is putting in a strong bid. Dropping her new single 'SUBURBIA', the singer serves up a warming single that captures the essence of summer. Fusing R&B sensibilities with ethereal vocals, the singer creates a kaleidoscopic soundscape filled with bright piano chords and glittering synths. “I wish there was some spicy back story to this song,” the singer candidly said, “But the chorus was really just a shower thought I had upon some brief reflection of a crush I had on a girl a couple years back who was very much not available. The song loosely follows me and my hypothetical suburban lover through our affair. The main theme throughout the song is being upset that she doesn’t love me the way she loves her husband. I want to be the person she comes home to, but instead I go directly to her home and leave when she’s done with me.” [via Wonderland]

Alternative agitator DeathbyRomy returns with the explosive 'Day I Die,' her first new single of 2021. The Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter combines undeniable hooks, brash production, metal riffs, and double-kick pummel on the track, which comes with a mind-melting music video courtesy of director Pix3lface. An anthem for the terminally lovesick, 'Day I Die' finds DeathbyRomy (born Romy Flores) deep in the grips of obsession. “Take all of me, make me feel again,” she laments. “You got something sick and I know I’ll always want it to the day I die.” That’s when the gnarled guitars come crashing in and the song takes a crushing turn. Jarring, catchy, and raw, 'Day I Die' captures an artist already known for pushing boundaries breaking even more new ground. “This song is about my relationship with life, death, and love. ‘Day I Die’ at its core is a love song. Love isn’t soft and mushy to me, it’s hard as fuck. Love is god. It’s vibrant and addicting. Love is what fuels me to do all I do,” says DeathbyRomy.

Viktoria Modesta makes a comeback after five years away from music, perhaps after some well-deserved time in this planet's outer orbit. The icy-blonde bionic superstar’s new single, 'One With The Ray of Light' debuted July 9, and now is joined by the release of an accompanying art film. OWTROL will launch Modesta’s venture into a new chapter that puts art at the core and compromises nothing. From avatars to techno influences, the artist is looking to create a world of her own. The upcoming record, Moksha, was written alongside Grammy winner Janet Sewell and Madeaux, compared to past works, details a more personal narrative into Modesta’s unique life. Coming at this hybrid project with a more hands-on approach, Viktoria has edited, location scouted and styled the film accompanying her single. [via Flaunt]

Alicia Walter has unveiled another track from their forthcoming album I Am Alicia. The Prince-inspired 'Suit Yourself' comes with a music video directed by Falyn Huang. The artist said this about the new song/visual: “'Suit Yourself' is a motivational anthem empowering myself to follow my dreams and do what I want to do in life, “cause babe, this ain’t that long of a ride.” I'm asking myself to stop worrying about what everybody else thinks or about what’s “right,” and to show up for myself and chase my wildest dreams — because the universe might just deliver! In the video, we see me at home, getting up out of bed and becoming who I want to be. We watch as “pretend” — playing dress-up with different personas and careers, dreaming up what I could be —becomes reality, me stepping into my fullest potential (and, *suitably,* a glam power jumpsuit!).” [via mp3 and npcs]

Comprising Dolorès and Freddy Van Ballast, LETTEN 94 is a Swiss coldwave duo that takes this mental image of Letten, and more widely of Europe in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, as a starting point to try to create electronic music which is sometimes aggressive and syncopated, sometimes dark and mysterious. The band has dropped new single, 'Empty Landscapes' alongside a captivating music video, directed by Normotone. Subliminally immersive and dangerously alluring, 'Empty Landscapes' is driven by bleak bouncing and throbbing bassline along with stark, lashing beats relentlessly penetrating the droning dank, dream-like mist stabbed by piercing, heart-wrenching guitar gleams, ominous resonant baritone strains and icy sweeps of evocative winding, glaring synths, to painfully reverberate with poignant intensity around powerful and bewitching female vocals, that ebb and flow betwixt cold, detached exhalations and passionate, aching longings of agony and ecstasy, whilst descending breathlessly into the soft distant echo of male whisperings, to reveal an abandon train stop where fantasies are fulfilled. Cinematic visuals build tension and intrigue around an inter-dimensional romantic interlude. A fragmented storyline dissects a mysterious couples physical connection with split-screen segments drawing isolation from both a barren, panoramic countryside and a dim-lit noir-ish lounge setting. Raindrops blur alternate dream states merging, fantasy and reality behind smoky rooms, hypnotic imagery, unfocused lens frames, and suggestive reflections to form a magnetic perception of disassociation. Shadows ebb and flow under swaying light angles to capture hints of doubt from the intense solo eye contact leading into a strange metaphysical reunion, left wandering in the hidden sands of lost time. [via WL//WH]

London-based artist Alewya has released her new track 'Spirit_X', a mesmerising track indebted to the sounds and communal embrace of the rave. Drawing from the restless rhythms of drum and bass, 'Spirit_X' moves at high speed, with Alewya’s vocals echoing the emotions of a heady night. Alewya says on 'Spirit_X': “I know that the rave can be utilized as ritual and ceremony to transform, uplift and energize a person. I love giving visceral experiences. I love drum and bass for that specific reason. ‘Spirit_X’ encompasses all of the above in my way.” [via FEMMusic]

Sneaker Pimps have shared the video for 'Fighter,' the lead single from Squaring the Circle, their first album in nearly 20 years. The video was directed by the band's own Chris Corner and shot near his studio in Pioneertown, CA and features Janine from IAMX wrapped in a gimp suit and subjected to a downpour of colorful rubber balls. It's a striking video.“We live in a world of mental illness where we are surrounded by profound idiocy and overload," says Corner "'Fighter' is an ode to a struggle to tune out, gain strength and breakthrough. In the video, the character’s fight is ridiculous, there is no other. In the grip of the darkest depression and anxiety the opponent is her own mind. She locks herself in her ring, painting a circle and shrinking her world even further. Freeze, flight, or fight. Self fulfilling prophecies. She's wrapped in a gimp suit because she’s a slave to her own negative narratives. Trapped by vices and triggered by the most innocuous objects. In this world, bouncing balls and balloons become existential threats. But there’s also a faint light of hope. She’s dancing in the face of the full catastrophe of life. She will prevail, she always has. Round 2.” Corner goes on to say, "I shot the video in anamorphic to give it a filmic stretched and otherworldly feel. Soft flares and subtle distortions to add distance, keeping us as the viewer outside of the fighter’s world. My crew spent weeks painting and repainting the set to find just the right queasy color. Repeatedly repacking hundreds of bouncing balls and balloons for shot after shot. Everything you see is on camera. Simple but time consuming. Janine from IAMX was willing to jump into the gimp suit and suffer in extreme desert heat. If you look close you’ll see real sweat dripping down the arms. Everybody worked like dogs for the love of it, this was the ultimate no ego video. Those people are my heroes.” [via Brooklyn Vegan]

Remi Wolf returns with bright, vibrant new single 'Liquor Store'. Laying out her stall with ultra-catchy introductory statement 'Liz' earlier this year, the California native is aiming to release her debut album this Autumn. New single 'Liquor Store' is an explosion of colour, a truly larger-than-life release that actually taps into an extremely personal topic. Dealing with sobriety, 'Liquor Store' is about "shedding a skin", as she puts it. Remi explains: "It's about my journey with sobriety, which has been a major life shift for me over the last year. At the end of 2020, after six months away from the studio, I had a crazy explosive week where all these feelings came pouring out of me — 'Liquor Store' captures a lot of them. It’s my first baby of the bunch and I hope you love it." The video is truly exceptional, a furry world of day-glo tones that has a cartoonish feel. [via Clash]

Cape Town’s HONEYMOAN have just shared the second single from their upcoming Palace EP. ‘False Idols’ combines the best elements from their multi-genre influences and comes with an equally fun music video. Palace arrives August 18. ‘False Idols’ is another infectious offering from HONEYMOAN, beginning with vocals and drums taking centre stage for maximum impact. Later, the song bursts into full colour with electronic pop elements and triumphant guitars. The music video has an 80s sitcom vibe that matches the energy of ‘False Idols’ perfectly. Vocalist Alison spoke about the new single: "'False Idols' is a triumphant story of success, a message to anyone to ever said you couldn’t do it, you were too young, too old, too scared, too whatever but you did it anyway and look at you now" [via Gigwise]

Alt-pop duo Marian Hill is gearing up for something exciting with the release of their newest single 'omg.' 'omg' arrives after June’s 'oOo that’s my type,' their cool girl anthem in collaboration with Yung Baby Tate. The new single is a throwback to the duo’s jazz-injected sound featuring bubbly saxophones with their own trap flair. The chorus bursts into whistles and hi-hats as Gongol sings “Sashay, I’m wearing nothing but my lingerie / It’s all I’ve got til I do laundry,” as a tongue-in-cheek reflection of their raunchy hits. The song arrives alongside a visual which features Gongol writhing around in bed with lingerie on and exploring her home before settling in with an extensive cardboard cutout collection of famous pop stars, including one of Lloyd himself. The video hints at a forthcoming album, although details have not been released yet. ”’omg’ is the first song we’ve ever written that makes us laugh,” share the duo in a statement. “We discovered such a fun zany stir-crazy energy with it, and had so much fun taking the usual sexy Marian Hill vibe to its comedic extreme. As soon as we wrote the song we saw the whole video – the lyrics are basically a script for it.” [via Paste Magazine]

Alessia Cara acts out a silly noir melodrama in the new music video for her recent single, 'Shapeshifter.' The video was directed by Tusk, and in it, Cara plays all the main roles: The jilted wife with the bottomless martini glass, the cheating husband, the clumsy private eye, the gardener and the maid. The clip mainly follows the private eye as he tries to figure out who the husband’s secret lover is, and the mystery ends with a very unexpected and surreal twist, when the investigator catches the husband smooching a figure with a sheep’s head. After stumbling into the pool, however, the PI appears to wake up, as if from a dream, in an ocean far away. [via Rolling Stone]

Anne-Marie thinks Little Mix made 'Kiss My (Uh-Oh)' sound "10 times better" than it did as a solo track. The 30-year-old star has teamed up with the 'Shout Out To My Ex' hitmakers on her latest song, and she was delighted to finally get round to collaborating. She told the Daily Star newspaper's Wired column: "I feel like so many people have been wanting that collaboration. We have actually been talking about it for so long, we sent each other a few songs every now and again, but they never felt quite right. Then I was doing the tracklisting for my album, 'Kiss My (Uh-Oh)' was originally a solo song but I thought they would sound so good on this so I sent it to Leigh-Anne and she said, 'We love it, we are going to vocal it', and made it sounds 10 times better. So now it's a single thanks to them." Anne-Marie also heaped praise on the trio for their work on the music video, not least because Leigh-Anne and Perrie are both pregnant. She added: "Everyone shines and their ad-libs at the end are insane, they kill it. They are very powerful people. In the video they were pregnant, it was quite inspiring to see. I would just be at home eating pizza, so good for them going through it." [via Music News]

Amsterdam-based indie-pop singer-songwriter Sophie van Hasselt has released her single 'EaT mY bRaiN'. This is the first single of her upcoming debut-EP called Eat My Brain which will be released in February next year. This EP is an introduction to different themes that are typical for a girl in her twenties. From layered vocals sounding like inner conversations to bouncing baselines, pulsating pads and quirky guitars playing in the background. Sophie is an interdisciplinary artist who not only creates music, but also works in fashion photography and videography. The combination of these three expertises make her a unique creative mind. Sophie uses her DIY ethic and the 'reality shifting' aspect to remind us that life is as how you imagine it. Her music sounds like the 'Swinging Sixties' and a combination of artists such as Brigitte Bardot, Lily Allen and Beach Boy's 'Smiley Smile'. In 'EaT mY bRaiN' Sophie van Hasselt, a modern flower-child, opens the doors to her highly imaginative world - filled with songs to play, where she lives in day-dreams and quite figuratively 'eats her own brain'. [via Front View]

[allycryz]

Thancred x Nerys x Haurchefant for either Spring Prompt 4 or Spicy Prompt 10

I went with Spicy Prompt 10 (Praise Kink). For some background context the loose timeline right now is

Lakeland Invasion -> Emissary Haurchefant goes in disguise to infiltrate Eulmore as a soldier -> Amh Araeng- -> Thancred and Nerys get back together -> Than and Nerys hook up with Emet ->  Save Eulmore/Haurchefant -> Reunion Sex with Haurche turns into Thancred and Haurche Hooking Up for First Time

This is set after that while they work on the Ladder

Rated E, not for Everyone, Haurchefant gets praised and pampered

"Early tomorrow," says Thancred, wiping a forearm over his brow. His coat is a long abandoned pile on the lumber. "Should be ready to go by then, I think."

"Well ahead of schedule then." Nerys sits on the ground, propping her back against said lumber. They'd made her rest during the morning but she had made up for it during the afternoon. 

Better to have the distraction of work while she processed her earlier conversation with Emet-Selch.

"Come sit." She curls a finger at him. He looks...magnificent in the tight black shirt, his muscled arms shown to advantage. More than one of the laborers gives him an appreciative glance. 

"If I sit, I might not stand." He grins. "Did you see everything Chai-Nuzz had me haul around today?"

"Oh come now, you've had far more taxing days."

"After you and Haurchefant wore me out two days and nights in a row?" His grin grows bigger now and she can't help but return it.

She had imagined of course–what it might be like to have them both. Especially after she and Thancred reconciled. But she hadn't dared hope the two men would fit together as well as they did.

"So what was everything we did up until then? A warmup?"

"Well...Haurchefant is a wellspring of energy. Speaking of..."

The man himself strides towards them, clad in the golden armor bestowed upon him when he became the Crystarium's Emissary. There are appreciative glances for him too, but also double-takes.

There was a fairly recent addition in Eulmore; one of the soldiers who defected from the Crystarium after Vauthry's attack on Lakeland. A tall, black-haired, friendly fellow named Edmont Grey.

The glamour on his features is gone but there were enough similarities between the two handsome profiles. Those who didn't know must wonder if this man is related to the affable soldier. 

"I hoped I might find you together," he says. "Am I allowed to steal you away yet?"

"We were about to discuss that," says Nerys. "Thancred worries he cannot keep up with you, my lord."

Thancred nudges her arm with the toe of his boot. "Don't go spreading lies, sweetheart."

"If anything it should be the reverse. You two have been at work on the ladder all day while I have been spent the past hours in meetings or traveling via Amaro and Aetheryte." Haurchefant steps closer to Thancred, running a hand down the front of the tight black material. "Never fear, where I'm taking you has all the amenities to unwind."

Thancred watches the path of the gauntleted fingers as they stroke over his midriff. "And where is that?" 

"You'll see." Haurchefant turns to Nerys, extending a hand. She takes it and finds herself hauled up, tugged against his chest to receive a soft kiss. "Hello."

"Hello." She slips her arms about his neck, shivering as Thancred presses a hand to her lower back. "You may take us away, my lord. Alphi will tell the others where we have gone."

"Hm?" Haurchefant glances around, till he spots what Nerys had a few moments ago: Alphi trying not to get flustered seeing three of his comrades positioned as they were. He is a good ten yalms away and Haurchefant lifts a hand to wave emphatically. "Hello Alphinaud! I shall be borrowing these two, take care of the others!"

"Right," the youth calls back. Looking pointedly at their faces and not their hands. "Good evening!"

"When I was his age," Haurchefant says to the other two. "It had stopped surprising me when the knights retired to a single bunk, two or three at a time. We squires just made ourselves scarce for the evening."

"He admires you a great deal," says Nerys. "Maybe that's part of it."

"And you. And Thancred, of course."

"Mm, do not try to flatter me. That boy saw me at all my absolute worst and at best thinks of me as a wayward brother." Thancred sighs. "At least he doesnt delight in spilling about my past like Urianger and Alisaie."

"Sweet Urianger is an imp," says Haurchefant. "However, he did help me secure our destination. Please hold on tight."

They do and it is no hardship to embrace thus. Haurchefant wraps them in teleportation magicks, whirling them away from Kholusia…

...and to the colorful wilds of Il Mheg. They stand before a little cottage Nerys recognizes from her hunting ventures. Abandoned, not all that far from Lydha Lran. Or–it had been abandoned but looks freshly cleaned and aired out. 

Haurchefant holds up a hand and opens the door. "The game was that if they did not touch anything, I would give them something fun and sugary."

"And we did not!" A voice giggles above them. Three pixies hover above, watching expectantly. 

"Yes, it look quite well looked after.." He produces a handful of colorful paper straws sealed at both ends. "Tear off whichever end you like and you can eat the treat inside."

"...Haurche," Thancred says, eyes gleaming with mirth. "Are those-"

"We thank you Haurchefant," one of the pixies cooes. "It is too bad you won't play with us to-day…"

"Ah, but another day I should like to. Hide and seek the next time I am here?"

They nod, flying away with a burst of magic. None too soon because Thancred has to duck into the house and explode with laughter. The sound is like a balm to Nerys' heart–it has been too long since he made a sound of pure and utter delight like that. 

"Well," Haurcefant says, grinning. "There must be a reason the Crystarium merchants call it that. The fae love sugar."

"Good gods, Haurchafant," Thancred leans against the small dining table for support. Careful not to muss the place settings though it is a very near thing.

"It was a good idea," Nerys says, stifling her giggle. "It's no tricking them into making your tea but…"

“I prefer honest bribery with pixie sticks rather than elaborate ruses." Haurchefant grips her hand, urging her to take one of the chairs. The ache is getting worse the past few days, the churning of the light in her belly. So she doesn't protest. 

He steps over to a small ice chest and gathers up items for the table--cheese, cold cuts, fruit, a bottle of sweet Kholusian white. Butter to go with the loaf of bread he takes from a cabinet. "I...may have had a bell or two prior to bring things here, after my meetings."

"Look at that." Thancred steps over to him, laying an almost tentative hand on his arm. "You're a good man, Haurche."

Haurchefant beams under the compliment and the touch. Nerys watches the pull between them in silence, the hesitation before Thancred curls a hand in his hair and tugs him down. Kisses him soft and sweet, his murmur barely audible. "Very good."

She knows well the shiver that goes through Haurchefant. Nerys stands, needing a moment of support from the chair before walking over to them. Burying her hands in the soft fabric of Haurchefant's blue cape. "This was lovely of you, finding a private place and preparing this food for us."

"Truly, it is the least I might do." Haurchefant turns his head towards her. "And all I did was cut up some of the offerings."

"Still." Nerys finds the clasp of his cloak and removes the bilious garment. She peers over his shoulder at Thancred who gives her a minute nod. "Its exactly what we needed."

"Perfect." Thancred looks around the small space–the kitchenette, the table, and the largish bed in the corner. They'll have to huddle but that is fine. His gaze returns to Haurche and he smirks a little. "You're perfect."

"I know what you two are doing," Haurchefant says in a sing-song way. He moves his arms to let Thancred remove his cuirass. Sighs when his shoulders are bare and Nerys rubs soothing fingers into his shoulders.

"But it's working," she sing-songs back. "Let us take care of you, please."

"My love…" He turns in the circle of their arms, pressing his palms against her cheeks. His bright eyes bore into her and there is no hiding from him. There never is. "You need care as well I think."

"I do," she admits. "It will make me feel good to do this."

"And with that you have trapped me," he presses his forehead to hers. "As you take care of me, please let our Thancred also take care of you."

Our Thancred. Her heart flutters at that and she kisses him, her gratitude and joy permeating the contact.

Haurchefant's armor disappears piece by piece until he is pressed between them, cloth the only barrier left. Thancred tugs his lips down, dropping praise against his ear. "You're gorgeous in the armor and even better like this. And those hands-"

Those hands slide over Thancred who groans in appreciation. The three of them move in a tangle to the bed. Nerys feels hands on her own hips and chest, though it’s hard to tell at first who is touching what. Only that they're petting her, peeling off her leathers and tugging loosely at her short hair. 

She finds Haurchefant's ear and sucks lightly at the tip. "Do you know how beautiful you look right now? You almost never blush but…"

At that, the faint pink across Haurchefant's cheek grows. He sighs, turning his body to face hers and rubbing her hip. "This is the effect you have on me, beloved."

"Not just her, I hope." Thancred slips his arms about him from behind.

"Not just her. You're an attractive man, Thancred."

"Indecently so." Nerys adds. "He could bat those eyelashes at a king and receive half a kingdom."

"You forget, they called me Thancred of the Silver Tongue when I was a young and wild bard." That same tongue traces Haurchefant's jaw. "I am more than a...what did you say once? Infuriatingly handsome face?"

Nerys grins. "Alright then, please demonstrate how good you are with that silver miracle."

"Verbally or..." He slides his tongue into Haurchefant's mouth, kissing him into a pliant puddle of limbs. They're dazzling together–Thancred half-propped over the other man, hand curled about the knight' cheek. He directs Haurchefant's limbs upward, above his head. "Good boy."

Haurchefant groans. "What wickedness do you have planned for me?"

"No plan, moving as we are inspired to." Thancred presses a hand over his chest, kneading Haurchefant's pectoral through his shirt. "You're so beautiful Haurche, you drive a man wild. Whenever I look at you I think seven hells, how can we mortals be so lucky."

"Ha-I thought you were the pretty one," Haurchefant gasps, hands flexing above his head. "There-keep rubbing right there."

Nerys cannot hold herself back anymore, adding her hand to the ministrations. Slipping it beneath his shirt to cup the other pec, circle the nipple with her thumb. He starts to jerk forward, to reach for her-and then keeps his hands where they are above his head.

"You're so obedient for us," she says, kissing the underside of his jaw. "So good and sweet "

He sighs. "I would do anything for you."

"We know." Her lips travel to the column of his throat. The words fumble a little--Thancred and Haurchefant are good at reciting a litany of praises. She doesn't talk quite as much during.

As if he senses her doubts, Thancred grins at her and picks up where she leaves off. "How lucky we are, to have someone this giving and beautiful in our bed. Will you do us a favor, lovely one? Will you let us suck your cock?"

Haurchefant groans like a man wounded. "Fury, you don't even have to ask-"

"Of course we do." Their hands are quick at Haurchefant's laces, shoving down the supple leather leggings and the smalls all at once. They draw him out: already hard and in need of their succor. 

"You look amazing like this," Nerys says. "So still and good, and needing us to take care of you. And one of the prettiest cocks I've ever seen."

"Agree," says Thancred. "And we've both seen enough to know. Yours is by far one of the best."

Haurchefant groans, disobeying so that he might cover his eyes with a forearm. "You two will destroy me before I even feel your mouths on me."

"Look at us," Nerys begs and he lifts the arm. His lips are parted, his cheeks flushed, his eyes blown wide with desire. "There. I want your eyes on us, and not just because they're exquisite."

Thancred nods his approval at that. "And promise to be vocal, so we know when we're doing a good job."

"You have my vow."

"Good boy." Thancred licks a stripe along one side of the shaft and Nerys the other, meeting in an open mouthed kiss at the head. Haurchefant obliges them with a moan and some very improper Ishgardian curses. "Nerys, suckle him."

She obeys without hesitation, drawing the swollen head into her mouth. A gentle but insistent hand cups the back of her neck, lips brush her cheek and whisper, "Good girl."

Nerys shivers. If she isn't careful, Thancred will have her as overwhelmed as Haurchefant is.

The pressure increases until she takes more of Haurchefant, savoring him with the flat of her tongue even as her jaw aches and he slides further into her throat. She watches as Thancred changes his angle, drawing the heavy sac into his mouth while she bobs up and down the shaft.

Haurchefant gasps, hands once again reaching for them before he returns them above his head. Thancred draws himself up and murmurs something into his ear-too quiet for Nerys to parse but Haurche’s cock twitches in her mouth with each syllable. 

She looks up and can see Haurchefant's eyes shut tight, his breathing growing faster. Nerys takes a shallow breath through her nose and takes him deeper. It is never an easy feat, big as he is, but she wants this for her dear knight. 

Haurchefant gasps, pressing his face into Thancred's shoulder. The words become louder, probably for her benefit.

"Look how she takes you, big boy that you are. That's how much she wants to make you feel good. You deserve to feel good-"

"Thancred," Haurchefant pants. "Nerys, I don’t have much control left-"

"Yes you do. We know you do." Thancred slides back down, tugging Nerys away with gentle hands. Putting his own mouth upon Haurchefant's straining cock.

"There you go," Nerys says, cupping his sack with gentle fingers before subtly increasing the pressure. "Our lovely knight has so much control left."

"Yours," Haurchefant sobs. "Yours, I'm yours-"

"Ours," she hums, lips pressing to the base of his shaft where neither of them can manage to swallow. "Our wonderful, perfect Haurche."

His back arches and she can feel the control shaking through him, the strain to hold back and be good for them. 

Nerys' eyes meet Thancred. He pulls off with a gentle pop and their twined hands replace their mouths, their mouths hover close to the head.

"Come for us," Thancred says, drawing their hands quick over the spit-slicked cock. "We need you."

"Please," says Nerys and it seems to be the last straw for Haurchefant, who comes with a desperate yell. Painting their faces, their open mouths. He babbles through it–declarations of love and need that twine with the other two's fervent praise.

He sags into the mattress, as if it might cocoon him. Tugs at their hair and arms until they rise to meet him with slow, tender kisses. 

"You did so good," she tells him and he smiles.

"So did you. And you, dear Thancred. Silver tongue indeed."

"He's very good with it." Nerys says, curling against her love. And then seeing the mischievous glint in his eye. Uh oh.

"Oh really?" Haurchefant smirks. "I think I need to see it again, on a willing test subject. Do you volunteer?"

Her own need pulses between her legs and she nods. Swallows. "Yes, I think I do."

"Good girl," says Thancred, as he crawls over to her, a leg swinging over her waist. "Shall we?"

[jq37]

The Report Card – Fantasy High Sophomore Year Ep 13

What the Hell?

Hey y’all. We’re back with a very eventful episode of Fantasy High--both from a plot an RP perspective--so let’s not waste any time getting into it. As you remember from last week, the kids are split up doing their various investigative activities. The first group we’re gonna check back in with are the Owlbears--Gorgug, Fabian, Ragh, and the Hangman--who are with the gnomish tinkerers.

Gorgug talks to the head gnome dude (Krumpkin in case I didn’t mention before) and asks to have his shoes loaded up with springs, which he is happy to do. Lou--via an offhanded comment that he absolutely commits to--establishes that Fabian has extremely small feet which is not plot relevant but I felt like I needed to mention. While they’re waiting for the shoes to be done, Krumpkin brings in a logbook so they can see what Killian--the elf working for Arianwyn--bought. It was a lot of stuff used in making magical candles and 2 blocks of Dusk Moss Incense. Dusk Moss is a hallucinogenic moss that people use recreationally to have sort of lucid dreams while awake. Gorgug knows that some kids in school do Dusk Moss but he’s never heard of it being in incense form before. He decides to buy everything that Killian did to be safe--including the drugs which he and Fabian are (hilariously) very flustered about.  

The gnomes give Gorgug his upgraded shoes and, in return, they just want to check out his crystal. Easy trade. He explains to them how the crystal works and Gorgug realizes, “Hey. I’m surrounded by people who know how to build stuff.” Maybe they can help with making a cell tower. They think they might be able to do it but they’d need access to more raw materials. Either that or access to a satellite. Gorgug (with the help of Fabian’s Bardic) suddenly remembers: while he was in jail the year before his parents actually launched a satellite into space! And a bunch of the schematics and stuff for it are in the Van. They go to get it while we flash over to see how the Nerd Squad is doing. 

They’re still casing the room Arianwyn was staying in at the Owl and the Harp. Adaine finds non-detection runes her mom put up to keep Falinel from finding her. She also can tell that two rituals happened in the room: one to kill Killian and the other to put the Devil’s Heart Ruby (ie: The Gorthalax one) into his body. Riz realizes that the ritual isn’t about getting into Sylvere so much as getting the Shadowcat into Sylvere by way of having the gem Petrosmos (as is rock+osmosis--as in what’s going on with Ragh’s mom) with someone she’s infected. He also finds a lot of super old school medical texts written in, like, hieroglyphs almost. Adaine ritual casts Comprehend Languages so she can read it and one of the texts is a diagram of a centaur with scary looking cat symbols at its eyes, ears, tongue, sinuses, and spine but not the brain (which they later deduce means that she can access their senses but not their thoughts).  He also knows that the two rituals were cast 24 hours apart which means that either Arianwyn left while they were partying or somehow knew to do the ritual the second they initially grabbed Aelwen.

Adaine rolls to try to find proof that her mom cares about her any personal effects left behind and does that thing people always do in movies where they lightly shade over a piece of paper to see what was written on the sheet on top of it. She finds a note written in her mom’s handwriting that says: Aelwen is with me. You are betrayed. You have no other choice, darling. Come join us. It seems as if she wrote it down to make sure she was under the limit for Sending. Adaine assumes it was to her Dad since it wasn’t to her. Riz also sees that the amount they were packing is way more than they would need to get to the temple. It’s hard to tell exactly what they were going there to do though because they brought all the important stuff with them.

They discuss Kalina’s abilities some more and are pretty confident that she can only be in one person at a time. They also think she’s unable to get into a Moon Haven/the Hallowed Van but they’re not sure if she can get in if she’s already in one of them before they go in. Adaine wants to establish that any private info, they Message to each other instead of saying it out loud. With an 18 Medicine check, Riz knows there’s a cure but he doesn’t know what it is. He takes all of the research to bring back to the party clerics who we’ll visit right now actually.

The Clerics and Fig are in the shrine with Vrath, the super aggro devil who’s just served Fig a subpoena. Fig reads it and sees that she’s being subpoenaed as a witness for a Tribunal against Gorthalax for neglecting his domain (he’s gotten 9 summonses which have all lapsed). Fig thinks it’s just a misunderstanding since Gorthalax is in a gem. Fig wants to do some court shenanigans but Kristen convinces her to at least get everyone together first.

Gorgug gets the research to the gnomes and they think they can rig something up in maybe a day. Then, the Owlbears go check in with the other two groups. After being told about the whole subpeona situation, Sandra-Lynn points out that Gilear actually knows a good amount about the law. He insists he’s not a lawyer but agrees to help and, upon reading the subpoena, says it seems pretty above board. Fig and Kristen also think they might be able to recruit the devils to fight against the NK while they’re in Hell since devils hate demons.

Adaine sets up the Message system they talked about earlier and Kristen decides to peruse the medical docs Riz found. NAT 20 BAY-BEE! And Kristen might have a -3 to Dex but she has a +9 to Medicine. That’s a big ol’ 29! 

After taking a second to eat his dice and contemplate how jossed his plans are, Brennan says that they can make a tincture using Dusk Moss and some other alchemical supplies from Sylvere that would cure it and that, with a Nat 20, she understands it so well that she specifically can cure it with Greater Restoration. Sandra-Lynn talks about what she found (where Arianwyn and Co. entered the forest) to cover the fact that Adaine and Fig are Messaging this information mentally to the group so Kalina doesn’t know what they know. Adaine thinks maybe they should start saying things that are untrue out loud so that Kalina is getting bad info. Fig thinks maybe they cure everybody but one person so they can control the info she’s getting but realizes that Kalina would probably realize what they’d done and catch on. Tracker pitches that they also could just all go in the Hangvan to be safe and then Kristen could one by one cast Greater Restoration on everyone who needs it. But she can only cast it once a day so it would probably take longer than they have.   

Gorgug asks a very insightful question that hadn’t occurred to me--if Sandra-Lynn is infected, why isn’t Gilear? Fig relays the question to her slightly embarrassed mom who says she must have gotten it within the past 3 years. Not info Fig really wanted to know I’m sure but these things come up when you go adventuring with your parents.

Anyway, after some more discussion, they decide that they have to go the tincture route so they can all get cured at once since doing it piecemeal means they lose their element of surprise and they also decide that going to Hell to clear up Gorthalx’s tribunal is top priority. Tracker stays behind in the Van since she can’t get into the temple where the door is because of the mural while everyone else tries the door. Fig goes in first but stands in the doorway so it stays open (if anyone else tries to approach, the door starts growing thorns). Gilear walks in, Riz is hanging onto Fig. Fabian and Adaine are next, both on the Hangman but the doorway recognizes a devil (the Hangman) going through the door and shuts, leaving Fig, Riz, Gilear, and the Hangman in Hell and everyone else in the shrine.     

Gilear immediately gets knocked out by fire-rain but Riz brings him back with his healer feat and the Hangman (who is very sad puppy about being separated from Fabian) gives him a devil mark on his forehead that protects him from fire. Gilear also says that, as long as they go to the tribunal, the devils will have to send them home afterwards. On their way to the tribunal, Gilear has some playful banter with Fig which Riz is immediately suspicious of he gets Gilear to blurt out in a panic that he’s feeling confident because Sandra-Lynn and Jawbone broke up and she asked to sleep with him and he declined. They had a good talk and they left it on good terms but that’s what’s going on. Fig is happy Gilear is feeling more confident, especially since she feels a little guilty about his whole deal, a fact that shocks Gilear. She thinks it’s obvious. She’s a living reminder of the fact that he got cheated on by his wife. He pauses. Then he says he’s going to step up for her and turn his life around. Oh, also, Riz going absolutely feral but that’s unrelated. 

They get to court which is overseen by Vraz (plus a Spiked dude and a Chained dude--Blozo, Vraz’s boss, is stuck in traffic). Fig is called up and asked if she knew of any intention by Gorthalax to neglect his duties. She says no and that Gorthalax was trapped in a gem by Kalina via a proxy (which, you will remember, was her). Brennan makes Fig roll to get away with that tricky wording of the technical truth and Adaine gives her a Nat 20 portent roll to beat Vraz’s 23. That gets Gorthalax off the hook for punishment but they still have to get someone to run the place while he’s gone and the tribunal isn’t over. Vraz calls a recess and puts the party on house arrest in hell. Also, Fig cut herself to show her blood to prove she was Gorthalx’s daughter and inadvertently created a fully sentient imp valet for herself so that’s also something that’s happening.   

Back in the shrine, Adaine checks out the mural and sees an occult rune on the spellbook and realizes she’s seen it somewhere. They then go check out the spot Sandra-Lynn found where Arianwyn entered the forest and the briers there are actually more tangled than in other places, not less. It seems like they were trying to throw people off by entering through a less intuitive spot but also that it will probably slow them down. They go back home to prep and wait for the rest of the party. Fabian gets a ping from the Hangman asking if he should try to call his dad. After a little bluster, Fabian admits that yes, yes he should. 

Meanwhile, Kristen wants to check out their coins to see if they have the spellbook (though Gorgug thinks the baddies already have it) and Adaine realizes she saw the symbol at the Compass Points library so Ayda would know what it means. She doesn’t have Sending stocked so she decides to trance so she can either get a short rest or have a long one and get the spell prepared, depending on when they need to leave. Gorgug decides to go see how the gnomes are doing with his crystal. Since he’s there, he can help out. Nat 20! They get the crystal to work. He now essentially has a satellite phone.

He magic Facetimes Zelda who is at a party with the rest of the 7 Maidens. She’s shocked that Gorgug was able to rig his phone to work on the road and she’s not even mad at him anymore. She apologizes for reacting so strongly and says she misses him so much. In the background, her party members do the extremely teen girl thing of hyping up the boyfriend that they all like. He and Zelda have a sweet little conversation and Gorgug lets her know that they’re about to go into the forest so their service might not be great. Zelda says that they’re done with their quest so he shouldn’t worry about her. She also says he loves him which the gnomes with Gorgug are super stoked about. They pop some bottles. 

Adaine wakes up from her trance, restocks her spells, and casts Sending to ask Ayda about Planeshift and the rune she found. Ayda says they should use the Synod of Spires and has Adaine check her right jacket pocket where she finds a glowing blue key. When Adaine uses it on a nearby, glowing lock, she finds herself in this cool pocket dimension which Ayda also appears in. She gives Adaine a copy of the spell (it’s 1st level I believe) so she can use it too when they need to talk and the Sending spell would be inconvenient. Re the symbol: Ayda says it’s an Abjuration rune (but not a protective one, a meta-magic one ie: modifying magic) that masks powerful curses and spells by letting them Trojan Horse under a different curse (she says the underlying curse could be a vessel for other spellcasting which sounds like a spellbook to me). She also says the larger Trojan Horse curse would be better if it was something static--Adaine suggests the wall around the forest and Ayda says that could work.     

When Adaine offhandedly mentions that Fig is currently stuck in Hell, Ayda freaks about rescuing her immediately, eventually revealing that they kissed for an hour the night before (“AN HOUR???”) to Adaine’s immediate delight (until she starts in on the TMI at least). Ayda actually was about to call Adaine as well so she could ask her to use her Oracular abilities to suss out how to avoid any possible futures where Fig doesn’t want to be with her anymore which has got to be the most teen girl thing Ayda has ever done in any of her lives. Adaine tells her that that’s not really how her powers work but reassures her that Fig wouldn’t play with her emotions and it wouldn’t be weird for her to ask Fig for clarification about their relationship status. They end up having a little talk about how both of them are wired differently which they bond over and the episode ends with Ayda mentioning that she created the friendship section of the library that Gorgug found a while back out of loneliness. And now she has a best friend and a girlfriend (probably)! What a different ending that a devil subpoena.  

 Detention

Kristen for Trying to Handcuff Sandra-Lynn 

No one actually did anything too crazy this episode so I’ll give it to Kristen for a joke I have no idea how she saw going over well.   

Honor Roll

Kristen for Making Brennan Eat His Dice (And Going Full Jonas Salk All Over Kalina’s Ass) 

I think the only other person who’s made both lists in one ep is Fig.

Anyway, you know I had to give it to Kristen for that Nat 20 to figure out literally everything in those medical texts and how to cure everybody. What a clutch time for Ally’s dice powers to kick in. This is why Kristen had to almost break her leg ribbon dancing out a window. Equivalent exchange. 

(Also, props to Brennan for honoring the roll and probably jossing some of his own plans in the process.)

Random Thoughts

Housekeeping Update: There are only 7 episodes of Sophomore Year to go (not counting this one)!  March 25th is the last one so prepare accordingly! As much as I’m enjoying these, I’m pretty OK with this since I think more digestible content is one of the big strengths of Dimension 20 content. 

Also, for those of y’all who don’t watch Critical Role or missed last episode, on Friday (2/14) Ally will be playing on their Valentines Day one-shot of Monsterhearts (monster high school setting) and, based on the promo, looks like they’ll be playing a werewolf so be sure to check that out if you want more of Ally’s shenanigans in your life.  

I feel like Brennan must have a lot of fun coming up with nonsense gnome names. They’re all so insane. 

“Anything is an alchemical ingredient depending on what you’re trying to do.”

Lol at Lou being like, “We all have the same information and I didn’t figure out any of that,” when the Nerd Squad was figuring stuff out irl.

I love how Gorgug has no patience for eleven nonsense but someone says the word, “crystalmatron” to him and he doesn’t bat an eye. 

“This is in hell.”/”What!?”/”Hell.”/”What!?”/“Hell.”

Gilear: Everyone is in great danger all of the time

Adaine: I agree.

Gilear: Good? But also disquieting coming from the Oracle.

It occurs to be that Garthy is a really bad person to be infected by the Kalina Virus considering their occupation and how good they are at it. 

Fig is right. A simultaneous, “Bye Kalina,” would be very dope. 

If Kalina happened to be watching them at any in this episode, it’s good that they bought the Duskmoss beforehand. Like, if Kalina knows they bought Duskmoss blindly because they just bought everything Killian did, she’d be a lot less suspicious of them than if she sees them suddenly buy 2 huge bricks of an important ingredient in the cure for her.  

It occurs to me that Jawbone is also a bad person to be infected with the Kalina Virus. 

Oh man, Jawbone and Sandra-Lynn just got a house together with so many people. And now they broke up. I know they’re both being adults about it and all but you can’t tell me it’s not gonna be a little awkward.

I wonder what Zayn is doing back in the haunted house while this is going on. No real reason. Just wanna know. Like is Adaine gonna come back and he’s like, “I taught Edgar how to do a trick. What about you?” And she’s like, “Hoo, boy. Where do I even start.”

Fantasy drugs in D&D are always so so funny to me.  Also, lol at the fact that Adaine is actually pretty down to do fantasy hallucinogens (she thinks they might be therapeutic). 

The 6/7 Maidens texting Gorgug to be like, “Good job buddy!” is such a sweet detail. 

The vulnerability from Fig talking to Gilear in this episode. Gah. Fig’s thing is that she’s not a closed book despite what she says. She’s a wide open book for the most part. But that’s not the same as letting yourself be vulnerable necessarily. And the clear shock from Gilear that Fig would not only concern herself with his wellbeing in that way (like, she’s always head of the Gilear cheer squad but this is like, more than surface level, you know?) and that she would put it upon herself--something that she should never have to deal with as the child? I did not ASK for touching scenes from GILEAR but by God are they happening anyway.

Upon learning that Fig is wearing her library card behind her ear now instead of a clove (in tribute to Ayda of course) I got my library card and tried that and, folks, it is for sure a Choice. 

Man I hope Adaine messes with Fig over Ayda. Them acting like bratty sisters (like them fighting for rooms in ep 1) is one of my fave dynamics amongst the Bad Kids. 

Do we know how/why Ayda ended up in Leviathan in the first place? Like, did Aguefort just drop her there for some reason? Is that where she was conceived? How sentient are phoenixes? Does she have any kind of relationship with her mom?

“I want to be alone but also surrounded by my friends at all times.” Again, too real. 

Siobhan knows so many crazy words offhandedly. When Brennan said “synod” I started Googling and before I even pressed Enter she was like, “So it’s a church thing.” Wild.

@jamiebluewind has a Galaxy Brain theory that the kids need to get rid of all of their Kalvaxus gold for the coin/spellbook to reveal itself (details here) which I think makes a lot of sense because from a storytelling/gameplay perspective it would be weird for them to have possibly spent it before they even knew it was a thing they were looking for.

The obvious person that Arianwyn would have sent that Message to would be her husband but I’m wondering if either it’s a mislead or a trap because we know they’re not working together because of Aelwen (who I’m inclined to believe). What is your game Mom Abernant? What are you doing?

They got Gothalax out of punishment by saying that the reason he hasn’t shown up is because he’s been in a gem but 9 seems like a lot of summonses to have received in the past, what, four days (?) since he’s been trapped. Feels like a longer-standing issue potentially. 

Kristen and Gorgug each roll one Nat 20 in this episode and Fig gets one via Adaine’s portent roll. Fig and Fabian each roll one Nat 1. 

[koganphrancis]

Shameless really had to scour the history books to come up with the reason I guess they’ve landed on for Ian’s marriage issues.  

It would’ve made a lot more sense if they had brought them up in S6, but, no, Mickey was gone by then and Ian was about to experience actual love for the first time in his life-or so the show wanted us to believe.  And that’s why I have to call bullshit on Ian seemingly suddenly not thinking he’s deserving of love.  Once he got on his meds, he strode bravely into relationships with Faileb and Trash without batting an eye.  (And yes, one could argue those were “bad” relationships a person who knows they are worthy of love would’ve avoided-but that was never the show’s point of view.  They literally thought each of those partners were huge upgrades from Mickey, and that they would provide Ian with healthy relationships, something other than “war and sex”, which is what they tried to reduce Mickey to.)  Think back to when Ian pursued Trash FOR MONTHS-he never once said, “Maybe Trash doesn’t want me because I’m unlovable.”  

And that they randomly brought up Ian’s medical condition after all this time as a big part of the “reason” didn’t set well at all.  Myles’ AV Club review sums it up beautifully: “I don’t want to dwell too much on this, but I have long argued that the show has fundamentally mishandled Ian’s disorder by refusing to acknowledge how it would impact his day-to-day life. When I asked showrunner Nancy Pimental about this back in 2016, the answer was basically that they didn’t think people wanted to see Ian “popping medications all the time,” but I’d argue that it makes any stories they do want to tell about his bipolar disorder weaker. If they just put in a small amount of legwork discussing his disorder—a mention of a doctor’s appointment, a scene of him picking up a prescription—it would make it less like the show is just circling back to his disorder when it’s convenient for the story. The idea that Ian had to search so deeply to realize that it was his bipolar disorder that was creating his reluctance to marry Mickey (or anyone) implies that even he doesn’t have it at the front of his mind, and while perhaps that’s a defense mechanism the show has set the issue aside too long for that to be articulated. I’m happy the show is finally bringing it back to the surface, and Ian and Mickey’s eventual reconciliation will be better for it, but it doesn’t change the mistakes made along the way.”

Could Ian’s bipolar disorder be part-or even the cause-of his issues about marriage?  Absolutely.  Has the show done anything before tonight, other than the Season 5 finale, to indicate this?  Absolutely not. 

Plus, within the episode itself, Ian acts as if Mickey’s the one who has a problem, not him.  He tells the assembled family members that Mickey “will work it out of his system” (with Byron) and then be ready to talk things out, so...

Anyway, to go back to the beginning of the episode-if online friends and others hadn’t pointed out that Ian was thinking of Mickey here

it never would’ve occurred to me that he was.  I’ve never seen Mickey in that bed-and I haven’t seen Mickey and Ian in bed together in YEARS.  Prison bunks don’t count-and even if they did-Mickey bucked him out of there so fast in their first episode this season it couldn’t have counted anyway.  

And that brings me to something that also bothers me about the entire way they’re handling this marriage problem of Ian’s-we haven’t seen Mickey and Ian interact in any meaningful way since they got out of prison.  The writers have been hellbent on throwing even more obstacles in their path at every turn-which, I get, yes, that’s a big part of storytelling.  But these guys have all the traps with none of the downtime to relax and recover together-and to let the audience see what’s going on while catching their breath.  They cut the scenes where it was just two of them in the same room, talking about what we’ll never know because they were CUT.  

These two have had enough angst-if the show really wanted us to believe the logical destination for them was down the wedding aisle, why not give us a season of them growing together instead of tearing them apart again?  They were in prison living right on top of each other-couldn’t the comedy have come from them getting out and sticking just as close, even when they didn’t have to?  Couldn’t we have had scenes of them sitting together on the couch, Mickey drowsing while Ian’s watching some dumb reality dating show Mickey has no interest in, but he’s there because Ian’s there and they both like feeling the warmth their bodies generate merely by being close?  Couldn’t we have them talking in bed, long into the night-Ian asking Mickey to remind him to get a renewal for his prescription; Mickey having an “oh crap” moment when he’s telling Ian how he spilled his Orange Julius on his (cute) khaki shorts and remembers at 2 in the morning that the other pair is in the laundry and Ian tells him it’s fine, he washed them with his own clothes and even ironed them and they’re hanging in the closet?  Have Ian find a You Tube video about making a recipe that tastes “just like” Kentucky Fried Chicken at home to save money, so Mickey’s hanging out in the kitchen while Ian’s attempting to make it with disastrous results and they wind up with Mickey calmly putting the big lid from the spaghetti pot over the grease fire Ian starts in the frying pan and telling Ian he’ll spring for the twenty bucks to get a bucket of extra crispy for their supper?  Couldn’t we have just had that interspersed with actually discussions about what they’re feeling or going through?  The show, via up till now unknown Sandy, tried to convince us it was giving us domestic Gallavich-why didn’t they just write it?

Anyway, I did like the fact that Ian had to wake up, put some clothes on, put his boot on, get himself down the stairs and Mickey was STILL pretending to kiss Byron behind his big honeydew melon helmet after all that implied time passed for Ian to do all that shit with his injury ;)  Mickey is nothing if not fully committed to making sure Ian knows what he’s missing out on.  

Mickey packing up his shit and telling Ian “when you know, you know” was to me equal parts funny and frustrating because it was like he was telling Ian A: Mickey knows how he feels about Ian and B: Ian should know how he feels about Mickey by now-but he clearly doesn’t.  I thought having Mickey say Byron might be a Koch was a weird choice-I don’t think either Mickey or Ian (and most of the show’s target audience) would know that would mean his family-it it’s THOSE Kochs-are rich af, and if the show wanted to argue Mickey thought it meant his heir to the Coca-Cola fortune or that they somehow hold a patent on cocaine they can drop fucking dead.  And the stretch to try to make the joke about Byron studying something from Britain vs “English” was painful.

And flashing back to S6 yet again, the show had Ian belittle Mickey twice-first by saying his emotional IQ is lower than Carl’s actual IQ (and, again, by the end of the show we’re supposed to think it’s Ian who is emotionally blocked, but how are we supposed to believe it or have sympathy when he was mocking Mickey-who is actually quite open with Ian when it comes to his emotions), and then secondly by claiming that Mickey has freakishly small hands.  Well, Ian, you have a freakishly large head, and it doesn’t seem to dwarf Mickey’s mitts:

The scene with Debbie didn’t enrage me for once, and I was shocked.  But I was glad she told him to marry Mickey to make him happy-but again in that scene Ian was searching for a reason after the fact to justify his still even a mystery to him reluctance to marry.  

The scene with Lip was the best one they’re probably going to have for quite a while, maybe ever at the rate the show is going, but again, violent flashbacks to Ian’s Faileb/Trash days when he said “Debbie told me to” (marry Mickey).  Remember those lost seasons where he did anything those bozos told him to and never stood up for himself?  And also, if the show wasn’t wasting so much time with scenes of Frank tied to a bed and Debbie grooming an under-aged girl, Lip and Ian could’ve talked further, maybe delved into what Lip suggests Ian figure out for himself someday.  If we could actually see Ian trying to get to the root of the problem, maybe it wouldn’t feel like the white board didn’t just say something like: Mickey/Ian break up-bipolar???  

Their last scene of the episode had a lot of good stuff in it, even if ultimately it just broke down in the end with the lazy writing.  Ian shoving the ring at Mickey and Mickey being let down by finding out not only is Ian not trying a little too late to salvage the engagement, but he’s making some lame “promise” and claims Gallaghers don’t break their promises-how can he say that to Mickey of all people?  Name one promise Ian KEPT to Mickey!  Noel, as always, plays out so much emotion without saying a word, and the heartbreak is palpable.  And when he says Ian is saying he doesn’t love him enough?  Noel!  He makes it all so real.  And we’re not let off the hook yet.  But Mickey calling Byron by the wrong name, Ian pointing it out, and Mickey countering with he answers to whatever the fuck I call him was a nice throwback to the days of Mickey’s refusal to use Ian’s first name AND all the nicknames he came up with from Fire Crotch to Sleepy Face and Mumbles and almost makes me believe that the writer of the week maybe bothered watching at least the Gallavich scenes videos on You Tube.  Almost.  I’m more ready to believe Noel improvised that line in there himself ;)  

We then get the reuse/recycle scene of Ian saying how there’s so much wrong with him and how he doesn’t know himself from one day to the next (so, again, would’ve been nice if there had been evidence of him feeling that way/dealing with it before last night), when he says to Mickey “how do you know that’s who you want to spend the rest of your life with?” I thought Mickey’s answer of “Jesus Christ, Ian” was perfect.  He wasn’t going to stand there and give Ian a list of the many, many times he’s proven his love for Ian or try to coddle Ian and kiss him to try to make it better.  Mickey’s finally figured out it’s up to Ian to either believe in Mickey’s mighty love or not, but Mickey’s done trying to sell it.  Mickey’s gotta be so tired of all this-all along he’s done what Ian wants, even back when it was putting his own safety in jeopardy (another thing that I hate about the Terry retcon-remember when he was yelling his head off in the background when Mickey told Ian he’d meet him at the store in twenty, even tho it wasn’t a good time?  Ever since that day, Mickey has always done everything in his power to give Ian what Ian thought he needed or wanted from Mickey).  

Anyway, maybe I’m just a bear of very little imagination, but I honestly don’t see that they’re going to write anything that wraps up all this “tension” and Ian’s inability to commit well.  By the end of the episode, I was picturing that they’ll have Mickey and Ian do a non-singing version of the Elephant Love Medley from Moulin Rouge to get Ian over his qualms about marriage.  It fits in perfectly with the writers stealing from other stories, plus the whole thing is 4 minutes, which is considered a long scene for IxM these days.  

The last we see of Ian, he takes a little detour to piss in the Vespa’s tank, and so now we’ve had two scenes of Paula getting at Ian’s junk, one of the Vespa with it, one scene of Mickey’s cousin grabbing Mickey’s dick, while that scene with the mayonnaise lube was the one and only time Ian and Mickey have come close to each other’s genitals/having sex all season.  For all we know, they haven’t had it since-especially since Mickey had that telling line of getting bitchy when nothing’s been up his ass for a while...

(Gif credits: Ian and pillow-sickness-health-all-that-shit, Club kiss-mickeygifs)

[erintoknow]

Nemesis Adrestia

fallen hero: rebirth fanfic, borrowing @ratkingkisses​‘s Zia Basri for an extra-canonical adventure of revenge ~2.4k words. hrrrm, maybe content warning for spider time.

------

       It really shouldn’t come as a surprise to you by now, but it’s obvious you’ve gotten in over your head again. “Was this a part of your genius fucking plan?” You hiss.

       “Sweetheart, darling, of course it was.” The figure crouched down next to is dressed in an almost form-fitting black powered-suit with pink accents up the sides, the black hood of their cloak up over the mirrored helmet. “Keep them busy for a moment, won’t you?”

       You grit your teeth. “When are you going to play rabbit?”

       “When I’m not the stronger telepath, Adrestia.” She says it so matter-of-factly in that weirdly electronic and rasping voice of hers it makes your eye twitch.

       Despite your frustation, it’s hard to argue with that. Nemesis seems to have a talent for getting her hooks into a crowd. Handling that kind of mental feedback is a little much for you.

       …Alright then. Keep a team of armed officers busy while Nemesis safely sits behind a wall playing mind games? Sure. Okay. Why not?

       Take a breath, steady yourself, then dash out from behind the wall, pulling at their attention as you go. Nothing fancy, just eyes on me, encourage them to forget the second figure, already at work. You can feel her in the back of your head, weaving threads of thought into straitjackets. Watch how you think, you’ll have to be careful not to get snagged yourself.

       A trail of bullets follow you, they can’t seem to remember to lead their target, such as shame, really. You slide behind the reception desk, breathing hard. Try to steady your heart, get it back down and out of your throat. These aren’t cops or street thugs. Trained professionals, soldiers. You’d never have been so bold as to try this on your own, or so stupid.

       Zia lounges across the booth, taking up both seats, legs crossed. She flashes a practiced smile, offers a honeyed greeting and pushes a plate of cupcakes across the table to you as you sit down across from her. You pick one up, take a bite, it’s still warm. Is she trying to put you at ease and failing or is she purposefully trying to unsettle you with this exaggeration of hospitality? You can’t be sure, can’t know

       Getting involved with Zia is dangerous. On multiple levels. There’s a reason you’ve taken to calling her ‘Triple-X,’ although never to her face. She’s respected your boundaries so far – has never laid a hand on you. But whenever you’re in her presence it feels like you’ve been put under a microscope. The octopus trying to pry open a clam.

       Looking for that way in.

       Well, that’s a game that two can play.

       You unshoulder your purse onto the table, pull out the envelope and slide it across the table in exchange. Floor plans, hand transcribed from months of careful reconnaissance. Valuable information to a career thief.

       Zia palms it, slides the envelope down the front of her shirt. Her smile shows her canines. She makes no secret of being a dangerous woman. She’ll get in touch with you soon, she says. You make a show of playing up your nerves. The woman who has nothing to fear and the woman from which there is nothing to fear. You both wear your masks well.

       “You fuckers couldn’t hit an iceberg!” You yell out, palming through the smoke grenades and flash bangs attached to your belt. Keep their attention, don’t think about how the bullets punch through the pressed woodpulp of the desk, barely missing you. How much time do you need to buy? 

       You thumb a flash bang, trying to get a sense of where to throw it when you feel strings pull taunt. You reflexively throw up your mental wall as Nemesis finally springs into action. There’s the tension of sudden silence. No guns fire, no movement, then at once the sound of five bodies hitting the floor in unison.

       You poke your head up, none of the men are still standing. “Jesus,” you whisper under your breath so the suit doesn’t pick up your voice and amplify it, “what did you do.” Five bodies lay sprawled on the ground where they fell. Still alive, you can see it in the rise and fall of the chests. But their mental presence is weirdly blank, twisted into itself. Not comatose exactly, but deeper than normal sleep.

       Nemesis strides out into the middle of the lobby, “Don’t just stand there gawking, dear. We’ve got more where these fools came from.” You have a limited window before someone or someones beyond your pay grade crash the party. Now that your cover is blown, if you’re going to hit your target and get out, every second needs to count.

       Still… you glance down at bodies. “Are they going to wake up?”

       “Who cares?” She responds, voice drained of its theatric warmth. She doesn’t stop walking.

       You frown behind your helmet but don’t argue. Kneel down and fish out the keycards from one of the men before catching up with Nemesis. You might be the pathfinder on this operation, but Nemesis isn’t about to let anyone else take lead. That suits you just fine. Maybe she can take a turn getting shot at next.

       “I need your help.” You admit. Don’t look at her face, focus on the window, how the light still manages to make it through the closed blinds.

       She leans forward, hands cupped under her chin, in a move clearly designed to emphasize her cleavage. “You have no idea how happy that makes me. I can think of plenty of ways to help make you sing.”

       You glance at her, eyes wide, “What? Uh- Um-, no, no not like that.” You break eye contact again, look elsewhere, anywhere else. Try to swerve around the images she’s broadcasting at you. “This is strictly business.”

       You feel her sharp disappointment like a slap to the face. You flinch. She leans back. “Business it is.” Her voice drained of any previous warmth.

       “Well, more like revenge, really.” You admit. Flash the photograph in your hand. That gets her attention again.

       The next stop is one of the security offices. It’s not a far walk. Two officers stand between you and getting inside, but it’s hardly a contest. Pull their aim off, pull their attention on you instead of calling for help. Nemesis crumples the one on the right with a punch to stomach followed by a knee to the groin. You take out the one on left by yanking the gun out of their hands and then bashing their nose in with the butt of the rifle. 

       They didn’t even lock the door. During a lockdown. You laugh, a sharp cackle, as you throw open the door and take stock of what you have to work with.

       “Something amusing, my dear handmaiden?” Nemesis stands outside, her attention focused down the hallway. Focused like this, her mind feels like a cord of rope, severed and fraying into a million threads at one end.

       “D-doesn’t matter.” You grind your teeth at the nickname.

       The connection between your names is entirely accidental, you’ve gone through a couple before settling on Adrestia. Nemesis, however, has latched onto it with a frightening degree of enthusiasm. At this point you don’t think you could change your name again if you tried.

       You fish out the flash drive from its secure canister as you ran a hand over the bank of computer terminals on the far wall of the tiny room. There, under the desk, a row of servers. You pop open the flash drive and slot it home. Actual coding is far beyond your skillset, but with the connections Nemesis has, getting your hands on something capable of cracking a military system hadn’t been difficult. Turns out the primary defense is physical access, and… well, the two of you have that handled.

       A stressful minute of waiting later and now you have access to the internal systems via your suit. All it takes is a few simple commands to lock out anyone else on the system. You pull out the flash drive and pocket it again. No sense leaving evidence behind. Nod to Nemesis. “We’re good, let’s keep moving.”

       You can feel the frayed edges of Nemesis attention as she runs beside you. Between her ability to pick up and redirect the attentions of multiple people at once and your pathfinding it’s a surprisingly smooth dash through the building to your target’s office. And with the security systems firmly still under your control no one else is able to follow your progress through the complex. No cameras, and barriers are mere formality as doors open and lock again behind the two of you.

       You can feel your heart pound. This has been a long time coming.

       Nemesis Adrestia; Retribution Inescapable.

       The two of you round one last corner and Nemesis gestures with her head towards a set of doors across the hall. “This is the place, sweetheart?”

       Tentatively you reach out to get a read of how many people are on the other side, sheltering in place. Eleven, twelve, thirteen, you reel back, curl your song tight around yourself. “He’s here alright.” You hiss through your teeth.

       Nemesis makes an unearthly sound, laughter distorted beyond recognition. “Let’s catch up with an old friend, I’m sure they’ll be delighted to see us..”

       “Peter Byrne.” You trace patterns in your leg, fighting down nausea, memory. “Recognize him?”

       Zia thumbs the tiny photograph, lips pursed. “No.” She finally admits.

       “One of the eggheads that used to run the… the…” You mouth is dry. How does anyone talk about this? To vocalize what’s never been said? “the, uh– the debriefing process. Memory extraction. Research.”

       You watch as Zia’s expression darkens, narrows her eyes at the tiny man in the picture. “How do you know it was him?”

       Don’t think about it. Don’t think about the spider. “Met him.”

       She looks at you, doesn’t hide the disbelief. “You met him.”

       “Broke the process once.” You’re pressing your finger into your leg hard now as you trace.

       “Broke the–?” You can feel it in the way Zia’s attention has turned to you, a thousand little threads probing for answers, looking for holes, expecting a trap. You’ve turned from a fun game, a toy to tease and distract herself with into a danger; pulling open old wounds. 

       There’s nothing for it. You need her invested in this. You grit your teeth and

can’t move

can’t even ‘can’t move’

wake up

wake up

stay

       awake

over you spans,

no not you there is no ‘you’ only

an exquisite corpse under spider legs

like needlepoints, they poke something soft in–

You’re standing on the beach, salt air curls your hair, water wraps around your ankles. He smiles at you, taking your hand. ‘Finally, someone who understands’ – The feeling is writ across his mind, it overwhelms you. You suppress a shudder, smile back, swallow thoughts down like bramble. Stay focused. Edge to the side, pull him along. The line of fire needs to be clear.

–a wriggling thought until she bites down, stills it, not yours not yours hers now, she draws out the memory on bloodied thread; wrapping, spinning, going

no, no

stay

       awake

reach up, find, pull. not hers, not hers, yours.

this one is yours.

!

something’s

       burning

       You flinch, that’s not quite the memory you wanted to vomit up, never mind broadcast. You curl your song tight against yourself again, block the world out. Meant to do the moment after, chickened out. Stupid. Stupid. You risk looking up at Zia. There’s a look of fury slowly burning across her face and then the world reels backwards as she punches you flat for springing the memory on her. But– You think you’ve got her.

       Nemesis kicks the doors in before you can. “Everyone, lovelies, please remain calm.” She calls out, her empty hands up in the air as she walks through the cubicles. “Only one of you needs to die today. The rest have nothing to worry about…” The ease with which Nemesis is able to spread out and curl the threads of her attention around the gaggle of people in the room should terrify you. Instead all you can think about is what you’ll do. What you’ll say.

       You follow in behind, the pistol in your hands held in a death grip. It’s been years since you’ve let yourself handle one, but the muscle memory is still there. Some things you can never forget, they made sure of that.

       Like a conductor Nemesis is able to coax their fear into a wail of terror, drowning out any fantasies of trying to run or call for help. Fourteen fear-filled souls. You have to pull your own song tighter around you as a shield against the radiant emotional energy. “You don’t need to give them fucking PTSD,” You hiss at her.

       “Why not?” Nemesis laughs. “You’re the anarchist, dear. Here’s a bunch of government stooges, why not have a little fun?”

       “They’re just pawns. They don’t matter.”

       “Not all of the little dears.” There’s an edge in her voice. Nemesis beckons with a hand and one of the fear-stricken office workers finds himself stumbling forward towards the two of you, pulled along on Nemesis’s invisible strings.

       You choke down bile. “Hello, Peter.”

       Peter turns his head to you, mouth gaping open, then closed, incoherent.

       You shoot a glance at Nemesis. “For fuck’s sake, might as well let him talk.”

       “That’s a mistake.” Nemesis warns. Nevertheless, the invisible cord around Peter’s neck slackens and the man gasps for air.

       “Hello, Peter.” You repeat. 

       “That– that is not my name, you’ve got the wrong–”

       “I don’t give a rat’s ass about what name they gave you after you screwed up, Peter.” You grind your teeth, feel the gun in your hand. Safety off. “Did you think you’d be safe out here?”

       Nemesis nudges your shoulder. “Don’t bother toying with the man, get to the point.”

       “I’m working up to it!” You snap at her, turn your attention back to Peter. “How long has it been, Peter? Fourteen years?”

       “Fourteen…?” The look of confusion and terror on the man’s face gives way to pallid dread, the color draining out of him.

       Nemesis crosses her arms. “Oh, we’re really going to drag this one out, aren’t we?”

       “I’m not finished yet!”

       Nemesis tsks at you. “That’s no way for a handmaiden to address her mistress.”

       You ignore her, adjust your grip on your gun. You’re. In. Control. “Did you enjoy your job, Peter?” You don’t feel like Adrestia right now. You just feel sick. “How were the perks, Peter?” Panic and dread radiate off of him. His, it has to be his emotions that you’re feeling, That’s why you can’t keep your gun steady. 

       Nemesis leans over you, a hand on your shoulder. “There’s a time and place for foreplay sweetheart. Now is not it.” She puts her other hand over your wrist to steady your arm. “We can’t stay here all night.”

       You flinch under her touch. “I– I– I need him to– to understand. He has to know. Or it’s… it’s not justice.” You’re not a murderer. This is more than just some random act of revenge. He’s earned this. He needs to know.

       “Darling,” Her voice is low, quiet even with the distortion. “I think he gets the picture just fine.” She puts her finger on the trigger, resting over yours. “Isn’t that right, dear?” She raises her voice with all the cheer of a cactus.

       Peter raises his arms, “I didn’t do anything wrong…”

       Nemesis guides your arm up, pointing the pistol in your hand towards Peter as he takes a step back, hitting the wall. “But you had some good fun back on the farm, didn’t you?” 

       The two of you pull the trigger.

[arabellaflynn]

My craft projects tend to balloon. The problem is that I know how to do it right, and I hate having to do it wrong. I need a shawl for flamenco. I have some practice things, but I need a real one to use for shows, on the assumption that if I've been at this long enough to buy real shoes I'm probably going to end up doing it on stage. The customary ones, mantones de manila, are made of embroidered Chinese silk brought in through the Philippines. The nice ones can run north of $300, which is not going to happen. The simple student ones made of acetate and polyester satin are about $100, which I could probably do eventually, but would rather not if I can help it. I did some math and raw materials would run me $30-35. I can do that, probably. I know where the fabric store is, I know where to get hoops, and I know how to embroider things, technically, although I spend more time darning clothes I don't want to replace than I do decorating things with thread. I decided to splurge a bit and gave Amazon a whole $8 to get a set of six nested embroidery hoops, which will take care of all of my embroidery needs for the rest of time, rather than just buying the 12" hoop I needed. The floss I can buy for $1 a pop if I spring for the shiny stuff, once I actually figure out what I want to put on it. The sticking point is the fringe. The long fringe, or flecos, is an integral part of the design, and given how much it weighs, it contributes a lot to how the manton moves when you swing it. You can actually get 24" chainette fringe by the yard, but there are a few problems with it. It's thicker than flecos usually are, and it's attached wrong. Fringe trim is just loops of chainette cord that are stitched together at the top to form a band, whereas flecos are punched through the shawl with a crochet hook and tied in a lark's head around the edge, then a few rows of decorative knots are run around the perimeter to keep everything in place. It's also typically thicker than the cord used for flecos, and most damning, it's so frigging expensive that buying enough of it to edge a 5' x 5' shawl would miss the point of making a manton instead of ordering one. Okay. I know how macrame works. I'll just do the fringe myself. I just need to find the right cord to use. Flecos have a particular fluidity that comes from the strands sliding over one another. Mercerized cotton is about the right diameter and looks right in the ball, but once you cut it and try to string it on an edge, the strands want to cling to each other and clump up. Two- or three-ply embroidery floss is also about right, but again, cotton floss sticks to itself. The flecos on a synthetic manton are made of "viscose" or "art silk", which is called rayon in the US after an old trade name for nitrocellulose. Happily, rayon embroidery floss exists; unhappily, it seems to only be available to consumers in small skeins, rather than the industrial 1 lb spool I'd need. Rrgh. FINE. I will figure out what they're made of in Spain and go get a bunch of THAT. After getting Maestra to kindly send over a photo of the stuff she bought on her last trip over, I set about Googling the company in an attempt to figure out whatthefuck it actually was. It turns out that my Spanish is just about sufficient to bang my way through the website of an Andalusian textiles manufacturer without the magic of Google Translate. Which was fortunate, because all of the useful link text was in the form of graphical buttons, as they had been tragically trapped in the proto-internet of 1995. Success! The cording flecos are made of is a very fine chainette called hilo de cuquillo in Spanish -- 'cuckoo thread'. Why is it called that? No fucking clue. Cuckoos are famously deceptive birds, so it's possible the stuff started off as a convincing substitute for something more expensive. But nowadays, it is the genuine thing that genuine flecos on a genuine manton are genuinely fashioned from. It is not particularly expensive, and it is common enough I could even price shop. I think I paid about €12 for a 500 g spool. There is one more step to the process, however, and that is getting the cuquillo physically into my hands. And there I was stumped. No one would mail it to the US. Literally no one. I tried individual shops. I tried hitting up the manufacturers websites directly. Amazon España even had it right on the product page -- Este producto no puede enviar a los Estados unidos. I couldn't figure it out. Maestra couldn't figure it out. Her Spanish husband was baffled. Apparently hilo de cuquillo is just some sort of ancient Spanish secret that you are forbidden to tape into a box and huck onto a DHL jet. I now owe one of my classmates a beer for smuggling my craft supplies out of Europe in her suitcase when she went to visit her family. I swear to God nobody else has to do this. from Blogger https://ift.tt/31xkrbu via IFTTT -------------------- Enjoy my writing? Consider becoming a Patron, subscribing via Kindle, or just toss a little something in my tip jar. Thanks!

[thesinglesjukebox]

LIL NAS X - OLD TOWN ROAD

[6.73]

We're gonna bluuuurb til we can't no more...

Katie Gill: The problem with "Old Town Road" is that it's more interesting as a thinkpiece than an actual song. The song charting, then being excluded, from the Billboard Country Music charts opens so many questions that can't be answered in one sitting. Is this a further example of the well-documented racism in country music? Or is this just a freak accident hick-hop song that vaulted it's way out of the depths of subgenre hell? Is a twangy voice and references to horses enough to make a song "country"? Does the presence of Billy Ray Cyrus in a remix that dropped on Friday legitimize the song's credentials or just make them worse? Where was all this controversy when "Meant To Be," an honest-to-god pop song, was holding steady on the charts? There are so many questions and so many points of conversation that spring out from this song, that it's a pity "Old Town Road" itself is just okay. Everything about it screams "filler track for the SoundCloud page," from the length to the trap beats to the aggressively mediocre lyrics. The song didn't even chart on it's own merits: it charted because it's used in a TikTok meme! This is like if "We Are Number One" or "No Mercy" made their way to the top of the iTunes charts and people decided to have a conversation about the limits of genre based on those charting. I'm a little annoyed, because the conversation around "Old Town Road" is something that country music should be having... but just not around "Old Town Road." [5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: There are essays upon essays to be written about "Old Town Road" as a prism for the racial divides that have served as undergirding for the modern American genre system since the 1930s division between "hillbilly" and "race" records. It's the perfect hunk of think-piece fodder: a simple core question -- is it country? -- that can spiral out to all corners of culture until the song itself is obscured. So let's focus on the song, instead. Because beyond all world-historical significance, "Old Town Road" fucking bangs. It's all in the bait and switch of that intro -- banjos and horns plunking away until Lil Nas X's triumphant "YEAAAH" (second this decade only to Fetty Wap) drops and the beat comes in. It's a joke until it's not -- maybe you came in from the Red Dead Redemption 2 video, or from a friend of yours talking about the hilarious country trap song, or from the artist's own Twitter, which is more Meech On Mars than Meek Mill, but no matter the source, you'll find that "Old Town Road" has its way of looping into your brain, all drawls and boasts and banjos. It's meme rap, but much like prior iterations of this joke ("Like a Farmer"), Lil Nas X fully and deeply commits -- he doesn't drop the pretense for a single line, keeping the track short enough to not outlive its welcome while still exploring its weird conceit to its fullest. Yet even in its jokey vibe there's some actual pathos -- no matter how put on, the lonesome cowboy sorrow of Lil Nas X's declaration that he'll "ride till [he] can't no more" feels genuine. "Old Town Road" is everything at once, the implosion of late teens culture into one undeniable moment. [10]

David Moore: So here's a true gem of a novelty song -- a phrase I use with both intention and respect; I grew up in a Dementoid household -- that could launch a thousand thinkpieces about hip-hop, country, class, the object and subject of jokes, whether to call something a joke at all, you name it. But what I keep returning to is the economy of it, its simplicity, how there is so much in so little, the way that someone on the outside can grok things inaccessible to the insiders, maybe by accident or by studious observation and a fresh perspective, the way music can be a multiverse, characters from one world complicating or clarifying or confusing the limits of another in a mutually provocative way. I'm not a backstory guy, which is to say I'm not a research guy, which is to say I'm either intuitive or lazy or both, so I don't have any clue where this came from, but I know magic when I hear it, I know what it sounds like when you discover, or simply stumble into by accident, the path beyond the bounds of territory you presumed exhausted, territory that can always get bigger, always invite whole new parties to the party. It's a real party party; you can get in. [10]

Katherine St Asaph: "Old Town Road" is the "Starships" of 2019: a song that objectively is not great, but will be called great for the understandable reason that liking or disliking it now unavoidably entails choosing the right or wrong side. This tends to lead to hand-waving freakoutery about critics not talking about the music, man, but once The Discourse is out in the world, it becomes a real and critical part of the song's existence; not talking about Billboard punting "Old Town Road" would be like talking about "Not Ready to Make Nice" as an workaday country song. The problem is not quite as simple as "the Billboard charts don't want black artists," an argument with historical precedent but now doomed to fail: clearly, people like Kane Brown and Darius Rucker and Mickey Guyton (who's left off lists like this, somehow) have hits. It's more about respectability politics. Traditionalists hate the idea of memes, social media, and perceived line-cutting, all of which means they'll hate a song born not of the Nashville and former-fraternity-bro scene, but via TikTok and stan Twitter. But what they really, really hate is rap and anything that sounds like a gateway to rap; like if they tolerate this Cardi B will be next. Country radio, for the past decade or two, has been pop radio with all the blatant rap signifiers removed; its songs aren't about cowboys or horses but suburban WASP life. Of course, double standards abound. Talking about lean is out; talking about bingeing beer is fine. "Bull riding and boobies" isn't OK because it's from a guy called Lil Nas X -- I honestly think people would whine less if this exact song was credited to "Montero Hill" -- but "I got a girl, her name's Sheila, she goes batshit on tequila" is OK because it's from a guy called Jake Owen, and "Look What God Gave Her" is OK because it hides its ogling of boobies behind plausibly deniable God talk. Fortunately "Old Town Road" is better than "Starships" -- the NIN sample is inspired, and the hook is evocative and sticky. (It fucks with authenticity politics, too -- Lil Nas X wrote his own song, but the big corporate country artists often don't.) Its main problem is that it's slight: a meme that doesn't overstay past the punchline, a song that never quite gets to song size. [5]

Thomas Inskeep: Sampling Nine Inch Nails' "34 Ghosts IV" to (help) create a western motif is hands-down brilliant, so huge thumbs-up for that. Lyrically, this is pretty empty, a bunch of western clichés strung together -- but then again, the same can be said of plenty of Big & Rich songs. Split the score down the middle, accordingly. [5]

Scott Mildenhall: But surely this is how country music should sound? Lil Nas X has performed alchemy in combining two generic styles into something inspiring, flipping the meaning of "pony and trap" on its head. The mechanical sound of trap is rusted into the mechanical sound of fixing a combine, or at least pretending that is something you might do, and such performance is fun for all the family. Well, unless you're an American farming family tired of stereotypes anyway. [7]

Stephen Eisermann: Non country (trap) beat with subtle country instrumentation? Sounds like much of country radio, only way better! [7]

Nortey Dowuona: A burning, humming bass girds under sticklike banjos as Lil Nas X rides into town to water his horse and head back out onto the open road. [5]

Alex Clifton: I spent the weekend re-enacting this scene from Easy A with this song, so it's safe to say I like it. I especially love the "horse"/"Porsche" line, which is unexpected and amazing. [7]

Alfred Soto: The usual genre conversations threaten to smother analysis. If Lil Nas X can use trap drums, then why can't Sam Hunt use loops? Silly. (Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes: "The Constitution is what the judges say it is"). The Kanye allusion ("Y'all can't tell me nuthin'") works extra-diagetically. An assemblage of modest, discrete charms held together by a solid performance at its center -- nothing more. I await the Future-Frank Liddell collab. [5]

Edward Okulicz: It's affectionate and actually quite deferential in its treatment of its parent genres. Crossovers like this have been hinted at, and gestured towards in the other direction quite a bit of late (country artists affecting hip-hop, less so the latter), and the two genres have more in common than the caricatures of the sorts of people who are supposed to listen to them do. Of course, I mean those genres as they exist today, and not in the warped imaginations of purists. You can see why kids have latched on, and it's easy to snarl at Big Chart for sticking their oar in. The kids are right; artists control the means of production and radio and chart compilers can accept that they aren't the tastemakers, and attempts to force their tastes down other people's throats will lead to a backlash. This is not a brilliant song but it's a picture of one of many potential musical futures and, at two minutes, the perfect length too. The right response is to smile, and "Old Town Road" makes it easy to smile -- it's an earworm. Sure, it doesn't give me the same immediate feeling of fuck!!! this is the best that I got when I first heard that version of Bubba Sparxxx's "Comin' Round" but country music survived "Honey, I'm Good" and it will survive this. It might well thrive. [6]

Joshua Copperman: I recently found out that I have a moderate Vitamin D deficiency, but looking up the song everyone was talking about and hearing this basically confirmed that I should go outside more often. There are definitely things to talk about: it's the logical conclusion to "I listen to everything except country and rap" jokes when the inverse has taken over the Hot 100, and it's a song that's set to hit number one because everyone is incredulous that it exists at all -- with a Billy Ray Cyrus remix to boot. The conversations about what makes a song "country" are all fascinating, but it's hard to fully enjoy pieces about something that, as an actual song, is so fundamentally empty. The Nine Inch Nails sample is interesting, but like everything else, more intriguing in theory than execution. This will wind up on every site's "best of 2019" lists, and then in ten years people will snark on how a song with "My life is a movie/Bullridin' and boobies" was so critically acclaimed. As a meme/discourse lightning rod, it's an [8], as a how-to guide for late-2010s fame, it's a [10], but there's little appeal in a vacuum. Adding a bonus point, because music has never existed in a vacuum anyway. [5]

Taylor Alatorre: Remember when the internet was still described as a realm of lawless and limitless potential, when open source could be touted as revolutionary praxis and "free flow of information" was a sacred utterance? Now one of the key political questions is whether private companies should be doing more to banish online rulebreakers or whether the federal government should step in to delimit what those rules are. Whichever side ends up winning, it's clear that the wide open spaces of the Frontier Internet are rapidly facing enclosure. Montero Hill learned this the hard way when his @nasmaraj account was suspended by Twitter as part of its crackdown against spam-based virality. While Tweetdeckers are nobody's martyrs, it's a minor tragedy every time an account with that many followers and that much influence gets shunted off to the broken-link stacks of the Wayback Machine. Rules must be laid down, but their enforcement always entails loss -- the bittersweet triumph of civilization over nature that forms the backbone of every classic Western. Maybe Hill/nasmaraj/Lil Nas X had this loss in mind when writing the jauntily defiant lyrics of "Old Town Road." Maybe he was just riding the microtrends of the moment like he was before. Still, this particular microtrend -- the reappropriation of cowboy imagery by non-white Americans -- feels too weighty to be reduced to mere aesthetics. Turner's Frontier Thesis may have been racially blinkered to the extreme, but the myths and yearnings it spawned can never die; they just get democratized. So it makes sense that young Americans, even those who don't know who John Wayne is, would subconsciously reach out for the rural, the rustic, the rugged and free, just as we feel the global frontiers closing all around us. Our foreign policy elites hold endless panel talks about "maintaining power projection" and "winning the AI race," but most normal people don't care about that stuff. We're all secretly waiting for China to take over like in our cyberpunk stories, so we can drop all the pressures of being the Indispensable Nation and just feast off our legacy like post-imperial Britain. And what is that legacy? It's rock, it's country, it's hip hop, it's "Wrangler on my booty," it's all the vulgar mongrelisms that force our post-ironic white nationalists to adopt Old Europe as their lodestar. In short, it's "Old Town Road." We're gonna ride this horse 'til we can't no more, we're gonna reify these myths 'til we can't no more, because when the empire is gone, the myths are all we have. (Oh, and the Billy Ray remix is a [10]. Obviously.) [9]

Jonathan Bradley: People suppose that genre exists to delineate a set of sounds, and while it does do that, it depends even more on its ability to build, define, and speak for communities. The question of whether "Old Town Road" is a country song or not is in some ways easily resolved: country music showed no interest in Lil Nas X -- or at least not until Billy Ray Cyrus noticed an opportune moment to complicate expectations and grab headlines -- and so Lil Nas X's song was not country. Even taking into account its sound and subject matter, his hit is best understood as a burlesque on country music, one that parodies and exaggerates the genre's motifs and themes for heightened effect. The kids on TikTok, who turned the long-gone lonesome blues of the song's tumbleweed hook into viral content, understand this intuitively: they use the incongruity that clarifies at the beat drop as an opportunity to engage in caricature and costume. And while Lil Nas X, a huckster and a trendspotter before he was a pop star, has been happy to embrace the yee-haw mantle that has been bestowed upon him, his song is a familiar rap exercise in play and extended metaphor. The Shop Boyz did much the same thing with "Party Like a Rock Star" and it would be obtuse to suppose that was a rock song. And yet, as the country historian Bill C. Malone has written, country since its inception has attracted fans "because of its presumed Southern traits, whether romantically or negatively expressed"; there has always been a bit of schtick to this sound. I wondered when we reviewed Trixie Mattel whether country is, on some level, intrinsically camp, and it's tough to declare definitively that Lil Nas X's bold hick strokes are that much more stylized than Jake Owen's performance of small town ordinariness. And just as a country music based on cohesive community rather than sound has found itself broad enough to encompass northern hair metal, Auto-Tuned club stomps, and Ludacris, the gate-keeping involved in keeping Lil Nas X out begins to look suspicious. After all, the first song to debut on Billboard's Most Played Juke Box Folk Records chart, the predecessor to today's Hot Country Songs, was "Pistol Packin' Mama," a hillbilly goof by the decidedly uncountry combination of Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters. As Malone has written, "While the commercial fraternity thought mainly of profits, the recording men, radio executives, publicists, promoters, ad men, sponsors, and booking agents who dealt with folk music also readily manipulated public perceptions in order to sell their products." One of the ways they did that was to tap into already mythological figures of American individualism like the cowboy, who is, after all, a creature of the west and not the South. "The respective visions of cowboy and western life drew far more from popular culture and myth ... than they did from reality," Malone writes of the early country singers who embraced cowboy personae; in some ways Lil Nas X's purloining of meme interest in that same culture places him within a rich country heritage. After all, when in popular entertainment has shameless self-promotion not been part of the aspirant's trade? It does matter how cultural communities react to the music made in their name, but when certain people are adjudicated not fit for club membership, it is worth asking why. Country's culture, I said recently, is "one that's implicitly but not definitely Southern, implicitly but not definitely rural, and implicitly but not definitely white," and it's easy to see how Lil Nas X doesn't fit into that. Country music's racism isn't unique to the genre -- the historical hegemonies of punk and indie rock are at least as determinedly white -- but it is particularly visible. Country is racist like the South is racist like America is racist. Lil Nas X disrupts that settlement, helping us imagine a country music that genuinely encompasses the music of the American South -- a genre that has space for "This is How We Roll" and Miranda Lambert, Lil Boosie and Young Thug, "Formation" and Juvenile, and perhaps even Norteño and banda sounds. That would be, however, not only a far different country music to what we know today, but the music of a far different America. [7]

Iris Xie: Yeet haw! Aside from the great pleasure I've had in showing this to my friends, (Me, two weeks ago: "Have you heard this country trap song???" My friends, this week: "Iris, that song you're talking about now has Billy Ray Cyrus on it??") and either slinging back and forth memey references, engaging in discussions on the state of white supremacy in the music industry while also debating about the song's merit, or hearing my friends start singing "can't nobody tell me nothing..." very quietly at any moment and I can't help but join in -- it's all been very fun. Aside from making plans to play "Old Town Road" on my next country road drive to Costco, something that's occurred to me is that this is a song boosted by the status and calamity of its metanarrative. We could always use more discussions of the double standards that Black and POC artists face in the industry when it comes to genres and participating in it, and I'm honestly glad Lil Nas X just made something that was fun and made sense to him, even if "Old Town Road" doesn't stray too much from the conventions of both trap and country, resulting in a well-balanced mashup that sounds more safe than surprising to me, but is serene in its confidence nevertheless. On the flipside of that genre-mashing, Miley wishes and is probably very jealous of her father now for hopping onto this train, lest we forget about all of her cultural appropriation attempts. But for the song itself, those long, relaxed drawls and the imagery of riding a horse to the trap beat -- why not? We live in weird times now, Black people's contributions to country music were erased, and it's kind of a relaxing song. Also, I'm a fan of the "Can't nobody tell me nothing" lyric, which has become an unintentionally defiant line in the face of all the backlash, resulting in a message to rally around. Now excuse me, as I text my friends that "I'm gonna take my horse down to the old town road." [8]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

[swanqueeneverafter]

43. Lily, Pt.2

Storybrooke. The Mayor’s Mansion. Exterior. (Henry steps off the school bus and sees Pongo sitting alone outside.) Henry: “Hey, Pongo. What are you doing here? You shouldn't be out here by yourself. (Pongo runs away and Henry follows:) Pongo! Pongo! Pongo! (Pongo leads Henry to an alleyway:) Okay. Come here, boy. (Pongo begins to growl at him, baring his teeth:) Whoa. What's wrong? Calm down.” (Cruella arrives in her car, blocking the exit.) Cruella: “Don't blame the dog, darling. He's simply following orders, and I told him to fetch.” Henry: “What do you want?” Cruella: “I want you to be a good boy and get in the car.”  Storybrooke. The Mayor’s Mansion. (Regina exits the mansion with a suitcase, as Emma follows her, clearly not pleased. Opening the trunk of her car, Regina places the bag inside, ready for her journey to New York.) Emma: “Are you sure going to New York is a good idea? You don't know what Zelena has planned. What if you're walking into a trap?” Regina: “I cannot leave that child in the clutches of my psychotic sister. Robin's clueless, so I have no choice.” Emma: “You don't have to go alone.” Regina: “Don't worry about me. You have your hands full with the Author. I can handle one wicked sister.” Emma: “Things are different in New York. Without your magic... Listen. (Hands Regina her gun:) If you won't take me with you, I want you to take this. I hope you don't have to use it, but... I want you to stay safe.” Regina: (Taking it:) “Thank you. (Putting the gun in her bag:) So you're not... Angry with me for keeping your parents' secret?” Emma: “Not only did they lie but they put you in harms way to protect themselves. Trust me, it's between me and them, you were only trying to help.” (Both of their phones beep as they receive a message.) Regina: “It's Henry. Video message?” Emma: “Must be a thing now. I got one, too.” Henry: (Via Message:) “Mom, Mom, Cruella has me. If you ever wanna see me again, you have to do what she says.” Cruella: “Hello, darlings! As you can see, I have your dreadful son. If you prefer him to remain intact, you'll do exactly as I say... Kill the Author. Then, ah, bring me his broken little body, or... Your boy will meet a very unhappy ending. Hmm?”

Mr. Gold's Cabin. (Mr. Gold returns to the cabin.) Isaac: “Finally. The joy of getting lost in a good book just isn't the same. Not after it happens to you literally.” Mr. Gold: “Stop talking. We haven't much time, now that you and Cruella have been reunited at last.” Isaac: “Cruella? No, I-I-I don't even...” Mr. Gold: “Enough. You both lied to me about your past, and now those lies are coming to the surface.” Isaac: (Springs to his feet:) “I'm sorry. Please don't hurt me. I-I didn't think it was... Relevant.” Mr. Gold: “Oh, it's not only relevant, it is essential to my plans. Cruella is so desperate to see you dead, she just kidnapped the Savior's son.” Isaac: “How do you know that?” Mr. Gold: “Well, you have your tools. (Conjures a crystal ball into his hand:) I have mine. I watched as Cruella gave the Savior a rather morbid choice... Either you die... Or her son dies.” Isaac: “Now hang on. You said you need me to get the Savior to go dark. This is how you plan to do it? By having her kill me?!” Mr. Gold: “Relax. If you died, the mantle of the Author simply passes on, perhaps to someone less willing to help me. No, no. I need you alive.” Isaac: “Then why work with Cruella, if she wants me dead?” Mr. Gold: “A person obsessed with vengeance is easy to manipulate. She thought I believed her happy ending was reconciling with her mother. But I knew she was after something else... Your death. Now I wanna know why. I wanna know precisely what you wrote about her, the exact words.” Isaac: “You wanna know? (Pulls out a card from his pocket:) Here. Read it for yourself. I'm better on the page, anyway.” (Mr. Gold reads the card and then chuckles.) Blanchard Loft. (Regina and Emma have come to the Charmings for help.) David: (Zooming in on the message on Emma’s phone:) “I recognize that trailhead marker. Cruella is holding Henry a couple of miles south of the toll bridge.” Mary Margaret: “So what now?” Regina: “Time to get our hands dirty and do whatever it takes to get him back.” David: “You're not actually considering Cruella's demand to kill the Author?” Regina: “Of course not. Even if we could find him, it wouldn't be half the fun of killing Cruella. Let's see how she likes being made into outerwear.” Mary Margaret: “Regina!” Regina: “What? It's Emma's heart we're trying to protect, not mine.” Emma: (Sitting arms folded:) “If we go in guns blazing, we risk hurting Henry. We have to find another way. And where the Author is. If he's enemies with Cruella, maybe he knows the best way to defeat her.” Mary Margaret: “Oh, we may be able to help with that.” David: “We went back to the convent and found a flask that we gave him. He dropped it when he escaped. A locator spell might work on it.” Emma: “Sounds like a perfect job for you two. I'll take Regina and we'll scope out the area where Cruella's holed up with Henry.” Mary Margaret: “Emma, I know you're still angry, but avoiding us is not going to help.” Emma: “I'm not avoiding you. With Henry's life on the line, I need to be around people I trust, and right now, that's not you.” (Regina and Emma leave as Mary Margaret is left speechless.)

Storybrooke. The Woods. (Regina and Emma scour the woods looking for their son.) Regina: “I’m not saying what your parents did wasn’t horrific but you can’t hold it against them forever.” Emma: “Says the woman who held a grudge for half her life because a 10-year-old spilled a secret. The difference is that you never held yourself as some paragon of virtue. You were honest about who you were. My parents weren't. They said they were heroes.” Regina: “Even heroes make mistakes. You know, not long ago, your mother gave me some advice. She said I needed to believe I could still earn forgiveness, that I had a chance at grace. I didn't realize it then, but... She was talking about herself. Emma, she's been trying to make up for what she did for a long time.” Emma: “If you suddenly understand them so well, you forgive them. I can't.” Hook: (Catching up to them:) “Swan.” Regina: (As Hook approaches:) “If you want to punish your parents, why don’t you tell the pirate what they did to his child.” Hook: (Nods to Regina:) “Your majesty. Swan, your parents told me where to find you. I've headed many rescue missions.” Emma: (Nods:) “We’ll take all the help we can get.” Hook: “You know, not to sound paranoid but I get the impression the Charmings are deliberately avoiding me.” (Regina and Emma exchange looks.) Emma: (Deciding that now is not the time:) “We’ve got more important things to worry about right now, like saving Henry.” Elsewhere In The Forest. (Cruella is playing a game on her phone.) Cruella: “Blasted birds. I'll show you what angry looks like.” (Henry finds a piece of glass on the ground and uses it to cut his restraints. Once freed, he makes a run for it. Pongo barks.) Cruella: (Looking up from her phone, rolls her eyes:) “Pongo, sic!” (The dog chases after Henry.) Mr. Gold’s Cabin. (Mary Margaret and David burst into Mr. Gold's cabin.) Isaac: “Oh! Don't come any closer! Stay back!” David: “We're not gonna hurt you.” Mary Margaret: “We just want some information.” Isaac: “Unh-uh. I want some guarantees, because if I tell you everything, you just might kill the messenger.” Mary Margaret: “You're safe. Trust us.” Isaac: “Trust you? I've seen what you'll do to protect your daughter. (David lunges at the Author, pinning him against the wall:) Aah! Ow! Hey! You said you wouldn't h...” David: “What have you done with Emma?” Isaac: “Nothing. I was just trying to protect the world from Cruella. I had no idea that Gold would use her like this. Even I couldn't see the end to the story.” Mary Margaret: “What are you talking about?” Isaac: “Yours wasn’t the first story I meddled with. What I did to Cruella... it saved lives, I swear!” David: (Roaring:) “Stop your babbling and concentrate! How does this story end?” Isaac: “With the Savior... Turning dark.” (David releases Issac and the Author hands David the card he showed to Gold earlier.) Mary Margaret: “What is that?” Isaac: “Something I wrote. The truth.” David: (Reading the card:) “Cruella De Vil can no longer take away the life of another.” Isaac: “Do you see now? Henry's in no danger.” Mary Margaret: “Cruella can't kill anyone. She's defenseless.” David: “Emma doesn't know, which means Gold wants her to...” Mary Margaret: “We have to stop this.” (They rush out of the cabin.)

Storybrooke. The Woods. (Henry is being chased by Pongo.) Henry: “Help me! Please! Help me! Help!” (Emma hears Henry screaming.) Emma: “It's Henry. Quick, it's coming from over there.” Hook: “No, it's this way.” Regina: “Has cannon fire damaged your hearing? It clearly came from over there.” Henry: “No! No! Help me, please!” Emma: “Split up. Go!” With Regina. Henry: “Somebody!” Regina: (Following her son’s voice:) “Henry?!” Henry: “Help me! Please!” Regina: “No.” (Regina finds a shell from which Henry’s voice is emitting.) With Hook. Hook: “Henry?!” Henry: “Somebody! Help me!” (Hook also finds a shell.) Hook: (Picking it up:) “Magic.” (As Hook walks off, we see that Mr. Gold is watching from a safe distance. Henry, meanwhile, runs to a cliff edge.) Henry: “Help me! Please, somebody... (The dog catches up to him:) Pongo...” Cruella: “Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks? (Points her gun at him:) You shouldn't have run.” (Emma arrives.) Emma: “Henry!” Henry: “Mom!” (Cruella grabs Henry.) Emma: “Let him go!” Cruella: “I'm afraid not. Come any closer, and he dies. One small dead Author. That's all I asked. Simple revenge, and you failed utterly.” Emma: “Put the gun down, Cruella.” Henry: “Mom.” Emma: “It's gonna be okay, Henry.” Cruella: “I'll do it, Savior. Believe me, I will. (As Emma raises her hands:) Put your hands down, Savior. We both know you're bluffing.” Emma: “That's my son.” Cruella: “And you're a hero, and heroes don't kill.” (Emma uses her magic to push Cruella away from Henry. Cruella falls from the cliff edge to her death. Pongo immediately returns to normal.) Emma: “Henry?” Henry: “Mom.” (Emma rushes forward and hugs her son as Mary Margaret and David arrive too late.)

The Enchanted Forest. Past. (The Apprentice seeks an audience with the Sorcerer. Appearing merely as bluish red smoke, the Sorcerer questions his Apprentice.) Sorcerer: “What brings you here?” Apprentice: “The Author... He has violated the rules. He has changed things. The Savior... He made me channel her potential for darkness into Maleficent's child. There must be a way to undo it.” Sorcerer: “I'm afraid not. What's done is done, my Apprentice.” Apprentice: “But what now of the girls, their fates?” Sorcerer: “They remain entwined, as they always were and always shall be.” Apprentice: “Of course.” Sorcerer: “Our concern now is the Author.” Apprentice: “I have taken care of that, master. Our mistake has been rectified. He is inside the book, where he can no longer alter our world... Only record what happens.” Sorcerer: “You must see to it there is no more damage. The Author must never be allowed to toy with fate again.” Storybrooke. Present. Cruella's Funeral. (Issac and Mr. Gold stand by Cruella’s grave. They are the only two people present.) Isaac: “When I took away Cruella’s ability to kill, I never thought it would come to this, that she of all people would be left defenseless.” Mr. Gold: “Don’t beat yourself up too much. Cruella killed her father, her mother and two step fathers simply because she enjoyed killing.” Issac: (Nods:) “Still, I'll miss her. Furs and all, I'll miss her. She was good to me... In her way. Made me who I am.” Mr. Gold: “Well, someone had to die at the Savior's hands.” Isaac: “Did they?” Mr. Gold: “We won't have what we need to rewrite the book, to secure our happy endings, until Ms. Swan has completed her journey. The Savior has taken the first step down a dark path. And we have to make sure she stays on it... For both our sakes.” (From across the way, Emma is watching Mr. Gold and the Author.) Granny’s Diner. A Short Time Later. (The Charmings, Hook, Henry and Regina share a table as Emma paces before them.) Emma: “I'm going after Gold. He made this happen. He needs to answer for it.” Hook: “Careful. Don't go off half-cocked.” David: “Hook's right. He wants you angry.” Emma: “Yeah, well, I am angry. That doesn't mean he's gonna get what he's after. Do I wish I could change what I did to Cruella? Yes. But that's regret, not darkness. (Meaningfully to her parents:) I think we've all done things we regret. Right now, we need to focus on one thing... How to keep Gold and the Author from causing any more damage.” Hook: “Actually, two things. (To the Charmings:) Now that I’ve got you here, I’d like to know what Ursula meant about you knowing what happened to my child?”

(Maleficent enters.) Maleficent: “I might be able to help with that.” Hook: (Getting to his feet, surprised to see her:) “Mal...” Maleficent: “Stay seated, Killian. I’ll deal with you momentarily. (To the group:) It now appears we have a common foe... Rumplestiltskin.” David: “But... he resurrected you.” Maleficent: “To help himself, not me. Cruella's death only confirmed that.” Hook: “Oh. Now you want to turn on him before he turns on you.” Regina: (Smiling:) “I knew Gold couldn't keep the dragon on her leash for long.” Mary Margaret: “What do you want?” Maleficent: “Nothing from you. But your daughter, I hear, has a talent for finding people.” Emma: “Yeah, I do. Who do you want found?” Maleficent: “My daughter.” Hook: “Daughter? I have a daughter?” (Maleficent glares at Hook.) Mary Margaret: “She's alive?” Maleficent: “Yes. She survived the journey to this land... The journey you sent her on. (Hook turns to the Charmings who cannot meet his eye. Maleficent uses her powers to mute the pirate momentarily. To Emma:) You want to prevent Rumplestiltskin from achieving whatever he wants. What better way than leaving this town and helping me?” Emma: “I'm not running away from Gold.” Maleficent: “It's not running from him. It's hindering him.” Emma: “What do you know about her?” Maleficent: “Just what the Dark One showed me... That she was banished to this world 30 years ago, to a place called Minnesota, where she was adopted by a couple. And they named her Lilith.” Emma: (Realisation dawns:) “No.” (Emma quickly leaves the diner as Hook’s voice returns.) Hook: “Swan? What is it? (To Maleficent:) You and I need to talk, right bloody now.” 

Storybrooke Sheriff’s Station. (Emma is scanning through microfiche for old newspapers. She finds a picture of a little girl in an adoption announcement. Noticing the star on the girl’s wrist, her suspicions are confirmed.) Emma: “Lily.” Mankato, Minnesota - 1999 (Emma and her foster family are preparing for vacation.) Emma: “Flashlight... Batteries... Canteen... Matches...” Bill: “How's the checklist going, Em?” Emma: “Good, I think. Uh, what's ‘G.O.R.P.’?” Katie: “Good Old Raisins and Peanuts. It's trail mix.” Zach: “Haven't you ever been camping before?” Emma: “I've never even been on a vacation before.” Bill: “Not everyone was lucky enough to grow up the way that you and your brother have. Emma, we're just happy that you're gonna spend your first family vacation with us.” Emma: “So am I. Oh. I almost forgot... Sleeping bag.” (Emma is in the garage, when she hears noise, grabbing a baseball bat, she readies herself. Curled up in the sleeping bag, she finds Lily.) Lily: “Emma, wait.” Emma: “Lily? What are you doing here?” Lily: “I know I'm probably the last person you want to see right now. But, I... didn't have anywhere else to go.” Emma: “What's wrong? What happened?” Lily: “It's bad, Emma. I know I've lied to you before, but I really need your help.” Emma: “Why should I trust you now?” Lily: “Because I am in big trouble. You once said we'd be friends forever. Did you mean it? 'Cause I did.” (Bill enters.) Bill: “Emma? Who's this?” Emma: “This is... Lily. My friend.” Bill: “You never told me that you had friends in the neighbourhood.” Lily: “My foster family just moved here. I thought I would surprise her.” Bill: “Ah. Well, Lily, would you like to join us for dinner?”  Storybrooke Sheriff’s Station. Present. (Regina joins Emma.) Regina: “Ain't fate a bitch? You know this girl. How?” Emma: “She was my friend.” Regina: “Oh, the one you told me about. Who you said you pushed away?” Emma: “How is this possible? Of all the kids in the world, the one I end up friends with is the one my parents banished?” Regina: “Emma, there are powers beyond our understanding, and your parents messed with them.” Emma: “So the only friend I ever had wasn't even my friend by choice.” Regina: “I know. It hurts, doesn't it? I've been there, too.” Emma: “Yeah?” Regina: “You think it was a coincidence that I just so happened to adopt the Savior's son? Our actions are our own, but fate pushes us. Maybe it's time to push back.” Emma: “How?” Regina: “Well, I have to go to New York to rescue Robin and Roland from my insane sister, and you have to find this girl to redeem your parents and show Gold he's wrong about you... That he can't change you. What do you say we help each other?” Emma: “What, like a road trip?” Regina: “Well, if that's what you want to call it.” Emma: “I'm okay, Regina. I don't need a babysitter.” Regina: “But maybe I need you. You lived in New York. I've barely been outside of Storybrooke. Besides, I’m curious to see where you and Henry lived for that missing year. How about it, Swan? How about we make today the day we both beat fate?”

[kevbake]

(via How Do Bees Use Pollen - A Common Misconception - Carolina Honeybees)

Do Bees Eat Pollen?

Everyone knows that bees eat honey! We know that honey bees collect nectar from blooming plants. This plant nectar is converted into honey and stored by the bees for use during Winter.

The nectar to honey story is old news. Even most children understand that real honey comes from honey bees.

But bees eat something else as well! Bees need to consume pollen.

Do Bees Use Pollen to Make Honey?

Ok, this is the misconception. Because we know that bees have a great interest in pollen, some people think it is used to make honey. But no, bees do not directly use pollen to make honey. Honey is made from plant nectar. A hive full of pollen will not produce 1 ounce of honey. But there is more to the story…

[[More]]

Bees Collect Pollen From Flowers

Bees and pollen have a story to tell as well. Where does pollen come from ? Flowering plants use sweet nectar to attract honey bees and other pollinators. By moving particles of pollen from flower to flower, bees help the plants produce fruit. They don’t do this purposely of course. (Well – not as far as we know anyway :).

Pollination is very important to modern agriculture. Large fields of crops require many pollinators and honey bees fill that role very well. They live in large colonies and can be transported. Gardeners who live in areas without pollinators have to resort to desperate measure such as a "pollination wand." Can you imagine? It sounds funny but it is a serious problem.

How Bees Use Pollen

Surely it can not be that important ! What can this fuzzy dust do for honey bees? And its not just honey bees. Other bees, wasps and even spiders use pollen. Do bees eat pollen? Yes, once it has been mixed with enzymes and converted into bee bread.

Pollen plays a vital role in the life of bees. Without the benefits of pollen to bees and other insects, the colony would fail. Learn why bees collect pollen on their legs and return to the hive. And, how bees use pollen to grow their family.

Do Bees Use Pollen to Make Honey?

Again no, not directly but bees use pollen for another important job. Without pollen the colony would not be able to make honey because it would not have any workers to do the job!

Pollen is used to feed baby bees. It is the only protein source for the honey bee colony. Pollen is vital for the health and productivity of a honey bee colony. Without this protein source, no young bees could be raised. And it is important to have a variety of pollen sources for the young bees.

Watching bees carrying pollen from flower to flower is an enjoyable activity. Pollen can be very colorful. I enjoy watching the bees coming into the hive with a heavy load of pollen and trying to guess which plant was the source. I often see bright yellow pollen from dandelion flowers, pale green pollen from Red Maple and bright red from Henbit flowers.

Bees continue to need pollen during the cold months of the year. Brood rearing will slow down or stop for a while but some pollen will be used. Yes, even here in the South we have cold temps and the occasional snow storm. But, we also have warm days throughout the winter.

Our honey bees are blessed to leave the hive and fly on afternoons above 50 degrees. And my bees may find a very small amount of pollen from a blooming dandelion located in a warm corner.

Honey bees collect pollen during the warm months here in South Carolina to be used later. It is during the late winter and very early Spring that the stored pollen is most important. After months of little brood rearing activity our bees use pollen to raise young.

While Winter still rages outside the hive, brood rearing slowly begins. Stored pollen is eaten allowing nurse bees to feed brood. This food is essential for new bees. Even in the South, not much pollen is available for collection in late December/ early January.

Because pollen is not readily available when the bees start to rear brood, they rely on stored pollen. Any hive that fails to store extra pollen during the Fall is at risk. Nurse bees must consume bee bread (pollen and salvia,enzymes etc.) as a stimulus to produce royal jelly for very young bees.

Pollen – Not Just An Allergen

Sometimes pollen “gets a bad rap”. The itchy eyes and stuffy nose associated with pollen leaves us complaining about the yellow dust. However, pollen is viewed different by beekeepers. In fact, the fine pollen from wind-pollinated plants is the main culprit of your allergies. Honey bee prefer larger pollen particles.

How Do Bees Collect Pollen?

Bees collect pollen of different colors on their legs. In the hive, bees eat the pollen to provide food for young. A bee collecting red pollen. Bees use pollen as a protein source.

Pollen is a component of plant reproduction. In most cases it is necessary for seed development.

Some plants use the wind to transfer pollen from bloom to bloom, they dont need bees. Other flowers depend on pollinators such as bees, butterflies, moths, etc. to carry pollen.

A bee lands on a pollen producing flower. She wets the dry pollen with juices from her mouth and packs it onto the stiff hairs of the hind legs. (Sometimes pollen is sticky too !)

We call these hairs “pollen baskets”. She continues to pack pollen on her baskets until she is ready to return to the hive.

Sometimes pollen is collected accidentally. As the fuzzy honey bee is searching for nectar, dry pollen particles stick to her body and hitch a ride to the next flower.

Pollination Is An Accident

As bees transfer pollen inadvertently, the flowers are fertilized. But the bees are not intentionally pollinating flowers, they have another mission.

As mentioned earlier, pollen contains protein and other nutritious substances. Honey bees need protein to raise developing larvae (baby bees). All the honey/nectar in the world will not raise young bees without some pollen.

The healthiest bee colonies will harvest pollen from a variety of blooming plants. This practice helps them provide the most complete nutrition for the baby bees.

Bees Storing Pollen – Planning Ahead

Honey bees are designed by nature to store resources when they are plentiful. As the summer and fall grow to an end, the busy bees pack away nectar/honey to serve as food during winter. But as we see, it is not just nectar that is collected.

Fall is a major time when honey bees collect pollen. Bees continue to collect pollen until cold weather arrives. Especially in the early morning, you will see them working.

As they wet the pollen and packed it on their corbiculae (stiff hairs on the hind legs), they pay you little attention. You will see them working with extra energy as if they know Winter is coming.

I love to see a worker bee carrying pollen into the hive in October. This lets me know that the hives are preparing for winter. A smart beekeeper will check their colonies for pollen before winter sets in. A hot summer with little rain may result in low pollen storage.

Beekeepers Sometimes Help

If a honey bee colony is short on stored pollen, beekeepers can provide pollen substitutes.

This condition can happen during times of drought or other severe weather conditions.

How Bees Store Pollen

Pollen is a natural protein source full of nutrients and some moisture. It will spoil and degrade in nutritional value. The wondrous honey bee has a way to deal with that problem.

A worker bee brings pollen into the colony. Once inside, she goes to a honeycomb cell in a certain area of the comb near the nursery area. . She rakes the pellets off her hind legs into the cell. Using her front legs, she grooms all the pollen from her body. She solicits a drink of nectar from another house bee and returns to the field to collect more pollen. We must add one more step to the pollen storage procedure.

A worker house bee will firmly pack the pellets into the honeycomb cell. During packing, enzymes are added to the pollen. This process causes the pollen to undergo a lactic acid fermentation.

The end result will be a product that is less perishable and more easily digested by the bees. A small amount of honey is sometimes placed atop the pollen cell. We call the end product “bee bread”.

Nurse bees use pollen as a food source enabling them to feed young larva. Most of the pollen collected by the bees is eaten by older brood (over 3 days old) and young adults. The young adults (nurse bees) consume pollen to produce food from glands in their mouth for the youngest larva. As larva age their diet will change as well.

People Collect Bee Pollen Too

Sometimes beekeepers collect pollen to feed back to the bees during times of drought. The natural pollen must be stored properly to permit mold. This is not easy to do. That is why many of use rely on pollen supplement when I bees need them.

Many people also choose to consume bee pollen. It is believed that bee pollen contains many substances that promote good health. Proper collection methods are necessary to prevent mold due to the high moisture content of fresh pollen.

Whether collection is aimed at feeding bees or humans care must be taken. Beekeepers must collect carefully to avoid stressing the colony and causing a pollen shortage for the bees !

As an educational activity, I have collected pollen from my bee colonies. I was curious to learn what types of pollen my bees bringing to the hive. It is possible to identify pollen source by color. But there are so many pollen source out there it is not easy.

At local events, children (young and old) enjoyed touching and smelling the dried pollen. They are many educational opportunities involving the study of pollination.

I own a small plastic pollen trap exactly like the one pictured here. It is a little flimsy ! However for occasional use it performs well. Don’t even try to use the little gold hooks that come with it. I use a stretchy bungee cord and attach it to the front of the hive. I have had mine for many years and it is still functional.

Bees Use Pollen In Late Winter To Prepare For Spring

During late Fall in South Carolina, my honey bees have generally been taking a break for a few weeks. For most colonies, the queen has stopped laying eggs or at least only a small number. This is okay, we do not want the bees to be too populous. They might eat all their stores and starve before Spring.

As winter solstice passes and the daylight hours lengthen, a magical thing starts to happen inside the hive. The bees know spring is coming. The queen bee will start to lay a larger number of eggs each day. This gradual buildup will continue as the weeks progress.

Young bees need pollen for development at a time when there may not be pollen outside to collect. Thankfully , the numerous bees collecting pollen last fall have some in storage to use. If the colony experienced a large pollen deficiency , the colony may be in trouble. Late winter/early spring days can be windy and cool. Some trees (red maple) may produce pollen during winter but the weather may not allow flight.

Bee collect pollen from trees and flowers that bloom. Pollen is used by bees to raise young. Bees use pollen to raise young. They are collecting a pollen substitute in my homemade pollen feeder.

Beekeepers Help Colonies Lacking Pollen

This is an opportunity for a beekeeper to provide pollen for hungry bees. Some beekeepers collect and store natural pollen to give back to their bees during times of need. I think this is great.

However, I’m very concerned about proper storage of fresh pollen. It molds easily if not stored properly and I am not as good at making bee bread as a worker bee. Moldy pollen is a bad thing. Beekeepers who collect fresh pollen often use a food dehydrator to dry it for storage.

A well tested pollen supplement is the easiest way to provide pollen to your bees for most beekeepers. I have tried several formulas and my current favorite is “Mega Bee”. Mega Bee comes as a dry yellow powder . Another good choice is Bee-Pro from Mann Lake.

A protein patty is made with it using honey or syrup for use inside the hive. Or you can feed it to the bees dry. I prefer the dry feed method. This time of year, I always put a couple of cups of pollen sub outside in a protected place.

Bees Collecting Pollen From My Feeder

I really wanted one of those nifty pollen feeders but they cost $100. So, I found one of my empty Tidy Cat Plastic litter pails, washed & dried it thoroughly and hung it up under my shed. Your dry pollen sub must be protected from rain.

By late afternoon, the bees were having a wonderful time. I enjoyed watching them for a few minutes. The busy bees collecting pollen were not concerned about me watching. Their focus was on the job.

I was able to stand very close and watch them roll around in the powdery substance. Then each worker would groom herself making ready for flight. Away they would go back toward the bee yard, little yellow pollen pellets on their hind legs.

While looking through those seed catalogs, choose a few pollen producing flowers. If you have honey bees in your area, this can be a great activity for the family. However, be sure to place the pollen bucket well away from your home or play area as it will be buzzing for a few hours.

Happy Bee Lovin’ – Beekeeper Charlotte

[achrisstevenson]

Young Adult—Naughty or Nice?

 Young adult books are generally aimed at readers in the 12 to 18 year-old age bracket. However, it can vary sometimes by a few years either way. There is also a sub-classification of “upper” and “lower” YA. Lower might be 12 to 17 years-old, whereas upper could be around 14 to 19 years-old. Young adult books are not really age oriented as much as they are content categorized. I lean toward the upper young adult level of 14 to 19 years-old. There are no fast and hard rules about this. It’s a generalization because there is also a huge crossover appeal to adult readers. Look no further than the Harry Potter books which started out as middle-grade, then slid upward to young adult and then shanghaied the adult audience.

 LENGTH

 YA books can be shorter than adult books and get away with it. I’ll shoot for around 200 to 300 pages. I feel comfortable with that; I plan it that way. Only because I want to appeal to younger readers who do not feel trapped into reading a long and detailed tome. They have lessened attention spans. YA book can be of the novella size, which are shorter still. As much as the term is not widely worshipped, I write what I consider “beach reads.”

 SEX, DRUGS AND ROCK ‘N ROLL

 Generally, with adult books you can pretty much let it rip. I think you know what I’m talking about. If you go too far with mentions of physical sex, drugs, multiple partners, adultery, violence, foul language, suicide, law-breaking and other stark and unsavory topics, you’re entering ghetto, punk or erotica territory. Graphic adult romance is nothing new, although there is the sweet variety that is very popular—more so than the other type.

 The same applies to young adult books only you have to be very careful of what you include in the text and storyline if you want to keep it clean, safe and non-threatening. After voluminous reads and research in this category, I would think that holding hands and kissing would be the best way to go without offending scruples, religion, or the adults who might be the purchasers of such books for their teens. Anything more could be a turn-off to one of the largest audiences and purchasers of young adult books—the librarians. They recommend books to all manner of sources, but particularly to schools. Such books have to pass muster with the teachers. It’s definitely a form of censorship. It is not the type of censorship that violates freedom of speech rights. It is more of a checks and balances of morality with what might be considered appropriate and sane. Notice I said “sane.”

 There are some publishers and reviewers who have stated, in words to the effect: “I don’t go for the sweet and innocent portrayals of teens that are unrealistic and status quo. Rip my face off and tell the blunt truth about how real teenagers act, live, believe and talk. To be sure, these preferences are in the minority. But there’s a heck of a lot of gray area too. There are some things you can get away with, and ride the fence, and there are times when you’ve crossed a boundary line. The question is, how much naughty can you get away with without drawing fire, yet still remaining true to the characters and real life circumstances?

 Not much—it’s limited. You can touch upon taboo subjects from afar, or hint or make reference to them. Even then you should to careful. When you start painting images via innuendo, it will show itself in the eyes of an on-guard adult reader. Believe me, condemnation is more prevalent when you’ve crossed the naughty line as opposed to receiving praise for telling it like it is in all its naked glory.

 I’m very conscious of what I write in young adult books now more than ever. It does not take much to set somebody off. When you start crossing lines you have word-of-mouth critics to contend with. Anything that is negative about your written word can go viral and dash a book to smithereens. Never mind your reputation. That was the first thing that went!

 Example: I’ve made mention of drugs before in my books but kept them out of use. I’ve had older teens take a few sips of alcohol under stress. Such scenes were over before they began. I dropped the F-bomb and several other swear words about a dozen or more times in the length of a book. I had my main characters witness a copulation scene from a hundred yards away, and forget about it in the next moment. I’ve had some unintentional nudity in scenes, but there was no emphasis on it. To me, these scenes and subjects were relevant to the plotline and situation. I had to strive for realism. Even if it was borderline. The result was, 90% of the readers took it in stride. The other 10% were offended by it and voiced their opinions. Nothing can destroy your review rank faster than a reader who blatantly disagrees with your subject matter. I know, I know…to hell with that bunch. (hey, I used a swear word)

 The balancing act between naughty and nice is skewed toward the nice. That’s hardly unexpected with young adult books. Remember those librarians and teachers? It’s not a good idea to lay it all out there if they’re going to grab a copy of your book. They are a credentialed gatekeeper. They have a heck of a lot more experience with literature than you or I. If they are young adult book librarians their expertise is magnified three-fold.

 Chris, what about sex behind closed doors? Teens indulge in this activity whether we object to it or not. It’s all part of the growing up process. It’s instrumental in every facet of their passage into adulthood.

 I wouldn’t. The characters might talk about it. Leave it be. It’s giving the green light to underage sex. Stay away from it. At 18 years-old plus: knock yourself out, or knock the boots of your characters (doh). Although use a little moderation. In case you haven’t noticed, the NA (New Adult) category was created for one of its most primary reasons—permission to lay and get laid. Never mind college. Think Spring Break, wot?

 So what the heck can we get away in this very subjective analysis? I can only guess and give you some borderline examples of what you or your reader might find inoffensive in this analysis. Remember, everything in moderation. You will have to ultimately decide where your comfort zone is.

 Fondling

Nudity

Alcohol consumption

Drug use

Bullying

Extended suicidal depression

Dirty jokes (not kidding)

Groping

Gross violence

Physical and mental abuse (particularly toward female characters)

Animal abuse

Murder

Marriage (this one requires parent’s approval depending upon the country or other facts)

 I’m learning more and more about moral turpitude in this category. My sister even advised me to have characters marry before sex. Not a bad idea. Didn’t Stephanie Meyers hold her characters back for three volumes before anything happened? I can’t remember. It’s a great hook technique—keeps the reader guessing.

 Christian young adult fiction usually abstains from sexual activity before it is morally and legally appropriate. That goes for other religions and cultures.

 But, Chris, doesn’t your views make you an unrealistic prude? Not really. I was a teenager once too, although some will dispute this! I know what goes on. The trick is to read between the lines where there is a lot more there to discover about messages than you think. I’m lucky enough to pull off this kind of subterfuge. I just can’t get away from blundering on occasion. That happens to all us scribblers. I hope you don’t blunder.

 Just remember, there are not only some speed bumps that you have to consider in writing young adult literature, but there are some barriers which are best not crossed. The parents and librarians will never need to wipe sweaty brows or unclench a fist after reading your story. If…you are mindful.

 Happy travails. I’ll red-shift outta here….

[journeysintowebcomics]

Girl Genius Liveblog #119

UPDATE 119: All the Main Characters are Sick Now

Last time they had arrived to the areas above whatever source of energy the Castle has. It’s not going to be easy to deal with, but with Tarvek, Agatha, Gil, Moloch and two random minions it shouldn’t be too hard to do, right? It’s worth a try. So let’s continue.

What’s the Dyne? The answer is the first thing revealed today. Turns out the source of power of the Castle seems to be because of a river underneath the Castle. I admit that’s not what I thought it’d be. I had expected something...flashier, let’s say, like harnessing the depths of magma of Earth or something like that. A river is...normal!

Nevermind, here it says this is more than just a mere river. Guess I should have seen that coming, in this crazy, crazy world things can’t be as simple as they seem at first sight. So, what’s going on down here? Is that ridiculously oversized mold? Pods? Should I expect monsters to emerge in any moment from those things?

So, looks like this village here wasn’t founded by the Heterodynes. There used to be a spring here, that’d bring insanity and despair to the people who entered it, except in a few occasions. The people who lived nearby had superstitions, but of course the ancient Heterodynes didn’t have any particular respect for rules and superstitions. Instead of dying, he survived with increased stamina. And then he did what any conqueror would do: take over the town via castle building. Not that anyone made an effort to stop him, he turned into part of those superstitions.

That explains a lot.

Some time later, a different Heterodyne decided this small spring wasn’t enough, he sought to increase the flow of the spring until it turned into the river everyone sees right now. It ended destroying the castle, and since a spring turned into a river pretty much instantly I’d be willing to bet a lot of other stuff was destroyed too wherever this river passed by. And that’s the story. That’s how this big, noisy river came to be. I wonder...hm...given that the river is a secret, I suppose that means the water’s effects haven’t been used at all for a long time. That may be for the better.

Once the water’s powers for electricity was harnessed, the effects are gone. Ah, that explains it! Except here right where they are, but it’s not advisable to drink the water, for reasons you dear reader surely can guess by now. Anyways, they came here to fix the power, better get going before something inconvenient happens—oh goddammit.

Well that’s not good. Can Agatha heal herself? The procedure and the machines she had made were just for these two, and although it’s true this disease is rather slow in its deadly effects, unless Agatha makes one of the stabilizing machines she strapped to Gil and Tarvek she’s bound to be delirious anytime now. This is the worst time possible for that.

The conclusion Gil gets to is that Agatha kissed Tarvek. Hah! So that’s coming to bite her in the ass, just not in the way I expected. The disease is infectious, but it doesn’t seem to me like it’s too contagious. Nobody else has showed symptoms despite being near Tarvek, hm...so everyone should be okay as long as they don’t touch Tarvek nor Agatha.

Oh, shut up, Tarvek, you weren’t being particularly attractive back then.

Yeah, how could she resist her romantic impulses at such display of sexiness and sanity.

Anyways, Agatha being sick opens a lot of trouble here. She’ll have to be hooked to the valeo procedure she had been planning, procedure that was already risky and complicated enough with two people. “We’ll make it work” she says and I say that yeah, of course they’ll make it work, hard for Girl Genius to exist without the Girl part.

The rest of Agatha’s equipment comes crashing down, minion Snaug lost control. Ah, right, that’s her name, I had forgotten. Nothing seems to be broken. Violetta is also okay – except for her pride, when Moloch shows concern for Snaug and tells her to rest, even offering her something to drink. Hah! Maybe Moloch likes a certain minion too! That’s sweet.

...if I didn’t know better, ‘getting something to drink’ while being near the river filled with deadly water would make me very nervous.

Violetta doesn’t take well that Agatha is changing colors too, chance Tarvek and Gil use to discuss what they’re going to do. Agatha’s going to hook herself to the machine they’re going to assemble, and the one thing they have clear is that, if there’s any danger or anything starts going wrong, they’ll save Agatha. Tarvek even offers his own life for her safety.

“Are you two fighting again?” Agatha asks. Surprisingly they aren’t, but I don’t think Agatha would be pleased if she knew what these two were talking about. The repairs are going to be difficult, but with some effort and blueprints it should be doable. The plan is that they’ll setup their equipment so the current will pass through them all, trying to heal Tarvek and Agatha at once. That’d leave...everyone else to watch over the equipment. Quite risky, and while I think Moloch is smart and prudent, he’s not a spark. I don’t think he’d know what to do if something goes wrong. The Castle can’t do much either. I guess I simply lack the imagination and madness necessary to imagine something that wouldn’t go badly.

...yeah, like I said before: when one problem is solved, three arise. The machine had been made to maybe heal Tarvek and the procedure started, but then there were these problems with the source of power, Agatha got sick, the Castle is now angry, and Zola escaped. It’s almost a miracle anything gets done in this story.

The possibility the only Heterodyne around here will die doesn’t make the Castle happy, even if it’s just a temporal death. It even suggests the possibility to make a clone of herself once she builds a machine for that – no comment.

Top notch support, way to go. But yeah, even if the Castle tried that it wouldn’t work, would it? Agatha wouldn’t let herself be trapped just like that.

I’ll stop for now.

Next update: four updates

[art-angels]

From Nirvana to 'weightless worlds': How photos evolved underwater

Nirvana's second album "Nevermind" revolutionized rock music and has sold at least 30 million copies since its release in 1991. Its cover also features one of the best-known underwater images ever made: the photo of a baby swimming towards a dollar bill on a hook. The music -- including lead single "Smells Like Teen Spirit" -- made the album's success. But that iconic image carved it into our minds. 

Spencer Elden, the cover model also known as the "Nirvana baby," was not simply thrown into a local pool in Southern California. Achieving this image took significant preparation, according to photographer Kirk Weddle."Since kids are always an unknown at shoots, I did several prelight and prefocus passes with a doll. Once I felt I had the framing, light, and exposure dialed in; the parents slipped the child into the water," wrote Weddle on

his website

.

The mention of underwater photography may recall plastic-protected throwaway yellow cameras for snapshot memories of summer vacations. Yet water has long captured the minds of fine artists.

"Alla Prima" by Barbara Cole 

Unfamiliar territory

The first underwater photograph, a blurry image of aquatic life, was taken in 1856 by William Thompson, who didn't actually dive in to capture it. This is why French marine biologist Louis Boutan is widely considered the early pioneer of the genre, as he was the first to plunge into the ocean to take the first underwater portrait, armed with a camera he had invented with the help of his brother Auguste.

Underwater photography grew from a long line of documentarians, who wanted to record wildlife beneath the waves. But the attraction to underwater images quickly branched out into the world of make-believe.

As early as 1916, director Stuart Paton adapted Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" into what became an incredibly expensive production that used a system of mirrors to capture underwater scenes. But it was Bruce Mozert, the grandfather of underwater art photography, who first capitalized on the genre. He was an ace at creating seemingly impossible scenarios, such as a smoke-filled barbecue using a can of condensed milk. Florida was the perfect backdrop for Mozert's interpretations of a homely 1950s way of life, and his images soon became an icon of the clear waters of Silver Springs -- and the American dream.

Taking photography to new dimensions

Underwater photography has since grown further into an art of its own. Contemporary photographers Barbara Cole and Christy Lee Rogers have become two of the most prominent artists in the field, ingeniously using water as an artistic tool to transform reality. They don't simply drag our on-land surroundings into a pool, in the style of Mozert, but rather take advantage of the submarine environment to create a dream-like alternate dimension.

"Emulsion" by Barbara Cole

"My goal since I began to exhibit in 1984 was to push the medium -- to paint with a camera, resisting the realism that is normally expected of photography," said Cole via email.

Canadian-born Cole, whose work will be on view at Galerie LeRoyer this month, entered the world of photography at the age of 19, as the fashion editor of the Toronto Sun. Her days were spent taking pictures and absorbing as much as she could from staff photographers, among other editing jobs.

Cole, who is "always looking for a way to transform reality," started creating her ethereal compositions by using a Polaroid SX-70. "When that was no longer an option I decided to accomplish an analogous effect by shooting through water. It was a natural progression. I've been swimming almost daily for 40 years and the secrets and beauty of the way a figure appears underwater hadn't eluded me," Cole said.

"Jet Lag Triptych", Underworld series, by Barbara Cole 

Along with Cole, Rogers is changing the way water is used in photography to create images that can easily be mistaken for paintings and that push the boundaries of reality. Unsurprisingly, water has also had a great bearing on Rogers' life. She now lives in Nashville, Tennessee, and has exhibited globally, but prefers to shoot at sundown in Hawaii, where she grew up.

"Water was like freedom, purity and pure lifeblood. It was also an overwhelming powerful destroyer at the same time. A body immersed in it, free from gravity but trapped by the inability to breathe or survive under it, was a great dichotomy that was profoundly compelling to me," Rogers said in an email.

In these shoots, the main working environment is inhospitable, so the connection between the image maker and the models becomes even more important. Rogers explained she has to be the "eyes of the models" because they have to keep them shut as soon as they're submerged.

"Alive" by Christy Lee Rogers

"This is how one of my favorite models Elisabeth Donaldson explains her experience, 'when modeling underwater there is an initial moment of complete physical terror. You have blown out all of your air, and are underwater in darkness, searching for light, wrapped in fabric that grabs you and pulls you and covers your face,'" said Rogers.

She continued: "I don't think these images are supposed to be possible. Every time I do a shoot, I think it'll be my last because I don't know if I'll be able to capture it again. It's so exhausting for me mentally and physically."

"Obsession" by Christy Lee Rogers

Since the early 20th century, fine art underwater photography has evolved from Mozert's surrealist, submerged renditions of life on land to Rogers's and Cole's painterly images, reminiscent of Botticelli's billowy fabrics and floating figures.

"Short of working in outer space it's the best place to be able to play with gravity. Under the water I'm dealing with a weightless world. Figures can be literally suspended, time slows down, and sounds are very gentle," said Cole.

"Submerged: Four Series of Underwater Photographs" by Barbara Cole is on view at Galerie LeRoyer in Montréal until Nov. 1, 2018.

[caveartfair]

The Radiant Paintings of Les Nabis, the Movement Started by Bonnard and Vuillard

Pierre Bonnard, Dining Room in the Country, 1913. Courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

The walls of the room flash red and pink like spring camellias, mimosa-yellow, clivia-orange. Tables are laden with inkpots, books, fruit—apples cut in half, their wet insides glistening; piles of fat grapes; bananas as fiercely golden as the sun—and discarded cutlery. A woman speaks to the person in the seat next to her, as she feeds a little dog that lingers under the table. It’s an unremarkable image, and yet a common one among the paintings of Les Nabis. It’s precisely the everydayness of these scenes that gives them their vibrancy, the intimacy that comes from utter knowledge of repeated ritual.

Active from around 1889 until 1900, the Nabis (whose name in Hebrew means “The Prophets”) were a loose collective of French artists—among them Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul Ranson, Paul Sérusier, Félix Vallotton, and ��douard Vuillard—who met at the Académie Julian in Paris. Synthesizing late-Impressionism’s focus on light, Japanese-influenced lines, and Paul Gauguin’s striking use of color, the Nabis presented the possibility of what art could be in a world rushing towards the end of one century and the beginning of another. Rejecting the serious political and philosophical agendas of some of their peers and successors, the Nabis were always half-humourous, unwilling to be taken too seriously as a coherent or united force in art. As Nicholas Watkins notes in his essay on the group, they “were not cultural rebels; rather, they were innovators who picked up and developed themes of the moment in often original ways.”

Pierre Bonnard, Nude in the Bath (Nu dans le bain), 1936–38. Courtesy of the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ Roger-Viollet.

This Nabis’ lack of a unifying aesthetic goal meant that despite a united interest in bright colors and bold, semi-abstract shapes, there were extensive divisions in subject matter. Ranson, Denis and Sérusier fixated on symbolic scenes heavy with mystical or religious connotations (see Ranson’s interlaced Buddha and Christ, Sérusier’s sorcerer-filled forests, or Denis’s vision of the Garden of Eden), while Bonnard and Vuillard’s “intimism” drew from the everyday, forcing us to reconsider the beauty of our household objects and unthinking rituals.

It’s tempting to see this as the reason why Bonnard and Vuillard are the subjects of current and forthcoming solo exhibitions at, respectively, Tate Modern and the Holburne Museum; their distillation of our intimate relationship with the mundane still feels fresh to modern audiences. The trappings of a middle-class French lifestyle are close enough in time and sensibility to a modern aesthetic that we are able to relate them to our own lives. Today’s audiences lack the appreciation of late-19th-century mysticism necessary to engage with the work of the other Nabis painters; their works today seem like eccentric curiosities.

As well as their formal similarities, Bonnard and Vuillard had a particularly strong personal bond. Outspoken supporters of Albert Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army who was wrongly accused of treason in one of the period’s most infamous political scandals, they came to be in direct opposition to Denis and Sérusier, who were on the side of the French army. Despite the Nabis’ apolitical beginnings, it was the intensely political nature of the Dreyfus Affair that deepened the divide between the key players.

Edouard Vuillard, The Flowered Dress, 1891. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Only Bonnard and Vuillard remained close, and the two corresponded and visited each other long after the dissolution of the Nabis as a collective. “If I wrote to you every time I think about you, our past, painting, etc. you would have enough letters to fill a library,” Vuillard wrote in his last letter to Bonnard before the former’s death in 1940. As their careers progressed, the two became even more closely aligned in their depiction of intimate domestic interiors, their knowledge of the quiet magic of the mundane more pronounced.

Much of Bonnard’s focus on the everyday involved his wife, Marthe. Marthe often took long baths to alleviate her chronic pain, and Bonnard also found a strange, unknowable beauty in the repeated action. In The Bath (1925), Marthe becomes lavender-streaked, washed blue like French skies, and somehow disembodied, familiar yet strange, wallowing and flat like a fish. These bath paintings are incredibly affectionate, full of the kind of stillness and quiet that exists only in situations of intense intimacy. We aren’t spared the details of this closeness in Nude in the Bath (1925)—crumbled clothes sit on the chair, Bonnard’s slippers appear at the edge of the frame—to the extent that we feel like voyeurs, not of a sexual act but of something somehow more revealing: a routine carried out between two people over years.

Édouard Vuillard, The Candlestick, c. 1900. Photo by Antonia Reeve. Courtesy of the National Galleries of Scotland and the Holburne Museum.

Vuillard, for his part, elevated the everyday rituals of his mother, painting her seated at her vanity table, fixing her hair. There’s a striking tenderness in these images. Vuillard once termed his mother his “muse,” and even when absent from his paintings, she feels present in the draped fabrics; a seamstress, her eye for color is apparent in his patterns. In one of his most famous paintings, The Flowered Dress (1891), his mother is presented alongside other women, all of them sewing. But while the others are shadowed, their dark clothes fading into the background, Vuillard is able to communicate his love for his mother by anointing her with light. She wears a black dress clustered with white clematis-shaped flowers and tied with an orange belt like a kimono, her body slightly turned away from the viewer.

The detritus of domesticity is something that deeply informed Vuillard’s sense of intimism. Many of his paintings center candlesticks and scraps of lace tablecloth, old satchels hanging from hooks in the wall. His subjects are often knickknacks placed on shelves and desks. These overlooked items reveal far more than they initially suggest.

The ritual of eating becomes almost sanctified under Vuillard’s gaze. His lithograph The Hearth (1899) focuses only the apparatuses of cooking, pots and pans huddled around the fire. Here, these objects, normally concealed in cupboards, hidden out of sight, are rendered in reds and citrus yellows.

Pierre Bonnard, The Dining Room, Vernon, c. 1925. Photo © Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. Courtesy of Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

The repetitive beauty in the routine of the preparation and consumption of the meal is also seen in The Family After the Meal (1891). His subjects’ faces are turned towards each other in the glow of the lamp, plates still on the table, wine uncorked. They’re relaxed, chins resting on hands, seen at their most authentic and most revealing.

This domestic closeness is similarly reflected in Bonnard’s dining scenes, informal events that normally consist of family members—or even just Marthe—sat around a modest table. He’s acutely aware of the intimacy inherent in the kitchen table—the small rituals we undertake, the way in which we eat when unobserved, the food we cook for our loved ones—and paints them laden with meat and wine and pots of stew, cutlery placed haphazardly on plates of half-eaten food. Sometimes the figures are captured talking and gesticulating, but at others they simply sit, sated and slumped.

It’s in these quiet domestic scenes that Bonnard and Vuillard demonstrate the power of intimism—the insight that our everyday rituals, known only to those closest to us, can bring. They force us to consider our possessions and our homes in a different light, transforming them from objects into potent symbols of our intimate lives.

from Artsy News

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Trapped by Tropes: Spoon, The New Pornographers, Alt-J, Charly Bliss

Forget authenticity, anti-commercialism and the like — above all, indie-rock as a genre fascinates for how performers quiver beneath the anxiety of influence, nervously seesawing between referents. One new sound can stay in the culture forever if acolytes repeat it, pay tribute to it, revive it when it falls out of fashion, or reverse it while acknowledging the original’s primacy. In 2017 it often takes effort to distinguish between novel forms and received ones, alternative forms and normative ones. The four bands reviewed below walk these tightropes with varying degrees of grace.

Spoon: Hot Thoughts (Matador)

I’d say this clinches it, but they clinched it a decade ago: Britt Daniel and company only know how to make one album, which they’ve done about a half dozen times over a now storied career. It’s a pretty good one, though, and it keeps getting more fanciful within established strictures. That four to five men should for years take such professional delight in tweaking such an oddly staid model of lightweight guitar-rock, rather like a cat batting around a ball of yarn, is an amusement in itself.

If ever a band were trapped by formula, Spoon is it, but that misses the point somehow. Formula is their subject, their muse. That jerky, tensile style of guitar/piano jitter rattles around in their bones, as inextricable from the band dynamic as Daniel’s raw bleat. Musical strategies that with other bands might indicate attempts to break the mold have long since become integrated into said formula; Spoon’s mild spareness accommodates any range of sly sound effects and compositional experiments. Recent Spoon albums have abounded with more good and bad sonic ideas than most bands manage to pack in, and this installment is no different — the long synth intro with gradual guitar fade-in on “WhisperI’lllistentohearit,” the shakers/rainstick on “Pink Up,” the keyboard belches augmenting or replacing the guitar parts — and yet none violates the boundaries of the compressed, muscular template they invented around the turn of the millennium. The title track’s confluence of ominous electronic ostinato, heavy guitar crunch, and plinky cowbellesque percussion produces quite the slinky stunner, while “Shotgun” lopes purposefully along, its interlocking rhythm guitar parts barking at each other. Much of the rest remains beige, clunky, and male, which isn’t a bad thing — imagine those adjectives in their friendliest incarnations.

The brand of quirk-rock available here isn’t quiet, but it is slight; the album might not fit into casual contexts. Spoon’s jarring, stop-and-go motion demands the listener pause and contemplate the album as a self-conscious aesthetic object. The preponderance of these objects in indie-rock is at once its most pressing limitation and its great gift to the world.

The New Pornographers: Whiteout Conditions (Concord)

Self-consciousness usually compounds formal dilemmas rather than solves them, but every album don’t work out that way. Sometimes it’s fun to watch musicians puzzle their way out of a tight box, as with the New Pornographers, the infamous, long-running, ever-shifting aggregate of Canadian singer-songwriters who here defeat indie-rock’s self-referential impotence with, er, a beguiling concept album about self-referential impotence. It rocks, too!

Dominated by mainstay A.C. Newman and essential covocalists Neko Case and Katherine Calder, this is their best project in a decade or more because ordinary rules regarding the linear motion of time don’t apply: like many bands acutely conscious of their predecessors, they frolic in the wreckage that litters posthistorical space. Furthermore, they’ve written a bunch of songs about being an indie band struggling to survive in some dystopian confluence of straitened material circumstance and the aforementioned abstract posthistorical space .”I only play for money honey,” begins the first song, and by the end their “blues from the last world/news from the future” has been “consigned to the dustbins.” They dodge their chronic scatteredness, adopting a consistent sound that, puzzlingly, recalls Broken Bells, testing the preciousness of their guitar-based songwriting against integrated electronics that function as jabs in the ribs. Their smooth mesh of acoustic and electric guitars readily admits alternately whizzy, spattery, and serene synthesizer parts, caught up in crafted, high-flying soar. Propelled through the air from beginning to end, the album deploys its riffage with such streamlined efficiency it takes several listens to notice the spiraling melody adorned with synth staccato in “Whiteout Conditions,” the raw guitar blasts dotting the steady bassline in “Darling Shade,” the way the chorus in “Colosseums” swells up anthemically only to clamp down on itself hard, all achieving grace and ease that belies the frustrations expressed in song.

The depth of their defeatism reveals the limits of their musical world; the collapse of their own particular tradition doesn’t mean the collapse of all music. It’s hard to fault said defeatism as a critic who has made criticisms of indie-rock similar to those the band repeats and turns on itself. No collapse of tradition prevents genre obsessives from assembling records into elegant, hummable, distinct pop shapes. Come for the hooks and stay for a scary, inchoate sense of political urgency.

Alt-J: Relaxer (Infectious/Atlantic)

Caring about indie consensus in 2017 means pondering bands who mistake eccentricity for notability and consider divergence from received form reasonable evidence for talent. After two passable albums on which they defined their own amateurish, electronic, mechanized, folkish sound, the English experimental rockers here tweak that sound several steps over the edge in accordance with the above two misconceptions, and the whimsy is just too much to bear.

There’s no denying their originality — no other band assembles slithering acoustic guitar strings and antiseptic keyboard hum into such hushed, mesmerizing, immaculately interlocking clockwork ticky-tock. They demonstrate excellently how admirable attempts to create new sonic templates often produce labored ones. Theoretically, the organic and electronic elements would click into a striking musical contraption, a hissing, chirping metal machine cobbled together from moving parts, spinning reassuringly around the coffee table; indeed, “Matilda” and “Fitzpleasure” from their first album exemplify this ideal. There’s a calming quality to it, as the charm of the mechanical elements overlaps with the relaxed, brushed folk guitar. To accentuate the prettiness on the current album, they slow down the tempos, sing more breathily, foreground the painstakingly strummed or plucked acoustic riffs, and generally dilute each element until they attenuate the wires running through the machine, and the whole thing unravels into a pile of gears,poles,snapped strings, and smaller contraptions themselves unraveling. The record that emerges from the mess, at once wispy, whispery, and robotic, struggles to associate attenuated sound with attenuated emotion. The one upbeat exception sticks out awkwardly: “Hit Me Like That Snare,” as crazed a sex-rocker as you’re likely to hear this year. Its tinny guitar chug comes as a relief.

Given music this tightly sprung, make sure not to hit the quick release. Provided the parts haven’t rusted over, I await the day they reassemble their gadgetry.

Charly Bliss: Guppy (Barsuk)

The question’s been asked a billion times: given a billion practically identical young punkish bands, why the hell does this one sound so special? There’s often no answer; hear enough such bands and ask the question often enough, and a healthy respect for the gods of arbitrariness emerges. That Charly Bliss’s brand of power punk should delight so makes no sense, and delights for that too.

Despite their sunny cheer, the pop-punk tag sits uneasily on them. The tempos are too frantic, the rumbling guitar roar too distorted, the mix too dirty. This is more like Grimes singing for Roomrunner — scrawny messy energetic whomp meets Eva Hendricks, whose squeaky, sugary scream abrades at this moment in history like no electric guitar will. Positing a dialectic between girly vocalist and tough band would be too facile, reliant on a spuriously gendered equivalence between guitar noise and macho defiance. It’s the musical juxtaposition that thrills, as Hendricks and the electric riffage press similar buttons in the mind’s ear. As for the guitars, she and Spencer Fox rip out harsh, fuzzy, clanky power chords as if throwing a smokescreen in front of the frenetic pounding beat hot on their tails. Sweet melodies shake out the dirt from their hair before turning back on themselves in perfect feelgood resolution (“Black Hole”); others get halfway there and rub their dissonance in your face (“Westermarck”). Stylistically and technologically, the album could easily have come out in the ‘90s, but I like them better in our modern age — you can hear how much they adore a form passed down and refined through history. That’s their secret.

I hope they don’t maintain such ebullient crunch forever — it would wear thin — but for at least the length of an album, it galvanizes. Here’s another riddle: do the songs themselves express joy, or were they just so happy to have written these songs that the joy springs from the performance?

The post Trapped by Tropes: Spoon, The New Pornographers, Alt-J, Charly Bliss appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[gastro-nomique]

Home Depot Cleaning Tips

Spring Cleaning Tip No. 1

Sure, sweet onesies and ruffly dresses are fun to buy, but why not give parents what they really need to have a baby? A new baby cleaning kit will be the most appreciated and used gifts that the new parents receive. (And if you are an expecting parent, go ahead and make yourself one – you won’t regret it!) Our second baby was born a few months ago and this is the gift that I wish I had received, so now I make them for all my new parent friends.

Make sure you include only non-toxic, eco-friendly cleaners, because there is no time more important than when your baby is a newborn to keep your house free of toxic fumes. Method has a great line-up of non-toxic cleaners, and I’m sure you can find an alternative for any product you use.

I included in a Galvanized Pail:

Method Dish Soap for all the baby bottles and pacifiers that accumulate every day

Method Pink Grapefruit All Purpose Cleaner to keep every surface i the house sparkling (and I love that you only need one spray to handle almost any job – because the baby clutter will take up enough space on its own!)

Method Free and Clear Laundry Detergent because the amount of laundry that one little seven pound human can make is unbelievable

Method Juicy Pear Hand Wash & Method Lemon Mint Foaming Hand Wash to keep the germs away – stock up since there will be a lot of hand washing going on in the first few months

Method Daily Shower Spray to keep things clean after each shower since there will be a lot less time to spend cleaning the bathrooms once the baby arrives

Some easy erasers, a microfiber duster, some brushes & cleaning rags to get any cleaning job done

A few all natural cotton muslin swaddling blankets a few small toys and rattles just for fun

Spring Cleaning Tip No. 2

Did you know that the air inside your house is 2 – 5 times more polluted than the air outside? This is especially scary for infants, whose lungs are still very immature.

The best way to clean the air inside your house is to open the windows every chance you get. Cross breezes do wonders for improving indoor air quality. The other way to improve the air quality for your baby is to put plants in the nursery. Certain plants can clean up to 90% of the toxins out of the air in less than 24 hours.

Plants (in a colorful ceramic pot to match the nursery) make a great gift for a new parent. Some good choices are Aloe Vera, Sansevieria and Spider Plants, which are all very easy to care for. Because let’s face it, new parents have their plates full already trying to keep their newborn healthy and happy, the last thing they need to worry about is a plant.

I like Aloe Vera because in addition to cleaning the air my baby breathes, I can use the gel from inside the plant when she scratches her face with her razor sharp little nails.

Spring Cleaning Tip No. 3

The plants may be removing the toxins from the air, but they sure aren’t getting rid of the dirty diaper smell! For that all you need baking soda. Fill a 1 Qt. Metal Paint Bucket about half way with baking soda and wrap it with twine to make it look like part of the decor. Try to place it close to the changing table or diaper pail to keep the air smelling as sweet as your baby.

Spring Cleaning Tip No. 4

How is it that such tiny, cute little things can make such big messes? It seems like we go through a dozen outfits every day. And at least half of those are stained in some way or another. The good thing is that I have figured out a fool proof way to get out any stain that a newborn can possibly make. This method works on everything from sweet white onesies to cloth diapers to crib sheets.

Start by washing the soiled items with Method Free and Clear Laundry Detergent. I love Method Free and Clear because I don’t want any fragrances or nasty chemicals that may harm my sweet baby’s sensitive skin. I like to do an extra rinse, just to make sure there is no residue left that may irritate her skin. After washing, simply hang the items on a clothesline in the sun. And like magic, within a few hours, the stains will have disappeared! (If it is windy, don’t forget the clothespins or you may be washing again)

Spring Cleaning Tip No. 5

Baby clothes and diapers aren’t the only things to take the hit when baby makes a mess! It is almost inevitable, the time I set the baby down without something under her is always the time that she spits up or has a diaper malfunction. And unfortunately, I can’t use my laundry trick on the couch, mattress, or rug. To clean these messes, first blot the soiled area with towels to remove the moisture. Then mix baking soda and a few drops of essential oils in a mason jar and sprinkle liberally on the soiled area. Let it sit for a few hours, or overnight if needed, then vacuum it up.

Spring Cleaning Tip No. 6

Babies explore their world with their mouths, so it is imperative to keep baby’s toys sanitized. But what new parent has time to hand wash and sterilize each and every toy after use? To keep things simple, set up a system to simplify the washing process. Simply line a Galvanized Pail with a Laundry Wash Bag. Once a toy or pacifier needs to be washed, drop it into the pail. The next time you are going to run the dishwasher, zip up the wash bag and put it right one the rack. Use a Cascade Platinum Dishwasher Pac and it will sanitize the toys and leave your dishwasher sparkling clean.

Spring Cleaning Tip No. 7

High chairs take quite a beating, and with all of those crevices they are so hard to clean. But with a little bit of elbow grease, it can be done. Start by taking off any pads, straps, and any other removable parts. Then combine HDX All-Purpose Cleaning Vinegar with a little bit of Method dish soap in a spray bottle. Spray all over the high chair and let it sit for 15 – 20 minutes to loosen any stuck on food or debris. Using a Plastic Putty Knife, scrape away any gunk and wipe clean with a wet cloth.

Spring Cleaning Tip No. 8

Kids are notorious for leaving half-eaten bananas on the counter. And with a newborn in the house, it may be a while before those bananas get picked up and put away. Cue the fruit flies. And once those pesky little creatures settle in, they multiply like crazy.

Luckily, it is cheap and easy to make a trap that they can’t resist. Mix Method dish soap and Apple Cider Vinegar in a mason jar and set near the fruit bowl or anywhere else the fruit flies tend to congregate. They will be attracted to the smell of the vinegar, and will try to land on the surface. When they do, the soap traps them in and they drown. It is strangely satisfying to see how many you can catch in such a short period of time.

Spring Cleaning Tip No. 9

Big siblings are sure to have a bit of free time on their hands while mom and dad are caring for the new baby, so giving them the tools to help clean up will not only give them something to do, but it will make them feel helpful (and hopefully give mom and dad a little rest!)

Clean out a cupboard or find a shelf that the older sibling can easily reach. Hang a dustpan and brush, a microfiber duster, and a tile and grout brush from some Command small hooks. Then stock their shelf with a kid-sized scrub brush, some easy erasers, and a non toxic cleaner. Add some cleaning rags (or old baby washcloths) and make sure to have a  bucket or pail where they can put the dirty rags when they are done.

Spring Cleaning Tip No. 10

Help the older sibling keep track of ways that they can help out around the house with a simple chalkboard chore chart. A 3′ x 4′ chalkboard panel is the perfect place to make lists, and to doodle when the chores are done. Hang a Chalk Marker or piece of chalk from the chalkboard with twine and keep a HDX Easy Eraser close by to clean it off when the list is complete.

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