#I was actually planning on turning this into a full Poetry Post once upon a time

[simmyfrobby]

devils poem?

― How to Be Perfect, Ron Padgett

[teriwrites]

2020 Writing Wrap-Up

Something that I do every year on the 1st is go back through absolutely everything I’ve written throughout the previous year and compile it into one massive word document. Everything from outlining notes to unfinished short stories to my NaNo project wind up in that file, where I like to read back and reflect on what I’ve gotten done through the year. 

Every year, I end up having written more than I expected, and this year was no different! 

Total for 2020: 203,119!

This is the first recorded year (I think it’s year 4 that I’ve done this for?) in which I’ve cracked 200K! It’s also the first year I’ve ever actually followed through on my resolution to share some of my writing online! So as rough as 2020 has been, I still somehow managed to break some personal records in writing. Which probably has everything to do with the fact that I joined this community earlier this year, and it’s been incredibly encouraging and supportive!

I also branched out a bit more this year in a few ways. I worked on some poetry and prose, which is not something I’ve put a lot of time into before so tends to be a challenge. It’s nothing that I’ll be posting anytime soon, but it was fun to work on in the moment, which is especially important in such a wild year as 2020.

One snag that I definitely hit was the fact that I have a lot more unfinished work than most years. A majority of the short stories I started working on never got finished. But I can’t even be too upset about that, because I totally loved being able to read back on even the fragmented pieces I ended up with. And while I do think a large part of that (for me) is discipline over inspiration, I’m willing to accept that, sometimes, things will remain unfinished. And it’s okay to stop working on them. 

My overall focus shifted a bit this year, too, which was interesting. I worked more on longer things than most years - started out the year by finishing my first draft of Castle on the Hill, continued making some edits and reworking its outline, did a large part of Beneath Alder Creek’s first draft in November. Right now, I’m working on what I expect to be a novella by the time I’m done with it. It’s a big contrast to the usual, short and snappy short stories that fill most of my previous wrap-up files. But I still definitely write those sometimes, and it’s nice to be able to try stretching and testing my own boundaries. 

This is the part of my wrap-up where I go ham throwing in some of my favorite out-of-context quotes from a variety of different things I’ve worked on. Some of them might be familiar, a lot probably won’t. I’m going to post it beneath the thing so this doesn’t become even more absurdly long!

Some of the ~highlights~ of 2020:

First Thoughts in the Morning: wow the sexual tension between me and the alarm clock right now. Later Reflection: wtf? (a literal note on my notes app that I included because I Cannot remember writing any of this and it made me laugh)

Edriele’s gaze trailed down to the woman’s armor, and her stomach twisted. “Where did you find your attire?” The woman glanced down in surprise, as though she’d forgotten she was wearing it. “It was fitted to me when I gained my ranking. I suppose it draws attention, but after my confrontation at… you mean to ask me whether I’m impersonating a Knight!” “The thought had crossed my mind,” the Sister replied dryly. (novella WIP)

“Do you need to make a stop at your house before we head to the chapel?” Leslie asked as they started off. “What for?” Winnie asked. Leslie looked pointedly at the tip of her galoshes poking out from beneath her dress. With another roll of her eyes, Winnie sighed. “Oh, I suppose so.” (Beneath Alder Creek)

When the third meeting for the Society of the Hidden Immortal Tribe was called for the decade, I knew heads would roll. Gathering the entire society together took months. Everything had to be hush-hush; that was the entire point of spreading ourselves out. Plus, every time a letter arrived in the mail, it was a reminder of the idiot who had decided we needed a name change. Everybody agreed that being deemed the ‘S.H.I.T.’ was humiliating, but nobody could agree on a better title, so it had remained the same for nearly a full century. That was the problem with living forever. You always had more time to make decisions, and, in the end, nothing ever got done. (S.H.I.T.)

When she leaves, I’m not sure I remember a word of what she’s said. But as the stresses of the semester wash back in, and my mind clears like being pulled out of a dream, I suddenly understand how one could crash upon the rocks without realizing they’d ever changed their course. (A Modern Siren)

When Georg arrived later, he found Klaus leaning forwards onto the table, staring vacuously at one of his textbooks. "Studying hard?" he taunted as he approached and dropped into the seat Ingrid had been occupying. "I talked with Ingrid," Klaus explained. Georg's eyebrows shot up in genuine surprise, but he quickly recovered and looked pointedly at Klaus' posture. "Go that well, then?" "She said I'm arrogant and completely self-involved and that I never take what a girl says into account whenever I'm on a date." With a haunted gleam in his eye, Klaus stared up at his friend. "I think she's right." "Well then it's a good thing somebody pointed it out," Georg offered, and he turned to his work. (Castle on the Hill)

Takemoto Hana rested a hand over her face. She couldn’t see the swirling of darkness over her head, but she heard the whine behind its words. With a wry smile, she asked, ‘Do you not know how to brew tea?’ ‘Of course I know how to brew tea!’ The dark spirit’s voice boomed with a defensive defiance that rang false in the funny little woman’s ears.  (The Funny Little Woman)

“None of us want to be here right now,” Edgar called out to the hall. “None of us want to go back through the handbook and listen to the steps of proper etiquette in immortality. But it seems that, once again, it’s necessary.” “Dammit, Dave,” muttered the man next to me. I said nothing, but I couldn’t help but agree with the sentiment. Dave was… how do I describe Dave? To call him an idiot would be underestimating his craftiness. To call him a genius, I’d have to ignore all of his dumb antics. Cruel was too strong. Misguided was too innocent. Mischievous fit best, but even that fell short. Dave was a trickster god, if ever one existed. (S.H.I.T.)

Ridiculous, he told me with a self-conscious laugh of someone who didn't expect to be believed. I smiled, but I didn't join in. (The Little Roads)

“Hey, where did Alina go?” Lorelai asked. Zoe shrugged, but Jaiden cleared his throat. “I think you crossed one of her boundaries, Lo. She specifically asked not to involve her girlfriend in this, and then you did anyways. I know we needed the help, but friendships have to be built on mutual trust, my dude. You should’ve at least let her know your plan before you went behind her back.” The two women stopped and shared a look. “Hey, Jaiden,” Zoe asked. “Do you know the capital of Canada?” He shook his head. “I dunno, Ontario?” “Amazing.” (Mirror, Mirror)

"We had a bet going over whether you'd make it in time," Hans told him. "Did you win or lose?" Josef replied. Hans flipped a 5-Deutsche Mark coin over to Peter, who grinned as he pocketed it. "I'm glad you have so much faith in me." Josef's voice dripped with sarcasm. (Castle on the Hill)

Taliesin reached over his head and grabbed at one of the low-hanging bows, picking leaves from it. “I’m not sure.” Winnie stopped. “What do you mean?” “I mean that I don’t know.” (Beneath Alder Creek)

While she attended to these, the man beside her began to stir. Ella could see him out of the corner of her eye, attempting to push himself up into a sitting position. ‘You may want to lie back down,’ she told him, scrubbing uselessly at her skirt. The man continued to sit up anyways, pressing a hand against the side of his face. ‘Am I killed?’ ‘No, but your savior may be.’ Ella threw her skirt back to the ground. ‘When the Madame sees the state of me, I’ll be spending my future afternoons off making a new dress out of the fabric scraps.’ A frown crossed the man’s face as he considered her words, followed by a scowl of understanding. ‘You work for them. The bourgeoisie.’ (Cinderella)

Ingrid took the seat and began digging through her bag for a book. As she did so, she explained, "There were no other tables open in the building - even in the quiet section upstairs - so I figured that I would just ask the first person I recognized if I could sit with them, and well... here we are." "Don't worry about it," Georg answered when Klaus found himself dumbstruck again. "Just ignore the oaf, he'll leave you alone." Ingrid shot a grin at Georg, and Klaus suddenly wondered whether it was a good idea to have the two of them sit together. (Castle on the Hill)

Up ahead, I could see the glass walls of the bus stop. Usually, I waited for the bus leaning against the metal frame of the stop, leaving the seats inside open for children on their way to school. But the seats were empty now. I still avoided them. (Flo’s Magical Emporium: The Pandemic)

Now, I ask that you do not feel too much self-pity. For as easy an error as it may be to mistake a visiting aristocrat’s son for the hired help, the true talent in such a display causing his immediate departure lies within you alone. And to think that the meeting was the work of your father’s tenuous sway over the court! Well, I am sure the time away will do him some good, lest you begin to consider that you’ve ruined his position as well as your prospects. (Dearly Detested,)

Edgar was at the front of the lecture hall, and standing beside him was Dave, smirking as though at some private joke that only he was in on. He was wearing sunglasses, despite the dim lighting of the room, probably because he thought he looked cool. I rolled my eyes. What a tool. (S.H.I.T.)

 The work is different now. Countryside pathways winding through the forest lie forgotten for years without the familiar steps of a traveler. Off beaten paths in the city are never unknown for long, and sometimes streets that were once crossed by thousands a day fall back into obscurity. (The Little Roads)

“How much time will you give me to think on it?” she asked suspiciously, wrapping her arms around herself as though afraid they’d reach out to him if not kept in check. “You have all the time in the world,” the golden man said. “The boy’s, however, runs out with every passing second.” He extended his hand. (Beneath Alder Creek)

You ever met a rich person? Not comfortably wealthy. Not ‘my Uncle Kenny is a lawyer’ rich. Not even ‘widow answering the door to her manor on a hill dressed in fine silk’ rich. No, I mean proper, so-much-money-you-literally-can’t-spend-it-fast-enough rich. They say it isn’t worth Bill Gates’ time to pick up a $100 bill off the floor because he’ll have earned more in the time it takes to grab it. That kind of rich. They seem to be bred for times like these. Their houses are a source of endless entertainment – movie theaters, bowling alleys, personal gyms with a view of the sprawling landscape they overlook like cruel dictators. There’s no need for them to leave during a pandemic; they have access to the equivalent of a luxury resort most families have to save up month to visit. Necessities can be stockpiled in one of the useless extra spaces in the house. I mean, I once had to hide out in a luggage room for a contract. That’s right. An entire room dedicated to holding luggage, bigger than some of the apartments I’ve rented. I thought their residential labyrinths were my greatest source of grief. But social distancing? I’m one bad contract away from retirement. (Bounty Hunter During a Pandemic)

Shaking his head, Detlef pulled a new sheet from his notebook. “Look, I’m just saying, if we can get the satire right, we can be a modern Jonathan Swift.” “I don’t want to be a modern Jonathan Swift, I want to be a student actually passing his debate course!” Peter snapped. (Castle on the Hill)

Moonlight illuminated the German’s fair hair and pale skin, the effect more malevolent apparition than man. (Face on the Other Side of a Dark Window)

Back then, he’d been known for commissioning the exact same portrait of himself every hundred years, hanging them in a hallway in his manor and trying to pass them off as his line of ancestors to any of the locals. It had been a far less skeptical age, and Dave had earned himself a small band of worshipers before Jeff Goldblum himself had been forced to intervene. (S.H.I.T.)

Clara stood before the board of advisors assisting with her thesis. She was one, very intense paper away from her M.A., and she wasn’t about to risk it all by being too proud to ask for help. When she’d made the appointment to meet with them, she expected a series of questions surrounding her topic. Instead, they’d opened by offering her a job. “You want me to steal from the school?” Dr. Pye wrinkled her nose at the suggestion. Next to her, Dr. Pritchard said, “Don’t think of it as theft, dear. It’s merely redistribution.” Clara hadn’t amassed tens of thousands of dollars in debt to be lectured on the definition of robbery. “Either way, it involves me sneaking into the Chemistry department and taking a huge risk to get you some new toys to play with.” (Origins: The Ghost)

“Why is undermining Pryderi so important to Queen Ceridwen that she would risk breaking a timeless alliance just to dismantle them?” Her stomach twisted into a knot, protesting against the answer. “There are few members of the Dusk Court that we know by title.” A shadow passed over Enid’s expression. “The Lord of the Undernell is second only to the Queen.” “Great deeds build the reputation of one in their own court. Cruelty builds it in both.” Taliesin buckled under Winnie’s weight as she suddenly leaned against him. (Beneath Alder Creek)

“Why are all my friends so quick to endanger themselves?” I muttered as I packed up Midas’ crate. Natalie swiveled around from the candy aisle. “So you’re finally willing to admit that we’re friends?” “Save it.” (Flo’s Magical Emporium: The Pandemic)

[mxmaneater]

5 favorite works of 2020 tag

Rules: It’s time to love yourselves! Choose your 5 (ish) favourite works you created in the past year (fics, art, edits, etc.) and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you brought into the world in 2020. Tag as many writers/artists/etc. as you want (fan or original) so we can spread the love and link each other to awesome works!

Thank you @the-starryknight and @gallifrey1sburning for the tag!  In return, I tag @bogglebeans and @bafflinghaze and anyone else who’d like to participate!

1. The New Flight Instructor - So this was actually my first ever fic (both Drarry and otherwise), and I wrapped it up in April of this year.  Before that, I had held a lot of the common hesitations of “I could never write something like that” and “even if I did, I’d be too embarrassed to put it on the internet!”  However, once I decided to just give it a shot and start posting, I quickly became entrenched in the joys of writing it, and my plan for a short 30k or so story somehow turned into a 145k gargantuan beast.  But I finished it - and that really made it feel like I could write and post anything. 

2. Tiny, Insignificant Treasures - This piece came to me while writing the sequel to TNFI, which focuses on Draco’s POV, and I realized that it actually bothered me a great deal that we never hear anything more about Charity Burbage or Draco bearing witness to her death - even though it seems like it would be a very traumatic turning point for him.  This story came out of an attempt to reflect and bring about catharsis - for both me and for Draco - regarding this matter, and it was more serious than any of the fics I’d written up to that point.  So it will always hold a special place in my heart. 

3.  Once Upon a Midnight Drarry - I think this one speaks for itself.  It’s a full Drarry rewrite of The Raven, therefore 18 stanzas of true-to-form trochaic octameter.  I wrote it in the course of one day - but a full day - and was pretty pleased with the results. 

4.  Born of Shadow - This one is a multimedia piece, of which I am proud of each of the elements.  It started as both a picture and a poem for the Drarry Discord’s monthly drabble challenge, and, afterwards, I recorded a short podfic of the poem to go along with it.  The picture was all in sharpies, which I don’t normally work with, so I was happy with how it came out, given the circumstances!

5.  Pomegranate - This is a very recent fic, but my first femslash piece - and one I felt very strongly about as I wrote it.  I write a lot of poetry outside my writing of fics, but in this case, I tried combining some of those elements.  I think it came out pretty good, and I was proud of the flow of format.  (It also made me want to read and write more femslash!)

[rebelsofshield]

Star Wars: The Clone Wars “The Phantom Apprentice” -Review

The Clone Wars creates a horror movie of inescapable dread in the game changing, “The Phantom Apprentice”

(Review contains episode spoilers)

Maul and Ahsoka Tano are now face to face. As the battle for the future of Mandalore unfolds around them, it becomes clear that something much larger is at stake. The fate of the galaxy hangs in the balance and everything that is known will change. And our heroes and villains are powerless to stop it.

It’s been known for quite a while that the end of The Clone Wars would tie into the events of Revenge of the Sith. The show has been on a collision course with this darkest installment in the Star Wars saga ever since it premiered in 2008 and now the inevitable moment has arrived. Everything in the galaxy is about to upend itself and the feeling of dread and tragedy hangs over everything. While The Clone Wars has dipped its feet into the horror genre before, director Nathaniel Villanueva and writer Dave Filoni have created a half hour experience of impending dread and terror.

The Clone Wars was always going to end in heartbreak. Revenge of the Sith was the inescapable end point for this series, but the unspoken cruelty of this series is in the unaware insignificance of its own cast. Ahsoka Tano, Rex, Maul, the Mandalorians are doomed to be side notes in the galaxy altering Skywalker Saga. Their narratives are twisting, emotional, and undeniably engaging but they will never escape living in the margins of the adventures of the mythic figures they count as their friends, allies, and enemies. There is a knowing futility to Filoni’s script for “The Phantom Apprentice” that pervades everything. We can be watching titanic battles unfold on the streets of Sundari and daring lightsaber duels, but it’s all for nothing. Composer Kevin Kiner, still the only musical talent that has come close to mirroring and expanding off the legendary work of John Williams, turns the aural landscape of this conflict into a sound that can only be described as Star Wars meets Hereditary. We are never once made to feel comfortable. There are no hints that this will work out. It won’t.

Like the standout season finale to Star Wars Rebels’ second season, the title of “The Phantom Apprentice” is deceptively nuanced. It’s actually in conversation with three different characters, one of whom never actually appears on screen.

The most obvious of the three is of course Maul, the original apprentice to The Phantom Menace. I’ve never hidden my adoration for the long, strange character arc that Lucasfilm Animation has taken this formerly one note villain on. Sam Witwer, Dave Filoni, and the rest of the creative team have transformed this former Sith assassin into a perpetually broken and emotional frail man that is never more than a few steps away from collapse. First hinted at in one of his first appearances on this series, Maul was always aware to some degree of The Clone Wars and the larger machinations of his master. The pieces were always in place and now Maul is slowly realizing that the end goal of his master’s decades long plan is finally upon them. And it terrifies him. Long gone is the confident Maul who thought he could carve out an Empire for himself in the shadows of the galactic underworld. After Darth Sidious’s humiliating beatdown of him in “The Lawless” and the murder of his mother in the Son of Dathomir comic series, it’s now clear to this lost Zabrak that his master is the most powerful being in the galaxy and something to be feared above all else. Witwer plays Maul’s former anger and jealousy at having his dreams of grandeur robbed of him as a transformation into existential collapse. He realizes that he really is nothing more than a cast aside bit player in the revolution that is about to come and he is determined to stop it from happening. Not out of any kind of good will or redemption, but out of his own desperation for survival and relevance.

I’ve always been a tad skeptical of one of the final confrontations of the series being a duel between Asoka Tano and Maul. Not at all because Ahsoka isn’t capable of taking on a character like this wayward former Sith. She’s more than proven herself able and “The Phantom Apprentice” more than sells that Maul is definitely not acting at full capacity. (We’ll talk more about that fantastic confrontation later along with the rest of the stellar action here.) Instead, I was concerned that this clash would feel hollow. Ahsoka and Maul do not have an existing relationship prior to “The Phantom Apprentice.” Their big climactic meeting of sabers could have been nothing more than a set piece that was created only because they were the only characters free during the Revenge of the Sith era to have one. That is very thankfully not the case.

Filoni smartly positions Maul and Ahsoka as two sides of the same coin. As Maul was eventually cast out and discarded as useless by Darth Sidious, Ahsoka was also tossed away by the Jedi order by their own dedication to doctrine and lack of trust. Both are victims of their respective order’s worst qualities and exist as relative outcasts. However, the true dramatic irony of it all is that by doing so, both Ahsoka and Maul are arguably in better positions to survive the coming slaughter and possibly put an end to it. Sure, Maul’s argument for their teaming up to stop Sidious is mostly self-serving (even if I suspect that it does have some root in the sad sack of a Sith’s perpetual need for companionship and belonging), but Ahsoka considers it for a moment because she can see the truth in it all. It’s a fascinating moment and the fact that it feels emotionally genuine is a true feat of Ahsley Eckstein, Witwer, and the entire creative team. We can’t not acknowledge that incredible shot of the shattered glass and embers blowing through the wind as Maul’s fateful offer is made.

The final apprentice is of course Anakin Skywalker. Perhaps the most startling development of “The Phantom Apprentice” is Maul’s revelation that he is more than aware of Anakin’s eventual slip to the Dark Side and it was probably in the cards for quite some time. (His moment of post-mortem pity for Dooku is a fun wink to how doomed all of Sidious’s apprentices were on their eventual march toward Anakin’s ascension.) It recontexualizes so much of the final days of The Clone Wars and of Sidious’s plan itself. Of course as Anakin’s fateful seduction to the Dark Side is occurring parallel to the events of the Siege of Mandalore it is more than fitting that Maul is not the only one with Anakin on his mind. The brief call between Obi-Wan and Ahsoka comes from a place of compassion, but it ultimately serves as further example of Ahsoka’s suspicion of the Jedi. She sees a kindred spirit in Anakin at the moment that the Council betrays his trust and how could she not. The fact that Ahsoka and Maul’s duel happens mostly as a retaliation to the assertion that Anakin will fall speaks to her unbreakable trust in her surrogate older brother. It ends up playing as a bit of a fight for Anakin’s soul. Hope versus despair and denial versus inevitability.

And what a battle it is. Dave Filoni mentioned at Star Wars Celebration last year that they brought in original Darth Maul stunt actor Ray Park to assist with the animation for this fight and it certainly shows. While it may not be the most sprawling duel ever or as brutal as Pre Vizsla and Maul’s duel to the death, The Clone Wars has never featured a confrontation as fluid and dynamic as this one. The constant back and forth of the upper hand and the emotional instability of both fighters gives this encounter a strange edge that ratchets up the tension even if we know both combatants are destined to make it out of this alive. The final stage in the scaffolding that holds up the city of Sundari is a standout and brings to mind a similarly stellar set piece from Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation.

It’s not just our phantom apprentices that get in on the action this week. A claustrophobic showdown between Bo-Katan and Gar Saxon in an elevator shaft is one of the most inventive set pieces that the series has produced and Villanueva sells it with a cluttered intensity that never loses clarity. A prolonged battle between the liberating forces and Maul’s loyalists is similarly brutal and striking with sweeping tracking shots of the action that smartly know when to cut into the carnage and when to transfer back to other scenes. It brings to mind some of the great multi-tiered battles in Star Wars history and it once again gives big screen live action installments of the franchise a serious run for their money.

 A few random final thoughts!

It seems only fitting that Almec would be gunned down by one of his own allies. Gar Saxon is poised to take over Almec’s position as the self-serving Mandalorian leader in the era of the Empire and there’s certainly some poetry in this sort of cyclical killing. Poor Mandalore. Planet’s not going to sort itself out anytime soon.

Jesse lived! I’m sure every one of us clone junkies were prepared for one of our last surviving 501st boys to fall to Maul this week, but through some small glimmer of positivity the newly minted ARC Trooper survived. I’m not sure we can be as hopeful in coming episodes, but I’ll take the positivity where I can find it.

I actually really loved Maul’s cameo in Solo: A Star Wars Story and it’s nice to see “The Phantom Apprentice” tee that up with the blink and you’ll miss appearance by Dryden Vos. Was really hoping for a tiny line of dialogue from Paul Bettany, but I guess that’s as good as we’ll get for right now.

Sam Witwer remarked several months ago that the scripts for the final arc of The Clone Wars were the best the series ever produced and it’s hard to argue with that. Never before has this saga had more on its mind or felt as emotional or consequential. It’s a nail biting stunner of a chapter and I’m genuinely in awe that we are only half way done. Buckle in folks. This is when the pain really begins.

Score: A+

[onestowatch]

little luna’s “shift & go” Is a Mesmerizing Debut

Here we are at last, gifted with the beautifully mesmerizing debut single “shift & go” from new Alt-pop artist, little luna. Inspired by her poetry, little luna has put the intense complexity of personal growth into words. It’s not easy finding your passion, but the true challenge is following your passion once found. little luna illustrates a conflict between feeling internally free and outwardly trapped; “freed little child on the inside, crying where have you been?”

little luna released a lyric video, coinciding with the original music video, that we were given the opportunity to premiere. The lyric video created for “shift & go” is anything but predictable. The text displaying the lyrics was not added in post-production, but rather projected onto the floor and walls throughout the video as a unique stylistic choice. The lyrical element of the song and story are very important to little luna. She wants the viewer to deeply feel and absorb what is being said and presented. The lyrics are far from an afterthought and that is apparent through the beautifully crafted video below. We are eagerly waiting to see what else little luna has in store for us. In the meantime, read our full Q&A to learn more about her.

Ones to Watch: Congrats on the release of your debut single, “shift & go”! For those who don’t know, who is little luna?

little luna: thanks so much! OTW is one of the few music outlets i look to for new music, so i’m over the moon about this interview – thank you for having me. little luna is rachael kathryn bell & rachael kathryn bell is little luna. for a long time i felt like they were separate parts of my personality; combining the doc marten-loving songwriting LL with the yoga-loving actress rkb. throughout making this music though, i’ve realized not only that i can be all of it at once... but i already am all of it at once. the exploration of music was what i needed to realize a) i am allowed to change & b) i’m going to continue to change.

“shift & go” was inspired by a poem you wrote. Would you say that poetry is a part of your writing process or is ‘shift & go’ unique in that way?

poetry is a huge part of my process; a majority of my songs are based off of poems i’ve written, some poems dating back to first moving to LA almost ten years ago. one day i’ll put them all in a book of sorts, but for now i just keep turning them into songs. whether my session has a co-writer, or i’m just working solo with a producer, i’ll normally take in a few lines from poems / melody ideas i’m vibing with that day and see if the other writer / producer vibes with any of them. everything is a collaboration.

What do you want your listeners to take away from the story of this song?

honestly music is so personal, so i’m not going to try & control the listener’s narrative. half the time i’ll listen to a song on repeat & have no idea what the lyrics are but the instrumentation alone tells me a story / makes me feel a type of way. with that being said, of course my hope is that upon listening to “shift & go” you’d feel like you are allowed to change. no matter how long you’ve fit into the label that has been put on you, or that maybe even was you for a period of time, that doesn’t have to be forever. take time to reconnect to your inner child & make decisions for yourself out of that place. making this music has been & continues to be my sonic journey through re- discovering my truest self, giving you sounds & words to support you as you do the same.

The visuals and music video are beautifully haunting, can you speak to the inspiration behind the imagery?

thank you! my visuals are created by myself & Jade Ehlers. actually, the lineage of our working relationship is amazing & a story for another day. Jade has helped me bring LL to life & really is a huge part of my journey. considering i grew up acting / studying film, for me the visuals within little luna needed to be on point to help tell the story. marrying sounds with visuals is one of my favorite things to do... like... i’m that person geeking out watching a film when the music supervisor has placed a song at THE perfect moment. any time i’m in-motion (driving, walking, on a train/scooter, etc) i feel like i’m in my own movie, blasting the soundtrack. the visuals to “shift & go” just tie into my love for cinematic expression in general.

What made you shift your path from acting into music? Are you still pursuing acting?

i discovered my love for acting & singing at the same time... a sixth-grade musical ha. it just so happens that acting was what i focused on first & then dove fully into from the age of thirteen to like, two years ago. i got to a point where i just wasn’t passionate about the pursuit of acting & would rather spend my days grinding in sessions than at auditions. there’s no bad blood & if a dream role came up tomorrow i’d love nothing more than to be on set, but i had & this unquenchable thirst to allow myself the time to give 100% into music, so here we are.

Can we expect more songs (possibly an EP) in the near future?

i’m sitting on so much music right now that i cannot wait to share with the world. my little (no pun intended) but mighty team & i wanted to give “shift & go” proper space to live & breathe. so, something could always change, but as of now we’re planning for back to back singles dropping in 2021 followed by my first EP.

What or who would you say has been the biggest influence on your music?

i have answers for both as they are both equally important to me. “what” has been the biggest influence on my music is lush forests, museums & the connection to my truest-self which i first started finding through practice of mediation & yoga. “who” is Bon Iver, James Blake, Etta James, & Stevie Nicks. my parents always had music playing in the house growing up, so my list could go on but i’d say these four have had the greatest impact.

Who are your Ones to Watch?

my Ones to Watch are YEИDRY, EVAN GIIA, & Lous and the Yakuza

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A post shared by rachael kathryn bell (@littleluna) on Oct 2, 2020 at 1:26pm PDT

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[askalucario-blog]

Caption: ‘yule’ when finished, Kennedy gives each of the masks a name and completes the project by posting an image online images courtesy of the artist.

Damselfrau interview: a peek behind the many masks of the London-based artist

if you somehow stumbled accidentally upon the work of Norwegian artist damselfrau, you’d be forgiven for thinking you had unearthed a cache of ancient vestments; something mystical, arcane—maybe even occult. defined by intricate beadwork, delicate lace and bold, bright color, damselfrau’s masks are at once visually arresting and bewitchingly unsettling. beautifully reshaping the face of the wearer, her work is laden with character, suggesting not just individual personalities, but whole narratives, histories, and worlds of their own.

the name ‘damselfrau’ is inherently contradictory. while ‘frau’ is a term used for married women, ‘damsel’ denotes one who is unmarried. combined, they form the paradoxical and provocative pseudonym adopted by artist magnhild kennedy—originally as a skype username, now as a professional alias—that she likes to interpret as ‘married to oneself’. it’s a fitting mantle for an artist who has become renowned for her masks; a craft that involves placing another ‘self’ on top of your own, creating both a combination of the two and suggesting something entirely new altogether.

damselfrau masks in vogue portugal, ‘the bold side of christmas’image by vasily agreneko, styling by pierre-alexandre fillaire

originally from trondheim in norway, damselfrau moved to london in 2007. while both of her parents are artists, she herself never formally trained. rather, kennedy’s practice originated somewhere a little less conventional: the dance floors of london’s nightclubs. working at a vintage designer shop in islington at the time, kennedy drew inspiration from the collection of clothes around her and was able to sew her own pieces behind the counter, which she would then wear clubbing. eye-catching, eccentric and strangely seductive, it’s no wonder that mask quickly became her craft of choice.

since then, damselfrau has made pieces for artists like mø and beyoncé, and collaborated with alister mackie and louis vuitton. beads, glass, lace, textiles, paint, hair, paper: everything and anything can be included in one of damselfrau’s creations. rather than chaos however, the result is one of organic artistry. ‘for me the mask is a place where different elements come together as situation,’ she says in her artist’s statement. ‘the work is about this place-situation, more so than the mask as a theme or category of form. the mask is a place’. livened by the found nature of the materials that comprise them, damselfrau’s masks perfectly walk the line between being delicate artworks of visual poetry and ghostly uniforms for the mystical.

damselfrau’s intricate gold face piece can be spotted at the start of this music video for mø’s track ‘kamikaze’

designboom spoke with the artist recently about her journey toward mask making, the best spots in london to find new materials, and her plans for the new year.

designboom: you come from a particularly artistic family. what was your own personal journey like as an artist in light of this? do you remember the first time you sat down and said, ‘right, I’m going to make a mask’? how did it turn out?

magnhild kennedy: I came to myself quite late. I’ve always made various types of stuff, but nothing good. I’ve known since I was a teen that I was going to have to head to london at some point, but it didn’t happen until I was in my late 20’s. I have no idea how masks became the format for me, I’m not particularly interested in masks as a category. I worked in a vintage design shop when I first moved here. looking at the old clothes, their details and decor gave me some insight into making. I went to car-boot sales every weekend to find utilities for our new life here, and started schlepping home all kinds of funny materials, textiles and bits I found there.

I had to do something with all these materials. it started with making masks for a party and the format stuck. from there it just grew slowly and organically. five years ago my husband robert started dalston pier studio. I got myself a proper work shop there and felt it was the time take it seriously. I felt like an imposter for the longest time. I’m self taught, I didn’t go to school past the age of 19. but growing up with two artist parents, it’s been schooling from day one

DB: you work a lot in found textiles and have spoken about picking up materials in car boot sales and the like. what is the strangest place you’ve ever found material for a mask, and when working on a new piece, do you have a go-to place in london to start looking for inspiration?

MK: I find things everywhere, I have picked fruit netting out of bins. one christmas in paris, they decorated the trees of the champs-élysées with plastic crystals. rouge ones had fallen off and been stepped into the dirt pavement and I scratched out pocket fulls. I’ve picked gold confetti off the floor at alternative miss world. friends bring me things from their travels too. a friend gave me a norwegian 1700’s hair wreath, a japanese friend gave me an antique geisha hair piece I crocheted into a mask. old tea towels. I’ll use whatever if it has personality.

just walking out the door is inspiration, really. I live in dalston. people from everywhere in the world, young and old. fashion kids. charity shops. I’ll go to sir john soane’s museum. the wallace collection. spitalfields on thursdays. dennis severs’ house. dover street market. a pub.

DB: how long does it usually take to finish a mask, and what is the longest you have ever worked on a single piece?

MK: anything from a day to forever! I have unfinished masks on my shelves that have been waiting for ‘something’ for months—years even. I’ll just have to wait until that right something comes along.

percifor’‘I felt like an imposter for the longest time…but growing up with two artist parents, it’s been schooling from day one’

DB: I know you originally made masks for clubbing in london. how has creating masks specifically for a club environment and club culture in general influenced the work you make? do you still wear your masks clubbing?

MK: it’s been a loooong time since I went clubbing! I might make myself something fun for halloween if I am going to some party. the ‘craft something from nothing’ element of the club culture was inspiring. what some people could make out of some egg carton, tape and paint, you know? there was no hierarchy amongst the materials. that is the main thing I learned that I have brought with me into the work.

‘uro’‘there was no hierarchy amongst the materials. that is the main thing (…) I have brought with me into the work’

DB: how do you personally feel when wearing one of your creations, and what do you hope the experience is for an onlooker?

MK: I don’t wear the masks much once they are done. I try my best not to make to many decisions for the masks. people see what they see. it’s none of my business!

DB: you have collaborated with a lot of really interesting people in the past. are there any artists you are particularly influenced by, or anyone you would love to work with in future?

MK: when I was a kid I saw moebius’ and enki bilal’s comics, and they definitely still inform what I do. I’m very interested in homes and how people surround themselves. I decorate a lot. I sew my own christmas ornaments. at the moment I am taken with the book ‘dawnridge’, about tony duquette’s wonderfully OTT home. he was an artist, film and set designer in hollywood. I like miniature model makers like charles matton and thierry bosquet.

I like spaces over-informed by the people who use them and live in them. I have always felt I work mostly like a decorator. my all time greatest obsession is versailles. I don’t have a particular person in mind, so my dream collab would definitely be with versailles.

DB: you often talk about your masks having a character and life of their own. how much of yourself do you see in each piece you make, or do you always see it as a separate entity from the start? what stage in the process does a mask’s character start to reveal itself, and what does that moment feel like?

MK: separate entity I think…it’s a kind of meditative state, making these things. i’m always surprised by what comes out and that I have made something. usually the character changes several times along the way. there are very few conscious choices taken along the way, or at least it feels like it.

I try to think as little as possible, really and just go by instinct. no overthinking. I have clear physical reactions in the brain to if something works or not. like two ant antennae meeting, releasing some warm spark. some severe chemical reaction, it’s totally a high.

DB: you have a strong presence on instagram and images of your work are understandably popular on sites like instagram and tumblr. how integral to your process is social media, and how has it impacted the way you make work, if at all?

MK: it’s a big part of the work. a mask isn’t finished until I have taken a portrait of it and sent it out on general internet high-ways like my instagram or blogspot. this way the mask makes a life of its own and communicates its own being. it’s how it has turned into actual work.

DB: are you working on anything at the moment you’d like to share with us, and what does 2019 hold for damselfrau?

MK: yes! I’m very excited. I have been invited to exhibit at the national museum of decorative arts trondheim in norway this september. it’s the first time I’ll show the masks in the flesh in norway, so it’s pretty grand for me. I used to visit this museum as a kid, I have strong feeling for this building. it’s surreal to be showing there. I am also working on an interesting project with queen mary university and designer rachel freire, incorporating technical fabrics and movement sensors with my masks. that’s a new universe for me—very cool.

DB: any personal mottos or words of wisdom you try to live by?

MK: ‘walk, don’t run’, as my dad always says.

[cbk1000]

Jenn Recommends: Historical Fiction II

Welcome to another blog post in which I tell you what to read, and you just sit and passively do it because I have excellent taste in literature and also I’m kind of a bully. Check this tag for more recommendations.

Today we revisit historical fiction, because it’s one of my favourite genres and I have lots of suggestions, all of which you should definitely take to heart. My first list of historical fiction recs (which can be found here if you’re curious) was all gay, all the time; this list is slightly more heterosexual, although not much, because here be lesbians.

If You Like: Dickensian lesbians (and really, who doesn’t?)

Read: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

I’m going to lift the summary from Goodreads, because it’s faster, and I’m lazy:  Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a "baby farmer," who raised her with unusual tenderness, as if Sue were her own. Mrs. Sucksby’s household, with its fussy babies calmed with doses of gin, also hosts a transient family of petty thieves—fingersmiths—for whom this house in the heart of a mean London slum is home. One day, the most beloved thief of all arrives—Gentleman, an elegant con man, who carries with him an enticing proposition for Sue: If she wins a position as the maid to Maud Lilly, a naïve gentlewoman, and aids Gentleman in her seduction, then they will all share in Maud’s vast inheritance. Once the inheritance is secured, Maud will be disposed of—passed off as mad, and made to live out the rest of her days in a lunatic asylum. With dreams of paying back the kindness of her adopted family, Sue agrees to the plan. Once in, however, Sue begins to pity her helpless mark and care for Maud Lilly in unexpected ways...But no one and nothing is as it seems in this Dickensian novel of thrills and reversals.

This novel really hearkens back to ye old days of sensation fiction when literary thrillers were a bit slower, a little more cumbersome; they wanted more patience from the reader, who watches all the little threads get teased out bit by excruciating bit. There’s a sinister undercurrent you feel pulling at you till about the halfway point of the novel, when everything is suddenly upended and you sit up in bed screaming, “BRUH!!” because your stupid ass did NOT SEE THAT COMING EVEN A LITTLE BIT.

Waters is really good at this; her evocation of Victorian England is excellent, and transports you in a way that only the best historical fiction can manage. The narrative unfolds slowly in the first half, building upon itself with a sense of heightening doom that a faster pace could never achieve. As the reader, you’re in on the con (or are you?), and you know what’s going to happen, how it’s all going to end, where the burgeoning relationship between the two girls is painfully trundling along to--except you don’t. Waters pulls the rug out from under your feet, and she doesn’t just do it once, which is why I’m reluctant to say too much about the plot. AND--she does it all in really lovely prose that’s reminiscent of the time period she’s working in; I never really felt a modern hand guiding me. I could have been reading any piece of 19th century literature; the seams between the 21st century and the 19th are never visible, never jarring. If you, like me, are a slut for ornate Gothic literature, and/or you want your historical lesbians and you want them now, give this a try.

If You Like: Watching an oblivious pre-WWI Edwardian society hurtling to its inevitable doom through the eyes of a fucked-up family whose matriarch loses herself in the magic of her own fairytales instead of actually paying attention to the flesh and blood children they are based upon

Read: The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt  

From Goodreads:  When Olive Wellwood’s oldest son discovers a runaway named Philip sketching in the basement of the new Victoria and Albert Museum—a talented working-class boy who could be a character out of one of Olive’s magical tales—she takes him into the storybook world of her family and friends. But the joyful bacchanals Olive hosts at her rambling country house—and the separate, private books she writes for each of her seven children—conceal more treachery and darkness than Philip has ever imagined. As these lives—of adults and children alike—unfold, lies are revealed, hearts are broken, and the damaging truth about the Wellwoods slowly emerges. But their personal struggles, their hidden desires, will soon be eclipsed by far greater forces, as the tides turn across Europe and a golden era comes to an end.

It actually took me about a month or so to read this book--not because I kept putting it down and then begrudgingly picking it back up again, but rather because I purposefully wanted to draw it out. The language, the atmosphere--it was all just something I needed to savour. This is a slow, thoughtful book that focuses rather minutely on the dramas of one family and the people who become entangled with it; it will not be for everyone (which is a caveat attached to every book, but I feel this one in particular requires the warning). This is a book about the creative process and the myriad escape hatches it offers us from the real world, sometimes to our own detriment. It is a book about WWI even though the actual war inhabits only the last quarter of the book. It is a book about the options of women in a time when society was still debating whether or not they should be considered full-fledged people. 

This is one of those books that sort of just crawled inside me and stayed; I didn’t want to leave it. I think part of my reluctance came in not wanting to reach the end, knowing WWI was bearing down on these characters, knowing many of them wouldn’t make it, because that’s what the war did to an entire generation: it erased it. I knew it was going to erase whole swathes of the story I had spent hours devoting myself to. I knew for so many of the characters there wasn’t going to be a tidy ending, and there wasn’t; they just stopped, abruptly. You follow generations of the family and in the end feel cheated, not through any failing of the author, but through the cruel and arbitrary machinations of history and the things it has perpetuated against the human race through our own blind stupidity (I’m still upset about WWI, ok??? please don’t touch me).

There was magic in this book, in Olive’s fairytales, in the puppet shows of a family friend: but it’s magic that the matriarch in particular is using to encapsulate herself. It’s not a childlike reverence for things we forget about as we age; it’s a hiding. It’s a sort of disappearance into ourselves and our storytelling because we can’t bring ourselves to look at the material world in all its varying shades of shit and wonder.

Anyway, I had feelings, ok?

If You Like: Italian people, anatomically impressive statues, and erotic descriptions of marble (seriously, I think my dude Michelangelo might have put his penis in a block or two of it)

Read: The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone 

This is a biographical novel of Michelangelo which begins when he is thirteen and still in the very beginning throes of his artistic talents. Stone apparently read through Michelangelo’s entire personal correspondence (and patiently waited years for it all to be translated) and also moved to Italy to write this, so that’s dedication, and the least you can do to repay it is sit through the sometimes vaguely uncomfortable descriptions of Michelangelo’s artwork and his sexual tension with it.

While this doesn’t have the literary merits of the previous recommendations, it’s meticulous historical fiction; Stone painstakingly recreated Michelangelo and his work. It’s an interesting peek into a niche section of art history and also covers part of the turbulent Renaissance period and the powerful politics at play which snare the hapless Michelangelo when all he wants to do is sculpt (and probably wank to) realistic marble people, goddammit. It’s entirely believable as a biography (though it is, in fact, fiction).

Bonus: Michelangelo’s poetry, which was not a thing I even knew about prior to reading this book.

[crocifixio]

THE BOY GENERAL

There was this nagging voice inside my head during this ‘history hike’ that I found too hard to ignore. That since I was walking in the shoes of the rayadillo, I will not be crashing for comfort in some manicured campsite to slurp hot Jin Ramyun nor will I be locked in snuggle fest with my warm blanket. Instead, I will be curled like a ball on cold bare earth, sharp rocks poking my back and unable to get a few minutes of shuteye due to heightened senses. I will be waiting for enemy bullets to come flying over my hair and if I were not to come out of my shithole with guns blazing, The Boy General is waiting to practice his Bulacan brand of poetry on me, the relative smallness of my balls (or lack thereof) is his subject.

Truth is, there is no other way you could take this historical trail without imagining yourself in the shoes of our ancestors. Knowing that they walked the very same path puts one in the same perspective as tracing Rizal’s last steps from Fort Santiago. So let it be said that I was utterly beside myself during the entire hike, for I got to be Carlos Celdran (Walk This Way Historical Tour) and Gideon Lasco (Pinoy Mountaineer) at the same time. But then maybe my hiking buddies saw nothing more than just a mere reincarnation of Contemprato in me.

Contemprato was the local wacko from our town who was said to have lost his mind from some war-related trauma. During the eighties, kids would loiter on rooftops to watch him fight an unseen enemy around the local Parish church grounds. He would dive, dodge bullets and shoot with an invisible rifle in what would appear as a choreographed act. And since I was experiencing Tirad Pass to the full, there I was, two hundred fifty miles away from home, at times finding myself diving, dodging bullets and shooting with an imaginary rifle. Sometimes getting hit – may tama ako! Daplis lang, malayo sa bituka! – but able to carry on, much to the amusement of our local guide. I would tell him to wipe the smirk off of his face because the damned Texas Rangers were still in hot pursuit, and we were running low on ammunition!

All the amusement seemed to dissipate however, once we got to the Tirad Pass monument. In spite of the festive mood typical of Philippine campsites, there was a heavy cloud hanging about. Lying here once was a boy of twenty-four who fell from a sniper’s bullet. A boy who made a name for himself from fighting with valor one fierce battle after another, and winning on every occasion save for this last stand. Stripped of his clothes, belongings and dignity, left for all the crows to feast on.

I wondered if all the campers scattered around the monument knew of all those details. Amidst the tired limbs, the whiff of tinola and cheap brandy in the air, the loud Bluetooth speakers- I did not think it would even make it as a passing topic for drunk backpackers.

The larger group already settled by the campgrounds around the monument was unaware of my thoughts and was in fact delighted upon my arrival. This was because they had run out of booze and I was their hero of the day and not The Boy General. I called them earlier on a number I got from the local tourism after checking out if there were any other groups scheduled for a climb, hoping me and my buddies could hitch a ride. Unfortunately they had already left when I made contact, so I asked if maybe they had room for three more on the way back and you probably have an idea now of how the liquor came into the picture. 

But we never got to ride back with them and the liquor never got paid. By summit bid the following morning, my group had to wait for two full hours at the lower ridge while they took their sweet time taking pictures at the summit of Tirad Peak, a small pointed rock that could hold only a few. We took our own sweet time at the summit during our turn as well. It was one of the best summit experiences I have had in a while, mishaps notwithstanding. It was so good that we were far too detached at the possibility of the other group breaking camp in such a hurry and leaving us without a ride back to the city. But a wave of nonchalance was already flying by and me, Liquidator and Dirty Harry decided right then and there that maybe we should tell them by text that they could go ahead without us. We ain’t chasing them now after waiting for them for two hours at the summit. So fuck it, like all of our other previous climbs, we would again leave to luck our ride back home. Our guide was not sure how we were going to do it though, knowing how scarce small motorbikes at the jump-off were. But we made it back to his house at the exact time his neighbor was backing up a monster jeepney, ready to go back to Candon City on a sudden errand. I had the whole seat for myself and nothing but Ilocos empanada on my mind for the whole ride back.

Watch your six!

PS;

I am not done with the whole liquor debacle yet. The worst part was actually at OUR campsite. A site that I had deliberately placed far from the Tirad Pass monument where everybody was, to savor some peace and quiet. The larger group’s local guide had actually stolen one bottle from the stash that we had bought for their team and decided to drink it all by himself- at our designated camp kitchen. He was already drunk when he came over, talking gibberish and had incoherent nonsensical outbursts. He was spitting everywhere for the entire evening. The ground where we had planned to lie on should the tent’s heat become unbearable was now full of spit. Soft pine needles for natural bedding, but full of gob and phlegm. Liquidator forgot all about it and came out of the tent crawling on all fours, looking for something. I woke up from his howl, let out a soft chuckle, and went back to sleep.

Wasted the following morning, the guide was not able to control his group who had overstayed at the summit as he was down in the lower ridge with us, mumbling again. Some friends say, I actually attract these types.

The actual climb happened on Jan 7-8, 2017 and still follows the chronology of my hikes. We wanted to ‘start the year right’ so it was scheduled this early in the year.  A lot has happened since then- I have seen the movie, read the book and the mountain has since claimed another life.

Below are some more pictures;

L-R; Dirty Harry, Liquidator and Me at the summit

Shadow of the sharp peak of Tirad

 Summit, Tirad Pass Welcome sign, Some beach in Candon.

For two hours I had been looking left and right: left at my watch counting down the hours and right, at the peak waiting for the other hikers to come back down

It was really Edo noodles, not Jim Ramyun, that we brought here. Along with Vigan longganisa purchased earlier at the market.

One of the reasons why we stayed behind was to appreciate this monument in peace..

Doing the 'syano pose only to realize I was looking down- UP the barrel of Gregorio del Pilar's revolver. Anyhow, two hooves up means rider died in battle, one hoof up says rider was wounded but lived, all hooves on the ground- died of natural causes. It was a myth but a pattern ensued and latter-day sculptors seemed to follow the trend. (copied from my iG post, too lazy to edit)

[followmetoyourdoom]

Helpless // Chpt 4: Union Plans

Moving past the devastating events of the coming of age ceremony, how will the Ephedians solve the interkingdom disputes? Perhaps the Queen of Runic can be of help.

Chapter 5 is actually already written too, I got bored during a baseball game my brother took me to. I guess this is what having no internet does, it makes you productive??? weird. ANyway. That chapter I’ll post later on in the week.

Read it on ao3 or below:

The Crown Princess did not return to the ballroom before the festivities ended. Royals and nobles flooded out of the Ephedian castle in groups, most of the adults giggling stupidly and stumbling about. The Borealians and Voltans had carriages waiting for them; the Calixian royals called for their mounts; and the Runics teleported away, the twins mournfully looking back at the castle before they did.

Izira was to return to Xeris on her own - her Kingdom needed her to step up as Queen until her mother's blood transfusion was complete. Talia would stay with Laina to ensure no more harm came to her.

A group of Xerin guards stood ready and waiting at the castle gates, ready to escort Izira home to Xeris. Several of them stayed behind to provide support for Talia and Laina.

The Xerins were not taking any chances.

Only Talia was allowed in and out of her mother's sick room. Izira had already donated some of her own blood and now Talia had stepped up, transferring as much blood as was needed in steady amounts. In case Laina's body rejected the blood, Izira had taught Talia some more advanced healing spells in the hope of finding a solution there. But that was a last resort; regardless the younger princess had thrown herself into her studies.

Talia had been a happy go-lucky child. Never many worries on her plate, and the few she had, banished by a simple song.

But as she got older she realised why her mother was always tense when her friend Iris was visiting or vica versa, why she'd restricted the amount of time they could see each other after the Ephedian Princess passed her Shanila. Why her father always stayed behind to protect the kingdom if Liana needed to attend business in the capital.

Iris had told her it was because her father, Jericho, used to be Laina's best general, her proudest warrior. Until he fell in love with the Ephedian Queen - at the time still the princess - on a recon mission.

More than half of the Xerin army followed him to Ephedia, leaving Xeris unprotected and Laina paranoid.

The kingdoms had a treaty of course, but this did little to reassure Laina, having only recently taken the throne after the abrupt death of her mother. Even as her husband trained even more soldiers, just in case, Laina was busy crafting a powerful weapon using an old family heirloom - a medallion - that she would soon pass down to her eldest daughter.

It would be a weapon with enough force to level mountains, strong enough to part seas, powerful enough to cause armageddon should it fall into the wrong person's hands.

It would be the greatest Xerin creation since the Ancient Ephedian Spell Book.

That had been a few years ago. Now, their army was back up to full capacity and Izira had mastered the use of the medallion.

Yet the tension that had sprouted from one marriage still continued and wrapped itself between the two kingdoms, the most recent incident opening a great chasm through the entire interkingdom relationship. It seemed ironic to try to fix it with yet another marriage or two - but that was exactly what the Queen of Runic was intending to do, while doing what was best for herself and her own kingdom of course.

Peace was beneficial to all kingdoms after all, so why shouldn't Acherontia try to resolve the lurking conflict before it even reared its ugly head?

And so while Talia nursed her mother back to full health, while Mephisto wrote his very first letter to Iris; Acherontia wrote one to the Queen of Ephedia, outlining (most of) her plan and including a short reminder to look out for the lonsdaleite around her kingdom as she hadn't been able to find it before she had left the party.

Both letters were sent off at the same time, and soon enough...

"Your Majesty, a letter for yourself… and another for Princess Iris."

The announcement came at breakfast. Iris' face lit up only for her to look back to her meal as her mother took both letters off the royal page, setting them down next to her plate.

Tapping her plate nervously, Iris pipped up, "Mother can I-"

"Not until I have read it," Xiphi said curtly. It wasn't that she was going to deny her daughter her correspondence, she just needed to check beforehand that the letter wasn't going to upset her, especially with recent events. Iris had told her many times that she was old enough to determine this herself, but Xiphi wouldn't hear of it.

For the rest of the morning, Iris wiggled her feet anxiously, occasionally stealing glances at her mother's face once the Queen finished her meal and began to read the one addressed to Iris.

Within seconds she scoffed, "Another love letter. Here, Dear, amuse yourself." She tossed it across the table to her daughter and turned to the second letter.

"Pah, 'marital unions', as if I don't have more pressing matters to deal wi…" Xiphi trailed off.

Jericho looked up from his third helping of breakfast and leaned over his wife's shoulder to sneak a look at the contents of the letter. Xiphi was reading through it as quickly as she could, her hopes for lasting peace growing more and more with each and every word.

If this worked…

"Iris, I need that letter back." Without pausing, Xiphi snatched it from her daughter.

"HEY! MOTHER!!" Iris' face flushed red. "I was- that's private now! Y-you can't-"

She waved her hand dismissively, "Oh I already read the embarrassing parts, Sweetie, don't worry. That's why I handed it over to you, I know you like that sort of sappy stuff."

"If I remember rightly, you did too once upon a time," Jericho put in with a grin.

"Shush you," Xiphi joked, jumping to the end of the letter. "As I thought. Iris, reply to this boy, make him fall in love with you."

Jericho snorted as he read the small poem Mephisto had written for Iris. "By the sounds of this he already has. Goodness, this is more flowery than anything I ever wrote for your mother. Your eyes put the sky to shame // the iris flowers feel blessed to -"

"JERICHO!"

"DAD!"

Xiphi rolled the letter up and bapped her husband on the head with it before finally handing it back to Iris.

"Mother… Don't I get a choice in this? I like Mephisto, I really do, but…"

"Then what's the issue hmm?"

Iris sighed heavily, "Why him. Of all the people that have sent me love letters, or even marriage proposals - why the Runic Prince?"

"He's powerful. He'll be able to protect the kingdom well. Plus," she admitted, "his mother gives a very convincing argument."

"He got his mother to help him?" Iris asked incredulously.

Xiphi shook her head. "She acted independently I believe. She sees the potential in this union as I now do. Not to mention this is only the first step to peace. Acherontia is a very smart woman," she tapped the Runic Queen's letter, "She has a plan to solve our little issues with Xeris."

Cryptic though that was, Iris chose to ignore it and moved back to the topic at hand. "Okay but," she fiddled with the letter, "I...I need more time to get to know Mephisto."

Xiphi sighed. "I wish time is something we had, Sweetheart, but we only have until the Xerins leave. I doubt Laina would be willing to let her daughter return anytime soon so we have to sort this out while she's still here."

"Is this about Talia?" Xiphi nodded. "Mother! I- I almost… you know what I almost did." She bowed her head in shame and twisted the letter in her hands. "Talia's been through enough."

"Which is exactly why she needs a distraction! You mentioned before she had a… what do you kids call it these days? A crush? On the Runic Princess. So you get the Prince to fall in love with you, the family visits us, the Princess meets Talia, and falls in love with her. We get a union between the three most powerful kingdoms on the planet, ours truly included of course. Problems solved."

Iris shook her head. "Mother, just because Dad fell in love with you at first sight, doesn't mean it'll be that way for everyone. These things take-"

"Time yes I know. We don't have any. What do you think, Jericho?"

The King swiftly hid a grimace and smiled at his wife. "Wonderful idea, my love. Though perhaps we could give Iris a little more time, after all she does need to work on controlling her magic better. A union is all very well and good, but we need to ensure we don't have another… accident."

That was a very good point. "Very well." Xiphi turned to her daughter. "Two weeks."

Iris nodded. It wasn't a lot of time, but it was as much as she was going to get when war was just around the corner.

"If you have finished your meal, you can leave now, Iris." Xiphi said pointedly.

Knowing that look well, Iris rolled her eyes once her back was to her mother and left the dining hall, taking Mephisto's letter with her.

"MAKE SURE YOU REPLY TO MY FUTURE SON-IN-LAW."

"Will do, Mother!" Iris called back.

"ASK YOUR FATHER IF YOU NEED HELP WITH ANY POETRY."

"I'm good!"

"JUST IN CASE!"

Iris was well down the hall by now, "I SAID I'M GOOD!"

As the doorman finally shut the door, Xiphi glanced back at Acherontia's letter. "Jericho, can you tell your guards to look out for a box of lonsdaleite. Apparently Ati misplaced it the other night. Well, she says it was stolen so that's a possibility too I suppose."

The King nodded then raised an eyebrow at his wife. "Ati?"

"What? She's going to become family. Besides," she picked up her letter and pointed out the p.p.s at the end. "See, she even suggested I refer to her as Ati."

Holding his hands up defensively, Jericho replied, "I'm just saying. Maybe don't get too chummy with her yet. It sounds like she's getting herself a pretty sweet deal: her son the future king of Ephedia, and one of the world's most powerful magic users the future queen consort of her own kingdom. Something doesn't seem right to me."

Xiphi shrugged. "Runics are power hungry, always have been. So long as this plan works, they can be in whatever position they want. Besides, we always have plan B."

Jericho looked around nervously, making sure no one was listening in. "I just hope you know what you're doing. He's our last resort and you know it. Who knows what would happen to our kingdom - to our planet - if we placed all our hopes in him . It would radically change everythi-"

"Don't you think I know that!" Xiphi snapped. "But if this fails… we might not have a choice. Either way, we keep Iris away from him at all costs."

[bibliosexxual]

Hey guys! I’ve gotten a lot of new followers lately, so I thought I’d do a little summary of what’s been going on my blog so far this year to update you all.

I’ve been unusually prolific, so I’ve got a lot of new Sterek fics up, including some old WIPs I updated this year.

So, without further ado, here’s the masterpost, as of early May 2017. Happy reading!! And let me know if you think a post like this for my older fics would be helpful as well.

EDIT: Almost forgot, I’ve marked the most popular fics with a ❤.

*

rich!Derek first date drabble (on tumblr) ~1300 words | E

Out of necessity, Derek has fine-tuned a few simple tests for anyone he goes on a first date with.

the kid!fic (on tumblr) ~2300 words | Teen

“Do you think I’m ready for fatherhood?” Stiles asks, trying to keep the panic out of his voice. He’s not freaking out about this. He’s not.

Boyd says flatly, “Stilinski, you’re twenty-one years old. You’re supposed to know how to use a condom by now.“

Stiles’ hand spasms and he accidentally squirts a huge glob of ketchup on his mound of curly fries. Fuck. He has the ideal ketchup-to-curly-fry ratio down to a science, and this is not it. “No, absolutely not what I meant. It’s just. Did you know Derek had a kid?”

❤ stress baking (on tumblr, AO3) ❤ ~1500 words | Gen

From the prompt, “You bake when you’re stressed and sometimes you give me cookies, but recently you’re giving me whole baskets each day, now I’m not complaining but are you okay?” 

❤ the flight to hawaii (drabble on tumblr) ❤ ~900 words | Teen

Jake runs a hand through his sandy blond prince-charming hair and snorts. “Please, this relationship is over when I say it is. Or do you seriously think anyone else is lining up to date you?”

For a moment Stiles is actually speechless, because how has he spent the last three months thinking this guy was attractive? How did he overlook this level of douchebaggery? Some kind of witchcraft, probably.

That’s when the guy in the row ahead of them turns around in his seat, looks Stiles straight in the eye, and says without even one hint that he’s joking, “I would date you.”

❤ the engagement (on tumblr, AO3)  ❤ 1595 words | Gen

The whole thing starts with Stiles really, really craving a meatball sub from the place across the street.

❤ the saga of the valentine’s day cucumber (on tumblr) ❤ 616 words | Teen

Drabble based on the prompt,

I JUST SERVED A CUSTOMER AND THEY WERE PURCHASING A CUCUMBER AND THEY WENT

“It’s for Valentine’s Day”

I REPLIED

“You must be lonely?”

THEY REALISED WHAT I MEANT AND NOW I’M SAT WITH A COMPLAINANT FORM IN FRONT OF ME.

❤ the nerd party, AKA the bookstore!AU (on AO3) ❤ ~4400 words | Teen

From the prompt, “We both tried to grab at the last copy of that desired book at the same time and had a tug of war.” HS!AU in which Derek is crushing hard and Stiles might not be as observant as he thinks he is.

Sterek doctors!AU (on tumblr) ~2000 words | Teen

A ficlet in which Stiles and Derek are coworkers at the hospital, Stiles accidentally (?) becomes Derek’s new roommate, and there is pining. Basically the outcome of my addiction to House, M.D.

you know you’re on my mind (WIP on AO3) 8164 words | Teen

The pen pal AU where Derek lives in California and Stiles lives in Poland. Long-distance pining, whoo!

draw me like one of your french girls (on tumblr: part 1, part 2) 3687 words | Teen

College AU + art student AU + nude modeling AU.

❤ accidentally? (on tumblr, AO3) ❤ 3683 words | Mature

Based on the prompt,

boss: “know why I called you in here?” me: “because I accidentally sent you a dick pic” boss [stops pouring 2 glasses of wine]: “accidentally?”

yup.

❤  breaking & entering (on tumblr, AO3) ❤ 4161 words | Teen

Based on the prompt, “[burglar gently wakes me] You live like this?" In which Derek Hale deserves nice things (and gets them).

prince in training (on tumblr) ~3000 words | Teen

Based on the prompt, “i grew up not knowing i was royal and now i guess i’m heir to a throne and you’re the guy who’s supposed to be teaching me how to be royal bc i suck at it and oops we made out”

❤ gorgeous beards of BHU (on tumblr, AO3) ❤ 2239 words | Teen

There are a lot of reasons Stiles is pretty sure Erica is his platonic soulmate. Her brilliant innuendos. Her epic dance moves. Her stubborn refusal to back down from things that scare her. The fact that her comic book collection is even bigger than Stiles’. And, of course, her @gorgeousbeards_of_bhu instagram account.

Or,

In which Erica posts a picture of a gorgeous mystery man to her Instagram and Stiles has to know who it is.

the roommate (on tumblr: part 1, part 2) ~1900 words | Teen

In which Stiles and Scott get a terrifying-except-not new roommate thanks to Craigslist.

❤ little spoon (on tumblr: part 1, 2; AO3) ❤ 6455 words | Teen

To save money while attending college in NYC, Stiles and Derek decide to rent one tiny apartment together. With one bed.

the blazing bombardier (on tumblr) 1670 words | Teen

Fluffy summertime meet-cute in which Stiles loves roller coasters and Derek really, really does not.

the valentine’s day showdown (on tumblr) ~4000 words | Teen

So Stiles and Erica have this competitive flirting/wooing thing going. This totally-mutually-agreed-upon-to-be-platonic competitive flirting/wooing thing. Every Valentine’s Day Eve, Erica gets him good, and every Valentine’s Day, Stiles gets her back, thoroughly.

Except this year things don’t go quite according to plan.

❤ on the bus (on AO3) ❤ 13299 words | Mature

HS!AU in which Stiles and Derek ride the bus to school together, and there are bisexual awakenings.

older!derek fic (on tumblr, AO3)   ~4000 words | Mature

Stiles likes Derek. Derek thinks he’s too old for Stiles. Meanwhile, Stiles is stubborn (and attractive).

❤ ships passing in the night (on tumblr, AO3) ❤ 1410 words | Teen

Stiles can’t say he blames Derek for quitting. Hell, this is basically the best thing to ever happen to Derek, Stiles knows that, and it’s awesome. They’d talked about their dreams, and Derek had always said he’d love to be a musician. Now his single has climbed to number eight on Billboard’s Hot 100 and his face is at the top of Stiles’ news feed every day for a week, and Stiles wouldn’t take that away from him for anything.

BUT. Just because Derek gets his dream job doesn’t mean he can just—just leave and never contact Stiles again.

Only, that’s exactly what he does.

Or, musician!Derek AU with pining.

not really casual (on tumblr, AO3) 2714 words | Teen

They meet in Biology 101. Stiles is a freshman, and he’s in this class mostly because Scott is pre-vet and Stiles signed up for all the same classes because he has no earthly idea what he wants to do, career-wise. Derek is a junior Spanish lit major taking this because he needs the gen. ed., and he’s terrible. He’s the only person in the class who’s not a freshman. He’s always a few minutes late—that’s how he ended up sitting at the table by the door with Stiles and Scott the first day—and he’s so gloomy, and he always lugs around this backpack full of Pablo Neruda books because he has a Spanish poetry class right before this one, and he takes the neatest, most meticulous class notes Stiles has ever seen. (Stiles, meanwhile, doesn’t take any notes. He takes photos of every slide with his phone as the professor talks and then spends the rest of the time goofing off quietly, doodling dumb stuff on Scott’s arm and working on five different assignments at once on his laptop.)

at the museum (on tumblr) 2452 words | Teen

Of course the first time Stiles sees Derek Hale since high school just has to be on the day he’s finally gotten Lydia from Marketing to agree to go out with him. That’s how the universe works, apparently, always giving Stiles the shittiest luck.

the hunger games AU (WIP on AO3) 7941 words | Teen

Derek shifts on his feet, says, quiet, “You must really care about him.”

“He’s my brother,” Stiles says simply. “And with his asthma, he’s—he wouldn’t have made it fifteen minutes in there. Even assuming he did, he wouldn’t kill anyone. He doesn’t have it in him.”

“And you do?” Derek asks.

Stiles stands a little straighter, looks Derek straight in the eye. “I’ll do what I have to do.” He hopes it comes out sounding more sure than he feels.

Or, in which Stiles takes Scott’s place in the arena.

***

So that’s it for this year… but the year is still young. :)

[sword-and-quill]

Confrontation

Taking place a couple weeks after the severing of the alliance.

Mara inched backwards, feeling for steady ground with the soles of her black flats. The sidewalks in the area were uneven and full of cracks from years of overuse and insufficient repairs; not ideal for running or fighting, which was exactly as Thein must have planned. “I really should be heading home.”

Still smiling warmly, he matched her movement step for step. In the rapidly fading light, his luminescent silver eyes glowed more brightly. “In due time, Marimara. Surely you have a few minutes to spare for a devoted friend and teacher.”

“You betrayed me!” She exclaimed, scrambling back a few more paces. “I- I trusted you with everything, even things I thought Booker wouldn’t understand, and you were planning to murder me the entire time!” A growl, rumbling close to the earth, sprang up behind her, warning that she was too close to the watchbeast he had instructed to block her path. She stopped backpedaling just in time to avoid tripping over it. “How can you still call yourself either of those things?” Mara quickly checked over her shoulder to gauge her proximity to the creature while still attempting to keep Thein in her peripheral vision. It was a lot closer than she had anticipated, belly low to the ground and growling a continuous warning in her direction. Unable to retreat further, she refocused her attention on her former ally.

“Both remain true for me; there is no changing my affection for you, no matter the unfortunate, contextless excerpts of information you may believe you have overheard. My only wish is, as it has always been, to see you fulfill your potential.” Thein approached until he was nearly toe to toe with her, towering over her like an ashen tree. “These past two weeks, my sources have not seen you conducting any patrols of the area. Rumor is beginning to spread through the underground that the city’s protector has lost her nerve; such an idea could prove absolutely disastrous for the humans you have sought to protect. You are not yet ready to face the world on your own… put aside your fears, Marimara, welcome me back to your side, and we shall purge this city of every rival.”

“I wish you were telling the truth.” Mara scrubbed her cheek fiercely, trying to hide the presence of her tears. “I don’t want to be alone, but Booker-”

“Booker is not present.” Thein reached up to her prominent cheekbones and wiped away the tears with great care. “I am here. You can trust me, my dearest hunter, and you need an ally in this time of instability and fear.” His hands were warm; worse, they were still familiar and still comforting, even after hearing him plainly declare his intent to sacrifice her to his insatiable gods.

Taking a deep breath, Mara pushed his hands & the fond memories away, stepping laterally to put both the watchbeast and Thein in front of her. “No. I can’t.” She said firmly, finally feeling the anger surface beneath the cold, sucking mud of her grief. (Was he feeding on her? Even now?) “If there is the smallest chance you’re not lying to me now, you’ll understand why I want you to leave me alone.”

Thein’s hands fell back to his sides. “Marimara, a hunter working alone is a temptingly isolated target. It is because of my genuine affection for you that I cannot let you cast me aside.” His dismay was readily apparent and so convincingly portrayed that she could almost believe him again, as she had believed him for so long. “Can you truly have forgotten how I have risked my power, my well-being, my very bones for you?” His eyes flared with a hint of anger, surfacing just beneath his emphatic insistence on reaffirming their partnership.

“Thein…” Mara sighed and reached up with her free hand to rub her chest, trying to massage away the deep, hollow ache nestled underneath her ribs. Booker would know what to say, if he were there. He knew how to handle Thein because he had always seen him for what he was. “I don’t want this, okay? You were my best friend and I would have done anything for you and you were planning to stab me in the back the entire time. I- I- I showed you my music, my favourite paintings, even my stupid books of poetry! God, I even came to you for advice about dating!”

He offered a small, sad smile at that. “And your companionship has been a refreshing source of constant light, these passing years; truly, I enjoy witnessing your growth. However, you must understand: I have a reputation which protects me, Marimara - losing it would render me outcast, devoid of influence, and completely powerless. There are many things I do and say to preserve the image I have carefully constructed for myself in the underworld. It saddens me greatly that you were disturbed to witness these efforts firsthand, but the things I said were necessary to preserve my rank.” Her former mentor paused to see how his words were sinking in, eyes glowing a bit more intensely for a moment before they rapidly dimmed back down to a subtle glimmer. “... though perhaps this was an important example for you, hm? My perceived betrayal has wrought such turmoil in your soul, dear Marimara; it pains me to imagine the manner of damage I might have inflicted upon you in your vulnerable state, had I been your enemy.”

She was stunned. “Are you…” Slowly, the words pushed themselves out. “Are you actually trying to pass this off as a lesson?”

“As the venerable Mr. Booker would likely remind you, were he present: Every experience is an opportunity to learn.” Thein said. “Now then - let us briefly pause at your home so you can change before we begin this evening’s patrol in earnest.”

“No.” She denied so forcefully that he actually seemed startled, blinking at her in askance. “I’m done listening to you pretend. Leave. Me. Alone.” Thein opened his mouth to present yet another long-winded rebuttal, but Mara turned on her heel and sprinted down the street, having maneuvered into a position that gave her a clear shot to the end of the road. Over her shoulder, large claws scrabbled against the pavement as the heavy, muscular beasts under his command hurled themselves into the pursuit.

“Marimara!” He called out after her, but she was moving too quickly to spare a thought for what else he had to say.

One of the creatures was closing the gap, so she quickened her pace, feet stinging with every slap against the pavement. Once again, she lamented her lack of sneakers. She needed to focus, if she was going to outmatch her pursuit. Still dashing down the road, Mara ripped open her bookbag to retrieve her knife, losing several sheets of music and a workbook in the process. Now armed, she veered abruptly towards the steps of someone’s townhome, taking them two by two with springy bounces. On their landing, she tensed her muscles and executed a swift backflip, landing neatly behind one of them. She brought the knife whistling around and slammed it into the top of its skull, penetrating the bone and lodging solidly within the brain cavity. She almost laughed at the small victory, but took off running again just as the other came bounding after her with its feet rapidly thudding against the concrete.

As she wove back onto the main road, she picked up speed over another thirty seconds and gunned it for a street light. Hoping that she was correct about how close the creature was, she leapt at the lamp post, gripping onto it with both hands, and used her momentum to swing around in a wide loop so that the beast took the full force of both of her feet slamming into its side. She was grimly gratified to hear the snapping of bones on both the initial impact and when it hit a parked car with a sickening crunch - it lay motionless after. Although both of his minions were likely dead, Mara could see Thein smoothly navigating obstacles, catching up with her at an alarming rate. To her additional dismay, she realized there were at least two more watchbeasts attempting to cut her off at the beginning of the next city block. Determined not to be caught, she leapt nimbly onto a car and redirected her course into an alleyway. No sooner had she vaulted over the dumpster than she realized it was a dead end. She spun around, intending to make it back out onto the street, but Thein stood in the entrance: foreboding and wreathed in shadows.

“Leave me alone!” She demanded, backing away from him as she clenched her hands into fists. Her useless bag slipped from her shoulder and onto the ground, where she promptly kicked it away to reduce the risk of tripping.

“It seems you do not fully grasp the extent of your vulnerability just yet, Marimara. I’m afraid I must impress the gravity of the situation upon you, lest someone else do so in my neglect.” Thein calmly removed his jacket, folding it with the utmost precision to avoid creases and wrinkles. While he seemed preoccupied, she seized upon the only opportunity she could and bolted for the mouth of the alley, attempting to dodge around him in the process. He moved more quickly than she anticipated and caught hold of her wrist, holding on just long enough to redirect her inertia so she careened into the wall. The force of the impact was such that she gasped, startled by how much hitting the bricks actually hurt, but also horrified that Thein was the one who had done it. Even with her mistrust and cutting contact, she hadn’t really believed, deep down, that he would harm her.

Mara pushed away from the wall, glowering at him with wounded disbelief that was being rapidly subsumed by a potent mixture of both fear and anger. He stood a few feet away with an easy, open stance that she recognized from months of training together; he used that one in particular to help her practice taking falls with minimal injury by hurling her to the ground or over his shoulder with various techniques.

“You were focused on the exit instead of on me.” Thein lectured, the barest hint of a smile creeping in from the corners of his mouth. “Try me again.”

She noticed that his jacket was laying on the ground in a heap and briefly replayed the events in her mind, concluding that he had been removing it as a ruse to get her in range, at which point he tossed it aside and cut off her route. She needed to be careful. More than that, she needed to take him off-guard somehow. Mara waited until she could breathe normally again, psyching herself up, and then bent over to pick up a stray bit of metal. As she crouched down, there was a blur of motion in the corner of her eyes. Instinctively, she jerked back just in time to have his foot clip her side, where it would have been a solid boot to the ribs otherwise. She rolled away from where he raised his foot to strike again and sprang back up to a defensive position, popping her fists up to guard her face like a boxer.

“A passable dodge, but once more, Marimara,” A length of solidified shadow slipped down and curled around the piece of metal she had hoped to use, lifting it up and planting it firmly in Thein’s hand. “Keep your eyes on your opponent at all times.”

Countless memories of their previous sparring sessions flickered through her mind on an incomplete reel. He always had the advantage of experience, but there had to have been times when she managed to pull one over on him and she only needed one good move to break away from the fight and make a run for it. Mara moved around him in a wary half-moon arc, taking in the details of the scene in her peripheral vision while giving him the direct attention he was demanding. There were several bits of promising debris not far behind her, but they would require retreating further away from her intended exit.

Closer to Thein, there was a rusty metal bucket that could suffice, but it would bring her within striking range again and he had already proven to be faster than she expected. She edged backwards cautiously to avoid tripping, but he advanced rapidly and forced her to hop back to avoid a swing from the metal bar. She was able to weave in and out of range, always narrowly avoiding his blows until she reached the well-worn broomstick leaning against the wall, missing most of its bristles. Mara snatched up the weapon, ducking down to allow the metal bar to whoosh harmlessly overhead, and then aimed a low blow for his knees, prompting him to spring back so it wouldn’t connect. With the skirmish temporarily equalized, she drove him back a few paces, trying to work away from the wall for added mobility.

When she had pushed the fight about halfway back to the entrance, Thein blocked a blow that she aimed for his head. He deflected another broom strike to one side and then caught her fist in his hand as she brought what would have been a crushing blow hurtling towards his chin. Not one to forget her training, even in the midst of her attempts to escape, Mara hiked her knee up and snapped her foot towards his midriff - which he blocked with his own thigh. With these assaults neutralized, she tried to pull back to begin a fresh pattern of attack, but he dug his claws into her hand, gripping it tightly enough to draw blood. Desperate to force him to let go, she used the only avenue left available to her and reared back to headbutt him squarely in the face.

She was rewarded by an immediate release as he staggered back, blinking to clear his vision as a tiny trickle of black ichor dripped from his nose. “Better.” He commented approvingly, reaching up to rub the blood away. “But insufficient to avail you against me.” The streetlight at the mouth of the alley dimmed by degrees, its illumination interrupted by countless, writhing shadows that roiled behind Thein. Pieces of the movement were torn away from the masses that seemed to be bulging from the darkest corners and beneath the dumpster, forming tangles of ragged, razor-sharp tendrils that rose behind Thein by the dozens until he was practically engulfed by an ominous silhouette that only vaguely resembled him. In this silent hive of pitch-black motion, Thein’s argent eyes were the only source of light, gleaming with a fierce, disconcerting intensity.

In the brief cessation of battle, Mara could physically feel the fear creeping up through her gut. He rarely used his demonic powers when they sparred, but they had always been some of their toughest matches - fast, sharp, and almost impossible to spot before they attacked. Once again, it struck her how incredibly, painfully different reality was from the illusions Thein had lead her to believe. How was it possible that, of all people, he was the one to betray her? Thein, who had always been so wryly amused with her human eccentricities; Thein, who had seen to her wounds with explicit gentleness on more than one occasion; Thein, who had always been so careful with her secrets; who had promised her that she was special (to him.)

The first attack came without warning; a nearly imperceptible blur of almost incorporeal shadow lashed out for her ankles, but she leapt vertically, letting it pass beneath her feet without damage. Scarcely leaving time for her to land, a second appendage rushed towards her face while another aimed to pierce her abdomen. Mara spun to her left, feeling the razored edge breeze by her cheek with only centimeters to spare. Many of the tendrils arched over Thein’s head, like a great and terrible scorpion, while others seemed to appear out of nowhere, not tethered by proximity to his form. Soon she was dodging dozens in rapid succession, mostly able to escape severe injury, but definitely hedged into the narrow corridor by the wild nest of assaults. She began to feel overwhelmed relatively quickly and Thein himself was slowly advancing on her, idly whirling the corroded bar in a circle that hummed through the chilled night air. There was no way to make a retreat. Stalling the shadows could only stave off serious injury for a short time and there was no way to harm them or wear them out.

Again searching for a means to reset the situation, Mara hurled her broomstick like a javelin, arcing it through the air with pinpoint accuracy directly at Thein’s head. Although it didn’t connect, he did have to rotate his focus from controlling the shadows to blocking the incoming projectile with his forearm. Taking advantage of his temporary distraction, Mara sprinted forward and launched herself directly at him with an entirely desperate dropkick, solidly planting both feet into his chest and bringing both of them crashing to the ground. Even with the wind knocked out of her, she scrambled back up; unfortunately, Thein was similarly swift in returning to his feet. Trying to press whatever upper hand she might have gleaned, she again launched herself forward and full-body tackled him back to the hard concrete, forcing him to take the added weight of her body with the fall. Both of them went to the ground again, but Mara remained on top of him and wound up to solidly clock him in the jaw. Once - Twice - as she drew back for the third punch, he threw her off to the side and pushed himself back up once again. Mara used the wall as leverage to fling herself back into the fray, determined to keep him off-balance and distracted enough to prevent effective use of his shadowy assistants. Even still, they writhed around him, occasionally snapping out at her in tandem with a punch or kick.

And then, she failed to block one of his attacks and took the metal bar’s full strength across her chest; the pain was immediate, but she coughed and continued to defend herself. A tendril slashed her shoulder as she ducked another swing from the pipe; his kick connected with the inside of her thigh, setting it to throbbing immediately. Staggered, she took three rapid punches to the gut, punctuated by a vicious knee to the same place. While struggling for air, Thein hooked a leg behind hers, stepped forward, and forcefully hurled her to the ground. Without wasting a second, he slammed the pipe into her ribs again, and again, and again until they both heard something crack deep inside of her. He raised it over his head again, a twisted, angry snarl on his typically amiable features, and brought it whistling down towards her head. Mara squeezed her eyes shut, bracing for the inevitable blow as she gasped painfully…

… only to have it still not land moments later. She dared to open her eyes and saw Thein standing over her, bloody bar clenched tight in his fist as he stared at her. Bit by bit, the terrible fury ebbed from his expression; his snarl relaxed into a more neutral, thoughtful frown. He took a deep breath - shuddering with either horror or pure ecstasy - and dragged his free hand through his incredibly mussed hair, combing it meticulously back into position. “Oh... Marimara.” He sighed raggedly, wiping black ooze from his mouth and slinging it away, before tugging on his suit, trying to rid it of most of the wrinkles it had picked up during the scrap. “I very nearly made a tremendous mistake.” Mara tried to roll away from him, stifling a groan at the strain put on her badly battered frame. He calmly re-buttoned his shirt, which had been torn in the fight. “It would be an absolute tragedy to permanently damage you, let alone such a comely visage as yours.”

(From this point, Mara is taken to the hospital and spends a couple days there. Prior to her release, she decides the best way to mitigate the risk to her family and herself is to run away: so she does. She takes a bus to a new city in pursuit of one of Booker’s old contacts, hoping the warlock will know wards or spells to help her get away. This transitions from the prologue part of the book to part one: where she begins forming a group all her own. These new friends have all experienced a profound betrayal or inability to trust in the safety of their surroundings, which is a factor that bonds them together. Together, they can try to learn to trust again while also trying to make a difference in the safety of their community.

Normally I don’t do summaries/spoilers because I want my work to speak for itself, but I deemed it important here.)

[venusdebotticelli]

Okay, gather ‘round, children, ‘tis storytime!

Once upon a time when I’d just recently moved to Manchester, I needed to go do some paperwork in London, so I went and spent a couple of days with my uncle, who’s been living there for quite a few years.

It was a couple of days of sightseeing and eating cool food and basically just ~*¡¡¡London!!!*~, which sounds really nice, in theory. Thing is, it was a couple of days with just my uncle as company. At the time I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that, I thought it was a cool plan.

But here’s a non-exhaustive list of things I heard from him that weekend:

Autism is caused by drinking milk, and the government poisons the food in supermarkets so that only rich people can afford healthy food that won’t slowly kill them.

The government secretly murders all scientists who dare publicly speak out about this horrible truth.

All the abused women in the world deserve the treatment they get, because 100% of women (actual scientific statistic figure provided by him) always go for the assholes and ignore the Nice Guys™ like him.

The gays are horrible monsters who oppress the poor straights, because that one time he went into an Obviously Gay™ Gay Bar to have a drink on his own people gave him weird looks.

“I really don’t like the way you’re looking at me right now” -My uncle, to his queer niece, right after he said that we are horrible monsters who oppress the straights and have all the power in the world, because all the managers at his workplace are gay and very incompetent. (I’m pretty sure that means I was oppressing him with my stare, or something)

Apparently I just have a huge Victim Complex™, I like to victimise myself by seeing issues were there are none---says the aforementioned oppressed-by-the-gays-and-their-meanie-stares uncle.

This was around the time of the winter olympics in sochi, and when all the controversy about the Russian ban on gay propaganda was going strong, and people were actually getting arrested. One of the TVs at the pub we were at was broadcasting the olympics, and he thought it vital to inform me that the whole “gay thing” in Russia was just a ruse, a fake problem invented by the government to distract from the real truth of their shady dealings.

Apparently anything that affects the gays only is just a fake problem, because it’s not actually affecting anybody, y’kno¿? I’m guessing The Real Issues™ are just those that affect straight white men like him, everything else is just government fabricated distraction.

This is a very big secret, you know, highly classified information that he had confirmed by the obviously very reliable sources of his internet circles, so please read the next point at your own discretion, I don’t want the FBI/CIA/NHS kicking down your door in the middle of the night because you know too much: 

There is a very very very exclusive gay night club, called The Black Rose or something like that iirc, where all the world’s biggest elites gather together in secret, you know, george bush, david cameron, vladimir putin, the clintons, to name a few, and they all partake in super secret initiation rituals that involve gay things that he couldn’t tell me about because they were too dark and perverse for my poor sensible ears to hear. But ovbiously that creates this huge Gay Elite ruling the world behind the scenes and oppresing all the straights globally.

I’m pretty sure there’s more stuff I’m forgetting, after all, this was around three years ago already, but you get the idea. It’s obviously the kind of edifying, fascinating conversation you’d pursue when your queer, autistic, just-turned-19 niece visits you in a foreign city and has no choice but to sleep in your house and to spend the whole two days with you :) 

Perhaps a little unreasonably, my young self thought “Oh my goodness, this person is a little bonkers, maybe being a 50something year old man living on his own with no friends and the internet as his only company for years has slightly perturbed the waters of his mind¿? I feel a little alienated, I’d rather avoid his company in the future, whenever possible”. That is exactly the delicate way I told my friends about it in the next five hours of bus ride back to Manchester, fo’ sho’, no furious whatsapp ranting was involved at all :P

Anyway, as was my intention, I kept ignoring his existence, and only warily skimming through, and affording no response to, his emails full of links to conversation threads about the moral failings of letting beings like Conchita Wurst show their faces on respectable TV and similar topics. 

It’s been a few years now, and every once in a while my grandma mentions that when he talks to him he’s really sad I don’t keep in contact with him, and that he thinks I’m quite ungrateful, and that he’d like to know what’s going on with my life and for us to see each other every now and again, and that he’d like to help me out in this foreign country we’re both living in but that I just don’t give him the chance. My mum also asks me whether I’d like to get in contact with him and go visit, sometimes, though not as often. Today was one of those times, since apparently they’ve been talking lately, and he asked her about me, and my mum sent him some of the assignments I did for class, which I’m quite proud of. 

One of those is my poetry assignment, which includes five poems and an analysis of three of them, and the poems are quite personal pieces treating topics such as queer love, my mental illness and autism, and toxic societal ideals surrounding romantic relationships. His answer to that¿? He told my mum to look up the concept of “Generation Snowflake”, of all bloody things. Lemme just helpfully give you the definition of that here:

Generation Snowflake, or Snowflake Generation, is a term used to characterise young adults of the 2010s as being more prone to taking offence and less resilient than previous generations, or too emotionally vulnerable to cope with views that challenge their own. It is considered derogatory.

So now I ask of you, dear friends, to send me links to posts and articles giving good rebuttals to the utter bullshit that is that bloody baby-boomer concept, because I know I’ve read some very good ones here on tumble dot com, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to even begin finding them. Please help me out here¿?

[theconservativebrief]

Jeh Johnson, Barack Obama’s second-term secretary of Homeland Security, quips in a recent Washington Post op-ed that “abolishing ICE is not a serious policy proposal; it’s about as serious as the claim that Mexico’s ‘gonna pay for the wall.’”

It’s a bit unfair. Both the idea of a Gulf-to-Pacific border wall and the idea of coercing Mexico into paying for it suffer from essentially insurmountable technical problems, whereas ICE in its current form only dates back to 2003 and clearly the bureaucratic org charts could be redrawn again to get rid of the agency.

But on another level, it’s a decent analogy. Building the wall and making Mexico pay was a potent campaign signal that marked Donald Trump as an advocate of unusually harsh border security measures and a confrontational attitude toward Latin American governments. It was a slogan that people understood and connected with — both supporters and opponents — on an emotional level, even as they almost certainly understood that the specific elements of the program were a little fanciful.

“Abolish ICE” is the progressive response. Democrats are adopting the line as a signal to voters that they reject Trump’s vision of a closed America, one that separates children from parents as they seek asylum. They aren’t offering a 17-point plan to restructure immigration enforcement.

ICE is operating exactly as designed when it rips screaming children from parents. That’s exactly why we must abolish it.

We MUST have the moral and political courage to #abolishICE.

Weak half-measures do nothing. This is a defining moment of our time – the time to act is now. pic.twitter.com/0viiQ4qdz8

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) June 19, 2018

Democrats are following in Trump’s footsteps by prioritizing emotionally resonant constructs over detailed, practical agendas for action. Other popular progressive rallying cries of the moment, from “Medicare-for-all” to “free college” to “guaranteed jobs,” are incredibly ambiguous as policies. The activists and elected officials promoting them often seem more focused on building support for the slogans than for a particular vision of what they mean. It’s striking, for example, that most “Medicare-for-all” proposals would enroll people in programs that are very different from existing Medicare.

This is an aspect in which Trump very much is normal. What’s abnormal was the fad for most of the Obama years for very literal campaigning. An old saying about American politics holds that you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. In the Trump era, it’s back to poetry. And all of us — perhaps especially the literal-minded among us — had better get used to it.

Once upon a time, of course, Barack Obama was the airy, sloganeering fantasist of American politics.

His 2008 health care plan was basically unworkable, which Clinton pointed out at the time. Obama implicitly acknowledged this in office by adopting her individual mandate proposal that he rejected as a candidate. As a first-term senator, he seemed underqualified for office. He vowed to violate traditional diplomatic protocols and norms of office by holding direct talks with the leaders of rogue states, and his most memorable campaign pledges were “hope” and “change you can believe in,” rather than actual policy promises.

It turned out, however, that the president can’t unilaterally change American political culture — especially when the opposition party in Congress has a vested interest in stymying him by turning everything under the sun unto a partisan food fight.

What he can try to do is make people’s lives better in concrete ways, which is what Obama did. He pivoted his political strategy to emphasize that fact.

Detail-oriented, policy-focused journalists like Michael Grunwald, Jonathan Chait, and a number of other writers who now work at Vox created a supportive online media environment for his approach.

Then Republicans drew the comically-inauthentic but plausibly-competent Mitt Romney as their nominee, and Obama’s reelection bid turned into a historically unusual wonk-off.

Obama attempted to pass the baton to Clinton, who had long been openly derisive of his more idealistic streak and whose approach across two primaries and one general election campaign might be characterized as featuring the audacity of hopelessness.

[embedded content]

I’ll confess that I, personally, always liked this about Clinton. Clinton was an open practitioner of Max Weber’s politics as a vocation in a world full of phonies preaching unworkable charismatic leadership models. At the end of the day, though, part of embracing an ethic of responsibility is recognizing that you need to win to do anything. And plodding literalism is not a great way to do that.

The important thing is to be ready to govern, not to spell it out in detail on the trail.

Bernie Sanders’s 2016 primary campaign annoyed a lot of establishment Democrats by being so obstinately, flagrantly unrealistic.

People who lived through bruising congressional debates that ended up killing even a weak public option and exempting auto dealers from Consumer Financial Protection Bureau oversight knew that there was simply no way Democrats were going to spend 2017 enacting a single-payer health care system and breaking up big banks.

But by detaching itself entirely from the practical realities of the legislative landscape, Sanders managed to get in touch with a much clearer set of values that animate people in progressive politics. The reason that Democrats fought for the Affordable Care Act is they didn’t think people should find themselves blocked from the ability to get medical care by lack of money. And while the ACA took large strides in that direction, various proposals to further tweak it did not speak to those values in the same way that a call to extend Medicare coverage to everyone did.

Since the election, most Democrats seeking national leadership have been trying to capture some of that magic. And that drive to articulate values more clearly has — even more than movement to the left on policy — been the main shift inside the party.

While endorsing the call to “abolish ICE,” for example, Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) didn’t really say anything different on policy than what Obama said in his second term. What she found was a more emotionally resonant way to say it.

I believe we need to protect families who need help, and ICE isn’t doing that. It has become a deportation force. We need to separate immigration issues from criminal justice. We need to abolish ICE, start over and build something that actually works. https://t.co/JtSN68k4Fd

— Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) June 29, 2018

What exactly starting over to build something that actually works entails is unclear, just as nobody has yet written a “Medicare-for-all bill that explains exactly where the revenue will come from. The point, however, is that most Americans believe that people should be able to get medical treatment they need regardless of ability to pay. For Democrats who want to own that brand, signaling that the party shares the public’s beliefs on health care, “Medicare for All” is a profound, important, and useful statement of values.

There’s no sense hectoring normal people for preferring comprehensible slogans and high-minded aspirations to tedious disquisitions on the art of the possible, and there’s certainly no sense in hectoring practical politicians for trying to give people what they want.

That said, it is always worth keeping in mind that governing is difficult. Republicans over the years have veered so far into the realm of sloganeering that they barely retain any capacity at all to develop policies that bear any resemblance to their campaign rhetoric. Years of promises to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act with something that would address some of people’s frustrations with the program turned out to be completely vacuous — which seemingly surprised even many GOP members of Congress.

Democrats should remember that even their more wonk-oriented party suffered from some serious failures of policy substance — most notably an underpowered stimulus bill, a health care law that wasn’t structured to support short-term economic recovery, a group of excessively timid and unimaginative Federal Reserve appointees, and an inability to grapple with the foreclosure crisis in a timely manner — that played a larger role in generating electoral defeats than any shortcomings of sloganeering.

It’s incumbent upon politicians embracing the new poetry of the activist left to spare some time for thinking about what, exactly, it is that they want to do if they take office.

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” is a classic of American oratory notwithstanding the fact that it was not, strictly speaking, accurate. But the New Deal itself became an iconic success story because Roosevelt married his rhetoric to policy initiatives that (mostly) worked on a technical level.

The tough question for Democrats on immigration isn’t really about whether or not to abolish ICE or even what exactly that means, it’s what should the entire progressive program on immigration look like in an era when the quest for a grand bargain is dead. But the trend toward putting the poetry back into politics ought to be seen as a welcome turn to normalcy, not some kind of objectionable left-wing flight of fancy.

Original Source -> Democrats are campaigning in poetry again

via The Conservative Brief

[wilhelmphoenix-blog]

“Richmond”:

Richmond, VA. RVA, as it’s often referred to colloquially, hipster capital of the state (as well as actual state capital) and my current pinpoint of existence before the next one comes along - whenever that may be, if at all. I came here around 7 months ago after finally escaping my hometown of Virginia Beach. I remember the day I came up here on a whim to visit friends from college at the Stone Brewing just a hop, skip and jump from Shockoe Bottom, and was offered an opportunity to move up here. 

It was about a week and a half before my dad passed away.

Even though the job I found that brought me up here in late December last year turned out to be absolutely nothing like what was advertised in the online posting and subsequent interviews, it still felt like the slightest step up compared to life back in VB. About five months after graduating from William & Mary, and one year before my dad died, I was left with no option to stay with my dad full time for a time. Then aged 77, living on his own and a full blown alcoholic regularly drinking himself into oblivion every night, he needed daily care so as not to be a danger to himself or anyone else.

So I lived with him, driving him around where he needed to go and walking the dog too strong for him while continuing to further break into online journalism as a freelancer. I’d see friends from college as often as I could whether they were elsewhere doing great things with their lives or if they were still back in Williamsburg finishing up their own time there, but time with all of them was relatively limited given what my priorities were. For the first few months, I was fine. Living in Virginia Beach was no picnic because, well, it’s Virginia Beach, but I was doing alright given the circumstances.

And then, I wasn’t. I can’t trace it back to any specific moment. I just wasn’t. I’d often think about how most people I’d known from college that had graduated with me in 2015 were gainfully employed, in grad school or doing something else wonderful with their lives, while I was stuck. Stuck having to take care of my alcoholic father, stuck in the cultural wasteland that is Virginia Beach and stuck in my professional pursuits with few and little upward leaps made.

I could feel myself quickly spiraling down with each passing week. I was angry at my dad for his addiction, angry at myself for trying to do something with my life that’s tough as shit to break into and most of all, seemingly incurably depressed about it all. And I did everything I could to deny that I was. I buried myself in work, in continuing to write creatively whether it was poetry or my first screenplay, for which I enlisted the help of a friend I’ve known since the second grade (now she lives in New York City and writes amazing stuff for Vanity Fair, and she got called out by Tucker Carlson on live television, which is fucking hilarious).

Of course, none of it was working. Not even seeing friends as often as possible was helping, but I couldn’t ever admit that to myself. And every now and then, I felt what it was like to be on the verge of ending my own life. The heavy, oppressive numbness to my own existence that kept seductively whispering in my head, “It’s okay. You don’t have to hurt anymore.” I felt like a walking blank space. But every time I felt the urge to do anything about it, I’d picture the potential black nothingness of death and being dead and scare myself into existing despite my greater impulses (thanks, atheism).

Actually admitting to myself that I wasn’t doing alright, and then admitting it to family was one of the hardest things I think I’ll ever do. And once I did, shockingly, I found myself getting a little better every day as the anger was washed over by clarity. I started seeing a counselor every other week, who would be there to console me when my dad’s time on Earth was done, as were so many others to whom I could extend all of the gratitude this world has ever known, and it still wouldn’t be enough.

Life with my dad gone was going oddly better than before, but it definitely wasn’t that much easier. Since he passed, I’ve had at least three anxiety attacks about my life in connection to him, one of which happening at a weekend Thanksgiving celebration in Fairfax with a bunch of people I knew from the fraternity I was part of, and another that was the impetus for me to quit that shitty job I took and begin writing about movies again (I hadn’t written so much as a single letter for two months after my his death).

And now here I am, writing about movies in a different city for still no pay and looking for a part-time gig to support my endeavors. Life in Richmond has been great by comparison, but I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t admit that what the future holds and the sustainability of this project keeps me up at night sometimes. Some days are fantastic, and on others, it’s difficult not to think that life hasn’t changed that much since I moved, and that I continuing to dig myself into an inescapable hole.

To make a long story short (too late), this song is about that despair, while making cathartic use of the depression that I know still lurks inside me and used to dominate my everyday life. A lot of this was inspired by various Counterparts songs and the masterful eloquence vocalist Brendan Murphy commands over imagery created by language. I also listened to Every Time I Die’s new-ish song “Petal” for influence. Like, a lot. Though where’s the surprise there? I consume that band’s heavy ‘70s rock and southern-style hardcore, sludgy riffs and philosophical lyrics as if it were a daily requirement for bare minimum sustenance.

I was planning on sharing this song around this time anyway, but the recent death of Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington gave me greater impulse to share what I felt once upon a time, potentially give someone else an extra outlet for their own emotions and extend a loving hand to anyone who’s feeling the same way, whether I know you or not. You are not alone. Your demons are not who you are. We are right here with you. We are not going anywhere. And we love the fucking shit out of you. It’s okay to not be okay.

Trace the map and change the name when nothing's new, but it's not the same. The wild's been already tamed.

Mount a stranger's kill on the wall 'cause you ignored the trigger's call. If it doesn't hurt, you didn't fall.

Just take my cut and lock it in a safe I cannot crack.

The fire at sea extinguished by oil. The beacon that's tasked to shine through the soil.

I guess I'll wake up and live for a day I've never seen. I grew a heart to spite my noble legs and build a life on repeat.

A banana peel with both feet in the grave. His heart could still beat, but the eyes looked glazed.

I almost slipped when he was already gone. What excuse have I got?

Blood twixt flesh and bone has got more homes than I. These clouds overhead can't do much if I'm not one with the sky.

But I guess I'll wake up and live for a day I've never seen. I grew a heart to spite my noble legs and build a life on repeat.

I've yet to pay as much as I have lost, and I'll pay much more to know when it all stops. The 'where,' the 'how' are unimportant thoughts. Just tell me 'when' it all will fucking stop.

I've yet to pay as much as I have lost, and I'll pay much more to know when it all stops. The 'where,' the 'how' are unimportant thoughts. Just tell me 'when' it all will fucking stop.

[pretentiouslittleartstudent-blog]

Inside my head

I decided to use stop-motion videography to tell my story as I wanted it to engage my audience and made it more personal by drawing.

Whilst doing this video, I drew inspiration from art techniques such as glitching and the usage of avatars to explore self identity. To me, these two channels unbridles the limits that one can express themselves.

Avatars

Avatars are easy to understand, they are icons or figures that we can choose and customise to represent our online self for games, websites etc. The usage of avatars was inspired by “Second lives: Jeux masqués et autres Je” where the construction and deconstruction of identity is explored. 

These avatars can be created to resemble our true self or they can be a creation of what we wish to look like aesthetically. One can hide their real self behind and avatar and conjure up a completely different personality, have hobbies and beliefs from his or her actual self. I have avatars that I create when I play games like sims and maple story. For social media such as snapchat I use bitmoji to create my own avatar to express my thoughts and feelings with my friends. Avatars are interesting because we have always discussed the idea of the possibility of having an online persona and an offline persona, and in my opinion avatars add an additional later to this. If we create an avatar that resembles our physical appearances but adopt an online persona that is different from our offline persona, are we then using the avatar as a channel to project how and who we want to be? Is there a difference to someone who creates an avatar that looks completely different from their physical appearance and adopts a different offline personality? On a more personal level, it encouraged me to think of why I use these avatars and the rationale about why I create my avatars to look as such. I noticed I tend to like creating avatars that look vastly different from my asian looks. This can be attributed to my perception of beauty, I have always preferred the “white” look. Blonde hair, blue eyes, sharp noses, defined cheekbone. On a deeper level, it made me question my perception of beauty. What is wrong with my oriental features? What is wrong with having a small nose and small eyes? I realised while I was busy trying to look like a certain type of race, it was useless. I realised despite how I look like online as an avatar, it does not matter and should not matter. Most importantly, one should embrace their physical appearance and spend time thinking and working on their personalities and flaws to be a more worldly person.

Glitches

Glitches however, is something beyond one’s control. We can explore what glitches produce but we cannot channel glitches towards a certain direction. This makes glitches an interesting form of artwork, we often conjure up an artwork such as paintings with the intended art piece in mind but in this case, the artist starts with a technique in hand but the end product is left to the beauty of glitches. Jon Satrom, an artist that explores the usage of glitches in his artwork believes that glitches are “ever-evolving, elusive entities that inhibit and disrupt systems within our realities”. I believe this is exactly how we humans are, we may not be who we define ourselves to be. There may be underlying layers of ourselves that we have yet to discover, or desperately push it to the back of our minds as they are cognitively dissonant with the person that we aspire to be. We are creatures of constant flux, ever changing and full of surprise.

Social Media - Instagram

Amalia Ulman created an “instagram masterpiece” as a sociological critique of the internet’s obsession with appearances using the self-portrait methodology. It forced me to think how much of the pictures/captions/status updates that I post are influenced by how others will perceive me. 

Codes

Another art technique that I find particular interesting is the usage of codes to produce art. Before attending this class, codes were merely numbers, letters and symbols to me. They were a language for machines that were simply functional and cold. However, upon reading up on coding, I chanced upon this website - code-poems.com that explored how codes can be more that just a language for computers.  

“Code can speak literature, logic, maths. It contains different layers of abstraction and it links them to the physical world of processors and memory chips. All these resources can contribute in expanding the boundaries of contemporary poetry by using code as a new language. Code to speak about life or death, love or hate. Code meant to be read, not run.”

This inspired me to think about whether feelings could be injected into these codes. In my video, I spoke about wanting to create and appreciate so I decided to create an art piece that appreciates the beauty of codes as well as the language of love. I wanted to create an artpiece that utilised codes but wanted to inject something that was personal to me. I experimented with binary codes and drew inspiration from one of the hottest chick flicks “sex and the city”. In this movie, love letters from great men were quoted and there’s one from Beethoven that struck the hearts of all the girls who have watched this movie. Mine included.

“Good morning, on July 7

Though still in bed, my thoughts go out to you, my Immortal Beloved, now and then joyfully, then sadly, waiting to learn whether or not fate will hear us - I can live only wholly with you or not at all - Yes, I am resolved to wander so long away from you until I can fly to your arms and say that I am really at home with you, and can send my soul enwrapped in you into the land of spirits - Yes, unhappily it must be so - You will be the more contained since you know my fidelity to you. No one else can ever possess my heart - never - never - Oh God, why must one be parted from one whom one so loves. And yet my life in V is now a wretched life - Your love makes me at once the happiest and the unhappiest of men - At my age I need a steady, quiet life - can that be so in our connection? My angel, I have just been told that the mailcoach goes every day - therefore I must close at once so that you may receive the letter at once - Be calm, only by a calm consideration of our existence can we achieve our purpose to live together - Be calm - love me - today - yesterday - what tearful longings for you - you - you - my life - my all - farewell. Oh continue to love me - never misjudge the most faithful heart of your beloved.

ever thine

ever mine

ever ours”

I created an art piece that can be exhibited by converting this love letter into a binary code and made it the background of the image, layering the letter in english on top. I played around with different colours to enable the audience to see the contrast between the two. The video ends with the quote “ever thine, ever mine, ever ours” to leave an impression on the viewer. I remember watching the movie and hearing the narrator read out these lines, and felt my heart constrict. I felt the exact same feeling when I saw the quote in the art piece as well. I loved the notion of codes being injected with romance! It was lovely to think of numbers and symbols having the ability to have warmth and feeling.

Defining myself

I used to see emojis as a way to express my emotions and feelings, however, an artwork-  “Gorando” that was part of Blinding Pleasures at are byte gallery in London caused me to think about the deeper implications of these seemingly harmless emojis. This artwork is based on the 6 Facebook reactions one can have to a status update/shared post etc. By clicking any one of these 6 reactions, the users are not just sharing their thoughts and feelings with friends and family but are placed at the mercy of algorithms whereby our reactions are under surveillance and big data as well as emotional data are sold in a monetary transaction. I began to think more about how we are led to think that we have a choice to choose the emotions that we wish to express but in actual reality, we are just victims of targeted advertising and emotional manipulation. Thus, I realised how the internet and seemingly harmless things like emojis and status updates can in turn control us if we are not careful. Hence, I want to break away from the control of all these big data and algorithms.

I hope you enjoyed watching my video as much as I enjoyed planning it’s creation and execution!

Links:

http://we-make-money-not-art.com/second_lives_jeux_masques_et_a/

http://we-make-money-not-art.com/obfuscates-your-feelings-on-facebook-and-defeat-its-algorithms-in-the-process/

http://code-poems.com/

http://adage.com/article/guest-columnists/future-engagement-big-data-big-emotion/295350/

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/performing-camera

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/meet-artist-cum-instagram-star-amalia-ulman-203861

http://jonsatrom.com/