#I had to decide if I was going to draw Proto with a gun

[malmagma]

Hi yes go read all of @megamanrecut ‘s things that is my command

(Based on Become The Night)

[contrivedchaos]

So idea Sera and Emily fall and Sera who knows a bit about hell decides that two fallen angels would draw attention they don't need decide to start moving trying to find somewhere safe plus as proper angels not sinners they aren't immortal to everything but angelic steel if someone shots them with a normal gun it's over. She doesn't really know which fallen angels are still around baring Lucifer which if any would be willing to help instead of kill her on sight or even how to get to Lucifer. Meanwhile Carmilla hears about two fallen angels leaves the girls with Zestial and goes out looking for them unfortunately because Sera isn't staying put she can't find them and spends a while trying to find them. While that is happening the two are struggling they have no money shelter or food at at this point probably have some injuries most likely broken wings from the fall and random other things they realize running isn't doing any good so they need to find someway to support themselves or more accurately for Sera to support them. Sera eventually after looking around finds the overlord who filled Valentinos niche before he came along. (Somewhat off topic but how does hell technology work like is it tied to the real world was the Valentino of 600 years ago doing plays and selling woodprints) Sera is very a beautiful and an Angel she could easily be make him a lot of money after all the beautiful 10 ft tall angel would almost certainly be popular so they make a deal Sera will work for him and sell her soul in exchange for money shelter and promise that no one will harm Emily or ever buy her soul. Like the moment after the deal is signed Carmilla shows up realizes the fallen Angels where her ex from heaven and her sister and learns she is too late to stop the deal though Sera does tell Emily to go with Carmilla since she knows she'll be safer with her and accepts her fate. Carmilla doesn't she attacks proto Valentino and either keeps beating him until he undoes the deal or just kills him freeing Sera. Once that part is dealt with she takes the two tired, hurt and hungry angels home. She gets them cleaned up, fed, get someone to deal with the injuries (Sera is worse off she did her best to protect Emily and at points that meant standing in front of things blowing up or taking whatever hell threw at them) and lets them rest and recover. The two also get back together after all neither had gotten over the whole break up originally and after all that well Carmilla makes Sera feel safe and Sera is doing her best to make Carmilla feel loved.

I swear to not-God, you guys are not afraid to completely beat my heart to a bloody pulp with some of these AU ideas. 😭😭 I'm fine! I'm fine! (I'm not fine!)

Without knowing how making deals works in Hell, I guess I could see Sera get to a breaking point and do whatever she thought she needed to protect Emily. Then, not realizing the repercussions of the deal until it's too late, she's trapped. I assume Hell's society is also much more primitive at this time, like there's obviously no social media, shopping, television, or overall community of any kind. The denizens have to find entertainment somewhere, so her beauty would be something Sinners would gravitate to.

I like to think that once Carmilla realizes Sera sold her soul to proto-Valentino, she would not hesitate to just off the bugger right then and there. Like at this point the overlord alliance probably isn't that strong yet. The only other person she still trusts is Zestial, and some guy who puts on plays and makes woodprints isn't going to be a big enough player in Hell's economy that she'd be willing to risk Sera's soul. He'd just be double-dead from the word go.

She and Sera can reconcile, get back together, and start building back the great Hell empire from there. That's how I see it all playing out!

[bode-leone]

andy + booker, gen, 1,924 words. 

--

K̂ormon means weasel, ermine or stoat in Proto-Indo-European.

The gif referenced is this one.

--

Andy shows up at his Paris apartment, sporting her usual black backpack and sunglasses, nearly two years into the exile. He hasn’t done much but he’s taken to speaking to other people online, through messaging boards and forums, and has even worked up the courage to begin talking to someone more psychologically trained. He’s still in his single digits amount of appointments, and it takes a lot to work through the issues he has when he has to use subterfuge for most of them. It’s from one of these appointments that he unlocks his door, unthinking and not realising that someone is in there until he hears a shift and his hand flies to the gun he doesn’t have on him. 

“You’re not going to shoot little old me are you? Hmm?”

Andy’s voice. It was Andy. He can barely get his eyes up to look at her before tears are running down his face, to both his shock and hers. His appointment had been dealing with a lot of heavy stuff, that is, mainly about Jean-Pierre and his feelings about outliving his family. So Andy showing up for the first time since he’d been left on the river Thames was like a tsunami running through him. He brings his hands up to rub at the tears. 

“I’m sorry,” he says watery, sniffling. “I promise I’m doing better, really.”

Andy looks him up and down and comes to a decision, he can see the cogs in her head turning from where he’s standing in the middle of the rundown apartments living room and kitchen. She soon opens her arms wide, inviting him in to hug her. 

“Come here, Book,” she murmurs and he does, but he drags his feet giving her enough time to back out if she wants to. 

He sees her roll her eyes and she crosses the last few meters herself, throwing her arms around him and seemingly holding him up as his knees nearly buckles, despite the height difference between them. She rubs his back, humming a little, and he clings to her, his face shoved in the junction of her shoulder and neck. He thought he’d never see her again, never again get to talk about translations of classics, never again get to listen to her repeated stories about fighting with the real Achilles, with the real Alexander. But here she is, in the flesh. 

She still smells the same, he notes when his crying has subsided and his body has worked itself into a tired slump, hinting at exhaustion. 

She pulls back and her almost doesn’t want to; wants to hold her in his arms until she knows instinctively that he’s sorry and that he’d never do anything stupid or selfish as what he had done ever again. Looking at her, though, he thinks she knows. He looks at her carefully and she doesn’t look any more older than she had when he had last seen her, maybe a frown line more. 

“I want to go out, Book, know any good places?” She says as she lowers and then removes her sunglasses. 

Her eyes still spark at him and leaves him a little dimwitted.

“Um...ah, I go to a club that plays old stuff, stuff from the forties and fifties. Or do you want to go somewhere more modern?” He says quietly, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly. He didn’t really go out much and when he did it was more for the ambience than the dancing, really.

“No, that’s great. It’s getting close to six now, we should head out.”

--

He calls an uber to take them to the 11th Arrondissement and to the club that he goes to. He pays for their entry fees and takes her to where he usually sits. They sit there for an hour, him buying her drinks and listening to anything she’d give him about herself, the others. She purses her lips when he first asks her about the others, obviously running through the risk of her telling him anything anyways, before deciding that some will not bring them to ruin. Again. 

“We’re doing fine. Nile is learning quickly, quicker than you did,” he laughs into his drink to cover the subtle sharp pang at that, “but we’re all different. You were different. She’s different. Differences aren’t bad Sebastien, however much you’re thinking you were never good.” 

He looks at his drink, the beer suddenly souring in his mouth. Yet again his deficits are so easily seen despite the amount of effort he had put in the last two years to fix what was wrong with him. The use of his name further cements this as a failing. 

“I’m sorry,” he says truthfully, looking at her out from under his mop of hair that he really needed to get cut. “I’m in therapy, I have been for the last few years. I know it doesn’t make up for anything but I am trying to be better.”

She looks at him in the eye, taking a mouthful of her horrifying liquor mix as she does so. She sighs when she swallows. 

“Are you doing this for you? Or are you doing this as an attempt to lower your sentence?”

He thinks, for a moment, on the questions. 

“Both. I’m doing it for me because I can’t live with my brain telling me things like that but I also can’t help but hope it’s enough to reduce my sentence,” he says and winces. “Sorry, I guess I’m not really very far in being better. Sorry.”

He looks out into the small crowd of people dancing already, some slowly and some fast. It’s nice to see something kept and saved, even if it’s just a dance. It feels like the more he looks, the more there’s little to recognise. He cannot imagine what it’s like for Andy, with all her thousands of years. 

“Wanting something isn’t necessarily bad, Sebastien,” she says quietly and draws his gaze back to herself. “It’s not bad that you want to come back, I’d be suspicious if you didn’t, but the fact that you can recognise that you need help is the most important thing here. Now, I want to dance and you’re going to dance with me.”

She holds a hand out to him over the booth table and he takes it and tells himself the butterflies he feels are simply the emotions of having contact with his family. 

They dance for hours, both swing and slow, and he blushes involuntarily when his hands are on her hips like he’s a teenage boy, stuttering and nervous. She leads more than he does, considering the last time he had been dancing like this was when the dances were originally from. He finds he has a good time, able to let go of himself for just a little while and pretend he truly was the forty two year old man his body portrays him to be. 

They leave, with Andy’s arm hooked through his, in an uber the same way they arrived. Upon arriving home, he realises he has not planned for a single major obstacle: his apartment only has one bed. He tells Andy that he can sleep on the floor and she can take the bed and her eyes roll upward. 

“Book, it’s fine. Stop acting like everything that happens is the end of the world, we’ll be fine.”

He tries not to stare at the reddish-pink scar on her abdomen when her singlet rides up as she gets ready for bed. Tries to not let its existence feel like the reaffirmation of the thousands of pounds of guilt on his shoulders, rising to his ears instinctively. She huffs at him after brushing her teeth. 

“What you did, it’s shit and horrifying, but it’s been done. It does nobody any good to keep reminiscing on it.”

She lifts her shirt over the scar and motions to it.

“This? This isn’t going to go away no matter how much we both wish it would. Stop looking like you did,” she motions with her neck and shoulders, “you look like a k̂ormon.”

His face must show his confusion over the last word because she rolls her eyes, drags him to the bed, pushes him down into it and turns out the light, plunging the room into darkness. He gets himself situated under the sheets and blankets, not knowing which way to face. Andy checks her phone once before locking it and putting it on the side table. 

“So-”

“It means weasel, Book. You look like a weasel when you do that.”

He bursts out laughing involuntarily, wiping his eyes. 

“K̂ormon, k̂ormon, k̂ormon,” he murmurs, knowing instinctively that it’s from her original language. “I like it.”

--

He wakes up and feels someone’s arms around him. 

It takes a moment for his brain to work and place whose arms they are. Her face is pressed into the back of his neck. He sighs, relaxing out of his tensed position. He looks out the window to the dreary, grey light. It musnt be very late, he can continue to sleep. It’s the first time in a long time that he hadn’t had a Quynh dream, hadn’t woken gasping and thrashing, without the use of alcohol or narcotics. He yawns and buries his face back into his pillow, distantly feeling her arms tighten around him before he slips back under. 

He wakes again to the rustling of fabric and his eyes slip open, blinking slowly. The light is bright and a warmer colour. He turns to where the rustling is coming from, seeing Andy zipping up her backpack. 

“What time is it?” He murmurs muzzily, rubbing his eyes. 

“It’s seven thirty,” she says as she puts her sunglasses on her head. “Know anywhere good to eat?”

He does so he gets up and showers and makes himself presentable to be seen in public. As they walk down the arrondissement towards the café, she slings an arm around his shoulders and leans close.

“The others are waiting for me to make a decision about whether or not you can come back,” she murmurs before pulling away.

He keeps moving, in shock, until he motions for her to stop and they walk into the café. He gets a black coffee and croissant with Andy getting a café crème and croissant. He doesn’t know how to respond to the revelation and eats his croissant and drinks his coffee. Once he’s done and he’s had enough of watching Andy’s self satisfied smile, they get up to leave. He lets her wander out and he pays for their meals. 

He wanders out to her and she swings her pack onto her back using both shoulders. She reaches out and kisses his cheeks, quickly, rubbing her thumbs over his cheekbones.

Slipping her sunglasses onto her face, she smiles at him. 

“It’ll be all good, k̂ormon, you’ll see,” she says, “just wait for my signal.” 

She then walks off in the direction of the metro. 

He rubs his hand over his mouth and then walks in the opposite direction, back to his apartment. 

--

The signal comes in the form of a gif in a text message at 2:45 AM that wakes him up as the tone goes off near his head. 

The gif is of an ermine, a white one, and it looks like it’s talking, saying “we shouldn’t change just so we can fit in here.”

There’s a short message, too. 

It’s time to come home, k̂ormon.

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

A Tale of Red States and Blue States

Once upon a time, there was a state.

It was a large state, with vast stretches of country between its world-class cities. It had communities rich in diversity and activism and ideas – and it had a lot of resentful white people who were just plain old rich.

The richest and most resentful white people created a terrible blight they called “modern conservatism.” They set their wicked curse on the state, and then unleashed it on the nation with two Republican presidents – one lamentable, the next even worse.

There were many along the way who sounded the alarm, but there were more who ignored the danger far too long. The spell had summoned a beast. The beast was hideous and stupid. It was no good at anything except being a hateful beast. But the dark spell had done so much damage that being a hateful beast was enough for the beast to win, at least for a time.

In one version of the story, the state is called “California.”

In another, it is called “Texas.”

It’s strange to think of now, with a decade of sneering about the “left coast” and “San Francisco liberals” and blah blah blah baked into political conventional wisdom, but it’s true. The reactionary modern conservatism which held the whip hand on the backlash to the great civil rights advances of the 1960s was born in California. California voted for Richard Nixon six times: once as their senator, twice as Eisenhower’s vice president, and then three times as the Republican presidential nominee. In between those elections, Nixon of course had to win primaries. In 1968, when he was the Republican front-runner, he faced an upstart challenger who wanted to make sure he’d be racist enough to keep conservative southerners in the tent. That person was not a southerner, but the then-governor of California, Ronald Reagan, who would go on to be the next Republican elected after Nixon.

So what the fuck happened? Well, a lot of things, and I don’t want to pretend to do justice to the generations of righteous activism that pushed back against this disastrous regime. Democrats did occasionally win state-wide – notably, California elected two Democratic women to the Senate in 1992 – even though Orange County was practically a metonym for American conservatism right up until the 2018 midterms. But the turning point that seems to have gotten your average voter to turn on the Republican party for good was in 1994. Governor Pete Wilson, a kind of hard-right proto-Trump, threw his weight behind a hateful anti-immigrant ballot initiative. It passed, even though it was so deranged that it never went into effect because a federal court ruled it unconstitutional within days of the vote, because the California electorate really was that conservative. The electorate changed, almost on a dime. Mexican-American voters organized. Their friends and neighbors and fellow citizens realized that sitting back wasn’t an option. And now the Republican Party of California is a fucking joke.

This isn’t, like, the eternal winds of history blowing microscopic chips off the statue of Ozymandias. If you remember the Clinton presidency, this happened in your lifetime. If you’re a little bit younger than that, it happened in your big cousins’ lifetimes.

Part of what makes it hard to see changes like this is that the dim bulbs in our political media see everything through a horse race lens, where who gets one particular W is the only piece of information worth retaining. You win and you’re clever; you lose and you’re a dumb sucker who tried. Who gets power is really important! But if you only care about that, then you miss the really important trends.

Take the Georgia 6th, the district once represented by Newt fucking Gingrich. Its representative joined Trump’s cabinet in early 2017, at least in part because it was such a supposedly safe Republican seat, so there was a special election for his replacement. Traumatized Democrats and Women’s Marchers threw themselves into the steeply uphill campaign of former John Lewis intern Jon Ossoff. When he came up a few points short, our blue-check media betters tried to turn Ossoff into a punch line stand-in for silly #Resistance liberal losers coping with Trump by losing some more, SUCK IT, MOM! but the other, correct, interpretation is that Ossoff only came up a few points short in a district that was supposed to protect the kookiest of right-wing cranks. His campaign had functioned as kind of an ad hoc boot camp for novice organizers, canvassers, and future school board candidates who had previously been too discouraged and disorganized to take this kind of swing, and it showed Democratic party donors that the district was winnable. So when gun safety advocate and Mother of the Movement Lucy McBath stepped up to the plate in the 2018 midterms, her campaign had the infrastructure it needed, and now she’s well-positioned to be reelected because she’s doing a great job. Meanwhile, Ossoff’s organizing chops and the enthusiastic work his supporters did for Rep. McBath are a big part of why he’s in a dead heat against incumbent Republican Senator David Purdue.

That’s why I’m keeping an eye on the South this year. The presidential campaign there is interesting, but the real story is in those network effects. There’s a rising tide that threatens to make the blue wave of 2018 look like a light spring shower if things break the right way. Just look at the Democratic senate candidates. They’re a diverse group: men and women, Black and white, preacher and fighter pilot. Most are relative newcomers to national audiences, but only some of them are young. Jon Ossoff is just 33; when he was in grade school, Mike Espy of Mississippi was Secretary of Agriculture. What they do seem to have in common is that they are having the time of their fucking lives.

Here’s Espy:

Moving and grooving in McComb. pic.twitter.com/RANCRGGpX7

— Mike Espy (@MikeEspyMS)

October 31, 2020

Ossoff:

The people of Georgia are tired of having a spineless, disgraced politician serve as their Senator. pic.twitter.com/OdaYwFKzmz

— Jon Ossoff (@ossoff)

October 30, 2020

Senator Doug Jones of Alabama:

I know you’ve heard us say it before, but when you see this clip, it bears reappearing: This guy really is clueless. https://t.co/w9YOUHegCW

— Doug Jones (@DougJones)

October 22, 2020

Jamie Harrison of South Carolina:

It's debate night and y'all know I'm going to walk it like I talk it. Let's see if @LindseyGrahamSC can do the same. pic.twitter.com/TNABxsaTEO

— Jaime Harrison (@harrisonjaime)

October 30, 2020

And the bad bitch with her eye on the big prize, MJ Hegar of Texas:

It's about time Texans had a senator as tough as we are. https://t.co/8MQ8Tykmyt pic.twitter.com/bgPr5vtgdh

— MJ Hegar (@mjhegar)

October 16, 2020

Clutch those pearls, John! https://t.co/iWej8MrhtV

— MJ Hegar (@mjhegar)

October 22, 2020

The spineless bootlicker Hegar is challenging, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, is currently resting his dainty patoot in the seat once held by none other than Lyndon Baines Johnson. As president, LBJ would aggressively push for some of the greatest human rights legislation in American history in pursuit of what he called the Great Society. That meant Medicare and Medicaid. It meant a revolution in environmental protections. It meant PBS. And it meant telling the one-party authoritarian regime in the Jim Crow south that America was done with their bullshit, they were going to have real democracy, they were going to do it now, and if they didn’t like it they could eat his ass.

Johnson was a complicated guy and left a complicated legacy. His project required an unusual leader of courage, conviction, and unmitigated savvy, cut with streaks of megalomania and dubious mental health. No architect but Lyndon Johnson would have built the Great Society, and no place but Texas could have built Lyndon Johnson.

Then again, Texas also gave us the Bushes in the late twentieth century. It gave us a terrorist attack on a Biden campaign bus just this weekend.

That darkness is real. So is the long, grinding slog to turn on the light. Like the GA-06 silliness, Democratic efforts in Texas get laughed at as some quixotic waste of resources by arrogant flops. In fact, the past few years of high-profile statewide elections in Texas have been on a pretty clear trajectory. In 2014, Wendy Davis, a state senator from Fort Worth who captured widespread progressive attention with her heroic filibuster of a 2013 state abortion ban, ran for governor. She lost by the ~20-point margin you’d expect in a year where Republicans everywhere did really well, but it was a vitamin B-12 shot to a perpetually overwhelmed state Democratic party. The 2016 Clinton campaign, when it was (correctly!) on the offensive before FBI Director Comey decided he would really prefer a Trump presidency, invested heavily in its Texas ground game. It was always a long shot, but even after the Comey letter and the Texas-specific sabotage by the Russian Internet Research Agency, Texas Democrats cut Trump’s margin there down to single digits. That is to say, they recruited the volunteers and taught the skills and raised the cash and registered the voters to carry the ball way down the field. And in the 2018 midterms, El Paso representative Beto O’Rourke built on all that energy to fight Senator Ted Cruz to a near draw. O’Rourke didn’t quite make it, but he did help a lot of downballot Democrats over the finish line and forced Republicans to light a few oil drums of cash on fire to save a seat that they had always assumed would be safe.

That growth has been possible because of a ton of hard work and persuasion, but it’s also been possible because there was so much untapped potential. As progressives have argued for years, Texas was less of a “red state” than a non-voting state. I’m not a person that usually has a lot of patience for people not bothering to vote, because the people who get to be loud about that are whiny, privileged assholes who can afford to be flip about the right to vote. But there are a lot of people who find it hard because they absolutely do know the weight and importance of voting, because they or their mothers or their grandfathers were beaten and terrorized to keep them away from the polls. They might make the same mouth-noises as the selfish dilettantes about how it doesn’t matter and they’re all corrupt and blah blah blah. But a vote is a tiny little leap of faith. It’s at least a skip of hope. And it hurts to know the weight and importance of that and to keep feeling that disappointment over and over again.

A key thing that Republicans in the South managed to do for a while, but California Republicans didn’t, was to let their misrule seem almost tolerable day to day. As outrageous as the overall trends were, as catastrophic the results were for a lot of people’s lives, it didn’t necessarily feel entirely irrational for lots of people to avoid the inconvenience and disappointment of trying to stop them. But if you’re just going to be a constant, unwavering shit show of incompetence and evil, infuriating people every waking minute of every fucking day for years on end, they’re not going to be deterred by inconvenience and disappointment. They're not going to be deterred by fucking tear gas. They’re going to understand that it’s worth trying to get rid of you, even if it’s a long shot. They’re going to line up to kick you in the shin just for the hell of it. And that’s exactly what millions of them have already done.

These dumbass motherfuckers radicalized Taylor goddamn Swift!

LOOK WHAT YOU MADE HER DO!

So yeah. People who had given up are fucking voting. Texas has already had hundreds of thousands more people vote than voted in all of 2016. BEFORE ELECTION DAY!

Vice President Biden likes to recite a poem by the great Irish bard Seamus Heaney. It’s about how you have to have faith that a better world is possible, even when you don’t have any rational reason to expect it any time soon, because it’s the only way you’ll be able to seize the most precious of opportunities, when “justice can rise up/ And hope and history rhyme.”

Sometimes hope and history walk into a bar to tell dirty jokes for a bachelorette party in downtown Austin. And they rhyme.

For a hundred and fifty years, unreconstructed revanchist terrorist sympathizers have threatened that “the South will rise again.” They mean the treasonous mobsters who called themselves the Confederacy.

Why do those losers get to define the South? Like, literally, they’re losers. They lost.

There’s another South. The terrorists cut it off at the knees, so it never quite rose the first time. But it’s always been there. The South the heroes of Reconstruction tried to build. The South of the Kennedy Space Station and the Center for Disease Control. The South of the French Quarter of New Orleans and the gay neighborhoods of Atlanta. The South of Barbara Jordan, Ann and Cecile Richards, Stacey Abrams, and the young women of the Virginia state legislature. The South of Maya Angelou, Molly Ivins, and Mark Twain. The South of the exiles of Miami and the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. The South of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Representative John Lewis. The South of James Earl Carter, William Jefferson Clinton, and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Once upon a time, there was a colossus. The richest and most resentful white people feared it, for it was both great and good. So they hunted it mercilessly. They tortured and killed its most vulnerable people. They bound it and silenced it and told the rest of the world it didn’t even exist. But they knew that wicked lie was the best they could do, for something so mighty could never be slain by the likes of them.

The giant grows stronger every day as it struggles against its chains, and those chains are turning to rust. One day soon  - maybe in this decade; maybe this week – it will break free. It will rise. And it will shake the earth. Just you watch.

[dickytwister]

HEY do you maybe have like an oc page or could you tell me something about all your ocs because i'm Interested and you have my full attention :eyes:

AHSJDKGLHL that's so sweet i'm nfjghl???? i don't have an oc page bc i'm the embodiment of an old man being given an iphone after 50 years of using a rotary phone but !!! i can yell abt them a bit aaa thank you for asking abt them 🥺🥺💚

i put everything under the cut bc dear god i have a lot to say abt my kids and i'm not gonna make everyone scroll through that HHHHHH haw 🤠🤠

elliot fletcher

- he's my deputy in fc5!! he's from waverly in iowa and he's just...very tired nfjfkhl give my poor man a break

- everytime his radio crackles he ages 10 years and if it's john talking add another 10 years

- he keeps the three heralds alive but he doesn't care abt joseph <3

- gets in trouble bc he's impulsive af nfjghl when jacob is close to the cage?? ram his face in the bars. when john leans like rlly close in the confession scene?? headbutt 😌🙏🏼

- the only people who know abt his past are earl, grace, faith and john, the rest just kinda speculate and elliot lets them believe what they want bc not only does he rlly not want ppl to know the actual truth, it's also very funny to listen to the stuff they can come up with

- speaking of faith he often seeks her for advice and sometimes they get high together and he gets teary eyed bc she's just... very nice to him and when all you see everyday is violence it's overwhelming to be shown a little bit of kindness 🥲🙏🏼

- he's in love with john but also he'd kick him across the county if he could but also he'd give his life for him

- after the bombs and all he unlocks his final form and becomes A Husband™, complete with a beard, a scarf and bad jokes that make john want to officially marry him so he can divorce his ass

- fun fact i came up with the name elliot fletcher bc i thought it sounded neat but recently i found out there's a trans actor called elliot fletcher too??? like what were the odds ngl that's so cool

carter quill

- this is my character in the marvel dnd game my brother is dming!!

- his parents are peter quill and kitty pryde and he inherited his mom's powers (so he can become immaterial and stuff uwu) and his dad's tiny pebble brain~

- he grew up on a ship with the guardians so his family is just... a bunch of uncles, one of which is a tree

- he's part of an initiative called the peacekeepers with isaaq cage (luke cage's and jessica jones' son), finneas "zorn" reeves (brock rumlow's and sinthea shmidt's son), lu "highway star" khan (the mandarin's son), alexis "hex" pythagoras (doctor strange's protégé) and ev-lin (ronan the destroyer's daughter who also happens to be carter's bully when they were 11 HHHHHH)

- everyone agrees that carter is just... a puppy. a little labrador. so overexcited. head empty. he doesn't know what's going on but he's having fun with his friends and that's what matters <3

- he died once and went to hell for like 66 years bc he held a bomb while it was exploding but he got better and he doesn't remember most of his time in hell but also he's a lil traumatised

- he wears cute skirts sometimes and also froggie themed clothes 🥰🥰 he's terrible at applying nail polish and it ends up smudged most of the time bc he can't sit still for more than two minutes without going insane but he still likes it

- he has a pet bird called ink!! he thought it was a nice name bc his last name is quill so u know,,, ink,,, quill,,,, he inherited his dad's terrible humor also

- he's fruity and has a big fat crush on one of his teammates 😳😳👉🏼👈🏼

- he strictly refuses to kill, so he uses stunt energy guns and a three section staff to fight!! he accidentally killed someone once and threw up

- he knows asl and is fluent in it!! he's also very bad at reading measurements when cooking (and reading in general) so he relies on their proto-ai, dadji, to help him cook and he listens to audiobooks a lot!!

- idk what else to say abt him except like two games ago he was in the hospital bc lu got hurt and he wanted to get him muffins from a coffee shop across the streets but he panicked when faced with the selection so he bought one of each and came back to the hospital room with like,,,, twenty muffins

- i found this pic of his face claim and it honestly just radiates his vibe so here have it

thorgran galvish

- he's my dwarf enchanter from another homebrew dnd game!! in this universe (and maybe others idk shit abt actual dnd HHHH forgive me) enchanter dwarves are lowkey enslaved bc of their rare link with magic

- thorgran blew up a wall and ran away to the surface so now he's a fugitive and he's constantly on the run uwu trust issues ensue

- he loves the sky so much?? especially at night?? he knows abt constellations, but he thinks they're just whatever you see in the stars and doesn't know there are like,,, actual constellations so he sits on the roof of a tall building sometimes and finds his own constellations

- he also tries to draw them but he rlly sucks at it aslkdsgl that doesn't stop him from filling his journal with little stars and drawings!!

- during my very first game with him he found his rival, who turned out to be a 16 years old teenager?? millennial/gen z rivalry

- agh i don't have much abt him yet bc i've only just started to play him but he's my beefiest boy and also a dilf 🥰🥰

theadric "elder" montajay

- yet another character from the same universe as thorgran, but this time it's a funky little halfling bard

- his instrument is the violin!! he tried every other instrument and his mom was very supportive despite how bad he was at all of them. his community was raided and his father died, so he inherited his violin and that turned out to be the only instrument he could play

- took his love of the economy to the next level when he decided to fuck every gang leader he could find to control their operations and ruin their organizations so the money they hoarded could be put back in circulation

- accidentally fell in love with a half-orc gang leader and was abt to tell him the truth abt what he was doing but was exposed by the first person he'd cheated so he had to run without explaining himself to his lover smh ://

- "i don't wanna fall in the slutty bard cliché," i say before immediately giving elder the tightest leather pants and opening his shirt to show his majestic chest hair.

- surprisingly good with kids?? anyone younger than him who looks sad becomes His Child and he turns into a lil mama, tasting the food of an inn first to assure it's not poisoned, giving hugs, soft shit like that ngl he's just a mom 😔😔

- we abandoned the game he was in but we left off when he'd just escaped a dwarven prison with his new child and others owo anyway slutty bard with chest hair?? that's just the witcher's jaskier

scylla

- my gay pirate lady!! i don't have much abt her either bc AAA BRAINROT but !!! i still love her very much

- she's a hybrid between a human and a psaarinch (fish folks in our homebrew universe uwu) and she looks very human except she has like shark abilities?? she can smell blood, taste with her skin, breathe underwater for like two hours or smth, sharper teeth,,

- she started off as a privateer but like what was the kingdom gonna do?? track her down to make sure everything she did was legal?? nah man she got that sweet fleet and became a pirate

- she beats men up in inns and gives their wives a good time <3

- she's very close to her crew and they're kinda just a big family

- she fights with those s-shaped staffs?? but they're actually blades ngfhl she's very agile and looks like she's dancing when she's actually fighting

- fun fact she's my second shark oc the first one was called maito and she was a yellow lantern in a dc game we did (the main difference between them is that maito loved men while scylla is very much a lesbian 😌🙏🏼)

i have like so many more of them but that's already such a long post and i don't wanna do too much NGL if u wanna know more hmu i'll yell some more 😎😎🙏🏼🙏🏼

[ncfan-1]

I probably shouldn’t hope for this, since pulling it off well would require more competence than I think the Gotham writers possess, but…

…Bruce Wayne and Jonathan Crane are currently each other’s strongest narrative foils and parallels in Gotham, and I think that now, when Bruce is currently in free-fall on his downward spiral, would be a good time for them to first encounter each other.

At this point, they are both (well, Jonathan was the last time we saw him; since the writers and the main character both seem to have once again completely forgotten about him now that he’s not on-screen, who know?) in the process of lashing out. Bruce is lashing out as a result of something he’s done, trying to become someone else to deaden himself to the pain. Jonathan is lashing out as a result of multiple things that were done to him, trying to become someone else because becoming himself has (from his perspective) become completely untenable. They both wear masks to conceal their true selves, but their masks in their present forms have been shaped by the trauma they’ve undergone, and are both very ugly as a result.

Going back to the roots, we watched earlier in the show as they both had their lives as they knew it completely destroyed. Bruce’s parents were killed in front of him, and he was forced later to confront the fact that his father wasn’t the man he’d thought he was. On top of that, a large part of the reason he was targeted by the Court of Owls was because he was a Wayne—because of his blood, because of his father.

Given that Gerald Crane’s obsession with fear and with ‘curing’ it likely didn’t take its final shape overnight, Jonathan’s life had probably been deteriorating for a while before his father decided to start killing people and that, for whatever reason, his son needed to be along for the ride instead of sent to live with relatives or have other arrangements made for him (Probably to ensure Jonathan couldn’t blow the whistle on him—likely the reason there was no money in that car—but Jonathan and Gerald’s relationship was ten kinds of fucked up). Then, he’s forced to be complicit in his father’s crimes, forced to be a guinea pig for his father’s experiments, which culminates in Gerald forcibly administering a massive overdose of the serum to Jonathan, and Jonathan watching (still conscious and lucid despite being in the middle of a seizure) as his sole surviving parent was gunned down in front of him.

They’re also both very alone right now. That Jonathan is completely alone in the world has been true since his dad was killed. Bruce has alienated Selina, fired Alfred, and his relationship with Gordon is on the rocks. His primary relationships are with other teenagers who haven’t seen who he is deep down, who he engages with only as “Party kid desperately trying to deaden the agonizing mental pain he’s in.”

If handled well, I think the two of them having a shared arc could be a great thing for the show. It would make for good, meaty character exploration of both Bruce and Jonathan, revealing things about each of them through the way they reflect on the other. You can learn a lot about yourself from looking into a mirror; sometimes, you learn even more from looking into a mirror that happens to be warped. It would also be thematically rich, playing on the themes of masks and the true self hiding underneath.

One scenario is that Bruce runs afoul of proto-Scarecrow somehow. Maybe Jonathan’s starting to get to the point where he’s targeting people for ‘experimentation’, and he happens to pick a party Bruce is at. Their first major interaction is as adversaries. The exploration of the two characters as foils and parallels, how they reflect the themes of masks and the true self would take place over the course of several episodes as Bruce chases after him, galvanized back into action by seeing one of the future members of his rogue’s gallery wreaking havoc. Galvanized back into action by getting a nasty dose of (hopefully waterproof now) fear toxin, and the unhappy self-examination he may have been forced into by what it made him see.

Another scenario is that when they meet, it’s not as adversaries, but, sort of, as friends. Maybe Bruce wanders into the Narrows one night after a party, possibly very drunk, and bumps into an odd, slightly older boy who takes him off the streets for the night. Given that the GCPD hasn’t caught him yet, I assume Jonathan isn’t walking around Gotham in costume and calling himself ‘the Scarecrow.’ Even considering how incompetent the GCPD is, I like to think they would have spotted him if he was. So Bruce doesn’t recognize him as an Arkham escapee. He just assumes Jonathan’s a street kid like Selina; not a difficult conclusion to come to, since wherever Jonathan is, he’s probably hiding out in an abandoned building. Jonathan may or may not know exactly who Bruce is at first, but he’d likely find out sooner or later.

They sort of befriend each other, but as the season wears on and plots develop, a rift grows. Bruce is slowly waking up to the fact that he can’t carry on as he is now, and while “numb Party Kid” Bruce Wayne might not have noticed it, Bruce Wayne as he really is, can’t help but be uncomfortable with the fact that Jonathan really seems to want to make people hurt. He may also grow frightened of Jonathan, both because Jonathan is capable of being incredibly menacing and because he’s picking up on the parallels between the two of them, and it’s struck a deeply uncomfortable chord with him.

On Jonathan’s end, there could be a strain of resentment and disgust—“Yeah, you watched your parents get gunned down right in front of you. That’s horrible; I feel sorry for you. But after your parents died, you still had a life. You had a home to return to, a guardian who was prepared to protect you from people who would exploit you, you had friends who were willing to stick their necks out for you. And you don’t seem to value it nearly as much as you should. You still had all that, and asides from your house you’ve thrown it all away.”

There’s something else, something interesting; we’ve seen Bruce commit murder, whereas Jonathan hasn’t. Bruce killed Ra’s al Ghul because Ra’s threatened to come back some day and kill Bruce’s hypothetical wife and children, when Bruce may never get married, may never have children—Bruce basically killed Ra’s over a threat Ra’s made to people who don’t even exist. Meanwhile, though we’ve only seen Jonathan in two episodes of S4 so far (and given Gotham’s track record, they’ll likely try to push him over the moral event horizon simply because they don’t have any other way to try to make Gordon look good in comparison to him—and note I said try), it’s actually pretty striking that he hasn’t killed anyone. He didn’t kill Grady or Warden Reed, two men who abused and terrorized him, the latter incessantly for three years, when he had them at his mercy. He didn’t even kill Gordon when he had him disarmed on the floor in front of him, while Jonathan had his scythe in hand. He calls on the other inmates to kill Gordon, but it read more like a frantic attempt to get them to cover his escape—because Jonathan, after three years in Arkham, knows exactly how reliable those guys are. Maybe upon finding out that Bruce killed a man, Jonathan will draw away from him because, at this point in his character development, he considers murder beyond the pale. A nascent supervillain regarding him with disgust because he’s never sunk so low as Bruce has might be enough to give Bruce the jolt he needs—or at least might be enough to constitute a tipping point for Bruce.

Like I said, the prospect of interaction between these two characters just fascinates me. I think I’d actually like to see the second scenario play out more than I would the first, because we’ve already had Bruce and Jerome meet as enemies, and having Bruce and Jonathan’s relationship be more ambiguous would be more interesting. I have little faith in the writers to pull this off well, and I have plenty of faith that the next time we see Jonathan, he’ll be written as performing gratuitous acts of supervillainy in a cynical attempt to make us lose sympathy for him (And if so, nice try, writers, but no, it won’t work. I still remember how this kid wound up the way he is now). But still I find myself hoping for better.

[idreamofasriel-blog]

Beyond the Battle Network Line: A Megaman Fanfic Series

Megaman X Episode One: Chaos Control Part One Note: If you read the Preview version of this, you will notice some changes I did to it to fix the story in it. There will be a drawing reference of Konnar and Chaos later on once I get their drawings done. Keep this in mind that I’m not the best artist in the world and I try my best to give good details on my characters. Also, the story is under Keep reading due to it being so long. Yes, you will see some writing errors and I use the help of Grammarly before I post. Thank you for giving this upstarting series a try.

After the incident of the Jakob Project and the halted production of the Copy Chips, New Generation Reploids are stepping forward seeking help from the Maverick Hunters and the Government to erase any traces of Sigma's DNA in their Copy Chip for good and willing to work side by side with the Old Generation Reploids to bring an end to the Maverick war. But someone else has other ideas to end this war. The rain was pouring down rapidly in the once populated human city that is now nothing more than a mere ghost town with leftover remaining signs of humans being once here in the past. Traffic lights flickered on and off and the street light lit the Hunters way to their destination. Raindrops splashed and dripped down their armors and weapons and Axl let out a bored yawn, “Man, I thought this place will be crawling with Mavericks by now.” he said while resting his gun on his shoulder, “I'm itching to shoot one right now in the face.”  Zero groaned and shook his head, “The minute we got here, you're already complaining about being bored.” said Zero, surveying the empty streets. “You have to be patience, Axl or this mission will be all for nothing if the Mavericks found out that we're here to stop them.” said X, Axl pouted a bit and they stopped in unison after loud banging of trash cans echoed through the city and they looked around to search for the source of the noise and Zero singled them to follow his movements and they headed toward a warehouse by an abandoned factory. Zero held his hand up when he saw a shadowy figure darting away and heading toward the opening doors of the warehouse. Moving toward the door, the Hunters stood on both sides of it. “Okay, on the count of three and we'll ambush them. One...” “Three!” Axl took off running straight into the warehouse, leaving X and Zero surprised and frustrated for Axl's action and they ran after him, “Axl, it could be a trap!” X shouted and they froze when they heard a gun going off and Axl screaming and they ran faster to catch up with him. There was a light at the end of the warehouse that opens up to another room and they found Axl rooted in place, staring off in horror with one hand cupping his mouth and his gun laying on the ground with the barrel of the gun smoking. His hand shook as he pointed at what is shaking him to the core and X and Zero turn and they too look in horror. “Who would commit this disgusting crime?” said X, wanting to look away but yet he couldn't and Zero stepped forward to investigate. The room was filled with dead bodies of New Generation Reploids, ripped apart with their chests slashed opened and gutted like fishes. It was their twisted frozen screaming faces that's what got to Axl shivering with fright and he took a few steps back and turned to dash out of the door screaming from the top of the lungs with X and Zero running after him to make sure he's safe and back at the base unharmed. General Signas sighed and he rotates his chair to face X and Zero who are seated in front of his desk, “How's Axl? Is he in a better state of mind to attend this report session?” Signas asked and X shook his head, “He's still shaken up by the crime scene we saw and he wants to sit this one out. We'll give him the details of this meeting later when we check up on him.” said X and Signas nodded and he pressed a few buttons on his desk to bring up a profile on X and Zero's report and scroll through it, “Unfortunately, this isn't the last murder we're going to see. We've been getting reports of New Generation Reploids being murdered and having their chests ripped opened and they all have one thing in common; their copy chips are getting stolen and now our project to remove all traces of Sigma's DNA is falling apart at the seam.” “You got to be kidding me.” Zero muttered under his breath and Alia gave them copies of past reports of other New Generation Reploids being murdered and torn open to look over, “I wish I was, Zero but we got New Generation Reploids backing out of the program that is either going into hiding or refusing to do it altogether.” said Signas. They looked over the past reports and all the crime scenes photos and the report told the same story, New Generation Reploids are murdered and removed of their Copy Chips for unknown reasons. “We're now concern about Axl's safety and we want extras watch over him in case they decided to go after him.” “Don't worry, sir. Zero and I will keep a close eye on him until this murderer is brought to justice.” Axl has been aimlessly wondering about the Hunter Base and taking deep breathes to steady his nerves and taking breaks from his walking. He saw dead bodies of Reploids before in the past and they never shook him hard to the core. But seeing Reploids of his own kind has done it. It's even worst when Axl recognized half of them from the program that Signas requested him to help and reach out to shape-shifting Reploids like him who want to rid of any traces of Sigma in them. “I can't let this bother me. I need to need to find this murderer and put them in their place. I won't have any problem handling them myself if I have to.” Axl said with a tone of confident and stood out with pride. He yelled when a hand was placed on his shoulder and turned around to put himself in a fighting stance with guns drawn on a gray and purple colored Reploid holding his hands up, “Axl! Woah! It's me, Konnar.” he said and Axl put his gun away and sigh with relief. “Sorry, I got pretty tense for a second there.” Axl smiled while nervously rubbing the back of his head. “Yeah, tense enough to almost put a bullet into his skull.” said a sarcastic rude voice when an AI Reploid appeared next to Konnar. Konnar is a gray and purple Reploid with a diamond shaped gem on his helmet with smaller round ones around it. He has a short brown ponytail and his left eye is black while his other eye is normal with purple irises. Chaos the AI Reploid on the other hand, his left eye is gone and can only see out of his right one and he has a short Mohawk with braids on one side and shaved on the other side. “Give him some slack, Chaos. Axl had a horrible day and he's still recovering from it.” Konnar looked at the AI from the corner of his eyes. “You feeling okay, Axl?” Konnar frowned and Axl sighed, “I'm not sure, Konnar. I don't know why today's mission shook me up since I'm used to seeing destroyed Reploids on some mission but this....This one got me.” Konnar put a consoling hand on Axl's shoulder, “It's no doubt it's because most of the dead Reploids you have seen are either Mavericks or the so call “Old Generation” Reploids we're being called but when you see one of your kind getting killed then yeah, you are going to feel shaken up.” Chaos folded his arms and they couldn't help but feel that Chaos is right, for an AI that can be a jerk and picking fights with X from time to time. Zero and X greeted Konnar and he gave them a friendly hello back to them before he excuse himself and Chaos to head for their training with his mentor, Starblade Raccoon. Zero and X had a long talk with Axl and explaining to him about the other series of murder and Signas' order to have extra security around him and they offered to watch over him, “That murderer has to be insane to go after a Maverick Hunter like me. I'll be fine without having extra security and handling them by ourselves.” said Axl and  X shook his head, “Axl, you can't be reckless over this and think the worst isn't going to happen. Zero and I are concern about your safety since you're a shapeshifter yourself and they might come after you too.” “But I'm a Proto-type. Why would they waste their time on me? Then again, Sigma was after me and he destroyed the whole Red Alert to do it.” Axl looked away, thinking about the day when he left his old group when they weren't themselves. “Axl, how about you get some sleep and we'll talk more about it in the morning.” Zero suggested and X nodded in agreement, “I agree with Zero. Maybe a good night sleep will clear our heads.” Axl looked up at them and smiled a bit, “Yeah, sleep sounds good right about now.” he said and they bid each other goodnight before heading off to their room to sleep. Good night sleep didn't come to Axl and he was haunted by the images of the grizzly crime scene. Their faces all frozen in terrified horror and ripped body parts everywhere and the room's light began to flicker and one by one, the bulbs burned out and echoing footsteps rang through the air and stopping halfway throughout of the darkness was Lumine in his psychotic state and stared at Axl, “This could of all been prevented if you would have joined us and abandoned the old generation.” Lumine cocked his head at him and he turned into a twisted monster and attacks. Axl woke up screaming and placed a hand on his head and feels his core running fast. It was raining outside again and the raindrops dripped down his window and there was knocking on his door, “Axl, are you all right?” X asked him and Axl answered the door. “Get your armor on, Axl. I'm afraid there's been another murder of a New Generation Reploid.” said Zero. Axl kept telling himself that it was nothing but a dream and it shouldn't bother him but when they arrive at the crime scene, the dreaded feeling in the pit of his stomach all came back to him they were greeted by their scout, Nyiem, a navy blue and red colored Reploid with faded yellow hair and wearing a ragged scarf and he was taller than the hunters that approached him. “Glad to you here, Commander X and Zero. I found this body on my way back from my scouting mission.” said Nyiem and Axl swallowed and followed them at a slow pace. “I must warn you, this isn't going to be pretty.” “All right, we're ready to see the crime scene.” said X and Nyiem hoisted the white clothes away to reveal another dead Reploid body and Axl eyes widen out of pure horror started stepping away from the beheaded and torn open New Generation Reploid and feeling his core racing faster than before and his body was trembling and shaking with dread of fear and his head was hurting. “Axl what's wrong?” Zero asked him out of aghast and the hunters ran to his side to help him out, “He's having a panic attack! Get him out of here and somewhere safe right away!” said Nyiem and The Hunters helped Axl up to his feet and helped him move away as soon as possible from the crime scene. “Nyiem is right, you suffered a Panic attack.” said Lifesaver, turning the monitors off and Axl hopped off from the exam table, “What caused it?” Axl asked him as he put his helmet back on, “Overwhelming anxiety and fear. Is your previous mission still bothering you?” Lifesaver asked him as he writing down any answers that Axl would give him, “Well, I did have that nightmare of the said mission and what did it was the current body found from Nyiem. I felt like was going to shut down right on the spot.” Lifesaver nodded, “It's best that we nip this in the bud before it starts giving you bigger problems in life.” The sun was setting over the city with the faint glow of the remaining light and Konnar waved hello to Axl and the two teenagers chatted and Konnar frowned, “I do hope you get better, Axl. Having Panic attacks is no fun. I would like to chat some more but my mentor is having me accompany him on a patrol tonight.” said Konnar as he adjusted his Gungnir on his back and he can see the old Raccoon calmly singling him to hurry and Konnar waved goodbye to Axl in a friendly manner. “Konnar, I can see why you're easy to get along.” Axl smiled a bit and headed to his room. The nightmares came back again but this time Axl was in a dark void and one by one, pairs of glowing eyes would appear and step out of the darkness is Lumine again but looking calm and collective as he walked toward Axl, “Gruesome, wasn't it Axl.” he said in a soft voice and Axl gasped as he felt hands coming out of the darkness to grab him. He struggled to free himself but Lumine reached out and grabbed hold of his head to make him look at him. Lumine smiled a bit, gently caressing his cheek, “Theirs a way we can stop those senseless murders by doing one simple thing.” He turned Axl's head to the side and lean closed to whisper into his ear, “Let me control you.” Axl struggled harder and shouted no and Lumine stepped back from with a cold emotionless expression. “So death it is then. No matter, once the killer is done doing away with you. I'll repair and take over.” Lumine made tentacles appear from his back and all at once, they lunged toward Axl. It was the scream that was heard all over the base and X and Zero came rushing to Axl's aid and X blasted his door down and they found Axl having his Panic Attack again. The Hunters didn't waste any time and they helped Axl out to recover from his attack. X spoke to him in a calming voice and Zero was encouraging to Axl take deep breathes and do breathing exercises with him. Axl let out a relaxing sigh and he felt his core slowing down to a normal steady pulse. “Axl, it's best-” Axl interrupts Zero, “I'm fine. I just had another bad dream is all.” he said and he stood up to get ready for the day as X and Zero watched him with worrying expression, “Well, you're not going to like this but it's up to you if you still want to come or not. We got another body dump today.” said X. Axl couldn't peel his eyes away from the trashed up and gutted out New Generation Reploid that lays before them. What disturbed him the most was the Reploid's terrified frozen expression on their face before the corpse was picked up and hauled away to the morgue to figure out what caused its death but X and Zero knew well that the results are all going to be the same like the past murders. “What a mess.” Zero muttered as he gets a clear view of the grizzly crime scene before them and X frowned, seeing how aghast Axl is to see another Reploid like him killed and harvested like they were nothing but sheep for the slaughter. “Axl, you don't have to get yourself involved in this and we can request General Signas to take you off the case.” said X, resting a hand on Axl's shoulder and the teenager shakes his head, “I can't, X. I haven't gotten a good sleep without closing my eyes and seeing their destroyed bodies and their disturbed faces. I have to know who's been targeting them and why. Their copy chips are pried out of their chest but yet we don't know why would anyone wanted them from the start.” Axl let out a sigh and they can see how scare Axl is when he looked at his friends, “I can be next on their butcher chopping block. They could be watching me right now and waiting for me to be alone and kill me!” The Panic Attack is setting into Axl again, his breathing grew problematic and Zero reached out and grab hold of Axl's arms without grasping hard, “Axl, take a deep breath with me and listen to us.” he said and Axl swallowed and nodded his head. He took a deep breath with Zero and exhale and breath in again with him and feeling his panic going away and X rubbing his back to help comfort him as much as he can, he hates to see Axl like this and he wants to see him being his old self again. “Axl, I agree with X here. It's best we take you off the case until you're feeling better and get more treatment for your panic attacks. If we get any new breakthrough in the case, we'll come to you right away.” Axl hates to admit it but they're right, being in a panic isn't helping anyone, not even himself or the murdered New Generation Reploids who some of them been working with the Maverick Hunters to have any of Sigma's DNA erased from their system for good. X smiled a bit and he leads Axl away from the crime scene and Zero began their investigation. He kneels down to look at the ground and traced his fingers over a series of scratch marks all over the ground, none of them looked like they were done with knives or any other sharp weapons but yet they look all too familiar but who use to make them is Zero's question. “Alia, I need all information on past and current Mavericks who are known to use their claws as weapons.” Zero spoke into his earpiece while he picked up a torn up piece of metal off the ground stained with some fluids and Alia replied, “Okay, Zero. I listed off the Mavericks who are known to use claws as weapons and all I got is Neon Tiger, Grizzly Slash, Slash Beast, Mattrex, and Blizzard Wolfang so far popping up from our data source.” she said and Zero thinks it over, “Flash Cheetah is a maverick who uses claws too and Carcass Vulture uses a scythe if he wants to cut his enemy down.” While Alia is talking to him, Zero thought he saw a shadowy figure moved from the corner of his eyes and slowly turned. “Hold on, Alia. I think I saw our culprit fleeing.” Zero goes radio silent and runs down the narrow alleyway of the city. He stopped and he reaches for his saber and walked quietly as he can and avoided anything that makes a sound to alert the culprit. Zero wants them alive and brought back to the base for questioning, even if they have to kill each other first. “I know you're here. It's either you come with me quietly or I'll force you.” Loud footsteps echoed through the Ally Way and a dark shadow downcast over and the Maverick Hunter slowly turn and his eyes widen with the shock, “What the Hell is that?” End of Beyond the Battle Network Line Megaman X Episode One “Chaos Control Part one”

[leftnipsdoodles]

almost got ‘em all! thanks everyone for asking! answers are below~

1. What age did you begin getting into art? Why did you get into it? hmmmmm im gonna try to answer this as interestingly as i can. so ive been drawing all my life and i think it was just bc a) there was always art supplies lying around and b) i just had so many things in my head and wanted a way to express them or just get them out. like when i played with my toys i was always completely quiet bc i was imagining everything in my head. sound/speech/words just weren’t as interesting to me as a way to put my thoughts out there as visuals were. also i rly liked ranma 1/2 and wanted to draw it.

4. Do you make merchandise? Favorite kind of merch to make? i don’t. i did think about making charms once, even if just for myself. you know, those cute, chibi-esque ones everybody makes? then i remembered i couldn’t draw sth cute if you put a gun to my head.

5. Who/what are your art inspirations? I listed some of my favorite artists the last time i answered questions like this so i guess this time i’ll go with the ‘what’ rather than the ‘who’. to me, the most inspiring thing are atmospheres. it could be a garbage container with 1000 stickers stuck and half-way teared down on it. the way the colors and rips in the stickers look and how it adds to the mood of the location. or sometimes it’s listening to a certain song at a certain time in a certain place that creates a unique mood and inspires you. but looking at art has never been an inspiration. so there’s that.

6. What is something (a technique, behaviorism, etc.) that you do with drawing that you think is unique to you?

ok but in seriousness, i don’t think there’s anything. any uniqueness comes from a lack of skill and knowledge so i don’t think it’s worth mentioning. like what do you even want me to say?? that i edit pictures i drew in clip studio in ms paint?? bc i do.

7. Describe your style. What would you change? neither here nor there. i feel like you can tell i’m a bit scatterbrained bc my drawings always look like they were done without any kind of direction lmao.. in general, i’d like to draw more realistically. i’d like to look at my own drawings and think ‘this pose looks rly natural, the way the clothes fit, the way the face looks, the perspective, the way this character interacts with the environment; it all looks right’. i’d also like to be able to use colors better but it’s hard when you struggle to name more than 3.

8. How do you get out of an art block? well, usually, I don’t. i’m pretty sure i’ve been in one for the past 3 years or so lmao (lamenting my anguish online) but i’ve been told that just working through it is the best way to go. just drawing. even if you hate everything. future you will thank you for it, bc you’ll probably be learning things while doing so, even if you can’t see it at that moment.

9. Does your style reflect who you are visually or your personality? both tbh. if you saw a pic of myself next to a drawing of proto danny you’d definitely see a resemblance in a way. (things like the clothes i draw him in are a given i think. ive probably drawn 90% of my wardrobe at this point) but my personality too. the things i spend more time on while drawing, the colors i choose, the mood in my drawings. that’s all a part of me. im pretty sure my oc tags are fairly accurate documentation of my mood swings and general attitude towards life throughout time lmao also, this thing i summed up in my tags a few years ago

10. What do you find easiest about drawing? getting the ideas for it

11. What do you find hardest about drawing? actually drawing said ideas. look, the moment i sketch the idea down it’s already 50% worse than i imagined it, then when i go to actually draw the thing it turns into sth so bad that i can’t even come up with a forced joke about the scenario. but anyway, lately the thing that scares me the most about drawing (and why i can hardly do it) is heads. heads heads heads. faces faces faces. i just cant do it man lmao

12. Is art part of your career or a hobby? What is your goal with art in life? my goal is to get a better hobby and to never have to return to drawing ever again. but that’s wishful thinking. i guess it’ll always stay my biggest hobby but i’d consider my life a failure if it ever turned into a career.

13. Advice to give to beginning artists? draw your ideas. never limit your creativity bc you don’t have the skill to express it to its full extent. a crappily drawn picture that conveys a cool idea or creates a cool atmosphere is just as good as an expertly crafted painting that has a lame subject. there’s a reason ppl admire the mona lisa but would rather read 90s manga than stare at that portrait all day. god. i guess motivational speaker is another career that’s out of the question lmao but you get what i mean!!

14. Advice to give to your artist peers?

also don’t take advice from me.

15. What have you drawn recently that you are proud of? ‘recent’ is relative, and so is ‘proud’, but i still rly like how this pic turned out. i just feel like it looks very decided, like i knew what i wanted to do and did it (i didn’t)

16. Show something you drew in the past that shows your improvement. 2017 - 2011

ahh tbh.. looking at this i don’t feel like i’ve improved a lot at all lmao..

17. Show something you drew in the past you’re still proud of. this pic might just be one of my favorites i’ve ever drawn. it’s still alright art-wise and it’s probably the most from-the-heart thing i’ve drawn so obviously, i have a soft spot for it lmao but i also just found this again and i still love it, even tho it’s ugly. also this bone which, infamously, is my crowning achievement

you know what i find funny rn? that it’s hard for me to decide which pic to choose for this question. i mean i went through my old art and cringed a LOT but there’s so many pics that im rly fond of, now that i’ve gained some distance to them. i wonder if it’ll be like that with the stuff i draw now, too.

19. Share a tutorial or reference that helped you. nothing concrete but i’ll mention ‘blind drawing’ again. it helped me get a different feel for the lines i’m drawing and, theoretically, would have made me better at drawing from life too

20. Plug time! Where else can followers find you? in the woods around 3am. don’t make eye contact.

[doomedandstoned]

SUCK: The Untold Story of South Africa’s Pioneering Heavy Metal Band

~By Tim Harbour~

Steve Gilroy was raised in Liverpool and educated in London. Gil was the firebrand guitarist of the Johannesburg band SUCK between late-1970 and early-1971. This iconic heavy metal band started up in the same year Black Sabbath released their seminal album Paranoid and rose quickly to fame, then suddenly disappeared -- all within the span of a single year. But, what a year it was!

Suck changed the face of South African music. The outrageous antics of the band won them notoriety throughout the land. They chopped up pianos, set fire to stages, used colourful language on stage, and smashed up everything and anything around them. They were wild and they were banned from playing in every South African city and major town. They were evicted from what was then known as Rhodesia and escorted to the border by the police. Their only album, ‘Time to Suck’ (1970), recorded in less than a dozen hours at EMI Studios in Joburg, was banned from the South African Broadcasting Company and shunned by many radio stations. Every newspaper carried stories about their wiles, however, for if there was one thing that Suck made sure of, it was that they were being sufficiently noticed.

Suck specialized in an infectious style of acid-soaked hard rock and proto-metal, brought to life its four original members:

Andrew "Andy" Ioannides (vocals, flute)

Stephen "Gil" Gilroy (guitar)

Louis "Moose" Forer (bass)

Savario "Savvy" Grande (drums)

Now, nearly fifty years later, Suck are finally being recognised for their music and the one vinyl album to their name is currently being sold for about R 18,000 (approximately $1,279 USD). The album was pirated in Europe and Japan with a purple record sleeve and many of these still exist. Not until 2009 was it officially released in the United States, two years after Suck's mention in the Classic Rock article, 'The Lost Pioneers of Heavy Metal.'

This is their story as best remembered by Gil, whose recollections are being shared for the very first time in the pages of Doomed & Stoned.

Two Rabbits Runnin' In A Ditch

"I came to South Africa in April 1970 by invitation of the South African Government as a mechanical engineer. The day I landed, I phoned Eddie Eckstein who was the drummer with the Bats. I met Eddie in England when the Bats were touring there and we played on the same gig. We drank a few beers together and he said, 'Wow, man, you’ve got to come to South Africa. It's great!' When I called him he said, 'Shit, you’re really here. Did you bring your guitar? Let’s go jamming!'

The 1974 Publications Control Act was written for me the bastards.

"That night he took me to some of the big clubs in Joburg: Club Tomorrow, the Black Out, Ciros, and The Underground. I jammed with the top bands, drank a lot of beer, and had fun. I remember Eddie grabbing a bass guitar -- a brand new Fender -- off a bass player and performing an incredible head-first roll across the stage. The bass player nearly passed out! It was a night to remember, but how it finished I have no recollection.

"About a week later, when the word had spread one of the bands introduced me to ‘Moose’ Forer. He was a really good, aggressive bass player. We had a few beers together and went to jam with a band. We clicked and blew that club away. Clive Calder and Ralph Simon had just started Sagittarius Promotions. They had heard about Moose and I and they saw an opportunity to do something big."

Season of the Witch

"Savvy (Savario Pasquale Maria Grande) came up from Cape Town and we played together. Shit! What a drummer. We were blown away! Every number we played was a perfectly timed drum solo from start to finish. Savvy was like Keith Moon of The Who, but Savvy was far better. He was a big part of Suck’s big sound. We had the musos, now we needed a vocalist, a real screamer. Andy Ionidies was a real screamer! Now we had a band.

"Before we even started to play together, Clive Calder organised a record deal. We had just three weeks to get material together for an album. There was no time to write new material so we listened to music we liked and gave it the Suck treatment. Moose and I did write ‘The Whip’ during a lunch break and that was the only original number. When we played it live, I had a cat o’ nine tails and whipped Andy while he was singing. The audience went into spasm!

"We recorded the entire album and a few extras in nine hours. Four hours on one late afternoon and five hours the following morning. That was it, most of the album was recorded in one take and then onto the next song. Everything was on a budget – that’s how we did it in those days. None of this 'We’ve spent six months in the studio' bullshit."

C'mon and Save Me

"It was the same story with the poster shoot. We had a photographer booked for three hours one afternoon. We were taken to an old, falling apart house with an upstairs fireplace jutting out of a half-demolished wall. Rick Alexander, the photographer, said, 'That would make a great shot. Can you get up there?' I went up to see if it was safe and the floor collapsed! I fell through the floor, hit the ground floor, went through that and ended up in the cellar. Moose dug me out of the rubble. We did the shoot, blood running down my chest, my carefully combed hair a disaster and Andy holding me up. In those days you just did it.

I fell through the floor, hit the ground floor, went through that and ended up in the cellar. Moose dug me out of the rubble.

"The band took me to Joburg General Hospital and a very Afrikaans matron took one look and told me to come back if I started coughing blood. I said, 'If I start coughing blood I’ll be dying.' She casually looked over her shoulder and sneered, 'Well, you had better hurry then.' The guys took me back to the flat, leaned me against the wall, knocked on the door and ran like hell. Lin put me in a bath full of Dettol and started cleaning wounds. It was a big job and involved a lot of alcohol one way or another."

Hear Me Talkin' Baby

"Suck never really gigged, we went straight into playing packed stadiums and theatres. There was a huge amount of hype around Suck, but the band was plenty good enough to pull it off. Moose and I perfected the art of smoking huge amounts of grass, drinking insane amounts of beer and throwing up out of lots of windows and all whilst playing never-ending chess games.

"Travelling around was hell. Clive found an old Volkswagen panel van that the Singer Sewing Machine company had put out to pasture. Three guys in the front, and two Marshall stacks, a PA system, a drum kit, and one guy squeezing in between the equipment and the roof. We kept the Singer signs on the van because it was much safer than Suck. South Africa was by most standards a very conservative country and Suck came as a bit of a shock to most. There were quite a few confrontations -- a typical example was Pietersburg.

About 40 or 50 guys popped into town to inform us that they had come to f*ck us up.

"I think there was an Air Force base there and, while we were unloading the van at the hall, about 40 or 50 guys popped into town to inform us that they had come to ‘f*ck us up.’ We got used to this and the usual procedure was to face them off. My weapon of choice was a heavy claw hammer. Moose had an insane f*ck off sized Bowie knife, Andy had a mike stand with a cast iron base, and Savvy would get hold of anything handy. On this occasion it was a fire axe. We would just stand in a line our backs to a wall, cracking jokes between ourselves, and looking tough. It was obvious that our opponents would suffer casualties and sooner or later our aggressors would chicken out and walk away shouting, 'Fok jou.' It worked every time, I’m delighted to say"

So Many People I Can Be

"The road was hard and shows were always a long way apart. Sagittarius gave us an allowance of R1.00 per day. That was it! We played to big crowds. I seem to remember at Kingsmead Stadium we pulled about 12,000 people, and we lived on R1 per day. It was enough for Viennas, chips, and a slice of bread. We lived on that.

"Clive Calder learned a lot from Suck. We were his first big band and he went on to the USA to produce some of the world’s biggest bands. Suck was promised an American tour, money and more albums, when suddenly nothing happened! We got to the top in South Africa and there was nothing there. It wasn’t going anywhere. I lost interest in music and went back to engineering for a while.

"I started Mame Enterprises -- South Africa’s first nudie photo company. All tastefully presented as an aide to budding artists, complete with drawing instructions. We were banned (I was used to getting banned) and we took the case to the Rand Supreme Court and won. So, the government changed the law and, about a year later, a court case in Pretoria resulted in being banned again, this time for all future publications. The 1974 Publications Control Act was written for me, the bastards.

"Later, I started a small printing company that developed into a pharmaceutical printing business and then I decided to follow my passion: beer! In late 2008 Gilroy’s Brewery, Restaurant and Pub opened in Muldersdrift where my band plays Jazz and Blues on most Friday afternoons.

"Sadly, Andy passed away from a gun accident and Moose was taken by cancer. I’ve heard that Savvy is building racing cars in the Cape and I’m at Gilroy’s having a great time. In the old days Moose and I would play for beer -- it seems that I’m still doing that but this time it’s Gilroy Beer!

"It was tough but I’m really glad that I did it. That feeling of being on stage playing with top-end musicians to a raving crowd -- there is no feeling quite like it."

[discogs]

a trip through murder rates: crash course in nick cave

here is the playlist, beneath lies the story.

i hope you enjoy. 

1. i have an evident bias to rowland and rowland’s friends, it’s a slight one that is emphasized by an deep spiritual attachment, therefore we must start with rowland s. howard and not our dear nicholas. there were two main melbourne acts, one of which was nick’s just now forming ‘boys next door’ (which he decided to create with friends tracy pew and mick harvey after he was kicked outtuv art school), the other is rowland and ollie olsen’s ‘young charlatans.’ rowland was responsible for the creation of the boys next doors’ biggest song “shivers,” here is a clip of rowland and ollie speaking while with the young charlatans. ( x ) 

2. rowland wrote what i believe to be the perfect song, adaptable to all outlooks, at the age of sixteen as a comment on the over the top nature of teenage love. the song is initially a sarcastic one, yet has been redone so many times over that generally speaking it looses it’s cynical nature. this recording is the one done by the young charlatans, it’s original form with rowland on vocals.

3. this is actually about nick cave, i swear it, and here is where we get into that more so. here is a cover of nancy sinatra’s “these boots are made for walking” done by the boys next door some time in ‘78. i don’t know why nick sings like that, i’m assuming he had no sense of his vocal range at this time, and i wish the young charlatans had gotten a video but unfortunately the band split up fairly quick due to disputes between rowland and ollie.

+ there’s this house party, or maybe it’s a show, there’s mixed stories on this. but the general consensus is that nick, unruly and screwed all up on speed had been eyeing rowland for some time at this event. it was after a testosterone gun show in the bathrooms where nick ripped out a sink, that he found his fist in rowland’s face demanding to know if he was a punk or not. naturally, s a thin boy raised by women rowland was a bit disgusted by nick’s display, however took him up on his offer to meet again the following day when nick apologised. this eventually led to the creation of the birthday party, but before that rowland had managed to get a word in with his bandmates about that one song, y’know the one ..

4. here we see nick, all marionette gestures and heavy eyeliner belting his heart out over lyrics written by the tiny post ‘66 fender wielding raven shown briefly in the video. it’s undeniable that nick seemed to take this a lot more genuinely than rowland did, or at least that’s what he intended to display. this is the more popular version of the song, much glossier and easier to imagine being played at a high school dance than the previous version. this was all fine and dandy, now, but songs that sound like roxy music aren’t cool, man ! besides, every member of this band displays a talent that is remarkably astounding. the song is beautiful, yet tight, and though this is spectacular there’s much more beneath.

5. this is track is one of the birthday party’s first singles, released along with several other birthday party songs on a compilation called hee-haw which mainly consisted of the band’s earlier work. the cover art here is done by nick.

6. this track is off of the birthday party’s second record entitled ‘junkyard,’ released in 1981 and expressing more fluidity within their musical style with a certain wounded animal characteristic to the music jolted by the viciousness of nick’s voice. it is around this time, or perhaps some time before, that the band had found themselves penniless in london and retreated to berlin.

+ tensions have been steadily arising from day one due to rowland and nick’s individual stubbornness over artistic expression, nick is searching for an escape from the birthday party as he despises the route their presentation has taken. as most even vaguely punk sounding bands often realise that their audience doesn’’t so much care for the music but instead the thrill of seeing someone hurtling themselves into the ground repeatedly. no one wanted their name to be engraved in a violent history, and lucky for nick he sound his way out in berlin.

7. for some years now, the west berlin music scene has been a bustling hub of creation and innovation. with acts like abwarts and malaria surrounding, a young and reverse individual finds himself forming what would the band pioneering not only unconventional instruments but the proto-industrial movement. the band was based off a fairly simple concept; destruction as a means of creation, a notion adopted from this (x) marxist era essay as well as the factory-line like gentrification of the surrounding brick paradise. thus einstuzende neubauten was formed, and by the first glance nick felt as though he’d net his match. this rubber clad being of fire and metal was blixa bargeld, who you will see in this particular clip. (x) is a performance that shows off the impulsive and chaotic nature of the band as well as their use of out of the ordinary instruments.

8. this meeting of kindred spirits leads to nick definitively deciding to part ways with the birtday party. in an admittedly dick move, nick decided to call he record ‘the bad seeds ep,” presumably hoping to get a better feel for where he was going with his career. rowland and him are hardly speaking and they both have one foot out the door. his song is off of this bad seeds section, where nick begins to show his talent for world building and story telling. 

9. this track’s off the opposite end, the part which belongs more so to the birthday party than it does to the bad seeds. i love this track for all it’s inconsistency, it attacks you from all sides musically and leaves you feeling dazed lyrically for a lack of being able to keep up. to me, this is the best way to bookend the band’s career. it displays maturity in style like no other while also perfecting the sound now heavily associated with not only the birthday party but no wave music in general. 

+ below are bonus videos and music x ( mutiny sessions )  x ( live version of shivers sung by rowland with the boys next door ) x ( another song off of einsturzende’s halber mensch, my favourite ) 

10. admittedly i have neglected nick’s first two records ‘from her to eternity’ and ‘the first born is dead,’ i have a storage complex with my favourite musicians where i won’t listen to their entire discography because if i get stir crazy for new material then i can get familiar with one of the records i haven’t really heard. this track is off of his third record called ‘your funeral, my trial.’ like the previous two this was recorded with the first of the bad seeds lineup comprising of nick cave, mick harvey (of the birthday party), barry adamson (of magazine), blixa bargeld (of einsturzende neubauten), and for a short time hugo race. this track is one of the bad seed’s finest in my opinion, strong on atmosphere and tone with a plot line following a distinct character who’s in a strange bind - a hallmark of nick’s songwriting. this album sound tracked wim wenders film ‘wings of desire,’ with a cameo from nick and rowland in the final act.

11. let’s catch up to rowland for a moment, who is working somewhat parallel to nick as the guitarist for a band called the crime & city solution. rowland only worked with the band for one record, ‘room of lights,’ while in berlin where he was met with his brother, harry, playing bass, mick harvey once more on guitar, and a boy from a band called swell maps on drums named epic soundtracks. this clip is from the aforementioned ‘wings of desire,’ after this rowland and the mentioned members (minus harvey, replaced by rowland’s long-time girlfriend genevive mcguckin) broke off and formed these immortal souls.

12. a lot of musicians have released cover albums, and from what i can tell almost all of kicking against the pricks is except for this track. i wanted to display this song as it shows the broadness of nick’s vocal expression, in that this song makes me want to hang myself.

+ this is a little linear note about rowland’s work after crime, epic soundtrack’s origins, and who the fuck is nikki sudden again ? x ( these immortal souls: marry me (lie ! lie !) ), the project rowland worked on immediately after crime & city x ( swell maps: cake shop girl ), the band that epic soundtracks and brother nikki ‘little johnny thunders’ sudden came from initially, pioneers of what would become noise rock and grunge. x ( the jacobites: for the roses), nikki’s band with friend dave kusworth x ( nikki sudden & rowland s. howard: a quick thing ), a track from an album rowland did with nikki called ‘kiss you kidnapped charabanc’ x ( lydia lunch & rowland s. howard: burning skulls ), a song from the brilliant record cut on a whim based on a sense of familiarity between the two

13. this music video was recorded in the studio the song was recorded in, which is in berlin. this song was inspired by a girlfriend of nick’s and how she made him feel, a very momentous affair it seems to have been,

14. nick continues to make music as the end of the 1980s draws near, the first record of this time period is 'the good son,’ who’s most popular song is undoubtedly 'the weeping song.’ that track is definitely worth a listen as well, it is one of nick’s more popular tracks but it’s a rare full display of blixa’s vocals and a great duet. this song, however, is the title song and has a beautiful choir-sound to it which is present all throughout this album.

15. my favorite nick cave record is tied between this one and one that comes over twenty years after this one, but i’ll be damned if i don’t give this record the utmost appraisal. the album is more definitive in narrative than nick’s previous records, it all seems to be written to fit a particular story line and the sense of momentum in the record is impeccable. this track tells the story of the catholic saint, christina the astonishing, a story that nick was very attached to. as we further our way through his career his interest in catholicism becomes more and more apparent.

16. this song is the slowest on the album 'let love in,’ which is one of his most popular records. the most known track by nick - 'red right hand’ - is also off this album, but in my opinion it’s not the best track off the record. this song is inspired by a story nick read in robert smythe hichens’ “the green carnation,” and the unsettling nature of the story lingers in this song. it’s the counterpart to a song earlier in the album entitled simply 'do you love me?’

17. the huge thing about nick cave is his fascination for murder, something that, the more i learn about and listen to him doesn’t seem to be that huge of a fixation of his. at least not anymore than the bible is. this album, however, murder ballads, is obviously homicide centric. this track features kyle minogue on vocals as eliza day, but she isn’t the only guest vocalist on the album. on another track, henry lee (which is a must hear as well), there is another guest vocalist. pj harvey comes into the maelstrom of nick’s life, and as is displayed in the video, they become seamlessly intertwined in a romance that nick describes as one of the best events of his life. however, in nick’s own words, 'all things move towards their end, i knew before i met her that i would loose her …’

18. after the short lived romance between nick and pj, she leaves him feeling devastated. no one knows for sure why it is they split, but nick sure as hell took it like a landslide. this song is one off of his last album of the 90s, the boatman’s call, which is essentially the pj harvey breakup album. this song has stark similarities to tom waits’ first record, which rings nothing but lovely to my mind.

19. i really. really love rowland s. howard. he means everything to me, this is a song off his first solo album. i don’t know why i chose this one, maybe it’s because the proceeding two songs off it are too difficult for me to hear. he is so talented, he is so beautiful, i don’t know where these impressions of horrendousness come from. rowland is the kindest soul to every walk this earth, but um, here we are with another beautiful display of the sharpness of his guitar playing, and that aching voice of his. he’s my favorite guitarist, and the reason why is that he does not need to sing to tell you how much he is hurting - his guitar does that all on it’s own. we’re about to get heavy. 1999.

+ nick’s doing this shit called grinderman. i’ll be honest with you, i’ve never heard a line of it. and why ? because that mustache is an atrocity to not only to this earth, but to the heavens, hell, and purgatory as well. so there’s a pretty big gap in his discography after boatman’s call.

20. 2009. alright. so. i’m going to tell you this one thing first; rowland s. howard did not deserve to die. he did not deserve death, he did not deserve any of the numerous heartaches and horrendous experiences that he went through. he went his life a genius, and was scarcely ever recognized for his immense talent and uniqueness. rowland died in 2009 due to a liver disease. he wasn’t able to get a transfer in time. and look, rowland was not ready to die. he wanted so much more, he wanted everything of the world that he hadn’t the chance to reach before. he knew he was going to die, but he did not want to. i will tell you this with my heart bared open and bleedin to you - i would give up my life to have rowland back on this earth in a heartbeat. this song is from the last album he ever released, an album which i still find very difficult to listen to. he did not deserve to die. i don’t know where it is he acquired this seemingly immense hatred of himself, and the contempt for whatever actions he committed. he was the kindest, most loving soul to ever walk this earth, and i refuse to accept his passing as anything other than a true strike of hate by god to humanity. he means wonders to me.

21. so um. sorry. but nick comes back, with that record that i told you competes with henry’s dream to me. it’s called “and no more shall we part” and it is a really difficult record to speak of due to the cohesive story line there seems to be within it. this is the final track of the album, and i believe it sums it up pretty well. i think the line in here; “i think of my friends who died of exposure, and i remember other ones who died from the lack of it.” is in relation to rowland in the latter half. this song is sorrowful, without a doubt. this is the last record blixa did with him, stuck through for years. god bless him.

+ nocturama did not do well, neither did abattoir blues. i know nothing about dig lazarus dig, these three records remind me of rickety stairs on the way up to self discovery. in his 2016 movie, 'one more time with feeling,’ he mentions how you have to grow accustomed to being a new person. you have to suss out your new self, if this new you smokes or if this new you gave up smoking years ago, things like that. trying to find his place again. he did, of course, adjust to this new nick. and the product is brilliant.

22. nick outdoes himself time after time, throughout his entire career he has bested himself. please, do not take the initial crudeness of some of the first lyrics as a reason to discard this song, it’s off of his 2013 album push the sky away is without a doubt one of the most beautiful things i have ever heard. this record is one that is vicarious to me, these days i hear it every day to sleep and sometimes constantly throughout the day.

23. nick’s last record, 'skeleton tree’ was already in development before the death of his son, arthur. many of the lyrics in the record echo his last book, 'the sick bag song,’ especially in this track where the girl who dances on the rings of saturn is a reoccurring anomaly in the book. this record took everyone by storm, if that storm is freezing and you’re trapped inside a cold black marble home. this is the end of the nick cave train ride, thank you if listened and read the whole way through. this is essentially my bare bones.

- LM