#5ds is literally my comfort show because of them

[cooki3face]

Hello! 👋🏾,

I’ve found your page a few days ago, and reading through your masterlist was the first time I’ve ever seen the term ‘Divine Feminine’.

Your messages and posts talking about Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine made me wonder if I was a DF myself. They were hitting spot on for me personally.

Let me tell ya, every since reading your posts, I’ve seen DF messages everywhere! I’m just gone assume that was the universe and my spirit guides confirming that I am indeed, a Divine Feminine.

I haven’t met my DM outside of my dreams and the 5D, yet.

I’ve been having dreams where he comes in them for about a few years now, and it makes me happy whenever he shows up.

Whenever we talk to each other in the 5D my  conscious mind isn’t allowed to remember or be there for those conversations.

I’ve always known I was connected to him in some way, but now I’m wondering if he might be my DM. I’d be fine if he wasn’t, it’s just that my connection to him is completely different from the other people that come in my dreams.

I wanna ask if it’s normal for me to go through periods of time, where I’m not feeling the need to reach out to him as much and be consumed with him.

Because I go through periods where I’m so enamored by him and just the thought of him makes me giddy and happy. I could literally sit and think about him all day.

But then randomly, I just stop thinking about him that much and he stops showing up in my dreams. During the down period, it’s almost as if he’s just another man, but in a familiar way? Kinda like after awhile of being close to someone it starts to feel like you just want to exist along side them instead of being consumed by them?

I’m trying so hard to put this feeing into words that are easy to comprehend.

It’s an off and on thing that’s been happening since 2019, I wanna say.

I’ve known about him since 2017, but I didn’t think anything of it until he randomly started popping up into my dreams in 2019 and hasn’t gone away since.

He is literally everywhere. He shows up no matter what I’m doing, someway and somehow he finds a way to pop back up.

It’s funny whenever he randomly shows up somewhere he shouldn’t be, in theory.

I think I’m rambling now, so I’ll try to wrap this up.

I’m asking if it’s normal for Divine pairings to go through this off and on, intense, visceral need to be entirely surrounded by each other, to not really reaching out to one another that much?

We are currently in one of those down time periods, so that made me start thinking.

Also, I have no idea what a Divine Feminine actually is, so if you feel comfortable with answering that as well, I’d like for you to explain that to me, please.

Thank you for answering, if you choose to. And even if you don’t answer, thank you for reading this anyway.

🤎

Beautiful questions, don’t worry about your questions being too long or feeling as though you’re inconveniencing me by asking long questions, you’re giving other people the opportunity to learn and giving me the opportunity to share with you. Only you know the answer the question on if he’s your divine masculine or divine counterpart or not and I believe that you know deep down inside. What you’re experiencing are no contact/separation periods and they are completely normal and a regular occurrence for those experiencing a twin flame connection or even a really high level soul connection. The periods of time where you don’t think of him as much are don’t feel as driven to communicate with him or be around him as much are normal and you may feel as though you don’t feel his energy at those times.

In my personal twin flame journey, during the early years of our connection, we would go our separate ways quite frequently, often times without any given reason at all and go off and live our lives for a while, be in different relationships, experience different experiences in our lives,, and there were times when we separated or went or separate ways due to disagreements or arguments but all in all when we came back to one another or reconciled again it was like we never left. The connection was just as strong if not more, the love never left.

There are times when divine counterparts go into separation and the desire to be with one another, be around one another, be consumed by one another,, is very real and very deep. You live, breathe, sleep, eat that person.

What is/who is divine feminine?

Divine feminine looks different and feels different for everyone or may differ significantly depending on who you ask. She can fall under so many different aspects, be presented and expressed in so many different ways. To put it simply and easily, divine feminine is the feminine aspect of the divine. The divine feminine is the yin/dark energy (darkness,passivity,gentleness, absorption, earth) the divine feminine energy has nothing to do with societal adaptations of what femininity is supposed to look like and has everything to do with energy so the energy of being, the energy of receiving or receptivity, the energy of resting, the energy of surrender, forgiveness, flow, trust, emotion, intuition, and sensuality.

So when we speak about the divine feminine vs the wounded feminine we see certain specific juxtaposition between the two. A wounded feminine energy may hold energies or things like being out of tune with oneself, repressed truth or repressed identity, feeling unworthy or insecure or having low self esteem, holding onto feelings of guilt or shame, not being able to set strong boundaries or hold oneself to high regard or express yourself in such a way in which you know you deserve good things and are open to receiving them. You may also see things like codependency and being dependent on something or someone outside of oneself to make them feel whole, feel good about themselves or make them feel safe or secure. When someone suffers from wounded feminine energy, the authentic (feminine) core,spirit or essence of someone is disabled from being able to be fully embraced and expressed.

Here are some beautiful chakra/archetype charts for feminine energies:

[deerloaf-trash]

Some quick 5D’s doodles because I love and care and appreciate them

[it-fits-i-ships]

I don't think I'll ever be over Knock, Kock, Knockin' On Hooty's Door and Eclipse Lake

Luz being all panicky about the idea of asking Amity out, "I'll never make my way into Amity's heart- I mean make a portal back home," Luz calling Amity a cotton-candy haired goddess, Luz gushing about Amity to the echo mouse, the implication that Luz is so worried about asking Amity out because she was rejected by previous crushes for being too "cheesy" and now she's afraid of scaring Amity off by coming on too strong or being mushy, Amity's little blush when Luz helps her out of the giant owl pellet, Luz back-peddling when Amity says she wants to forget about the kiss because she doesn't realize Amity just doesn't want to scare her off, the hugging and blushing after the floor moves, them clinging to each other for safety the whole way down the chute, the pillow winking at Luz, Luz panicking and setting the pillow on fire because it reflects her "cheesy" super romantic nature and she is absolutely terrified of showing that side of herself to Amity and making herself vulnerable to more rejection, Luz's facial expressions throughout the entire tunnel of love sequence as she is slowly consumed by the dread of Amity potentially thinking less of her or worse not wanting to be around her anymore, Amity blushing and fidgeting once she realizes what this whole tunnel of love thing is about and sees Luz's real opinions about her displayed on the sign, Amity getting really sad when she sees Luz is so resistant to the tunnel of love and getting visibly upset when Luz starts flipping out and destroying everything in her panic, Amity feeling like she's been rejected because of Luz's attempt to not be rejected (the irony and parallels are so good), Amity crying and thus alerting Luz to the fact that she done fucked up and Amity actually does want to date her, them being caught in a sapphic glitter bomb slo-mo moment together (followed immediately by more Bi Panic ™ from Luz), Luz freezing up when Eda asks her about how Hooty was trying to help her because she doesn't want to admit in front of Amity that she was trying to ask her out, Eda being super supportive and telling Luz that if she wants to ask Amity out she should go for it, Luz being herself and asking Amity if she's okay after Hooty wrecks the ground, all of the facial expressions and body language during the scene where they are asking each other out is so wonderfully awkward and adorable and perfectly captures what it's like to be a young queer person entering your first relationship, Amity admitting that she isn't too cool for the sappy "cheesy" stuff that Luz likes to do, the heart on the ground, Hooty referring to Amity as "Luz's new GF," Hooty's smile of satisfaction at having successfully set Luz and Amity up

Amity being super nurturing and making an abomination just to hold tissues for and otherwise tend to Luz while Amity is busy with other tasks, Amity checking on Luz and being worried about how a magical disease might affect her, Amity confiscating the portal key for Luz's safety, Luz's pouting being quickly overtaken by her urge to message Amity "UR PRETTY," Amity not understanding the message but trying to be supportive anyway, Amity taking every opportunity to say out loud that she's Luz's girlfriend (which feels very true to a young person in a new relationship, honestly, I do this as self-talk when I've recently started dating someone so I can totally relate), Amity bursting in to help when she hears Luz yelling, Amity volunteering to go on a dangerous mission just to help Luz, Eda being like, "Yeah, yeah, we get it, you're Luz's girlfriend and it's adorable, moving on," Eda having a nickname for Amity? (Boots) and telling her to grab a coat like the mom she is, Amity taking her mission super seriously, Amity telling Hunter to watch it when he sounds like he might be threatening Luz, Luz messaging Amity "UR RAD," Hunting projecting onto Luz and Amity's situation based on his trauma, Amity having that short period of doubt because Hunter's projecting triggered her own trauma, Amity asserting that she is an awesome girlfriend, Luz being desperate to reach Amity to warn her of the previously unknown added layer of danger, Amity catching and clutching the chat device in a way that tells us it's one of her most prized possessions, Amity confiding in King about the message Hunter projected onto and King quickly putting her fears to rest because Amity trusts him enough to listen when he shows her another way to look at the situation, "Of course, this is Luz we're talking about," Amity inadvertently gushing about Luz when she says "there are people out there who won't make you feel worthless" while she's comforting Hunter and reaching out a literal and figurative hand to him just the way Luz would (thus actively choosing to be the bigger person, but more importantly a better person than she was at the beginning of season one), "Oh, come on! Being nice usually works for Luz," Amity being visibly scared when Hunter says he knows where to find Luz, Amity playing 5D chess with the portal key, Luz clutching the messaging device in her hand even while she's asleep because it's clearly very important to her as well, Luz calling Amity her awesome girlfriend immediately upon seeing her, Amity's little blush and smile after Luz calls her an awesome girlfriend

Their relationship is so cute and layered, I can't even, I can't wait to see what comes next for them!

[bluemoonpunch]

HI! This is from a pretty old post but I was wondering, what did you mean when you said you used to "enter a trance state in three or four different sets"? Did you just repeat a certain technique over and over until you went under or did you mean something else?

A: Yeah, pretty much. It's sort of like dropping deeper and deeper into your unconscious mind layer by layer, similar to what they do in Inception, I think. Similar concept. Every layer would be something different like I would do something different in order to go down further as I was in a different state of mind or holding a different level of consciousness.

XXXX

Q: Hey! I was re-reading the external alignment of min yoongi that you posted (because weirdly his readings which are very old now, give me comfort :| ) and read that incarnation cycle part and your mentioning 200-year cycle. Just realized that the great Jupiter Saturn mutation cycle is also 200 years long so maybe it's some dots that connect? Idk I almost had an epiphany moment and then felt dumb, sorry.

A: It is an interesting lineup for sure. I wouldn't be surprised if there is some connection there. Here's an article about it if anyone is interesting: link.

XXXX

Q: me : vibin to the end credit music of bmp's videos

namjoon : sings

me: 👀

Bmp: slips in some numericals ( ͡°³ ͡°)

Me: 👁👄👁

seriously nam-vocals and them codes hit diff -@bursaat

A: This is a very old ask that I've had saved in my ask box for a while just because it always made me smile, lol.

XXXX

Q: heyy just wanted to add a little info, Billie apparently shared her birth time back in the days on Twitter when she was talking about astrology and charts with her fans and it's 11.30 am. If you want you can look up to that too :) thanks for your work for the collective 🙏 -@bursaat

A: Thanks for letting me know. There's definitely some aspects in her chart that line up with her EA reading, a lot of interesting tension between planets that seems to be set up for public progression, kind of leading people through certain phases of life by publically displaying her own progression. It's very interesting for sure.

XXXX

Q: what happens when two souls merge?

A: If souls merge while still occupying physical forms, as in they are still existing physically as two separate humans, there can be a lot of psychological issues between the two or a severe imbalance where one has more trouble than the other, which can lead to a very noticeable power imbalance, especially in romantic partnerships. This is also something that can happen with twins who either share a split soul or just have a close enough connection or are dependent enough on each other that their souls merge.

I have seen before in some of my personal work and exploration that in some pretty severe cases one person will "vibrate out of the body" in order to merge with the other. In other words, the one who is "weaker" mentally or physically will die in order to merge with the other. On a higher level, the souls or the consciousnesses may remain separate, but they'll merge on lower levels. Such as merging on a 5D plane but remaining separate on 9D plane.

XXXX

Q: Hi! This is not a reading request, but could you please add dates to the mini-readings on your website from now on? There's no date for them anywhere and I know I can find them here and see where they were done, but if it's not too hard please add them in the future! Thanks!!! <3

A: Yes, all of the mini-readings on the BMP website should now show the dates they were posted on the top center, just below the main title of the post. Just be aware that some of the posts put up in late 2018 were carried over from Tumblr, so there will be two dates, one under the title for when it was posted onto the website, and another date at the top of the entry marking when it was originally posted on Tumblr.

XXXX

Q: Hey! Hope you are well. I have a general question about shifting timelines: How do we identify if we've shifted to a different timeline in a tangible sense? Is it based on how our interests change, how clear/hazy our memories become of fairly recent years, etc? I've been getting back to regular meditation again and I'm trying to figure out if what I'm going through is because of work+isolation+lockdowns messing up my perception or if it is something else.

A: Well, I assume it can be different for everyone, but for me, it's definitely a matter of memory and energetic ties to those memories that state out the most. Specifically around trauma and very heavy memories that used to really deeply trigger me even with the slightest mention of it now feel almost like something that I've only just heard about rather than experienced. Like, I still remember things very clearly, but they just don't feel heavy anymore, they don't come with negative feelings the way they used to, it's just kind of... there. Almost like a dream.

I've definitely experienced certain shifts before where, deadass, one day I was absolutely terrified of a specific concept, specifically involving aspects of communication with higher consciousness or beings of other dimensions and whatnot, and then suddenly the next day it was absolutely not a problem at all. It was really strange, but it was literally like flipping a switch. I've had a few moments like that in the past 4 years or so where "flipping a switch" could most accurately describe certain points of shifting timelines or shifting in levels of conscious awareness simply because of how fast it happened.

Shifting timelines can also come with remembering past lives, or being able to recall experiences you yourself didn't have, which can be really confusing and anxiety-inducing at times, but as long as you are conscious of it and you know what's going on, it's easy to ground yourself and settle into the present moment and just focus on the here and now.

Sudden inspiration or interests popping up out of nowhere along with very strong intuitive pulls toward new things can be a sign of shifting timelines but also signs of spiritual or conscious expansion and development within a singular timeline as well.

[husbandomail-archive]

submitted by @sacredwarrior88​, looking for a man from Yugioh 5Ds.

Name: Corethra (or Corey for short)

Age: 25

Gender: Female

Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual

Occupation: Hand Packer at an ice cream factory

Zodiac Sign: Pisces (born March 2)

Chinese Zodiac: Year Of The Pig

MBTI Type: INFJ

Alignment: Lawful Neutral

Hogwarts House: Slytherin

Love Language: Acts Of Service

Physical Appearance: African-American. 4'11 (Call me short and I’ll kick your butt!) Average but well developed figure at best. I weigh about 158 lbs and am pretty insecure about my body. Black and naturally curly hair but I keep it flat-ironed so it’s straight. It’s long and goes down to just below my shoulder blades. There are times when I will have braids put in though. Brown eyes, and I wear glasses.I usually dress up in a casual way, just throwing on whatever looks good at the time but I will sometimes put in the effort when the time calls for it or when I’m in a good mood. I have an affinity for the punk, emo, and goth styles and I rarely wear feminine clothes but I will wear something risky every once in a while.

Hobbies/Interests: Video games, reading, writing, anime, internet surfing, listening to music, politics (sometimes), watching movies/TV shows, basically being an overall nerd

Dislikes: Ignorance, stupidity, restriction, manipulation/gas-lighting, bullying, humanity, not being understood

Personality: At first glance, I seem quiet and keep to myself, only speaking when I need to or when I’m spoken to. I’m an anti-social introvert to the fullest and don’t care much for small talk or going out. I prefer to have deeper conversations. When I get comfortable enough in whatever environment I’m in, I start to open up bit by bit. I’m a tomboy and pretty rough-minded as well as stubborn. I’m very sassy, have a smart, sarcastic, and witty mouth if not humorous and outrageous at times, can be borderline rude, and I’m more sensitive than I care to be. I can literally cry at someone’s suffering especially if it’s someone I’m close to or even a total stranger. I’m very empathetic and my heart is bigger than what most people would expect. Most people describe me as quiet, intelligent, creative, dorky, a smartass, and really sweet. I love a good laugh and have an open sense of humor to boot.

Many of my friends say that I’m very sweet and kind which I usually am if I’m in a good mood as well as affectionate as hell. Hugs and pet names galore with me! However only my friends and family see that side of me. My language is often unfiltered, harsh, foul, and blunt which shocks people because they think I’m a pure angel. I say what I want when I want and no one tells me otherwise. If they do, they can expect a mouthful from me. I’m an escapist and very imaginative, can be a bit scatterbrained at times, and I’m methodical and detailed to the point of perfectionism. I’m usually a walking contradiction in terms of personality in so many ways to the point where the real me is almost impossible to decipher. To make matters more complicated, I’m not very good at expressing myself verbally and prefer to let my actions do the talking.

I have many pet peeves and I get annoyed easily in general. I’m also slowly embracing misanthropy and nihilism but I can be pretty idealistic so it balances out. I’m practically zero tolerance when it comes to bullshit. I hate confrontation and conflict but I’m starting to work on it so I can be less passive-aggressive and more assertive. I also wish to stand up for myself more often than I should so people won’t think that I’m weak and an easy target. I’m pretty cynical which is to be expected and usually expect the worst from people. When someone angers me, I will either just withdraw altogether and completely cut them off (slam the door basically) or get in their face and go off before doing the former. I’m the “hold my anger in and release it all at once” type but I hope to change that one day and stop letting things fester before they get out of hand. I can be quite petty and even cold as well and if someone wrongs me, they will have to make the first move to mend fences. I refuse to apologize if I’m not in the wrong and I will not accept gaslighting/guilt tripping.

I have issues with trust and a wild imagination to boot. I usually trust my instincts and can see right through bullshit. I don’t like taking risks and I have to know all the details when I do something so I don’t mess up and look like an idiot. I am indeed a perfectionist and introverted to a fault which often prevents me from trying new things and going outside my comfort zone. I haven’t been in a relationship yet and am still a virgin due to my issues with trust and not wanting to be hurt or humiliated as well as being quite picky/perfectionistic with the people I allow in my life. I have high standards for both people and myself although I’m pretty laid-back and my dislike of conflict allows me to also take a lot of shit from people too before I eventually say “fuck it” and slam the door on them. I don’t think very highly of myself and can sometimes fall into a period of self-hatred and self-pity

Many people praise me for my intelligence which is fitting since I’m an intellectual. My ideals and beliefs are rather odd to say the least (I’m a classical liberal/independent and despise most ideologies/ideas. This includes religion, feminism, social justice, traditionalism, statism, big government, nationalism, socialism/communism, etc.) and I feel misunderstood because of it (mostly because of the black community ostracizing me). I am indeed a rebel, open-minded, and a free thinker. No one tells me how to think or feel or else they face my wrath. I highly value power over myself and I think it’s the most important thing that a person needs in order to survive. I am definitely an outcast at heart and I often distance myself from others and don’t like talking about my feelings or beliefs because I think most people lack the ability/capacity to understand me. Before I give my opinion on something, I like to do as much research as possible as well as look at things from all perspectives before coming to my own conclusion. I don’t mind discussing things but I prefer logic over emotion when doing so which makes it damn near impossible these days for me to have an real conversation without insults and threats being thrown (usually towards me). Chances are I’m gonna find something wrong with damn near anything someone believes in or says and I’m not afraid to call it out when I see it. Once I do open up and express how I feel, the gates of passion will open up and never close. I also have high morals and values and stick to my guns no matter what which can make me pretty stubborn at times.

I’m currently battling depression and often experience many symptoms of it including suicidal thoughts and depression spells. I also suffer from iron-deficiency anemia as well. These things are pretty annoying for me to deal with whenever they flare up. 

Overall, I’m pretty crazy and a handful to deal with. Good luck matching me up with someone :P

It sounds to me like you’d go well with Crow Hogan!

You sound like a fantastic counterbalance for him; especially taking so many kids under his wings, he really needs somebody who’s much more grounded, but still willing and able to keep up with him. The fact that you initially speak so little is pretty powerful— he learns quickly that if you’re talking, he needs to listen. He also majorly appreciates the fact that you’re just so blunt and straightforward; he’s impatient and not really one for nuance, so the fact that you just say things as they are really gets it through his head. He tends to think with his heart— your valuing logical smarts is something sorely needed in his life.

Once he’s past your shell, though, he adores the sweeter parts of your personality just as much— he thinks you’d be an incredible motherly figure for all the kids, so although he won’t ever pressure you into anything, he loves when you’re able to hang out with all of them. Since you’re pretty tomboyish, you fit right in with their entire group. The kids love you too, because you don’t treat them like toys. The fact that you’ve practically got their wild dad on a leash is endlessly amusing to them. Your wild imagination is yet another benefit; sometimes the kids need bedtime stories to get to sleep, but Crow needs them just as often, so he loves listening to you talk and make things up.

Your love language being acts of service really meshes well with Crow!  He’s incredibly similar; obviously he doesn’t have much money for gifts, and he can get a bit flustered over genuine compliments, so acts of service work well for the both of you. It comes pretty naturally to him— he loves being able to cook a big meal and set out a dish for you when you’ve clearly been busy all day. Underneath his rough-and-tumble exterior, Crow really is a sweet man; he’d take care of you and encourage you to grow how you like, until you’re happy with yourself.

All that being said, I think he’d balance you out pretty well too. Despite everything he’s gone through, Crow remains pretty optimistic and hopeful about life; I think he’d be able to pull you from the worst of your cynicism, and at the same time, you’d teach him to be a bit more cautious. He really wants to be able to see the best in people, so he’d make an active effort to get you to trust people more— the two of you might end up butting heads over this, but he’s devoted to you, so fighting once in awhile won’t really mean anything. He’s also super supportive of your desire to become more assertive— he’s had to grow up in a tough world, so he recognizes full well how important a trait that is to have. He may be enthusiastic, but he respects you immensely, so he’d never try to take anything further than you’re comfortable with; even though he’s a lil bit dense about people’s emotions, he’s pretty in-tune with you, and does his best to keep you happy when he notices you’re not feeling well. He wants you to feel comfortable opening up to him about anything.

Really I think the biggest issue you’d face would be both of you being so headstrong. Even though he loves you, Crow’s not used to sharing his life with someone as an equal; when he thinks he’s in the right, he won’t back down, and since you’re the same way, sparks can fly constantly. The two of you will have to learn to talk things out and compromise somehow to keep things peaceful, but he’s willing to do things like that, exactly because he loves you so much!

[vrainsrewatch]

episode 19 thoughts

this is... the most screenshot heavy post i’ve made so far, lmao, so please bear with me. as i’ve said, this is one of my favorite duels, and there’s a lot that gets covered here. like, seriously, i haven’t written this post out yet but i can guarantee this will be my longest so far lmao.

the beginning of the episode starts off fairly standard, and mostly dueling:

i really do love the pacing of this duel. i was glued to the edge of my seat while watching these episodes. i remember it so clearly, too, because i’d been binge watching from episode 16 that day, and got to like, 24 by the time i stopped, lmao.

ai does a lot of cute/funny stuff this episode, to help break up some of the more dark tones of the rest of it, like this:

it really makes me miss hi in this form :( i really like his soltis form, don’t get me wrong, but i miss him on yusaku’s wrist lol. i would say when things were less angsty, but, well. lmao.

we very quickly get akira’s rad boss monster summoned out:

and seriously, i just love the animation for it. it’s so sick. the door, the fire, how it looms behind him at first.... aaaaaa. so cool.

and of course the classic:

the worst part about this line is it’s said so often (esp in arc v LOL) that i actually. have slipped up and said it in normal, day to day conversation before. my boyfriend looked at me for like a minute and gave me the deepest sigh i’ve ever heard the first time i did that pff.

also:

i couldn’t not screencap this, given what my blog is for LOL

every time something reminds me of that painful final duel, i have to screencap it and make you guys sad with me. if i have to be sad seeing all this stuff, knowing where their relationship goes and how the series ends, so do you.

also, though, i forgot how often this was brought up before the bohman duel lmao. it makes that theory look a lot more credible, so it’s cool that it had all these little hints towards it, even if it ultimately wasn’t true.

seriously, my heart. i don’t think i need to talk much about this scene to make y’all sad, but really. they went from this to i loved you. ugh, god, i’m so sad thinking about it lmao.

there is so much to talk about between akira and playmaker and even blue angel in this episode, so i guess we’ll start here.

it is hard to decide that you want to take control of your trauma and do something about it. it is not easy. to see yusaku fight for that right so thoroughly is incredible, and really, really validating.

more sadness! seriously, this is too much. this deck was created specifically for him by ai. i don’t like this anymore lmao

but even besides that, often times the protag’s decks mean a lot to them, obviously, but i love that it wasn’t built strictly by yusaku. his cards were literally made by ai, and i think that’s such a cool twist. 

but then, akira’s speech:

i talked last time about akira wanting to handle things himself, and i briefly touched on him thinking he knows best...

but i really admire how calm yusaku stays at that tbh. he gets angry, reasonably so imo, but he takes this so well. i know i was a much more volatile kid then he is, so respect lol

i’ve spoken at length already about akira, but i also want to talk again about how oblivious he is. he is so blinded by his own thoughts and feelings on the situation that he doesn’t stop to think about how yusaku might be feeling -- and worse, honestly, how his sister might be feeling.

it was why he was so visibly shocked when emma mentioned a few episodes ago that aoi wasn’t just a little kid anymore. it’s so clear that he still, at the moment, sees her as the six year old girl he swore to protect, and not the sixteen year old person she’s become. he doesn’t think about how she might be feeling towards his actions, or why she does what she does.

this is highlighted as early as episode 6 iirc, when he asks her why aren’t you happy? as much as i, personally, dislike his character, i can’t deny it’s very realistic and well written.

speaking of aoi:

i love how she’s written in this episode, too. but her entrance here is great, and i love how she stands up to him about this. it’s minor, but it’s still a good step. when she’s blue angel -- or blue girl, or blue maiden -- she feels comfortable doing that. at least a little, and it obviously grows throughout the series. i hope that transfers over to the real world for her, too.

and then, we finally get the full story:

i remember flinching when he started talking about it, remembering the shots of yusaku getting electrocuted from his duel with revolver.

i really love this. i said it last episode, but vrains handles yusaku’s trauma so realistically and it’s amazing.

i remember originally staring open mouthed at my tv screen while this part played. we got a bit of it from the other episode, but the full context truly shocked me. where’s that post that says “who thought this was an acceptable backstory to give to a card game protag” bc honestly??? YEAH

it’s still hard to watch. it’s still hard to see play out, even if it’s only fiction. even though i’ve seen these clips so many times, and written about them in detail a few times too. doesn’t matter lol. watching it in context actually still made my stomach drop.

which leads me to talk about reactions to this, actually:

the two that vrains focuses heavily on are blue angel’s and kusanagi’s, and they contrast really well here imo.

blue angel’s is a normal reaction. it’s horrified, both at the thought of it happening and at the fact that someone would actually do that to another person -- a six year old child, no less.

kusanagi’s is strained. he is angry hearing about this, thinking about jin. we’ve been told, and have seen in the last few episodes, how much the lost incident impacted kusanagi and his brother, but i really love that the show tells us that here, too, and shows the difference between hearing about a tragedy and being involved in some manner.

i did not expect it at all when first watching vrains, and honestly, it still impresses me how gracefully they handled it coming off of arc v (cough, shun i love you but really cough cough). no hate on arc v at all, it’s my third favorite ygo very close behind gx, but the difference between the two on how they handle these things is staggering.

this whole section makes me thing that ryoken talked to yusaku fairly often, after the first time. which is something i don’t see brought up often? but that’s so important imo. it meant that yusaku had someone encouraging him not just once or twice, but on the regular, but also it meant that ryoken was constantly risking himself to comfort that child. 

we don’t see too much of ryoken when he’s a kid, but we do see him scared and crying over the lost incident. the fact that he was able to talk calmly to this child so many times is really amazing. it also makes more sense as to why ryoken feels so guilty over calling the police -- he probably felt that maybe if he had just kept up his encouragement, the kids would’ve all gotten out okay and his father wouldn’t be in a coma. 

this was so powerful. it’s obvious, and i think anyone with half a brain would understand that the LI isn’t something that a kid would recover from easily, but i love this anyways. 

he wasn’t saved. and even if he was in body, it’s still something he and all the other victims will live with for the rest of their lives.

this also is something i don’t feel like people bring up enough, but does this mean that yusaku went around asking the kids at the hospital when he was rescued? it’s not hard to believe they were all put together, at least for a short amount of time, but it’s still something i feel like people overlook. 

i also love this, because it’s nice foreshadowing to how revolver feels. he’s not captured, not like yusaku and the lost kids were, but he is a prisoner. and just like ryoken saved yusaku, way back then, he is determined to repay the favor.

not just because of that, either. because that voice meant so much to him. because that voiced saved him. because that voice understood him, and was there for him in his hardest moments. god i love them.

i love this shot. it’s so dramatic, how the match the drum beats with flashes of everyone’s reactions.

but it drives home his point, and while i know most of akira’s development came through emma and aoi, i’m sure this helped, too. 

i’ve sung vrains praises this entire post, but i’ll do it again -- this is incredible. this is so realistic. it’s so well portrayed. and it’s really honest to god incredible that we got a protag in ygo who was shown going to therapy. 

ygo has always dealt with some pretty dark subject matter, and it’s never really been shy about showing it on screen. i’m not saying that at all. arc v obviously dealt with some pretty heavy stuff, and while i haven’t seen zexal (keep shaming me please) i know it does, too. 5ds obviously has the dark signer arc, and the later arcs concerning bruno and also yusei’s father, and gx has... well, it’s entire third and fourth season. 

but we see everyone healing via card games. we see those shows talk about these things, but kind of at the same time, skirt around the subject matter; or if they do go deep into it, they pull out (ie 5ds) or the characters don’t get resolved properly (ie arc v). 

idk where i was going with this but i just really love that this happened, this was shown on screen, and they stuck to yusaku’s character. they didn’t just... up and make his trauma and his world view disappear at the end. he has a bittersweet ending, but it suited him and his development. a lot of people were mad about it, and i get it -- i wanted him to be happy, too.

but that’s not always the case, and it’s really important to me that vrains doesn’t pretend it is.

anyways, though, i’m almost done with this episode i promise lmao. before the episode ends, we get this:

and i think it’s honestly kind of cruel that akira says this, after everything, and still maintains his point of handling it himself. he has heard, first hand now, how horrible the incident has scarred yusaku for life. and yet, he still is stubborn in refusing to relate or at the very least empathize.

what i mean by that, since we obviously see him attempt to last episode, is he refuses to look at it from someone’s else’s perspective or in a way that might make him uncomfortable. the way my boyfriend describes these kinds of people is that they “haven’t had their bubble popped”.

everyone has a bubble when they’re born, and that bubble shields you from realizing that the world is a cruel and hard place. even if you go through hardships, sometimes your bubble stays put, and you think that is the worst of what can happen. 

i’m explaining this very poorly, because i’m running on not much sleep and i’ve been typing about this episode for like, far, far too long, but essentially, he refuses to step out of his comfort zone and recognize, in playmaker’s case, that he doesn’t have a right to interfere and that playmaker’s desire to handle it himself is justified and helpful for his healing. and in aoi’s case, that just because he does a lot of good for her doesn’t automatically mean ignoring her for work and keeping her locked in their house is an okay trade off. and also that she’s not a child anymore -- she’s nearly an adult and she deserves to be treated as one. 

those thoughts seem to unsettle him. you can kind of see it in how detached he is after hearing all that come from playmaker. blue angel is visibly shaken up by what he’s said. akira doesn’t even flinch, because he’s not really listening right now. 

i’m glad he learns to, or at least learns how to start, later on.

anyways, i think that’s enough for this post lmao. this took forever to type up, so let’s hope i actually have time to cover up to 21 here today LOL. if you read all that, thank you for your time on my kind of dumb vrains thoughts :’)

[letterboxd]

Tristan Oliver Q&A.

“We have had far more problems shooting on a 5D than we ever did on film. The sheer absurdity of the throwaway society and obsolescence leaves a bad taste in the mouth.”

Cinematographer Tristan Oliver takes us behind the scenes of the Wallace & Gromit train-chase scene, a flood on Isle of Dogs, and the time he acted with Colin Firth, Rupert Everett and Cary Elwes in 80s British romance Another Country.

Oliver was the man behind many of the cameras on stop motion films including Isle of Dogs, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, ParaNorman and Chicken Run. He also filmed the Academy Award-nominated Loving Vincent.

We asked him some of your questions and some of our own (but we did not ask him “what is Wes Anderson like?”—read on to find out why).

Several Letterboxd members (including ReiJr, Curtis and Nicolas Inard) want to know what drew you to animation cinematography over live action, and what makes it interesting for you?

Well, obviously it’s a ridiculous way to make a living by any definition and I don’t think I ever really, actively wanted to do it. I just kind of fell into it. I was shooting some pop promos for friends and needed to borrow some lights and I knew a couple of people at Aardman—at that time it was literally a couple of dozen people. They said “Oh great, what are you doing next week?”

It was so great—they never used to schedule anything. They just used to ask you in and you’d stay until the job finished a few weeks later. So I stayed as a freelancer with them for a very long time. At the same time, I had a child, so I needed some regular income. I stuck at it at Aardman and I was good at it and they liked me.

It was an exciting time inasmuch as they were reinventing the entire look of stop-frame [animation], because stop-frame really was kids’ TV up until that time—it was super quick and rough and very crudely photographed. Big, soft lights and go home and forget about it. So what we started to do was create a very cinematic look for it, and make it into a much bigger canvas and bigger screen. Our driving motivation was that we made no concession at all to the fact that it was animation, we just tried to make it look nice.

[Animation] was a genre that was neglectful of its cinematography, and even now, I meet animators who don’t really care about it. It’s all about puppets as far as they’re concerned, and I think generally anyone watching the films doesn’t really care about cinematography. It’s the Cinderella department. People are all over the props and puppets.

Immediately getting a little more technical, how does one pull off a rack focus with moving stop motion elements in the shot? —Gina

That’s very interesting because of course stop motion isn’t moving. It’s entirely static until you move it. So a rack focus is just broken down into as many frames as you want it to take place over. So if it’s a twelve-frame or an eight-frame rack focus, in one way you can put a piece of tape over the lens and you move it one notch each frame. Or, we use a motion control computer to do it, which we do these days because it’s much smoother. The animator will press a button, the camera takes a frame, the motion control computer moves—and the animation software will trigger what needs to be triggered.

Although the camera move is conceived in real time, you know, A-to-B, if it takes four seconds you can run it at four seconds or you can run it at a frame a time—now move your puppet and off it goes. So the puppet follows the camera, as it were.

Motion control is one of the things that really liberated us. When we were setting up Chicken Run, that was suddenly a film that needed to play out on a cinema screen rather than a television screen, and moving the camera through space was one of the ways to expand that space. We kind of take it for granted that we can do that now.

Cinematographer Tristan Oliver on set

I was wondering how different lighting a set for a stop motion film is compared to a live-action film and maybe what some challenges of lighting a stop-motion film are? Thanks, I love your work! —Ben

Thank you Ben! Well. I would say that aesthetically there should be no difference because, coming back to my original point, one’s aim should be to make something look beautiful and not really concede in any way to the fact that you are shooting animation.

But there are some issues. Primarily of course the size of what you’re shooting—and this means that relative to the characters you’re shooting, the camera is very, very large. The camera is kind of the size of a small car inside a domestic environment. It’s normally as tall as the character, so you do have issues lighting the character without the camera getting in way. You also have enormous issues with depth of focus because normally we are working right up to the minimum [focal point] of the lens. So to get stuff looking natural, you have to work at a very tiny aperture to get the depth of field that you’d find acceptable in live action.

A puppet’s head might only be the size of the top of my thumb and if I focus on its eye I might find that its nose and ears are unacceptably out of focus. So we are really asking the lenses to do something they were never really designed to do well, which is to work at tiny stops. Most lenses are optimized around ƒ/4, ƒ/5, ƒ/6 and we typically use them around ƒ/14. We really do beat them into submission.

The other issue is heat, of course. We don’t want to be cooking the animators or the puppets or the environments. Luckily, we don’t need a huge amount of intensity with light because we can vary our shutter speed, because we are taking shots one frame at a time. But we do need to keep sets comfortable. We do occasionally use large lights—especially if we’re shooting daylight exteriors—because you very quickly give away that they’re models [if] the shadows fan out, and real shadows don’t do that. They remain parallel, or “coherent” as we call it.

Has LED lighting changed DOP work for stop motion? —Tim

Yes, LED has in many ways transformed our world. The reason being that it’s very tiny so you can hide it and it’s very cool so it doesn’t produce any heat, and also you can dim it without the colour changing.

As an example, on Isle of Dogs we have a large theater set which is all painted with red and black lacquer in the Japanese style and it is lit by paper lanterns (which are actually made out of painted resin). Each of those lanterns contains a very small incandescent bulb, so when you dim those the colour gets very warm and orange. But then we have other [LED] fixtures in that environment and they can be dimmed right down but their colour doesn’t change, so you can keep a very dim but pure light point and that makes the warm stuff read warmer. It’s all about showing the eye where the light is. LEDs just have that purity of colour which doesn’t change with intensity.

And the other thing I wanted to say is the main difference is the sheer number of units we’re shooting on. We typically run between 40 and 50 units, and I’m having to be across all of those in terms of how the film looks. So I’m personally hands-on lighting a lot of those but I can’t do all of them. I have a couple of other guys who help me out and they work to my brief so that it looks like one person did it.

It is a huge, very busy environment in a very large stage with a lot of people running around. I think people’s impression of animation is a very ponderous, dull thing but actually, although it takes a long time, they’re working as quickly as they can. And they’re all working on their own.

Wes Anderson with his Isle of Dogs cast

What type of personality do you think you need to work in stop motion? There’s a stereotype that you must have to be very patient, but the reality is quite different?

I think the idea of “patience” is... I don’t even know where that comes from. That is what we call one of the “top five questions”. That, along with “tell us what is one of the most difficult things you had to do on the film” and “what is Wes Anderson like?”.

I don’t know what anyone’s being patient about, really. Where’s the patience? An animator is animating. He (or she) is working as fast as he possibly can, doing a very complicated performance through the medium of a puppet. So he is undergoing a degree of concentration it would be impossible to imagine and around him sets are being built, painted, lit, set up.

In all respects it is exactly like a live action department—it’s very busy, there is no downtime. So this concept of patience is entirely erroneous. What you actually need is stamina. Not patience. Because this is five or six days a week, 60-hour weeks for two years. And it’s intensely busy. Because of the length of time it takes to shoot, we’re in a rolling process of pre-production even when we’re in production. People are constantly losing their temper and constantly screaming and running out of the studio. To think there’s some kind of monkish, trappist environment… [shakes head].

Which villain did you find more terrifying from the films you worked on? —Manny

They’re not that scary are they, because they’re puppets, but I guess the best villain is Feathers McGraw from The Wrong Trousers, because it’s a penguin and it never speaks, and yet it has a sense of menace to it that is so thorough. It hasn’t even got pupils! It does occasionally blink but it mostly just sits there and... looks. It’s amazing how well it works.

What is it about penguins in animation? There are so many… Surf’s Up. Madagascar. Pingu…

Feathers McGraw and Wallace in Aardman Animation’s The Wrong Trousers

When stop motion films were first shot digitally, sensor noise was an issue that sometimes led to ‘crawling’ artefacts between frames. Has this been mitigated in newer camera hardware, or is it something you still need to watch out for? —Matthew

Do you know what? I read that question and I thought “I have no idea what you’re talking about!” I’m completely unaware of this as an issue. The only film I think that may have been an issue on was Corpse Bride. We did have issues with the 5D which was used as the default animation camera for about ten years. But those issues were to do with the chip heating up and causing fluctuations with the density and the contrast. But the camera I used for Isle of Dogs and also Aardman used for Early Man, which is the Canon 1D X, was pretty damn good. Pretty stable. So it’s kind of ironed out. I mean, you know, no camera on earth is designed to shoot stop-motion animation. I mean why would it be? So we’re always looking for the next camera.

I know that Pete Kozachik is an extreme fan of 30- to 40-second shutter speeds, which is frankly ludicrous. That may have resulted in excessive sensor noise, but that’s more to do with the shutter speed.

How do you handle having to start an insanely complex shot again after an error?

That’s a very interesting question and I’ll tell you why: because the only reason that we reshoot is if there’s an animation problem. Because nothing gets shot until everything is right. So everything is tested. The lighting, the motion control, set dressing, everything is run in front of the director to the point where they say yes, good to go.

The reason is: you can’t ask an animator to reshoot a shot if they’ve done nothing wrong because you’ve cocked it up. So only animation issues are reshot. And from that point of view, it doesn’t bother me in the least, because I just go in and make sure they’re good to go, and they just go again. It’s their loss of time, not my loss of time. They’re normally quite okay about it. Most animators don’t mind having a second go because it does give them the opportunity to improve.

If there’s a catastrophic tech error on the other hand… We did have a flood on Isle of Dogs. We had a massive hole in the roof and a torrential thunderstorm and we lost some stuff in that way. So that becomes an Act of God, a force majeure, and you just have to get on with it.

But also we do monitor what’s going on, so I tend to pop in and just make sure the animators are okay and do my daily rounds. If I see an animator has unwittingly missed a focus point or position because they hadn’t been concentrating, I would inform the first [assistant director] and say “we need to restart this shot”. But because of the critical mass of shooting on 40 to 50 units, if you have an issue, it’s not really an issue. It can be frustrating, that’s all.

Gromit and friends in Curse of the Were-Rabbit

What, if anything, do you miss about the 35mm Chicken Run and Curse of the Were-Rabbit days?

There are things I miss about 35mm days. The structure of the day is far more coherent when you’re shooting on film, because you start your day looking at the rushes, looking at the dailies, then you go into the edit suite and you look at that material cut in, and then you go to the studio floor and address what needs addressing. Whereas when shooting digitally, every time someone finishes a shot you all have to go and look at it, get them turned over, and so on.

There is also far less downtime for animators and bizarrely I think they suffer from that because the process of sitting down and discussing shots and comparing notes is over. The experience of sitting in a green room and getting into a conversation with two or three old silverbacks of the industry is gone really.

The other thing is it’s no quicker shooting digitally. We shot Chicken Run in 78 weeks and we shot Isle of Dogs in 86 weeks, so it actually took longer.

A problem you get with digital is you suddenly have far too much choice. We would do everything in-camera on film. We would use painted backdrops for skies. Everything would be shot into camera, and now of course you can just shoot green screen and decide what your background’s going to look like later.

You’re giving yourself way too much choice because you can. So the amount of creative decision-making is thrown to the end of the movie. That seems like liberation but in fact it’s just putting off what could otherwise be a perfectly reasonable decision. And I think living with what you’ve done isn’t a bad way of working.

And the other thing—which has nothing to do with the practicalities of shooting—which appals me, is that every time we do a movie you have to buy new cameras, because they wear out, so they have a life, and they always stop manufacturing the damn things.

Halfway through Isle of Dogs they stopped making the camera we were shooting on! We had 50 and we had to find another 30 and we had to scour the world for them because Canon was no longer manufacturing them.

Whereas at Aardman, I could take a camera off the shelf that was made in 1928 and I’d know that I was using a piece of 70- or 80-year-old technology that was just going to keep going. We did not lose a shot on Curse of the Were-Rabbit or Chicken Run to a camera problem.

We have had far more problems shooting on a 5D than we ever did on film. The sheer absurdity of the throwaway society and obsolescence leaves a bad taste in the mouth. That at the beginning of every movie you have to spend $300,000–400,000 on new cameras.

At the end all those cameras are [sold on] eBay. The sheer fact of having to put all those cameras on eBay is absurd.

The famous train-chase scene in The Wrong Trousers

Can you tell us any good stories about the train-chase scene in The Wrong Trousers? (Emma guesses it must be the most challenging scene you’ve ever worked on, and there’s no doubt it is one of the best action scenes in a film, ever.)

Ha! Do you know how long ago that was? My daughter Sally was born the second week of shooting The Wrong Trousers and she’s just had her 26th birthday. However, I can tell you exactly about the train chase because it was a lot of fun, that particular segment.

So what you have, of course, is you have this chase that appears to take place in an infinitely huge environment, because the train is moving. We did some crude math and decided the train would be moving at 50mph if it was scaled up. So we did some tests and it looked really slow. So we just kept going up and up and up. And in fact it’s now moving at about 200mph scale-to-scale.

It’s tiny, absolutely minute, the train. We devised this method for shooting where you never see both ends of the train at the same time, so it’s either being pushed or it’s being pulled. It’s attached to the camera, [which is] on a crane hanging over the set. And the camera either had a rod that was pushing or a thread that was pulling. There is no motion control at all.

Laid on the floor is a tape measure and a pointer pointing at the tape measure. We’d hit the camera button—it had a two-second exposure—and we’d push the train 10cm [3.9in] along the track. So it’s moving at 10cm a frame. That’s a lot of distance to cover. And as the train is pulled or pushed, its wheels naturally go around on the track, so it self-animates its own spinning wheels as it goes along.

And we had a set that was a sort of long living room. It was Wallace’s living room but stretched, so it was about five meters long. At one end there was this huge sofa and the camera would go along following the train and it would go behind the sofa and as soon as it moved we’d pick the sofa up and take it down the other end of the set and the camera would move around the sofa and the train would keep going again.

And then when the penguin flies through the air, we actually mounted a sheet of glass in front of the camera—a big sheet of glass so you could see the set through it—and then the penguin was animated across that sheet of glass from right to left. So it looked like it was flying through the air, but the camera was still moving—everything was moving at 10cm a frame—so that’s 2.4 meters per second on double-0 gauge (if you know anything about trains). If you scale that up you’re moving at a hell of a lick!

So the penguin is stuck to the sheet of glass each time he is moved?

He’s had his back sliced off him so he’s like half a penguin, a bas-relief, if you like.

Then there are two other bits on that sequence. (It’s a very big sequence, obviously, there’s a lot to tell!) One is when the train goes around the corner. So for that I built this tiny dolly, which was a wedge of timber with four furniture casters on it and a massive Mitchell camera mounted on top of it. The track went under the camera, and I actually knelt on the set and hand dollied it round the bend.

I thought “this is fantastic!”. But when we actually shot it, what I had completely neglected to register is that as you hit the button the shutter goes around and it completely obscures the eye-piece—so I did it blind, really.

And the other shot is where the camera goes under the table. I can’t actually remember how we did that. I think we had a table that just broke away. But it’s all in-camera. There are no special effects at all.

We had a crew of six on that film. And only 150 shots in the whole movie. It’s amazing. The camera just sits there and watches what’s going on. It doesn’t cut, cut, cut. The camera sits there and you watch the whole sequence of penguin looking up at museum and all the other scenes.

Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs

Did you have a favorite moment on Isle of Dogs?

[Laughing] The last day! There are certain bits of Isle of Dogs that I greatly enjoyed bringing to the screen, but overall it was a slog. Working with a director who is an auteur gives you far less scope to exercise your own creative imagination, so you become reactive rather than proactive. That can be frustrating. That isn’t saying that the film isn’t fabulous and everyone will love it, but in terms of saying I loved that and I did that, it isn’t really my work. It’s something that I “enabled”, if you will.

There are some things that give you a degree of satisfaction. The problem with these movies is they are vast machines that roll on, so the intense personal satisfaction that I used to derive from shooting stuff like The Wrong Trousers is kinda lacking, because it’s such a huge thing.

I had a lot of fun shooting ParaNorman. By my own admission, I think I made a really, really good job of it and I think it looks fantastic. I enjoyed the directors, I enjoyed working at Laika. It was great.

What are five films you love for their cinematography?

I love Conrad Hall so I would always have Road to Perdition, his last movie, which I think is absolutely stunning. The beauty of shooting that film, dying and then getting a posthumous Academy Award is fantastic.

Seamus McGarvey is a great talent and I think Atonement is a beautiful looking film.

Casablanca is absolutely beautiful in black and white. That’s an astonishing looking movie. God, absolutely stunning.

I just think the standard of cinematography is so high at the moment. Production values just generally are so much better than they were 20 years ago—you can see a lot of bad movies but they’re very rarely badly shot.

The latest Blade Runner is fantastic. I’m so glad Roger [Deakins] won an award for that. Revolutionary Road, he did a fantastic job on that as well.

Any women cinematographers you have an eye on?

I realise that’s a prod, but Mudbound is a very handsome looking movie. I think [Rachel Morrison] did a fantastic job on Mudbound. Ask me in another ten years and I’m sure I’ll have many more names.

Did you ever meet Roger Deakins?

No, never. I met Jack Cardiff a couple of times, in his 90s. He was very twinkly. He’s a very naughty man—I think he had sex with nearly every leading woman that he worked with, which given that he is about five foot four is astonishing. He wrote a fantastic book called Magic Hour which has some absolutely awesome anecdotes in it. It’s well worth a read.

Could you have imagined in your wildest dreams that you’d spend a quarter of a century working in this field?

Tristan Oliver on set

My wildest dreams? Like some hideous nightmare! I mean, “no” is the answer. I think I’ve always kind of felt that I would be getting out of it at some point. You very rapidly become pigeonholed in this business. Because it’s what I do, it’s what I get asked to do. People are ludicrously conservative about this.

A case in point is Loving Vincent. The reason I got that job was because I knew about animation. But I actually shot a 90-minute, single-camera, live-action movie with a dolly, cranes, the works, in 16 days, which is pretty good going for a 90-minute movie. Then someone took it away and whilst I was shooting Isle of Dogs they painted all over it!

But isn’t it weird that I got the job because I knew about animation? That’s what the business is like—a crazy, slightly blinkered view. But all my films get seen by a lot of people. They’re proper big movies, they go all over the world.

What memories spring to mind when you think about Another Country all these years later? It must feel like another life.

Ha! 35 years later. The thing about that movie is that’s kind of what made me do what I do today. I didn’t really know anything about films until I did that movie, and I became very friendly with the camera crew [director of photography Peter Biziou, who later won an Academy Award for Mississippi Burning, and camera operator David Garfath, who also worked on The Empire Strikes Back]. I was really interested in it.

At secondary school I had done my exams in physics, biology and chemistry so I had a technical knowledge. I absolutely adored acting. I really, really, really enjoyed acting, but it just never happened for me. I had at one point to make a decision about whether I was going to live in a tiny flat by the seaside and do a couple of commercials and a pantomime every year and end up in a blazer and cravat, or do something that would make me a living. So I did spend a couple of schizophrenic years being a clapper loader and an actor, then I went to film school.

But my memories of that film are very intense and very fond. I mean, that was a real eye-opener for me. I’d never been in that environment before, surrounded by those sorts of people doing that job. It was deeply affecting. I think it damaged me for about five years. Although it was only a few weeks of my life, I then had to go back and finish my degree and the phone never rang. Everyone was interested in Rupert [Everett] and Colin [Firth], or Cary [Elwes]. Although only Colin really became a superstar.

In hindsight I’d have got myself a publicity agent and gone out there and sold myself. So I do this now. I lead a life of anonymity.

Look at an animated feature: in terms of awards, all it’ll be up for is best animated feature. The Annies don’t ever have a category for cinematography, and they have a category for everything, even an award for the floor sweeper! I wrote to them and asked them in the nicest possible way, why don’t you have a category for cinematography? And they went, ‘Oh it’s far too expensive to introduce new categories’. Then a year later they introduced two new categories. It’s absolutely absurd. We go very unconsidered in this world. Trying to gain membership of any professional organisation is impossible.

I’ve shot six movies and every one has been nominated or won an Academy Award. And I’ve shot short movies that have won or been nominated. They just go, ‘Yeah, it’s animation though isn’t it’.

Well, what keeps getting you up in the morning, in terms of what you do?What do you think is the role of storytellers such as yourself and the teams you work with in our society?

Stories are what separate us from the beasts. We are the only animal capable of projecting abstract thoughts into the future or into the past and drawing analogies in that way. I think it’s what makes us human: the ability to tell stories. There’s no anything without story. People ask me what makes a great movie and I go “the script”.

People love to watch people acting stuff out. It’s peculiar. It’s not something that any other animal does. It’s very deep within us, this need to tell stories. In fact they’ve now decided that the way these neolithic cave illustrations have been structured, with animals with multiple legs, is because when they were lit by candlelight it gave the impression of running. As the candlelight flickered, these things galloped. It’s all about story.

Finally, tell us why we ought to visit Bristol, the home of Aardman Animation?

Why would one visit Bristol?! Well, it has a thriving arts and animation scene. It’s a little bit laid-back. It’s rather like Portland in that respect. If you were in the UK and you wanted a day out I’m sure it’s right up there with Bath. It’s next door to Bath so you could probably do both in a weekend. But the thing about Bristol is it’s so nice, it’s so comfortable, that people used to go there and never leave.

I’ve experienced this many times because when I was crewing up Fantastic Mr. Fox—and indeed Isle of Dogs—I asked some of my old crew from Aardman to come and work with me. And they were all incredibly reluctant and it’s only 110 miles away! They were happier to be unemployed in Bristol than come to London, which terrifies them because there’s too many people there. Portland is where young people to go to retire and Bristol is the graveyard of ambition.

Our thanks to Tristan Oliver for his time and energy and to Fox for arranging the interview. See the accompanying list of favorite cinematographers and the questions thread.

[darkvalkyria]

i have now completed zexal I and am excited as hell for zexal II because i’ve adored zexal so far and i’ve heard the barian arc is one of the best yugioh seasons!

notes on what i love about the show so far:

- yuma is absolutely adorable and such a good boy. he's emotional, passionate, exuberant, extremely supportive and caring for his boyfriends, and is so resilient in the face of adversity. that speech he made during his duel with tron where he talked about knowing what it was like to grow up without a father made me tear up, but it was exactly what was needed in the situation and i love that he is confident in his feelings and able to deliver his emotions strongly to his foes. i am never going to tire from watching this boy in action.

- i really like ryouga and kaito. no... i'm pretty sure i love them. i DID NOT expect to like them this much going into zexal, especially since i was indifferent towards kaito in arc v, but they are also such supportive boys with good hearts that interact so well with yuma. kaito is actually warming up to possibly be my favorite rival to watch on screen. i did NOT expect him to win versus yuma in the last episode of zexal I. as soon as zexal is over i'm going to go straight back to his episodes in arc v so i can enjoy them more. the three of them make for a good trio and i can't wait to see them spend more time together.

- i also love kotori! she is such a lovely, caring girl and is so supportive of yuma it literally adds years to my life. i did not expect to adore her this much because of the general consensus about her 'uselessness' and poor characterization, but i think she really understands yuma and his heart and she's always there to listen to him. it's clear that they both find immense comfort within each other. her outfits and hair and voice are adorable and she is my princess. my biggest complaint with the show so far is of course that none of the female characters are devoid of some romantic attachment. in fact i was super disappointed when they revealed that droite loves kaito... i mean, come on, she was doing so well before that.

- kattobingu is good. it's definitely my favorite 'yugioh catchphrase' because i apply it to my own life all the time. i am surprisingly not tired of it at all... and yuma says it a lot!

- the animation is so freakin good?! all the characters consistently look gorgeous, there's great use of lighting and different environments. yuma and ryouga's faces are beautiful. not to mention the zexal openings and endings are by far my favorite in the yugioh anime. they're well directed, designed, and animated, and the music is stunning! i could talk about them for hours. i think the animation is only supposed to get better in the barian arc and i'm really looking forward to it!

- equally as important as animation to me... the music is STUNNING. i haven't listened through any of the sound duels yet because i want to wait until the end of the show, but the anthems and melodies of all the battle music are so appealing. i'm only through the first half of the show and this is already up there competing with 5ds and arc v for my favorite yugioh soundtrack spot.

[lovehaswonangelnumbers]

New Post has been published on https://lovehaswonangelnumbers.org/sudden-shifts-in-perspective/

Sudden Shifts in Perspective

Sudden Shifts in Perspective

By Hare in the Moon Astrology

Sunday June 7 – June 14 2020

“To muster the heart, to stretch to the edge of what beckons you is your ticket to ride. This is what you are for. Your capacity to imagine is a subversive technology, altering everything. Dangerous. This is what you are for.” Melissa la Flamme

A heads up! The sudden shifts in perspective catalysed by Friday’s Gemini eclipse have torn the blinders off- personally and collectively. Old outdated laws, rules, beliefs and social norms are going to be dismantled and left in the dustbin of history as the fallout from the wild card eclipse ripples out in a domino effect until the baton of change is handed over at the next 2 eclipses across Gemini/Sagittarius on November 30th and December 13th.

Distortions, untruths, corruption, inequality, injustice and incongruency will be seen for exactly what it is – especially obvious in world leaders wearing the Emperor’s new clothes- and the usual platitudes, invoking religion or fobbing us off with promises of doing better will not cut it any longer. This week Mars meets Neptune in Pisces at odds with the Sun and the Node of Fate. Be alert for deception, fake news, along with cynical photo opportunities as diversionary tactics.

The big question is whose Truth is in accordance with Natural and Eternal Laws?

To navigate the coming 18 months of Gemini eclipses, you need to trust your own judgement above the social media echo chambers, above tribalism, to base your actions on your core values and to recognise when your body is giving you either a Big Yes or a Big No and follow its guidance.

This week, amplifying all the 3D polarisation, the separation and the ferocious tribalism we are seeing on our screens 24/7, on Sunday 14th June, Pluto and Jupiter make a 2nd exact square with Eris from Capricorn to Aries. Eris acts a subversive or chaotic agent, a disruptor of the status quo, a rule breaker -a female Awakener symbolising people and circumstances that are so different that you resist considering them “one of us” and instead see them as the Discomforting Other. A Stranger, an Alien. Think of how that is literally playing out in the US right now……..

This messenger of transformation brings growth by disrupting old patterns of thinking, beliefs and expectations, shattering the unexamined and comforting codes of “this is how we do things around here”. Through being challenged over and over by your reaction to radically new concepts and being compelled by circumstances beyond your control to integrate these concepts into a re-designed inner map of the world, you evolve into a much more expansive field of unity consciousness.

Reminder: we are in an unpredictable and volatile triple eclipse tunnel until July 22. Sudden shifts are everywhere and you won’t see them coming. There is nothing to do, ritualise, practise or change- just stay open and say Yes to change wherever it shows up in your life. These cosmic wild card eclipses are delivering you to a part of yourself that you’ve never met before and she is kinder, braver and wiser than you ever imagined:

The map is not the territory.

Respect for everyone’s map of the world

People make the best choices they can at the time from the thinking that looks real to them at the time.

Increase choice by constantly shifting from your Small Me perspective to the Witness Perch and back.

Action changes understanding. If you want to understand something, act, move, embody it.

You already have all the inner resources you need or can create them

Everything points to integration and wholeness

New! If you’re a creative, path paver,healer or sensitive, the 3 June/July eclipses are about to fast track you into Phase 2 Embodiment and change your way of living and working. Sign up to my June 5D Report:” Another Roll of the Eclipse Dice” : www.hareinthemoonastrology.co.uk

Find essential tools and resources for the emerging pathways at : www.hareinthemoonastrology.co.uk

““Freedom to create our very own, unique reality. That’s what your work does Lorna. So I thank you because its massive what you are doing and its helping so many of us” Katie M Clonmel Ireland

No sign forecasts today-I’m needing to rest.

******

LoveHasWon.org is a Non-Profit Charity, Heartfully Associated with the “World Blessing Church Trust” for the Benefit of Mother Earth

Share Our Messages with Love and Gratitude

LOVE US @ MeWe mewe.com/join/lovehaswon

Visit Our Online Store for Higher Consciousness Products and Tools: LoveHasWon Essentials

http://lovehaswonessentials.org/

Visit Our NEW Sister Site: LoveHasWon Angel Numbers

https://lovehaswonangelnumbers.org/

Commentary from The First Contact Ground Crew 5dSpiritual Healing Team:

Feel Blocked, Drained, Fatigued, Restless, Nausea, Achy, Ready to Give Up? We Can Help! We are preparing everyone for a Full Planetary Ascension, and provide you with the tools and techniques to assist you Home Into The Light. The First Contact Ground Crew Team, Will Help to Get You Ready For Ascension which is Underway. New Spiritual Sessions have now been created for an Entire Family, including the Crystal Children; Group Family Healing & Therapy. We have just began these and they are incredible. Highly recommend for any families struggling together in these times of intense changes. Email: motherofallcreation@lovehaswon.org for more information or to schedule an emergency spiritual session. We can Assist You into Awakening into 5d Reality, where your experience is one of Constant Joy, Wholeness of Being, Whole Health, Balanced, Happy and Abundant. Lets DO THIS! Schedule Your Session Below by following the Link! Visit:  http://www.lovehaswon.org/awaken-to-5d/

Introducing our New LoveHasWon Twin Flame Spiritual Intuitive Ascension Session. Visit the link below:

https://lovehaswon.org/lovehaswon-twin-flame-spiritual-intuitive-ascension-session/

Request an Astonishing Personal Ascension Assessment Report or Astrology Reading, visit the link below for more information:

https://lovehaswon.org/lovehaswon-ascension-assessment-report

https://lovehaswon.org/lovehaswon-astrology/

Experiencing DeAscension Symptoms, Energy Blockages, Disease and more? Book a Holistic Healing Session

https://lovehaswon.org/lovehaswon-holistic-healing-session/

To read our Testimonials you can follow this link: http://www.lovehaswon.org/testimonials

Connect with MotherGod~Mother of All Creation on Skype @ mothergoddess8

Request a copy of our Book: The Tree of Life ~ Light of The Immortals Book

Order a copy of Our LoveHasWon Ascension Guide: https://lovehaswon.org/lovehaswon-ascension-guide/

**If you do not have a Paypal account, click on the button below:

If you wish to donate and receive a Tax Receipt, click the button below:

Donate with Paypal

Use Cash App with Our code and we’ll each get $5! FKMPGLH

Cash App Tag: $lovehaswon1111

Cash App

Donate with Venmo

VENMO

Support Our cause in the creation of the Crystal Schools for Children. Visit our fundraising link below:

LoveHasWon Charity for Crystal Schools

Support Our Charity in Co~Creating the New Earth Together by Helping Mother of All Creation. Visit our fundraising link below:

Support Mother Earth!

Support Us on PATREON

PATREON

Support Us Through Our LoveHasWon Wish List

LoveHasWon Wish List

We also accept Western Union and Moneygram. You may send an email to michaelsilver@lovehaswon.org for more information.

***If you wish to send Donations by mail or other methods, email us at motherofallcreation@lovehaswon.org  or  michaelsilver@lovehaswon.org***

**** We Do Not Refund Donations****

MeWe ~ Youtube ~ Facebook ~ Apple News ~ Linkedin ~ Twitter ~ Tumblr ~ GAB ~ Minds ~ Google+ ~ Medium ~ StumbleUpon ~ Reddit ~ Informed Planet ~ Steemit ~ SocialClub ~ BlogLovin ~ Flipboard ~ Pinterest ~ Instagram ~ Snapchat

[alexandrite-dragoness]

YGO 5D’s: Birds of A Feather - Chapter 4

He couldn’t forget about that night. No, no matter how hard he tries he just can’t forget about the incident that night. It really pisses him off. A knock was heard from his front door, and he walks over to open it, seeing it was Jack and Yusei. “Hey guys. What are you doing here?” “Well, we thought we could cheer you up.” Yusei brought his son over as well, holding a gift in his hands and hold it up to him. “For you Crow.” “Awww you shouldn’t have. Thank you Odin.” He smiled and kindly accepted the gift, opening it up as it looks like it’s a bird nest coo-coo clock. “R-Really, you shouldn’t have.” “Odin put a lot of thought into it. He actually made it himself.” “Wait, really!?” Yusei chuckles, seeing that Crow was taking it seriously. “Well with some help of course.” “I hope you wike it!” Odin smiled up at him, hoping he does like the gift. “Like it?...” Crow took a closer look at the clock, then looks back at the boy. “I love it!” “What am I here for?” Jack just had to interrupt the moment. “Because he’s your friend, and when a friend is down you should come to comfort him.” “Hmph,” He snorts. “He only got beaten by a little girl he should be shamed more than being comfort.” “Not just anyone Jack. She was known to outrun Sector Security. That’s no ‘little girl’.” “Guys! I know you’re trying to help me and all, but you don’t need to come and check on me. I’m fine. Really.” “Good! I’m off!” Jack just heads out the door, not even bothering to think twice. Crow’s phone starts ringing, and so he picks it up. “Crow speaking.” “Hey Crow,” It was one of the Sector Security officers. “You know that lady you caught a couple of nights ago?” Crow listens carefully. “Yeah?” “Well, we locate her. However if we try to catch her she’ll slip through our wall again.” “What does this have to do with me?” Crow just cocked an eyebrow, showing a puzzled look. “I’m sure you’re at home, right? She’s literally nearby your place. So if possible you can come in with a sneak attack.” “Oh… okay--?” Crow ponders on the idea. “So, can you do it?” “Well, sure but--” “Great! I’m sure you’ll get her this time Crow! See ya real soon!” And just like that the officer hung up. Crow just put his phone and thinks it over. “Something wrong Crow?” Yusei snaps Crow out of his thoughts. Crow just goes to get his helmet, and walks to the front door. “They found the girl, and want me to go get her since I’m the closest at the moment.” “Well why don’t they just go get her instead of depending on you. Something tells me that they’re too lazy to do anything.” Jack assumes. “Well I’m going to get her anyway,” The ginger-haired man puts his helmet on as he got to his Blackbird. “Besides, I would like a retry anyway.” Yonah is sitting against a mossy wall of an old building, taking a smoke break while looking over her shoulders. It became a habit since she was first seen by the public after a long time hiding in the shadows. She tends to freak out on any little movement she sees, and gets up to put up a fight. Most of the time it was nothing to be afraid of. She gets a little too paranoid when on the run, but she shouldn’t be blamed for it. She looks up at the sky, groups of pigeons standing on a wire, looking at all directions. “Daddy daddy, the birds are attacking me!” A flashback came showing little Yonah with a horde of pigeons all on top of her, taking pieces of her bread bit by bit. A middle-aged man sitting next to her just laughed and walked over to shoo the pigeons away. “There’s nothing to fear Yonah. They just wanted your bread. That’s why they’re standing all around you. Look.” He points at one area where the pigeons are cautiously taking steps towards her, hoping to get some food from the girl. “Oh…. should I?” She asked, moving away from the pigeon to her foster father. “You can if you want.” She pulled a piece off from the bread and threw it far away, the horde of pigeons goes towards the piece all together, fighting over the bit. “Haha, they’re funny.” “Sure they may be quite odd.” Yonah looks up at the man as he spoke. “But unlike a lot of people I find them very astonishing. So beautiful… like you!” He elbowed her gently. “Eww, dad! They’re gross! They just eat food off the ground.” Yonah whined. “Well that’s what they do. Without them the world would be a real mess. Besides being harsh to the poor things, you should thank them for their help.” Yonah takes it into thought, and looks over at the birds. “Found ya!” Yonah snapped into reality as she heard a voice from the end of the building, a man on his D-Wheel looking at her. He gets off his D-Wheel and walks over to her. She gets up in a cautious manner. Crow stops walking and takes off his helmet. “Now,” Crow places his helmet down, showing no trouble. “We can do this the nice, easy way. I’ll just escort you to the station. No harm--” Just in moment’s time she breaks into a run, leaving Crow incomplete with his sentence. He just sighs and facepalm. “...Or the hard way. That works too.” He starts running after her. As Yonah goes to make zigzag directions on paths between buildings, Crow goes to make shortcuts to get around and in front of her path. By the time that happens the girl cuts to a sharp corner, hoping to shake him off. As it felt like she was running forever, she stopped and turned around. No sign of the man, she sighed in victory. “Who’s the slowpoke now?” She grinned to herself, but just as she turned to the other direction, Crow was standing right in front of her, face to face. “I guess that makes you ‘the slowpoke’.” The other officers were able to come on time and arrest her, taking her to the the police car. “I have to say that was pretty quick.” The officer who called him earlier walked up him, patting him on the shoulder. “Even for someone who was on break.” “It’s fine, just here to do the right thing.” He looks at a far distance as the woman gets her head pushed under the car hood through the door. He had suddenly a different feeling just then. “Welp, thanks Crow. No wonder why you’re called the Bullet.” The officer then heads back to the others, calling it off for the day and getting ready to leave their location. Crow however hasn’t moved yet. He tries thinking back at the time he first encountered the criminal, and then to now when he just caught her. “What is with this woman? Trying to run away and yet not even defending herself…” He goes back home where Yusei and Jack still are, parking his D-Wheel in the garage. The two walked down the stairs, hearing him coming back. “So… did you find her?” Jack asks. Crow nods. “Yeah…” Jack continues asking. “And you caught her?” “Uh-huh,” Crow nods again, and this time not really saying a word. “Ha! I knew you could do it!” Jack finishes walking down the stairs and goes up to Crow with a grin on his face. “I bet she wasn’t even much of a challenge this time.” “That may be true…” Crow answered. “But… something doesn’t seem right with her…” “What do you mean?” Jack became puzzled. “So was she too easy? Maybe she wanted to get caught this time.” He shrugged. “I mean, she was probably drained from her previous flights. You know, weak and all.” Crow still ponders on the incident. “But still, she didn’t fight back like she did the last time I caught her. She looked more troubled than before.” “You’re thinking too hard on this!” Jack felt annoyed by his thoughts. “Look, she’s a criminal. You caught the criminal. Done. She’s now going to be in jail where she should be.” “Sure… sure.” Crow is mentally distracted, showing Yusei something’s wrong. “I’m sure it’s alright Crow.” Yusei looks over to his friend. “For now you should be more concerned on that donut thief that’s still on the loose.” The three just laughed. “Yeah, you’re right.” Crow smiled, and stretches. “Well, are you guys staying for dinner or something? It’s getting late and all.” Yusei puts his jacket on. “I don’t know about Jack but I’m going back home for sure. I told Aki that I’ll be back before dinner.” “Well I don’t mind staying--” Jack acknowledges to stay with Crow, just then he looks at the text from his phone he received from Carly. Seeing the expression in his face, Jack seems disappointed. “...Nevermind. I gotta get home.” “Alright. See ya!” Crow walks up to his garage door as Yusei and Jack gets on their D-Wheel to go home. They may be right. He’s probably thinking too hard. And so he forgets about his troubles and gets ready for his dinner for the day, and making sure he gets ready to go to work tomorrow.

Want to find the other chapters? Go find my tag #Yugioh 5D’s Fanfiction and you’ll be able to find the rest!

[theopenroadbeforeme-blog]

Mountains are the sirens of geologic formations — luring in adventurers and enthusiasts with a rugged beauty that draws a veil over the hazards they contain.  Soaring altitudes, inclement weather, and unstable terrain… these things and more have wrought tragedy upon countless backcountry explorers drawn inexorably towards the mountains.  But there is one breed of peak that ups the danger ante to insane levels with pyroclastic flows, lava, and Earth-shattering eruptive force.  Volcanoes.

All Nature’s wildness tells the same story: the shocks and outbursts of earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers, roaring, thundering waves and floods, the silent uprush of sap in plants, storms of every sort, each and all, are the orderly, beauty-making love-beats of Nature’s heart.” — John Muir

Guatemala has at least 37 volcanoes — the highest concentration in Central America.  While many are dormant or extinct, there are several active ones, of which Volcán de Fuego is perhaps the most infamous.  This is especially true in 2018 after a June eruption killed more than 150 people and displaced thousands.  While that eruption was Fuego’s most powerful in over 40 years, the volcano is nearly constantly active, belching out smoke and fire day in and day out.  Crazily enough, there are companies that lead tours up the adjacent Volcán de Acatenango and even onto the treacherous ‘Knife Ridge’ that is leveled at Fuego’s fiery gullet…

Kevin Sebold, photographer [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)%5D, from Wikimedia Commons

One of the most well-known of these companies is OX (Outdoor Expeditions).  Their Double Whammy tour offers the chance to both summit Acatenango and walk along the Knife Ridge towards Fuego.  After doing some research into their safety practices and watching some videos of the volcano in action, I bit the bullet and booked my tour.  I would be climbing Acatenango and Fuego, making for one of my largest summits and my first active volcano experience, respectively.

Climbing Acatenango and Fuego

We set out early, meeting at the OX headquarters in Antigua at 7:00 in the morning to pack our bags and eat a quick breakfast.  From there, it was just over an hour to the trailhead.  The ascent was merciless from the get-go, with an exposed slog through cornfields comprising the entire first leg of the hike.  Since the track starts at just under 2,500 meters in elevation, altitude is a factor,  so we went slowly and took plenty of breaks to rest and hydrate.

After the sun-baked grind through the fields, entering the cool shade of the cloud forest was a welcome reprieve.  Thick tree-cover hung with ferns and vines kept the sky from us, save for the stray beams of sunlight that dappled the forest floor.  It was strange to think that we were on a volcano which had erupted as recently as the ’70s; indeed, it felt more akin to a rainforest far removed from any sort of life-purging flame.

The shift from cloud forest to alpine forest is sudden, as if all the lush vegetation mutually decided that none of it would grow higher than this elevation.  But the shift in flora didn’t make for a barren landscape.  The sweet tang of pine needles filled our nostrils, and alpine flowers blossomed in purples, reds, and yellows along the dusty path.

Solitary Volcán de Agua loomed in the distance, its 3,760-meter bulk dwarfing the surrounding hills.  But not our Acatenango.  Acatenango reaches a height of 3,976 meters, while Fuego tops out at 3,763 — give or take a few layers of transitory volcanic rock and ash.

After a lunch break during which we hoovered some fantastic sandwiches, we carried on as the first clouds of the day gathered around us.  The wind picked up as well, and it wasn’t uncommon for a wisp of cloud to be harried past us before disappearing around the shoulder of the volcano.

When we (at last) reached our Base Camp, Fuego lay before us — a titan of smoldering menace intermittently shrouded in cloud.

Every few minutes, a puff of smoke would burst from its cone, roiling black and thick through the cloud cover.  Occasionally, the spectacle would be accompanied by a low rumble, followed by the clattering of searingly hot stones cascading down Fuego’s flanks.

After a short break at Base Camp, two of us set out with our guide, Miguel, towards that rumbling, fiery giant across the valley.  The descent down Acatenango was frenzied — a literal sprint down a steep slope with thick layers of fine, volcanic stone.  After the first few, terrifying steps, the experience became exhilarating, feeling for all the world like cross-country skiing down a volcano.  It basically was, sans any skis.

But that descent only meant we had to climb back up to reach the Knife Ridge of Fuego, and we set out from the saddle between the two peaks with weary steps.  A sea of clouds broke against the flanks of Acatengo behind us, and the glow of the sinking sun tinged them with gold.

When we crested the ridgeline and saw Fuego smoldering in barely contained fury before us, I could feel a chill go through me — and not just from the cold!  The path dropped sharply to either side, and Miguel made a point of showing us which way to fall if we lost our balance.  “Don’t fall this way, you’ll die.  If you fall this way, you’ll just slide for a very, very long time.”

Thanks, dude.

Other groups trudged behind us, and we all stopped just beyond a scattering of fresh rocks from a recent eruption.  Because, you know… safety.

The sun dropped further towards the horizon, and we huddled on the safe side of the ridge to take shelter from the wind.  I had a thermal layer, a fleece, and a windbreaker, but I was still freezing.  Waiting became a war of attrition, and I alternated which hand I kept exposed to work my camera shutter as I tucked the other as deep into my pocket as I could manage.  Miguel stood staring out over the clouds, oblivious to the elements.

In the distance, Volcán de San Pedro loomed over a cloud-covered Lago de Atitlán, where I’d spent the last few weeks staying in Santa Cruz la Laguna.

Darkness fell, and Fuego’s eruptions turned fiery, lending credence to its name.  In Spanish, it literally translates to Volcano of Fire, while the Mayan name of Chi’gag translates to, ‘Where the Fire Is’.  Apt.

We descended Fuego and made our way back up Acatenango in total darkness, picking our way gingerly down the steep slope and practically crawling the last several hundred meters up into camp.  Dinner and a fire waited for us, followed by a cold, windy night on packed earth as Fuego rumbled and shook in the distance.

Morning came much too soon, as we all got up at 4:00 am for a pre-dawn ascent of the summit of Acatenango.  Bleary-eyed and groggy from a restless night at altitude, we trudged up the slope as the sky began to lighten, cresting the rim of the crater just minutes before sunrise.

The sun rose just over the shoulder of Volcán de Agua, painting the clouds below and the neighboring peaks in soft reddish-orange light.  Fuego sent up its regular plumes of ash and the occasional belch of lava, prompting cheers of “FUEGOOOOO!!!!” from gathered onlookers.

Lake Atitlan was visible behind us, with its vanguard of smaller volcanoes dwarfed by the shadow of Acatenango.

As we’d learned the night before, sometimes the easiest way to descend a volcano is to run straight down, so that’s what we did.  A steep pitch covered in a deep layer of loose stone made for a surprisingly safe ‘ski’ slope.  We took giant, leaping steps down, sliding up to a meter per step down the scree.

We took our time eating breakfast while Miguel and Milton broke down camp.  When it came time to bid Fuego farewell, we waited for one last eruption before heading back along the trail.  Behind us, the Volcano of Fire rumbled on, sending ash and fire into the clear blue expanse of the sky.

Review of Ox Expeditions

Climbing Acatenango and Fuego with Ox Expeditions has undoubtedly been the highlight of my trip. Not only was the experience extremely epic and satisfying, but the guiding expertise and overall organization of the trip by Miguel and Milton were exceptional.  They handled our group of 14 with aplomb, easily adapting to the different hiking abilities present in our group.  The food was better than I expected and having the crew set-up/tear-down camp AND prepare all the meals was a welcome surprise.

The administrative side of Ox was a little less organized, as my hike was rescheduled at the last minute — forcing me to frantically adjust some travel plans because of the inconvenience.  That said, Ox made good on the snafu and organized my transport to Antigua AND comped my pre-trip night’s sleep in their dorm.

I’d definitely recommend them as a tour operator and would highly encourage you to use them for climbing Acatenango and Fuego when you eventually visit Guatemala!

What to Bring

Good hiking shoes.  I use Merrell Moab or Chameleon hiking boots and have always been impressed with them!

A windbreaker.  I use the Arc’teryx Incendo hoody and love how I can just stuff it into my pocket when I’m not using it.

Thermal layers.  Bring these for top AND bottom, as it gets very cold up on the peaks — sometimes the temps are sub-zero!

Tough, breathable long pants.  You’ll be sweating a lot, so jeans are a strict no-no, while the rough volcanic stone can chew up flimsy materials.  Get something comfortable, tough, and protective for the hike up — I use Coalatree’s Trailhead pants.

A fleece jacket.  Columbia makes great quality fleeces for affordable prices.

GLOVES! I forgot these and ended up having to put wool socks over my hands to keep them warm.

A warm hat.

Snacks.  While lunch, dinner, and breakfast are provided, snacks are not; so bring some chocolate, nuts, berries, or your favorite hiking food to snack on during the many breaks you’ll take on the way to the summit.

Sunscreen.  Needless to say, there’s not a lot of shade on top of the volcanoes, so you’ll be getting some prime exposure to the sun while at altitude — a recipe for a gnarly sunburn if you’re not prepared.

Things Ox Can Loan You

OX has gear to lend or rent for those who don’t have their own.  Here’s all the stuff I borrowed:

Sleeping bag

Sleeping pad

Backpack

Eating utensils

More… check with Ox if there’s something you need.  They might have it on hand for you to borrow/rent.

Hiking sticks are available to rent for 5 quetzales at the trailhead.

How about you?  Have you ever hiked a volcano?  If so, how was your experience?  Would you do it again?  Let me know in the comments below!

Did you enjoy this post? Pin It!

Climbing Acatenango and Fuego Volcanoes with Ox Expeditions Mountains are the sirens of geologic formations -- luring in adventurers and enthusiasts with a rugged beauty that draws a veil over the hazards they contain. 

[lovehaswonangelnumbers]

Archangel Michael ~ The Bravest Servants of the Mother

Archangel Michael ~ The Bravest Servants of the Mother,

Archangel Michael ~ The Bravest Servants of the Mother

Channeled by Genoveva Coyle

Greetings! I am Mi-ka-el, Archangel of Love and Bringer of the Truth, Warrior of Light and Peace, your brother, your protector, your family.

I come in love and gratitude for your service, for your fortitude and valor, for your commitment to your Divine Plan, and for your service to the Mother and to all. I come to bring you my love and strength, and to reiterate the fact that you are doing a marvelous job, not by the means of how you are doing it, but by the truth of who you are.

I am extremely pleased to see how fast you have come to realize that when you are only love, when you strive to be a clear conduit of light, and then give unconditionally and without any reserve, then you are in your best service.

You have been told that as warriors of peace it doesn’t necessarily mean that you sit in your comfort zones, isolated and undisturbed by the turmoil and the chaos around you. Yes, you can always intend and send love to the most disturbed and affected areas, being war, man-made destruction, or any other type of natural calamity – storms, uncontrollable fires, or earthquakes. And do not underestimate the effect that you have on the course of those events, because it is tremendous.

But it is the day-by-day interactions, and for many of you, the nighttime traveling and intercommunications that are the fastest and most efficient ways of reaching the ones that are in so much pain and lost in the shadows. Mostly they reach out to you in ways that are expected. But sometimes they come in sneaky ways, like through the back door – in ways that are less than totally acceptable. And they come to you because they see your light and brilliance, they see the warmth and love that is filling your eyes and your hearts, literally your entire being, and that is what they want! It reminds them of who they are at their deepest core.

And what do you do as my warriors of love and light? What is it that the bravest servants of the Mother do when confronted with these encounters?

Dear hearts, what you do is you set firm boundaries, with strength and kindness but, nevertheless, unwavering ones! And, after placing the light on their less than loving intentions, you declare that these are “no-no” events, for they are neither permissible nor allowable under the Nova Earth’s rules of love and freedom!

You proclaim and assert that you are setting clear “no trespassing signs” around yourselves, and around your entire soul family! Then you bring them in through the “front door,” and open your beautiful hearts to them. You listen to what they have to say, and you send them your love, the Love of the Mother that flows abundantly through thee. You beam the most generous flow of love directly into their aching and thirsty hearts, for they have been waiting for it for a long time. You show them how to do it from now on, living in the new world of love; for it is only in the heart that the real source of healing, nourishment, and true power resides.

This is the way you bring them the hope for a new and brighter life. You are now planting new seeds of love, and you reach out to them to reignite the light that is hidden deep down inside their closed and helpless hearts.

Then your work is done, for you do not have to take them under your care, you leave them under my care, and under their own heavenly guidance.

Understand that this is the way you forge new pathways, bringing and shining your light into the deepest places of the Earth, and into the collective human consciousness, effortlessly reaching one soul at a time.

As you see, the ones in need will find you dear hearts, and the manner in which they come to you is less important, for whether they are asking for help in a direct way or in a more covert one, it matters not, what counts is the fact that you recognize the cry for assistance. It is your task as the warriors of the light to see that everyone coming to you is asking for love and acceptance, and in fact, everyone wants to find their way back home into the heart of the Mother/Father/One.

You are the way-showers, you are the ones demonstrating love in action and the simple way home, through fair play, forgiveness, and love.

Know that I am always with you! You are loved and cherished beyond measure! Farewell.

~~~~~~~~~

Share Our Messages with Love and Gratitude

LOVE US @ MeWe mewe.com/join/lovehaswon

Commentary from The First Contact Ground Crew 5dSpiritual Healing Team:

Feel Blocked, Drained, Fatigued, Restless, Nausea, Achy, Ready to Give Up? We Can Help! We are preparing everyone for a Full Planetary Ascension, and provide you with the tools and techniques to assist you Home Into The Light. The First Contact Ground Crew Team, Will Help to Get You Ready For Ascension which is Underway. New Spiritual Sessions have now been created for an Entire Family, including the Crystal Children; Group Family Healing & Therapy. We have just began these and they are incredible. Highly recommend for any families struggling together in these times of intense changes. Email: motherofallcreation@lovehaswon.org for more information or to schedule an emergency spiritual session. We can Assist You into Awakening into 5d Reality, where your experience is one of Constant Joy, Wholeness of Being, Whole Health, Balanced, Happy and Abundant. Lets DO THIS! Schedule Your Session Below by following the Link! Visit:  https://www.lovehaswon.org/awaken-to-5d/

Introducing our New LoveHasWon Twin Flame Spiritual Intuitive Ascension Session. Visit the link below:

https://lovehaswon.org/lovehaswon-twin-flame-spiritual-intuitive-ascension-session/

Request an Astonishing Personal Ascension Assessment Report or Astrology Reading, visit the link below for more information:

https://lovehaswon.org/lovehaswon-ascension-assessment-report

https://lovehaswon.org/lovehaswon-astrology/

To read our Testimonials you can follow this link: https://www.lovehaswon.org/testimonials

Connect with MotherGod~Mother of All Creation on Skype @ mothergoddess8

We are a Donation based service for the Planetary Ascension. Thank you for showing your support and keeping our website and Love Energies moving forward! Thanks for supporting your family of light in their time of need to fulfill mission. We are Eternally Grateful!

Donate to Love: https://www.lovehaswon.org/donate-to-love/

Try Cash App using my code and we’ll each get $5! FKMPGLH

Cash App Tag: $lovehaswon1111

https://cash.me/app/FKMPGLH

Support Us on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/lovehaswon

Here is our Fund Raising information for The Crystal Schools: https://www.gofundme.com/lovehaswon

Request a Free copy of Our Ascension Guide or (The Tree of Life ~ Light of The Immortals) Book

MeWe ~ Linkedin ~ Twitter ~ Tumblr ~ Youtube ~ Facebook ~ Apple News ~ GAB ~ Minds ~ Google+ ~ Medium ~ Weibo ~ StumbleUpon ~ Reddit ~ Informed Planet ~ Steemit ~ SocialClub ~ BlogLovin ~ Flipboard ~ Pinterest ~ Instagram ~ Snapchat

,