#I contemplated on doing this for FloRid first though

[0ann3]

Slip Up: make a careless error

And they all made a deal just so Azul can make at least three people shut up about the whole thing - the end

Anyway, inspired by one of the prompts in the alphabet challenge I did for my ocs and from something that I actually witnessed irl LMAO

Bonus: Azul moments before this disaster

And then this guy proceeded to practice calling Deuce that in his head until he meets up with the group and remembered that he needs to talk to him for something

______

@thehollowwriter @distant-velleity

[lyledebeast]

Looking at the gorgeous Tavington gifsets by @fakehusbandgarbagedump has made me want to try to articulate, again, something I hinted at in this meta about how fucked-up The Patriot's take on pleasure is. Even though, as I've pointed out many times, Tavington does not appear to take particular pleasure in violence itself, he is a pleasure-oriented person, and his pleasure is far more demonized in this film than violence.

Even regarding other characters, the film's take on pleasure is pretty dour. People older than Anne and Gabriel are criticized for wanting anything to do with it, see the contempt heaped on General Cornwallis for wanting his wardrobe back. Even Benjamin Martin's own side is not safe from censure; he sneers at Villeneuve for wanting to face the enemy in his best powder-blue French uniform (You look lovely, Major. Martin can choke.) The framing of Tavington's pleasure goes beyond contempt, as though there is something sinister about the emotion itself. In his first scene, he clearly enjoys making Martin afraid of him and unravelling the pantomime Martin and Gabriel play out about not knowing each other prior to Gabriel being wounded. But if he was primarily interested in Martin's suffering, why not hang Gabriel then and there himself, in front of his family, rather than delegating his execution to someone else, to be carried out somewhere else?

The other scene where Tavington is enjoying himself as much, if not more than he does here is when he and Cornwallis discuss his reward for capturing Martin. One could claim that what Tavington is enjoying here is the contemplation of future acts of violence, but when the time for those acts comes, he executes them with far less florid glee than we see here as he makes the general dance to his music. But by that point, largely owing to his two prior scenes with Martin, the film has already established that there is something sinister about Tavington's pleasure regardless of its source. His curiosity about new animals is evil because he might have killed a firefly. (particularly hilarious as this happens moments after Martin makes his young sons help him kill twenty men). His washing his hair and shaving in a creek are evil because he just burned down somebody's house. His admiring flowers is evil because he does it while taking a moment's respite from torture. The man can't catch a break!

As funny as framing the mundane pleasures of villains as further evidence of their villainy always is, there is something more acutely sinister at play here. The film's demonization of enjoyment not only implicates comparatively innocuous acts but grants a kind of moral clemency to far more brutal ones in which the doers claim to have taken no pleasure. It's no accident that Tavington dies because he gloats, and it's also no accident that Martin gets to return unscathed to the land he paid for in Cherokee scalps because he's already suffered enough.

[myevilmouse]

2020 Fic Year In Review

This disaster year was my second of writing fanfic for the Star Wars fandom, focused as always on my handsome Jedi and charismatic Grand Admiral.  Here’s the same thing I did last year:  basically share the idea of the fic I wanted to write and the result of what came out of that idea.

Because I don’t outline or plan, it is often as much a surprise to me as to my readers as to where the story winds up.  But I enjoy the magic that is surrendering to the muse / autonomous typing hands, so I doubt that will change anytime soon.

Context:  2020 began with the fic whining circle’s discussion of the sad dearth of blowjobs for Luke Skywalker in fandom.  We resolved to remedy this with the creation of the Luke Deserves All The Blowjobs Challenge, our 12-month mission to provide our man with 12 blowjobs, detailed lovingly for your (and his) pleasure.  We all agreed to contribute and so my first offering was:

1.    Anomaly

Idea:  In 2019, I participated in the Star Wars Rare Pairs Fic Exchange.  Shanlyrical had requested the pairing of Guri/Luke, which I’d never considered.  I didn’t get assigned that one (I got assigned Thrawn/Original Art Forger), but the idea stayed with me.  The blowjob challenge was the perfect opportunity.

Result:  A one-shot I am quite proud of, written from droid POV attempting to seduce our Jedi (who is quite difficult to seduce damn his perfect ass), full of technical and cyborgian terminology.  Since shanlyrical had put the ship in my brain, it was gifted to her.

2.  Comfortable

Idea:  Write an “old married Skywalkers” smutfic for a Valentine’s Day gift to my Luke/Mara cohorts.

Result:  A rather florid one-shot that is overstuffed with choice adjectives and bursting at the seams with love for my Jedi’s happy ever after.

3.  The Problem With Prophecy

Idea:  Write a Thrawn/Pryce fic for the Thryce Discord’s Valentine’s Day.  The prompts shifted, from “blind date” to “soulmates” or maybe vice versa as a theme.  I had already started it when the prompt changed so made them both work.

Result:  Another “how they got together fic” (of which I seem to write many for Thryce) that was a lot of fun to write, with a little contemplation about free will vs destiny in there.

4.  Proxy

Idea:  The Luke Deserves All The Blowjobs Challenge needed more fic, and no one wrote that Asajj Ventress/Luke pairing I had requested for SW rarepairs 2019… *cracks knuckles*  If you want something done, gotta do it yourself!

Result:  This was an interesting challenge.  Whilst I typically attempt to create scenarios for Luke to bang all the ladies that are SOMEWHAT realistic, I decided the only way to make this happen was to assume whatever plot was required to set this up had already occurred, so it starts *cough* right before the action, so to speak.  I also sort of low-key ship Ventress/Kenobi (what is that called?  Ventrobi?) so operated throughout with the idea that since she couldn’t have Obi-Wan, she was settling for another Jedi as a plaything.  Since I used only pronouns for Ventress in the fic, I suppose the reader could imagine any wicked woman or Nightsister or whomever on the other end of Luke’s cock, but in my brain it’s Asajj and she is a lucky woman (and Luke is a lucky man).  Anyway, it was probably one of my least popular fics this year but I still like it!

5.  Thranto 400 Works Celebration Ficlet (Ch 3:  Everything To Lose)

Idea:  @jessko-fic​  asked me to contribute to this collection to commemorate the Thrawn/Vanto ship hitting 400 works on AO3.  Me:  Slash?!?!

Result:  I don’t write slash in general because I just…don’t really enjoy it, doesn’t float my boat or melt my butter, although so often I wish that weren’t the case.  I have read a lot of Thranto thanks to Jess’s evil influence though, and thought I could tackle this ship.  I wanted to write something exactly 400 words for the 400 works thing, and the result was a little “missing scene” that I hope was true to the spirit of the collection while also slotting into Thrawn and Eli’s storyline.

6.  Creativity

Idea:  For The May The Fourth fic exchange, try to hit my giftee’s likes and stuff as many MacGyver-inspired easter eggs as possible into the story.

Result:  14 “original series” MacGyver-isms crammed into this thing, including winks and nods to names and dates, and  plenty of Luke and Mara banter to accompany the mission. One of my most researched fics this year and one of the most fun to write!  And my giftee loved it, which is the best result possible.

7.  Physical Graffiti

Idea:  Agreed to a one-on-one fic exchange with @jessko-fic​, since we never get matched in “regular” exchanges.  She requested Luke x Sabine, which tied in perfectly to my never-ending goal of Luke x All The Ladies.

Result:  A (hopefully) sexy multi-chapter that required a lot of research on timelines to get them together for this “missing scene” and Mandalorian stuff.  My septuagenarian mom has proclaimed it’s her favorite of any of my stories, so I call it a success.  O_O  Yes, she reads my fic.

8.  Strangers When We Meet

Idea:  Write a reader-insert fic for @enmudecer​.  I love setting challenges for myself, and writing a smutty reader insert was something entirely new to tackle.

Result:  I think reader inserts sometimes get a bad name but they can be a lot of fun.  I avoided the (y/n) convention because I find it pulls me out of the story, tried hard to keep it gender neutral, and hopefully everyone who reads it can feel like they just banged Luke Skywalker 😉 Also I have a long-standing goal of writing songfic, and while I didn’t do it here, at least the title is from a Bowie song that seemed appropriate.  So not just my first reader-insert, my first song-titled-fic!

9.  Infectious

Idea:  The Thryce Discord, and in particular @handsofthrawn​, had been asking/lobbying me for ages about writing a quarantine fic since the world was in lockdown.

Result:  Well, this is what I achieved this year, when I look back at what I accomplished.  My longest fic ever, and a particularly ambitious premise of getting from an awkward, miserable (and hopefully realistic) fuck-or-die scenario to a happy ever after for my evil OTP.  I unashamedly love this story and I’m so happy and grateful to the readers who loved it with me—their comments and kudos gave me life when the stress of reality made me want to curl into a defensive little ball and hide for the rest of the year.

10.  Evilmousetober 2020

Idea:  I couldn’t choose what X-tober prompts to use for my October drabbles this year, so I used whatever felt right that day.

Result:  A compilation of my tumblr drabbles from various October prompts.

11. Dis Manibus

Idea:  I am not going to write this fic.  I am not going to write this fic.  Crack and ridonc and no way is there any conceivable way it would work.  And then I wrote it.  The basic concept as my muse nagged me was to write the “nightmare comfort” trope with Luke and Pryce.  WHY?! I HAVE NO IDEA I DON’T CONTROL THIS BITCH.  Anyway, the idea wouldn’t go away.

Result:  This fic is the perfect exhibit of how I never know what the heck is going to happen when I start writing.  Everything was a surprise to me, including the Thryce element to what was SUPPOSED to be a Luke/Pryce fic.  Also I didn’t get the smut I wanted.  *curses*  But I like it anyway and it worked, timing-wise, for Halloween-y themes.

12.  Alone Time

Idea:  After swearing not to write fic for the rest of the year, @contentment-of-cats​ put out her Merry Chissmas bingo card and my ambitious ass decided to try to knock every single prompt out with a one-shot.

Result:  Thrawn jerking off in the shower and thinking verrrrrry naughty things.  I apologize for nothing.

So in 2019 I wrote 26 fics and this year only got to about 12…but fanfic is for fun, and we all needed fun this year.  I enjoyed writing for you and I hope you enjoyed reading my output.  I look forward to providing more smexy silly and strange fic for you in 2021.  <3

[mymurderbooks]

Prince Lestat, and a review of Heliophobia perfume from Sixteen92

Title: Prince Lestat Author: Anne Rice Rating: ★★☆☆☆   Series: The Vampire Chronicles

Perfume: Heliophobia House: Sixteen92 Collection: Friday the 13th Limited Edition Rating:  ★★★★★

---

First, I have to confess that the two stars I’ve allotted Prince Lestat are almost entirely sentimental: Prince Lestat is terrible, but I love Anne Rice. Two stars for my love, and for me at least it holds a peculiar kind of nostalgic charm, though the book is so bad I dragged myself through it,

When I was little (about ten) I had a truly awful fansite on Geocities, dripping blood horizontal rules and all. I haven’t read Interview with the Vampire in a while but I will list it as one of my favourite books ever, and actually I think Feast of All Saints is an amazing non-vampire book of hers that’s largely overlooked. There’s a break in continuity in my Vampire Chronicles fandom, the last book I read was Vittorio when it came out, it was so bad that I lapsed for years, until recently I started following Anne Rice on social media and saw that she had a new book out called Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis. I rolled my eyes a little at the title but it did make me want to revisit the vampire world.

It seems the books between Vittorio and Prince Lestat were Mayfair Witches crossovers. I’m not a big Mayfair Witches fan, and Anne Rice proclaimed Prince Lestat the ‘true sequel to Queen of the Damned’, so I think it’s safe to skip over them straight to this. If it’s been so long you’ve forgotten the special terms Anne Rice uses throughout her vampire world, don’t worry, there’s a glossary in the front (the section is called ‘Blood Argot’).

As I mentioned it’s been over a decade since I last touched Interview with the Vampire and I can’t quite remember if it was this self-important and ponderous and overwritten, but in my memory, it was not.

I think Interview with the Vampire had such appeal because of the underlying desire for immortality that drove it and, in particular, the wish for an immortal child, while knowing that immortality was a cursed existence, that made it so powerful. This is absent in Prince Lestat, and the vampires are sort of beautiful, superhuman, mostly super-rich, and they feel comfortably detached from the kind of soul searching in her earlier vampire novels.

The plot itself isn’t terrible, and the book holds some interesting ideas.

Spoilers under the cut:

The plot of Prince Lestat is that there’s a Voice (referred to In Capitals), and the Voice has been telling vampires to destroy each other and sowing discord in the vampire world. Surprise, the Voice is actually Amel, the ‘spirit’ that entered Akasha the QotD, except now Amel is actually an alien being. Another of these alien beings had named himself Gremt Stryker Knollys and started the Talamasca.

So this Voice has thrown the vampire world into discord. Our little Chronicles family of vampires (Louis, Marius, etc. etc.) had moved out of Paris and New Orleans because, and I paraphrase, the riff raff had moved into those cities, which sounds a lot like some vampire version of white flight, and now cocoon themselves in, of course, brownstones on the Upper East Side. Benji (if you don’t remember who he is, he’s from The Vampire Armand, which also isn’t a great book) now runs a podcast, which conveniently broadcasts at a pitch too low for human ears, in which he lists the recent troubled news of the vampire world, entreats all of vampiredom to coalesce into a sort of vampire brotherhood, and calls for the ‘elders’ but especially Lestat to step up as leaders and come save them all.

All the vampires in this book are obsessed with Lestat.

Before I get more into that, now for a quick overview of the structure of this book: 

Part I is a sort of overview of the world, including I think the most interesting part of the book, we’re introduced to a vampire scientist, Fareed, who’s doing scientific research into what exactly a vampire is. He inducts other scientists into vampiredom, they all have a research lab, and here Anne Rice glosses over the specifics of how the biology of vampires apparently works, maybe through a lack of desire to do background research, I don’t know, but I kind of prefer that to an elaboration of the strange pseudoscience.

In Part II, various supporting characters/vampires/vampire groups get their own chapter each, except that the chapters are very similar to each other and this gets repetitive and obnoxious. I got through it, but honestly if you skim quickly through the bulk of it I don’t think it would make a huge difference. In truth I don’t remember many of the vampires from the previous books, or maybe they were in the books I skipped, there’s a mortal girl called Rose who’s like Lestat’s godchild or something, I’m not sure if she’s been in the series before but it doesn’t really matter because her entire life is summarised, and by the way Lestat has a kid called Viktor. You’ll see.

So each vampire chapter pretty much goes like this: vampire is beautiful, reminisces about the past. They live mostly alone, in posh dwellings with scented candles and tapestries and fluffy rugs and expensive artisanal carved wooden furniture and Ipads and Bose speakers (Anne Rice should have product placement) and all the trappings of the wealthy. They all sound the same despite being different people born in different eras. The voice speaks to them, they resist, and they contemplate how wonderful and amazing Lestat is, and how they wish to see him, and/or how they wish he would be their glorious leader.

If you made it through Part II, Part III does actually end with him becoming their glorious leader. Hence the title.

Lestat’s egotism is more palatable when reading in Lestat’s own voice, but an entire vampire world so enamoured with Lestat, I don’t know how I feel about it.

There are things I like about this book that I wish Anne Rice would have touched more on: the vampire science, the plight of the skulking-in-the-shadows vampire in the modern age of Google Maps and Insta, the workings of the Talamasca, aliens. The ideas are definitely interesting. I do think it would have been a much better book if a good chunk in the middle had been ripped out and the (frankly somewhat embarrassing) florid language had been edited out - though this might be Anne Rice’s doing rather than Knopf’s, and I suppose it could be considered to have its own rococo charm.

Will I, like a chump, read Atlantis, despite being disappointed by several of the Chronicles books? Yes, like a chump, I will. I also look forward to the possible Vampire Chronicles series that will apparently be made at some point soon (or maybe never), although I fear in my heart it’ll suck (pun inevitable). I guess you could call me a fan who’s returned to the Church of Lestat.

---

Heliophobia

My Anne Rice/Vampire Chronicles fandom is why I bought Heliophobia. The description goes: ‘the fear of sunlight – once believed to be a telltale sign of vampirism. Its scent is shadowy and reclusive; the crumbling and overgrown garden path of a long-forgotten estate, drenched in moonlight and delicate wisps of fog, pierced with a subtle tinge of the scent of untamed fear lurking in the shadows’, which is very vampire, and the notes of ‘climbing ivy, faded magnolia blooms, moonlit vines, cracked solarium glass, splintered wood, peeling wallpaper, humid air, fog & shadow, feral musk’, which makes it not just not any vampires, but specifically Anne Rice, moonlight and magnolias, giant dusty mansion type vampiric scent.

As you can guess it doesn’t actually smell like cracked solarium glass or shadows. I’m not exactly sure what those smell like. It smells largely of magnolia, magnolias and dust, a muted magnolia, like magnolias in an old house. It’s redolent of Interview with the Vampire, very beautiful. I’m so pleased with it and I recommend it if you like indie perfumes and early Vampire Chronicles. Put this perfume on, sit in your brocade armchair or whatever with your glass of red wine or dark grape juice or otherwise blood-reminiscent liquids, and reread your favourite vampire books.

Sixteen92 does excellent atmospheric scents and I like many of her perfumes, several are book themed and she had a whole Southern Lit series if you’re into that. You can order this from the Sixteen92 website but it’s only available on Friday the 13ths. The next one is March 2020.

[sofiadearos]

Any animal is more elegant than this book: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Unfortunately, this has to be the top contender for the worst “good” book I’ve read to date. So many words, so little substance– I’m shocked at how many words can be written about nothing much. I really wanted to like this book, guys, I really did. I liked Heidi Sopinka’s “The Dictionary of Animal Languages”, which has the same stylistic fragrance that Hedgehog attempts. 

The difference? 

The narrator of Languages brightened my world, while I was suffocated by the alternating narrators here, named Renee and Paloma.

Renee is a concierge approaching her sixties while Paloma is a twelve-year-old intellectual prodigy who loves writing in her journal and wrist-wringing over the constant trauma of living in, uh, a patently elite apartment complex in a gorgeous Paris neighbourhood where she is surrounded by relatively pleasant people and their pampered pets. Renee, who unflinchingly pronounces herself as stout and ugly, works in this apartment complex, and takes extreme precautions to ensure that the residents never find out that she is passionate about fine art, loves experimental cinema, and worships the literary canon. She also has a cat named Leo, after Leo Tolstoy, and is at all times paralysingly worried that the residents will get the reference.  

First of all, the central premise is questionable and absurd in that it goes great lengths to cloyingly counterpreach the stigmatisation of something that may not even be a stigma. The book in 140 characters or less: a concierge affectedly and pompously demonstrates that it is okay for her to be intelligent. Here’s an excerpt: 

“Concierges do not read The German Ideology; hence, they would certainly be incapable of quoting the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. Moreover, a concierge who reads Marx must be contemplating subversion, must have sold her soul to the devil, the trade union. That she might simply be reading Marx to elevate her mind is so incongruous a conceit that no member of the bourgeoisie could ever entertain it.”

The problem with this is that I don’t think anyone in the apartment complex would care if they found out that Renee was intelligent. Renee takes up half her narrative time belabouring how difficult it is to be someone who betrays societal expectations by being a smart concierge. Not once is her delusional hypothesis put to the test. Not once was Renee allowed to wonder whether, in fact, people had something against smart concierges at all. If she were, this brittle plotline would disappear and invalidate the whole book. 

Second, there are many characters living in the apartment complex, and I was interested in getting to know them. Colombe, Paloma’s older sister, was especially interesting! I did my best to piece together a portrait of her through Paloma’s exasperatingly condescending and hate-filled journal entries. I couldn’t help but feel that the fake-deep so-called “social commentary” was self-defeating and managed to destroy the storytelling. Where’s the due social commentary about hypocrites? You won’t find it in this book narrated by snobs devoid of self-reflexivity. What’s worse is that the musings of Renee and Paloma are less sincere social commentary than snooty flexings of how brutally they can tear down other people. The other characters are ruthlessly flattened and it’s a shame, because I don’t know if this is entirely necessary. The narrators sentimentally and self-importantly capitalise the words “beauty”, “art”, and “humanity” but their intellectual posturing is soulless and regrettably anti-humanity and unbeautiful. They’re so deep in their heads that they’re not ruminating on the human condition at all— they use other people as sandpaper against which to sharpen their mean verbal acrobatics. This is so blatantly their point and I rolled my eyes when Renee called herself a prophet for contemporary times or whatever. What’s the point of endlessly contemplating beauty and art when you spend hours and hours overarticulating how other people are worthless? I was not impressed by their devotion to jasmine tea and camellias. Reading about mean people is fun when the whole thing is graced with irony, when the author is so fully in on it. But the narrative voices of Paloma and Renee are so strikingly identical that I can’t help but feel that the author, Muriel Barbery, is writing with minimum effort, writing so close to her own heart that there isn’t much space for self-irony or self-parody. I could be wrong though. I also took note of how Japan was depicted in this book— all hype, no depth. This contrasts with how Paloma conflates Asia with poverty in talking about a Thai boy adopted by a French family:

“And now here he is in France, at Angelina’s, suddenly immersed in a different culture without any time to adjust, with a social position that has changed in every way: from Asia to Europe, from poverty to wealth.”

I know she’s 12, but it struck me. Japan in this book is fetishised and immediately valued exclusively because of a handful of its cultural exports. Sushi, bonzai, haiku, Ozu, the traditional bow, and wabi-sabi are briefly mentioned. That’s all. What’s afforded is the Google-able iconography. The book goes no deeper, and the peppering of Japanese references did nothing to re-posture the characters, which is what it seemed to be going for. Kakuro, the Japanese man introduced to change the narrator’s lives, was so thinly written. Extras in KDramas have received richer characterization. I was baffled as to why he, poised ummistakably as the pivotal character, was paper-thin and dimensionless, when the other characters were described with such precision albeit disdainfully. He “changes their lives” because the plot said so. One last thing: this book was published in 2009, before discourse on mental health became more widespread. Words such as “anorexic”, “autistic”, and “retarded” are used a couple of times as adjectives, usually in derogatory contexts, which will date the book. 

Man. I really wanted to like it.

Somewhat related recommendations: 

“Pure Heroines”, an essay included in Jia Tolentino’s bestselling collection “Trick Mirror”. The essay explores the tropes performed by female literary characters, i.e. as children, they’re exceedingly crafty and prematurely disillusioned by their environment, and the plot hinges on how gloriously they can rewire themselves to escape it all; as teens, like Paloma, they’re angsty and hot and intellectual; and as grown women, they become casualties of certain institutions, such as religion, marriage, or what have you, and eventually kill themselves. Paloma, in this case, is a suicidal teenager. Interesting. 

“The Dictionary of Animal Languages” by Heidi Sopinka. Also set in Paris. Also about an art-loving woman. Language is also somewhat florid but oftentimes delectable. Is a plotty book but doesn’t read as plotty, because it’s configured so diaristically. A sweet-smelling collection of painterly phrases. 

[kokoroikikoeru]

Fandom: Gravity Falls

Warnings: Profanity, Implied Drinking, Implied Sex

Additional Tags: College AU, College Parties, Fluff, Older Pines Twins, Human Bill Cipher, Nice Bill Cipher, Dancing, Comfort, these two are adorkable boyfriends that are good and considerate to each other, sorry if this sucks i'm not good at writing fluff :|

Maybe it was because of the stuffy, humid heat produced by the horde of inebriated college students or the pulsating, pounding sounds of EDM blaring through speakers, but regardless of whatever it was, one thing was for sure:

Parties were the bane of his existence.

He was okay with hanging out with familiar, old faces or heading somewhere with a very small group of people. Never was he one for meeting a sea of strangers, grinding up against someone else, drinking to the point beyond being shit-faced, and so on.

At least he had Bill, though.

The brunet turned his gaze from the shifting and squirming mass of people who were all dancing and packed in the other part of the room like sardines in a tin to the young man sitting beside him. The two were watching the crowd from the sidelines, idly seated on a nearby couch. The fingers of the blond’s right hand were laced and entwined with Dipper’s left while the ones of the guy’s free hand were restlessly drumming against a fairly shabby, stained armrest to the beat of the music.

Bill wanted to party and dance like the others, that much was obvious.

The young, sleep-deprived adult stared at the remainder of the swishing and sloshing liquid held by the obligatory red solo cup in his hand. He drew his lips into a thin line, contemplating something before letting an almost inaudible sigh as he forced a faint smile.

Times like these were when he’d truly realized how different they and their worlds really were.

“Y’know,” he started, catching Cipher’s attention, “you can go out there too if you want. You don’t need to force yourself to stay with me.”

Cobalt eyes widened, similar to those of a preteen found reading his father’s porn mags. The action was so short-lived that he would’ve missed it had he blinked.

The affable first-year was quick—but not quick enough—to conceal his blunder that screamed, “I’ve been caught!” by quirking his lips and slinging an arm over the shoulders of the boy beside him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, kid.”

“You look really bored,” Dipper countered.

“Geez, Pine Tree! I think you need more glasses or something since I clearly can’t see what you’re—”

“You really shouldn’t lie to your seniors, Billy Boy, especially if they’re your psychology study buddy.”

In reaction to the interruption accompanied with a smug, knowing look, the taller male looked away, uncharacteristically flustered as he grumbled something along the lines of “stupid smart guy”.

The shorter young adult let out an amused, good-natured sigh.

A serene though brief quiet passed between the couple as they listened to the thrumming beats of the song that was currently playing and the drunken shouting of their fellow peers. The introverted Pines twin was the one to break it.

“You can go if you want to. I don’t mind.”

“But you would mind joining me, right? Plus I’ll be leaving my poor, little tree all alone!” the blond dramatically cried out that last part. He threw an arm against over his eyes—well, eye—swooning like some damsel in distress as he swung his legs back and forth, kicking the air while flopping back into the cushions of the sofa.

Mason smirked at his antics and singsonged, “Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t mind watching you.”

Bronzed cheeks gave away a faint blush. Another tranquil and momentary silence transpired. This time Bill broke it.

“You sure about this, Pine Tree?”

“Absolutely.”

“Really, really sure?”

“Positively.”

“Really, really, really—”

The brunet stopped the probably never-ending river of what would essentially be the same, pointless question rephrased over and over again by turning to face the man, swiftly grabbing and tugging down on the other’s collar until their faces were a mere breath apart.

“Bill, just shut up and go dance. I want to see if my boyfriend can actually pull off the legendary moves he’s been claiming to be capable of for the past few days.”

Said boyfriend smiled mirthfully, genuinely and with a noticeable hint of guilt, arctic-blue irises softening fondly at the playful challenge.

Dipper wasn’t prepared for such an uncommon expression to cross his love’s visage. Nor was he prepared for a fleeting but warm and comforting peck against the tresses curtaining his constellatory birthmark from the younger.

“I promise I’ll make this up to you, sapling,” the smitten beaut whispered fondly. The guy’s smirk grew wider at the sight of a rosy flush blooming across the pillow-soft cheeks to the originally pale-tipped ears of a certain mystery-loving lad.

“Yeah, yeah,” the second-year mumbled, shooing the other away as he bit the insides of his cheeks and turned his florid mess of a face away from the other’s gaze. “Now go have some fun.”

And with that, the Pines boy watched his eccentric other half walk away, content though somewhat forlorn…

…only for the sapphire-eyed man to come back not even five minutes after his departure, deciding to return just in order to literally carry his unwilling, bibliophilic significant other with him as he dove back into the dense flock of college students.

After weaving and struggling their way through several waves of mainly inebriated people, they eventually reached an oh-so-very marginally less busy area near one of the sides of the room. Throughout their ephemeral but still rather arduous and tedious journey, the (much) smaller male was fruitlessly kicking and releasing shouts and protests that went unheard by both Bill and the surrounding students. To the freshman, it was honestly like carrying an adorably irked, drowsy kitten.

When he finally decided to gently put the thrashing nerd in his arms down, he received a punch to the shoulder and an aggravated sigh.

“You’re such an ass!” Dipper exclaimed. The blond gave him a faux sheepish grin.

“What can I say? I started missing and worrying about my favorite tree!”

The brunet attempted to force down the redness that threatened to creep up his cheeks and threw his hands up in the air in exasperation.

“What happened to the ‘I promise I’ll make this up to you’!? You’re serio—”

The first-year abruptly cut him off by placing a finger on his sapling’s plush lips. “Shh! Just dance with me.”

His lover sputtered, flustered before a sudden anxiousness and nervousness seeped in after realizing where they currently were.

The sophomore was beginning to panic, starting to feel like everyone was staring at him—even when they actually weren’t—with scornful looks that stabbed through his body, leaving it a porous, gory carcass. It wasn’t as if he wasn’t used to this, however, due to the numerous groups of girls and guys lusting after his popular boyfriend. Thankfully, though the other was deranged and unpredictable, he was always the first to notice and the first to be there to reassure and console him all those other times, so what made this time any different?

“Bill, I-I told you! I r-really don’t like crowds an-and I’m really bad at-at dancing and I really don’t want to—!”

He was cut off again, this time by the dark-skinned man looping an arm around his waist, partially and effortlessly dipping him while being mindful of the bustling people around them and the lack of space they gave. The taller male titled his Pine Tree’s chin slightly upwards, forcing gingerbread-brown eyes as wide as dinner plates to meet relaxed and confident blue ones.

“Focus on me, kid, just me.”

Dipper didn’t bother trying to bite back a soft smile.

The duo danced the night away afterwards—or, well, at least until Bill began getting more “aggressive” in their dance which inevitably led to the two of them retiring early for the evening because of certain very recently-planned activities they had much, much later that night (and yes, these activities did drag out to the ungodly hours of the morning).

A few people around them had realized just how heated their dancing was becoming. It’s not like it mattered to either party, though. Many others in the room were doing the same, so the couple forgot about the world around them during their dance.

The day after, while in bed and being securely wrapped in the safety of his partner’s arms, Dipper supposed that parties aren’t all that bad, so long as he’s with Bill.

[entergamingxp]

In Other Waters review – an ocean sanctuary for the meditative explorer • Eurogamer.net

It begins with one of the loveliest interfaces I’ve ever handled, a fluorescent origami puzzle of panels, dials and buttons, at once tactile and ethereal, vintage and high-tech, like a holographic astrolabe. At its centre, a circle of ocean rendered in the style of an old-time sea chart, its delicately nested contours travelling beyond the dashboard into a turquoise haze.

In Other Waters review

Developer: Jump Over the Age

Publisher: Fellow Traveller

Platform: Reviewed on Switch

Availability: Out now on Switch and PC

A tap of space bar sends out a wailing sonar wave, populating that circle of water with triangular waypoints and coloured dots, darting through or forming undulating patterns – creatures, going about their lives without much heed for the fumbling, dive-suited human in their midst. Tap a waypoint to scan it, a brief but evocative description filling a fold-out panel to the right. Push one of the larger buttons to set that waypoint as a destination, a sextant arm locking across the view with a gratifying click. Hit another button to engage the suit’s thrusters, then hit space on arrival to scan your surroundings anew.

This is the heartbeat of In Other Waters, a unique and mesmerising exploration game from Jump Over The Age, set on an alien planet. It’s a tempo that carries you from sunlit shallows to waters clogged with poisonous microbes, from pillars decked with pollen to abyssal reaches that harbour dreadful secrets. There is little to break the rhythm – no in-game antagonist to defeat, and only a small handful of tools such as laser cutters that open up initially inaccessible regions. Even the occasional terrain hazards, which range from stinging veils to pools of corrosive brine, are more like encouragements to keep moving than threats.

That ritual of scanning and setting a course may sound monotonous. During the first of my eight hours with the game, I worried that the cetacean whistles and clicks of the wonderfully tuned interface might begin to grate, that repetition might tempt me to skim past vital pieces of text. That temptation is fiercest when you’re wandering through toxic water, your eye flicking between a dwindling O2 reserve on the left and the leisurely unfolding commentary on the right. But these oppressive regions are manageable enough once your panic is cooled – your suit can metabolise scraps of organic matter for oxygen and power, and the only penalty for running out is being recovered by drone and obliged to start that region over.

After a while, you realise what the game is asking of you: not just curiosity but reflection and a certain method, a willingness to sample this ocean one bit at a time, as a considerate scientist would. You also realise that what you’re doing when you move and scan is weaving two lifeforms together – a xenobiologist, Dr Ellery Vas, who is searching these undiscovered waters for somebody she once knew, and the strange AI unit she finds abandoned on a reef.

Ellery can’t operate the suit herself: rather, she sets broad objectives, region by region, leaving it up to you how you achieve them and what you investigate along the way. Her agency in the field consists of remarking on and writing up the creatures and things you find. You can’t communicate with her beyond responding “yes” or “no” to very infrequent questions, but the act of exploration constitutes a dialogue, a tidal back-and-forth between an AI’s visualisations and a human’s powers of description and analysis.

That player-enacted symbiosis facilitates a well-paced, exposition-lite story about coexisting with nonhuman life, against the ravages of interplanetary capitalism. Ellery is an employee of Baikal, a corporation that strips whole worlds of resources. Working for this entity is the price she pays for escaping an Earth whose seas have been sterilised by climate change. She’s a survivor, then, but she is still a scientist, and Gliese 667Cc – an actual, potentially habitable exoplanet, previously visited by the Alien vs Predator franchise – is everything Earth has lost. You’ll encounter scores of bewitching lifeforms, collecting bits of plant frond or shell with a tool that resembles a shutter-operated camera, and storing them at the laboratory you uncover early in the game.

The lab itself – which serves as a chapter-breaking hub – is a delightful specimen, its floors stacked like slides under a microscope. Here, you can analyse samples you’ve collected to fill out a database, Ellery’s initial observations and speculations blooming into marvellously nerdy accounts of predation and reproduction. The game’s lead designer and writer Gareth Damian Martin is a florid stylist, but he and his co-writers strike a balance in the game between rhapsody and clinical precision. Gather enough data and you’ll unlock a sketch of the creature, a postcard to the AI from Ellery’s world.

The creatures are like nothing else you’ll find in a game, their eerieness only amplified by the knowledge that they are mournful homages to organisms whose habitats we are destroying. I’ll try not to spoil them too much, but we’re a long way from videogame staples like sharks. There’s a huge emphasis on interdependence: every organism is the way it is thanks to its interactions with another, be it turning a much larger organism into a habitat, or cultivating bacteria for food. Some organisms are in fact several, entwined together like Ellery and the AI.

Fascinating revelations, indeed, but as a mechanic the taxonomy system feels a bit wayward. Progress through the game is broadly defined by a database completion percentage, visible on your save file. Maxing a percentage is the hallmark of a more ruthless, acquisitive fantasy than In Other Waters – it clashes with the pliant tone of Ellery’s notes, which often end with yet more questions. Accepting the planet’s mysteries rather than trying to unravel every last one is part of the game’s ecological message, and as such, that touch of completionism seems out of place.

It’s a tiny quibble, though, forgotten the second you venture back out into the water. The game’s colour palette is astonishing, creating an atmosphere most open world blockbusters can only dream of. Beyond that opening wash of radioactive turquoise and sherbet yellow, you can expect glaring stews of red and green, and sunken recesses where the map is a tracery of bone emerging from midnight blue. Amplifying the mood is Amos Roddy’s meditative electronic score, which is elegantly attuned to the unfolding plot. Some of the major dramatic beats are tethered to melodies, played out note by note as you click between lines.

It might seem annoying that you can’t “escape” In Other Waters’ interface and explore the naturalistic three-dimensional landscape hinted at by Ellery’s sketches – certainly, I’d love to see a 3D interpretation of one particular colonial lifeform – but that’s missing the point. The AI’s perspective is reality, its collaboration with Ellery producing a world. That concept of reality as a co-production, fashioned by on-going interaction and acceptance, is anathema to the version offered by Baikal, which cynically divides existence into humans and the things we use. It’s a concept In Other Waters makes you live, scan by scan, waypoint by waypoint, as you contemplate an ocean that is every bit as unreal and fragile as our own.

Disclaimer: In Other Waters creator Gareth Damian Martin is a former Eurogamer contributor.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/04/in-other-waters-review-an-ocean-sanctuary-for-the-meditative-explorer-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=in-other-waters-review-an-ocean-sanctuary-for-the-meditative-explorer-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

[thain1982]

Gene Wolfe's address to ReaderCon 1987

This is the transcript of a speech Gene Wolfe gave at ReaderCon in Boston, 1987, regarding what he dubs the "New Illiteracy." It is an exceptional read.

 I would like to begin by asking you to contemplate a statistic and a quotation. The statistic is that in America today one person in seven is completely illiterate--unable to read "IN CASE OF FIRE BREAK GLASS," for example. Let me admit immediately that this figure--which was given me by a nurse who is involved in adult education--may be considerably in error. The fact is that no one really knows what proportion of the U.S. population is illiterate; any figure that may be quoted to you is an estimate. And if you are given a Government estimate, you should keep in mind that no government is really proud of its illiterates. However, the Adult Performance Level--APL--study funded by the U.S. Department of Education estimated that 27 million U.S. adults were completely illiterate; that is roughly one in five.

 The quotation is Mark Twain's: "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them." [emphasis mine]

 One of the reasons it is so difficult to get good figures on illiteracy is that illiterate people are ashamed of it, even though in nine cases out of ten it is not their fault. Thus the Census Bureau cannot simply ask whether this person or that cannot read. It would be told that he or she certainly can; and although it would know the answer was often untrue, it could not know how often.

 The people Mark Twain spoke of are, if anything, rather more difficult to detect. Let me give you an example. A few years ago, I came across a remarkably fine two-volume set of what I think is one of the best books of fantasy ever written--Washington Irving's The Alhambra. This edition had appeared in 1891, and its marvelously florid white and gold bindings were still protected by dust wrappers of thick black oilcloth. If its paper was not acid-free, it had certainly acted like it: the pages had not yellowed, and their decorative borders of bronze and vermilion could almost have been printed the year before. The two volumes were $7, and I bought them at once.

 Halfway through the first volume, I began to hit unopened pages. I was forced to read with a letter-opener in one hand, separating them as I went. No one had read more than the first half of the first volume, though the books had been in existence for nearly a century. I ask you to consider, please, just why the owner of those books had bought and kept them.

 Of course it is notorious that some rich people buy books merely to decorate their rooms. I have been told--and I'm sure it's true--that many interior decorators offer to supply up to so many yards of gold-tooled red or blue leather bindings. And though I hesitate to disillusion you, I fear that it's equally true that there is a stage set in the basement of the Senate Office Building made by cutting away everything but the spines of hundreds of good books. It permits a senator to face the cameras against a background as false as his own.

 The original owner of this set--let's assume him male--was clearly not that sort of man. He had kept its white-and-gold bindings hidden beneath their oilcloth jackets, remember; and in those jackets the two books are as dismal, and as plain, as you will ever see. What's more, he had begun to read them.

 That he never found the time is the conventional guess, to be sure. But when books published nearly a century before are discovered in near-mint condition, it's generally safe to assume that they have spent most of the century in the possession of a single owner. And since he bought them well before the advent of modern labor-saving machinery, he presumably had a good deal of leisure time. It's hard to imagine how decade after decade might roll slowly by without ever an illness or a vacation, a layoff, a summer Sunday, or a blizzard that would have allowed him to read.

 We are left, then, with the books themselves; and we must consider whether they are dull or overly complex. I very much regret that I didn't mark the exact point at which the previous owner ceased to read. But I remember the approximate place:

 In one of my visits to the old Moorish chamber where the good Tia Antonia cooks her dinner and receives her company, I observed a mysterious door in one corner, leading apparently into the ancient part of the edifice. My curiosity being aroused, I opened it, and found myself in a narrow, blind corridor, groping along which I came to the head of a dark winding staircase, leading down at an angle to the Tower of Comares. Down this staircase I descended darkling, guiding myself by the wall until I came to a small door at the bottom, throwing which open, I was suddenly dazzled by emerging into the brilliant antechamber of the Hall of the Ambassadors; with the fountain of the Court of the Alberca sparkling before me.

 Now I admit that is not utterly thrilling. A certain young American enjoying a holiday in Spain has decided to explore a ruined palace inhabited by beggars. He visits the beggar queen (whose friendship he has secured in an earlier chapter), opens a door that has piqued his curiosity, goes down a dark hall and an even darker stairway, and finds himself in the room in which the representatives of foreign powers once waited the pleasure of the Moorish king.

 But it is not without interest. One wonders what the young American will find next, and dreams--as he himself does at times--of ghosts and hidden treasure.

 Nor is it very difficult reading. There are three foreign words, but two of them are place names, and the third is part of a proper name. A reader who does not realize that tía is the Spanish word for aunt is free to assume that the lady's name is Tia-Antonia and get on with the story. Irving's sentences are somewhat long, but they are so filled with familiar words and words of one syllable--in, one, of, my, to, the, old, where, the, good, Tia, cooks, and so on--that they make easy reading. That darkling seems a little strange to us; it is the sort of word William Hope Hodgson and H. P. Lovecraft revived as a mannerism; but it is not a mannerism in Irving, and would not have seemed strange to a reader of 1891.

 Why, then, did the original owner stop? Why did he not go down that darkling staircase in an angle of the Tower of Comares with Irving? I think I know.

 It has to do with the history of literacy, and particularly with the history of mass literacy. People have been reading and writing for four thousand years and more, but for ninety percent of that time we readers and writers have been a very small fraction of the population. My mother once worked for a man named Appleby who made serious and protracted efforts to trace his own descent in the male line. He had an easier task than most of us would, because these ancestors had been English. Furthermore, he was lucky enough to strike a line of parsons that carried him back almost to the 1500s. But there the trail of ink ended, and no expenditure of time or money--and Mr. Appleby was a rich man--could turn it up again.

 Widespread reading began, as most of you surely know, with the desire to read the Bible; Still more with the desire that others should read the Bible. When William Tyndale said, "I will cause that a boy that driveth the pow shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost," he created thousands of teachers and preachers (then often the same person) whom we have since forgotten.

 They made it okay to learn to read. It was a staggering accomplishment. The boy was needed for plowing and sowing and chopping wood and a hundred other labors. The girl was needed to cook, mend, wash, and sweep, to make pickles and jelly, to watch the stove and her small brothers and sisters. All this not just because the wealth of the family depended on it, but because the very survival of its members depended on it. These people were subsistence farmers, as were nineteen twentieths of the population; and subsistence farmers need a good harvest each year with nothing wasted, particularly time. One crop failure may mean starvation. The boy's father and grandfather could not read a word; nor could the girl's mother, nor her grandmother.

 But God came first.

 The question was whether anything came second. Reading the Bible was all right--very much so. Reading a book like Pilgrim's Progress was probably okay too. But what about all this other stuff?

 As you might have expected, there were two answers. The old educated classes, brought up on Virgil and Homer, said yes. The newly literate or semiliterate class said NO!

 "I skip forty years," said the Baker,in tears,

And proceed without further remark

To the day when you took me aboard of your ship

To help you in hunting the Snark."

 But I really mean to skip a lot more than that. Tyndale died in 1536, and I'm going to jump to 1850, or so, with another quotation most of you are sure to recognize:

 Each in her turn stepped forward to the edge of the platform, cleared her throat, held up her manuscript (tied with a dainty ribbon) and proceeded to read, with labored attention to "expression" and punctuation. The themes were the same that had been illuminated upon similar occasions by their mothers before them, their grandmothers, and doubtless all their ancestors in the female line clear back to the Crusades. "Friendship" was one; "Memories of Other Days"; "Religion in History"; "Dream and"; "The Advantages of Culture"; "Forms of Political Government Compared and Contrasted"; "Melancholy"; "Filial Love"; "Heart Longings," etc., etc.

 A prevalent feature of these compositions was a nursed and petted melancholy; another was a wasteful and opulent gush of "fine language"; another was a tendency to lug in by the ears particularly prized words until they were worn entirely out; and a peculiarity that conspicuously marked and marred them was the inveterate and intolerable sermon that wagged its crippled tail at the end of each and every one of them. No matter what the subject might be, a brain-racking effort was made to squirm it into some aspect or other that the moral and religious mind could contemplate with edification. The glaring insincerity of these sermons was not sufficient to compass the banishment of the fashion from the schools, and it is not sufficient today; it never will be sufficient, perhaps. There is no school in all our land where the young ladies do not feel obliged to close their compositions with a sermon; and you will find that the sermon of the most frivolous and least religious girl in the school is always the longest and the most relentlessly pious.

 The scene is, of course, Tom Sawyer's school. We see that religion as a justification for literacy has lasted more than three hundred years. And we sense that its reign is about over. Here was one of the greatest turning points in its history. Was literacy to become a good in and of itself? An end, and not a means? Or was it to become no more than a fading customer that had lost its justification? (Notice, by the way, that Mark Twain carelessly supposes that village girls were writing themes in the Middle Ages, though he must have known better.)

 I think that Mark Twain saw the beginning of the change, and that the original owner of my set of The Alhambra was born in the period of transition. I think he stopped reading because he liked it too much.

 I realize that's an outrageous statement; but I think that it is true, like so many other outrageous statements. Consider what a set of books like those must have cost in 1891--only a few dollars, to be sure; but this was still the era of the five-dollar gold piece. Consider too that though he never finished those books, he preserved them beautifully for year after year.

 He lived, probably, somewhere in the Middle West. It's a raw and corrupt country even now, and it was a far more raw and corrupt one then. If he lived in Chicago--which is where I got his books--it was the Chicago of slums and packing houses, of Colonel McNeery and Jane Addams. But he had read of the Tower of Comares and the fountain of the Court of the Alberca, and there was no one he could tell about them.

 This, then, is the new illiteracy, the illiteracy of those who can read but don't. Mark Twain saw it coming, and we have spent our whole lives living in its shadow. Long ago it lost its own justification, of course; it had lost it before Mark Twain was born. And reading has found new ones even while retaining its old one--for reading's original justification was never really lost, only for a time "entirely worn out."

 Now for my own little sermon: This new illiteracy is more pernicious than the old, because unlike the old illiteracy it does not debar its victims from power and influence, although like the old it disqualifies them for it. Those long-dead men and women who learned to read so that they might read the Bible and John Bunyan would tell us that pride is the greatest of all sins, the father of sin. And the victims of the new illiteracy are proud of it. If you don't believe me, talk to them and see with what pride they trumpet their utter ignorance of any book you care to name.

 The old illiteracy is with us still, and indeed is growing; but its victims hate it, and escape it when they can. The new illiteracy, though it is so easily escaped, is escaped far less often. It is a jail so good that its doors need not be locked. The prisoners sit staring at the screen--or at the wall--or at of the window at the cell across the way; and they never try the knob.

 I suspect that many of you recognized this new illiteracy before I did, and that many of you have despaired of fighting it--as I, too, despaired for so long. For years it seemed to me that the only way to reach the victims of the new illiteracy was through television; and television was and is beyond our reach. But at least I realized that there is a more powerful medium than television, and that it is available to every one of us. It is speech--talk, if you will. Conversation.

 We can do two things.

 The first is what we're doing right here at Readercon. We can gather together specifically as readers. In Mark Twain's time a statesman said, "Books are a delightful society. If you go into a room filled with books, they seem to speak to you, to welcome you." That is so; and yet the pleasure of reading is doubled at least when you can share it.

 The other is simply to talk of books even to those who have not read. It exposes us to their contempt, indeed; and it may be that though they watch us enter their prison a hundred times, and leave it a hundred too, it will suggest nothing to them. But the opening and closing of the doors is bound to let in free air, and who knows what that may do?

[shannaraisles]

Set In Darkness

Chapter: 34 Author name: ShannaraIsles Rating: M Warnings: Canon-typical threat and violence Summary: She’s a Modern Girl in Thedas, but it isn’t what she wanted. There’s a scary dose of reality as soon as she arrives. It isn’t her story. People get hurt here; people die here, and there’s no option to reload if you make a bad decision. So what’s stopping her from plunging head first into the Void at the drop of a hat?

Thoughtless

"Ah ... so this would be the clinic I've heard so much about. How quaint."

Rory snorted with laughter, not bothering to look up from where she and Evy were making the last of the clinic beds. She knew exactly who was speaking.

"Not too rustic for you, I hope?" she asked, tossing the empty pillowcase to Evy as she finished tucking the sheet and blanket securely. "How about the smell?"

"All part of your charm, I'm sure," Dorian commented from the consultation room beyond the ward. "Oh, you were talking about the clinic."

As Evy gasped in offense, Rory just laughed, straightening up to get her first proper look at her favorite characters. Debonair wasn't really a word that could be used to describe anything in Thedas, but it certainly described Dorian Pavus. Clean and dapper, he seemed exceedingly out of place amid the grime and simplicity of Haven.

"You must be the mage from Tevinter," she said in a welcoming tone, gesturing for him to come into the ward.

"Which would make you the singularly inoffensive healer Kaaras mentioned." He offered both her and Evy a florid bow. "Dorian of House Pavus, at your service. That rather delicious commander has denied me a place at the Herald's side until I am proven fit and healthy, and a touch more easily trustworthy."

"No one should trust a magister, even if you did save the Herald's life," Evy passed comment, her dark tone not quite overriding the Chantry-induced fear in her voice.

Dorian sighed at her assumption. "Not a magister, merely a mage."

"Same difference," Evy insisted, setting the pillow on the bed.

"Not in the Imperium, I assure you," the altus pointed out patiently.

"Well, I can see you two are going to get on like a house on fire," Rory said in amusement, glancing between them. "Evy, why don't you open the clinic for the afternoon? I'm sure I can handle Not-Magister Pavus here."

Frowning with disapproval, Evy took the suggestion with an attempt at not seeming eager. "I'll be just on the other side of this door," she said pointedly, more for Dorian's benefit than Rory's.

"I'll be fine," Rory promised her, managing not to smile until the door closed in the younger woman's wake.

"What wonderfully suspicious minds you southerners have," Dorian mused, contemplating the now closed door. "It's almost like being at home." His sharp gaze turned to Rory. "I take it I am to be medically assessed, yes? And you are?"

"I'm Rory," she introduced herself. "And yes, I should assess you. Not that I'm expecting to find you unfit."

"Mistress Rory, you flatter me," he declared in his cavalier way. "There are a few things I am uniquely unfit for."

"I can imagine," she chuckled, moving to take a seat at her desk. She pulled a fresh piece of parchment from the pile, loading her quill to write his name at the top, along with his birth-date, and the current date. Is it weird that I know he was born in 9:11 Dragon without needing to ask? "Do you have any existing injuries or illnesses I should know about?"

"Apart from my devastating good looks and understated charms, you mean?" he asked in that indefinably Dorian way of his. "I have nothing to report currently, aside from an intense dissatisfaction with the food here. I did suffer through a terrible bout of Nevarran 'flu a while ago."

"How long ago was that?" she queried, scribbling this down. She hoped he wasn't still carrying it - as it stood, she had no in-patients, and as the assault on the Breach loomed ever closer, she was hoping to keep it that way.

"Oh, twenty years, at least," he told her. "Long before I reached my inevitable prime. Where do you want me?"

She drew her eyes from the page. "If you could just ... Oh."

There he was - gorgeous, adorable Dorian Pavus - stark bollock naked in the middle of her ward. Hands on his hips, he was completely at home with his nudity, eyeing her sudden blush with an expectant expression. As if drawn by magic, her gaze drifted downward before she managed to look away. Well, that brings the total number of men's privates I've seen here to well over two hundred. And not one of them was Cullen's!

With her inner fangirl sobbing uncontrollably at the glorious perfection that was the Tevinter mage, Rory offered him a warm smile. "Very nice," she complimented as he flexed, aware he was trying to make her blush darker. "Now if you could put your pants back on and come over here, we can get you signed off for the commander."

"You southerners don't check for hernias, then?" he asked, reaching for his pants.

"We do, but not in the way you're obviously used to," she explained with a smile. "I have a different method that is just as effective, and doesn't require you to be completely starkers. You're not alone in stripping off, though. Pretty much everyone I've assessed has shown me everything they've got."

"Truly?" Dorian laughed, covering his lower half without even a hint of embarrassment. "How fascinating. I must admit to some curiosity as to where I fall on the scale."

"Top ten," she assured him impishly. "Easily."

"My dear girl, what a marvelous life you lead," he teased, moving to sit down with her. "Spoiled for choice."

"Oh, I've already made my choice," she chuckled, reaching for her very primitive stethoscope. "And it had nothing to do with any sneak previews."

"I believe I may have to have that story from you some time soon," Dorian warned. He'd clearly been through this kind of assessment before, sitting upright as she set about listening to his heart and lungs.

She didn't have the familiar accoutrements of modern medical science at her fingertips, but what she did have was enough to assess and diagnose, to a point. Her stethoscope was essentially just a smooth wooden tube attached to a wide sounding board, but it did the job she needed. Pulse and resps were easy to record without any equipment at all, and though she had nothing to record exact temperatures, she'd learned how to guesstimate them by the heat of a person's resting armpit. It wasn't glamorous, but it was useful, and she'd found that people like to talk to her as she worked, to distract themselves from the discomfort. That was how she knew everything that happened in Haven - on any given day, multiple people told her about everything from their differing perspectives.

"Well, I see no reason not to declare you fit," she told Dorian after about an hour of talking and prodding around, handing him his leather shirt to put back on. "I would avoid teasing the commander if you want to be declared trustworthy, though."

"You don't think he'll respond well to my irrepressible charisma?" Dorian asked her, apparently comfortable with teasing her, at any rate. Mind you, she had just inspected him from top to bottom.

"In a word? No." She chuckled lightly. "At least, not right now. He has a lot on his mind."

"Perhaps someone should offer to ease the burden of all those cares," the mages suggested thoughtfully. "Though I'm not sure he would respond well to my methods, if at all."

"I'd advise against it," Rory warned in amusement, however funny the thought of watching Cullen fielding Dorian in full flirt was.

"Indeed? Have I somehow missed the subtle signs that declare the man to be taken?" Those beautiful hazel-brown eyes of his met her gaze knowingly above a faint smirk.

"Even if I don't answer that, you're going to know what the answer is," she pointed out, quite pleased with herself for not laughing and blushing at the perceptive way he was looking at her.

"Ah, so he's yours, is he?" Dorian looked absolutely delighted with this information. "You and I simply must have a talk about his tension. Soon."

"I don't think -"

Any further response was interrupted by an exclamation of shock from the consultation room, the sound of Evy's protests, and the inner door bursting open to admit a fully-armed and -armored templar, who seemed to be expecting to find trouble. Behind him, Rory could see Evy hastily helping her patient cover her chest, trying to reassure her, and trouble was quite suddenly exactly what the templar found. She rose abruptly, her expression flat with fury.

"Get out." It wasn't a request; it wasn't even said in a particularly loud voice. Her tone was even, furious, and promised a world of pain if he didn't remove himself immediately.

"The commander said -"

"I don't give a flying fuck what the commander said," Rory snapped. "You have just interrupted two confidential consultations. Get. Out."

The templar hesitated, torn between obedience to his superior and obedience to a healer who looked as though she was about to lamp him for his unthinking impertinence. He opened his mouth, thought the better of talking back, and abruptly turned on his heel, marching out of the clinic and closing the door loudly behind himself. Rory made an attempt to school her expression, turning her attention to Evy and the now frightened elven woman her friend had been seeing.

"I am so terribly sorry about that," she apologized profusely. "Please be assured that it will not happen again. I will make certain of it." She glanced into the ward, raising an arm to gesture to her own patient. "Dorian, if you'd like to come through, please? We're just about done, anyway. Evy, bolt that door behind us so there are no more interruptions."

"What are you going to do?" Evy asked worriedly. Rory didn't often get this angry, but one thing guaranteed to flare her temper was a threat to her patients.

"I'm going to have a word with the commander," she told her friend in an ominous tone, ushering Dorian out into the village. She waited until she heard the bolt draw across, turning to the guard on duty, who just happened to be Calman. "No one goes through this door unless specifically invited by a healer or a nurse, is that clear?"

The formerly difficult guard nodded, his gaze flickering disapprovingly to the templar who had pushed past him in the first place. "Crystal clear, Rory."

Satisfied for now that her clinic was inviolate once again, Rory turned back to Dorian. "I really am dreadfully sorry for the interruption, Dorian," she apologized to him. "It's been a pleasure to meet you."

"Oh, and you, Mistress Rory," he countered, ever so slightly uneasy in the presence of the glowering templar. "However shall I fill my time before we have a chance to properly socialize?"

"I'd suggest the tavern," she recommended. "Introduce yourself to Varric, he's usually there this time of day."

"Then that is what I shall do." He bowed to her, ambling past to make his way toward the sound of Maryden's first ever rendition of Sera Was Never.

Rory rounded on the templar who had violated her patients' privacy. "What were you thinking?" she demanded heatedly. "How dare you simply burst in without so much as knocking first? Didn't your mother teach you any manners?"

The templar - whose name was Harper, she remembered suddenly - fidgeted under her furious questions. "The commander ordered me to make sure you weren't in any trouble with the magister," he defended himself. "Said to check no matter who tried to stop me."

"Did he really." Lyrium-induced paranoia strikes again. "If this ever happens again, Ser Harper, you will knock, and you will wait to be invited inside. And if you ever force your way into my clinic again without a damned good reason, I will make sure that the next time you're in there with your pants around your ankles, the entire village gets a good look at you. Do you understand?"

Harper grimaced, but nodded. "Yes, Healer."

"Good. Now ... where is the commander?"

"In the Chantry, Healer," he told her. "Only he's not to be disturbed."

"What a shame." Rory's tone made it clear that she didn't care how busy Cullen was right now. "Go and find something to do that's quite a long way from here."

Harper gave her a grateful look and bolted for the gates. In her own turn, Rory stormed to the Chantry, pushing her way inside in the worst temper she'd had since landing in Thedas. She ignored the templars who tried to stop her at the door to the war room, forcing her way inside with such violence that the door slammed hard against the wall. Four faces turned to her in surprise, trained hands reaching for weapons before recognizing the unexpected intruder. Rylen, Brycen, and Lysette relaxed quickly, but Cullen didn't. He was the one who got the full force of Rory's angry glare.

"What is the one thing that I insist on for all my patients?" she demanded ferociously.

Cullen's jaw set, clearly taking offense at her tone. "This is a private discussion of sensitive issues," he began, but he didn't get any further.

"Which, evidently, you don't want interrupted," she snapped, laying her hands on her hips. "I could have sworn you just ordered someone not to afford me the same courtesy. You're many things, Cullen Rutherford, but I never thought you were a hypocrite."

His expression darkened as he held her glare. "Out, all of you," he ordered his senior captains. "Wait outside."

The trio hastily did as they were told, exiting the room with graceful aplomb. No one really wanted to be in the same room as that temper, and certainly not when it was about to clash head-on with the commander's. Cullen closed the door behind them, turning to scowl at Rory.

"Never speak to me like that in front of my people again," he warned in a dangerous tone.

"I will speak to you however I choose when you willfully disregard me, commander," she informed him, her voice tight with anger. "How dare you order anyone to burst into the clinic, especially when you know I'm seeing patients?"

"You were too long secluded with the magister," he told her coldly. "I was concerned for your safety."

"Oh, and I suppose as long as you feel better, the privacy and dignity of my patients, their trust in me ... that doesn't matter at all," Rory growled at him, her hand waving wildly in her agitation.

"It was just the Tevinter -"

"No! It's never just anyone!" she flared, aware that her voice was rising with impassioned rage. "You'd be outraged if you were the patient whose confidential examination was just interrupted on someone's orders, for no good reason. What the hell is wrong with you that you think doing something like this is okay?"

Cullen loomed over her, his handsome face set in stormy lines. "He's a Tevinter magister, probably a blood mage," he snarled back at her. "I will not have you putting yourself at such high risk!"

"So you wouldn't have done it if he'd been seen by Evy?" she demanded, shocked to see him hesitate. "And for your information, Dorian isn't a blood mage!"

"How can you possibly know that?" he questioned her heatedly.

"Blood mages have scars, he has none," she snapped back. "If you bothered to ask him, he'd probably show you how smooth his skin is! Honestly, what were you thinking?"

"I was thinking that I don't want to see the woman I love become a blood sacrifice!" he roared at her, anger overtaking sense for one crucial moment.

"Yeah? Well, I love you, too, but that doesn't mean you're not an arse!" she yelled back, both of them nose to nose and breathing hard as their decidedly unromantic declarations sank heavily into the sudden silence. At least they were reciprocated.

Cullen was the one to break that silence. "I apologize for my ill-considered actions," he said sternly, too angry with her behavior to say much more. "It will not happen again."

"I'm sorry I interrupted your conference and called you a hypocrite," Rory shot back, breathing hard through her still percolating temper.

He nodded in acknowledgement. "Is that all, Healer Rory?"

She hesitated, but she knew her temper was nowhere near settled enough for the conversation she now needed to have with him very soon. "That's all, Commander Cullen."

"Then, if you will excuse me, I have work to do," he said coolly, dismissing her. He half-turned back before she could leave, a flicker of something warm and hopeful in his expression. "Until tonight?"

Rory nodded slowly, feeling her anger beginning to ebb as something just as warm and hopeful flared in her chest. "Tonight," she agreed, turning to let herself out.

She caught a glimpse of the grin on Rylen's face as she passed her friend, aware of the varying levels of wide-eyed shock on the faces of others within the nave. Mother Giselle looked more impressed than anything; Minaeve's mouth was open; Josephine was peering out through her office door with silent astonishment. So much for private. It seemed as though everyone had heard that little ... discussion. And their heated exchange hadn't even begun to explain why he'd had Dorian's examination interrupted in the first place. She very much doubted it was really because Cullen suspected the altus of being a maleficar. And I may have overreacted a little, she admitted shamefully to herself, welcoming the icy breeze that greeted her as she left the Chantry building.

Breathing slowly, she let herself calm down as his unthinking roar filled her mind. The woman I love ... he loves me. Oh, please, let this not be a coma-dream.

[drjacquescoulardeau]

LIONEL & STÉPHANE BELMONDO –YUSEF LATEEF – INFLUENCE - 2005

 This double album is probably essential for the career of Lionel Belmondo, performing here with his brother Stéphane and an ad hoc group of musicians that associates the regular musicians Lionel Belmondo uses, plus his brother and some coming along with and for Yusef Lateef, a jazzman from the USA recently deceased, whose life and career span from Tennessee where he was born to Massachusetts where he died. He represents a jazz of his own that has impacted Lionel Belmondo’s work tremendously, and yet. . .

 As soon as the first notes of this recording we have a tone we had not found yet in Belmondo’s music so far in our discovery. A light, florid, rich, deep, joyous and even blissfully ecstatic music that sweats and radiates some happiness, joy and not the morbid mortiferous contemplation we found so often in Lionel Belmondo’s music. But due to the dates, is this mortiferous and morbid style a later style, a style due to something Lionel Belmondo has lost? For sure this here recording is full of light and sunny rays of pleasure.

 Without entering all the tracks one after the other, I would prefer giving you some impressions rather than a scholastic manual. The presentation booklet that comes along with the CDs is good enough for that and signed by Vincent Bessières who is a journalist at Jazzman, a French magazine on the subject of jazz and jazz performance. Founded in October 1992, it was merged with Jazz Magazine in September 2009 in response to the worldwide economic downturn and the general loss of revenue among music magazines. It was advertised as "the magazine for all jazz." Jazzman began as a free supplement in Le monde de la musique. It published its first independent number in March 1995. It is not clear whether the separation was a divorce or a way to expand the jazz publication by making it autonomous. The booklet is in both French and English. I have chosen to favor English.

 Bessières says somewhere the musicians have chosen the blues as their style. I am not sure because for me the blues requires a voice, a singer, words to express the blues itself and the music is generally not jazzy and it is certainly most of the time particularly sad, suffering, crying and weeping, howling at times with despair. Here the music is at most hesitating between having a continuous melodic line or just impressionistic touches like in the second track: “Si tout ceci n’est qu’un pauvre rêve” (If all this is nothing but a pitiful dream). The title by Lili Boulanger originally here arranged by Lionel Belmondo has been made luminous in its hesitation, the search of some elevation but no doubt ever, it will come from contemplating the inside dimension of this music that is never erratic but only curiously stumbling and touching around to look for a door, an uplifting golden path in the forest of some urban maddening crowd that does not madden you at all.

This recording owes a lot to Christophe Dal Sasso who gave two tracks on the first CD. He could be qualified as sad but it does not succeed and I will then consider that his half smile of half happiness is in fact the detachment of a contemplative man in front of this world. What could make his music sad makes it in fact restful and peaceful. We just let ourselves slip slowly into this music and we enjoy the rest we find there, the abandon and nonchalance that are seeping from the notes and the instruments. Are we lying on a deckchair or chaise lounge on some beach or gently rolling ship on an oily sea without any wind, apart from a light breeze that cannot even fill our sails? Just let’s look at the gulls, at the sun, at the dust dancing in the sunlight, let’s draw the curtains of our mental bedroom and let us recline in the velvety featherbed. Is there any regret at times not to be part of the game, part of that outside world of pure excellence and enjoyment without any exhilaration?

 There might be a desire behind this music by Christophe Dal Sasso and his use of percussions to make rolling balls dance from right to left and then open some window to some plaintive but aerial and sky like azure flute that could be some Indian musician in the morning challenging the percussions, the drums, the whole of nature and summoning the deepest and most secret animal spirits of our world, those we never listen to and we always want to meet but without the courage to say, OK yes, let the wolves come dancing with me, let the frogs croak with me, let some other deer or bears come celebrate life with me. That’s when a more metallic sound and a humming voice appear, if it is a voice, and deeper, more somber sounds come up, rise, swell in the sky on a canapé of metal percussion, cymbals and their metallic sweeping, bells, we are confronted to the birth a world, of a mythology, of a future because any birth means a future that will drop on the side what is not important for that future like the shouts and yells of crowds. The piano brings in the responsibility of life and government. And a saxophone or clarinet or whatever brass instrument comes and amplifies that social forest of responsible enjoyment of what is to come and we call for. The bass can then temporize with that future. And something lurks out of the wings and inflates itself into some existence You are, new-born god, the master of this world and we are your servants, your believers, your powerful intercessors to life and we become the echo of your peace of divine mind and that makes us divine too. Oh! Friend of mine that moved away, that is trekking along some new territory, your voice is still reverberating in my mind and that voice is like a divine message telling me what to think. It is the few isolated notes of a bird’s call and song. And then it can become the recollection of the pleasure of loving you and the pleasure of still loving you though you are blazing some trails in some new forest and a trumpet tells me you are strong, manly, powerful and sure of yourself like some calamus growing in Walt Whitman’s pond in his contemplation of the masculine heart of the conquerors of wild territories. That music is an ode to joy and bliss and orgasmic climax, all contemplative in the mind of the beholder. To contemplate is to have. Just enjoy that contemplation that is your possession, that rich possession that makes you another person and yet the same. That’s how a friend and his love can transform your mind even in his absence because he is always there in your brain. Can’t you feel him squirming when you speak of him?

 If you find Christophe Dal Sasso slightly liquorish and satiating, maybe too much, too hypnotic, just take a rest with Lionel Belmondo and his saxophone. No problem; you can go drunk on that heady music that titillates in you the dark humors that have to come out to become sunny and happy. He is the pleasure bringer, the hawker in the street that tries to hawkishly sell you the shiny trinkets you do not need and yet that will be so useful for you to dance all night as if you were happily in some luxurious and lustful reception in some palace imagined by Lestat de Lioncourt somewhere in Auvergne. Don’t let your fingers be taken up by these strings. Resist the envy and the desire to be nice with the hawker who is a predator like his name says and he will draw all he can out of you to let you go on your wooly legs totally empty of all your blood. You will sit on a public bench and you will admire your new acquisition of empty air.

 And that’s when across the street on the second CD Yusef Lateef comes and transform our urban stroll into a rainforest chase for unknown species. Chattanooga, Tennessee, is the destination. Is it Chattanooga today or the Chattanooga of the times of slavery? Is it the past or the future? To ask the question is sure to never get an answer. Just enjoy the trip.

 I guess Southern Comfort is next on that road to the south but definitely with an urban background from the north.

But it is a day to wake some vast ideal from morning to dusk. Iqbal dominates the whole suite and it brings together so many things, in 2005 and even more today. The great and mythic by now Sir Muhammad Iqbal, widely known as Allama Iqbal, was a poet, philosopher, and politician, as well as an academic, barrister and scholar in British India who is widely regarded as having inspired the Pakistan Movement. Born: November 9, 1877, Sialkot, Pakistan. Died: April 21, 1938, Lahore, Pakistan. There is in this music something that goes beyond the slowness and nonchalance of the south. There is something that enters the Muslim mind of Yusef Lateef, a Muslim mind that comes from his reference to Pakistan, an aspiration to develop, an aspiration to thrive but also a tremendous fear that behind the green canopy of the trees there may be a very aggressive and violent sky and yet let the canopy of leaves and birds in their nest lock itself up onto the shady happiness of here inside this temple and let our words open our hearts to the divine beyond this closed up cell of nature. That divine grandeur is not outside this cell; it is not outside our own minds. It is inside our minds and we have to cultivate that call, that language, our prayers, our demands, our request from God who does not have any obligation and would even consider this request as some kind of undue begging. Do we have the right to beg from God for small little advantages and presents;

 We should be the ones offering and not the ones being granted any offering. And by the ones offering I feel in that music how we are supposed to let ourselves be taken and we are becoming the offering itself this music makes to the giant monsters of life. We are the offering on the altar, on the pyre assembled for the sacrifice, we are the ones open, entirely open and receptive to the blade of the knife that makes us the redeeming sacrifice music brings up to the world to salvage this humanity. This jazz is an expiating sacrifice to save the world from its evilness, its monstrosity, its hawkish carrion eating raptors that are soaring and circling high in the sky over us, their preys. But strangely enough Yusef Lateef tries to convince us there is nothing to be afraid of and we can just sit back and lie low and enjoy the orgasmic communion with nature and with the duration of things and the cosmos, of the whole universe. That music is so pacifying, so smoothly caressing that we may forget the world outside is not that nice after all. And Allama Iqbal becomes an Iqbal sports champion, or an Iqmal child overworked and exploited by some wild capitalism in underdeveloped countries like Pakistan. There are so many Iqbal in this world.

 But if we come down from this vision we come to some may fest on the village green, with pipes and some dancing elves. The world is so beautiful when we look at it with the eyes of someone who has satisfied his divine duties and has thus rebuilt his ability to just take the world the way it comes and enjoy it in pleasure and bliss along the dancing crowds. Don’t wonder who this Brother John is. He certainly is not Saint John and his Apocalypse; there is nothing apocalyptic in this music, nothing menacing, just multifarious and multi-voice hymns and canticles dedicated to the peace of mind you reach when you concentrate your mind on the divine. This music is so Muslim in all possible ways. There is no contradiction that is not reduced like a broken bone that heals all by itself with the bandage of belief, faith and submission to the truth of on-high, of beyond all the dangers that are not of life but of some other world that has to be forgotten and nullified.

 There is nothing bluesy in this music, nothing sad, mortiferous and morbid. Why on earth has Lionel Belmondo later on developed his morbid and death-loving style? There probably is no answer to that question. But his productions of 2011 and 2012 are in complete contradiction with this radiating bright luminous maybe slightly unempathetic style. Happiness is at the bottom of the flowery meadow like in The Sound of Music. It is well known, provided the world is the microcosm of Switzerland untouched and unconcerned by the violence outside its borders. I must say I miss the drama and the tragedy of so much jazz that pushes its roots and branches into the compost of centuries of inhumane and barbaric history of slavery and exploitation. That’s maybe this contemplation of monstrosities from under the crystal dome of protected relaxation that is so common in Bordeaux and its region, in the Landes forest and on the lakes there that explains the coming together of two jazzmen who are so different.

 The world is beautiful and life is marvelous. Let’s enjoy them both till we are drunk with an overdose of sugar and alcohol.

 Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

[fulysa]

The Euphio Question By Kurt Vonnegut

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN of the Federal Communications Commission, I appreciate this opportunity to testify on the subject before you. I'm sorry—or maybe "heartsick" is the word—that news has leaked out about it. But now that word is getting around and coming to your official notice, I might as well tell the story straight and pray to God that I can convince you that America doesn't want what we discovered. I won't deny that all three of us—Lew Harrison, the radio announcer, Dr. Fred Bockman, the physicist, and myself, a sociology professor—found peace of mind. We did. And I won't say it's wrong for people to seek peace of mind. But if somebody thinks he wants peace of mind the way we found it, he'd be well advised to seek coronary thrombosis instead. Lew, Fred, and I found peace of mind by sitting in easy chairs and turning on a gadget the size of a table-model television set. No herbs, no golden rule, no muscle control, no sticking our noses in other people's troubles to forget our own; no hobbies, Taoism[I1] , push-ups or contemplation of a lotus. The gadget is, I think, what a lot of people vaguely foresaw as the crowning achievement of civilization: an electronic something-or-other, cheap, easily mass-produced, that can, at the flick of a switch, provide tranquillity. I see you have one here. My first brush with synthetic peace of mind was six months ago. It was also then that I got to know Lew Harrison, I'm sorry to say. Lew is chief announcer of our town's only radio station. He makes his living with his loud mouth, and I'd be surprised if it were anyone but he who brought this matter to your attention. Lew has, along with about thirty other shows, a weekly science program. Every week he gets some professor from Wyandotte College and interviews him about his particular field. Well, six months ago Lew worked up a program around a young dreamer and faculty friend of mine, Dr. Fred Bockman. I gave Fred a lift to the radio station, and he invited me to come on in and watch. For the heck of it, I did. Fred Bockman is thirty and looks eighteen. Life has left no marks on him, because he hasn't paid much attention to it. What he pays most of his attention to, and what Lew Harrison wanted to interview him about, is this eight-ton umbrella of his that he listens to the stars with. It's a big radio antenna rigged up on a telescope mount. The way I understand it, instead of looking at the stars through a telescope, he aims this thing out in space and picks up radio signals coming from different heavenly bodies. Of course, there aren't people running radio stations out there. It's just that many of the heavenly bodies pour out a lot of energy and some of it can be picked up in the radio-frequency band. One good thing Fred's rig does is to spot stars hidden from telescopes by big clouds of cosmic dust. Radio signals from them get through the clouds to Fred's antenna. That isn't all the outfit can do, and, in his interview with Fred, Lew Harrison saved the most exciting part until the end of the program. "That's very interesting, Dr. Bockman," Lew said. "Tell me, has your radio telescope turned up anything else about the universe that hasn't been revealed by ordinary light telescopes?" This was the snapper. "Yes, it has," Fred said. "We've found about fifty spots in space, not hidden by cosmic dust, that give off powerful radio signals. Yet no heavenly bodies at all seem to be there." "Well!" Lew said in mock surprise. "I should say that is something! Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in radio history, we bring you the noise from Dr. Bockman's mysterious voids." They had strung a line out to Fred's antenna on the campus. Lew waved to the engineer to switch in the signals coming from it. "Ladies and gentlemen, the voice of nothingness!" The noise wasn't much to hear—a wavering hiss, more like a leaking tire than anything else. It was supposed to be on the air for five seconds. When the engineer switched it off, Fred and I were inexplicably grinning like idiots. I felt relaxed and tingling. Lew Harrison looked as though he'd stumbled into the dressing room at the Copacabana. He glanced at the studio clock, appalled. The monotonous hiss had been on the air for five minutes! If the engineer's cuff hadn't accidentally caught on the switch, it might be on yet. Fred laughed nervously, and Lew hunted for his place in the script. "The hiss from nowhere," Lew said. "Dr. Bockman, has anyone proposed a name for these interesting voids?" "No," Fred said. "At the present time they have neither a name nor an explanation." The voids the hiss came from have still to be explained, but I've suggested a name for them that shows signs of sticking: "Bockman's Euphoria." We may not know what the spots are, but we know what they do, so the name's a good one. Euphoria, since it means a sense of buoyancy and well-being, is really the only word that will do. After the broadcast, Fred, Lew, and I were cordial to one another to the point of being maudlin. "I can't remember when a broadcast has been such a pleasure," Lew said. Sincerity is not his forte, yet he meant it. "It's been one of the most memorable experiences of my life," Fred said, looking puzzled. "Extraordinarily pleasant." We were all embarrassed by the emotion we felt, and parted company in bafflement and haste. I hurried home for a drink, only to walk into the middle of another unsettling experience. The house was quiet, and I made two trips through it before discovering that I was not alone. My wife, Susan, a good and lovable woman who prides herself on feeding her family well and on time, was lying on the couch, staring dreamily at the ceiling. "Honey," I said tentatively, "I'm home. It's suppertime." "Fred Bockman was on the radio today," she said in a faraway voice. "I know. I was with him in the studio." "He was out of this world," she sighed. "Simply out of this world. That noise from space—when he turned that on, everything just seemed to drop away from me. I've been lying here, just trying to get over it." "Uh-huh," I said, biting my lip. "Well, guess I'd better round up Eddie." Eddie is my ten-year-old son, and captain of an apparently invincible neighborhood baseball team. "Save your strength, Pop," said a small voice from the shadows. "You home? What's the matter? Game called off on account of atomic attack?" "Nope. We finished eight innings." "Beating 'em so bad they didn't want to go on, eh?" "Oh, they were doing pretty good. Score was tied, and they had two men on and two outs." He talked as though he were recounting a dream. "And then," he said, his eyes widening, "everybody kind of lost interest, just wandered off. I came home and found the old lady curled up here, so I lay down on the floor." "Why?" I asked incredulously. "Pop," Eddie said thoughtfully, "I'm damned if I know." "Eddie!" his mother said. "Mom," Eddie said, "I'm damned if you know either." I was damned if anybody could explain it, but I had a nagging hunch. I dialed Fred Bockman's number. "Fred, am I getting you up from dinner?" "I wish you were," Fred said. "Not a scrap to eat in the house, and I let Marion have the car today so she could do the marketing. Now she's trying to find a grocery open." "Couldn't get the car started, eh?" "Sure she got the car started," said Fred. "She even got to the market. Then she felt so good she walked right out of the place again." Fred sounded depressed. "I guess it's a woman's privilege to change her mind, but it's the lying that hurts." "Marion lied? I don't believe it." "She tried to tell me everybody wandered out of the market with her—clerks and all." "Fred," I said, "I've got news for you. Can I drive out right after supper?" When I arrived at Fred Bockman's farm, he was staring, dumbfounded, at the evening paper. "The whole town went nuts!" Fred said. "For no reason at all, all the cars pulled up to the curb like there was a hook and ladder going by. Says here people shut up in the middle of sentences and stayed that way for five minutes. Hundreds wandered around in the cold in their shirt-sleeves, grinning like toothpaste ads." He rattled the paper. "This is what you wanted to talk to me about?" I nodded. "It all happened when that noise was being broadcast, and I thought maybe—" "The odds are about one in a million that there's any maybe about it," said Fred. "The time checks to the second." "But most people weren't listening to the program." "They didn't have to listen, if my theory's right. We took those faint signals from space, amplified them about a thousand times, and rebroadcast them. Anybody within reach of the transmitter would get a good dose of the stepped-up radiations, whether he wanted to or not." He shrugged. "Apparently that's like walking past a field of burning marijuana." "How come you never felt the effect at work?" "Because I never amplified and rebroadcast the signals. The radio station's transmitter is what really put the sock into them." "So what're you going to do next?" Fred looked surprised. "Do? What is there to do but report it in some suitable journal?" Without a preliminary knock, the front door burst open and Lew Harrison, florid and panting, swept into the room and removed his great polo coat with a bullfighter-like flourish. "You're cutting him in on it, too?" he demanded, pointing at me. Fred blinked at him. "In on what?" "The millions," Lew said. "The billions." "Wonderful," Fred said. "What are you talking about?" "The noise from the stars!" Lew said "They love it. It drives 'em nuts. Didja see the papers?" He sobered for an instant. "It was the noise that did it, wasn't it, Doc?" "We think so," Fred said. He looked worried. "How, exactly, do you propose we get our hands on these millions or billions?" "Real estate!" Lew said raptly. " 'Lew,' I said to myself, 'Lew, how can you cash in on this gimmick if you can't get a monopoly on the universe? And, Lew,' I asked myself "how can you sell the stuff when anybody can get it free while you're broadcasting it?'" "Maybe it's the kind of thing that shouldn't be cashed in on," I suggested. "I mean, we don't know a great deal about—" "Is happiness bad?" Lew interrupted. "No," I admitted. "Okay, and what we'd do with this stuff from the stars is make people happy. Now I suppose you're going to tell me that's bad?" "People ought to be happy," Fred said. "Okay, okay," Lew said loftily. "That's what we're going to do for the people. And the way the people can show their gratitude is in real estate." He looked out the window. "Good—a barn. We can start right there. We set up a transmitter in the barn, run a line out to your antenna, Doc, and we've got a real-estate development." "Sorry," Fred said. "I don't follow you. This place wouldn't do for a development. The roads are poor, no bus service or shopping center, the view is lousy and the ground is full of rocks." Lew nudged Fred several times with his elbow. "Doc, Doc, Doc—sure it's got drawbacks, but with that transmitter in the barn, you can give them the most precious thing in all creation-happiness." "Euphoria Heights," I said. "That's great!" said Lew. "I'd get the prospects, Doc, and you'd sit up there in the barn with your hand on the switch. Once a prospect set foot on Euphoria Heights, and you shot the happiness to him, there's nothing he wouldn't pay for a lot." "Every house a home, as long as the power doesn't fail," I said. "Then," Lew said, his eyes shining, "when we sell all the lots here, we move the transmitter and start another development. Maybe we'd get a fleet of transmitters going." He snapped his fingers. "Sure! Mount 'em on wheels." "I somehow don't think the police would think highly of us," Fred said. "Okay, so when they come to investigate, you throw the old switch and give them a jolt of happiness." He shrugged. "Hell, I might even get bighearted and let them have a corner lot." "No," Fred said quietly. "If I ever joined a church, I couldn't face the minister." "So we give him a jolt," Lew said brightly. "No," Fred said. "Sony." "Okay," Lew said, rising and pacing the floor. "I was prepared for that. I've got an alternative, and this one's strictly legitimate. We'll make a little amplifier with a transmitter and an aerial on it. Shouldn't cost over fifty bucks to make, so we'd price it in the range of the common man—five hundred bucks, say. We make arrangements with the phone company to pipe signals from your antenna right into the homes of people with these sets. The sets take the signal from the phone line, amplify it, and broadcast it through the houses to make everybody in them happy. See? Instead of turning on the radio or television, everybody's going to want to turn on the happiness. No casts, no stage sets, no expensive cameras—no nothing but that hiss." "We could call it the euphoriaphone," I suggested, "or 'euphio' for short." 'That's great, that's great!" Lew said. "What do you say, Doc?" "I don't know." Fred looked worried. "This sort of thing is out of my line." "We[I2] all have to recognize our limitations, Doc," Lew said expansively. "I'll handle the business end, and you handle the technical end." He made a motion as though to put on his coat. "Or maybe you don't want to be a millionaire?" "Oh, yes, yes indeed I do," Fred said quickly. "Yes indeed." "All righty," Lew said, dusting his palms, "the first thing we've gotta do is build one of the sets and test her." This part of it was down Fred's alley, and I could see the problem interested him. "It's really a pretty simple gadget," he said. "I suppose we could throw one together and run a test out here next week." The first test of the euphoriaphone, or euphio, took place in Fred Bockman's living room on a Saturday afternoon, five days after Fred's and Lew's sensational radio broadcast. There were six guinea pigs—Lew, Fred and his wife Marion, myself, my wife Susan, and my son Eddie. The Bockmans had arranged chairs in a circle around a card table, on which rested a gray steel box. Protruding from the box was a long buggy whip aerial that scraped the ceiling. While Fred fussed with the box, the rest of us made nervous small talk over sandwiches and beer. Eddie, of course, wasn't drinking beer, though he was badly in need of a sedative. He was annoyed at having been brought out to the farm instead of to a ball game, and was threatening to take it out on the Bockmans' Early American furnishings. He was playing a spirited game of flies and grounders with himself near the French doors, using a dead tennis ball and a poker. "Eddie," Susan said for the tenth time, "please stop." "It's under control, under control," Eddie said disdainfully, playing the ball off four walls and catching it with one hand. Marion, who vents her maternal instincts on her immaculate furnishings, couldn't hide her distress at Eddie's turning the place into a gymnasium. Lew, in his way, was trying to calm her. "Let him wreck the dump," Lew said. "You'll be moving into a palace one of these days." "It's ready," Fred said softly. We looked at him with queasy bravery. Fred plugged two jacks from the phone line into the gray box. This was the direct line to his antenna on the campus, and clockwork would keep the antenna fixed on one of the mysterious voids in the sky —the most potent of Bockman's Euphoria. He plugged a cord from the box into an electrical outlet in the baseboard, and rested his hand on a switch. "Ready?" "Don't, Fred!" I said. I was scared stiff. "Turn it on, turn it on," Lew said. "We wouldn't have the telephone today if Bell hadn't had the guts to call somebody up." "I’ll stand right here by the switch, ready to flick her off if something goes sour," Fred said reassuringly. There was a click, a hum, and the euphio was on. A deep, unanimous sigh filled the room. The poker slipped from Eddie's hands. He moved across the room in a stately sort of waltz, knelt by his mother, and laid his head in her lap. Fred drifted away from his post, humming, his eyes half closed. Lew Harrison was the first to speak, continuing his conversation with Marion. "But who cares for material wealth?" he asked earnestly. He turned to Susan for confirmation. "Uh-uh," said Susan, shaking her head dreamily. She put her arms around Lew, and kissed him for about five minutes. "Say," I said, patting Susan on the back, "you kids get along swell, don't you? Isn't that nice, Fred?" "Eddie," Marion said solicitously, "I think there's a real baseball in the hall closet. A hard ball. Wouldn't that be more fun than that old tennis ball?" Eddie didn't stir. Fred was still prowling around the room, smiling, his eyes now closed all the way. His heel caught in a lamp cord, and he went sprawling on the hearth, his head in the ashes. "Hi-ho, everybody," he said, his eyes still closed. "Bunged my head on an andiron." He stayed there, giggling occasionally. "The doorbell's been ringing for a while," Susan said. "I don't suppose it means anything." "Come in, come in," I shouted. This somehow struck everyone as terribly funny. We all laughed uproariously, including Fred, whose guffaws blew up little gray clouds from the ashpit. * * * A small, very serious old man in white had let himself in, and was now standing in the vestibule, looking at us with alarm. "Milkman," he said uncertainly. He held out a slip of paper to Marion. "I can't read the last line in your note," he said. "What's that say about cottage cheese, cheese, cheese, cheese, cheese…" His voice trailed off as he settled, tailor-fashion, to the floor beside Marion. After he'd been silent for perhaps three quarters of an hour, a look of concern crossed his face. "Well," he said apathetically, "I can only stay for a minute. My truck's parked out on the shoulder, kind of blocking things." He started to stand. Lew gave the volume knob on the euphio a twist. The milkman wilted to the floor. "Aaaaaaaaaaah," said everybody. "Good day to be indoors," the milkman said. "Radio says we'll catch the tail end of the Atlantic hurricane." "Let 'er come," I said. "I've got my car parked under a big, dead tree." It seemed to make sense. Nobody took exception to it. I lapsed back into a warm fog of silence and thought of nothing whatsoever. These lapses seemed to last for a matter of seconds before they were interrupted by conversation of newcomers. Looking back, I see now that the lapses were rarely less than six hours. I was snapped out of one, I recall, by a repetition of the doorbell's ringing. "I said come in," I mumbled. "And I did," the milkman mumbled. The door swung open, and a state trooper glared in at us. "Who the hell's got his milk truck out there blocking the road?" he demanded. He spotted the milkman. "Aha! Don't you know somebody could get killed, coming around a blind curve into that thing?" He yawned, and his ferocious expression gave way to an affectionate smile. "It's so damn' unlikely," he said, "I don't know why I ever brought it up." He sat down by Eddie. "Hey, kid—like guns?" He took his revolver from its holster. "Look—just like Hoppy's." Eddie took the gun, aimed it at Marion's bottle collection and fired. A large blue bottle popped to dust and the window behind the collection splintered. Cold air roared in through the opening. "He'll make a cop yet," Marion chortled. "God, I'm happy," I said, feeling a little like crying. "I got the swellest little kid and the swellest bunch of friends and the swellest old wife in the world." I heard the gun go off twice more, and then dropped into heavenly oblivion. Again the doorbell roused me. "How many times do I have to tell you—for Heaven's sake, come in," I said, without opening my eyes. "I did," the milkman said. I heard the tramping of many feet, but had no curiosity about them. A little later, I noticed that I was having difficulty breathing. Investigation revealed that I had slipped to the floor, and that several Boy Scouts had bivouacked on my chest and abdomen. "You want something?" I asked the tenderfoot whose hot, measured breathing was in my face. "Beaver Patrol wanted old newspapers, but forget it," he said. "We'd just have to carry 'em somewhere." "And do your parents know where you are?" "Oh, sure. They got worried and came after us." He jerked his thumb at several couples lined up against the baseboard, smiling into the teeth of the wind and rain lashing in at them through the broken window. "Mom, I'm kinda hungry," Eddie said. "Oh, Eddie—you're not going to make your mother cook just when we're having such a wonderful time," Susan said. Lew Harrison gave the euphio's volume knob another twist. "There, kid, how's that?" "Aaaaaaaaaaah," said everybody. When awareness intruded on oblivion again, I felt around for the Beaver Patrol, and found them missing. I opened my eyes to see that they and Eddie and the milkman and Lew and the trooper were standing by a picture window, cheering. The wind outside was roaring and slashing savagely and driving raindrops through the broken window as though they'd been fired from air rifles. I shook Susan gently, and together we went to the window to see what might be so entertaining. "She's going, she's going, she's going," the milkman cried ecstatically. Susan and I arrived just in time to join in the cheering as a big elm crashed down on our sedan. "Kee-runch!" said Susan, and I laughed until my stomach hurt. "Get Fred," Lew said urgently. "He's gonna miss seeing the barn go!" "H'mm?" Fred said from the fireplace. "Aw, Fred, you missed it," Marion said. "Now we're really gonna see something," Eddie yelled. "The power line's going to get it this time. Look at that poplar lean!" The poplar leaned closer, closer, closer to the power line; and then a gust brought it down in a hail of sparks and a tangle of wires. The lights in the house went off. Now there was only the sound of the wind. "How come nobody cheered?" Lew said faintly. "The euphio—it's off!" A horrible groan came from the fireplace. "God, I think I've got a concussion." Marion knelt by her husband and wailed. "Darling, my poor darling—what happened to you?" I looked at the woman I had my arms around—a dreadful, dirty old hag, with red eyes sunk deep in her head, and hair like Medusa's. "Ugh," I said, and turned away in disgust. "Honey," wept the witch, "it's me—Susan." Moans filled the air, and pitiful cries for food and water. Suddenly the room had become terribly cold. Only a moment before I had imagined I was in the tropics. "Who's got my damn' pistol?" the trooper said bleakly. A Western Union boy I hadn't noticed before was sitting in a corner, miserably leafing through a pile of telegrams and making clucking noises. I shuddered. "I'll bet it's Sunday morning," I said. "We've been here twelve hours!" It was Monday morning. The Western Union boy was thunderstruck. "Sunday morning? I walked in here on a Sunday night." He stared around the room. "Looks like them newsreels of Buchenwald, don't it?" The chief of the Beaver Patrol, with the incredible stamina of the young, was the hero of the day. He fell in his men in two ranks, haranguing them like an old Army top-kick. While the rest of us lay draped around the room, whimpering about hunger, cold, and thirst, the patrol started the furnace again, brought blankets, applied compresses to Fred's head and countless barked shins, blocked off the broken window, and made buckets of cocoa and coffee. Within two hours of the time that the power and the euphio went off, the house was warm and we had eaten. The serious respiratory cases—the parents who had sat near the broken window for twenty-four hours—had been pumped full of penicillin and hauled off to the hospital. The milkman, the Western Union boy, and the trooper had refused treatment and gone home. The Beaver Patrol had saluted smartly and left. Outside, repairmen were working on the power line. Only the original group remained—Lew, Fred, and Marion, Susan and myself, and Eddie. Fred, it turned out, had some pretty important-looking contusions and abrasions, but no concussion. Susan had fallen asleep right after eating. Now she stirred. "What happened?" "Happiness," I told her. "Incomparable, continuous happiness —happiness by the kilowatt." Lew Harrison, who looked like an anarchist with his red eyes and fierce black beard, had been writing furiously in one corner of the room. "That's good—happiness by the kilowatt," he said. "Buy your happiness the way you buy light." "Contract happiness the way you contract influenza," Fred said. He sneezed. Lew ignored him. "It's a campaign, see? The first ad is for the long-hairs: 'The price of one book, which may be a disappointment, will buy you sixty hours of euphio. Euphio never disappoints.' Then we'd hit the middle class with the next one—" "In the groin?" Fred said. "What's the matter with you people?" Lew said. "You act as though the experiment had failed." "Pneumonia[I3] and malnutrition are what we'd hoped for?" Marion said. "We had a cross section of America in this room, and we made every last person happy," Lew said. "Not for just an hour, not for just a day, but for two days without a break." He arose reverently from his chair. "So what we do to keep it from killing the euphio fans is to have the thing turned on and off with clockwork, see? The owner sets it so it'll go on just as he comes home from work, then it'll go off again while he eats supper; then it goes on after supper, off again when it's bedtime; on again after breakfast, off when it's time to go to work, then on again for the wife and kids." He ran his hands through his hair and rolled his eyes. "And the selling points—my God, the selling points! No expensive toys for the kids. For the price of a trip to the movies, people can buy thirty hours of euphio. For the price of a fifth of whisky, they can buy sixty hours of euphio!" "Or a big family bottle of potassium cyanide," Fred said. "Don't you see it?" Lew said incredulously. "It'll bring families together again, save the American home. No more fights over what TV or radio program to listen to. Euphio pleases one and all—we proved that. And there is no such thing as a dull euphio program." A knock on the door interrupted him. A repairman stuck his head 'n to announce that the power would be on again in about two minutes. "Look, Lew," Fred said, "this little monster could kill civilization in less time than it took to burn down Rome. We're not going into the mind-numbing business, and that's that." "You're kidding!" Lew said, aghast. He turned to Marion. "Don't you want your husband to make a million?" "Not by operating an electronic opium den," Marion said coldly. Lew slapped his forehead. "It's what the public wants. This is like Louis Pasteur refusing to pasteurize milk." "It'll be good to have the electricity again," Marion said, changing the subject. "Lights, hot-water heater, the pump, the— oh, Lord!" The lights came on the instant she said it, but Fred and I were already in mid-air, descending on the gray box. We crashed down on it together. The card table buckled, and the plug was jerked from the wall socket. The euphio's tubes glowed red for a moment, then died. Expressionlessly, Fred took a screwdriver from his pocket and removed the top of the box. "Would you enjoy doing battle with progress?" he said, offering me the poker Eddie had dropped. In a frenzy, I stabbed and smashed at the euphio's glass and wire vitals. With my left hand, and with Fred's help, I kept Lew from throwing himself between the poker and the works. "I thought you were on my side," Lew said. "If you breathe one word about euphio to anyone," I said, "what I just did to euphio I will gladly do to you." And there, ladies and gentlemen of the Federal Communications Commission, I thought the matter had ended. It deserved to end there. Now, through the medium of Lew Harrison's big mouth, word has leaked out. He has petitioned you for permission to start commercial exploitation of euphio. He and his backers have built a radio-telescope of their own. Let me say again that all of Lew's claims are true. Euphio will do everything he says it will. The happiness it gives is perfect and unflagging in the face of incredible adversity. Near tragedies, such as the first experiment, can no doubt be avoided with clockwork to turn the sets on and off. I see that this set on the table before you is, in fact, equipped with clockwork. The question is not whether euphio works. It does. The question is, rather, whether or not America is to enter a new and distressing phase of history where men no longer pursue happiness but buy it. This is no time for oblivion to become a national craze. The only benefit we could get from euphio would be if we could somehow lay down a peace-of-mind barrage on our enemies while protecting our own people from it. In closing, I'd like to point out that Lew Harrison, the would-be czar of euphio, is an unscrupulous person, unworthy of public trust. It wouldn't surprise me, for instance, if he had set the clockwork on this sample euphio set so that its radiations would addle your judgments when you are trying to make a decision. In fact, it seems to be whirring suspiciously at this very moment, and I'm so happy I could cry. I've got the swellest little kid and the swellest bunch of friends and the swellest old wife in the world. And good old Lew Harrison is the salt of the earth, believe me. I sure wish him a lot of good luck with his new enterprise.