#General Labourer- Warehouse | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

this-game-has-themes · 18 days ago

Text

the Rebel Defects' updated character designs and bios ft. writeups from @lair-of-the-white-worm. now nobody is allowed to be wrong about our characters ever again

“Drill”

Rescued from Slig Barracks. Mudokon Worker. Delinquent. Long range weapons specialist. Unruly teenager.

Hatched in a labour provision warehouse, he was assigned to be a maintenance Mud in a fashion brand sweatshop the moment he was capable of using his thumbs. After losing his leg in an automatic sewing machine accident trying to save one of his brothers from the same fate, he quickly became irate and aggressive towards everyone and everything around him, so much so that the owner of the sweatshop labelled him a “Delinquent” and had him shipped off to the Slig Barracks Delinquent Camp to be taught a lesson or two about respect. Due to the abuse he was forced to endure under General Dripiks orders, and constantly being used as target practice by Sligs in training, he became even more unruly and aggressive. He was mockingly given the nickname “Drill” by the other Mudokon delinquents in the Barracks. Drill insists that the nickname comes from his job as a maintenance Mud and skill with power tools, but the nickname actually stuck as a result of his constant insulting and scolding of other Muds much older and larger than him, with a confident gusto not unlike the drill sergeants they were faced with every day.

The “Target Practice” jumpsuit is standard issue for Mudokons in the Delinquent Camp. The Sligs in the Barracks entertained themselves greatly by aiming directly for Drills peg leg every time he was sent out on the shooting range to pick up bullet shells. It became a game for them. After going through leg after leg made of rusty rods leftover from outposts and wrappings made from empty sandbags, Drill eventually started making his spare legs out of weapons that were tossed into the Barracks’ “discard pile” for reasons such as malfunction or obsoletion. Drill will darkly comment about how the guns his leg are made from are just like him, “thrown away for not working right.”

When Abe first arrived at Slig Barracks on his mission to shut down SoulStorm Brewery 401, Drill had no interest in following Abe. He didn’t believe in some Messiah, and he certainly didn’t believe in blindly following some leader to become an off the grid hippie. The murder of General Dripik cracked Drill’s skepticism. He still didn’t believe in Abe’s prophecy, but Howler's grit won him over. He decided to trust Abe and Howler and go with them on their journey (after stocking up on an overly excessive amount of stolen Slig artillery per Howler’s request, much to the dismay of Abe). He was sent through a bird portal by Abe after the death of Vice President Aslik. Freedom however, did not result in Drill’s attitude improving. If anything it got worse. After the Brewery’s destruction, Drill became the first official member of Howler’s “Rebel Defects”. He did not fit in well with the freemuds let alone the natives, he even managed to receive the luck of being the first Mudokon that was ever kicked out of Alf’s Rehab & Tea after giving the namesake proprietor a very harsh, unwarranted, but not dishonest tongue lashing. He began being turned away from most front doors, not that he seemed to care, but it was clear he didn’t fit in.

He inadvertently joined Howler’s mission to assassinate her oppressors when she coaxed him into realizing they both wanted the same thing; to kill the Industrialists that murdered their childhoods, no matter how small or indirect a role they played in it. In order to convince him that Howler had his best interest in mind, she gave Drill her collection of General Dripik’s medals, a trophy she had taken from the Glukkon warmonger’s dead body the day that he had been murdered as an ironic quarmic vengeance on behalf of the spear belonging to her Drone Beget being turned into a centrepiece in Dripik’s trophy room. Giving up the medals to Drill was a meaningful gesture, as the murder of Dripik was something Howler had longed for since the Glukkon’s army razed her tribe into the ground and abducted her. The medals were, to her, a reminder that she had outlived him, her tribe had outlived him.

Drill keeps the medals adorning whatever he can show them off on. He is the weapons specialist of the gang. Thanks to his non-consequential career in maintenance, excessive time spent in Slig Barracks, and his experience jury-rigging prosthetics out of reverse-engineered Slig weaponry, his knowledge of industrial firearms is practically unmatched. He is skilled with both a close range handgun and a long range sniper rifle, and can identify any bullet, even if the shell is mangled.

As the youngest member of the gang he is constantly on edge about being patronized. Though Howler sees her younger teenage self in Drill, caring deeply for him and understanding his pain, the majority of their interactions result in arguments and insults thrown at one another. Thanks to the Delinquent Camp he is an expert at interrogation tactics and is quick to harshly clock people on their Slegshit, even his own gang. He does not respect Howler as a leader, and is the only member who tends to call her out when her motives are clearly favouring herself over others.

His second closest relationship is with Trip Hazard, who trusts Drill the most when it comes to describing the appearance of things like dead Sligs; something the two of them both find quite hilarious. -

“Trip Hazard”

Rescued from Necrum Mines. Mudokon Worker. Blind. Explosives expert. Geezer with a dirty sense of humour.

Ever since he was a hatchling, he never looked where he was going and was always stumbling about in the way of others, earning himself the nickname “Trip Hazard”. After spending his able-bodied years slaving away with explosives in various locations under the orders of SoulStorm Mining Co., he was eventually shipped off to Necrum Mines under the facade of a “promotion”. It became clear to Trip that this was a lie when he was knocked unconscious and had his eyelids sewn shut before being thrown into a Cheapo Labour train car without any care whatsoever.

Mudokon slave miners in the lowest levels of Necrum are all surgically blinded before they are stationed there, for various reasons. One being that any burial offerings dug up by the slaves are confiscated and sold to Industrialist museums as “excavated artifacts”. Deprivation of sight ensures the slaves don’t have the chance of seeing anything valuable while they’re digging and trying to pocket them. Also, if they become aware what species the bones they’re ordered to dig up belongs to it would likely cause the workers great moral distress, which could lead to panic attacks or suicide, and their bosses don’t want to deal with that paperwork. The blinded slaves are also deprived of sunlight as they are never permitted to leave the low tunnels of the mine. The lack of sunlight and oxygen causes their skin to become very thin and pale. If a blinded slave was even seen at a glance by someone who wasn’t supposed to see them, it would be a PR nightmare for the mining company, so they’re kept underground, essentially until they die and become the very bones being dug up. In short, slave miners being promoted to work in Necrum Mines are being sentenced to death.

Trip Hazard was always very aware that Necrum would become his grave, but always remains very lighthearted about it all. He was well known by his coworkers before for his sense of humour, always cracking jokes even in the most dire of situations. When dumped off at Necrum he was typically working on his lonesome by order of Morguer, who demanded that all explosive technicians be sent on location alone in order to minimize casualties. Trip was fully expected to die on multiple occasions, but he has managed to evade death every time with a smile on his face and a bird flipped to his Slig supervisor.

Explosives remained Trip’s one and only comfort. He was already half deaf due to his work and was now fully blind, meaning he couldn’t at all see the bright fiery clouds and couldn’t much hear the boom beyond a ringing in his ears. However he could still feel the explosions. The vibrations in his bones that shot through him after detonation were more familiar to him than a cold Brew or a good night's sleep. He often mentions that his lifelong dream is to go out with a bang in the biggest, brightest, most destructive explosion possible and that all the previous explosions he’s been in “clearly weren’t sexy enough”.

When Abe caused Necrum Mines to cave in, it was Trip Hazard himself who aided in laying the explosives to do so. Unlike Drill, Trip Hazard didn’t hesitate when offered rescue by Abe. However, not unlike Drill, he didn’t fit in with the other freemuds and natives well. Not many of the blinded Mudokons did as the tribes themselves weren’t used to large populations of disabled and were not equipped to provide them necessary aid. Trip’s age didn’t do himself any favours either. As a crotchety blind old Mud, he expected to be treated with respect by the tribes as they seemed to value their elders. The contrary proved quickly true. His status, not only as a factory-hatched Mud but one that contributed to the “defiling of Necrum” earned him frequent disrespect and saliva spat in his direction by Posers, Kahonees and Shamans.

He quickly learned that the only place he was truly welcome was in Howler’s circle of screw-ups, and when the offer to join her mission of retribution was given to him he jumped to take it.

His contribution to the Rebel Defects is his both his nasty sense of humour and expertise in explosives. When rescued from Necrum he made sure he took as much dynamite as he could with him, “just in case” as he put it. He always seems to have the exact explosive the gang needs, whenever, wherever, however, just by reaching in and pulling it out.

The mining hardhat Trip wears has a broken light. Trip is unaware it’s broken and still switches it on whenever entering any dark areas with the gang, despite the fact he wouldn’t even be able to see with the light anyway. It’s merely a habit he never let go.

He also carries with him a shovel he uses as a walking stick, perfectly indented with the shape of a Slig’s skull- one that had cornered Howler the day that Abe had come to the mines. Trip gave the Slig a quick whack knocking him dead to the ground, an act which stood as his first introduction to Howler and the Mudokon Messiah himself.

Trip’s strongest relationship is with Slogmeat. He is completely oblivious to the fact Slogmeat isn’t actually a Slog. The gang doesn’t bother to correct him because Trip doesn’t believe them when they say Slogmeat is a Mudokon. -

“Malpractice”

Rescued from Vykkers Labs. Mudokon organ farm. Field medic. Anomaly. Somehow sentient.

Mal wasn’t born, nor was he hatched, he was grown as a product of the Vykker Pharmaceuticals Universal Donor™ program, a horrific "medical breakthrough" that promised a consistent, conscious-free supply of transplant-ready organs that could be rented, leased, or sold. “75% ethically sourced Mudokon organ farms, incapable of conscious thought, pain, or suffering, for the discerning transplant recipient. All tissue is guaranteed cross-species compatible. Book a new liver or kidney today!” That’s what the brochure said. Mal was meant to be one of those, the 75%. Lifeless, unfeeling and disposable. But by a fluke, something didn’t take.

When Howler’s gang raided one of the many Vykkers Labs in search for the notorious cosmetic surgeon Dr. Knicks, she instead found Malpractice on a steel table. Despite her first assumptions he was shockingly alive, eyes open, organs halfway removed, having been watching the procedure being performed on him in silence, before it was interrupted by gunshots. He sat up, gestured towards a suture kit, and stitched himself back together. Howler spoke to him, and it was the first time anyone had ever addressed him at all.

His name comes from an identification tag that was tied to his toe, notifying the surgeon that was operating on him of something uncertain. Malpractice was the first word that Howler recognized. She asked the Mudokon if it was his name. Mal had never had a name before aside from the barcode identifier on his forehead, so he nodded.

Mal is tall and bone-thin, stitched together like a ragdoll in surgical thread and steel staples. He’s a grotesque sight, the kind of figure even other Mudokons flinch away from. The Vykkers called him “it”, and the natives still do because they consider his existence “unnatural” due to having not been hatched from an egg.

His gait is stiff, like he’s unused to moving under his own power (which is true). His muscles shouldn’t even work properly but, somehow, they do, and very well. Despite his stature his strength is impressive. He doesn’t feel pain due to his nerves having been grown to not have any sort of feeling. His skin is cold. His body is a patchwork of foreign parts, no one’s sure how many of them are even his. He doesn’t seem to know either, or care.

He speaks very rarely, but when he does, his voice is low and precise, more like a readout than a conversation. He says that it’s because he doesn’t want to waste any words. His bedside manner is nonexistent, but in the field, no one can deny he’s effective. He knows how to keep others alive because he’s spent his entire life watching death happen in slow motion. He’s been an unwilling observer to countless surgeries, dissections, amputations-silent, motionless, always aware. The Vykkers never noticed. They never thought to check if the organ farm could see them.

Mal learned from the inside out, both figuratively and literally. Within Howler’s gang, he puts that knowledge to use. He is the gang’s medic, though a more appropriate title would be their butcher. No one knows how much pain a body can take better than Mal. His cold precision and anatomical knowledge make him indispensable-if not exactly comforting. He doesn’t see suffering as something to prolong unless it serves a purpose. In fact, Mal is the only member of the gang who truly believes that sometimes, a painless death IS the only form of freedom left for a creature too far gone. He’s seen too much to believe otherwise.

He doesn’t sleep. The only rest he’s ever known came in the form of cryogenic suspension. Without drugs, his body just keeps going, because there’s no fatigue in dead nerves. Unless he is artificially sedated with whatever Vykker Pharmaceuticals Knockout drugs the gang can get their hands on, he spends the night staring at nothing for hours while everyone else rests. Processing, remembering, and dealing with the traumatic reality of being alive. Mal doesn’t want revenge, he is revenge. Every scalpel, every suture, every Vykker executive with a missing kidney and a message carved into their chest is just another step toward something bigger, something final. He wasn’t made for war, but he’s very good at it.

Mal wishes sometimes that he was capable of feeling pain, for the sole reason of being able to feel something at all. He’s unable to feel taste, touch, and can only barely feel temperatures. He isn’t even able to feel hunger despite his stomachs. He still prefers to eat through a pouch and a tube. He’s bitten off the tip of his tongue before and hadn’t even realized until Drill pointed out the blood coming from his mouth. He’s unable to feel sensations as well, and his artificial blood type was created for no reason other than being pumped by his lab-grown heart to organs that he wasn’t even allowed to keep.

His bond with Howler is the only connection he’s ever had. She was the first person to see him as more than a “thing”. Not just a Mudokon but a person. He doesn’t know how to show what that means, of course. He’s never had a friend before her, but he follows her without question, protects her without hesitation, and if it ever came down to it, would kill every living thing in sight to keep her breathing. When the gang disagrees, he always takes her side. -

“Slogmeat”

Rescued from Bonewerkz. Body of a Mud. Mind of a Slog. Closest thing to a bodyguard the gang has.

Slogmeat’s true origins are shrouded in mystery. The gang has no idea what his name is, or if he even has one. All that is known about him is that when he was a child, he was tossed into the Slog kennels of Bonewerkz. While it’s likely that he was left there assigned to the role of shovelling up offal and feces left by the Slogs, it was commonly joked about amongst other workers that he was intended to serve as food for the animals, and truthfully the more likely case. Hence why most employees and security referred to him as “the Slogmeat”, seeing him as less of a sentient being and more of a mindless creature.

Sligs themselves contributed to Slogmeats delusions, having essentially raised him from childhood exactly like they raised Sloggies as a form of humiliation and bullying. They kicked him, beat him, kept him chained in the pens, fed him Slog food, and even forced him to respond to commands like a Slog would. Slogmeat however, has managed to survive despite his circumstances, although not without consequences. Besides the various injuries and chewed off chunks of himself, he has developed a sort of familial relationship with Slogs. This comes more from being considered one of them, rather than by any training or discipline. Since he spent his formative years among the animals, he himself doesn’t recognize himself as a Mudokon. He is a Slog in his own mind. He moves like one, thinks like one, barks like one, and, thanks to his size compared to the other Slogs, he has assumed the role as the Alpha among them, saving him from being on the receiving end of a lot of vicious attacks.

Other Bonewerkz employees would often share urban legends about Slogmeat to the point where scrubs were debating his existence. He was spoken about more as if he were some sort of cryptid lurking around the factory at night. Sometimes the Sligs would play along just to freak others out, and when scrubs were assigned with Sloghut cleaning duty, they were told to “watch out for the Slogs, but especially the Slogmeat”. Scrubs sent to the Sloghuts to clean them were given that task as a sort of punishment and did not come out in one piece, let alone alive. They doubled as cleaners and dinner to Slogs.

During the revolt, Slogmeat was found by Abe in a Sloghut, chained up, beaten, bruised, feral and mauled beyond recognition. At first glance Abe had assumed him to be a mutant Slog rather than a mutilated Mud. Slogmeat had no desire to be rescued, not recognizing the Messiah as kin at all. All the years of abuse made him incapable of even understanding any words spoken to him that weren’t his trained commands. He was rescued against his will.

Among the Freemuds, Slogmeat was the furthest from free. He was considered just as much of a mutant as he was back in Bonewerkz. He was still unable to see any Muds as kin, and after several visits from Shamans attempting to essentially exorcise whatever “vicious Slog spirit” had possessed him, he was deemed a lost cause. He is far more content living as an animal rather than a Mud due to his mind being completely gone.

Though he assumes the role in the gang as a “bodyguard”, he is more accurately a guard Slog. His ability to communicate with other Slogs comes in incredibly handy. During the Rebel Defects endeavours, they have come across many Sloghuts with angry animals within. While Abe was quick to use Astra Kata and other problem solving skills to sneak through any areas filled with Slogs, Slogmeat would instead use his stance as an “Alpha” to communicate with his brethren, earning their trust toward Howler’s gang, and promising them through some persuasive barks and growls that they would receive not only freedom, but a chance to exact revenge on the Sligs that have been abusing them. Anywhere there are Slogs, it won’t be long before Slogmeat has them on a collar and chain connected to his own.

Slogmeat doesn’t typically get along with Mudokons, but maintains the closest and strongest relationship with Trip Hazard, who doesn’t realize the feral Mud isn’t actually a Slog. Even though Trip is always eager to hear the sounds of the gangs feral beast mauling the organs out of a security guard, he isn’t afraid to let Slogmeat rest in his lap and makes it a habit to hold long conversations with Slogmeat even though the latter is unable to understand nor respond to him. But Slogmeat is able to sense the friendship between them, and if he were to consider anybody an “Owner” it would be Trip, who in turn considers him “Mud’s best friend”. -

“Wittly”

Conspiracy theorist. Magog Cartel skeptic. Pirate radio show host. Tech savvy. Resident nutcase.

Wittly the Slig was a reject among Sligs due to his frailer than usual physicality. After refusing to take Big Bro hormonal injections (dubbing them “brainwashing vaccines”) he began a new life off-the-grid. He is the host of the Strand-2-Strand Pirate radio show, a station which he uses to broadcast across central Mudos his conspiracy theories regarding the ruling Magog Cartel. Most of his listeners are Wolvarks tuning in ironically because they think Wittly is incredibly fun to laugh at and that his conspiracies are ridiculous. Sometimes other conspiracy theorists call in to parrot his beliefs, but the majority of his callers are prank callers who role-play to scare him further. Because his radio station is pirate, the signal itself isn’t great. All his equipment is put together himself as he believes that Vykker equipment gives off brain-frying signals. He is completely distrusting of the Cartel and all of its branches. His distrust is warranted of course, but it has also manifested into him developing extreme paranoia and obsessive compulsions about everything even remotely related to the Cartel. He even refuses to consume any foods approved by any Magog or Vykker divisions, not because he thinks the additives and microplastics are unhealthy, but because he believes that there are chemicals in the foods that will mess with things like his intelligence and sexuality. Wittly also believes that Slig Barracks mandated pants and goggles are equipped with mind controlling technology and therefore refuses to wear them whatsoever. He has slapped together his own homemade pants and goggles, as well as a helmet made from a strainer, tinfoil, and other junk that is intended to nullify his susceptibility to Mudokon mind control. Whether or not it works remains pretty unknown.

While a lot of his theories are nonsense, some of them are pretty bang-on-the-Moolah. The Magog Cartel is aware of Wittly’s piracy and has attempted to shut it down in the past, but Wittly seemed prepared with backup everything, every time. It was soon decided by higher-ups in the Cartel to not bother with trying to shut the Slig down as they realized that trying to interrupt the broadcasts would fail in suppressing rumours. The Cartel knew if they actually did silence Wittly, it might cause more people to actually start believing some of the things said by him. Wittly often says during broadcasts that he knows “Cartel agents” are listening (and they are), but thanks to his accurate suspicions being mixed in with gobbledygook there is never any intervention.

When the rumours about Abe the Mudokon’s uprising began to spread, Wittly believed they were the complete truth-especially since he suspected pretty early on that the Cartel was attempting to cover it up and suppress all talk of it. In fact, for some Sligs and Mudokons, the pirate broadcasts were how they first received word of Abe. Despite his conspiratorial beliefs, Wittly does not see Abe as a hero. His paranoia and distrust of Mudokons is unfortunately shaped by the very Cartel he despises, and he has fallen for every nutjob pseudo-archaeological claim that Mudokons aren’t simply in tune with the magic of nature and spirits, but are the descendants of gods from another planet. He believes the Mudokon Moon is actually a signal from extraterrestrials calling for their “people” to return. He has even discussed theories on his broadcast that there are ancient Utopian cities built under the temples of Scrabania.

Trip Hazard was one of the many ironic fans of Wittly’s show. Despite the poor signal it managed to be the one and only radio station Trip was able to tune into all the way down in Necrum Mines, for some reason. When Howler’s gang formed and began their first acts of rebellious terrorism, the Magog Cartel was quick to suppress rumours and downplay the amount of destruction caused by the gang in news publications in order to decrease public panic. Wittly however was onto them from the start. Trip was eager to tune in and hear what the nutty Slig had to say about it. It became a habit for the gang to listen in on Wittly, until one day while listening, Howler keenly noticed that he was jabbering on about a lot of information on Cartel branch executives that would be really handy to them. He even apparently knew information on Corrective facilities that Howler knew for certain wasn’t even common knowledge among most Sligs that worked in and out of it. Wittly’s obsessive paranoia meant he miraculously had informative tabs on people Howler had on her hitlist. She knew the gang needed him.

After an abrupt kidnapping and convincing Wittly that they weren’t there to infect his mind with Brain Slurgs, the gang had their sixth member. Wittly’s in-and-out knowledge of Magog technology, navigating the Webb incognito, and techniques in scrambling transmissions comes quite in handy.

#my art #oddworld oc #ocposting #oddworld

37 notes · View notes

transmutationisms · 11 months ago

Note

Hi do you have any brainy thoughts on the disney movie inside out (and the sequel). My family and i went to go see inside out 2 today and i kind of hate it. Theres something about presenting an office, its warehouse and all the associated mechanisms as the objective truth of our minds that i dont especially like, but i dont really care about that ultimately. But what i do hate is the idea that we all feel the exact same emotions which can each be neatly identified and delineated, to the point that they act as entirely separate people in our heads. People who dress and look the same no matter who you as an individual are outside of extremely surface level changes (maybe). But I'm having a hard time articulating precisely what I dont like about it. In your studies have you read about like ... the taxonomy of emotions or sensations ? Many therapists value the idea of each emotion being readily identifiable with a name. They have charts about it. It feels all in service of an understanding of ourselves rooted in flawed psychological frameworks. One in which the literal "mood disorder" exists

congrats on the only disney anon i would probably ever answer. yeah i saw the first inside out in like 2018 or 19 really stoned and this also pissed me off. in general when people start trying to present living things in really tidy taxonomical schemata i am immediately suspicious; what's being done is not 'reading' this or that out of nature but actively interpreting a phenomenon according to some set of predetermined rules or distinctions. in psychology this especially gained popularity toward the end of the 18th century and into the 19th: the notion of discrete brain 'functions' was the foundational assumption of phrenologists, and also intimately tied up with the idea that 'emotions' / affective states could be neatly distinguished, delineated, named, and ordered.

it's a really curious sort of dualism that ends up taking hold, esp in much of the anglo and german literature, where you the subject are configured as, on the one hand, a conscious experience resulting from your material brain, and yet, on the other hand, distinct enough from that very brain to experience a kind of dysphoric disjunction from its operations. in inside out, this is dramatised quite literally, as a conflict between the protagonist and the independent entities that 'are' her emotions (where the medium even allows each to be protrayed by a different actor!)---a better work might interrogate this schizophrenic conception of selfhood and ask, for instance, if such a portrayal of a split self is intended to resonate with many people's everyday experience, what is it that distinguishes the 'pathologically' fractured consciousness, and what does this suggest about what's at stake for those who seek to understand affective experience by naming and categorising it...?

& i do also find the warehouse metaphor odious haha. such a throwaway choice on the part of the filmmakers, but one that really speaks to both a failure of imagination (all forms of social organising must be one that i am already familiar with, even in a fully fictional and animated story) and a somewhat disturbing conception of human interiority (i would argue there's a continuity here from using the labourer-owner metaphor in a dramatisation of the mind, to broader attitudes about human dominion over 'nature').

#inside out

79 notes · View notes

allthecanadianpolitics · 9 months ago

Text

In the winter of 2020, at the outset of the pandemic, the Immigrant Workers Centre where I’m an organizer brought together a group of migrant workers for a Zoom meeting. It was a snapshot of the precarious lives of those who make Canada’s economy run. [...] These stories are not an exception but the norm for temporary foreign workers. These racialized workers generate great wealth for the corporate class inside countries like Canada because they’ve been made exploitable through a restrictive immigration regime designed to ensure they remain vulnerable, docile, deportable and disposable. Capitalists tend not to be fundamentally anti-migrant but rather seek to control and manage migration for the needs of business. They envision migration to be a kind of kitchen faucet that can be turned on and off according to labour market fluctuations. [...] Corporations in critical sectors like logistics, warehouses and distribution rely on the same strategies in the Global South as they do in the Global North: when the industries cannot be offshored, they rely on a precarious workforce of migrants.

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

#capitalism #immigrants #immigration #economy #migrant workers #corporations #cdnpoli #canadian politics #canadian news #canada

62 notes · View notes

tozettastone · 3 months ago

Text

With the usual disclaimers that this is a draft, may be subject to change, etc. etc., I have come to show you the first part of the draft of my OC×Itachi Covenant Fic (paging @mixelation and @waffliesinyoface, my covenant buddies). This is also to prove I am definitely writing it, 100%, promise, LOL.

I think for me right now, this opening sets up all the things I want it to, but it's pretty slow and it introduces three (3) OCs, when the preferred number is probably one (1). That's kind of a product of its setting, but maybe that means I should have picked a different one. Well, we'll see how I go.

---

It was almost impossible to buy close-toed boots in the elemental nations.

Fuyumi had tried. For years, Fuyumi had tried. Suppliers who produced them — mostly those in the frigid mountains up near Lightning, go figure — did not make them in her size. Everywhere else, they were a custom product, and requests were met with furrowed brows and eye-watering prices.

Fuduka Fuyumi, an unaffiliated ninja doggedly avoiding her own debtors, certainly could not afford to have warm, dry toes. This was why her toes squelched when she stepped out of the river that morning.

There absolutely existed ninja in this world whose chakra control was good enough to jog five miles down a swift-flowing river and simply avoid wet toes altogether. Some of those ninja even stopped in Uteki village, actually, since they were so close to Ame, where the worst-hidden secret society of ninja criminals on the planet made their base. Fuyumi was not among their august number, though. She had her own tricks and talents — she could drink grown men under the table and crush watermelons with only the undiluted power of her thighs. Fine chakra control? Not so much.

The dock was a floating wooden platform that bobbed along with the current of the river. The boats that arrived there were mostly long river barges, and the waterway was narrow enough that some of them were even drawn by horses or oxen pulling along the far bank. The bleached and battered wood creaked under the feet of the labourers, rough-looking men whose jobs consisted in the logistics of all this industry, taking from boats onto carts into warehouses and into, presumably, other carts.

In this part of town, the warehouses huddled like stout ugly sentinels over the river, surrounded by detritus of crates and ropes and rusted horseshoes and canvas. Further in was the market square, which was a bloody grand name for a place where they generally sold sweet fuck all.

Despite her squelching footsteps, nobody even glanced twice at Fuyumi when she returned. The tiny Fuduka family was well known in the village. It was her home now.

While she'd been living there, Fuyumi had never once thought she'd come to miss the dubious luxuries of her old home town. She'd grown up on a hard-packed red-dirt road between an electrical supply store and a farm equipment supplier. She'd had dial-up internet well into the 2010s, and the places to be seen were the mobile monthly disco and the shopping centre car park. But the elemental nations, in aggregate, had really made her count all the blessings to which she no longer had access. You know: a variety of beautiful out-of-season foods, healthcare that wasn't based on vibes alone, taxpayer-funded disability and aged pensions, a twelve-year educational curriculum… and fucking shoes. With covered toes.

Fuyumi even missed XXXX, which was, frankly, saying something. She had yet to find a single lager in the elemental nations.

She squelched a little more on her way to the market, waving to the few people who lifted their hands at her in passing, most of whom she recognised vaguely from long nights spent in the bar. In her experience, docks always had the better bars. Anywhere the wharfies were, you could guarantee no wine sat open long enough to sour.

Although heading immediately to a bar at noon on a Wednesday was not totally unknown for Fuyumi, she did have responsibilities, and today these took her down towards the market instead.

The warehouses were quickly exchanged for symptoms of consumer commerce: faded striped awnings and peeling wooden signs arranged loosely down a tiny street of semi-permanent storefronts, manned by farmers' wives and the odd travelling merchant. The very moment she stepped out of the shadow of the teahouse on the corner, a creaky voice called out:

"Oh, Fuyumi-san! Could I trouble you to help me with this?"

'This,' was three hefty crates packed tightly with bottles and straw, and 'me' turned out to be an ageing woman Fuyumi recognised only vaguely. She might've been one of her grandmother's friends. (Akane, despite her entire personality, had many friends.)

"Sure," said Fuyumi, because her next destination was her mother's house, and there was pretty much no task Fuyumi would disdain in pursuit of procrastinating against that eventuality. She unloaded the clinking bottles under the twin glowers of the midday sun and of the lady, who turned out to be called Aya. It wasn't ringing a bell? But Fuyumi didn't really mind moving heavy stuff for old ladies even if she didn't know them. If Fuyumi was ever old — which experience said was… uh, not likely — she'd want local ninja to unload crates for her. Right?

The bottles turned out to be full of oil, so they were light, but there were a lot of them and their shapes made them awkward to handle. While she was drifting between the crates and the shady insides of Auntie Aya's little wooden store, Fuyumi learned that the crates were outside on the street because that was where Aya's son had delivered them, instead of putting them inside the shop where they could be locked away from harm.

"He's useless, you know," Auntie Aya said, watching Fuyumi's progress from her three-legged stool. "You mustn't marry him. Although I suppose you'd be useful enough for two. You ninja have to have so many skills, it's a tough job for a woman…"

She went on in this vein for some time, and Fuyumi mostly let it wash over her.

Before she let her go, Aya said, "Those ninja men in the black coats have been around again," which really just went to show why you should always help lonely old ladies when they asked.

"Huh. Good to know. Are they… bothering you?" Fuyumi wondered. She didn't know what the hell she was going to do about it if they were. She was a ninja, but she wasn't, like, the kind of ninja you asked for when Uchiha Obito was causing a nuisance and you wanted someone to stop him, you know? She licked her teeth. She could help with an expeditious evacuation, in a pinch.

"Oh, no, they never bother us here." Thank fuck for that. "But I thought a kunoichi should be careful."

Fuyumi cracked her neck and rubbed her nose. "That's good advice, Auntie," she agreed.

She left the store, richer by a single bottle of oil Auntie Aya pressed upon her, and went about her business, which today consisted in collecting groceries for her mother — the inimitable and moody Fukuda Setsuko. She kept an eye out for a flash of red clouds and black swishy fabric while she did it, though.

Once upon a time, back in, like, 2007, the person currently known as Fuyumi had read a shitty scanlation of the Naruto manga. She'd done this via a screebly dial-up connection, hunched over a glowing CRT monitor while the fan clicked lazily (and futilely) overhead. Later, she'd caught… most of the Shippuden anime, probably, on her laptop, and managed to figure out the rest via social media osmosis in between her university classes.

Back then, she hadn't been an Akatsuki fan. Even the most fleshed out of the characters had seemed to have confused (and confusing) motives, and some of them were completely incomprehensible. Now, living as she did in Uteki, she'd actually spotted several of those men in the wild, and she… still wasn't an Akatsuki fan? They were extremely impressive ninja, sure, but the elemental nations were full of extremely impressive ninja, and not all of them were sixteen personality disorders in a flappy coat.

Fuyumi had even spotted the much-beloved figure of Uchiha Itachi once, from a distance, and her thoughts on that fan favourite were: wow, there's really no accounting for taste, huh? She didn't get the appeal. He was a pale guy with a resting bitchface that could kill someone from fifty paces, and he walked around swaddled in a coat too big for him, looking exhausted.

Personally, Fuyumi's favourite character had been Tsunade, because she was an absolute fucking legend who could break walls with her pinkie and Fuyumi badly wanted to get a drink with her one day. This was lucky, because she was so famous a figure in the elemental nations that, if asked, Fuyumi could still say, 'Well, I really admire Senju Tsunade,' and even random guys in bars just grunted and nodded their heads sagely.

So… Suck on that, Itachi girls.

Despite her drifting thoughts, knowing that there were Akatsuki members in Uteki did make Fuyumi move more purposefully and quickly. As a born unaffiliated ninja, she had no bounty, so there was no reason they'd be interested in her — but she had no interest in courting a surprise introduction to, like, Hidan or something. Christ. That would suck.

Setsuko lived six miles out of town, which would have been an absurd walking distance to Fuyumi in a previous life. For a ninja, blessed with a chakra-fortified body and training that commenced in early childhood and never really ceased, it was forty-five minutes, while carrying the groceries, taken at her laziest jog. Fuyumi would have preferred internet access and childhood immunisations, sure, but since she was stuck here, chakra and absurd physical fitness were pretty cool consolation prizes.

"Did you roll in mud before visiting me?" sighed Setsuko when she saw her daughter. Thirty-nine, five foot nothing, and pale, Setsuko had a perfect round face and the deceptively delicate look cultivated by true, old-fashioned kunoichi. She was pretty, poisonous, and not nearly as fragile as she habitually pretended. Today there were hydrangeas decorating her hair, a splash of purple against its midnight darkness. In spring, it had been fruit blossoms.

"I think you get bigger every time I see you," she said, tapping her lower lip as Fuyumi ducked into the shade of the house and kicked off her sandals. They were dry after the trip here, at least.

"I've been going like a cut cat all morning, so, no, I didn't shower. They had dogs," she explained, eyeing her own ankles. Her mother, predictably, reached up and rubbed her fingertips across the scars on Fuyumi's face. She didn't mention them aloud but her expression said a lot, none of it good. "I ran the river to get back so nobody'd track me."

Her hems were pretty grotty, a fact that had totally escaped her until it had been pointed out. Her legwarmers really needed a wash.

Setsuko's eyes had drifted in the same direction. "You should get rid of those," she said, for perhaps the sixth time. "You must have dropped six separate stitches."

"I made them," Fuyumi protested, as she always did. So what if it was hard to keep track of her rib stitch? "Out of nothing. Like a god." She sucked at all the girly arts her mother had tried to pass on to her. Handicrafts were just one among a million.

"Out of yarn," her mother pointed out. "And… more like a toddler."

"Where do you want your onions?" she asked, even though she knew exactly where they went. It was time to change the subject before her legwarmers got confiscated straight off her legs, somehow.

Setsuko was, Fuyumi thought, totally capable of getting her own groceries. She could even have sent a water clone, if her knees were really causing her so much pain. But Fuyumi valued the routine of bringing her weekly shopping to her, when she could. This way, her mother could not claim she was being cruelly neglected by an unfilial child, but Fuyumi could show up, unload groceries, and be gone in twenty minutes, if she was lucky. It was a perfect system.

However, if she was not lucky…

"I'll need you to get on the roof and get some of those branches down before something makes a nest up there. And there are some trees I've been meaning to transplant, so you'll need to do the ditches."

"Okay," said Fuyumi, letting this information drift over the surface of her mind without touching down.

She liked doing menial chores for her mother a lot less than she did for the grandmothers about town. What she really wanted, she felt, was a drink. Or five. Just to get a little fuzzy at the local bar and not think too hard about anything at all. But before she could do that, there was roof-climbing and trees, apparently. And, inevitably, Setsuko.

"You don't think you're still growing, do you?" she wondered, peering up at Fuyumi.

At over six feet tall, Fuyumi was an anomaly. She came by it honestly, though: her dad, long dead, had been a giant among men, a hulking taijutsu expert from up in the mountains somewhere.

Having a lover — a male lover — built like a brick shithouse was one thing. But, for Setsuko, having a daughter follow in his footsteps was quite beyond the pale. And she'd been chucking an extended wobbly about it on and off since Fuyumi was about twelve.

"Hardly matters," Fuyumi responded with forced cheer. "I'm already the tallest person you know. Let me get the roof out of the way first," she added, putting away a huge sack of rice and closing the cupboard door, "and then we'll see about the garden."

Her body shape wasn't the only way in which Fuyumi was nothing like her mother and a whole lot like her absent father. She also had his elemental affinity for earth. Her poor control meant that, unlike him, she was only entrusted with the creation of roofing tiles at moments of direst need. But she was an expert ditch-digger.

Despite her facility at the task, her mother kept her hard at work in the garden under an endless stream of helpful criticism for another ninety minutes, after which Fuyumi made her excuses with more firmness than tact.

"Going off to drink too much with Harusame, I assume," Setsuko sniffed. "Your father drank with that man for ten years and he ignored me for eight of them. I've never come to understand what the appeal was."

Since this was indeed, exactly, one hundred per cent what she intended to do with her evening, Fuyumi just shrugged. She bent down to put her shoes on at the door again.

Setsuko sighed a deep, put upon sigh. "Just… please tell me you're not sleeping with him."

Jesus fucking Christ, the things that worried this woman. "I am not sleeping with Harusame. Don't be ridiculous."

Setsuko examined her sternly, but her mum-senses must have detected no lie, because she made a little noise of relief and adjusted her hydrangeas. "Fine. Go, then. And wear your knee brace, Fuyumi!" she added, apparently unable to prevent herself from offering one more parting criticism.

It was, at last, probably good advice. As soon as Fuyumi figured out where she'd put the stupid thing, she'd follow it.

Right. That was her day done, then. Mission: finished. Pay: collected. Mum: visited. Now, to the bar, and Harusame's careless temper. And if she was very, very lucky, she'd get exactly drunk enough to stop thinking without getting sloppy.

---

Of course, now that all the worst parts of her day were over and she couldn't use them as an excuse to put anything off… this was when Fuyumi spotted the Akatsuki members about town. Naturally.

She took the same route back as she'd taken to get to Setsuko's home. The stores and stalls were closed now, and the faded awnings seemed exhausted in the golden light of the early summer evening.

She stepped into the square proper, and was smacked in the face by a tidal wave of chakra that was so massive even she couldn't help but feel it. Water, she thought, even though she'd never once picked someone's elemental affinity from feeling their chakra before in her entire goddamn life. It was just… very obvious.

Fuyumi's heart thudded heavily in her chest. She exhaled, slow and careful, and took a step back again. Whatever that was, she probably didn't need to run headfirst into it.

She licked her lips and scaled one of the nearby buildings for a better view of what the hell was going on. It was a residential one, so they'd probably be pissed off when they discovered the damage she did to their flowerpots on the way up.

Crouched on the roof of the two-storey building, Fuyumi squinted against the sunlight, catching mostly chakra, golden sun glittering on an expanse of water that categorically did not belong where it was surging, and dark silhouettes trying to kill each other atop the choppy flow of it.

The surface tension of the water was defined by chakra rather than any normal physics: it eddied around buildings and flooded the streets, and then when it reached the edges of the chakra bubble in which it was permitted, it just kind of… stopped, huddling wetly, a tame wall of fluid.

The amount of chakra that must have required was… astronomical. Fuyumi felt faintly queasy just thinking about it.

Hoshigaki Kisame was easy to pick out: he was big and waving his feared sword, which looked sort of ridiculous when you actually saw it. It might have been a veritable cheese grater of a weapon, each spiky protrusion perfectly lethal and thirsty for blood... but it looked like it was some kind of fluffy animal puffed up in indignation.

He was fighting someone small and fast, who was wearing sensibly tight clothing rather than a giant flappy coat. He was not in much danger of victory, Fuyumi judged, but he was giving it a red hot go, twisting and darting in and out with his superior acrobatics, evidently in an attempt to out-manoeuvre the mix of absurd power and even-more-absurd reach that made Hoshigaki Kisame such a bloody hard opponent. It was a respectable way to face his certain, grisly death.

She watched for a second, transfixed. Hoshigaki's defence was airtight. His footwork on the moving water was precise and practised. He was calm, he was controlling the distance between combatants, and he was setting the pace. He was indomitable. The fight was clearly his.

If she'd been the other guy, she'd have called it and run.

While she was distracted watching Hoshigaki's fight, a second silhouette darted out from the shadow of of his opponent, leaping away from the fight, zooming over the water at speed. It wasn't an illusion: its feet hit the water audibly.

It hit the ground running and didn't look back, racing past her perch on the roof.

In hindsight, Fuyumi could actually pinpoint exactly the moment that would change the trajectory of her new life. Since it was a brutal fiery murder, it did not, at the time, seem very auspicious. This — again, in hindsight — was probably the kindest warning fate had ever given her.

Uchiha Itachi still looked like he was swaddled. The coat was too big for him, and he hadn't even bothered with the arms this time: it just hung off his shoulders, sleeves flapping.

He appeared in one of those dizzying Konoha-style body flickers, standing still and moving at light speed, and the running figure made a noise of shock and dismay that she could hear even up on her roof. It drew a short, curved sword, upon whose sharp edge the setting sun burned golden.

There was a clank as it met Itachi's kunai and was deflected with, apparently, no effort, even though a kunai had nowhere near the weight of the short sword. Fuyumi watched, dazed, as the two exchanged a lightning-fast flurry of blows. Dirt sprayed underfoot.

Itachi took one easy, elegant step back — like he had predicted every movement, like he had all the time in the world — leapt over the sweep of the sword, and, while performing a mid-air flip to avoid the follow-through with the shuriken, formed several hand-signs. They were just… not even fast. It looked almost languid, even though it was probably about twice as speedy as Fuyumi herself had ever managed.

His pale fingers moved deftly through the signs like he knew the rest of the world was just waiting for him to finish before it continued apace. His enormous dark coat fluttered. His hair streamed in the breeze, long, dark, and, somehow, nowhere in his line of sight.

Fuyumi was barely twenty metres away, and even though she could see the effect of his chakra, she couldn't feel even a whisper of it against her own senses. The world before him burst, beautifully, into flame.

The swordsman didn't dodge.

Maybe he'd been distracted, like Fuyumi was, by watching Uchiha Itachi's long pale fingers and effortless athletics.

There was a lot of screaming, then.

Fuyumi watched, transfixed, from her crouch on the roof. He had really nice hair, she thought, stupidly. It looked so silky. It positively glowed in the blazing light of his burning victim. She had the sudden, powerful image of just… sinking her hand deep into it, closing her fist, and giving it a firm tug. She could pull his head to one side, expose the soft, vulnerable part of his neck. He might even like it.

You cannot do that, she said to herself, firmly, reeling from both the intensity and the stupidity of such a thought. You cannot do that, because that is Uchiha Itachi.

There was an unsettlingly familiar warmth in her belly that told her she was going to think really hard about it anyway.

Fuyumi wasn't suicidal, so she licked her dry, dry lips, got silently to her feet, and retreated from the market square entirely. She could take the long way around to the bar.

On her way, she thought about how the Itachi girls had somehow been right all along. Fuck. What the fuck. No. No.

----

"I've never seen you rhapsodising like this about anyone without tits," Harusame mused, nearly two hours later.

Harusame, dark eyed, dark haired and broad shouldered, was nearly double Fuyumi's age and, technically, had been a longtime friend of her father's. But her dad was long dead, so she'd laid claim to him now. He wore a set of swords: a wakizashi and a katana, both on the same side of his sash. His blue and grey yukata gaped, exposing pale bandages wrapped around his waist and an old amulet dangling on a necklace.

"He doesn't even have tits," she agreed, putting her face down on the sticky wood.

"You have no idea where that bar has been. Do you know what kinds of people they serve here?" He didn't actually sound particularly concerned. "They serve me here."

"The bar has no idea where my face has been," she countered after a long, blurry second of thought. Her brain moved fast, but her tongue moved underwater-slow.

"...I guess I have no way to refute that." He scratched his stubble.

She rolled her face to watch him light his next cigarette with the glowing butt of the one that came before. Then he dropped the dead one into his empty sake bottle and took a long drag.

It wasn't like people had failed to recognise the link between smoking and, you know, dying, in the elemental nations. But Fuyumi thought that they probably didn't understand the full impact of the practice here. Once upon a time, she had been raised on a diet of government PSAs and gruesome cigarette package art of infected fingers and eyes.

Harusame had a cough. But he wore it pretty well... for now. He was only thirty-six, though.

"Don't look at me like that. It makes you look like Setsuko."

"Fuck off," Fuyumi said, automatically. The last thing she wanted to hear about, pretty much ever, was her mother. "What are you going to do if you need to run somewhere, old man?"

"I'm retired," he said. "If I need to run somewhere, something has gone horribly wrong in my life and I probably deserve what's coming."

Ugh. "Idiot," she muttered. She looked away and immediately spotted a red and black cloak in the smoky dimness. Naka Tetsumaru was perfectly recognisable: snow white hair, lily-pale skin, overconfident swagger. He was deep in conversation with a hunched and misshapen figure in one of those ominous Akatsuki cloaks, which made her nervous to see in her local bar. They were sure out in force today, huh? This figure was recognisable, but it was decidedly not —

"Uchiha Itachi, huh," Harusame interjected thoughtfully, spinning his bottle on the bar. "You know... usually I would tell you to chase your dreams. But... Uh, I'm not so sure about that one, Fuyumi."

"Don't worry. He'd outrun me. Like, effortlessly."

"That certainly is the rumour, yes," Harusame agreed. "So? You going to do anything about it? Look for some sweet, dark-haired gentleman to take you home?" He flipped his own hair, which was, as advertised, long and dark.

Fuyumi snorted. "Well, obviously I'm going to sit here and drink and complain that it's unfair that a deeply unwell missing-nin should be more beautiful than he has any right to be."

"Uh-huh."

"And if I see him again," she thought about it, "I guess… I should go introduce myself?" It seemed unlikely that he'd outright kill her for, like, saying hi. Wasn't he meant to be a pacifist at heart or whatever? It couldn't really hurt, right? "What else do you do when you think someone's hot?"

It wasn't as though Fuyumi genuinely thought Uchiha Itachi was going to let her pull his hair and fuck him. But one thing that remained regrettably true between worlds was that… no matter how unlikely a thing you wanted was, if you asked about it, your chances of receiving it usually rose.

The spinning stopped. "Introduce yourself?" Harusame repeated dubiously. "Er, to... Uchiha Itachi?"

"Yeah?" She raised her head and propped her chin in her hand. She'd wanted to be drunk — rather badly — but now the bar seemed loud and close, her stomach was a little unsettled, and she needed to piss. "Jeez, don't look at me like that, it's not like I want to marry him. But how else do you meet someone?"

"Right." He took a long, long drag on his cigarette, presumably to stall for thinking time. "I think girls are supposed to wait for someone else to do that, aren't they?"

She snorted. "Girls like ma, maybe. If I waited for other people to want me, I'd never get a date. Luckily, confidence is sexy."

He frowned at her, the uncomfortable kind of frown of a man who was vastly out of his element but felt he should say something anyway. "That's not true."

She scoffed, and levered herself off her stool. She felt wobbly but she imagined she probably didn't look it. "Hardly matters, anyway," said Fuyumi, who was not very genre savvy, "what are the chances I'll see Uchiha fucking Itachi again? Really? Be back in a minute."

Visiting the bathrooms in this particular bar was a bit like spinning a roulette wheel. Thankfully, this time the only body in there was visibly still breathing, and didn't even twitch when Fuyumi stepped over her to use the single toilet with the stained bowl. It smelled overwhelmingly of bleach, which was a lot better than all the other things of which it could have smelled.

Her face in the cracked mirror was... Well... If a casting call had gone out for a fierce looking female villain, they wouldn't even have had to put makeup on her: her eyes were dark, hear features were hard and sharp, and her complexion was already showing the wear and tear of too many nights in a row on the booze. There was a scar that bisected her left eyebrow, a long, interrupted red line that scored over her cheek and dragged off into her hair. It was pretty red today, which had probably been what her mother had been so displeased about earlier. Ugh.

Her face covered the front of her skull, and that was basically all it had going for it.

"That's its only job, dipshit," she muttered to herself. She turned the water off, stepped over her snoozing bathroom companion again, and headed back into the bar.

#my fic #the covenant has been signed

35 notes · View notes

seat-safety-switch · 2 years ago

Text

I read an article recently that said some egghead scientists had hooked up a machine learning system to MRIs. They trained the computer to identify brain waves, which made the media freak out about "computers that can read your mind."

Nothing annoys me more than fantasy claptrap, so I decided to get started on the real stuff. All it took was a lot of sub-minimum-wage labour in developing countries, and a little bit of good old-fashioned random number generation. As a result, I now had an expert system (that's 1980s for artificial intelligence.) What's it do, then, wise guy? Something truly essential to humanity: it identifies the song that's stuck in your head.

That was the easy part, though. Once I fed the machine every song in the world and tweaked all of its various parameters by throwing a pipe wrench into the wiring closet repeatedly, I determined that it had developed a sort of primitive sentience. Knowing everything that there is to know about music had turned it into a snob. If Pitchfork magazine still existed, this Python script would be on top of the masthead and embroiled in some incredibly risky office drama.

So, that's the Faustian bargain then. You can know what song is in your head, the one that's been haunting you throughout your days, but not without judgment. Dare you step into the gloomy warehouse, don the stainless-steel pasta colander that makes up this insanely over-powered homemade CT scanner, and then be mocked endlessly on the internet by a series of millisecond-precise bullies that never sleep and have been reading your social media accounts?

I did. Turns out it was Jingle Bell Rock. You'd think I'd have recognized that from the lyrics. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go smash that wall of televisions before it shows you the pictures from the "blackmail" album on my phone and ruins the surprise.

281 notes · View notes

leveragehunters · 2 years ago

Text

I was going through my great grandfather's memoirs (born 3 March 1880) and came across this part, which feels eerily similar to our current times:

Our biggest handicap was the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918. With men off sick we were lucky to have 50 staff. Some would come back and more would go off. I was off two weeks myself. There were many deaths in the city. The war was over and the men were returning from France. We were working a fifty hour week. With the men returning, the trend was to repress wages and frown on a reduction of working hours. My responsibility had been increased so as I was next to the superintendent. This was fine, except my wages were the same as the day I started. They said, "You are doing a good job, but with the men returning that is all we can pay you." There was general upset. The returned men were dissatisfied with the wages offered, not only with our company and the warehouse business, but with what was being offered in general.

He then goes on to explain how they met with the Trade and Labour Council to form a union and present their demands (which were union recognition, basic wage of $180.00 a month, an eight hour day in a year's time, and a two year contract), but it all went to hell because of spies reporting back to the bosses and scabs who refused to honour the strike.

After the second day they flooded back like sheep. At Ashdown the travellers and buyers worked the warehouse without interruption of service. The strike was a washout. I was out of a job!

The night before the strike was scheduled to start the bosses even resorted to the closest they had to social media 105 years ago.

The Evening paper carried an advertisement, by all companies concerned, advising that all employees absent from work for three days, would be discharged.

(The memoirs are 180 typed pages, so I may post more bits as they catch my eye)

#Canadian history #strike #solidarity #history is an ever repeating cycle #personal #memoirs #Great grandpa was an awesome dude #absolute badass #unrelated but his grandfather - so my great great great grandfather?#was a WEAVER in the New England States woolen mills before they moved to Canada in the 'early part of the nineteenth century'

209 notes · View notes

sashaisready · 1 year ago

Text

Chapter Twenty-Three - Hell if I know

Bucky Barnes Mob AU x Femme Reader

You're hard at work in Pepper's Bakery when notorious mob boss James 'Bucky' Barnes darkens your doorway one typical afternoon, and life is never the same again.

Warning: PTSD/trauma response, Steve being cute

18+ - see Masterlist for full list of warnings

Chapter 24

Series Masterlist

Thank-you to everyone who has read, liked, reblogged and commented on this series! It means so much and I love hearing your thoughts!! Just two parts left now - to be posted tomorrow (13th Dec).

You had finally peeled yourself out of bed so Bucky could debrief his men after the events of last night. He’d shown you the ensuite bathroom and laid out some spare clothes so you didn’t need to put last night’s back on (you’d asked him to throw them out). He told you firmly to come downstairs and have some breakfast when you were ready. Not that you were particularly hungry, but after you’d protested he had shot you a warning look and you’d buckled – not wanting to put a dampener on the mood after your morning together.

It was easily the best shower of your life. Bucky’s guest bathroom was impressive, a huge walk in waterfall shower amongst brand new fittings and slate grey tiles. There were array of fancy toiletries on the shelf, each stylish bottle probably the same price as your monthly electric bill.

The water pressure was intense, you closed your eyes and allowed the hot water to wash everything away. You took your time washing your hair, taking care to scrub every inch of yourself and wipe away every trace of HYDRA and that night. Every speck of dust, blood, sweat.

You lost track of time as you enjoyed the feeling of the warm water on your skin. After washing your hair you took a moment to lean against the tiles, which proved to be a mistake.

You weren’t sure if it was the feel of the hard surface on your back but suddenly you were transported back to the attic in the warehouse, folding yourself into the corner and holding tight against the wall as you hid and waited in the dark. Your breaths became short and laboured as the room started to spin. The steam from the shower, once comforting and soothing, suddenly seemed stifling and threatening. Fear coursed through you as you were struck by the idea that there was someone in the bathroom with you, hiding within the steam, waiting for you, even though you knew the door was locked from the inside.

You were bent over double as you finally began to push through it. Eventually you managed to regulate your breathing and calm down, switching the water off and wrapping yourself in a fluffy towel as you cautiously moved to the door. Nobody there, of course, nobody in the bedroom either. You exhaled, taking a second to adjust. You had a feeling that wasn’t going to be a one off.

The bathroom was also generously stocked with toiletries - everything a guest might need including new toothbrushes and hair products. After making use of the deodorant and toothpaste you pulled on the clothes Bucky had left for you, navy blue sweat pants, a t-shirt and a large hoody - a pair of boxers too. Everything was too big for you but they were comfy, and they smelled like him too.

You gingerly left the room with your wet hair and borrowed clothing. No Scott guarding outside any more, the house seemed quiet. You crept down the stairs, once again in awe of Bucky’s home. You couldn’t believe anyone in New York had this much space, your shoebox apartment could fit in this floor alone several times over. Everything was modern and looked brand new, pristine white walls and immaculate floors. He must have a cleaning team working round the clock.

You didn’t see anyone as you went down the stairs, crossed the hall and made your way into the intimidatingly enormous kitchen. Nobody there either, just every food gadget you could ever imagine and a table big enough to host a small army. But you supposed that made sense, there seemed to be dozens of people here at any one time. You fantasised about baking there, using the state of the art food mixer and spreading everything out across the many surfaces - a world away from your tiny kitchen at home, where you huddled everything onto your meagre counter with your well-trodden mixer running on nothing but sheer force of will at this point.

You fought your way through the seemingly hundreds of cabinets to finally retrieve a cup and then moved on to trying to figure out the coffee machine. Unfortunately you seemed to need an engineering degree to work it, so hadn’t got very far when you heard someone come into the kitchen behind you.

“She’s awake! How are you today, cupcake?” A cheerful voice called out.

You whipped around to find Steve walking towards you, grinning. He was wearing a slick grey suit, looking every inch the part of second in command.

“Cupcake…? Oh, ‘cos I’m a baker…yeah I get it. Clever” you giggled, rolling your eyes.

“I’m not just a pretty face”. He shot you a wink as he moved to the coffee machine and started pressing buttons .

“She’s got a bit of a knack to her, just need to show her who’s boss and-“

The machine whirred to life and he turned to give you a satisfied smile.

“Thank you, Steve” you beamed back at him. “Where’s Bucky?”

“A little caught up - he’ll be back later. Sorry to say you’re stuck with me for now. So, what we having?”

He takes off his jacket and rolls up his shirt sleeves. You blink at him for a moment before you realise he’s offering to make you breakfast.

“Steve…you don’t have to babysit me. I can make my own eggs” you chuckle.

“Eggs it is…”. He retrieves a carton from the fridge. “So how we doing this? Fried? Boiled? Scrambled? I can even poach if that’s what you’re into…”

“It’s fine…I can do it” you lightly scold him.

“Mmm sorry but I’m under strict orders here. So drink your coffee and tell me what how you like them before I pick for you” he says sternly.

“Fine. Scrambled, please. On toast” you sigh in defeat.

You feel uncomfortable being doted on like this. You’re very independent and used to taking care of yourself. This isn't you.

“Perfect. Let’s go” Steve replied, pulling out a pan and moving to the stove while he grabbed a loaf of sourdough.

“So is this how it all goes down every time?” You tease. “You distract the girls with breakfast the morning after, while Bucky makes a quick exit?”

Steve turns to you and grins. “This is the first time, actually”.

“Bullshit”.

“It is! Would you believe me if I told you most girls don’t even make it to breakfast?” He tells you wickedly.

“Wow, charming” you scoff.

“Well, Bucky knows you’ve had a rough night and asked me to take care of you” he admits earnestly. “You certainly keep him on his toes, cupcake”.

You blush at that, averting your eyes as you clutch your cup. You sit in a comfortable silence for a few minutes as Steve hums and cooks. The toast pops up, Steve plates up your meal and brings it over as you take a seat at the kitchen island.

“Thank you, Steve. This is very sweet of you”.

“Don’t thank me yet” he shoots back, waving a spatula warningly as he puts the pan in the sink. “I’m a bit rusty in the kitchen. This isn’t one of my usual duties…”

You laugh and take a bite, humming with happiness as you chew.

“Good, huh?”

“I mean it’s possibly because I haven’t eaten in like…seventeen hours? But yeah it’s really good, thank you”. You smile at him.

And you are grateful. As much as you don’t like people fussing over you, you can’t deny it’s nice to be cared for - particularly after the last twenty four hours. And you’re touched that Bucky is looking after you even when he’s not there.

“Oh almost forgot….” Steve leans over to where he put his jacket and reaches into the pocket. “We salvaged this for you. Case is a bit cracked but the screen seems okay”.

He throws you over your phone and you catch it, thanking him. You unlock the screen and see a few messages. One from Wanda asking how your date went, another from Peter saying he enjoyed hanging out and you should do it again sometime (platonically of course). You reply to Peter with some non-committal enthusiasm and tell Wanda you’ll call her later as you have lots to tell her. It feels strange that their world is just carrying on as usual around you, while yours had changed forever in a matter of hours. Pepper also let you know she’d offered the Assistant job to the top candidate and was waiting to hear back.

You see the texts HYDRA sent on your behalf and the reply from Bucky and hastily delete them before you can fully react to them, wishing you could remove your memories just as easily.

“So you and Buck…” Steve questioned warily.

“Me and Buck what…?” you ask as if you don’t know what he’s implying.

“What’s your deal? Are you actually together now?”

You shrug animatedly as you eat your breakfast. “You probably know more than I do…”

And that’s the truth. You have no idea what is going on with you two as you hadn’t discussed it. Yes, he gallantly came to your rescue (although he was somewhat morally obligated as he was the reason you needed saving…) and yes you’d slept together again…but nothing had been explicitly said between you. From your perspective…you felt like something had shifted between you now. You knew in your heart wanted to be with Bucky. Really wanted to be with him. Despite his flaws, despite everything that had happened. You were still cautious but nonetheless drawn to him like a moth to a flame, unable to stay away. It was hard to imagine your life without him now.

Steve laughs and shoots you a ‘Hell if I know…’ look.

“Steve…” you ask cautiously as your fork plays with the last of your toast. “What did you mean when you said I keep Bucky on his toes?”

He chuckles. “C’mon cupcake, you know exactly what I meant”.

The two of you stare at one another for a moment and you feel yourself flush as you finish your final bites. Steve picks up your empty plate and takes it to the dishwasher.

“All I’m saying is he’s got it bad” Steve continues as he cleans up. “There’s a reason I’m standing here cooking for you”.

You nod, finishing your coffee as his words sink in.

#mob bucky barnes #mob bucky x reader #bucky barnes #mob bucky au #mob bucky x you #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes x you #james bucky barnes #sweet and sour fic

133 notes · View notes

petercapaldi-press · 3 months ago

Text

INTERVIEW

Exploring new avenues

2007

Peter Capaldi is best known for playing ferocious spin doctor Malcolm Tucker in the BBC political comedy The Thick of It, but now he is turning his hand to another kind of humour - a farce on stage. He tells Nick Smurthwaite about Absurdia

[transcript under the cut]

For most actors, no matter how talented or versatile, the onset of middle age normally brings with it typecasting and the death of professional adventure. For Peter Capaldi, it has brought him the role of a lifetime.

His dazzling portrayal of Malcolm Tucker, the foul-mouthed, apoplectic spin doctor in Armando Iannucci's political sitcom The Thick of It, has raised Capaldi's game in a way he didn't think was possible in his mid-forties.

"I'd got to the stage where I was doing nice parts in Midsomer Murders and Waking the Dead," he explains, "but nobody was asking me to do anything different or difficult.

"The whole process of making The Thick of It was completely different from anything I'd experienced before. I suddenly found myself in a working environment where everything was dangerous and scary."

In most TV drama or comedy, the position of the camera determines the blocking of the scenes. In The Thick of It there is no blocking, the cameramen simply follow the actors around.

"We don't rehearse, so nobody really gets the hang of what's going on, giving it that chaotic feel. We can go off in a different direction both physically and verbally; which is both tough and incredibly liberating. We've done takes of 45 minutes long."

Capaldi suspects Iannucci deliberately creates a "pressurised, neurotic, wrong-footing atmosphere" to keep the actors on their toes and help them become their characters.

Does he find Tucker's rage and bile easy to access? "Easier than I thought," he smiles. "I think it must have something to do with my age, but obviously it is my job as an actor to bring it all to the boil. It would be boring if he was shouting at people all the time, so I try to make him cunning, to give him quieter, pressure cooker moments. I prefer it when he is hatching some mad Machiavellian strategy to extricate himself from another impossible situation.

"I can't praise the writers too highly. The actors all found it difficult to improvise at first, because the scripts were so brilliant. Also, if you're going to improvise, it has to be funny and in character, otherwise it doesn't work. But the adrenaline carries you along. It's a powerhouse once we get going.

Coincidentally, only four years before The Thick of It arrived on the scene, Capaldi was involved with another New Labour satire, Feelgood, by Alastair Beaton, in which Henry Goodman played a Tucker-like spin doctor, clearly modelled on Alastair Campbell, while Capaldi was his cowering speech writer.

That was Capaldi's last foray on to the London stage, clearly not his natural habitat. Now he is returning in Absurdia, a trio of one-act comedies at the Donmar Warehouse, consisting of two old ones by NF Simpson and a new one by Michael Frayn. Why bother, I ask, when his work in TV is going so well?

"You do it for the challenge, the stretch," he replies. "Generally in TV, you are employed to do what you are known for doing best. Here I'm doing things I've never done before, a lot of mime and movement. The Frayn play is about staging a farce in the middle of the desert, generated entirely in the imaginations of the two characters, with no props. I've never done mime before, so it remains to be seen if it works."

A former art student who cites the Pythons as a major influence, Capaldi has dabbled rather successfully in 'absurdia' of his own. Twelve years ago, he picked up an Oscar in the Best Short Film category for Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life, with Richard E. Grant as Kafka, which Capaldi wrote and directed. Once nominated, he suddenly found himself propelled into an alien world of Hollywood development deals and heavy duty schmoozing.

"The truth is, I went to Hollywood after the film was nominated and didn't know what to do when I got there," he says. "I was an actor, not a director, so it was all very strange and scary. The money men were hardly going to give me $80 million to play with, because they could see I wasn't anywhere near experienced enough."

He did, however, manage to sell a feature-length screenplay even before the Oscars took place. But the fact that he wasn't interested in becoming a director of blockbusters cramped his style as a bright young hopeful. He just wanted somebody to give him half a million to go away and do his own thing.

"I went to art school, so my whole creative ethos is about expressing myself in images. I didn't make a little film in order to make bigger ones. I just like the idea of making little films in which i can express myself."

For some years now he has been trying to get his third project as writer-director off the ground (the second, Strictly Sinatra, was a disappointment). It is called The Great Pretender and it has four parts for Ewan McGregor. While Capaldi doesn't see any problem persuading his fellow Scot to do it - he says he is already committed 100% - there are money problems to sort out.

"I know it will be really easy to make and we're all ready to go," he says wistfully. "But the problem with making your own films is that you end up spending all your time trying to blag the money. I'm really not interested in that side of it at all, but unfortunately I have to do it in order to get the thing made. I loved Kafka, looking through the camera and seeing this little world we were creating take shape, but I don't think it will ever be like that again because of the size and nature of the project and the number of friends I had working on it."

Taking his cue from the style of The Thick of It, Capaldi has written what he describes as a "pseudo documentary" biography of a fictional celebrity for TV which he hopes will go into production later this year.

While he is proactive when it comes to writing and generating his own projects, Capaldi the actor is content to sit back and wait for the phone to ring. "I don't know any actors who decide what roles they want to play and then go chasing after them," he says, when I suggest that The Thick of It might have given him more clout to pick and choose his roles. "My knowledge of the theatre isn't broad enough to be able to say, I'd like to play such and such a role.

"I agreed to do Absurdia because I liked the material and I'm a great admirer of Douglas Hodge, the director. You have to be nuts about the play you're doing because the theatre pays so badly and it takes up six months of your life.

"The worse thing is going into a job where, two weeks into rehearsals, you realise the director you thought was wonderful is crap. You're stuck with a sadistic egomaniac, you realise the whole thing is going to be a disaster, and there is nothing you can do about it."

He doesn't say so, but I get the strong impression he doesn't have those Tuckeresque feelings about Hodge and Absurdia.

Absurdia is playing at the Donmar Warehouse until September 8

#peter capaldi #interview #absurdia #2007 #the thick of it #the great pretender #theatre

19 notes · View notes

dailyanarchistposts · 10 months ago

Text

I.8.6 What did the agricultural collectives accomplish?

Most basically, self-management in collectives combined with co-operation in rural federations allowed an improvement in quality of rural life. From a purely economic viewpoint, production increased and as historian Benjamin Martin summarises: “Though it is impossible to generalise about the rural land take-overs, there is little doubt that the quality of life for most peasants who participated in co-operatives and collectives notably improved.” [The Agony of Modernisation, p. 394] Another historian, Antony Beevor, notes that ”[i]n terms of production and improved standards for the peasants, the self-managed collectives appear to have been successful. They also seem to have encouraged harmonious community relations.” [The Spanish Civil War, p. 95]

More importantly, however, this improvement in the quality of life included an increase in freedom as well as in consumption. To re-quote the member of the Beceite collective in Aragón: “it was marvellous .. . to live in a collective, a free society where one could say what one thought, where if the village committee seemed unsatisfactory one could say. The committee took no big decisions without calling the whole village together in a general assembly. All this was wonderful.” [quoted by Ronald Fraser, Blood of Spain, p. 288] As Beevor suggests, “self-managed collectives were much happier when no better off than before. What mattered was that the labourers ran their own collectives — a distinct contrast to the disasters of state collectivisation in the Soviet Union.” [Op. Cit., p. 95] Here are a few examples provided by Jose Peirats:

“In Montblanc the collective dug up the old useless vines and planted new vineyards. The land, improved by modern cultivation with tractors, yielded much bigger and better crops … Many Aragón collectives built new roads and repaired old ones, installed modern flour mills, and processed agricultural and animal waste into useful industrial products. Many of these improvements were first initiated by the collectives. Some villages, like Calanda, built parks and baths. Almost all collectives established libraries, schools, and cultural centres.” [The Anarchist Collectives, p. 116]

Gaston Leval pointed out that “the Peasant Federation of Levant … produced more than half of the total orange crop in Spain: almost four million kilos (1 kilo equals about 2 and one-fourth pounds). It then transported and sold through its own commercial organisation (no middlemen) more than 70% of the crop. (The Federation’s commercial organisation included its own warehouses, trucks, and boats. Early in 1938 the export section established its own agencies in France: Marseilles, Perpignan, Bordeaux, Cherbourg, and Paris.) Out of a total of 47,000 hectares in all Spain devoted to rice production, the collective in the Province of Valencia cultivated 30,000 hectares.” [Op. Cit., p. 124] To quote Peirats again:

“Preoccupation with cultural and pedagogical innovations was an event without precedent in rural Spain. The Amposta collectivists organised classes for semi-literates, kindergartens, and even a school of arts and professions. The Seros schools were free to all neighbours, collectivists or not. Grau installed a school named after its most illustrious citizen, Joaquin Costa. The Calanda collective (pop. only 4,500) schooled 1,233 children. The best students were sent to the Lyceum in Caspe, with all expenses paid by the collective. The Alcoriza (pop. 4,000) school was attended by 600 children. Many of the schools were installed in abandoned convents. In Granadella (pop. 2,000), classes were conducted in the abandoned barracks of the Civil Guards. Graus organised a print library and a school of arts and professions, attended by 60 pupils. The same building housed a school of fine arts and high grade museum. In some villages a cinema was installed for the first time. The Penalba cinema was installed in a church. Viladecana built an experimental agricultural laboratory. [Op. Cit., p. 116]

Peirats summed up the accomplishments of the agricultural collectives as follows:

“In distribution the collectives’ co-operatives eliminated middlemen, small merchants, wholesalers, and profiteers, thus greatly reducing consumer prices. The collectives eliminated most of the parasitic elements from rural life, and would have wiped them out altogether if they were not protected by corrupt officials and by the political parties. Non-collectivised areas benefited indirectly from the lower prices as well as from free services often rendered by the collectives (laundries, cinemas, schools, barber and beauty parlours, etc.).” [Op. Cit., p. 114]

Leval emphasised the following achievements (among others):

“In the agrarian collectives solidarity was practised to the greatest degree. Not only was every person assured of the necessities, but the district federations increasingly adopted the principle of mutual aid on an inter-collective scale. For this purpose they created common reserves to help out villages less favoured by nature. In Castile special institutions for this purpose were created. In industry this practice seems to have begun in Hospitalet, on the Catalan railways, and was applied later in Alcoy. Had the political compromise not impeded open socialisation, the practices of mutual aid would have been much more generalised … A conquest of enormous importance was the right of women to livelihood, regardless of occupation or function. In about half of the agrarian collectives, the women received the same wages as men; in the rest the women received less, apparently on the principle that they rarely live alone … In all the agrarian collectives of Aragón, Catalonia, Levant, Castile, Andalusia, and Estremadura, the workers formed groups to divide the labour or the land; usually they were assigned to definite areas. Delegates elected by the work groups met with the collective’s delegate for agriculture to plan out the work. This typical organisation arose quite spontaneously, by local initiative … In addition … the collective as a whole met in weekly, bi-weekly or monthly assembly … The assembly reviewed the activities of the councillors it named, and discussed special cases and unforeseen problems. All inhabitants — men and women, producers and non-producers — took part in the discussion and decisions … In land cultivation the most significant advances were: the rapidly increased use of machinery and irrigation; greater diversification; and forestation. In stock raising: the selection and multiplication of breeds; the adaptation of breeds to local conditions; and large-scale construction of collective stock barns.” [Op. Cit., pp. 166–167]

Collectivisation, as Graham Kelsey notes, “allowed a rationalisation of village societies and a more efficient use of the economic resources available. Instead of carpenters and bricklayers remaining idle because no wealthy landowner had any use for their services they were put to work constructing agricultural facilities and providing the villages with the kind of social amenities which until then they had scarcely been able to imagine.” [Anarchosyndicalism, Libertarian Communism and the State, p. 169] Martha A. Ackelsberg sums up the experience well:

“The achievements of these collectives were extensive. In many areas they maintained, if not increased, agricultural production [not forgetting that many young men were at the front line], often introducing new patterns of cultivation and fertilisation … collectivists built chicken coups, barns, and other facilities for the care and feeding of the community’s animals. Federations of collectives co-ordinated the construction of roads, schools, bridges, canals and dams. Some of these remain to this day as lasting contributions of the collectives to the infrastructure of rural Spain. The collectivists also arranged for the transfer of surplus produce from wealthier collectives to those experiencing shortages, either directly from village to village or through mechanisms set up by regional committees.” [The Free Women of Spain, pp. 106–7]

As well as this inter-collective solidarity, the rural collectives also supplied food to the front-line troops:

“The collectives voluntarily contributed enormous stocks of provisions and other supplies to the fighting troops. Utiel sent 1,490 litres of oil and 300 bushels of potatoes to the Madrid front (in addition to huge stocks of beans, rice, buckwheat, etc.). Porales de Tujana sent great quantities of bread, oil, flour, and potatoes to the front, and eggs, meat, and milk to the military hospital. “The efforts of the collectives take on added significance when we take into account that their youngest and most vigorous workers were fighting in the trenches. 200 members of the little collective of Vilaboi were at the front; from Viledecans, 60; Amposta, 300; and Calande, 500.” [Jose Peirats, The Anarchist Collectives, p. 120]

Therefore, as well as significant economic achievements, the collectives ensured social and political ones too. Solidarity was practised and previously marginalised people took direct and full management of the affairs of their communities, transforming them to meet their own needs and desires.

6 notes · View notes

justforbooks · 1 year ago

Text

Richard Serra, who has died aged 85, was a remarkable cultural figure – a sculptor who belonged to the generation of American minimalists, was associated with process art and made experimental films, yet evoked something of an earlier, more heroic age. The critic Robert Hughes described him as “the last abstract expressionist”.

Although this statement stretches the point, Serra’s interest in the processes of sculpture led him to some extravagant gestural acts that belie the severity of his grand public commissions. Weight and Measure, made in the early 1990s for what is now Tate Britain, exemplified his austere side, with its massive steel forms designed to counter the building’s overbearing classicism. However, some of his other works, such as the twisting, “torqued” structures installed at the Guggenheim in Bilbao in 2005, are positively baroque.

Curled around an existing sculpture, Snake, that was commissioned for the museum’s opening in 1997, these steel works, dominated by ellipses and spirals, articulate spaces in which the gallery visitor can wander. They are monumental enough to take on Frank Gehry’s grandiose architecture, but, with their patinated surfaces and curved forms, also have an intimate, sensual quality. Above all, Serra’s sculptures create a remarkable interaction with the public and a strong experience of gradual discovery – hence the installation’s title, The Matter of Time.

His works have proved popular with curators, but are not confined to museums. They have appeared in settings as diverse as the Tuileries garden in Paris, the Federal Plaza in New York, and the Qatari desert, attracting responses from intense admiration to a public inquiry. One of his sculptures, Fulcrum, was put up in 1987 at Broadgate outside Liverpool Street station in London. It manages to combine monumentality with fragility, made of weathered steel plates that appear to support each other precariously.

He was born in San Francisco into a family that provided a foundation for his later career as a sculptor in metal. His father, Tony, who was from Majorca, was a pipe-fitter in a naval shipyard. His mother, Gladys (nee Fineberg), who was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Odessa, used to introduce her son as “Richard, the artist” and was, later, touchingly enthusiastic when he began to make his way in New York. Serra himself laboured in steel mills during his time as a student and subsequently, in 1979, made a compelling film, Steelmill/Stahlwerk, about German workers in the industry.

Serra began his studies in 1957 at the University of California in Berkeley, graduating from the institution’s Santa Barbara campus with a degree in English literature. He followed this in 1961 with a three-year course in painting at Yale University, New Haven – a period in which he also worked as a teaching assistant and as a proof-reader for Joseph Albers’s book Interaction of Color (1963). At Yale he encountered such luminaries as Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt and Frank Stella, before winning a fellowship that took him to Europe in 1964.

In Paris, Serra was profoundly impressed by the sculpture of Constantin Brâncuși, but in Florence the following year he continued to paint, producing coloured grids in timed conditions controlled by a stopwatch. It was only with his first exhibition, at the Galleria La Salita in Rome in 1966, that he made a definitive move away from painting, filling cages with live and stuffed animals.

After moving to New York in the same year, Serra initially survived by setting himself up as a furniture remover, together with his friends, the composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Serra’s artistic development at this time was rapid, moving from experiments with rubber, fibreglass and neon tubing to the metal sculpture for which he became renowned. He soon began his long-term association with the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, in whose Warehouse annex he was photographed in 1969 throwing molten lead at the wall with a ladle.

In the same year Serra refined this procedure by splashing the metal against a small steel plate stuck into the corner of Jasper Johns’s studio. The “castings” produced when the lead cooled down were rough, expressive forms, but this project also inspired Serra to create more impersonal pieces, in which metal sheets were wedged into the angles of rooms, leaned against each other or pinned to the wall by lead pipes. His emphasis on objective phenomena – mass, gravity and other physical forces – can also be seen in his remarkable experimental films.

In Hand Catching Lead (1968), the hand is in fact the artist’s but it is shown disembodied, trying to grasp rather than cast pieces of falling lead, which it drops or misses altogether. The repetition of this fundamentally pointless act gives the film a serial quality, akin to the celluloid process itself.

Serra’s engagement with the cutting edge also led him to work with the land artists Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt. In 1970 he assisted them with Spiral Jetty at the Great Salt Lake in Utah and, after Smithson’s death in 1973, Serra helped to complete Amarillo Ramp in an artificial lake in Texas. His own site-specific sculptures included Spin Out: For Bob Smithson (1972-73), in the park-like surroundings of the Kröller-Müller Museum at Otterlo in the Netherlands. Here the three converging steel plates interacted with each other and their environment, exemplifying Serra’s aim that “the entire space becomes a manifestation of sculpture”.

The 1970s was a difficult decade in Serra’s life. In 1971 a worker was killed in an accident during the installation of one of Serra’s sculptures outside the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. His five-year marriage to the artist Nancy Graves ended in 1970, and his mother’s suicide in 1977 was followed two years later by the death of his father. However, in that decade he also met his future wife, the art historian Clara Weyergraf, with whom he collaborated on Steelmill/Stahlwerk. Clara was also to play a vital role in shaping his sculpture, as well as giving her name to Clara-Clara, a powerful, curvilinear work that was installed in the Tuileries garden in 1983. The history of this piece exemplifies Serra’s problems in making site-specific art, since it was originally intended to feature in a show at the Pompidou Centre, but at a late stage was deemed to be too heavy.

Clara-Clara’s travails were minor in comparison to the controversies surrounding Tilted Arc, a sculpture 36 metres long, set up at the Federal Plaza in Manhattan in 1981. Condemned for being intrusive, a magnet for graffiti artists and even a security risk, it was eventually removed in 1989, four years after a public hearing in which a majority of witnesses had advocated its preservation.

Despite this setback, Serra’s career continued to flourish. He had two retrospectives, in 1986 and 2007, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which also devoted a permanent room to his monumental work Equal (2015), as well as major exhibitions at home and abroad. He showed frequently with his gallery, Gagosian, in London, New York and Paris, most recently in 2021.

In 2001 he received a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale, in 2015 the Légion d’honneur in France and, three years later, the J Paul Getty Medal.

During his latter years, Serra became heavily involved with public projects in Qatar, above all the four steel plates, rising to over 14 metres and spanning more than a kilometre, erected west of Doha in 2014. Known as East-West/West-East, the work engages spectacularly with its surroundings, the gypsum plateaux of the Brouq nature reserve in the Dukhan desert. Serra himself described it as “the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done”.

He is survived by Clara.

🔔 Richard Serra, artist, born 2 November 1938; died 26 March 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

#just for books #richard serra #in memoriam

13 notes · View notes

symphonic-scream · 9 months ago

Text

I know I just posted but

An idea for like. A future but for that Akechi Twins AU!

It would be set 15 years after the events of the "game", when Goro is released from custody slash the mental facility he was in on probation. He's put in the care of the only remaining family he has, his twin, his only sibling; Makoto.

The team would have all grown up and found themselves. Akira has become co-owner of Leblanc, with Sojiro planning to step down in less than 5 years. Futaba has reopened her mom's old lab, and has been working with the Kirijo Group on research for ten years

Ann recently moved back after retiring from volleyball together with Shiho. Ann is interested in teaching and coaching now, and Shiho? Physical therapy, the first clinic in Inaba. Ryuji started an online support group for abuse victims, and has been using his work in construction and connections with Realtors to help get victims into new homes, away from abusers

Yusuke has fully taken over the Gallery of Inaba after his mother passed ten years ago. He's brought back the after school programming that was run when his mom was healthy, and that funding has helped keep the Gallery open, with less stress for Ryuji.

Morgana, now living as a human, has become store manager of Junes. He loved it so much when Akira was working there part time, so when he began living, he applied. He's been esctatic since

And, the "celebrities" of the group. Haru and Makoto both went to the local college in Okina; Haru for business, Makoto for general studies. Haru planned from the beginning to open a diner, where she can rekindle her love for cooking and baking without the spotlight that drove her away. Makoto, struggles to find what they want, for a few years. It's only through helping Haru cook most days that they decide to help out in the diner. Assisting with chef duties, clearing tables, taking care of the accounting work, etc

Both wanted a slower life. Where each day comes and goes like the flow of the Samegawa, gentle and soft. They get married, after five years. Another five later? They have kids. Twins first (Nonoka and Keima), and a son (Hirohide) three later. They're fully living the slow, Inaba lifestyle

Then, Goro is released. He takes up a room in the attic of the modest Okumura home, and spends his days adjusting to the free life. He keeps up with his med regime, volunteers to help with house chores, and understands Haru's reluctance to let him work in the diner. Or to leave him alone with the children.

He works in the back of Junes, the labouring warehouse work. He secretly slips part of his pay into his sibling's wallet, his way of paying them back for housing him.

It's difficult for them all. He doesn't talk to Akira for a while, mostly because of how things had been left when he, yknow, went off the rails. He and Makoto spend mornings sitting on the balcony, trying to find a way to reconnect. Goro struggles to find his place in a town that moved on without him, that once suffered because of him

And, yeah. I'd probably say Ann and Shiho have a kid too, maybe a daughter? Probably the one I gave them in Queers. Ryuji would've gotten married, since he's the best boy, perhaps even to Akira. That would be an interesting dynamic to have unfold. They'd have two kids maybe? An older daughter, and a baby boy now??

And Futaba would totally be with Kana or Sumire. Still deciding. Maybe both?? Who knows.

But yeah. The focus on the twins and shit, and the attempts to repair their relationship

#akechi twins au #p5 as p4 au

5 notes · View notes

briskettimefestival · 6 months ago

Text

The 25-point Program of the NSDAP (via Wikipedia.com)

It must be said the Nazis stated some nice ideas below that were false in their execution. For better or for worse, Project 2025 doesn't mince words.

None but members of the nation may be citizens of the state. None but those of German blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the nation. No Jew, therefore, may be a member of the nation.

Whoever has no citizenship is to be able to live in Germany only as a guest and must be regarded as being subject to foreign laws.

The right of voting on the state's government and legislation is to be enjoyed by the citizen of the state alone. We demand therefore that all official appointments, of whatever kind, shall be granted to citizens of the state alone. We oppose the corrupting custom of parliament of filling posts merely with a view to party considerations, and without reference to character or capability.

We demand that the state be charged first with providing the opportunity for a livelihood and way of life for the citizens. If it is impossible to nourish the total population of the State, then the members of foreign nations (non-citizens) must be excluded from the Reich.

All immigration of non-Germans must be prevented. We demand that all non-Germans, who have immigrated to Germany since 2 August 1914, be required immediately to leave the Reich.

All citizens of the state shall be equal as regards rights and obligations.

The first obligation of every citizen must be to productively work mentally or physically. The activity of individual may not clash with the interests of the whole, but must proceed within the framework of the whole for the benefit for the general good. We demand therefore:

Abolition of unearned (work and labour) incomes. Breaking of debt (interest)-slavery.

In consideration of the monstrous sacrifice of life and property that each war demands of the people, personal enrichment due to a war must be regarded as a crime against the nation. Therefore, we demand ruthless confiscation of all war profits.

We demand nationalization of all businesses which have been up to the present formed into companies (trusts).

We demand that the profits from wholesale trade shall be shared out.

We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare.

We demand the creation of a healthy middle class and its conservation, immediate communalization of the great warehouses and their being leased at low cost to small firms, the utmost consideration of all small firms in contracts with the State, county or municipality.

We demand a land reform suitable to our needs, provision of a law for the free expropriation of land for the purposes of public utility, abolition of land rent and prevention of all speculation in land.

We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, profiteers and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race.

We demand substitution of a German common law in place of the Roman Law serving a materialistic world-order.

The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program, to enable every capable and industrious German to obtain higher education and subsequently introduction into leading positions. The plans of instruction of all educational institutions are to conform with the experiences of practical life. The comprehension of the concept of the state must be striven for by the school as early as the beginning of understanding. We demand the education at the expense of the state of outstanding intellectually gifted children of poor parents without consideration of position or profession.

The state is to care for the elevating national health by protecting the mother and child, by outlawing child-labor, by the encouragement of physical fitness, by means of the legal establishment of a gymnastic and sport obligation, by the utmost support of all organizations concerned with the physical instruction of the young.

We demand abolition of the mercenary troops and formation of a national army.

We demand legal opposition to known lies and their promulgation through the press. In order to enable the provision of a German press, we demand, that:

a. All writers and employees of the newspapers appearing in the German language be members of the race;

b. Non-German newspapers be required to have the express permission of the state to be published. They may not be printed in the German language;

c. Non-Germans are forbidden by law any financial interest in German publications or any influence on them and as punishment for violations the closing of such a publication as well as the immediate expulsion from the Reich of the non-German concerned. Publications which are counter to the general good are to be forbidden. We demand legal prosecution of artistic and literary forms which exert a destructive influence on our national life and the closure of organizations opposing the above made demands.

We demand freedom of religion for all religious denominations within the state so long as they do not endanger its existence or oppose the moral senses of the Germanic race. The Party as such advocates the standpoint of a positive Christianity without binding itself confessionally to any one denomination. It combats the Jewish-materialistic spirit within and around us and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our nation can only succeed from within on the framework:

THE COMMON INTEREST OVER INDIVIDUAL INTEREST[13]

For the execution of all of this we demand the formation of a strong central power in the Reich. Unlimited authority of the central parliament over the whole Reich and its organizations in general. The forming of state and profession chambers for the execution of the laws made by the Reich within the various states of the confederation. The leaders of the Party promise, if necessary by sacrificing their own lives, to support by the execution of the points set forth above without consideration.

#democracy #government #project 2025 #trump administration #fascisim #resistance #republicans

2 notes · View notes

allthecanadianpolitics · 2 years ago

Text

Opponents of an expansion to a marine container port on B.C.'s South Coast held a news conference in Vancouver Wednesday to reiterate their concerns about the impact on the environment and local jobs if the project, recently approved by the federal government, goes ahead.

"There's times when we do need to say, 'No. We do need to say 'no,'" said Rueben George, a member of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, as he pointed to his nation's territorial waters behind him from Vancouver's CRAB Park with the Port of Vancouver in the background.

The group of those publicly opposing the Roberts Bank Terminal 2 (RBT2) in Delta, B.C., about 35 kilometres south of Vancouver, is growing and now includes two unions, the International Longshore & Warehouse Union of Canada and the B.C. General Employees' Union, along with a dozen conservation organizations.

Full article

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

#cdnpoli #canadian politics #canadian news #canada #canadian #Indigenous #First Nations #conservation #environment #rueben george #Tsleil-Waututh First Nation #Tsleil-Waututh Nation #BC #british columbia #roberts bank terminal 2 #RBT2 #longshore and warehouse union of canada #BC general employees union #unions

90 notes · View notes

chasing-illusions-studio · 2 days ago

Text

Can animated safety videos help reduce human error in construction?

Introduction: Animated Safety Videos

Construction sites are among the most hazardous workplaces in the world. According to the International Labour Organization, one in five workplace fatalities occurs in construction. With high-risk activities like working at heights, operating heavy machinery, and handling hazardous materials, maintaining a safe work environment is non-negotiable. While traditional safety training methods such as manuals and in-person sessions are essential, they often fall short in retaining workers’ attention and engagement.

Enter animated safety videos—a modern, engaging, and highly effective way to reduce workplace accidents on construction sites. These videos transform complex safety procedures into easy-to-understand visuals, improving compliance, training effectiveness, and, ultimately, saving lives.

In this article, we will catch you on how 3d animated industry safety guide videos can play an important role to avoid the construction site accidents and help the industry workers to learn more about the accidents through animation videos. Along with this we will cover some common topics and help you to choose best industrial animation services provider.

Why Safety Training Needs a New Approach?

Construction workers often operate in high-pressure environments, facing risks from falling objects, unstable structures, electrical hazards, and more. Conventional safety training tends to be text-heavy, monotonous, and often too generic, making it hard for workers to remember critical safety protocols.

Animated safety videos offer a dynamic alternative. With vibrant visuals, realistic simulations, and clear voiceovers, these videos simplify complex topics, helping workers retain information longer. Whether it’s demonstrating the correct way to wear PPE or showing the consequences of ignoring scaffold safety, animation communicates better and sticks longer.

youtube

What are Industry Animation Company Services?

Let’s explore we (Chasing Illusions) as one of the best industry animation services providers avail you many services whether you’re looking for safety training & compliances, manufacturing plant animation, working at hazards environment, machine operation, etc., we’ve got you becuase we’re the one you’re looking for to bring complex industry workplace concepts to enaging 3d animation videos.

Manufacturing & Industrial Plants

We create compelling visuals for manufacturing and industrial plants. We develop realistic virtual tour of industrial factories and Smart factory simulation walkthroughs that showcase plant layouts, production processes, and machinery functionality. Our visualizations help clients optimize workflows, improve safety training, and communicate complex technical information effectively.

Energy and water Plants

We create engaging Energy and Water Plants Animations that showcase the complex infrastructure and processes involved in energy generation and water treatment. Our virtual tour of water treatment plants help clients communicate effectively, whether it’s explaining the technology behind renewable energy sources or demonstrating the purification process of a water treatment facility. We bring the best 3D water plant walkthrough to life, highlighting their importance and impact on the community.

Logistics Plant

We create dynamic Logistics plant 3D walkthroughs, bringing complex operations to life. We develop virtual warehouse facility that showcase warehouse layouts, inventory management systems, and the flow of goods through the facility. Our 3D walkthrough logistics plant visualizations highlight efficiency, safety, and technological integration, helping clients optimize logistics processes, improve communication.

Innovative Machines and Processes

We specialize in visualizing innovative machines and processes in 3D animation. We create 3D virtual Industrial animations and simulations that showcase the inner workings and functionality of cutting-edge technology. Whether it’s a manufacturing process or machinery product, we bring these innovations to life, clearly communicating their benefits and potential impact.

Industrial Safety Training and Compliance

We create engaging Industrial Safety Training Animations. We transform complex safety procedures and regulations into clear and concise visual experiences. Our Safety animations cover a range of topics, from proper equipment usage and hazard identification to emergency response protocols and regulatory compliance. Our goal is to create a safer working environment for everyone.

Aerospace and Defense

We create compelling visuals for the Aerospace and Defense industry. We develop high-quality animations and simulations showcasing complex aircraft, spacecraft, and defense systems. Our expertise includes visualizing technical processes, demonstrating product functionality, and creating engaging marketing materials. We help clients communicate complex information clearly and effectively, from training simulations to mission visualizations, supporting their communication and strategic objectives.

youtube

What Are the Most Common Types of Construction Site Accidents?

Construction sites are inherently hazardous, and certain types of accidents occur more frequently than others. Here are the most common:

Falls from Heights The leading cause of construction-related fatalities. Workers may fall from ladders, scaffolding, roofs, or unprotected edges due to lack of fall protection or improper use of equipment.

Struck-by Object Accidents This includes being hit by falling tools, machinery, or materials. These accidents often occur when objects are improperly secured or when heavy equipment is in motion.

Electrocutions Contact with live wires, exposed electrical components, or power tools can lead to serious injury or death. Poor wiring, lack of PPE, and inadequate lockout/tagout procedures are common causes.

Caught-in or Caught-between Hazards Workers can get trapped between heavy machinery, materials, or collapsing structures. These accidents usually happen during excavation, demolition, or when equipment is not properly shut down.

Slips, Trips, and Falls on the Same Level Uneven surfaces, spilled liquids, loose wires, or misplaced tools can cause slips or trips, leading to sprains, fractures, or more serious injuries.

Overexertion and Repetitive Stress Injuries Heavy lifting, repetitive motions, and poor ergonomics can lead to strains, back injuries, or musculoskeletal disorders over time.

Machinery Accidents Improper use of construction equipment such as cranes, bulldozers, and forklifts can cause severe injuries, especially if safety protocols aren’t followed or machinery is poorly maintained.

What are Benefits of using Animated Safety Videos on Construction Sites?

1. Improved Engagement and Retention

Animated videos can capture attention better than text-heavy manuals or static slideshows. Through storytelling, relatable scenarios, and emotional appeal, these videos can make lasting impressions on workers. Research shows that people retain 95% of a message when it’s watched, compared to only 10% when read.

2. Visual Demonstration of Real-Life Scenarios

Animations can recreate construction accidents in a controlled and safe virtual environment. By showing what could go wrong and how to avoid it, workers learn the consequences of unsafe behavior without real-world risk.

3. Consistency in Training

With animated videos, every trainee receives the same quality of training, eliminating variations caused by different trainers or inconsistent delivery. This standardization is especially crucial in multinational construction companies where workforce diversity can affect how safety protocols are interpreted and applied.

4. Multilingual Support

In countries where construction sites host a multi-lingual workforce, language barriers can become a safety hazard. Animated safety videos can include subtitles or voiceovers in multiple languages, making training accessible to all.

5. Cost-Effective and Scalable

Once produced, animated videos can be reused indefinitely across various construction sites and training sessions. This scalability makes them more cost-effective in the long run than repeated in-person training sessions.

6. Onboarding and Refresher Training

New employees can quickly get up to speed through animated videos, while existing staff can benefit from periodic refresher videos that reinforce key safety concepts.

youtube

What are Key Topics Should be Covered in Animated Safety Videos?

Proper Use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)

Animated videos demonstrate the correct way to wear PPE such as helmets, gloves, boots, and safety goggles. They also show when and where each type of PPE is necessary, reducing the likelihood of improper use or oversight.

Working at Heights and Fall Prevention

Animations can illustrate safe harness techniques, guardrail installations, and ladder usage. They often simulate fall scenarios to emphasize the dangers and reinforce preventive measures visually.

Electrical Safety Protocols

Videos highlight the importance of lockout-tagout procedures and safe handling of live wires. They also cover warning signs of electrical hazards and demonstrate how to act during an electrical emergency.

Machinery and Equipment Handling

Animated training shows how to operate heavy machinery like cranes, forklifts, and bulldozers safely. It also includes do’s and don’ts during equipment use, helping reduce crush injuries and mechanical failures.

Emergency Evacuation Procedures

These videos provide a clear visual map of escape routes, assembly points, and emergency contact protocols. They simulate realistic fire or structural collapse scenarios to prepare workers for high-stress situations.

Fire Safety Training

Animations explain the use of different types of fire extinguishers and when to use each. They also show how to recognize fire hazards and prevent ignition in high-risk areas like fuel storage.

Scaffold and Ladder Safety

Videos guide workers through proper scaffold setup, securing ladders, and checking for defects. They also show how incorrect use can lead to accidents, reinforcing adherence to safety practices.

Site-Specific Hazards and How to Address Them

Every construction site has unique risks—animated videos can be customized to show those specific dangers. They demonstrate how to navigate around excavation zones, chemical storage, or unstable terrain effectively.

youtube

How to Avoid Workplace Accidents in Construction?

Avoiding workplace accidents in construction starts with proactive safety planning, thorough training, and strict adherence to protocols. Ensuring all workers receive regular safety education—preferably through engaging formats like animated videos—helps reinforce correct procedures. Employers must enforce the use of personal protective equipment (PPE), conduct routine equipment checks, and implement clear communication on-site. Regular safety audits, toolbox talks, and hazard assessments further help in identifying and addressing risks before they lead to accidents. Ultimately, fostering a safety-first culture where every worker is accountable is key to reducing incidents.

Which is best Industrial Animation Studio for Construction Site Accidents 3D Animation Videos?

The best Industrial Animation Company for 3d safety training videos is Chasing Illusions because we specialized in creating engaging 3d animated safety training videos for construction site accidents. With a strong focus on realism, technical accuracy, and visual storytelling, we transform complex safety protocols into engaging, easy-to-understand 3d animations. Whether it’s simulating fall protection procedures, machinery hazards, or emergency responses, their custom-built animations help construction companies train workers effectively, reduce on-site risks, and foster a strong safety culture.

youtube

Conclusion: Animated Safety Videos

Reducing workplace accidents on construction sites requires more than just manuals and verbal instructions—it demands engaging, clear, and effective training tools. 3D animated safety videos offer a powerful way to visualize hazards, demonstrate proper procedures, and ensure consistent understanding across the workforce. We (Chasing Illusions Studio) specialize in creating realistic and tailored industrial safety animations that simplify complex concepts and drive safer behaviors on-site. By partnering with us, construction companies can simplify their safety standards, reduce incidents, and build a stronger, more informed workforce.

FAQs: Animated Safety Videos

What are the most common causes of construction site accidents?

The leading causes include falls from heights, being struck by objects, electrocution, and getting caught in between machinery. Lack of proper training and failure to follow safety protocols are usually contributing factors.

How do animated videos compare to live demonstrations?

While live demonstrations provide hands-on experience, animated videos can supplement them by offering consistent, repeatable, and visual instruction. They’re especially useful when simulating dangerous situations that can’t be safely recreated live.

Are animated safety videos compliant with regulations?

Yes. When developed in line with OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) or local safety guidelines, animated safety videos can be part of your compliance documentation. It’s advisable to consult with a safety officer or compliance expert during production.

How to Contact Chasing Illusions for Industry Safety Training Animation Videos?

You can contact us through various ways like website: chasingillusions.com, call or message on WhatsApp, or even filling “Quote” form to get your customized plan within your budget.

CONTACT NOW

Don’t Wait!! Because Accidents Doesn’t Wait!! Educate Your Industry Workers Today with Animated Safety Videos

#industry safety rules #industry safety training video #industrial animation #industry animation services #industry safety training animation video #industry safety animation video #Youtube

0 notes