#I did a full coloured version but i ended up liking this mid stage one better

[sernediptitty]

It’s crazy how much just watching spider verse helps buff your art

[poirott]

This is the 2nd part of the "Riddle of the Spinx" interview with Death on the Nile cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos for British Cinematographer November 2020 issue (part 1 transcribed here). The full interview has now been released on the British Cinematographer website. I've included some of the text below!

In Part 2 Zambarloukos talks about shooting with the cast on location in Egypt and doing a particularly complex single shot of them on set, how they did the opening b&w sequence of young Poirot as a soldier, and built sets of Abu Simbel and the pyramids, the use of realtime footage projected on LED screens to make the studio sets look more realistic, what part of the Murder on the Orient Express set they recycled for Nile, etc.

Q: This was shot like Murder on the Orient Express at Longcross Studios with plates filmed on location in Egypt. Was it ever a possibility to shoot entirely on location?

Haris Zambarloukos: The issue is that 1934 Egypt barely exists today. For example, in the 1960s they moved the Abu Simbel temple 300 metres away so that the Aswan Dam wouldn't flood it. So, we built the entire four-storey high Abu Simbel at Longcross, complete with banks of water. The same with Giza and the Sphinx. In the 1930s the Nile went up to the feet of the Sphinx. Now all you see is the concrete expanse of Cairo.

Secondly, it's difficult to shoot complex shoots on a river while floating, taking all the cast down there and scheduling them, on top of ensuring everyone's safety on such a high-profile project.

Our whole design and research went into creating a set. We wanted to build a life-size boat inside and out; not to break it down into small sets but to shoot it as if we were on a boat. That’s a huge undertaking. Jim Clay built an amazing set to scale for the Karnak. It was so big we needed to build a temporary sound stage around it. We also wanted to use some real daylight when we got great sunlight in Longcross and use a little bit of water to basically film the boats carrying guests to the Karnak.

We recycled the railway from Orient and built the boat on that so we could wheel it in from outdoors to indoors. We built a very elaborate lighting rig that you could pull back and see the entire boat in one shot. You could step onto the boat and walk through all the rooms which were all lit for an analogue film f-stop. It was complicated and took most of our planning but I personally don't think you can tell the difference when we cut - even from a shot filmed outside in real sunlight juxtaposed with one in apparent sunlight on our sound stage. It's seamless because we took such great care and a detailed approach to our rig and construction.

In Orient you created some stylish direct overheads of the train carriage. You've told us of the Steadicam dance sequence in Nile. Were there other stylistic flourishes?

Inside the sound stage we went twice round the Karnak with the entire cast all choreographed for this one great reveal of a murder. It was really hard work to do. I understand why it was cut in the edit although they have kept a lot of other single long takes and there are lots of places where you see the whole cast in a single shot.

However difficult you might think setting up a long single is in terms of lighting and operating, it is equally, if not more difficult, to block a scene with multiple actors, keep the audience engaged and choreograph it in a way that is exciting and at the same time reveals things gradually. There's a lot of pressure on a lot of people in shots like that. Everyone's got to be on top of their game. Because we're all so interdependent, it's a domino effect in that the further you go in the take, the bigger the responsibility is for not getting it wrong whether that's the operator, focus puller, the actor saying the final line, the gaffer lighting a corner at just the right time. We always get excited about those shots but also very nervous.

You augmented the studio work with plates photographed on location in Egypt. Tell us about that.

We filmed on the Nile from a boat with a 14 8K Red camera array. We had a 360-degree bubble on top of the boat and two three-camera arrays pointing forwards and backwards as we travelled up and down. We specifically chose areas where modernity wasn’t present (or where it was, we removed it in post) and we also shot plates from the point of view of passengers onboard the Karnak.

VFX supervisor George Murphy edited the footage and stitched the plates together into an essentially very, very advanced virtual reality rig in which I could pan my camera. We did that before principal photography, so we never had to guess a month or so later what to put there. That’s a big help. Most shoots do their plate photography afterwards. It meant I could pretty much place the camera on any deck of the Karnak for any scene and know what the background would be.

As with Orient, did you play back footage realtime on LED screens outside the boat set?

I'd love to have done it live but on Orient we were only dealing with one wagon's windows at a time. It was still the biggest LED set-up ever done to that point, but the Karnak set is 20 time bigger than that. There aren't enough LED screens available – plus it would have been prohibitively expensive.

Instead, I went for a much larger version of a technique I'd used on Mamma Mia which was to hang back projection screens all around the boat – 200m in circumference, 15m high. We used Arri SkyPanels at a distance to create a sky or a part of the background. It could also be converted into a blue screen when we needed to. It meant that if I had a shot looking above the horizon line into the sky then it could be done in camera.

How confident were you of retaining colour and contrast from set to post?

I took stills on the recce and we used those to the create colours with this back projection for our skies. I take prints (not digital stills) so there is no misinterpretation. A still is a piece of paper that you can see. Once something is emailed across and seen by someone watching on another screen the information can get lost.

At the same time there were a lot more checks and balances put in place. We had a projector at Longcross and I watched dailies with (dailies colourist) Sam Spurgeon every lunchtime. With Kodak and Digital Orchard we have a very quick process to convert analogue filmmaking into digital by the next morning. Film is processed at night, they scan at 4am and by mid-morning those digital images are transferred to our dailies suite at Longcross. At lunch we’d watch it digitally projected, having been processed, scanned and graded at 2K.

I check that first and give notes to Sam and those get transferred onto our dailies which is what Ken, the editorial team, VFX and studio team sees. That's a major check. It's me with someone in a room, rather than me talking over the phone which is a big difference. I have a very good relationship with Goldcrest and (DI colourist) Rob Pizzey who also sees things along the way. I supervise the grade at the end. So, there's no need for anyone to interpret anything. It’s a collaboration in which we all look at the same images.

Did you shoot black and white for the opening scene or convert?

We shot colour for a couple of reasons. Although Kodak could manufacture BW 65, there is no lab in the world to processes it. Plus, there’s a certain skill to grading BW using colour negative and the added benefits are that that you can place a grey tone to a colour. For example, you could take red and decide it will look a very dark grey or a light grey, so you get very detailed tones. Ultimately, I get much more control in the DI this way. They were very monochromatic battlefield sets and costumes so it was quite limited in this case. The Germans wore grey and the Belgians wore dark blue and it’s a dark sooty gas-filled battlefield but you could manipulate the blue in the sky a little bit more and certainly manipulate the intensity of people’s eyes - especially if they had blue eyes (which Branagh does).

How did you handle sound sync?

To do sound sync work on Orient we used sound cameras that are twice as heavy as high-speed cameras, so I wanted to develop soundproof housing (blimp) for our camera on Nile. I took the problem to Stuart Heath at BGI Supplies at Longcross. They've made all sorts of props for us before, from Cinderella’s carriage to the furniture on Nile. I told him that I needed it really quickly. All my other attempts had failed. Stuart suggested using a material that they soundproof the interior of helicopters with. He brought a draper in who basically measured the camera as if making a dinner suit for it and quickly made a couple of versions for us. It was very effective and really opened up the Steadicam possibility for us. All from just wandering onto a workshop on the lot and asking a friend if he had any ideas about how to achieve something. In the old days that’s what everyone did – the answer was somewhere on the lot.

Finally, after six films and 14 years working with Ken Branagh, could you tell us what makes your relationship tick?

It is a fantastic friendship. To begin with you must be able to maintain a professional friendship with any cast and crew which is all about doing your very best and understanding where you have common aesthetics and shared thoughts about humanity. Ask what kind of world you want this to be, because that will come through in your filmmaking.

As you say, I've spent years working in close proximity to Ken and we have a mutual affection and admiration for each other otherwise we wouldn't be doing it for so long. He is relentless in pursuit of perfection and in his advancement of storytelling and is inspiring to work with. It means you have to be as relentless in your area of craft.

I think we both like making the same kinds of films. I'm a Greek Cypriot who grew up with Greek myth and tragedy. Ken's love of Shakespeare is legendary. You can easily see the lineage between Aeschylus (the ancient Greek creator of tragedy) that goes all the way to Shakespeare. Perhaps that appreciation for the human condition in its best and worst forms is the tie that binds.

Photo credit: Rob Youngson

Source: britishcinematographer.co.uk - February 4 2021

[tumbling-odyssey]

Games I played in 2020

Just felt like getting my thoughts out on all the games I played this year. I’ve been wanting to do something like this for years but I always let it pass me by. Well not this year! Fuck you laziness! 

I played the first half in 2019 but finished it in 2020 so I guess I'll count it. DQ11 was my intro to Dragon Quest and what a good starting point. I'm not exaggerating when I say this is one of the best traditional JRPGs on the market. Characters, story, combat, it all clicks in just the right way to make a flawless game... until the end credits roll that is. 

I have no idea what happened with the post game but by god does it dive off a cliff. It undermines everything you worked to do in the main plot. The characters act brain dead and it shamelessly reuses events from the main game. Please pick up and play DQ11 but for the love of god just stop when the credits roll.

Doom is a game I knew I'd like. The heavy metal ascetic and soundtrack were right up my alley, but I just never found the time. With Eternal on the way though and having found it on the cheap at a pawn shop I figured there was no time like the present. Needless to say but I was right. I loved everything about this game. The thrill of combat, the screech of the guitars, and the silent take no shit attitude of Doomguy. Make no mistake though, I SUCK at this game. I played on easy but still got my ass handed to me on the regular. But I don't care, I was having way to much fun.

I flipped my shit when this game got leaked at the tail end of 2019. Zero 3 is my all time favourite game. To celebrate this getting announced I went and 100% Zero 3 as I hadn't done it on my current cart, and Zero 3 was still the first thing I played when I got this collection! I love that game to death and I’m glad to have it on modern consoles again. As I was under a bit of time crunch with other games releasing soon I only played 2 other games in the collection Zero 4 and ZX Advent. Until the DS collection those and 3 were the only Zero/ZX games I had so I have a lot of nostalgia for them. 

Zero 4 hold ups better then I remember. Not as good as 3 but a damn solid game with tweaks I honestly wish hit the series before its end. I remember having issues with the stage design and ya it’s not perfect, but it’s far from as bad as I thought. For ZXA this was the first time I beat the game on normal difficulty. For some reason the ZX games have always given me more trouble than the Zero games, so finally beating one on normal was very exciting. Maybe I can now finally go and beat ZX for the first time...

The Mystery Dungeon series rising from the depth to punch all those unexpecting in the face was a very welcome surprise. I had a lot of hype going into this one as I have very fond memories of my time with Red Rescue Team and even more with Explorers of Darkness. And the game lived up to it! The remastered music is great and crazy nostalgic, the 3D models are well used and don't feel as stiff as they do in the core series, and the QOL changes are near perfect... So why did I drop this game like a rock once I finished the main quest? 

Anyone familiar with Mystery Dungeon will know that the post game is the real meat of it. The story is short and all the really cool shit comes in after it's done. But I just couldn't bring myself to put more time in after I finished said story mode. I'm definitely chocking that up to me just not being in the mood then an issue with the game. Here's hoping we get an Explorers DX sometime soon. That will fucking hook me for all it's got.

Second verse same as the first. I loved this game and sucked at it horribly. Out of all the games I've played this year Doom Eternal is the one I want to go back to the most. I was not the hugest fan of some of the changes made and retained a stance that I liked 2016 better. First person platforming has never been a fun experience in my opinion and Eternal did little to change that. And I know this a lukewarm take at best but fuck Marauders!. They are so unfun to fight and ruin the pace. The Marauder in the last mook wave took me so long I was worried I wouldn’t be able to finish the game. But the more I've seen of Eternal after my playthrough makes me think I was being far to harsh. I haven't played the DLC yet either. Mostly cuss I haven't heard great things about it. Gonna wait for the rest of it to come out to see if it's worth getting. Might just replay to whole game at that point to see if it clicks with me better.

This was my second favourite game of the year, and was going to take the top slot until a certain other game came out. Addressing the elephant in room right away, I hated the ending. But I was expecting something like that, I think we all were. I won't let the ending ruin the rest of the game though. Not gonna let 1 segment colour everything that came before it. We have to see how the later parts play out to truly see if this ending was trash or not anyway. 

It took Square over a decade but they finally got an action RPG battle system that works and feels good to play. This may be my favourite battle system in an RPG period honestly. All four characters are a blast and it only gets better the more time you spend with it. Figuring out the nuances of each character’s skills and how to combine them not only with the skills of the others but how to enhance them with the right Materia set. This makes fights thrilling and satisfying when you finally best whatever was giving you trouble. Tis was the best way to bring 7′s mechanics into the modern landscape while also fixing the BIGGEST issue the OG had. The fact every character feels the same aside from Limit Breaks. 

All this on top of graphics that just look fucking stunning, a few glitched out doors aside. Fuck I still feel blown away looking at the characters models (mostly Tifa) and see how god damn pretty everyone is. Also Tifa’s Chinese dress is gift from the Gods and I still haven’t picked my jaw up from the floor after I first saw it.

In my circle of the internet there was a lot of hype for this game. So much so that I ended up buying it to see what all the hubbub was about. I had never played a Streets of Rage game before and my only experience with beat'em ups was playing a LOT of Scott Pilgrim and last year's River City Girls. Turns out Streets of Rage plays quite a bit different and it kicked my ass! So sadly I had to switch to easy to make it through but I still had a fun time with it. 

I started playing mostly as Blaze but once Adam hit the scene oooooh fucking boy. I didn’t play anyone else. There's a deceptive amount of content in this game. You can unlock almost every character from the previous games and all of them rocking their original sprites and moves. If I had more of a connection with this series I'm sure I would have gone nuts on unlocking everything. I stopped after my one playthrough and I was happy with that. Always glad to support a long overdue franchise revival.

To properly talk about P5R I think I need to air a lot of my feelings on the original game and the importance it has to me. You see, prior to 2017 I barely played games, only sticking to specific franchises. AKA Pokemon and Mega Man/Mega Man like games. Until 2016 though I still bought a lot of games. Eating up Steam sales and deals I found at pawn shops. This lead to a Steam library and shelf filled with games I've never touched outside of maybe an hour or 2. So in 2016 when I took interest in the newly released Kirby Planet Robobot I made a deal with myself. I could get the game but I HAD to beat it.  And I did just that, gaining not just a new fav Kirby game but a new rule for game purchases. If I knew I wouldn't beat a game I was not aloud to buy it. Now what does ANY of this have to do with P5 you may ask? Well... almost everything.

 I was immediately interested in P5 when it hit the west in 2017. I loved the 20 or so hours I but into P3 years ago and really liked the P4 anime I had watched around the same time. So of course with all the hype around it I wanted to dive into the series full force with P5. But I knew myself. Putting over 100 hours into a game was beyond me and I had a weird relationship with home console games as I was predominately a handheld gamer. Add in the fact I didn't even have a PS4 and I was convinced P5 would be something I always wanted to play, but never would. So when I went to the mall with a few friends and they showed me that P5 had a PS3 version, I had a dilemma on my hands. I knew I wanted to play it and I now had a way to do so. But doing that would require me to change 2 HUGE hang ups I had with games. Would I being willing to waste 60 bucks with so much working against me? Apparently I was. I immediately started going to town on this game. Making sure I spent no less then 2 hours a day playing NO MATTER WHAT. Which may not seem like a lot but it was to me... at the time.. I also had just moved to my current house, so coming home from my still relatively new job and going straight into P5 was the first real routine I formed during this heavily transitional part of my life. 

I of course ended up loving P5 and put 200 hours into it. As such my outlook on gaming was forever changed. Console games were no longer out of reach and I knew I could handle playing monster length game. I started playing way more games then I ever did before and trying out generas I never thought I would play. P5 is the main reason for this and why I'm able to make a post like this. To actually touch on Royal though? It's unarguably the better version of the game and Atlus learned all the right lessons from P4G. The new characters are great and the added section at the end is possibly the best shit Atlus has ever written. I only wish Yoshizawa joined the party sooner so I could play as her more. 

The release of this really came out of nowhere huh? Wayforward announced it was being made mid way through 2019, then there was its weird half release on the Apple store... and then suddenly it was out! Very little fanfare for this one. Is that indicative of the games quality? Luckily no. Seven Sirens is a solid addition to the series and follows up Half Genies Hero nicely. The game goes back to Shantae's Metroidvania roots and makes a TON of improvements. 

Transformations are now instant instead of having to dance for them (don't worry dancing is still in the game) making the game feel more like Pirates Curse in its fast flow. They also added the Monster Cards which take heavy inspiration from Aria of Sorrow's Soul system. A feature I'm happy to see in any Metroidvania since Aria is one of my all time favourite games. Sadly though the game does not take the best advantage of these improvements. 

Over all the game feels kinda empty. The dungeons aren't super exciting to explore nor are they challenging in any way. And the plot is very repetitive, with each dungeon repeating the same beats. Really this game feels more like set up for a better game down the line. The mechanics are all here and Wayforward has a solid art style with the sprites from Half Genie Hero. Hopefully they capitalizes on this for Shantae 6 and we get the best game in the series.

While it may not have been the most thrilling game, Seven Sirens really put me into a Shantae mood. So much so that I went back to play the 2 games in the series I had never touched. This being the first game and Risky's Revenge. Shantae 1 really is a hidden gem in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, it's the definition of jank, but there's a lot of heart to this game. The sprites are great, the soundtrack is good, and the characters are funny... but it's still on the OG Gameboy and that's a massive hindrance for any game. I'm hard pressed to recommend this with how poorly its aged but I think it's better then it looks. 

Risky's Revenge on the other hand was a game that shocked me by how little it had to offer. I know this game went through a hellish development and what we got was far from what Wayforward planned to make, but it's hard to imagine a world where this was the technical BEST Shantae game. It's not a bad game by any stretch... just a boring one.

For the record my ranking of the games goes Pirates Curse>Half Genie Hero>Seven Sirens>Original>Risky’s Revenge

Sword and Shield are mediocre games at best. I know, real steaming hot take there. I managed to make my Sword playthrough a lot more fun by not spoiling myself on the new Pokemon designs for the first time since Gen 3. Either way, I enjoyed myself enough that I didn't mind playing more of it with these DLC campaigns. Plus I love the idea of Game Freak switching over to this method as apposed to making a third version, so I wanted to support it. 

Klara is a fucking top tier Poke Girl both in design and personality and is probably the highlight of Isle of Armour. GF actually went out of their way to give her multiple expressions to sell her toxic bitch personality and I love every minute of it. She sadly drifts into the background for the second half of the DLC’s story which hurts an already rough section even more. Not more then having to grind Kubfuu all the way to fucking level 70 though! That put a serious hamper on my motivation to finish the story but I pushed through anyway. Having to solo the tower with Kubfuu was at least a fun challenge though, as was the final fight with Mustard. Fuck the Diglett hunt though. Ain’t no one got time for that.

Crown Tundra may be my fav of the 2 though even if there isn't a character as good as Klara in it. The hunt for the legendaries was just pure adventure and I had a fucking blast doing it. The joy I felt when I figured out Registeel’s puzzle put a smile on my face unlike any Pokemon game since I was a kid. The whole Regi stuff was honestly a nice Nostalgia trip to my times with Emerald. The story around Calyrex was enjoyable, even if I still hate its design. Not revealing the horses before release was a good call to as it gave an honest surprise. Having to chase down the Galar forme Birds in the overworld is a great way to evolve the roaming legendaries idea and I hope GF sticks to this. Plus the Galar forme birds are some of the best legendary designs since Gen 5 and I love Chocodos way to fucking much. 

Here we are folks, my GotY. I love Panzer Paladin so fucking much. A combination of mechanics from Mega Man, Castlevania, and Blaster Master? Sign me the fuck up! This game is tailored made for me and I knew I had to play it once it started making the rounds on social media. I'll admit though, I was a bit worried when the the first full trailer dropped and showed the weapon mechanics. Breakable weapons that you have to sacrifice for checkpoints and power ups? I'm not sure about that.... Luckily I was being a complete moron and those mechanics are near perfect. 

I love the set up of each boss being a mythological creature from different cultures. They didn’t just pull the easy ones either. A lot of these things I learned of for the first time here. I love how Grit controls. Using the upward stab as a double jump and being able to pogo off enemies Shovel Knight style just felt great and satisfying. Flame was limited but it made her sections feel tense. She does more damage then you think she could at first glance. Also the only way to heal Grit being to use pods that only Flame could access was a cool idea. 

I am begging you Tribute Games, you have to make more Panzer Paladin games. Slap some new upgrades on Grit and expand what Flame can do and you have an even better sequel  on your hands. Also maybe not have so many 'gotcha' moments with enemy placement. That's really my only complaint about the game. Great music, great sprites, giant robots, unique premise, and a reference to Canadian legends. The ultimate self indulgent game for me.

It felt super out of left field for Curse of the Moon to be getting a sequel. The games fucking amazing but it was really just a tie in for the main Bloodstained product. Not something I expect to get a continuation. Either way I was pumped. If this was even half as good as the original then I was in for a great time. Which held true... cuss this legitimately is only half as good as Curse of the Moon. I still like the game, quite a lot actually. I mean how could I not with a fucking Corgi piloting a Death Train Mech. 

Something was just missing here that never made this click like the first game. Maybe it was the stage design, maybe the bosses, maybe the fact that it's a bit to long. I'm not sure. All I know is I couldn't bring myself to play all the modes like I did in the original. . Stopping part way in to the one where you can get the first games characters. I want to go back some day... I just don’t know when someday is.

This was an announcement I never saw coming. A Gundam Verses game coming to the west? That hasn't happened in the entire time I've been a Gundam fan. I had played a bit of Full Boost on my old roommates PS3 thanks to him having a Japanese account and I played Force on the Vita a few years ago. But to have the latest version fully translated with open servers? Holy hell that's a dream come true. 

Having the open betas every weekend leading up to launch was some much needed fun during this shit hole year. I had a lot of fun just fucking around with different suits and seeing what I could do with 'em. Absolutely trashing two Bael players as the Kapool is a memory I'll keep with me for a long time. Fucking danced on their graves. This gave me some new appreciation for suits like the Baund Doc and Hambrabi, the later becoming a lowkey fav as it was my main.

I've fallen off with the game in the last few months but I definitely want to go back. I hope to start learning the game and take parts in tourneys when cons aren’t death sentences anymore.

It felt like everything in my life was SCREAMING at me to start the Yakuza series. From 2 of my friends playing 0 recently, a youtuber I following live tweeting as he played through the WHOLE series back-to-back, and Yakuza 2 having a run at AGDQ 2020. Plus the constant pleas to play this series you get from following Little Kuriboh on Twitter. I finally broke and picked up 0 in the middle of August. Boooooooooy howdy did I not know what I was getting in to. And no I don't mean the content. I knew Yakuza was a series of wildly conflicting tones between the main story and side quests. What I mean is the length. I legit thought this was gonna be a 20-30 hour game. When i reached hour 30 of my playthrough and realized I wasn't even close to a conclusion, I think I knew I had bitten off more then I was planning. That misstep aside I ended up loving this game and want to play the rest of the series.... I just need to rest up first before I dive into Kiwami 1.

 Let's actually talk about the game for a moment here. Kiryu and Majima quickly clicked as likeable characters to me and I cared about their stories. Combat is fun and the multiple styles are all great.... though both the default styles take a while to get there. The mad rush I felt at the end was fantastic and the last bosses are a joy to fight. Only real complaint is the pacing of the side stories. I loved being able to just stumble into various different events while on route to the next plot objective. But this became less common as the game went on and side stories started getting more tucked away. Also hot take here, the host club mingame is more tedious then fun and I like Kiryu’s business stuff as I could do that in the background. I’m excited to dive into Kiwami and probably Kiwami 2 this year... Though I’m not sure when just yet.

Just gonna say it flat out, I think this is better the the 2018 game. The smaller scale helps in this style of game and Miles just naturally has a better move set then Peter. I'm not sure if they actually tightened up the combat system or if they just threw less bullshit enemies at you but fighting feels so much better in this one. Traversal is better too,  simply because they changed the button for tricks. In the original you have to hold down 2 face buttons to enter trick mode??? In hindsight that was such a bad call. 

Having both the heal and venom powers run off the same meter was a good idea. Making the choice between keeping yourself alive guaranteed or potentially ending a fight quicker/disposing of a problem enemy is super fun. The player having to make small choices like this during combat is what helps it not be brainless. I love all the different venom skills you get. While they all achieve the same thing in stunning opponents, how you achieve that goal is up to you. Do you want to just slug the bastard, throw 'em up in the air, tackle the shit out of them? The choice is yours. 

Only real big complaint is certain upgrades being NG+ locked. I know you want to encourage replays, but this is a shitty way to do it I feel. Also can we retire Rhino for the next game. Man has had 2 shitty boss fights now and I need a break. Between this and Spider-Verse, I'm honestly starting to like Miles as Spider-Man more then Peter.

I got this game more on a whim then anything. I was definitely interested when it was first announced for the west. Vanillaware's beautiful art style in a story about giant robots beating the shit out of Kaijus? Sign me the fuck uuuuuu-oh wait it's an RTS? I had never played an RTS's before, mainly due to the sheer concept stressing me out. So I let it fall to the wayside. The game started coming up again though towards the end of the year with GotY on everyone's minds.  This revived my interest, especially as what I HAD planned to be playing around that time was... well. Cyberpunk. Don't think I need to say much more. Also I had worried for nothing as the Real Time Strategy was not that Real Time. 

This game really lays on the analysis paralysis once you're out of the tutorial. Do you want to fight, do you want to do story, who's story do you want to do, what branch should you follow, how much should you play with this one character? It's very overwhelming at first. I decided to not go ham on just one character and swap around all the time. The twists in this game are equal parts exciting and infuriating. Learning something new always came with the caveat of more questions, or something you knew 'for sure' being disproven. Like when I learned 1 characters was actually 4 separate ones! Anyone that's played knows exactly what I'm talking about. 

Natsuno ended up being my fav and not just because of.... obvious reasons. BJ was cute if unfortunately named and her relationship with Mirua was my favourite in the game. Not that there was much competition except for maybe Ogata and Tomi. I ended up really liking the combat but I can see why RTS fans say it's the weakest part. It's far from complex and I had a winning strat by the third or so real fight. Aka spam turrets and have the Gen 1′s gank all the bosses.

One quick thing I want to share was how I beat the boss at the end of Area 2. The one where Inaba is singing. I had Hijiyama use the limit break skill to bum rush the boss right off the hop. I took out half its health in one hit but Hijiyama’s Sentinel was on death’s door. Only thing that saved him was sending in Amaguchi to blow up a bunch of missiles. Hijiyama took it out on his next attack but lost his Sentinel at the same time. It was a real clutch victory and crazy fucking anime. 

The best way to really describe Carrion is that it's a fantastic proof of concept. Can you make a game where you play as The Thing? Why yes, yes you can. Carrion just needed a bit more tweaking to really bring this concept home and be the A+ game I know it can be. As it is now the game is a bit empty. The level design is super samey and the lack of a map is fucking brutal at points. I know it would make no sense for a blob monster to have a map but somethings you just have to gameify for convenience. The level design must have done something right as even though I was completely lost I still moved from area to area properly. Hell by the time I actually looked up a map I had 1 more item to get and I learned I was one door away from beating the game. 

I love the idea of losing mass as you take damage and gaining more by eating people, but having abilities tied to size was a terrible idea. It just leads to tedium as I have to go and shed myself to the right size, do the puzzle, then of course I'm going to go back and rebuild myself to see if I can do the next segment at full power. Just make it so you can swap between abilities using the d-pad or something. I hope this game gets a sequel just so this sick ass concept can be fully realized.

[asarahworld-writes]

all i want

Prompt: Be careful what you wish for @badthingshappenbingo

Fandom: Z-O-M-B-I-E-S

If she hadn’t had white hair, if monsters didn’t exist, if the moonstone had never fallen to Earth, if she wasn’t a freak dating a zombie…

 “-then maybe you would have the picture perfect lives you want. I wish you could just be happy!” Addison yelled, turning away from her parents and swiping angrily at her watery eyes.  What she needed right now was to get away, to be with Zed, but she knew that leaving at this hour would only make things worse.  She looked at her watch, sighing with exhaustion. She’d see him in about five hours anyway.

 Five hours spent restlessly trying to sleep, scrolling mindlessly on her phone, pacing her room, staring out her window at the full moon as the sky lightened – purples turned pink then orange as the sun rose, bathing the world in daylight.  Six am. Addison got up, shivering as the covers fell away.  She looked down in surprise… she didn’t remember changing into pajamas last night. She looked to see where her clothes from the previous day were...nowhere.  The laundry hamper was filled with monochromatic pastels she hadn’t worn in a month.

 She shook her head and rubbed her eyes.  Shower first, figure this out after.

 Addison let the water flow over her entire body, soaking in the warmth.  She massaged the shampoo into her scalp, rinsed.  She applied conditioner to the ends of her hair, easily combing through its mid-length strands.  She frowned, looking at the hair twined through her fingers.  Blonde.  The exact same shade as her wig.  The same length.  Even the same texture.  Odd…

 She watched the water run clean into the drain and shut it off. Even if she didn’t wear it in public any more, her parents would still be seriously pissed if they found out that she’d ruined her wig by wearing it in the shower.  Maybe it was salvageable.  She reached up to take it off and frowned when she felt herself grab her own hair.  She reached again and again, somehow, managed to miss the wig.  Addison stepped out of the shower, wrapped a towel around her body as to not drip all over the floor, and walked over to the mirror.  It had fogged during her shower and she rubbed at it with the hand towel.  Blonde. The wig still wouldn’t come off. She stared at her reflection in the mirror, so familiar and yet so strange.  She pulled sharply at the blonde hair and winced in pain.

 Addison reached out as if to touch her reflection, watching as it mimicked her perfectly.  She looked into her own blue eyes, her brown brows, every feature she knew so well and then back to the foreign yet familiar blonde hair.

 There was a soft tap at the door.

 “Addison, dear, you don’t want to be late for school.”

 Dear?  Her parents might use informal pet names for each other, but never with her.

 “Yes, Mom.”  She pulled the blonde hair into a bow at the back of her head, picked up her bag and headed for the kitchen where a bowl of fruit was waiting for her.  She ate without really tasting the food, grabbed her lunch money, and started walking.

 Real blonde hair.  Her clothes gone.  Her parents were suddenly much more affectionate.  Addison was so lost in her thoughts that she didn’t notice arriving at school or even opening her locker.  Focus, Addy.  She grabbed her books for first period and looked at her watch.  She’d must have walked faster than usual, class wouldn’t start for fifteen minutes.  However, Zed was usually at the school early, hanging out with the guys or studying/chilling in the safe room.

 She opened the safe room door and called his name.  “Are you here yet?”  Her voice echoed in the empty room and she turned to leave.  The door sealed and she walked down the hall, alone, not noticing that the room wasn’t what she remembered.

 Students filled the hallway and Addison’s heart skipped as her eyes landed on the tall, lanky football star that was her boyfriend. She easily made her way through the crowd, using her short stature to her advantage to get around the other students.

 “Zed,” her voice cracked slightly, betraying her stress, and she froze, looking him over.

 “Um, can I help you?  I really don’t have time for autographs right now, but if you come back during free period I can hook you up.”  With that, he started to push past her.

 Without thinking, Addison grabbed his hand.

 He whipped around, easily breaking her hold.

 “Zed,” Addison looked him over, taking in the pink skin, dark hair, pastels.  “What did you do?”  Her brow furrowed in concern, her hand reaching out to touch his rosy face.

 “Okay, why are you trying to touch me?  Football stars are people too.  Personal space much?”  With that, Zed finally looked down at her, meeting her eyes.  The dark circles perpetually under his eyes were gone, his face was full of colour, his skin even felt warmer.  “Addison.  I thought I told you not to do that in front of people.  You know the deal.  Date the football star, get a bit of the spotlight.”

 “Zed, what are you talking about?  I thought we didn’t care what people thought, remember?  And I thought you were never going to mess with your Z-band again.  What did you do?”  She looked at him, black hair without the slightest tinge of green, skin that didn’t look like he was half-dead, and wearing perfect Seabrook colours.

 “I haven’t done anything I’ve never done before.  But if you’re looking for something different, find yourself a new boyfriend.  I won’t have any trouble replacing you.”

 Addison looked down, not wanting to let this… this person see her cry.  “Where’s your Z-band?”  Addison looked back up to Zed’s face, back to his empty wrist.  She reached for him again, looking for any hint that he was about to lose control.  There was none.  In fact, he still looked far too human.

 “What’s a Z-band?”  He scoffed.

 Addison felt her eyes well with tears and turned to leave, planning on finding Bree, when he caught her arm.

 “If I let you leave like that, it’ll give people the wrong impression.  Let’s go chill in the supply closet for a few minutes.”  Not-Zed, still holding her arm, led her to the Safe Room.  Or at least, what should have been the Safe Room. Instead of bunk beds and rations, the room was filled with cleaning supplies and a small first aid station.

 Addison took a shaky breath, trying to calm herself. “This isn’t right,” she whispered.

 “Really?  No shit it’s not right.  I should be out there with the guys, not stuck in a closet with a mopey girlfriend. I thought you were supposed to be a cheerleader.”

 “Zed,” Addison’s voice cracked, unable to look at the humanized person in front of her.  “This isn’t right.  This isn’t who we are.  This isn’t who you’re supposed to be, something’s happened, something horribly wrong.  But nobody seems to notice…” she couldn’t finish her thought.

 “Notice what?”  He was leaning against the doorframe, tall and dark, and…slightly intimidating.  Who would have thought that Zed would have made a scarier human than monster.

 “Everything’s changed,” she whispered brokenly. Not-Zed said nothing.  “When I woke up this morning, my hair looked like this,” she held it up limply, “all blonde like my old wig.  My parents…it was like something out of a movie.  I come to school early and you’re this…this isn’t you, Zed, not at all.”  She wiped the tears from her eyes before they could fall and continued.  “No matter how much it hurts, my parents are ashamed of me. My hair is an unnatural white color and until now I’ve always worn a wig to keep it hidden.  You’re still the star of the football team, but you’re not human, you’re a zombie.  You… gar-garziga, Zed.  The real Zed.”

 The real Zed, the real Seabrook, her real parents, she just wanted everything to return to normal.  This version of Zed, who apparently was tired of Addison being a clingy and vapid bitch, listened as everything poured out.  The accident at Seabrook Power, the creation of zombies, their first meeting, football, the cheer championships.

 “And all that just ‘changed’ this morning?”  Not-Zed scoffed.  “Things don’t just change overnight because you say ‘I wish’, Addison.  Not even for a cheerleader.”

 “But they did,” Addison whispered, broken.  “This isn’t right, any of it.  This isn’t who we are.”

 “So how did it happen?  I told these floozies I wish you’d just leave me alone, several times a day, and yet that never happens.”

 Whether not-Zed actually cared to know or not was irrelevant. “It was about one a.m.  I had a huge fight with my parents.  I said a bunch of things I knew they hated about me and said that maybe if none of them existed, that they could be happy.  If I had normal hair.  If monsters didn’t exist in this town.  Stuff I said in the heat of the moment.  And somehow, it all came true the next morning.”

 “In your version of the world, monsters exist?”  Not-Zed said incredulously.  “And I’m one of them.”

 “Yeah.”

 They were both quiet for a moment.

 “In your world…Zoey was at the cheer championships last year.” Not-Zed finally looked at her, his eyes hard.  Addison nodded, swallowing hard.

 “She started how monsters finally became accepted in Seabrook. There was only half a squad left and they were falling apart.  Zoey went on stage and started cheering herself.”  Addison smiled at the memory.  “Most of the zombies in attendance joined us onstage and we might not have won the championship for the first time in fifty years, but we were united.”

 Not-Zed didn’t say anything for a long time.  He lifted his head and said hoarsely: “My sister died when she was born, with my mother.  I’ve never told anybody about her before…her name was Zoey.”

 “Zoey is the little sister I never had.  She wants to be a cheerleader more than anything and she loves dogs.  She had a stuffed dog called Zander and at the end of last year, I got her a real dog. A small dog with long white fur she named Puppy.”

 “I don’t know how you found out about Zoey, but this is the dumbest prank anybody’s ever pulled.  Who set you up?”

 “No,” Addison said brokenly.  “Zed, I’m not making any of this up, I swear.  I know Zoey, I love her like she was my own sister.  Monsters are real in Seabrook.  They’re zombies, you’re a zombie.  And we’re… gar-garziga, Zedka.”

 Addison’s heart shattered when he spoke again.

 “Is that gibberish supposed to mean something to me?  We’re through, Addison.”  The finality of his statement hit her in a wave of emotions as he left the closet.

 Addison left school early, telling the nurse she’d gotten her period and felt nauseous.  The nurse agreed to send her home, noting that the walk might do her some good in relieving the symptoms.  Unfortunately, the walk back passed quickly and she was home.

 She let herself in and practically collapsed against the door.

[lovelahela]

❛ 'til death do us part ❜ ─ bloodbound.

⇢ pairing: jax matsuo x dark!mc (maia)

⇢ genre: angst, death

⇢ song: everybody wants to rule the world

⇢ description: they could never understand the power she could culminate. the changes she could make to the world. so be it. no matter. she can always make a better version of them.

⇢ word count: 1743

⇢ notes: should i make a mini-series of dark mc? also i wrote this in one go and didn't review it so i apologise if it sucks and u wasted ur time ajdjsjcjs

        Succumbing to the inviting arms of malevolence that seemed so warm but were so, so cold was one of the most tempting challenges you could face. Even the strongest of wills could take so much before crumbling uselessly, pathetically at the hands of a good-enough lie — in her case, a lie that promised her safety and normalcy even at the hands of a god-like power.

        She stood in front of the kneeling woman — the broken woman, whose face told a thousand tales of love, loss, and absolute pain. She was gazing up at her, eyes shining with a heavy coat of tears, but rather than conveying the emotion of devastation, they showed just how hopeless she truly was. "Do it, then," she had whispered, the tone of her voice hollow. "Kill me."

        Maia could feel the weight of her decision crashing down on her. Eyes were locked on her, questioning and worried, as she stared down the woman who destroyed everything — Rheya Apostolous. She had lost so many at her hands... Lily. She had lost Lily.

        When the scene of her best friend dissolving into ash flashed through her mind, the flicker of unimaginable power and fury grew inside of her. Slowly, her otherwise warm brown eyes began to glow an eerie yellow that reminded them of the sun's light itself. Her facial expression contorted into an appalled sneer. "Good riddance."

        An indescribable sensation coursed through her flaming veins, spreading a comforting warmth throughout her body. It was incredible, how it gave her an extreme sense of utter euphoria unlike any other thing. It didn't matter how much delicious food she ate, how much she indulged in adventurous activities abroad, or how many times she spent passionate nights with Jax — nothing in the universe could compare to this power.

        Maia held out her hand towards Rheya, as if reaching out to her, and the latter immediately began straining against the torture inflicted on her decaying body. All those millennia in which she "graced" the Earth with her presence began to rewind as her hair began to grey from its roots and her smooth skin wrinkled unnaturally while its colour turned to ash. Her blood shot out of her body and floated in the air before two strands winded like a DNA helix.

        And she absorbed them. She took in Rheya's blood, disregarding the sound of her limp body falling to the floor, and paying her full attention to the key to Godhood. It was as though her body crackles with electricity raging at thousands — no, millions of volts, except it made her stronger rather than rot her lifeforce. Her eyes shone bright because she could see the world in a whole new light, like a canvas she could reshape to her will.

        "It's... It's amazing!" laughed Maia, completely astonished with the state she achieved. "I can create life!" She held out her palm in front of her and watched with all but crazed eyes as a flower materialized out of thin air. 

        "My God..." whispered Kamilah behind her, overtook with shock and — this was a very rare occurrence — at a loss for words.

        Maia spun around to face her friends and a grin stretched across her lips almost maniacally. It only faltered for a second when she saw the looks of sheer horror and gradually growing distrust they were giving her. "I can bring back Lily!"

        Just as Maia uttered those words, plagued with delusional and false hope, the delicate flower withered in her hand. She frowned distastefully. "I just need..." She turned her gaze to the thousands of people seated in the opera, dazed and slowly waking up from the psychic hold their minds were strained by. "More power."

        "Maia, this is unnatural." Kamilah's voice was still uncharacteristically quiet and she spoke as if she were tip-toeing on eggshells — except those eggshells would annihilate the world if cracked.

        "No, this is brilliant! I know now! I know what she felt!" Another crazed laugh echoed through the opera, sending shivers down the trio's body. 

        "This is wrong, Maia. Deep down, you know it." She was taken aback at the tone of Jax's voice. Who was he, a weak little spec on what was now her world, to patronize her? She was a force of power. A blessing to the Earth. A Goddess.

        "You don't understand, Jax, I can bring back Takeshi!" Maia spoke with slightly less enthusiasm, words laced with an underlying threat. "I can bring him and Lily back!"

        Once again, she faced the audience, ready to put an end to their miserable little lives, when she saw them start to recover. A few began to point, scream, cover their mouths with terror. Her hands clenched, and her vision burned. Who were these people to look at her like that, to judge her? Tiny, insignificant things. Droplets in a torrent. What were their lives, compared to her pain? What were their screams, compared to her power? They had no idea what she could do. What she could become.

        "I could be a Goddess!" Her voice boomed, bouncing off the walls of the opera, vibrating with raw rage and madness.

        "Maia, no..."

        She whirled around to glare at Kamilah, face contorted with burning fury. "You don't understand! You can't understand!"

        Her anger was no longer targeted at the world, at its injustice and the ego of the petty mortals who inhabited it. It was directed at Adrian, at Kamilah, at Jax. They were gazing at her with such fear, such distrust... like she was still a reckless human rather than a Goddess made flesh. "Just watch," she had growled. "Just wait and see. I can make this right."

        "You sound just like her!" exclaimed Adrian incredulously, facial muscles slack with shock but body tense and ready to fight or flee. 

        "NO!" They flinched at the loudness of her yell. "Rheya was consumed by anger and vengeance. She was foolish and irresponsible, unworthy of this power. I will use it for good."

        Maia looked at them, one by one. "Don't you get it? I can give you everything you've ever wanted! Jax, I can rid the world of injustice! I can topple all systems of oppression, protect the vulnerable and the voiceless! Kamilah, I can bring your brother back!"

        She winced. "Don't... don't go there."

        "Adrian... all you've ever wanted was a better world! A peaceful world! I can give you that! I can give you the world you've always dreamed of." Maia spread her arms wide, beaming, as if to welcome them into her embrace.

        "Not like this. Not with more pain and death." He frowned at her, showing all signs of heartbreak, instilling a sense of offense inside her.

        Her grin faltered yet again. "Death is temporary. Pain is temporary. And if you don't understand that... I can show you."

        She reached out a hand to the crowd again and began to draw their blood, their life, drowning out their screams, when a hand reached out and a touched her shoulder. She looked behind her to see Jax, looking at her with softened eyes and a concerned frown. "Maia, listen to me. This isn't you, okay? You can still come back from this."

        Maia scoffed. "God... I thought you'd understand. You of all people! But you're just like the others. You can't see what I'm capable of!"

        His eyes met hers, and he looked achingly vulnerable and sincere, scared and loving all at once. "You're right, okay? I don't know. I don't know what feeling you're going through right now. I don't know what this power has done to you. But... I do know you're hurting. I've been there. Believe me, I've been there."

        He took a deep, shaky breath. "And I do know how easy it is to give in to that hurt. To let it define you. To become a monster. And I know... I know you're better than that. I know you're amazing."

        Jax extended a hand toward her, cautious yet welcoming. "I love you, Maia... please come back to me."

        She met his eyes yet again, cold and soulless. And with an empty, monotone voice, she said a single word that stroke unimaginable fear in their hearts: "No."

        And with that, shrieks of agony and horror rang in her ears, but no matter. They're only insignificant humans, and they're contributing to a good cause. A great cause. They're giving their lives to being back Lily, to exterminate the evil in the world. 

        "NO!"

        "STOP!"

        Stubborn little things. They'll learn to come around eventually. How could they not? After all, she is their new Goddess. They will bow down to her, or die opposing her.

        Maia cackled, euphoric, as power beyond measure overwhelmed her every sense. The humans were drained of their life, of their blood, as their bodies withered and decayed. Flowers bloomed all over the stage. It was amazing, intoxicating. Then, something else began to form mid-air — blood, muscles, gone. And Lily was reborn from the ashes.

        "YES!" Her entire body tingled like never before at the sensation of such potential swimming in the blood that ran through her veins. But then, Lily withered just like the humans in the seats. And suddenly a stake was protruding from her chest.

        Maia looked sideways to see a crestfallen Adrian, shaking his head continuously in denial. "I'm so sorry, Maia... I had to... I had to... I'm so sorry..."

        The stake melted away into nothingness. She sighed disappointedly. Did he really think that would work? On her? With a simple wave of her hand, Adrian disintegrated and was left fluttering in the wind as specs of grey. No matter, she'll make a new Adrian. A better one. One that will obey and serve.

        She ignored the cries of despair that burst out of her friends' quivering lips and let herself float in the air towards the rooftop. The crisp wind of the night encased her, caressing her practically glowing skin. Maia stared down upon the thousands of humans walking along the streets, laughing, eating, crying, faces illuminated by the faint glow of the towering buildings — each of them a small step forward to reviving Lily and reshaping Earth to her will. All important to achieving Godhood.

        And as she reached out her hand and began to feed, the world was lost to blood and death.

[weepylucifer]

Let’s Go in the Garden - Ch. 7

Peter has a moment. David is just going to go ahead and assume the game is afoot. Thomas has calmed down a bit, but that’s not going to last.

The West End address Guleed had given me turned out to be a theatre house, and not one of the more impressive ones. Posters up front were advertising a musical that I could vaguely remember watching a movie version of once, many years ago on a slow night.

I squeezed the Jag into one of the few remaining parking spaces next to an array of squad cars from Belgravia. It didn’t seem like a good idea to take Mellenby in with me, but although we were relatively close, I still didn’t have time to drop him off back at the Folly, and my suggestion for him to wait in the car had about zero effect. He simply latched on to me as I entered the building.

We were barely past the ticket console and the first team of forensic suits when we were waylaid by Seawoll in all his glory. I wondered what about this fresh corpse necessitated DCI Seawoll being there, then it occurred to me that this was the first notable Falcon-related case that had cropped up since Lesley had shot Chorley and, for all intents and purposes, vanished. If there was even the slightest possibility of her involvement, that meant all hands on deck.

I gave him a nod, and tried to scope out the mood. “Sir.”

“Grant.” He didn’t go out of his way to give me a smile, but his scowl lessened slightly around the corners. Once upon a time, he would now have started bemoaning the necessity of my presence, but he just said, “We’ve got the body backstage, Sahra said it might be something for you. She got Thomas to come in, might already be around here somewhere.”

“Great.” If Nightingale was at the scene, it seemed like the consequences for Jag theft would be imminent and carried out embarrassingly in public. “I’ll go have a look.”

Seawoll had now spotted Mellenby behind me. “And who’s this?”

“He’s...” Nightingale’s boyfriend. “He’s a Falcon-specialist consultant affiliated with the SAU,” I said, pulling this completely out of my bum.

Seawoll looked at me and raised an eyebrow, communicating without words that he wasn’t buying this for a second. “And where did you dig him up?” he asked.

“Enchanted cave,” Mellenby said, stepping around me and insinuating himself into the conversation. “It’s a bit of a long story.”

Seawoll gave him a level glare. He had almost a whole head on Mellenby. “You know, I told Thomas about a thousand times, I don’t love you lot bringing civilians to my fucking crime scenes.”

Mellenby parried with a grin. “A civilian? No one has called me that in quite a while.” He profferred a hand for a handshake. “David Mellenby, Lieutenant First Grade.” He stared right back into Seawoll’s eyes. Next to the bulk of Seawoll, he looked like a bantam rooster. But his gaze held the weight of a world war.

Veteran, I thought again.

With a sort of grunt, Seawoll caved and shook the offered hand. “DCI Seawoll, Belgravia. You’re one of Nightingale’s, then?”

David nodded. “First and foremost.”

Seawoll rolled his eyes a bit.

“Sir, are we looking at a potential situation here with Lesley?” I asked, thinking it high time this conversation got back on track. There was a body somewhere here for me to look at, and vestigia faded awfully fast.

“Eh.” Seawoll made a vague hand gesture. “We can’t dismiss the possibility at this point. But not every weird-bollocks-related crime in London can be Lesley.”

“But it doesn’t hurt to check?”

“Precisely. Now, Sahra can take you out back.”

Like the ninja she was most likely training to become, Guleed materialized at his elbow. She gave me a grin and a nod, and glanced curiously at David.

“You’re magical,” David told her as soon as Seawoll left us to it.

“Thanks,” Guleed replied. “I have a boyfriend.”

David clapped his hands and smiled beatifically. “Such a coincidence. I have one of those too. Even around here, I’m told.” He grew serious again. He got that look in his eyes that said clipboard and that I was beginning to recognize. “I mean to say, you’re magical but not Folly. Who’s training you?”

Guleed looked from him to me. “Who’s that?”

“Nightingale’s boyfriend,” I said. This was Guleed, after all. And I didn’t miss the split-second of David flinching and then perking up and smiling brightly when he remembered it was okay now to openly be Nightingale’s boyfriend.

Guleed raised an eyebrow. “Is that so.”

“I have been with Thomas for a hundred years,” David proclaimed. And of course he would. Of course he’d count the years he’d spent in a magical coma, with Nightingale believing he was dead.

Guleed’s eyebrows threatened to disappear within her hijab.

“He really has,” I explained. “Holdover from his war... stuff.”

“And is this one also magically not growing older?”

Huh. I hadn’t had time to consider that before. “We’ll have to wait and see, I guess.”

“I definitely plan to research this phenomenon in depth,” David said eagerly. “Thomas and his reverse-aging, that is. The way that’s been neglected is a travesty. There’s been no evidence so far pointing us towards the theory that I myself might also be affected, but who knows? I won’t be able to tell until I discover the cause of this... affliction.”

It would be sad, I supposed, in a karmic way, the two of them getting this second chance, and then one of them starting to age past the other. But the world didn’t run on karma. Perhaps if David indeed found a cause and a way to explain it all... but that had to wait for now.

I nudged David’s side. “Can’t wait to get the clipboard out on your boyfriend, can you?”

He sputtered, blushing a bit, obviously not being used to being so publicly teased, but also delighted by it.

“I don’t appreciate that kind of talk,” said a voice in our backs, “nor the bandying about of the term ‘boyfriend’.”

Nightingale had arrived on stage.

Quite literally on stage, too, and this time he had even lowered himself to putting a proper forensic suit on.

In crass dissonance to his words, he reached past me for David and gave him an almost absentminded kiss on the forehead. “Hello, love.”

Guleed stared. Mellenby lit up like a Christmas tree.

“Thomas!” he breathed.

Nightingale gave him that lopsided Captain-of-the-rugby-team grin (which, I would learn later, was very different from his Captain-in-the-war-effort grin). “Welcome to the 21st century,” he said, patting David on the back. David was glowing. “Oh, don’t cream yourself.”

My jaw joined Guleed’s on the floor.

Nightingale turned to me. “You are in a world of trouble,” he announced. “Both of you.”

“What, and no kiss for me, sir?”

I had no idea where that had come from. I wanted to unsay it about as soon as it left my mouth. More than that, I wanted the ground to swallow me whole.

Nightingale, to his credit, only shook his head a little. David in my periphery looked... amused and entertained, and was maybe mentally putting me back on a list.

“We’ll talk about your absconding with my car at a later point. Right now, it seems high time we took a look at our victim.”

----

The victim had been found in a room we were told housed the theatre’s props, all cluttered shelves and musty cupboards full of... things. There were heaps of prop swords, cases stuffed with plastic jewelry, set furnishings piled up in corners. Forensics had already been through, and left their little stickers and varied evidence of their work everywhere. The victim was a white woman, I put her in her mid- to late fifties. She was a tall, slightly corpulent lady of forbidding hairstyle (it was short, wavy, stiff with spray and completely aubergine), dressed in a sort of flowing black blouse sporting a variety of frills and tassles. The cause of death seemed mundane enough: she had taken a blow to the back of the head with a blunt object.

I got to my knees and bent down to inspect her. The vestigia took a few seconds to hit, and they were flighty, scrambled impressions. I felt the sensation of something... convex, and glass, and nice to hold in your hand, and then a piercing sting of... desire, of greed, a consuming need to own something, so manifest and physical that it felt like an actual stab to my stomach.

I looked up. “Something... round. Made of glass, like a snowglobe? And there’s this... greedy feeling.”

Nightingale and David both nodded.

“Yes,” David said quietly. “I can feel them from here.”

“David’s always been good with vestigia,” Nightingale said. “Better than me.”

“Because I listen harder.” It carried the tone of an oft-repeated inside joke. But Mellenby had paled again and was looking faintly ill, trying to cast his eyes anywhere but at the body.

“Um, sir,” I muttered at Nightingale and discreetly inclined my head in David’s direction.

“Yes. Quite.” Nightingale gave me a nod - thank you for bringing this to my attention - and turned to David. “First corpse since Ettersberg, eh?”

David shuddered. The colour was draining from his face even faster now. “Please, don’t name that place!”

“Avoiding the name won’t help with anything. And you really shouldn’t be in here. Why did they let you in here in the first place? Come, let me escort you out.” Nightingale put a hand on David’s back and gently led him to the door. Looking back at me, he asked, “Will you be alright here?”

“Yep.” I nodded. Beyond the initial vestigia check, there wasn’t much I could do with this corpse, anyhow, and I assumed it would quite swiftly be turned over to the tender mercies of Dr. Walid. I had another look around the room, but there was nothing to spot that would have been missed by your regular forensic tech.

There was no trace of the object that would have been used to deal the blow.

----

Our victim’s name was Deirdre Maxwell, 54 years of age, and she had been in charge of the props department at the theatre at which she was murdered.

At the time of the murder, as was later found once Dr. Walid had determined the exact time of Ms. Maxwell’s death, as it had been late in the evening and long past rehearsal had ended, only five people had been in the house with her.

There was Howard Sheen, the theatre director. Ajinder Singh, the night porter and watchman. Darja Polunowskaja, the cleaning lady, Derrick Johnson, the janitor, and Cora Watley, an actress.

I went over their alibis as soon as we got back to the Folly and Nightingale had stopped sternly lecturing us about the Jag theft. The director had been in his office at the time of the murder, busy with bookkeeping. The actress had been in her dressing room going over her script one last time before going home, she claimed. The cleaning lady and janitor claimed to have been at their jobs in entirely different parts of the building, and the night watchman had spent most of the night in his cubby hole observing the front door. None of these alibis were good.

The front door had been under watch by the night guard and had not been entered by anyone up to the time of Ms. Maxwell’s death. None of the windows or skylights showed signs of forced entry or magical tampering. There were back and maintenance doors, each outfitted with a CCTV camera. Guess who had to sort through all the camera footage? That’s right, me, next to the metric ton of Latin homework Nightingale had seen fit to punish me with for letting David elope with the Jag.

The footage, once I was through with it, showed a great load of nothing. Nobody had entered or exited the theatre all evening until all present within the building at the time had gone home, except, of course, for Ms. Maxwell. Unless someone had gotten in in some way that we couldn’t of yet determine - a slim possibility - that narrowed our list of suspects down to the original five.

“A locked-room mystery,” David called it. He was hovering nearby as I sifted through the camera footage in the tech cave, superficially leafing through a new issue of Nat Geo he had badgered Nightingale into getting on the way home, in reality watching me. “I’m assuming you’re going to interview all five of them?”

“That’s none of your concern,” Nightingale reminded him. “Civilian.” A corner of his mouth quirked up as he said it, but still the message was clear. David had no place in the investigation.

“Don’t be like that, Thomas,” David pouted. “Who doesn’t love a good whodunnit?”

“This is a police matter, it’s not for you to play detective,” Nightingale said. “Besides which, the matter of ‘who done it’,” I could hear the scathingly sarcastic air quotes, “will most likely end up being handled by the colleagues at Belgravia. Our concern will be the whereabouts of the magical object.”

Mundane murderer, magical murder weapon, that was Nightingale’s theory. I for one thought it much too early to judge that, seeing as the murder weapon had inconveniently vanished.

But before that could even be determined, it was up to us to get the lowdown on Ms. Deirdre Maxwell.

----

We went to her flat first thing the next morning. The door was opened by a dejected-looking man in his late twenties or early thirties who turned out to be the victim’s son, and introduced himself as “Hey, I’m Logan.”

He was a white man with short, mousy brown hair, dressed in jeans and a dark-gray fleece jacket over a black t-shirt, probably random clothes he’d just thrown on this morning. He didn’t look like he’d gotten much sleep the previous night. He wasn’t looking to be the type who cried and emoted messily all over the place, I noted, but perhaps that would simply come later, once the immediate shock died down. Right now, he looked... dazed, I suppose. A common reaction in the face of sudden, jarring tragedy.

I was assuming Belgravia had already sent someone over the previous day to help him get over the worst of it, but it couldn’t hurt to play up that role. It wasn’t anything I was stellar at, but unfortunately the last several years had equipped me with some experience in the matter. Didn’t mean any of that ever got any easier.

“How are you holding up?” Nightingale inquired. I hadn’t thought he’d volunteer himself to step up for the role of supportive cop, but I was glad he did.

“Like pure shite,” Logan Maxwell stated soberly. “But thanks for asking, guv.”

“We’re going to have to take a quick look around the flat,” I said.

“Why?” Logan Maxwell wondered. “My mother’s been murdered. Shouldn’t you be out looking for the killer? Surely there’s nothing in here for you to find?”

“This is pure procedure,” Nightingale told him. “We’ll be in and out of here within a minute, I’m sure. And of course a highly capable team of investigative forces is looking into finding our perpetrator as we speak. May we step into the kitchen and just have a short talk about all this?”

Ushering Mr. Maxwell on, almost herding him really, into his mother’s kitchen, Nightingale looked round at me and, with the slightest shift of his eyes, ordered me to search the other rooms. I nodded quietly and got to it.

Apart from the kitchen, there were three more rooms branching off the tiny, cramped hallway. A small bathroom (nothing at all special), Ms. Maxwell’s bedroom, a living room and what I assumed had been Logan Maxwell’s room once, but it became fairly obvious that he didn’t permanently live here any longer. Through the thin walls, I could hear Logan ask, “Do you mind if I just...?” to which Nightingale replied, “Oh, by all means, no, let me join you. I recently started again myself.” A lighter clicked twice, and soon I could smell smoke.

The living room was gaudy, chintz and little horrible knick-knacks everywhere. Not the fussy-old-lady sort, not porcelain dolls, you understand, but dream catchers, silk shawls, supposedly healing crystals and the like. It wasn’t anything I thought I had to worry about. Many people felt the need to spruce up their lives with a touch of magic, but most ended up completely off base. A light affinity for crystals wouldn’t do to explain Ms. Maxwell’s falling victim to a magical crime. Above the small TV, there was a cluttered bookshelf mounted to the wall, filled with romance novels and mediocre fantasy and some books that might have belonged to Logan as a kid.

“What is it that you do, Mr. Maxwell?” Nightingale asked politely one room over.

“I’m in insurance, actually, um, just started,” Logan Maxwell replied. There was a strained chuckle. “May I interest you in life insurance, guv?”

I heard Nightingale make a small, understated noise of genuine amusement. “You shan’t make a good living off of me in that respect.”

It seemed a common enough story. The quirky, hippie single mom and the son who rebelled by turning out as mundane and bougie as humanly possible. Perhaps this one’s grades hadn’t been sufficiently impressive for law school. I moved on to the bedroom.

“I’m not a grief counselor, no,” I heard Nightingale say as I opened drawers and found nothing at all of interest. “Merely someone of great personal experience with loss.”

“Good,” Maxwell replied. “I don’t want to be counselled. At least... not right now. The people from the murder team offered, but... I just need to... sit down and let it really sink in.”

“I understand all too well,” Nightingale said.

I opened up the door to what I assumed led into the second bedroom.

There was a little surprise there for me.

“If I may, Mr. Maxwell. Did your mother perchance do anything... unusual, strange, lately?”

“I told the other coppers, no. Not more unusual than always, I mean... I don’t know. Nothing comes to mind, really.”

I could practically see Nightingale’s immaculate, raised eyebrow. “Is that to say your mother did unusual things regularly?”

“Eh. She has this... had this... this dumb hobby of hers. She always... I mean, it’s just this thing she’d do on the weekends. It’s nothing.”

I examined everything and made my way back into the kitchen. Maxwell was seated at the kitchen table, an overflowing ashtray in front of him. Nightingale, cigarette clenched between his teeth, was making tea.

“Um, sir?”

----

“A fortune teller,” Nightingale surmised.

We were looking at the setup in what had once been the second bedroom. Apparently, once Logan Maxwell had moved out, Deirdre Maxwell had remodeled his childhood bedroom to house her fortune-telling operation. There was a small table covered in a large, purple velvet shawl, and a deck of cards and other paraphernalia on that table. There was a ouija board mounted to a wall, another bookshelf on the opposite wall, this one filled with a different kind of literature. Tarot, spirit healing, seances, palm reading, something called ‘green witchcraft’.

She had apparently recorded herself for the benefit of online customers, seeing as there was a laptop and camera rig positioned in a strategic angle to the purple coffee table.

And something... something was missing. I had never been in this room before, but there was a thought nagging at the back of my mind that something that should be here, that I’d expect to be here, was... missing.

“Yeah,” Logan Maxwell said sheepishly, “that was her thing. The Mysterious Madame Delilah. Load of bollocks.”

“You don’t think there might’ve been something to it?” I asked. I stole a glance at Nightingale, who ever-so-lightly made a so-so hand gesture.

“Nah,” Logan Maxwell said. “She always was on about some nonsense like that. Sure, people paid her for it, but... truth be told, I was embarrassed. The Mysterious Madame Delilah,” he repeated. “I don’t think she ever made any actual magic up in here.”

I ambled through the small room, examining the shelf once more, touching a chunky rose quartz, running my fingertips over the purple cloth that covered the table. And then it struck me: the smooth feeling of something under my hand, like glass, and a stab of desire.

Same vestigia, I mouthed at Nightingale.

Now I saw his raised eyebrow in action.

----

“I never met a fortune teller who wasn’t completely bogus,” he told me later, when we were walking back to the Jag. “Besides which, she had none of the literature on actual magic at her disposal. But if the last several years have taught me anything, it’s that there are... more than enough things I don’t know.”

I shrugged. “People come by magic in all sorts of ways.”

“Perhaps so,” he granted.

He had made a cup of tea for Mr. Maxwell, I thought. He had left his card with the man, “in case there’s ever anything out of the ordinary that occurs to you regarding the circumstances of your mother’s death”. He had smoked with him and apparently gotten chummy enough to be mistaken for a grief counselor. That was new, and it had started happening fairly recently, maybe, I suspected, as recently as David’s return. He seemed different, too. Something in his face, in the way he walked. Imperceptible to someone who didn’t know him well, but he seemed... more present, somehow. More involved with the world around him. Like something was waking up, or thawing out, that had been numb and silent for at least as long as I knew him.

The men’s emotional and psychological needs, Mellenby said within my short-term memory, all fell under Thomas’s purview.

Just then, another thought clicked into place, and I knew what I’d been missing, up in the flat earlier.

“No crystal ball,” I said.

“Pardon?” Nightingale asked.

“There was no crystal ball. What fortune teller doesn’t have a crystal ball? And the object we’re looking for is likely something round, smooth, made of glass. I’m sure you can deal a bit of a blow with a thing like that.”

Nightingale gave me a slight smile. “A thought worth keeping in mind,” he said in that tone of his that really meant well done, and he gave me an appreciative sort of look, and I felt... well, I felt looked at. No one looks at you like Nightingale sometimes.

Just then, his phone rang.

He took it from his pocket and, peering at the screen, I could see it said ‘David’, and just that. If I’d been expecting heart emojis, I was cruelly let down.

“Aww,” I said, “it’s the boyfriend.”

“I told you his status is pending,” Nightingale told me sternly. “He’s not presently my boyfriend.” He accepted the call. “Hello, darling.”

If I’d had a drink just then, I would have spat it.

“Mh,” Nightingale said, in reply to something on David’s side. “Yes. You can tell Molly that I’ll definitely be home for dinner. I can make no such promises regarding Peter. Unless...?”

He gave me a questioning look, but I shook my head. I was going to have dinner at Bev’s. What with there being a new case now, things were bound to get busy for me, and I wanted to spend as much time with Bev as I could.

“Ah,” Nightingale said. “Apparently not. Well, I’ll be seeing you shortly. What? Oh. Yes, yes, I love you too, David, goodbye.”

He hung up and gave me a token annoyed look. There was no real force behind it. “Well, that was David.”

I grinned at him. “Cute,” I said. “Did you two make up?”

Nightingale shook his head. “Not in the slightest. What makes you think that?”

I gestured a bit awkwardly. “Well... just now, you said...”

“It was a statement of fact. I am angry at David - inordinately furious, really, at David - but that doesn’t mean I don’t also love him. My anger and my regard for him can coexist.”

That seemed weird to me, but also... so simple. He wasn’t having a big crisis about that part of things at the very least. Nightingale was frighteningly straightforward sometimes, and ready to accept all manner of things. And then I saw how he was trying very hard not to smile as he pocketed his phone, and how he kept looking around the place as we walked to the parking lot where we’d left the Jag with a kind of wonder, like he was seeing London with new eyes - and liking what he saw. And I thought, yeah, they’ll be alright.

And I felt... weird about that.

Not because I still felt horrified by the gay sex thing.

At least I dearly hoped so.

There was something else...

I didn’t know what.

But just then, for a split-second, I had felt almost... annoyed by David calling, because Nightingale and I had been having a moment here goddamn it, and these moments of the two of us just doing something together without there being immediate combat had grown sparse of late, what with Lesley and Chorley. And I’d thought, oh sure, it’s his boyfriend, in an acidic tone that took me aback. I’d wanted... I don’t know. To have Nightingale to myself, maybe, for a few minutes before I’d get permanently busy with Bev and... well... and all that.

“Oh god, I’m having a child,” I said out loud.

“I’m sure you’ll make a splendid parent,” Nightingale said, almost absentmindedly. His eyes were far away, probably resting on some distant, David-related memory. “Don’t forget to apply for paternal leave.”

Apparently his new emotional approachability only extended so far.

----

By the time we got back to the Folly, Guleed had sent me the initial witness testimonials, but I would have to go talk to them all again anyway to check for magic. I decided to start right there at the theatre.

Rehearsals were already in full swing again when I walked in - I found that morbid but the show must go on, I suppose. I swung by Mr. Johnson in the janitorial office first. He was rather helpful in establishing a timeline for the evening: he made a round of the building before going home at about 8 pm, during which he crossed the night watchman, Mr. Singh. Apart from that, he was either in his office or performing maintenance duties in and around the building as-needed. Ms. Maxwell had died at about seven thirty. And sure, Guleed had already asked about this stuff, and included it in her e-mail to me, but it never hurt to ask again. At least one of the people here was holding something back, and sometimes people maintaining a lie got confused.

The cleaning lady reminded me of Varvara, but that was probably just her Russianness and didn’t necessarily have to mean something. While she had all sorts of delightful opinions on the actors, technicians, director, owner of the theatre and about everyone else working here, none of it was precisely helpful. “The place is going to the dumps,” she opined. “I have been cleaning here for five years and haven’t looked at a pay raise in three.”

I expressed my sympathies and, in a lowered voice, she told me, “I hear next year they’re going to put... the Scottish play on.”

Not quite knowing what to do with that, I nodded and left her to her work.

Mr. Sheen, the director didn’t have much time for me, seeing as he was supervising the rehearsal. When I asked him to confirm the cleaning lady’s account of whether the establishment was struggling financially, he said something to the effect of, “Well, we’ve always muddled through. It’s an uncertain business, with the audience, predicting what will land is always a gamble.” When asked about Ms. Maxwell, he said it was a pity, and that she’d been a dependable employee, and not much more.

He seemed stressed, concerned. The opening night of their musical was soon. Perhaps people weren’t going to patronize an establishment where someone had been murdered, he said, like that was the most important thing here. When I went to interview the actress in her dressing room, she said “I play the character of Janet” before telling me her actual name. These people were weird, and not a type of weird I was privy to.

But let’s tell it in order. I knocked, went into the actress’s dressing room, and found none other than David Mellenby there drinking tea with her. They were seated next to the vanity that held all her stage makeup, drinking from mismatched cups, the actress thumbing through her role book as they talked, as though this was commonplace, as though David was even remotely supposed to be here.

“Hello,” he said when he saw me, his face lighting up in a genuine smile. “This is Constable Grant, he’s very capable at his job,” he introduced me to the actress, all gallantry and outdated manners and breezing blithely past the fact that I had no bloody idea why he was here and it was likely to make my day substantially more complicated.

“And what... on earth... are you doing here?” I asked him.

“I thought it interesting to return here,” David said mildly, sipping green tea from a mug that bore the classic “You Don’t Have To Be Mad To Work Here, But It Helps!” slogan.

I took a deep breath, about ready to tell him that he absolutely should not have come, that he was in no way affiliated with this investigation, and that Nightingale would blow his fuse if he heard, and... I didn’t. I snapped my mouth shut again. Discussing this in front of one of the suspects would make both of us look bad, and that wasn’t something I was prepared to deal with.

So I simply also took a seat on the last free chair. “Alright,” I said.”Great. Now, I’d like to ask a few questions, just quickly.”

“I’ve been asked many questions by many policemen already,” the actress said. She had a quiet, melodic voice. “And they kind of need me at rehearsal.”

“I’ll just be a minute,” I replied. “And then I’m sure we’ll all be out of your hair for now.”

The actress sighed. She was a thin white girl, late twenties I thought, who’d recently dyed her hair blonde, maybe for the role. Combined with her dark clothes, it had the effect of making her look a bit disfavorably pallid and drawn. “I guess go ahead.”

I got out my notebook and a ballpoint pen and tossed them at David. if he was going to hang around, he might as well take notes.

“How long have you been an actress here, Ms...?” There. Nice and general.

“I’m engaged for the year,” she replied. “I play the role of Janet. It’s the female lead.”

“Impressive,” I said, because she really seemed to want me to. “And your name was...?”

“Cora Watley, um, Cora Jane Watley.” She shifted a bit in her seat, clasping her tea cup with both hands. “But I already told PC Guleed, and then DCI Nightingale.”

This gave me pause, because I’d had no idea that Nightingale had been through here, but then David caught my eye and stealthily held up... Nightingale’s warrant card, and wiggled it at me by way of explanantion.

Un-fucking-believable.

“I... okay.” I nodded at David, trying to send him a glare that silently communicated that we’d need to address this later. “As I said, Ms. Watley, just one or two more questions for the records.”

“What kinds of questions?” the actress asked. She seemed nervous, but trying to appear unflappable, but everyone here, down to the cleaning lady, seemed high-strung, what with their opening night coming up and the murder (and, yes, very much in that order of importance). Besides which, being a suspect in a criminal investigation is bound to unnerve most people. But did her nerves look like those of a guilty person, or simply like someone hoping not to get caught in the crossfire?

“For example, how well did you know Ms. Maxwell?” I asked.

The young woman shrugged. “Not too well. We’ve talked in passing. But she seemed... nice. Not the kind of person you’d murder, I’d think.”

“But she was... not well-liked here?” I tried.

“No, I do think she was. I don’t know, I’ve only been here for a year. But what gives you that idea?”

I took another deep breath. It felt strange, and tasted strange too, like there was greasepaint coating my lips and tongue. Weird. Was that just the air in here? It smelled pervasively of stage makeup. “Well, nobody here I’ve talked to seemed very... affected by the murder. Was Ms. Maxwell unpopular, or did she keep to herself...?”

Ms. Watley laughed. “Oh, she did not keep to herself, no. I’m certain people are affected. It just needs time to settle in, and with opening night so close, the place is a madhouse anyway. Even murder becomes just one more thing.”

I exchanged a look with David, who looked quizzically back. He was tugging at his cuffs again, even harder than usual.

“Would you have noticed if Ms. Maxwell had done anything... unusual, lately?”

“Unusual how?” The actress asked. There was that feeling again, that strange taste on my tongue when I breathed. Now it was accompanied by a sensation like scratchy cloth on my skin, and a glare of too-warm light from overhead. Were these vestigia? But then what was emanating them? “She had that weird hobby, I don’t know. Something about occultism, not really my thing at all. Do you mean that?”

I put on a neutral face that I hoped looked just like the one Nightingale always did. Gosh, but that glaring light was getting annoying. “Do I mean that?”

“It’s about the most unusual thing Deirdre had going on, I guess. I mean, I don’t know. Two months ago she said she was going to make a business of it, selling... palm readings or something to people online. No idea how that’s supposed to work.”

“This might be tangentially related. Did she ever... bring that hobby of hers into work in any way?”

Cora Watley crossed her arms. “What do you mean by that?”

What did I mean by that? It probably wasn’t the most intelligent way to find out about Ms. Maxwell’s fortune telling business and if it had led to her murder. But David being here irritated me, and these sensations or vestigia that I couldn’t place irritated me, and... maybe it was time to get out of here.

I said my bit, gestured to David to follow, and left the dressing room. We stood out in the hallway leading from the dressing rooms back out to the stage, facing each other.

“Why did we leave?” David asked.

“Why do you have Nightingale’s warrant card?” I rounded on him.

“I took the liberty of removing it out of his jacket.” He didn’t look the least bit regretful of this. “I’m confident I’ll be able to replace it before he even notices it’s gone.”

“I’m... pretty sure that’s a crime,” I said.

David shrugged his shoulders. “I thank you for your discretion, then.”

“That’s not how the police works these days,” I said. “That’s not how I work. You can’t wave at me and make me go away. I’m not the help.”

David had looked like he was going to be rebellious, but now he visibly deflated. He averted his eyes, picking at his sleeve. “I am dearly sorry,” he admitted.

I sighed, willing my irritation to simmer down. “Just what are you doing?” I asked, more calmly. “Nightingale said you are to stay away from the investigation. He was very clear, and he was right. People don’t play detective and crack the code, normally.”

He lifted his chin, suddenly again defiant. “Thomas is not my Captain anymore. Where does he get off, anyway, thinking I’ll obey his every order?”

Was that what this was? Another way to passive-aggressively carry out their lovers’ spat? I already felt exhausted with this. “Look, the way I see it... Nightingale is coming around. You guys might be okay, why go on pissing him off more?”

Not really wanting to stand around waiting for his answer, I started making my way back out to the stage. David was keeping pace with me. “Ingratiating myself to Thomas is not my entire purpose, you know,” he said. “I am a scientist foremost. I can’t not investigate things. There is a conundrum here, and I must know. Knowledge is not gained by adhering to what others say, or by failing to take risks.”

I was tempted to remind him that this here was a real crime scene, not a Sherlock Holmes story with him in the titular role. What did end up coming out of my mouth was, “I heard that was the exact attitude that led you all to Ettersberg.”

As soon as I’d said it, I knew it might have been a bit too much. As I stepped out on stage where the actors and director had since ended their rehearsal and cleared out, I heard nothing but silence behind me and, then, a long, deep, guttural sigh.

“You’re right,” David said, drawing level with me - he was pressing his hands to his temples. “I’m doing all the same things that I did before. I’m slipping back into the same behaviors. Assuming I know better. How have I not learned from what happened?”

Well, what could I say to that?

“I just get so blinkered sometimes,” David continued. “I don’t know why. And Thomas...”

He sighed once more. “Thomas was always the golden boy with all the natural talent. Coasting by when others struggled. I just want to show him that I also can achieve greatly. That I can stand beside him as his equal, not always one step behind playing catch-up. But Thomas never understood my efforts, my work. My research. And then I found friends at Weimar who were genuinely appreciative of my theories, but they took my work and made... well... of course, I told myself, Thomas couldn’t understand why I felt slighted. Why I felt hurt. But he simply looked at the way things were with clearer eyes. Of course 800 human lives were more important than my hurt.”

I gave him a strained smile. “You know what, it might do a great deal in your favor if you told him what you just told me.”

I took another step onto the stage. This environment was bringing back persistent little wisps of uncomfortable memories of the Punch case. Sure, this stage was a lot smaller and less glamorous than the one at the Royal Opera House. But... still. But surely this wasn’t Punch-related, right? We hadn’t heard of him since the incident with Chorley’s bell. I’d have to ask Les-

No.

No.

What the hell, brain? Really, still? After all this time?

“These... weird vestigia in here,” David said suddenly. “Do you feel them too?”

And I did feel them. For a fleeting moment, I felt in full force the glare of the stage lights, the bead of sweat running into my neck down into the collar of my costume, the theater makeup itchy on my face, the exhilaration coupled with stage fright and before me the murmur of the audience, waiting to be entranced, or disappointed, by me.

I shook my head, and was myself again. “Yeah, it’s like... like an actor, ten seconds before their big scene, or whatever.”

“Hmm.” David tugged at his cuffs again.

“We should get out of here.”

----

“Why did we leave?” David asked again, as we were standing out in the street up front of the theatre again. Why indeed? I had felt... dazed, in there, I’d felt a need to leave the building. I was sure he had felt the same.

“I don’t know. But something was extremely strange about that crime scene.”

“We don’t know what we’re dealing with, so we’re... retreating?”

It had a militaristic air to it, ‘retreating’. He had probably intended that. “Let’s call it regrouping,” I said. “Besides, Nightingale was right. Our concern should be the magical object. Guess I’ll have to find whoever would know about a magical crystal ball around which murders happen.”

That was going to be a needle-in-a-haystack search. The exact kind of busy work everyone wishes they could delegate to someone lower on the chain of command. With the Folly’s command structure being as it was, unfortunately I was the person this type of work was delegated to.

David must have seen my displeasure with the situation, because he said, “You could let me do it.”

Really? Hadn’t we had that conversation about five minutes ago? I told him as such.

“Sure,” he said. “But I don’t have anything else to do. I’m going out of my mind with the amount of nothing I’m contributing. Please.”

So he was determined to keep on learning nothing from his experiences. Not exactly stellar practice. But was that really my problem?

“Look,” I said, “You’ll talk to Nightingale, okay?”

[drbriangay]

Hey, so a little bit ago someone asked me if i would do a tutorial type thing on how to achieve realistic drawings and although this would probably fair better as a video my voice is shit and i can make sure i get everything down if i type it out.

I think the best way to do this is take you through one of my drawings? My latest Brian drawing i saved a decent amount throughout it so i can kind of comment on each process of the drawing. For the this drawing i drew it on Photoshop CS5 which is important bc i do utilise a lot of the tools there so if you use smth different then im sorry but im sure there are alternatives! I’m going to talk you through this drawing:

Because i dont use natural skin colours in my drawings i start drawings in black and white because i find that easier to control the tones? and then i can colour the drawing afterwards in whatever colour and play about with it instead of sticking with a colour from the get go. 

I start with painting the entire background a light ish grey because 1) its nice to work highlights and shade into a mid tone and 2) having pure white as a background can be a bit uninspiring? even with my sketchbooks i always make backgrounds before i do anything on them.

I then take a large brush, i use a mid-dark toned grey for this, i don’t like going in super dark super fast, and kind of mark out where everything goes super loosely, precision and proportions really don’t matter at this point, it will probably look bad but that’s fine! you’ll refine it as you go on!  the brush i use for this stage is usually just a soft non textured brush, but i don’t think the brush you use at this point really matters. My drawing will kind of look like this at this point:

I then go in with a smaller brush with a darker colour and kind of refine the face a little bit, i really take in the shapes of the face i’m drawing and try and get a good base to then really work on the shading/highlighting. Again, although this is your base to work on the proportions aren’t super important, it may still look bad but whatever is wrong with it you can just draw right over it to correct it! This is why i try and not give up on drawings even if they aren’t going the way i’d like it to because you can always correct it! my drawings never look amazing when i start them but i like to work into them as much as i can and i usually end up with something i’m proud of! anyways lmao, this is what my drawing will look like at this point: 

This is when i start the proper like working into the drawing with highlighting and shading and things. I also change my brush at this point! Honestly any brush will do but i really like the aesthetic of having a super textured brush, I do sometimes change up my brush every so often but the brush ive been using more often than not is this brush:

Also at this point i try and not use pure black or pure white, if you’re trying to go for a realistic look then i feel pure white n black really don’t factor into a face.I also think if you use more mid tone colours then there’s more of a natural gradient? which looks more realistic i feel. Of course if you like the aesthetic of having a high contrast then go for it! this is just how i personally like to do it.

I know a lot of people work by gradually working the whole face, like do loose highlights and dark tones on the whole face and then refining it but i like to do each part of the face one by one and i usually always start with the nose, this isn’t important lmao i just enjoy drawing noses so it’s what i start with. i think the use of highlight is super important to utilise when drawing the nose because its what suggests form,, this is my drawing will look like at this point:

I do end up darkening the shadow on the right side of his nose and the bottom of his nose but i usually get to this point and then move on and then once i do more ill go back and try and bring more dimension to the drawing.

Also! one of the best tools on photoshop that you can utilise and in some of my drawings it’s my saving grace is the liquify tool. Basically if you do the drawing and get to a point it would be hard to paint over then u can use liquify, as i was doing other parts of the face i realised that the nose was supposed to be a little to the left and the eyebrows had to be lower down so you if you open up liquify you can just click and drag the nose to where you want it to be so:

it’s a super helpful tool that really helps you get the facial features exactly where you need it, i used it a couple times throughout this drawing. I don’t think sai has it but you can use the lasso tool and rotate it or whatever and just draw over the little break it makes in the canvas:

so the next thing i do is the eyes and eyebrows. I’m usually not the greatest at getting the exact eye shape but again, liquify is your best friend. An important thing to note is the angle of the eyebrows in relation to the middle of the nose, Brian’s eyebrows are quite straight so i tried to keep them that way. I also started darkening up the drawing, i didn’t quite go full black, the darkest colour i used is like just off black. This is what i have so far:

Also another important thing to remember is the lighting of the image, in the image the right side of his face is more shadowed so the shadow on the left side of his nose wont be as intense as the right side and things like the bags under his eye on the right side would be slightly more prominent. Also because of the brow bone, theres more highlight on top of the brows and usually a shadow underneath because the brows are more elevated and the eyes are sunken in a lil bit. There will be a lil bit of highlight on the inner corner of the eyes though. 

In the next part of the drawing i just add a little bit to the forehead and cheeks :

I think by this time i had adjusted a couple of things like the angle his face was at was a little bit too tiled in my original draw so i just free transformed it and fixed the angle and the face i think was a little bit too wide so i just pulled it in a little bit. I think another thing to remember that places like the cheeks and forehead wont be pure highlight, especially with like men and older faces there will be more subtleties, with Brian he has highlight on the top of his cheekbones but the highlight is kind of broken up with the line that comes down under his eye and the forehead isnt a smooth bump above the eyebrows, especially with the lighting of the image the highlights get broken up a little bit. 

The next drawing is a little fast forward, i forgot to save in between but ill try and talk through everything:

When finishing up I realised the left eye/eyebrow was a little too high so i liquified that baby up to bring it down just a little bit. Another thing i sometimes struggle with is getting the exact shape of the face and angle of the jaw but you can just keep on drawing on top of it until it looks vaguely right. 

For the lips and mouth i think its kind of just a matter of trying to get a sense of the shape, look at the cupids bow and the length between the top lip and the bottom of the nose and how far the lips come out in relation to the nose as well, i think as well the shadow underneath the bottom lip is usually all you need to suggest the shape of the lip, it doesnt look all too natural if theres like a solid like to show the shape of the lip, the top lip though, because of the way the light is sitting on his face is almost completely shadowed, so the highlight on the cupids bow that goes down to the edge of the mouth is what helps give the mouth form. With teeth because they’re in his mouth so they’re not going to be super bright so i didnt add any highlight to them and just used a dark tone to outline the shape of them at the bottom and used a little bit of shading in between them to differentiate between them. 

For the eyes i usually just leave them without the pupils because it’s my brand but it wasnt looking quite right to me so i added a little outline of the pupils, i didnt want to do the full pupil because i like adding a lil smth interesting in the eyes but i like the way they turned out!  

The jaw you can usually bring out with the shadow of the neck. I didnt really feel like drawing the outfit so i kind of just did a couple of lines so show that he was wearing a shirt with a collar.

 Also for brian because he has so much hair i more often than not just use flat colour for his hair and because his hair is so dark it usually works fine but with people like Roger who has lighter hair is doesnt usually work out well? especially with a more realistically drawn face. I was originally going to keep the entire background that colour but it wasnt looking quite how i wanted to. I coloured first though, and tbh my colouring process really doesnt take me that long, the longest part is just working out what colours id like to use and what looks good with the drawing I've made.

So for colouring i use the gradient tool, you have have a gradient thats two colours that will make your drawings look like this

but recently ive started using the gradients with three colours so the highlighted sections will be a different colour to the base colour, i really like the way this comes out, without any other editing itll look smth like this:

I like to play about with the settings a little bit because i do enjoy the way this looks but it’s kind of a bit overpowering and i think sometimes the details of the drawing can get lost when you overdo it a bit? 

If you go through this itll give you many different versions of that gradient and i like to go through it and see which i feel compliments the drawing

heres a couple examples

The one i ended up going for was dissolve but it was a bit too intense so i turned the opacity down to 57%

which gave it a kind of static feel which i was in to, to finish it up i added a tiny bit to show some shoulders and then i wanted to add a tiny bit of a background so i used a flat pinky colour and put that around his hair and then on top of the background i added a little bit more into the hair.

and added so more vibrant pink into it as well just to spice her up a little bit.

[dailytomlinson]

Louis Tomlinson was left sour-faced after begging Simon Cowell to save his act Armstrong Martins but to no avail.

The former One Direction star lost Armstrong in the first double elimination on Sunday night's result show, as he was sent home - alongside Olatunji Yearwood - following Simon's deciding vote.  

Armstrong was forced to go head-to-head with Janice Robinson in the sing-off and while his mentor championed his performance, Simon chose to ignore Louis' pleas and ended Armstrong's time in the competition.

Robbie decided to support wife Ayda and voted to send Armstrong home, telling the hopefuls: 'Two extreme talents... can't believe either of you are right in front of me right now. I'm going to keep it sweet and simple, the act I'm sending home is Armstrong.'

That left Simon with the deciding vote and Louis gave it everything he could to persuade his boss and close pal to give Armstrong another chance in the competition.

He told the music mogul: 'If we had a meeting tomorrow you would sign him tomorrow... I'm that confident.'

Simon already appeared to have his mind made up, as he ignored Louis' pleas and decided to save Janice's place on the show.

Prior to making his decision, Simon had debated between the two acts. He said: 'I'm going to be honest with both of you - why I think you're both here is even with those save me songs they weren't the right songs for you.

'Armstrong you are interesting, Janice we've lost you since your first audition, you are the better singer but Armstrong you're interesting.'

Janice gave an emotional performance of Miley Cyrus' track The Climb. Ayda showed her full support for the former 90s singer, as she stood throughout Janice's performance and vigorously applauded the hopeful.

Armstrong sang his rendition of Phil Collins' hit True Colours. Like Janice, his performance was full of emotional as the star gave it his all. Louis said he was 'absolutely speechless and gutted' to see Armstrong in the sing-off. He said: 'What I see in Armstrong is an artist, not a contestant.'

Fans watching at home were quick to throw their support behind Armstrong, with many criticising Simon's decision to send him home.

They penned in fury: 'How’s Armstrong in the bottom 3!?

'is there a wild card thing on the show?? bc armstrong really deserves to come back

'Well I think that's enough for today... I'm just so mad because of Armstrong leaving the competition.

'ayda and robbie are always gonna save each other’s acts & simon is just a d**khead who wants to disagree with everything louis says for the fun of it. not fair at all.

Ahead of Armstrong's exit from The X Factor, Olatunji was given the boot as he received the fewest votes from the public.

Ayda seemed devastated to see the star go, as she told host Dermot: 'I'm completely devastated. I just don't get it. He smashed it last night. He brought the house down. He's an incredible human being.'

Olatunji thanked the show for the 'opportunity' as he gracefully bowed out of the series.

Simon, meanwhile, successfully had all his acts sent through to the second week of live shows, as did Robbie.

Danny Tetley was seen eagerly celebrating as he was the second to last act to be put through, while Robbie's boyband United Vibe secured the last spot going forward.

At the beginning of Sunday night's results show, Dermot O'Leary left viewers amused as he joked he doesn't get paid enough on The X Factor.

The show host couldn't resist making a dig at boss Simon, after the judging panel decided to get cheeky with him at the beginning of Sunday night's results show.

Asking Simon which acts could be under threat ahead of the first live elimination of the singing competition, the music mogul referenced X Factor's double axing, as he joked: 'I think two will go tonight.'

Sighing with dismay, Dermot rolled his eyes and vented in response: 'This is what i have to work with for six months of the year,' before adding: 'They don't pay me enough.'

Following the first live show, two acts are set to leave the competition after giving it their all for The X Factor's Greatest Showman themed first week titled 'This Is Me'.

Fans were treated to a special performance from star of the hit movie Kaela Settle, who took to the stage with the track that has made her a household name.

Sharing her advice for the contestants following her performance, she said: 'What you're already doing is enough. Stick to your guns when you forget how good you are you've got people around you to remind you.'

2017 winners Rak-Su also took to the stage to perform their new single I Want You To Freak. Speaking to host Dermot following their performance, they said: 'It feels amazing to perform in front of everybody who helped me and my friends have the 12 months of a lifetime.'

Asked who they were rooting for this time round, Rak-Su picked out Anthony Russell for the 'perseverance' he has shown, auditioning for The X Factor multiple times before reaching the live shows.

The 12 finalists have now been whittled down to 10, with both Simon and Robbie still successfully having all four of their acts left in the competition.

Simon is mentoring the girls; Bella Penfold, 19, Molly Scott, 16, Scarlett Lee, 20, and Shan, 25.

Robbie has the groups; A*, LMA Choir, Misunderstood and Vibe 5.

Following Sunday's double elimination Ayda has Danny Tetley, 37, Giovanni Spano, 33, and Janice, 37, left in her category, while Louis has Anthony Russell, 28, Brendan Murray, 21, and Dalton Andre Harris, 24.

The X Factor came under fire with viewers, with many claiming this series should be the show's last as they hit out at the quality of hopefuls competing in the live shows.

Simon is mentoring the girls; Bella Penfold, 19, Molly Scott, 16, Scarlett Lee, 20, and Shan, 25.

Robbie has the groups; A*, LMA Choir, Misunderstood and Vibe 5.

Following Sunday's double elimination Ayda has Danny Tetley, 37, Giovanni Spano, 33, and Janice, 37, left in her category, while Louis has Anthony Russell, 28, Brendan Murray, 21, and Dalton Andre Harris, 24.

The X Factor's first live show came under fire with viewers, with many claiming this series should be the show's last as they hit out at the quality of hopefuls competing as finalists.

Taking to Twitter, disgruntled viewers penned: 'Surely this is the last series of #xfactor !? Having Robbie and Ada are just scraping the barrel now!' One fan wrote, leading the troops.

Definitely the last series of #XFactor. It’s absolutely on its a**e.

'There was some rubbish on tonight. #XFactor'; 'WTF is this rubbish?'; 'Have to say on the whole #xfactor has been utter rubbish tonight.

'#XFactor this should be the last series simon dont even give a s**t about what his girls sing.' (sic)

X Factor's first live show was hampered with a massive error when the voiceover introduced Danny Tetley as Anthony Russel on Saturday. Nail-biting scenes saw the X Factor contestant stop mid-performance before restarting his song on the live show of the series.

Yet 'tearful' fans praised the singer for not letting the 'stupid mistake' unsettle him when he had to start belting out his vocals once again.However, it wasn't long before the outspoken judges turned on each other during the live show of the competition.

X Factor fans were seething with bosses for silencing Louis Tomlinson's microphone when he fought with Robbie Williams over One Direction on Saturday.

The Let Me Entertain You hitmaker ripped into Louis' former band One Direction when Simon Cowell criticised his group United Vibe during the first live show. Much to the distaste of One Direction's biggest fans, Robbie claimed his band United Vibe were 'leaps and bounds' ahead of the chart-topping boy group.

He asserted: 'You’re leaps and bounds ahead of One Direction. Better place than Take That one month in. These boys are going places.'

But before Louis could speak to defend One Direction, the X Factor bosses muted his microphone without any warning.

Fuming fans rushed to social media to share their frustration that the singer wasn't allowed to respond to Robbie's undercutting comment. The clash started because Simon made a sly dig at former boybander Robbie about United Vibe's image wasn't 'messy' enough for a boy band.

He said: 'This was better than I thought it was going to be. It all looks too stage at the moment. I don't need to tell you Robbie. It works when it's messy and fun.'

United Vibe, who were originally five singers put together as a group by the judges, drove fans wild on Twitter with their own version of former One Direction Niall Horan's song Slow Hands.

Keen to impress his mentor Louis, Armstrong Martins also sang a One Direction hit Story Of My Life when he showcased his incredible vocals.

Elsewhere on the show, Shan showcased her sensational vocals, even though Simon was away during her rehearsals this week and could only support via his phone.

Robbie confessed: 'I'm falling in love with you. You're the kindest woman in here, apart from my lovely wife.'

Ayda responded: 'I'm ok with Robbie falling in love with you. I have a spirit crush on you. I'd have super human power to sing just like that, SO WOULD ROBBIE.'

Olatunji impressed judges when he hit all the right notes with his own song he wrote just ten days ago before performing on Saturday's X Factor.

Back on the X Factor for a second time to prove she deserves a spot in the competition, Scarlett Lee sang her heart out to Aretha Franklin's A Natural Woman. The singer got a standing ovation from all four of the judges following her show-stopping performance.

Acacia and Aaliyah, who are only 14 and 15, put on a quirky performance when they sang Finesse by Bruno Mars and Cardi B.

Louis claimed: 'I love you two as individuals. I was expecting a bit more street than you. In general I was waiting for a little bit more.'

Ayda agreed: 'I totally agree I love you guys. I think you lost something. Too much stuff going on.' Robbie teased Simon: 'He is going through the man-a-pause. And unlike me, I think you can break America.'

Dalton Harris left everyone gobsmacked with his powerful performance of Life on Mars to close the show.

Louis said: 'I was so excited. I showed you off. I can comfortably say that was the best vocal of the night.'

[amplesalty]

Christmas 2020: Day 4 - Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas! The Musical (2020)

On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...

four red rocking horses!

So I probably touched upon this last year whilst inadvertently looking at a bunch of musicals, but it seems the US networks have a thing for churning out at least 1 big special a year around the holidays. I watched A Christmas Story Live last year but they’ve had things like Hairspray, Grease and Peter Pan before. Christopher Walken as Hook? Sold! They seem to share out the responsibility every year so I don’t know what agreement they have going on. This year it was apparently NBC’s turn and they bring us The Grinch. Well, how could I not watch this?

This show actually has some history to it, dating back to the mid 90’s before making it to Broadway in the mid 00’s so it’s not some random thing they slapped together or one of those quirky adaptations of a popular franchise that comes and goes quickly like Spider-Man. Apparently around the late 00’s the US tour had the bad guy from LazyTown in the title role so that sounds like it would have been fun. Going by how over the top he is in that show and the way that the Grinch is played in this performance, it kinda matches.

Which isn’t exactly how I was expecting the Grinch to be characterised. It doesn’t really strike me as the kind of thing that you can adapt to a musical given how surly the Grinch is, I suppose you did get a bit of singing from the inhabitants of Whoville though. In my head I’m imagining the Grinch being the one character who doesn’t involve himself in all this singing and dancing throughout, but becoming increasingly annoyed at all the theatrics going on around him. Kinda like Santa in Rudolph where he’s just rolling his eyes at having to sit through that stupid Elf song.

Which does happen to some small degree, chiefly through Max who is played by the amusingly named Booboo Stewart. That’s just a nickname though, which is good because I feel you’d have to be a pretty irresponsible parent to name your kid Booboo. I wasn’t sure if it was some heritage thing beucase he looks a bit Native American. Actually, what he looks like is Vanessa Hudgens. I must have spent a good wondering they had this one guy playing an older version of Max who serves as the narrator, but then have a woman play the younger version. I did find the humans playing dogs thing a bit off putting at first but I kinda grew to like Max, he’s just so happy and has this naive optimism about trying to win the Grinch round into being more positive too.

But going back to the Grinch’s characterisation, he always seems a little too into the idea of this whole musical thing. I could buy it if he joined in at the end of the show when he’s being redeemed but it’s just really strange to see him singing and dancing in the first place. Plus there’s a few moments where he breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience at home and one part where he does repeated curtain calls like he’s some over the top diva seeking the adulation of his adoring public. I kinda got a little bit of a Jack Skellington vibe in the performance, but that made sense from Jack because he was so bored with Halloween and readily embraced Christmas because it was so different. Maybe that’s whats happening with the Grinch, only it’s something deeply repressed and waiting to come out. The costume and makeup isn’t too bad, certainly prefer it over the Jim Carey live action version.

Which goes the same and then some for the Whos, much less disturbing than the 2000 version with their odd noses and buck teeth. These guys have a much more vibrant and colourful look compared to the older ones though, lots of pinks and purples. The movie seemed much more muted but made it up for it with the faces and wacky hairstyles. At this point though I think I just have an aversion to seeing the Whos in live action.

Continuing with the aesthetics, the sets are something I’m a bit unsure on. They certainly are very crude but I guess they were going with something in keeping with the original illustrations of the Dr Suess book. Plus this is more in line with an actual stage show with everything taking place on one changing set rather than the more extravagant locations seen in something like A Christmas Story Live last year. Everything just feels a lot more low budget in comparison, I guess I’m just used to seeing a jump in quality when these adaptations come TV/cinema, like in Christmas Story or The Producers.

The lighting is really good at times though, makes things very moody when the Grinch is looking down on Whoville from atop his mountain, or very dramatic as he rides his Max driven sleigh into town.

As for the show itself...eh. It’s pretty much entirely done through song and they’re all pretty forgettable. It’s either Grinch songs talking about how much of a loner he is or how he hates Christmas, or the Whos singing how much they love Christmas or other overly sweet claptrap. And much like in some of the musicals I was looking at last year, they lean heavily on the reprisal. Like, one of the first songs you hear is “I Hate Christmas Eve” from the Grinch which extrapolates from the lines in the original “The Grinch hated Christmas! The whole Christmas season! Now, please don’t ask why. No one quite knows the reason.” and the thoughts that perhaps his shoes are too tight. But then the next scene cuts to the Whos where Cindy Lou asks her mum what the deal is with the Grinch, only to get the song near enough repeatedly entirely. They do it again later on with “You’re a mean one, Mr Grinch” too, but that’s still better than that horrible rap version from the 2018 movie.

I don’t know if I’m just picking really bad examples here or what but I’ve not been getting on with these musicals. I know the reprisal is probably a big part of them but it just feels kinda lazy and especially so here given how quickly the songs repeat. This is an odd example sure but my musical knowledge isn’t exactly widespread, but in the South Park movie, you have the Mountain Town reprisal at the end but the original rendition comes right at the start so it serves as closure and bring things full circle. Plus it has different characters performing it and changes the lyrics to reflect how those characters and the story has developed throughout the movie. That soundtrack doesn’t really rely on the reprisal either and has a lot of bangers, Up There being...well, up there. Except they changed it on the CD release and whoever does the performance on that really phones it in. Outside of the Mountain Town at the end, I guess the only other repetition you get is that medley during La Resistance where Blame Canada comes back for a line or two.

I’m not sure where this would rank amongst the different Grinch versions, I feel like I’d have to watch 2000 again to see if it or this were dead last. Having pointed fingers at the characterisation of the Grinch, those odd moments in breaking character did bring some amusement so I probably would have enjoyed it more if they did push things further and made him more campy or push the sardonicism to all the musical numbers. They do tease it on occasion, like when Cindy Lou finds him stuffing their tree up the chimney and starts to sing, to which he says ‘Oh no, it’s a ballad.’ As it is, just stick with the KARLOFF short or the 2018 movie.

[dannsmith95]

Week 10 -  Gibbs Reflective Cycle

Description

Writing and recording my song has been a massive learning curve, I usually get a chord progression or riff I like and record it into my phone. If I get lyrics to it at the time I write down as much as comes out at the time then tend to leave it there, no thought of the context of the song or the audience etc. This time I came up with a riff during guitar practice which I noted on my first diary entry and I really liked the riff so I decided as I knew I would be working towards submitting a complete song for the formative/summative I would develop it into a complete song with lyrics, using the courses resources to expand on my knowledge of my discipline to develop guitar parts for the song, to also consider the audience it could be aimed at based on the sound and feel of the song so I could then write a full set of lyrics to it and work the song out from start to finish. I wanted to get more technical, adding layers to the chorus guitar parts and developing a bridge part that had more of a rock guitar sound. I also wanted to use my amp for the majority of the recording (I was initially unsure as to if I would use the Slate plugins as I liked the solo sound I got in the formative version) I decided to look into more miking techniques and dual miking the amps cap with 2 different styles of mic (dynamic and condenser) to capture a nice full sounding gain tone which in the end I was happy with. I recorded the songs and aimed for around -6db as I had in my head that this was a good recording input level, I watched a lot of tutorials before going into the mixing process to give myself a good base knowledge as shown in my research pdf, starting with the static mix once everything is recorded setting the levels and panning then moving through the mix track by track assessing the sound and tone and noting down what I thought could be altered and adjusted such as EQ on the snare sound to adjust the tone with some added compression to add more punch, softening the drum overhead track to take the harshness away from them also with the vocals some compression to smoothen out the vocals in the chorus parts. I EQ’d the bass to add more mid-range and cut some of the low end so it was less muddy and cut through the mix a little more while still sitting in the lower end. Strategically working through each individual track’s sound adding and taking things away with purpose was my main focus.

Feelings

I was feeling anxious about the process as I knew I wanted to make a big improvement on this version of the song in comparison to the formative version and I knew I had to work completely in line with my action plan in order to get it done with enough time for me to review it before submission. I knew that I had to create a bridge/middle 8 which would change the songs dynamic and feel completely to keep from the song being to much of the same and surprise the listener. I knew I wanted it to have a more rock feel to add sit with the other pop style elements as I feel this is my style and knew this is what it was missing. Once I created the piece musically, I knew I had to write lyrics for it again something I was anxious about however I thought best to record the music side then see what came out lyric wise which worked well. I really enjoyed creating the sound with different mic techniques for the chorus and bridge parts and adding a slightly more gainy sound for those parts also, this gave the song added punch and bite that I also wanted, the subtle chorus on the verse guitar parts I thought worked a treat adding a slight sparkle to the sound. Going into the mixing process was the most daunting although I had watched a lot of tutorial videos as much as it had informed me it had intimidated me to firstly how much of an impact this stage has and how crucial it is but also how complex it seems to be watching somebody do it. However, I had so much fun working through the song track by track and tweaking the tones where I though it needed adding and taking away where necessary. I thought to myself “treat it like tweaking an amp or pedal to find the right sound” once I simplified it a little in my head concept-wise I just had to watch some tutorials as I went a long of how to use certain features of Pro Tools. I found myself lost in the process spending a lot of time looping up parts of the track trying to get it to where I wanted it and then mastering the track to bring the volume up without losing the musical sound. Once the song was done I was unsure about the video editing process, what programme to use, how to piece multiple bits of video together showing all my contributions and then to match this up with the audio. After it was all recorded, I tried to load the different pieces of footage into a free video editing software which did not go to well as the video were jittery and the audio was sipping so matching up the video to audio was basically impossible, so I decided to invest in adobe premiere pro via the creative cloud as students get a big discount on the monthly instalments. This created another problem, learning how to use a more complex video editing software, so began the rabbit whole of premiere pro tutorials however after a few I was away and began to play around with some animation for the starting title and end credits.

 Evaluation

I thought the process went well, I worked to my action plan creating checklists for recording and mixing making sure I was keeping tight to them to leave myself a good amount of time to review the track over before submission so I could take a day out and go back at it with fresh ears and show it to a few others for feedback. I was happy with myself that I managed to get the recording and middle 8 created with words done quicker than I had thought and planned for, so it gave me a few days extra time for mixing/mastering. I surprised myself honestly, I thought I would really struggle but I was having a lot of fun throughout the whole process that I was excited to get started from waking up everyday and not wanting to stop at night. The whole process of piecing the song together then getting the drums back and adding them in and hearing it come together as a full song as if I were creating it with a band was great and so inspiring so much so I have been working on a couple of other songs in preparation for next term. I have learnt so much in such a short space of time I can not wait to see what my next recordings sound like on the back of this one. I think the song sound great in comparison to my formative version not just because it has full band arrangements but tonally however, I will look to re-record the song as my main error was the initially input levels were too high and this does not sit well when compression is involved so that was a massive learning curve. I sent the link to my song/performance video to a couple of friends who are also musicians for feedback regarding the musical arrangements and sound, also my friend’s girlfriend as she is a big music fan and I was thinking about my target audience which should we would be a part of so I wanted some feedback from someone who the song would generally be aimed at and all was positive, my friends thought the riff was really catchy and had the John Mayer vide I got from it and also loved the middle 8 as it was a refreshing rocky element which again I wanted and was so happy that they noticed. Also, one of them said the vocals were a little Ed Sheeran like (I was not at all going for this, but I’ll take it). My friend’s girlfriend said it would be something she would listen to daily and will be doing as she cannot get it out of her head which you could not really ask for more, this is also something my brother and my dad have said, I hear them humming or whistling it sometimes around the house and it gives me a really good feeling. Lastly, I delved into video editing, something just as daunting as using premiere pro was not easy initially but after a few tutorials I pieced the video together with the audio and even delved into some simple animation for the title and credits sections. Once I had played around with the masking for the title animation as I did not want to use a template, I wanted to create my own and the rolling end credits I tried something different a section of the guitar solo. The video is in black and white for the most part as I had to record in different rooms of the house and wanted to clean up the background a bit without using green screen techniques, I felt the black and white was simple and gave it an old tv feel. However, for the section of the solo I wanted to add a bit of colour and movement at the part where I slide down the neck so I added movement to the screen and an offset colour effect which is almost like the blue/red colour effect you would get from a stuttering VHS tape.

Analysis

I think I overlooked the recording aspect in favour of the mixing side of things initially, I thought I had the recording part down and was confident in my mic placement and tones however I did not take into account the input level as I set the input gain to as high as it could be without it clipping which in hindsight after some further research it seems -18db to -12db seems to be a sweet spot for input level to keep the sweetness of the sound and will be something I will be experimenting with moving forward before my next recordings as I found once the mix/mastering had be done the compression seemed to bring out some harsh tones in the chorus guitar parts, snare and lead guitar part. I will also be trying to relax more when I’m playing not worrying to much about how many takes I have to do and just having fun playing so that feeling comes out in the recording (I was so conscious about getting the lead guitar part right note for note that I picked to hard while playing) this is something that I come to notice a lot once the mix had been compressed. I will also be looking to purchase a better pop shield and portable vocal isolation booth, I feel the ‘T’s’ stick out too much in the mix (I have done all I can to take the harshness out of them) the pop shield I have is not very good and is a little small. Also, I want to isolate the vocals to prevent reflections from nearby walls as I work in small spaces mostly and this can be a problem, this will hopefully give me the truest vocal sound to work with when recording. Lastly, I want to look into video editing more to create performance videos for my songs that look clean and good quality and the after some investment into camera equipment potentially music videos as to add to my capabilities for my work portfolio, for use with my band and for my own personal satisfaction. I loved seeing it come to life in video and I also want to begin content creating via YouTube and Instagram in the future.

Conclusion

Moving forward I would set the input levels lower than I did initially as you can also turn the levels up in the mix, this will help to keep the tone and musicality of the instrument sounds when they are compressed when mixing/mastering. I would also make sure I am going into the recording stage with all parts of the song wrote so I do not have the pressure of writing while recording for the most part as I will always make adjustments where I feel they are necessary if they feel right when recording. I will be investing in some better equipment for recording, RODE NT-1a mic with Rode’s pop shield as mine does not cut it and a vocal isolation booth to capture the true vocal sound. Most importantly I will be learning to relax more and not take notice of the amount of takes I am doing as I am still very new to the whole process and it takes as long as it takes until it sounds right, I want the fun of creating my own music to come across in my playing and to capture that in the recording so when it comes to mixing and the end product I am completely happy with my work and what I have created. I have learnt so much about recording and mixing that it has inspired me to record and write more, I just want to create, capture, and release my music as much as possible moving forward. This course so far has been everything I could have ever wanted and needed, it had opened my mind to the possibility of me being a recording artist in whatever capacity that may be and has given me a passion I will continue to develop throughout my lifetime. Also, it has helped me prove to myself I am able to do it and given me the confidence to do so moving forward something I will be forever grateful for. I can know set up my equipment and get a song recorded, mixed and mastered to a point I will be happy with and if not I will know where I need to change it to make it something I will be proud to release to the world and then move on to performing live which will be the next step in my career when I have around 5 songs I can send to people and perform as a short set in local venues.

Action Plan

I would definitely create an action plan, recording/mixing checklist, again. This was something that helped keep me on track and gave me a clear path to follow and also eased my anxieties surrounding my progress as I was always aware as to where I was at. I will be researching further on recording and mixing so I can continue to develop my skills to get better sounding mixes and hopefully get good enough to add this to my future work portfolio as a private recording engineer. I want to develop my video filming/editing skills again to add to my future work portfolio, but I also want to create content for YouTube and Instagram for my band and my own personal channels, I enjoyed piecing my video together and adding the effects/animation bringing it all to life was great and I would also like to potentially do this for other people. I need to improve generally on the whole process, but I feel now I have a great base knowledge of recording music, video and mixing which I can develop on and progress for the next assignments and I am looking forward to it. One thing I have been inspired to do is write more and finish more songs, I have loads of riffs and chord progressions with either no words or some words so I will be going through the arsenal so finish them, something I have already done with 2 songs. I am going to continue to push myself to my limits as I think it brings out the best in me and I have surprised myself in how much I have accomplished in just a few months.

[shorthaircutsmodels]

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In an interview with Ellen Kaley, she stated that she always wanted to cut her hair and eventually got the chance to shoot ‘burning Bodhi'.'Since this drastic change, Kaley has rocked a series of stylish short haircuts that show off her gorgeous features and win our hearts . Kaley Cuoco's short hairstyles are a favorite by 10 people. Kaley Cuoco hair tutorial The Big Bang Theory actress made headlines on social media yesterday for sharing the instant Italian nightmare-delayed activities of jet ex Kaley after discovering that the hotel room instant coffee electric kettle and sachet ready at the so coffeemaker's 34 is a common date of nothing more than a year. Kaley Cuoco curly hair Kaley's Instagram stories were grumpy Central yesterday but that all changed. The actress is back with some fresh content and apparently some fresh coffee. She wears a sleek layered style that shows off her glowing skin and high cheekbones. 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This is the perfect hairstyle for any occasion and needs a strong holding product to keep you going all day or night.

[kierongillen]

Writer Notes: The Wicked + the Divine #29

Spoilers, obv.

Weird issue this, for me.

We've been away for a few months, so this is the reintroduction. As I've said, the second half of Imperial Phase is more constricted in time than the first, so we've got to set all that up. And in terms of my “stuff to do” list, I obviously had a bunch. I also had a structure, which was putting the focus on Persephone and take her through her day (akin to 24). It's about that hangover, juxtaposing the realisation of Sakhmet's actions and the feeling of being sapped and wrecked and regretful.

(I'm writing this with a hangover, oddly, though it's the “last night was amazing!” sort of hangover, so not exactly right.)

Anyway – I have the story goals and the structural means and all that, and basically hit them. But I also didn't do something more than that, despite having plans for a Big Swing issue. I simply choked. I hit the point and just didn't want to write what I had planned. Not even “didn't want to”. Maybe “wasn't capable of putting myself through it.”

As such, even though the issue has gone down well – better than I would have thought – it nags at me. I suspect it was best for me not to do it, and may even show character growth on my part in choosing not to, but it's still mildly annoying. I suspect it'll be my least favourite issue of the arc... but that may have been true anyway. I am particularly fond of the rest of this arc.

Anyway – that ennui and reluctance fed into what the script ended up being: “I'm tired and I don't want to do this any more but what other choice is there?” is very much the mood and the point.

(Why has this gone down well? The character focus, I suspect. We've got 10 main characters, and all of them bar Baph (and arguably Woden) get meaningful scenes.)

Okay – remember back in issue 27 on Phased I talked about how I solved trying to fit all the information in by realising one sub-plot could be excised and then pushed later? That was the Sakhmet/Persephone relationship stuff from this issue and the rest of the arc. We obviously had some of it in 27, but it was the absolute minimum necessary for 28 to make sense and to establish their interactions. I realised the rest would be just as effective if it's stuff Persephone remembers, in terms of the ghosts of their past together. It integrated well with the themes of Waking Up The Night After And Thinking Back.

Jamie's Cover

Was mildly annoying that this was released online just before the last issue dropped, as the blood coated coat is something of a spoiler. But you end up shrugging, because “Sakhmet covered in blood” is very much her look anyway.

Jamie covered this one, due to Matt being away on well deserved holiday.

The breaking of the portrait is the theme for the second half of Imperial Phase, as those who've seen the future covers will know.

Jock's Cover

Very happy to get Jock doing a cover – one of the definitive cover artists of the 21st century, and one of the nicest people in comics. If I ever made a faustian deal, it was made on the floor of Jock's hotel room in Dublin, waking up and picking fluff off my tongue and thinking “you need to earn some money at some point, Kieron.” Jock had let Jamie and me crash on his floor, like the kind and lovely fella he is.

Anyway! Morrigan, in full fashion-sepulcharal. Obviously look at how Jock uses space here, and plays with the logo. That sort of awareness of the specifics of any individual cover is one of the reasons why he is what he is. Lovely stuff.

The 25 Issues In Future Cover

For Image's theme months, we normally say yes or no depending on whether it strikes us as a worthwhile idea in terms of the book – which normally means “do we have a good idea instantly.” In this case, Eric went “A hypothetical cover for your book 25 issues in the future.” Everyone on the team went “Well, by that point the book is over so...”

Original idea was a graveyard, but realised that a monument would be the way to go. It's based on one in Glasgow, which Jamie pointed out as we went past it.

One day I'll get the HUMANITY statue in London into the book, but not yet.

IFC

Deciding what information gets added to these is always an interesting challenge. What matters? What doesn't?

Page 1-2

We're back, and first panel is the Laura narration we haven't seen since issue 11. I miss that girl.

Jamie does this whole sequence so well. Matt too, in terms of mood. I'm always interested in the question Jamie asks me – in this case it was “why the hell is she living in a crappy room in the underworld? She's rich.” And then I have to justify it, which is nice, because it reminds me that my choices actually do have the justifications built in. I suspect I believe I used Bojack Horseman and Sid Vicious in crappy hotel as my references.

Yes, the Lucifer fangirl is cruel and unusual. That Persephone left the party saying she wanted to be alone and wasn't in the mood, and between then and now she's picked up someone else, and someone who reminds her of her old friend says a lot about her. Same as later, when she goes clubbing rather than go home.

Really interesting colour choices in the second panel of the second page by matt – that beige-y red of the cigarette light. And then look at the cold blue/white light when the phone clicks in.

I think a lot about how we hear about news, both personal and world news. Occasionally it's in person, but I think of refreshing the Warren Ellis Forum and then the top post being “Plane flies into World Trade Center” with one unread message or anything else. Just a line of text that is going to change everything.  We do a lot of stuff like that – I find myself thinking of the climax of The Immaterial Girl.

Page 3

I believe I was thinking of Bananarama's Love In The First Degree. Bananarama were my original text pop band. Huge chunks of what I love in Pop Music can be traced back to Bananarama.

Page 4-5

Earliest scene in the current recurrence, I believe... at least in terms of showing gods.

This is in part to make sure the timeline was clear. As Baal's Death Day was revealed, we know when he must have appeared... which was before 2013 Ragnarock which still clearly believed the gods not have returned yet. If this is Baal's first gig, then we know he spent a couple of weeks not doing performances.

The question of when Sakhmet came is open. I suspect I'm never going to actually say it in the script, but I can see Sakhmet's appearance basically prompting Baal into doing his first gig just to make sure he gets to be first. Those would be fun conversations. I could talk about our choices in terms of when we started our story, but there's certainly another version of WicDiv which did everything in straight chronological. If I was writing it for (say) television, I suspect I'd take that route.

(The short version is that in a monthly comic “Gods reincarnating as pop stars” isn't a big enough hook. That's a theme and setting. I needed the specific big plot, which was the Did Lucifer Do It?)

Anyway – party in a Warehouse, but look at what Matt does with the colours here, which are brutal. In an issue with so little joy, this level of pop just shows what the book isn't now.

Page 6

I'm always interested in Jamie's choices for the gods when they're not on stage. Amaterasu's clearly herself, but not quite as loud.

Eight panel grid, which is my standard choice. I suspect I could have pushed either of these half scenes to longer scenes, but I have bigger fish to fry.

Jamie does great stuff here with the body language – being questioned by the police about your girlfriend murdering a bunch of folk when you're hungover can't be much fun, and panel 2 really shows it. And then there's panel 4 – Persephone holding herself as she trudges away. The contrast between that and the detective's words is a lovely bit of irony by Jamie – she really doesn't look like someone who could.

Matt's colouring in the fifth panel is just startlingly wonderful. Just look at that.

Chrissy's ongoing biggest regret is that we did PERSY instead of PERSEY when we first did Amaterasu's nickname for Persephone.

Page 7-9

The formalist in me is a little annoyed that I break the purity of “follow around Persephone on her hangover day” and have a scene which starts before her.

Jamie and Matt always realign their work between arcs, and Jamie is trying some slightly different approaches to the page. I mention, as for me, this scene is where it's most obvious in terms of “something is a little different to usual.”

Return to the I Can't Believe It's Not The Danger Room, introduced in issue 17. Also, Minerva and Baal in Valhalla, which says how seriously they're taking it – neither live there any more.

I smile at the hot pink in panel 4 on page 8. Hot pink! Hot Pink!

The last panel of page 8 took some tweaking – originally Amaterasu didn't have a line, which made it easy to overlook their entrance, which made Persephone appear to come out of nowhere in the next panel. Adding a line to her solves that problem, but does undercut the beat of Baal/Minerva – Baal had a line which we lost, which meant the reader's eye would treat the panel as two moments. The celebration of the two – a gap on the page – and then Amaterasu coming in on the right.

I think Marlboro Shite has been in my notes since issue 4 or 5. Everything eventually finds a home.

(It's so old I was worried I'd used it before somewhere. Baal repeating himself would be terrible.)

Writing that has also reminded me that I had a stress dream last night about a continuity error in Uber where someone pointed out we'd changed names of one character mid-through the story. My subconscious is totally crap.

Page 10-11

I don't use that sort of caption-dialogue transition a lot in WicDiv, even though it's a classic story writer trope. In terms of modern writers, I always connect it to Rick Remender. It's one of his main bridging devices.

More about the gig next issue, but it was important to set up a bunch of stuff here. It's been talked about, but not in this level of specific. Clearly it's going to be a big part of the plot. It's been a while since we've done a big performance scene, after all. Imperial Phase is all about getting to your Knebworth, after all.

God, Cass is almost translucent here. She works too hard.

I really like Persephone's necklace in this page. Just noticed it.

Page 12-15

Highbury & Islington, as seen in issue 5 and returned repeatedly to since then.

I'm still not bored of how we flipped Young Avenger's White Backgrounds As Aesthetic Device when dealing with the Underground. Which probably says everything about the two books.

Obvious setting up key stuff for the Underground we'll need later in the issue on page 12 – namely that we can find to places you've been before, but it is infinite down here.

I believe ”Crap Narnia” was a last minute tweak of the script, but it does please me. The Norns are not have it with these tropes.

Panel 3 on page 13: Awwwwkward.

I have no idea how Jamie keeps on doing these outfits. He's an amazing talent. I should do a comic with him.

The specific choice of “At least 3G” makes me smile, as if Cass is working out what signal is reasonable to get in a magical underworld. “Yeah, maybe you'll lose 4G, but 3G should be good” she thinks to herself.

Yes, nothing at all comfortable in any of this.

It's always interesting to me how Cassandra is as vulnerable as she clearly is. You choose the right places to hit her, and she'll be derailed. Some characters clearly understand that, and others don't.

The last panel is the point where people who read the solicits are thinking “wait – when Kieron said “Wherein Dionysus sits in the darkness for most of an issue, but in an awesome way. Honestly, you'll love it. Also: other stuff.” was he being literal?”

Last panel is great. Full bleed gets the sense of the endlessness of the dark, and Dionysus sitting there, facing it. Art against the void. Our comic in a panel.

Page 16-17

There's more interaction with the public in this issue for a while, but the crowd stuff is where we're trying to show the responses more. Some people are petrified. Some people are still trying to snap her. Some are both.

Yet more fine gods-casual-clubbing looks.

The club they're leaving would be the Buffalo Bar, as seen in issue 18 of WicDiv (since repaired in WicDiv). They're stairs leading down on the right. Also showed up in Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl.

Interesting flashback colour choices here from Matt. Teal and turquoise? Colourists are amazing.

The Bridge Reconstruction sign is 100% period Highbury & Islington sign. We moved dialogue over it to try and signal “I know this looks important, but it's not.”

Deciding which exact euphemism for sex Cassandra should use on 17.1 was some degree of thought. Originally I'd written “Fucking” but that jarred with Persephone's own Fuck. “Banging” was the most comic option – it just speaks to the lack of respect Cass has for Pers/Baph's act.

“I've never said that out loud before” echoes with Young Avengers, of course.

I wanted the hard – mid sentence to set up for a hard-cut to the club. I'm a fan of hard-cut jokes, but doing it as an anti-joke was kind of the point. Let's go home, as I need to OH NO I AM IN A CLUB AND HAVING A SHIT TIME.

Page 18-19

I look at the first page, and smile, in purely a “I love comics” way. When I talk about “Wanting to write comics” versus “wanting to write stories that get turned into comics” way, it's stuff like this I'm thinking of. If I didn't write full script, it wouldn't work like this. Well... not as easily. It's calling for specific effects that Jamie and Matt completely get. Matt bleeding the red in is pretty astounding – that third panel especially. The second one you can think it's just the club lights, but the third is saturating the image, and then it just takes over. And that expression on panel 5. Yay, jamie. Comics!

Thinking this was a pro-pantheon fan club, so the response is different than on the streets. These people are shook up. They mean well. But... yes.

Obvious call back to Baphomet's dialogue way back in issue 7.

I believe the last panel description was “Hmm. I do like coke?”

Page 20

A general sentiment, but dancing with Taylor Swift's Blank Space.

21-22

And we return to where we started.

How good was the coke? Will we ever find out? Stay tuned to The Wicked + The Divine, kids!

(Not the first time Coke has been explicitly referenced in Imperial Phase. It was implied in episode 24, and Woden's memorable nose-piece in 28. Imperial Phase, proggy double albums and all that shit is just connected with that particular drug for terrible people. Year 4 will be less coke-y, hopefully)

And Ruth's surname revealed.

It's odd – when writing this I'd completely forgotten the obvious fact that Persephone is disobeying the television's instructions. I am useless.

That this is the second time that data access in the underworld has been referenced in this issue makes me wonder whether my own router problems were working their way into the comic. All work is autobiographical, but not usually that crappily.

(Don't worry. It's solved now.)

Great Jamie expression on the final panel, of course. The colouring of the section was one of the most debated bits of the book, and I like where we ended.

Page 23

I suspect I've got some pun interstitials which are worse than this ahead, but not many. That would be impossible.

Anyway – back next month for top sitting in the dark adventures.

Thanks for reading.

[muthur9000]

Creature Effects & Character Design

Alien: Covenant 2017

Sir Ridley Scott’s latest installment in the ALIEN franchise.

Odd Studio was honoured with designing and creating the creature and prosthetic effects for Alien Covenant in collaboration with the U.K.’s Creatures Inc.

Together, the company’s merged to become ODD CREATURES for the project.

Alien-Covenant.com (AC): How did Odd Studio and Creatures Inc first become involved with Alien: Covenant?

Conor O'Sullivan (Conor): I’ve worked with Ridley on 3 occasions, Prometheus (we were responsible for the Engineers),

the Counsellor and Exodus. You’d have thought I’d learnt my lesson!

But I enjoy working with him – he’s creative, fun, demonical and loves working with his crew. He decided that he wanted me to head up the Creatures design and Make up effects department – which was a great honour and opportunity.

I had long admired Odd Studios work and after meeting them knew we could work together and make a great team.

Adam Johansen (Adam): I had also admired Conor’s work on projects such as Dark Knight (Heath’s joker make up) and I thought the ‘Engineers’ Creatures Inc did for Prometheus were beautifully done.

Conor contacted myself and Colin Ware October 2015 as he was heading to Australia and was keen to chat about a possible collaboration with Odd Studio on Alien: Covenant. We met and chatted and it quickly became apparent we could work well together. We also have a lot of mutual friends and colleagues both here and in the UK and a partnership seemed to make sense.

AC: How long would you say Odd Studio and Creatures Inc spent working on Covenant?

Conor: We started on the project in November 2015 – and finished on the main shoot in July 2016 – though there were some pick-ups. I am currently working on an installation of the creatures for Madam Tussauds – so I’m still on it.

Adam: Yes, November 2015 was when I officially started and by mid November my Odd Studio business partner Damian Martin joined me along with Colin Ware and Emily James, working on some initial sculptures and finishing tests. Actually, I had a day last week going through Fox storage for some pick ups. So maybe I’ve only just finished working on Covenant as of the start of March 2017!

AC: Compared to your work on other films, would you say Covenant was more challenging or was it a fairly smooth process?

Conor: Ridley is demonical! He likes to stir it up for everyone – the crew the cast, and the producers. He does that because it achieves a greater degree of effective creativity.

It was very challenging. Above all of that, Alien is an incredible high standard to maintain. As Adam said once – it almost made him feel physically sick working on it.

Adam: Alien, was one of those films that to say had a huge impact on me would be a monumental understatement. The world that Giger and Ridley created together, using Giger’s artwork for the creature, instantly became a cinematic classic. Following that legacy and being honoured with working with Ridley Scott on an Alien film was indeed a huge responsibility. That responsibility, combined with the sheer scale of the project and the pace of which it ran, was one of the most challenging jobs I’ve been involved with.

AC: What aspect(s) of creating props for Alien: Covenant were the most challenging?

Conor: For me the design was the most difficult thing. Getting my crew of designers to give Ridley not only what he wanted – but also what he needed. It was a difficult balancing act.

Adam: Personally, the design of the adult Neomorph, in particular the head, was most challenging. There were many, many artists working on the designs for this but nobody was quite getting there. Ridley continually referenced a goblin shark for the mouth/jaw articulation and a sketch form Carlos Haunte. I sculpted many maquettes and full scale heads while Colin Shulver worked on the body in Zbrush with Conor compositing both elements together in photoshop until Ridley was happy. Damian did a gorgeously disgusting paint job and colour scheme to finish it off. When we presented the finished full scale Neomorph head to Ridley on location in NZ he was thrilled. It was a satisfying moment. Generally, the design of most creatures was challenging because again, we were trying to give Ridley exactly what he wanted and also trying to retain a Giger aesthetic.

AC: What aspect(s) of creating props for Alien: Covenant were the most enjoyable?

Conor: Working with Adam and his crew!

I like working on set with the things we’ve made. But otherwise we did a lot of 3D printing and I found this very interesting and productive.

Adam: I enjoyed working with Conor and his crew too. Both our crews worked very well together and it resulted in one big creature crew family, with old friendships re ignited and many new friendships made among our 45 strong crew. Having such a dedicated and talented crew made it all possible and made the experience most enjoyable for me.

This was the first time I’d worked with Ridley and it was a career highlight for me to work so closely with him, especially on set. Be it puppeteering or dressing blood, KY and food onto our puppets/suits/effects with him was an unbelievable experience for me. He really loves to get things in front of the camera and shoot effects/creatures practically and that was an honour to see him in action with our creations.

AC: We know Covenant will feature a variety of Alien monsters, a few of which are familiar to us. Since Ridley Scott teased the return of the Chestburster, are you able to confirm if a practical model of a Chestburster was created and used?

Conor: We designed and made a practical version of the chestburster – Dominic Hailstone came up with the design. It was a simple puppet made in a beautiful glass clear silicone It’s very new. Gonna be controversial!

Adam: I loved the puppet we came up with and Ridley and Dom’s design in my opinion was gorgeous. Greg McKee our head animatronic designer came up with a beautiful little armatured puppet that moved very well. As it’s a departure from the original, I feel it may divide audiences too.

AC: To what extent would you say your practical effects have been paired with CGI? By this I mean, is there an overabundance of practical effects used with complimenting CGI enhancements? Or were most props used un-altered by CGI?

Conor: Hmm, at the point of this interview it’s difficult for us to know what will end up on screen. Everything was built and filmed, with the discussion of cg augmentation etc required for some elements.

Adam: At this point it is difficult to say what is and what is not CG. We made practical effects for all of the creatures and all the make-up effects – even though some of the creatures we had designed were impossible to realize without CG.

Ridley prefers to film everything for real and then use it to dictate lighting, textures and design in CG. It seems to be part of Ridley’s process, making things practically and shooting it to determine how it’ll end up, practical, cg…or both.

Remember - you’d have thought I’d learnt my lesson!

AC: We've heard Alien: Covenant will utilize animatronics as well, for various aliens throughout the film. One of these is the Xenomorph itself. Are you able to elaborate at all on this specific piece?

Conor: The Xeno’s design was one of the impossible creatures to realize practically. But we gave it a go.

Adam: The full scale suit was unlike any creature suit we’ve produced before. I think we came up with something really neat. I still clearly remember the conversation Conor and I had which was a bit like “what if we…”.

It stayed as true to the proportions of the design as much as practically possible I think. A huge bunraku suit/puppet with some animatronic movements in the head/neck by Greg McKee. The life size version was an animatronic puppet attached to an actor (a bit like a Chinese dragon) with animatronic head etc. I started fleshing out the full scale body sculpture and was joined by Dominic Hailstone.

Together we worked on the body and Dominic moved onto the full scale legs and arms. Bradley Simmons sculpted the initial head and face. Later there were some facial tweaks made by myself and Robert Trenton.Colin Shulver was working on the design too in Zbrush. Marea Fowler, our head fabricator did a brilliant job bringing the suits together making it as comfortable as possible for our creature performer, Andrew Crawford. Andrew did an amazing job wearing and performing in the suit, on stilts, in very trying conditions and small on small set environments. Damian, myself and Julian Ledger did the art finishing on the suit and Julian painted all the translucent carapaces.

A smaller, more traditional xeno suit, worn by Goran D. Kleut was requested by Ridley for shots where the full scale suit, which stood over 7.5feet tall would’ve been impossible to use. This was sculpted by Andy Hunt and Colin Shulver and painted again by Damian and Julian.

Conor: The final body design by Colin Shulver was realized towards the end of shooting.

We made 3 practical versions – 1 at life size version (8 ½ feet tall) and another as a man in a suit and a third totally animatronic upper body.

AC: Was an animatronic suit created for the new Alien creature (Neomorph) as well?

Conor: A simple suit was made as well as a separate animatronic head.

Adam: The Neomorph is seen at varies stages of growth. This meant we had to produce 2 versions of small rod puppets, some stand in and vfx reference heads and the adult suit and animatronic head Conor mentioned.

AC: Early rumors suggested the new Aliens in Alien: Covenant would have translucent skin, like the original concept for Giger's Xenomorph. Are you able to confirm if a translucent puppet or suit was created for Alien: Covenant?

Conor: We always use translucency using silicones – wherever we can. The Neomorphs have skin like an old man or a new born bird.

Adam: Yes, the are really translucent elements to both creatures however the Neomorphs are definitely the more translucent of the two. We referenced a lot of aquatic animals such as the goblin shark and sting rays etc for the finish.

AC: The shower scene at the end of the Alien: Covenant trailer, was that Alien a suit or CGI, or blend of both?

Conor: This was the animatronic head and torso. It was our first outing of our Alien creature – which was barely ready. From what I can see there have been some enhancements but it is largely a practical shot.

Adam: Actually this was one of the most enjoyable shots with the Xenomorph for me. We were literally sitting in the next shower cubicle with our big animatronic xeno soaking wet as Conor puppeeteered the tail and I was the hand coming into shot.

AC: The eggs seen in the Covenant Trailer look taller and less bulbous than the ones in previous Alien films. Was this merely a design preference or can you say whether or not these are "different" eggs?

Conor: They are slightly different eggs – again one of the designs Ridley like by Dominic. I think I prefer the original shape – more Aphid egg like.

AC: You worked closely with Alien: Covenant's concept artists to bring their imaginations to life. Were there any of their concepts which you did not get a chance to create, but wish you could have?

Conor: We were the Alien: Covenant Creature concept artists. I would have liked to have more time.

Adam: When we began the project we were under the impression most things were designed and had been signed off on, but this was not the case and we did become the concept artists/designers.

AC: Of all the practical props and effects you worked on for Covenant, which was the most memorable (if you can say)?

Adam: I loved all the shots we worked on but perhaps the most memorable for me was the first gag we shot, which was filmed on location in Milford Sound NZ. This was the beginning of principle photography and the scene was insanely violent and technically challenging. The scene was with my good friend Nathaniel Dean who plays Hallet, whom Damian, myself and Colin Ware had worked with years ago on Farscape. It was the Creature Dept’s first gag so it was a big deal for us, making sure we nailed it. After a few takes and after many, many litres of blood, slime and entrails had covered Nathaniel he looks at me. And right before the next take he smiles like a kid and says “How fucking awesome is this!” I hope the audience finds them all memorable.

Conor: They’re all totally unforgettable – but the chestburster’s going to be the controversial one.

AC: How many "burster" sequences can we expect to be completely practical?

Conor: The chestburster is largely digital replacement I think, however the mouth and backburster's should be 90 % practical.

AC: We know Ridley enjoyed scaring his cast in both Alien and Prometheus by surprising them with some form of practical effect gag - to elicit a real, natural response. In Alien, it was the Chestburster sequence and in Prometheus, it was the Hammerpede escape sequence. Did Mr. Scott request any similar set-ups from your team prior to filming certain scenes? If so, we're they effective?

Conor: He did – with everything. We shot facehugger's out of eggs, made dummies of everybody and sprayed more blood around than an abattoir.

Adam: Ridley would make sure the cast weren’t in earshot when he discussed sequences on set with Conor and myself.

AC: Were there any setbacks or issues which arose while building any of the props or suits?

Conor: The biggest setback for us was time. We had been told that all the creatures were all designed and there would only be motion capture suits with ref heads for us to make for the CG guys to ad in the digital creatures.

We were just to do practical make up effects and do the design. I should have known better – I never learn my lesson it seems.

There were hundreds of random designs - none of which Ridley had committed too. Then Ridley decided at the last minute to make men in suits (something I subconsciously knew he was going to do all the time) – which then began a frantic search for suitable cast and crew.

Adam: Time was an issue especially with the late decision to make suits. Finding the right cast for the suits and then obviously producing the suits required the team to be at the top of their game and we certainly benefitted from years of experience building creature suits in short time frames from the Farscape days.

AC: Were there any dramatic changes made to any of your props throughout or just prior to filming? If so, are you able to say which ones and why?

Conor: Things got a bit jumpy on our first outing with the Xeno.

Ridley had approved a design by Bradley Simmons – which we had scanned, printed molded remodeled and cast.

But in the frantic activity of starting the shoot, travelling to a remote location and then trying to get the thing ready we had all overlooked the impracticality around the lips design.

When the mouth closed, the muscles went baggy – which looked crap. Adam, Rob Trenton, Damien Martin and a few others - did a couple of long days (and nights) and sorted the whole thing out. Jumpy but we got through it.

Adam: Yeah, I basically made the call to strip the Xeno face back to the skull and redesign it as it wasn’t totally working. That required us working around the clock to redesign, resculpt, recast and finish it. I’m so glad we did because Ridley’s response to the modified look was “There he is!”

AC: Have you enjoyed reading some of the fan theories on the internet regarding Alien: Covenant? Have there been any rumors or speculations which caught your attention?

Adam: The leaked photos stirred up loads of theories, which were interesting to read. New names/titles/theories for some of the space creatures have been fun to read :-)

Conor: Nothings really caught my attention – but I know there will be stuff once it comes out.

AC: How would you rate your experience working on Alien: Covenant? Compared to previous films you've been involved with; would you say Alien ranks higher on your list? Why or why not?

Conor: I’ve aged about 20 years. Stressful, fun, creative and a great experience.

Adam: Working with Ridley Scott on an Alien film, where I was privileged enough to co-supervise the creature effects, is about as high an honour as I can imagine. Other career highlights I’ve been honoured to be involved with was working with George Miller on a Mad Max (Fury Rd) film and George Lucas on 2 Star Wars films.

I definitely aged on Alien: Covenant, it was very stressful but one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

AC: Finally, can you tell us what the "Black Goo" is really for?

Conor: The black Goo? The God’s special jam.

Adam: Nope ;)

Read more:

http://www.alien-covenant.com/news/exclusive-interview-with-alien-covenant-practical-effects-company-odd-studio--creatures-inc#ixzz4sVJZnjLB

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@Scifiedcom on Twitter | Scifiedcom on Facebook

[han-made-bookbinding]

Two Under Two...

So it would seem that having two children under two means there is not much time for anything else! In fact, finding enough time to brush my teeth has even been a challenge at times let alone getting any binding work done. 

Daughter number two, Winifred May (Winnie), was born in mid-November and the last seven weeks have shot by in a blur. Ivy has willingly jumped into the role of big sister however does need to be reminded on regular occasions that her sister probably doesn’t like having toys shoved into her mouth and ears. As much as we have tried it also seems to be impossible to get a decent picture of them together...(!)

On the run up to the birth, and the precious few quiet moments I have had since Winnie was born, I have been trying to keep on top of my work as best possible - actually a welcome release in amongst the chaos of parenthood! 

I currently have two bindings in progress, plus a hundred and one thoughts for new projects whirring around in my head (I have had plenty of thinking time whilst sat feeding Winnie!). The first of which is one I touched upon in a previous blog post, “British Birds”. I am at the embroidery stage of that one, having started with the outline work of the background first. I can’t wait to get started on the actual birds - I am saving that until last though as a sort of “treat”! 

The second is a binding of “The Noble Knight Paris & the Fair Vienne” by The Allen Press. The text is translated from French by William Caxton and is one of 130 copies printed on Val de Laga French paper. The text block is really lovely with little hand-coloured wood-engraved decorations on each of the pages.

The endpapers were inspired by these wood-engraved decorations and I decided to do some lino-cuts of the floral/leafy shapes that appear on the vines to the left of each page of the book. These were much larger than the prints on the pages but I thought it would be an effective way of tying in the endpapers with the text block.

I did many tests with each of the stamps until I was happy with the design and in the end chose to go for a repeat-print using a floral stamp. These papers will be further embellished with some colour and gold when the doublures are worked on. 

The text is love story between Paris the Knight and the maiden Vienne. I was struck by the idea of Paris jousting against his rivals for the admiration of Vienne. I thought that this would create a strong design and would mirror well across the cover with Paris appearing on the front cover and his rival on the back - their jousting poles I crossing the spine.

In the text it says that, "Alle other knightes there were knowen by their armes, but the two white knights were unknowen...Said Vienne, yonder two white knightes that bear no armes on their sheldes are more to my fantasie".

Paris is therefore depicted with a plain shield and in the story goes on to win a crystal shield and a gold garland of flowers, presented to him by Vienne. On the cover design she is seen standing on the spine section - the image taken from the wood block print in the text block. I drew her standing in the doorway to her castle, the castle being a much larger version of a wood block print that also features in the text block. 

The sample board has been embroidered and the book sewn and forwarded. I am now working on the book onlays and the next stage will be the embroidery of the covering leather.

I am also participating in COLLECT at the Saatchi Gallery at the start of February with Designer Bookbinders. COLLECT is the leading international art fair for contemporary objects presented by the Crafts Council. The show offers an unrivalled opportunity to see and buy exceptional contemporary craft by artists and makers represented by leading British and international galleries. Designer Bookbinders is of course not a gallery, but we have been given special dispensation by the Crafts Council to showcase bookbinding at this prestigious event. Subject to my binding getting through the selection panel it will be very exciting to be part of this.

“Collect will fill all three floors of the Saatchi Gallery from 2-6 February 2017, returning for its 13th edition with a fresh vision and revitalised look and feel. Collect profiles the exceptional skill and intellectual rigour behind modern craft from works in ceramics, glass, metal, wood and textiles to makers working in non-traditional materials with experimental techniques. At a time of unprecedented interest in craft, Collect connects the passion of collecting and the energy of making with a heightened awareness of design.

Works will be exhibited in a contemporary gallery setting during the five-day event, with a programme that includes a series of talks featuring leading craft thinkers, an exclusive preview of the latest acquisitions to the Crafts Council Collection ahead of a national tour, and an expanded Collect Open a dedicated showcase for concept-driven experimental craft.”

I am submitting a binding I did last year for inclusion, ‘Butterflies and Moths (British)’ - it is great I still have this one as I would definitely not have had time to make anything new! This binding was also featured in a blog post last year.

On a closing note I got a new tripod for Christmas that I am very excited to try out - I just need to finish a binding now in order to test it out properly! After struggling through for a couple of years with a ropy second-hand one it finally gave up the ghost at the end of last year. I have been photographing my bindings myself since I moved over to France, beforehand a friend was doing them for me. I had to learn the ropes myself so I could be self-sufficient whilst I was away and have kept up with this following my return to the UK. I have a method I try to stick to with the set-up and the photographs seem to do the job!

Hopefully in my next blog post I will be able to showcase some photos of bindings taken on my new tripod! In the meantime I better return to my other full-time job of being a mum...

[astralsecrets]

Dream - Saving A Sleepwalker & Prize Winning Artist & A Favour For A Favour

Date of Dream: MON 22 OCT - 2018 Dream No. 460 - Separated Sections Dream 460 A - Saving A Sleepwalker I don’t remember much about this dream. From what I can remember, it was pitch black in the middle of the night, the early hours of the morning to be exact. I remember being at the bottom of the stairs, weirdly my thoughts were still conscious but my actions were oblivious. As I opened the front door and went into the driveway, I was imagining like I was entering into the swamp of Spyro The Eternal Night. Then as I was actually on the driveway, fitting music played from the actual soundtrack but I also felt this sense of mysterious danger lurking about. Eventually, there was real danger in sight. A fire had broken out, bright orange, in the distance and I could hear sounds just like when the creatures dropped the bombs on the temple in the PS2 version of the game. I was scared out of my wits and my heart was pulsing very fast but once again, I couldn’t control my movement. I forgot to mention that when I was still down at the bottom of the stairs, I actually was aware of the fact that I was sleepwalking. Back to the current scene of the dream, I was freaking out big time and even felt at one stage like my life was about to end. Just as I was about to let out a scream, I literally only got in an initial gasp, when I was suddenly and swiftly grabbed, made to face the opposite direction, and pulled towards the house by an invisible force. All of a sudden, the urge to scream was gone and my heart pulse had slowed right down. As I was still standing on the pavement, the invisible energy showed itself as a very feint hologram… It was 18-Volt in his Game and Wario cover art appearance. He was shown in a hovering, sitting position, and so I knew what this meant. I was drawn to his lap and actually manoeuvred by the dream to sit on it. I can’t exactly describe it, it’s like the dream suspended me in mid-air, having me float redundantly in slow motion and then suddenly very quickly plonked me down onto him rather than the usual where I would climb up and seat myself. He then became invisible again and I couldn’t feel his lap or his arms, I now only perceived to be floating again but in that sitting position. Then he moved off. The front door swung open by itself and 18-Volt’s energy rushed me inside, flying me up the stairs at a rapid pace. Then the dream lapsed forward in time a bit. 18-Volt was now in his human form but as it was pitch black inside the house, I couldn’t see much in regards to colour. Once his energy had slotted me back into bed, that’s when he became human and gently placed the bed sheets to be just under my chin, patting them down on each side. The scene ended there. It was still pitch black in the house but now I was awake again and in the kitchen, talking to my brother in there. I was actually telling him the story of how I apparently found out I was sleepwalking earlier. I said something along the lines of “Whatever happened out there was absolutely crazy and I thought I was going to die. I was bloomin’ sleepwalking! But then let me tell you this… This guy appears, he whips me up, and takes me straight back to bed. He tucked me in. Like I can’t believe he actually rescued me”. As I was talking, I made sure not to reveal any trait of 18-Volt’s identity to my brother. The dream ended after I had finished telling my story. Dream 460 B - Prize Winning Artist I don’t remember how the dream started. From where I do remember, it was this completely unknown area. It felt like some stage and me and these other people were going through the lines of a script similar to the story of The Wizard of Oz. I was surprised in the dream that I was able to remember my lines really well and was playing my part of Dorothy to a high standard. Unfortunately though, one of the guys had cut me off saying that they wanted to stop there, so I was slightly cut because I was having so much fun. The next scene appeared to be in a school environment but once again, the surroundings were unknown. Apparently there was this sort of substance that when you painted it onto a watchband, it would make a really interesting pattern. I watched a few girls painting their watchbands and so was able to witness the effect of the paint medium. I then decided to try it myself but at first, I thought nothing was happening. “Oh come on...”, I thought as I then shook the watchband. After shaking the watchband though, something did happen and it was more than I expected. The colour started to bleed like expected but half way though, the watchband turned into this piece of paper and the art that was produced was absolutely and ridiculously phenomenal. It actually looked like the painting of some professional artist in real life. I then flipped the paper over and noticed that there was art on the other side too! My year six teacher came over and looked really amazed and what I had done. He said something to me but I forgot what it was. He then took my artwork to grade it but I didn’t like what he was doing. He was writing comments and the score all over it in pen and so I told him that it wouldn’t look good if I was to hang it up. The mark I got for the artwork was 60 out of 60. He then flipped the paper over to mark the other piece and he seemed to listen to me. He wrote in a very small corner only, marking it 40 out of 40. There was a small section of the next scene where I showed my mum but then dream went to another scene. I was now at this area at night time which seemed like an unknown railway station. I also had four friends with me that don’t exist in real life. Apparently we all wanted to catch a train but while we were waiting for the train, I wanted to find Dreamy WB to show her my award winning pieces of art. I called for Dreamy WB but there was no response and my friends, two girls and two boys, had looks on their faces like we weren’t going to get lucky any time soon. I decided that we would explore the area to go and find her. I went in one direction with two friends, one boy and one girl, and the other two friends went in the opposite direction. As I walked down the concrete stairs outside, I kept shouting to the dreamscape “Dreamy WB!” with my friends following and turning their heads to see if they could see her. No matter how many times I tried, there was still nothing. Soon the thought came to me though that the train was bound to leave soon and we were far away from the platform. So without giving any notice to my friends, I changed the direction of calling to 18-Volt. I seemed to wander a bit faster than my friends now and so soon ended up by myself. Yelling for 18-Volt didn’t seem as stressful as the tone was for Dreamy WB. All I ended up doing was looking up the stairs and said half way between speaking and yelling, “18-Volt, if you’re there, can you take us back to the main platform?”. As I continued to walk back up the stairs, the most amazing thing happened. I could see a shadow casting over my step, created by the pole lights and so I stopped. I slowly looked up and there was 18-Volt standing on the next step, looking right back down at me. He was once again in his Game and Wario cover art appearance and this time, he was even just wearing his singlet and shorts. I was actually so freaked out in this scene due to a number of factors. First of all, he actually looked like a real human, like I could actually see real flesh on him as well as his glasses being out of real blue plastic frames and then the lenses… Oh the lenses, accurately red and green of course… Everything about him was so, freaking real! Secondly, he was actually full-on staring at me and not saying anything, additionally having this constant stern look on his face that gave him the complexion of a criminal thug supported by his big, buff body. He was very scary to look at. For almost what seemed like a minute, he was staring at me very seriously and I was staring back at him nervously, I couldn’t see through his glasses to see what exactly his eyeballs were doing. I do know for a fact though that it seemed like he was staring right into my soul and from a very dominating position. This time, I could actually also smell the scent of African culture wafting off him and I could hear him slightly snorting each time he breathed outwards. For the first time in a dream, I actually started to perceive a negative energy coming off 18-Volt. As each second passed, my muscles became more tense, I became more guarded in my stance, and I was becoming a nervous wreck. He must have finally noticed the mess I was becoming as he all of a sudden, out of nowhere, broke out into a really wide and pleasant closed mouth smile. To my surprise, the weight just automatically lifted off my shoulders and every instance of negative energy I had gained before was now gone. That sense of familiar warmth and security had now returned. So now I prompted 18-Volt, reminding him to take me back to the platform. He made a physical gesture at me, which I believed he was telling me to wait for my friends. While waiting, I inched closer to 18-Volt on my step and started leaning on him, randomly examining each fine thread of cotton on his singlet and still thinking to myself “Geez, how on Earth is he real?”. Eventually, my four friends came walking up and so 18-Volt started things off by extending his left arm out. He scooped me up and I was placed right against his body. After that, he started picking up each of my friends; I was thinking to myself, “Your arm’s not big enough to fit all four of them in”. Apparently I was wrong and I was amazed; he put two behind me and then another two at the back, being pushed in by the crook of his arm. As he proceeded to carry us all up the stairs, the dream faded out and so I woke up. Dream 460 C - A Favour For A Favour I don’t remember how the dream started. From where I do remember, it was in some completely unknown area, appearing to be a mix of a shopping centre and somewhat of a house. I was in the house part of this complex with the lady, a complete stranger, planning to host some social movie event in which was apparently her place. I forgot what she said completely but she wanted me to go into the shopping centre part and recruit some guests, this one woman in particular. I made a mental note that I had to be back by 7:00 PM because that’s when the movie would start. As I’m leaving the house, I look at my brother and signal to him, asking if he had already brought the guests over, and he said no, so I was clear to go. I found the lady who was off in this weird little kitchen at the other side of the shopping centre area. I asked her about coming to the house but then she said she wanted me to do something for her. She wanted me to supposedly teach her how to cook something using dry ingredients only. I said that it wasn’t possible but she kept demanding that it be done. I told her to at least add water into the mix if she didn’t want to add anything else. My mind was telling me that it was nearly 7:00 PM and so I had to whisk the lady away from her cooking and get her out into the main part of the shopping centre. As I looked over towards the escalators, I could see random characters on it; I forgot what they looked like and when they reached the top, they would get trapped and then sucked in. I cried out to Dreamy WB, asking her to come and save them but nothing happened. It was getting really late and not much time was left and I immediately changed over to 18-Volt, calling out and asking him to take us up back to the house. In the meantime, while I was waiting for him, I opened up what seemed to be my techniques journal and also where I write everything under the sun. In this journal entry, it seemed that I was using a lot of cuss words for some reason and they weren’t necessarily too pleasant either, it did include the Lord’s name, I am not going to specify what the phrase was. The dream had also converted the pen ink into some permanent orange coloured typed font. Eventually, 18-Volt appeared and interestingly, he first of all seemed to have intentions to sort out my apparent cussing problem. He slowly crept up behind me and had a read at what I had written, he then put a finger on the start of the F word and rubbed it, in which he ended up smudging the F and turning it into another letter. Once I turned around and noticed him, he pulled me aside to speak to me. He had the appearance like in 460 A and B but was wearing a lavender business shirt and black business trousers. He whispered at me in a polite tone, I forgot what he said exactly but he was basically telling me to stop cussing. He then got this petrified look on his face like he was now scared that I was going to get mad at him. I reassured 18-Volt and said to him “No, that’s fine. Thanks for doing that” as I stuck my thumb up and nodded at him. As he then proceeded to stack me and then the lady into his arm, like in 460 B, I woke up. Dream 460: Results (Competition #8) 460 A Competition Night: 17 Lucid or Non-Lucid?: Non-Lucid Dream Guide: 18-Volt Emergency Team: None Eligible For Competition Points: Yes 460 B Competition Night: 17 Lucid or Non-Lucid?: Non-Lucid Dream Guide: 18-Volt Emergency Team: None Eligible For Competition Points: Yes 460 C Competition Night: 17 Lucid or Non-Lucid?: Non-Lucid Dream Guide: 18-Volt Emergency Team: None Eligible For Competition Points: Yes Points For This Entry: 9.5 Calculation Details: - Full Non-Lucid Dream (1.0) - Have A Dream Guide Automatically Appear: 18-Volt (0.5) - Full Non-Lucid Dream (1.0) - Summon A Dream Guide: 18-Volt (1.0) - Full Non-Lucid Dream (1.0) - Help Someone In Need (1.0) - Summon A Dream Guide: 18-Volt (1.0) - 3-Day Recall Chain (3.0) + Previous Total: 95.5 Total Accumulated Points: 105.0

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8297989 https://www.dreamviews.com/blogs/karlab18/dream-saving-sleepwalker-prize-winning-artist-favour-favour-85663/

[fashiontrendin-blog]

Why Elvis Presley Is Your New (Old) Style Icon

http://fashion-trendin.com/why-elvis-presley-is-your-new-old-style-icon/

Why Elvis Presley Is Your New (Old) Style Icon

It’s 1968, an NBC TV special. There’s a small stage, surrounded by primly-dressed women with big bouffant dos and men dressed as though they might be accountants. On the stage is a raven-maned man who occasionally sits on the steps to be among the people. But he is clearly not of the people – not least because he is in head to toe black leather. He’s the embodiment of rock’n’roll. He is, of course, Elvis Presley.

It’s not a look that would be easily pulled off unless one was a rock’n’roll legend, or perhaps a TT Race rider. But for Elvis it marks not just his famed comeback but the pivotal point in his wardrobe. Thereafter, through the 1970s, he would lapse, along with his fried peanut butter sarnie waistline, into pure stagewear: the rhinestones, the flares, the capes and those Bill Belew-designed, high-collared white jumpsuits (perfect for those black belt karate moves), like some hip-swiveling anti-Dracula. This, unfairly, tarnished Elvis’ reputation as a style icon.

Even Elvis wasn’t such a fan of it. That legendary, $10,000 gold lame suit of a decade earlier, which Colonel Parker commissioned for Presley from the rodeo tailor Nudie Cohn – the very man who made Johnny Cash the ‘Man in Black’? He didn’t much like that either – he’d often swap the trousers out for something plain and black. In the end he only wore the full suit three times. When it was suggested a new version be created for his ’68 comeback, Presley declined. “I have to be honest with you,” Presley said to Belew. “I always hated that suit.”

Presley’s earlier wardrobe, throughout most of 1950s, was much more him, and ironically, much more now. Think of Elvis today and you might first imagine ‘showtime’ Elvis – all exaggerated hair and jumpsuited up – but it’s his earlier dress sense that marks him out as a true style icon. And it feels particularly relevant today – Cuban collar shirts, wide-legged, pleated trousers, blousons – these are all garments making the rounds on the menswear circuit, but they were also integral to Elvis’ 1950s style wardrobe. He did it all first.

Elvis wearing a Cuban collar shirt in 1955

On stage, he said, generally he’d wear clothes “as flashy as you can get them”. “[But] in public,” he added, “I like real conservative clothes, something that’s not too flashy”. Indeed, in many respects Presley wore the clothes of his era. As a young man he’d shop at Lansky Bros in Memphis – to which he was a loyal customer all his life – where he learned to pop up his collar and where he bought high-waisted pegged trousers, two tone shoes or simple black loafers, short sleeve shirts, loose-fitting sack suits, skinny or bootlace ties: rockabilly, in other words.

One thing he wouldn’t wear, no matter how fashionable they became: jeans. Presley always associated working clothes with the sharecropping poverty of his youth. He’d only wear them if, say, a film role the likes of Jailhouse Rock demanded it. Or if money did. Ironically, Elvis lent his name to Levi’s for their ‘Elvis Presley’ style, the first black denim jeans.

In 1956, wearing a Cuban collar shirt, black trousers, penny loafers and argyle socks

“He was very much a product of his time,” argues Dennis Nothdruft, curator at London’s Fashion & Textiles Museum, “albeit a very fashionable version. What made him stand out was less his clothes as him – because he was extremely attractive and he had this louche quality about him, which shows in how he wore the clothes. They seemed to be less fitted as draped on him, which reflected the way he moved. I think it’s fair to say he wouldn’t be a first choice for purely sartorial reasons but he did have a certain something about him and, of course, he did look incredibly cool in that black leather for his comeback.”

Performing on the NBC special in 1968, wearing the famous all-leather outfit

Indeed, even at its most preposterous off-stage, Elvis managed to pull it off. When he met with a strait-laced Richard Nixon in the White House in 1972, Presley wore a gold-buttoned pea coat style jacket draped over his shoulders, a shirt with a collar bigger than the lapels on Nixon’s jacket, and a belt with a buckle the size of his head. Well, what else would a King wear to meet a President? “You dress kinda strange,” Nixon is said to have commented. “Well, Mr. President,” Elvis is said to have replied, “you got your show, and I got mine”.

Even when wearing what might seem merely his contemporaneous clothing choices, there was plenty of attention to detail. When he started making money Presley had his shirts made bespoke – he had elastic added at the cuffs and the elbows to give the sleeves a more billowing look. He was, unlike more pedestrian men of his era, comfortable wearing colour: for shirts and socks his favourite was bubblegum pink, then considered a distinctly feminine shade.

He’d happily clash patterns. He’d get his grandmother to embroider his shirts with some distinctive detail. His jewellery, of course, became increasingly excessive, but started with subtleties the likes of his ‘TCB’ (‘taking care of business’) signet ring – a deft bit of personal, and later profitable, branding.

Elvis eating an army-supplied packed lunch on the day he reported for duty, 1958

And then, crowning it all, of course, was that hair, a long, unfashionable pompadour – inspired by Presley’s time working as a truck driver, that being the signature ‘do for the kings of the road through the early 1950s – and most definitely counter to the favoured crewcuts of the period. Presley knew just how important what one disapproving child psychiatrist called that “badge of emptiness” was to his style, his rebel image and to his sex appeal. His hair was regularly dyed to ensure Presley’s naturally sandy blonde colour achieved that jet black shade – men dyeing their hair was unheard of at the time – and required three different kinds of hair wax, at the same time, to achieve the desired look. He’d have a jojoba oil and vitamin E scalp massage daily.

That Elvis was aware of his image was certain. What he was less aware of was the impact it would have on menswear at large. While his performance attire was never likely to be emulated, the sheer magnitude of Presley’s fame – enhanced by his starring in 31 movies over just 13 years, genuinely redefining celebrity in the process – meant that his more personal wardrobe inevitably would be.

“I think most people would think of, say, Paul Newman or James Dean as stylish men from roughly that era before they’d think of Elvis,” as John Harrison, the creative director of Gieves & Hawkes has it. “But it’s different if, say, you work in the fashion industry. Then Elvis embodies that whole ’50s look. He’s definitely a style icon.”

Three Key Elvis Looks

Workwear Chic

In King Creole (1959) Elvis wore the most workmanlike outfit of his career – even against the stylist prison uniform of Jailhouse Rock. A chambray shirt over a white T-shirt, flat-fronted, wide-legged trousers and a moleskin, twin pocketed blouson. Elvis returned to similar jacket styles throughout the ’50s and beyond, and it’s easy to see why. Today this look is easily replicated and has recently been plugged by the likes of Prada x Mr Porter, Oliver Spencer and Burberry.

Rebellious Tailoring

For one of his earlier performances, around 1956, Elvis dressed in a way that simultaneously mirrored convention and defied it: he wore black trousers and loafers, with a white shirt under a loose fitting, contrasting tailored jacket. It was smart but sassy too, even disruptive. “I can’t over-emphasise how shocking he looked and seemed to me that night,” one Roy Orbison would later recall. Apparently the first thing Elvis did was to spit some gum onto the stage. Disapproving mothers no doubt fainted on the spot.

Mid-Century Ease

One of the key attractions of Elvis’ early style was the ease of it. Yes, the way he wore his clothes added to his nonchalance, but the garments themselves were simple and easy to wear. Today, in a confusing world of fluorescent streetwear and flossing, this is an enticing way of dressing. Take this look as a case in point – it’s made up of straight leg trousers, an open neck polo shirt, a bomber jacket and white sneakers. It’s not going to change the world, but it’s an effortless combo that anyone can recreate. And no, he’s not flossing.