#also Tracy got a interesting face structure

[thecaffeinebookwarrior]

The Many Faces of the Strong Female Character

The much-requested, positive counterpart to my classic “Female Characters to Avoid in Your Writing” and it’s much-later sequel.  

Here, I will discuss some of my favorite fictional ladies and what makes them work so well;  given my rapturous love of women, there will probably be a sequel!  In the meantime, I talk more about portraying female characters here.

Happy writing, everybody!  <3

1.)  The Warrior

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When most people hear “strong female character,” they picture the most popular definition of the term:  a stony-faced, emotionally shallow, conventionally attractive broad who punches and kicks stuff.  She may occasionally shout things like, “I DON’T NEED NO MAN,” while perhaps punching a small baby. 

I decided to start with my wife Diana, because she is the perfect antithesis of this trope.  She isn’t stony, she’s courageous.  She’s unabashed about showing her doubts, hopes, affections, and optimism.  Her love interest never steals her spotlight, but she feels no need to shun romance to appear “strong.”  She’s beautiful, but not sexualized or objectified.

And while most Strong Female Characters™ are ironically reduced to damsels in distress at some point in their own narratives, Diana consistently takes the lead, totally autonomous over her own story.

You can kick ass AND love babies, people.  Joss Whedon, please take notes.

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Other examples:  Okoye from Black Panther, Furiosa from Mad Max: Fury Road, Rey from Star Wars, and Ser Brienne of Tarth from Game of Thrones.

2.)  The Comedian

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If you haven’t watched Chewing Gum on Netflix, stop whatever you’re doing and watch it right now.  Its relatively simple premise – a twenty-four-year-old from a fundamentalist Christian household struggles to lose her virginity – is a segway into a hilarious, genuine exploration of human sexuality, relationships, and how we forge our identities.

Brilliantly portrayed by the series’ creator, Michaela Coel, Tracy is essentially that one friend who knows exactly what you’ve been thinking and isn’t afraid to say so.  She is never relegated to a single trope or stereotype.  She’s stumbling, clumsily but enthusiastically, through the life experiences that shape us.  Most importantly, she is allowed to be sexually curious, awkward, aggressive, insecure, and – I can’t stress this enough – hilarious.  The dialogue is infinitely quotable, and endlessly relatable. 

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Watching shows like Chewing Gum makes me realize how few female characters – and even fe wer Black female characters – are portrayed as truly human.  Typically, they’re allowed to be sexy, but not sexual.  They’re allowed to be awkward, but only if it’s cute.  They can be insecure, but only if that insecurity can easily be solved by the affirmations of a male love interest.  And they’re rarely allowed to be the main source of a series’ comedy.  

So remember:  let your female characters be human.  Let them be awkward, funny, sexual philosophers.  It’s easier than you think.  

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Other examples:  Abbi and Ilan from Broad City, Leslie from Parks and Rec, Tina from Bob’s Burgers.

3.)  The Drama Queen

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Watching Riverdale is like hurtling along on a structurally unstable rollercoaster.  It’s utterly insane, a lot of fun, and once you’re on, you can’t stop.

But amidst the explosions of batshit crazy plot points, killer cults, and the existential perplexity of finding yourself attracted to emo Jughead, there are some real gems.  One of these is Cheryl Blossom, and pretty much every plot line surrounding her.

Cheryl is introduced as a fairly one-dimensional, catty mean girl, though the Regina George-esque charisma with which she’s portrayed makes her instantly likable.  Initially, we expect her to be a character we’ll love to hate.

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And yet, within the first few episodes, I was impressed by how layered and complex her motivations were.  Much of contempt towards others was misdirected rage from an upbringing of extreme emotional abuse, and grief over her dead brother -- all portrayed without a Snape-style condonation of said behavior.  By the end of season one, my thoughts were generally, “Oh, crap, I don’t think I can claim to be watching this ‘ironically’ anymore,” and “MORE CHERYL.”

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Season two answered my wish, and then some.  Cheryl was saved from an (impressively conscientiously portrayed) attempt at sexual assault by a pack of her female friends, and her attacker got the shit beat out of him in one of the most cathartic moments of modern television.

To the exaltation of my queer heart, she also came out as a lesbian, in a deeply moving story arc that I never would have expected from this show.  Without spoiling too much, she and her new love interest kissing in front of anti-gay propaganda footage was legitimately one of the most powerful moments I have ever witnessed.

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Before the season was over, she viciously threatened her abusive, homophobic mother while covered in blood, shot a serial killer with a bow and arrow, and joined a gang.  If that’s not gay culture, I don’t know what is.

Oh, how I wish this show was just about her.

Other examples:  Alexis from Schitt’s Creek.

4.)  The Lovable Bastard

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Ah, The Good Place.  I have never experienced such a breath of comedic fresh air.  A new philosophical principle each episode, examined and applied in hilarious and thought-provoking ways.  A complete absence of harmful stereotypes.  Incredibly lovable, three-dimensional, and ever-evolving characters. 

I was considering using my queen Tahani for this list, who externally larger-than-life and internally vulnerable after emotional abuse by her parents.  Also, she’s hilarious.  Everyone and everything in The Good Place is hilarious.  And I also thought about talking about Janet, who is the best character in anything ever, but of course:

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Instead, I’ll be talking about bisexual icon Eleanor, who is something very few female characters get to be:  the lovable bastard.

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Eleanor, when we first meet her, is not traditionally good in any sense of the word.  She turned down a high-paying job because she was expected to be nice to people.  She sold placebos to the elderly, and was great at it.  She was drunken, slovenly, hedonistic, and selfish.  And she’s instantly incredibly likable.

Why and how Eleanor is so enjoyable, even at her very worst, merits an essay all its own.  But in a nutshell:

We empathize with her.  We are introduced to “The Good Place” completely through her eyes.  We are in her shoes.  

The stakes are high.  When we discover that her entry into the good place was a mistake, we want her to be okay.

We come to understand her, and how her terrible childhood shaped her destructive behavior.  

She wants to be a better person, and with time, effort, and character development, we watch her become one. 

Not only is this an amazing lesson in how to endear audiences to your character, it is also infinitely refreshing.  The most famous lovable bastards are all men --  Han Solo, Dr. House, Captain Jack Sparrow, the Man With No Name, et cetera -- but women are rarely afforded the same moral complexity.  If a woman in fiction has done bad things, she’s not usually a lovable bastard.  She’s usually a bitch. 

Eleanor isn’t just a great character.  She conveys an important lesson:  women are people.  People with the same capacity for mistakes, growth, redemption, and love as anyone else.

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Other examples: Chloe from Don’t Trust the B*tch in Apartment 23

5.)  The Cinderella

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Yep.  I said it.  Cinderella is a strong female character.

My girl not only survived in an abusive household, she persistently stayed positive.  She worked each day to make the best of an impossible situation, from which she had no means of escape.  That takes an insane amount of courage and tenacity. 

But Caff, I hear you scream, she needed help to escape!!  Well, my imaginary counterargument, so the fuck what?  MOST people need help to escape their abusive situations, and there’s no shame in that.  Accepting help from someone you trust is the best thing you can do in a situation such as that, and implying otherwise is horribly damaging to victims of abuse.  

But she married the prince, you more feebly protest.  Yes!  She did!  She found love and happiness and a great life in a socially influential position!  And that’s an amazing message!

So in the flurry of female warriors, let’s not forget Cinderella, who tells people that their terrible circumstances won’t last forever, to stay hopeful and kind, and that accepting help from a trusted friend can lead to a happy life.  

Cinderella is a bad bitch, and she deserves her happily ever after.

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Other examples:  For some reason, I’m thinking of Sansa from Game of Thrones.  When people try to discredit her as a strong character, they often make similar complaints.  But both, quite fittingly, end up as queens.

[scrapyardboyfriends]

2021 Emmerdale Wishlist

(I was inspired by @softlass27 and wanted to do one of my own)

Some Overall Things

- More community involvement. I know, I know Covid, but hopefully they’ll be able to ease the restrictions before the year is out so it still applies. And aside from that, they need to work within the restrictions to do better. I still thought that clothing exchange in the cafe was a really good attempt to allow different characters to mix.

- In general, they need to really figure out how to work within the covid restrictions better because it has been very noticeable at times and the whole show has felt like it’s been a slower pace, including individual scenes and it’s a problem. 

- More appropriate story lengths. I’m tired of these never ending stories that just meander along. 

- Better story structure. Stories seem to either magic into being or they’re so slow to start you wonder if there is a story. I just want stories to have proper lead ins and build up and actual climaxes that feel worthwhile. And I want to understand the point of a story both as it’s going and for sure once it has finished. I don’t want to have to keep asking the question, “Is it going somewhere or is this just bad writing”.

- Work on relationship stories. Stop putting terribly suited people together. At least try and build relationships up naturally and allow them to have some time before just shoving them together. Stop having other characters talk about how people should be together. I want to see the actual couple together and understand why. If a couple isn’t working, actually break them up. Cheating stories can work but make them happen for an actual reason and not just cause you feel like drama. 

- In general, work on motivations for characters because so many people this year have just done things for little to no real reason. 

Character Focused things

- I too am willing to wait till the 50th Anniversary for Robert’s triumphant return. Enjoy that dad and son time Ryan, your time will come. Hopefully post pandemic restrictions and when there’s a new decent producer who has some robron nostalgia. 

- In the meantime, I would like the show to allow Aaron to become a real character again. While, I’ve very much been fine with his massive break this year because it’s given me time to process him not having a tall blond glued to his side, I would like it if he got a bit more screen time next year. And I would like for that screen time to include interactions with characters that are not Liv and Chaddy. I’d love to see him get a friend, whether that’s Mack or someone else, I just want him to have someone else to talk to. I would also like to see him have an actual story even if he is a supporting character, but make him a consistent one, not support to the support and not just a cameo for an episode or two. I’d love to see him have more to do than a relationship story but if he must, for the the love of god at least put some amount of effort into it. Or just let him go on random bad dates that he gets to talk to his new friend about how no one is right. 

- I want Chaddy to break up. Whether it’s actually a cheating story or they just realize how unsuited they are for each other after all, I don’t care. Let the Christmas wedding curse persist. (In lieu of that, I want them on screen as little as possible together and if they are they better not be having any problems or be overly sappy and if I hear more than one or two “Graaacieees” I’m out)

- As for Liv, either Isobel can get a big break with her music and Liv can take a never ending trip to Dublin or they need to do better. If she stays, I want to see her become an adult. I want to see her make some choices about her future, get a job etc. I’d still like them to explore what a relationship means to her without having it be a plot point in the next abuser’s story. That still means something to me and I’d like to see it on screen for real and not just in the background. 

- For the love of god give Matty a story. Let him date, let him and Amy finally get together but like...do it better this time. Let him move out of Moira’s and stop being a footnote in her stories. Let him get promoted at the HOP or get a new job. Go back to his transition story. Let him interact with his friends more. Just almost anything really. 

- With Charity, we all know Vanessa will be back eventually and they’ll put them back together, so in the meantime, I’d like to them to start figuring out a balance for her. I agree somewhat that the regressive behavior she’s engaging in now feels a little ridiculous but that’s mostly because it’s baseless. They need to find real reasons and motivations for her to have her scheming fun the way they did with Robert and Cain. So first things first, I would get her the hell out of the pub because that was always a bad idea. I want her back in a business that allows her to wheel and deal and scheme without it always having to be random criminal activity. I also NEED them to allow her to say she’s bisexual on screen and to own that and to stop having writers put in those stupid unnecessary biphobic jokes. And they need to allow her to realize that she’s okay on her own and that any growth she had wasn’t only down to Vanessa. 

- For Cain and Moira, I want them to actually stay together this time and not immediately get broken up by something absurd. They can be tested, but only so they can prove that they are really working on their issues. 

- I’d like Laurel and Jai to get through their grief and stay together. 

- I want Jamie to get a fucking back bone and break free of Andrea altogether and break free of Kim too. I’d be cool with him and Mack actually being friends. I’d like him to get a real love interest too. 

- For Mack, I want him to keep being the snarky, fun breath of fresh air he has been but I’d like to ground him a little bit too. I want him to find something real in the village, whether that’s a friend or a love interest. Jamie and Aaron are good friend options for him. Just someone to give him a real solid tie to the village and give him some to talk to/confide in. If they wanted to make him bi, I would not be opposed. I’d also like him to make some progress with Moira in the next year so that doesn’t remain stagnant. 

- For Kim, I want this stupid story with Cain to already be over because it’s based on nothing. I know she’s supposed to get a love interest and I’m already dreading it. I do want her to get a love interest but I want it to feel real with real feelings and not come out of nowhere like I expect it to. I think Kim needs real connections in general. That brief period where she was friends with Rhona was good. They should give her another friend. Just. something to make her feel less like a cartoon villain even if she still is an antagonist. 

- I want someone to run over Luke and Wendy. I want them the hell out of Vic’s life and the hell out of the village. I still can’t fathom why they ever introduced them or had them stick around. 

- I need Harriet and Will to go away. They’re useless and they’ve overstayed their welcome at this point. I want to free Dawn because I feel like she could be a decent character if she wasn’t shackled to them. If the Malone story FINALLY ends with Harriet and Will both leaving, that would be a miracle. 

- I want Dan and Amelia to move to Croydon so someone else can have their house. They’re just not relevant characters anymore. 

- I want the new vicar and his son to be good characters and for more of their family to come in, hopefully female family members so there can be more women of color on the show too. But also I just want them to all be good characters with good connections and good stories. 

- If Marlon and Rhona are going to get together again, I want them to actually work out as a couple because I’ve quite enjoyed their friendship over the years and I think they could work as a couple again if they just maintain what they’ve had and don’t ruin it. 

- I’d like this whole stupid Al story to blow up in his face quick so we can move the hell on. If Al’s going to stick around, I need him to do something interesting. Either ground him more and give him better relationships or have him go full villain. 

- For Gabby, I want to see her continue to grow and get more adult stories, once that don’t include her meddling in people’s relationships. I’d like to see them explore a relationship story with her too. If she wants to realize she’s bi or something too and that she and Liv are meant to be, I’d be fine with that too. 

- More Jimmy and Nicola but don’t use that screen time to destroy them. 

- For Meena, I’d like them to tone her down just a bit and resolve the weird petty stuff between her and Manpreet. I’m cool with them exploring her and David but I don’t want it to feel as rushed or haphazard. 

- For Amy, I kind of want Tracy to just blow the whole Frank thing just so she can deal with the consequences and move on. Or just have her tell Matty as they’re getting closer and have him be like “eh my mum killed Emma so this is fine” and then it brings them closer. I just want it out there so it’s not hanging over her head anymore. I also just want her on screen more and with Matty and being friends with Vic. 

- For Vic, other than being free of the Posners, I’d just like her to reclaim her life a bit more, maybe see her at the HIDE more, maybe catering more, maybe a better love interest.

- I’d like to see Billy get something decent too that’s not just another lame attempt at brothers at war with Ellis. Let him find a career he likes, make a new friend, finally make peace with Aaron, something. 

- Ellis can move to Dubai. 

- Sam and Lydia just need to keep being their perfect selves. Give them some fun little stories. 

- The Mandy/Paul/Vinny saga needs to END now. There’s just no reason Vinny should be keeping all of this quiet. It’s dumb. Paul needs to go. Mandy needs to steal Paddy away from Chas or something. Vinny needs to hang out with Sam and Lydia and Samson again and maybe find a better career than whatever scrap jobs Aaron can throw his way. 

- Belle needs to go back to maybe being a vet and maybe date someone that’s not an affair?! 

- Leyla and Liam need to just stay together or break up for good. 

- Rishi needs to stop being treated like a child.

- Tracy needs to just have this baby so we don’t have to hear about how she’s pregnant anymore (though I have enjoyed the reprieve lately) Are we sure Nate can’t go to prison after all? 

[wrestlingwithhistory]

Why do I like Pro Wrestling?

Even though I’ve put a few posts up on the page already I wanted to introduce myself a little and break down why I’m doing this and give a bit of history about me and why I like pro wrestling.

My name is Kyle, I’m 33 from South Wales, I am married with 2 children. I first started watching wrestling when I was about 7 which I will go into as we go through the post. I started this blog for 2 reasons.

1.     I love stories about pro-wrestling and wrestling itself.

2.     I am starting a creative writing course and want to keep on top of writing so that I am comfortable with writing as I haven’t done it since I was in school.

Now, there are a million stories from Pro Wrestling that you’ve heard from the Benoit Murders to The Montreal Screwjob to The Plane Ride from Hell, but I have an interest in writing about the stories that people are maybe not as aware of that still involve some of the biggest names in Wrestling history.

Nowadays, we can be thankful as wrestling fans that we have a multitude of ways that we could watch wrestling thanks to the rise of streaming sites, Youtube and online stores which you can buy DVD’s or digital copies of your favourite events. Being a child of the 90’s, you would stumble across wrestling almost out of nowhere. I remember being in my grandparents’ house maybe aged 5 or 6. I never had satellite or cable TV growing up, only terrestrial, and coming in one morning and seeing Hulk Hogan on the TV in my grandparents’ house really caught my attention. I couldn’t tell you what show it was or who else was on it, but I remember as I watched Hogan, waving his arms to the crowd and cupping his ears to the Hulkamaniacs as he did throughout his career, that I held a curiosity toward wrestling and did ever since.

I can then remember a few years later one of my best friends growing up had a video at home which on the cover, a man would be fighting himself! Undertaker vs Undertaker. Back then, it was the most amazing thing possible, the mystery of how a wrestler could square off against himself in the ring was unimaginable for a then 7–8-year-old. Of course, that event being Summerslam 94 would not be the great event you look back on, but you appreciate the spectacle of it. I do look back fondly on that VHS and as I watch the event back, the standout match-up is clearly the Owen Hart vs Bret Hart Steel cage match, but it’s not the type of thing you value as a child.

You value spectacle. You value entertainment. At least I did anyway. You treat it the same way you treat a cartoon or movie, you suspend your disbelief for a few moments and take in the pageantry of it all. Some people class Wrestling as 3rd hand entertainment, and I have had many occasions where people have made jokes of the fact I watch wrestling, to the point where I would not even mention it if asked.

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to not care and be happy with the fact I like it so much. It’s not a guilty pleasure, It’s just a pleasure. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve also embraced less of the spectacle side of it I once did and look at the athletic feats that take place in the ring, focusing on the technique that these men have to make it look as dangerous as possible, all the while keeping their opponent safe. I do still appreciate the entertainment value, but I definitely look at things like the work rate of the competitors and what they are capable of.

During my teens, we used to travel to video store not too far away from us in a town called Bargoed. Global Video was one of the first places to stock ECW VHS cassettes. My friends Daniel, Josh and I would go there, pick out a few VHS and go back to Josh’s room to watch them. One of the first ones I can remember watching was Living Dangerously 1999. For its time, the pacing and the layout of the matches were a perfect fit for that show. I remember thoroughly enjoying Tajiri vs Super Crazy, Sid and Spike Dudley vs The Dudley Boyz and also New Jack vs Mustafa which was enough violence for a teenage to endure at that point.

The one match from that event which today I place in my top 10 matches ever is Rob Van Dam vs Jerry Lynn for the TV Title. Watching the opening exchange between the two men figure each other out, reversals of pins, hammerlocks and wristlocks was fantastic and when they separated and looked at each other, it was rapturous. The crowd ate it up. You could tell something special was taking place. As the match continued, I saw things that I never would have seen on WWF during that time realistically speaking. There was a reason the E stood for Extreme in ECW. They always took things to the next level, and while the TV Title was far from being the most brutal match on the card (in part due to New Jack!) it was creative in the way it structured the use of weapons, tablet spots and fighting outside the ring. When the bell rings at the end for a timer limit draw, as a first-time viewer you feel almost cheated, not by the quality of the match but by the fact it could have gone on for another 30 mins. When Jerry Lynn requests 5 more minutes and is granted it, you think you are in for a Jerry Lynn victory but RVD pulls it out of the bag at the end hitting the 5-star Frog Splash. And great ending to a great match.

Throughout this time the Attitude era was in full affect. WWF had a huge roster of stars that any company would have been proud to have, Stone-Cold Steve Austin, The Rock, Triple H, Chris Jericho, Kurt Angle. It was a pleasure to watch some of these events. My friend Michael would record Raw and later Smackdown and let us borrow the tapes so we could get our fix. In January 2000, Channel 4 had gotten a deal to show a few WWF Pay-per-views for free starting with the Royal Rumble. I stayed at Daniel’s house and we watched it live on a small TV. We were extra excited that Taz showed up on the event to face Kurt Angle with an extra ‘Z’ in his name, especially after find ECW a few months previous. Add to that the shock factor of Mae Young’s striptease, the Rumble result, the street fight between Cactus Jack and Triple H, the tables match between the Dudleys and Hardys, it was a phenomenal show.

With the events now being on Channel 4, I would look eagerly on internet forums during school hours trying to find out which ones were next. I remember staying up and watching Backlash 2000 and Fully Loaded of that year, also recording them to go back and watch and study the matches. I would cover the back of the VHS case with white stickers and write the match card on the back in order, so I knew where to find my favourites. They also stared showing Sunday Night Heat as well, which I later years would also have an RVD vs Jerry Lynn match up but not at the same quality as the ECW Event the years previous. These events on Channel 4 ended with the Invasion PPV in 2001 after WWE bought WCW and ECW acquiring many, but not all of their top stars.

Tying this in with Video games like WWF Attitude, Smackdown, WCW/NWO Revenge, WCW Mayhem it helped nurture my love for it even more especially WWE Smackdown 2: Know Your Role because you can create your own shows, wrestlers and storylines. We would have nights playing the game having Royal Rumbles and tournaments, finding how to create wrestlers from online forums like CAWs.ws.

My friend Daniel got the internet at home and we would spend hours searching Kazaa for wrestling videos we couldn’t find on VHS, in-between searching for Create-a-Wrestler guides for Smackdown games. They would usually be the Music Video highlight reels of matches we would want to see. Being early 2000’s it was usually set to Creed, Godsmack or Limp Bizkit but it would be things like Sabu vs RVD in a stretcher match, seeing Goldberg jackhammer The Giant/Big Show, and whatever we could find of these old matches you would read about in Power Slam magazine like the Exploding Barb Wire matches involving Mick Foley, Terry Funk and Onita.

A few years later, with the introduction of freeview satellite there was now more channels in homes than before and one of those was The Wrestling Channel. I turned it to this station thinking it would be WWE but was amazed to see companies more similar to ECW. US Promotions Ring of Honor, Combat Zone Wrestling, TNA/NWA and a few smaller based promotions were present as well as a mix of local British talent. It was on this channel that I first saw a match that involved light tubes, obviously CZW. Although not my favourite style, death matches certainly have a car crash factor to them. You know something gruesome is going to happen, but you can’t look away. But on the opposite of that, with ROH you got to see unbelievable work rate wrestling with the likes of CM Punk, Samoa Joe, Bryan Danielson and Low Ki and with TNA similar talents but with more professional looking, AJ Styles, Teddy Hart and Jeff Jarrett being stars that shone there.

Getting to see high flying stars like Amazing Red, Jack Evans, Teddy Hart, AJ Styles was enthralling. It was a side of pro wrestling you never saw on the more methodical WWE and I would watch whenever possible but still getting my WWE fix via VHS recordings Michael would lend us, especially as some of our favourites from ECW and WCW were now competing there.

From around 2006, I began to wane off watching Wrestling as often. I was playing in a band and focusing on that was well as starting a relationship with my now wife. My band mates Lloyd and Ryan were into Wrestling, so I used to and still do talk to them about it now and then. We used to go to local wrestling shows in Merthyr Tydfil for Celtic Wrestling. Back then, they were just Joe Nobodies wrestling in a bar, but as I look back over many of the people on that show, they have foundations on Wrestling all over the world.

A list of some of the names I got to see in Merthyr Tydfil; Sheamus – Now WWE, Steve Corino – ECW Legend, Zack Sabre Jr – Current New Japan star, Tracy Smothers – Wrestling Journeyman passed away in 2020. I remember seeing Tracy Smothers and I was a fan from ECW when he was with FBI and he was great and a nice guy after the show too. The fact that someone who was wrestled for WWE, ECW and WCW was in Merthyr wrestling, to me was mind-blowing!

A few months later I found out they were doing Wrestling training at The Studio Bar in Merthyr in around 2008 (could be way off), so I went along. I didn’t tell anyone, I got dressed in football gear and told my girlfriend Sara I was off to play football. Instead, I went into this bar and rolled around on some mats for beginner lessons on a Wednesday learning basic holds and how to bump. I really enjoyed it and it was better than bumping on the grass like I used to do as a kid in my local park. I went twice in all, as much as I wanted to go back and keep going, I was thinking that playing music would be easier to justify to someone than saying you were a wrestler so that was that.

I always kept an eye on wrestling but not as intently as I did before, maybe it was my way of disconnecting from wanting to do it as much as I did. I would watch the odd Raw or Smackdown and just buy the Big 4 Pay-per-Views and this went on for close on 8 years, just dipping in and out casually but still knowing who was in the business and doing things else were. We still had TNA in the UK so getting to see that was great, especially with the talent they had there for a while.

It wasn’t until 2016 I started to get back into wrestling as much as I do now. AJ Styles had finally joined WWE after seeming he would never appear there and that interested me because AJ is probably one of my favourites of all time. Twitter was blowing up because of a match between Will Ospreay and Ricochet in the Best of Super Juniors during that year. Seeing mostly positive comments and the odd one or two negative comments from old school wrestlers. So, I clicked on a then Youtube video of the match and it was such a great match. I felt the buzz straight away and immediately started to get the itch back for watching wrestling again.

I had no experience of much Japanese wrestling, but I always enjoyed reading in magazines about people like Jyushin Thuder Liger and The Great Muta and seeing their matches on WCW years ago, as well as people like Taka Michinoku and Tajiri but the Ospreay-Ricochet match convinced me to sign up to NJPW World. That summer I followed the G1 closely. Bullet Club madness was in full effect, seeing the iconic t-shirts and the way they were in the ring were similar to NWO, almost too much to a fault. I didn’t really know any of the performers in the tournament but after watching matches, would go back through the New Japan archives and watch the matches of Okada, Tanahashi, Naito, Shibata and the others, getting to know their styles and gimmicks.

One that immediately jumped out to me was Kenny Omega. He was one of 4 non-Japanese wrestlers (Gaijin) in the whole tournament. I learned that he had turned on AJ Styles and took over as leader of Bullet Club. I went back and watched AJ’s final matches against Nakamura at Wrestle Kingdom 10, and then the tag match the following night between AJ and Kenny vs Nakamura and Yoshi-Hashi. I followed Kenny closely over the G1 and into the finals against Hirooki Goto which was an absolutely brilliant match. Omega ended up winning, going onto Wrestle Kingdom 11 to face Okada for the IWGP Heavyweight Championship. I checked my work diary to see if I had work that day, and I was off! Due to the time differences, I was able to catch some of the pre-show in the morning, drop my oldest daughter off to school and come back in time for the Naito-Tanahashi and Omega-Okada matches.

I got back and watched the Naito-Tanahashi match, a really fantastic match to which I remember saying to myself ‘the main event is going to need to be special to top that’. Cue watching my personal favourite match of all time. The pacing and the psychology of the match were so well done, Omega targeting Okada’s back ready for the One-Winged Angel but never getting to hit it through the match. The springboard moonsault to the outside over the guard rails, the Tope Con Hilo over the top which still holds one of the iconic images of the match as a whole, Okada’s resilience as a champion, back dropping Omega over the top rope to the outside through a table. It was and is incredible, debatably one of the greatest matches of all time. Not just in my opinion but for many others as well. And so, I was back in. From that point onwards, I was an ardent fan once again. I would use the archives of WWE Network, NJPW World, Youtube, Highspots Wrestling Network to feed my addiction, following twitter pages which is just GIF after GIF of just the craziest moves.

I would try and watch as many of the live shows in Japan as possible to watch Omega perform and throughout 2017, even though it probably could have been savoured a bit more, we got to see 2 more amazing Omega-Okada matches at both Dominion and G1 and also a lead to Omega-Jericho for WK12. Both my current favourite and my all-time favourite meeting for the first time for a great match. From a Kenny standard it was not as good as some of his previous but for Jericho it was probably one of his best even compared against some of his classics against the likes of Shawn Michaels and Chris Benoit.

In the Summer of 2018, I watched the Dominion show where again Kenny Omega went up against Kazuchika Okada for the IWGP Heavyweight championship. It was a 2 out of 3 falls match with no time limit. I couldn’t get the time off work for the event so I managed to smuggle my phone into work and would watch intently while selling mobile phones. It was another amazing match up, but I had to watch it over again after finishing work so that I could experience with sound, but even on silent, you could feel how brilliant the match was and Kenny finally defeated Okada for the title. Even though Kenny won it, I much preferred him fighting from beneath, almost as if achieving the pinnacle of wrestling was never going to happen. Even though he had a good handful of matches as champion, the ensuing AEW venture obviously scrapped any possibility of a long-term reign. Also disappointing to see New Japan miss a trick by letting Ibushi win the G1 and then the title from Kenny at WK13, instead vying for Tanahashi who, for as great a performer as he is, was not in his prime and the story between Ibushi-Omega would have been concluded or at least cliffhung until a later date. That aside, the show killed. It was amazing, but you could see the writing was on the wall in terms of Omega, the Young Bucks, Adam Page leaving to start AEW in 2019.

That kind of takes it up to current day, or at least as close to it as possible. It was possibly a long-winded diatribe of saying ‘Yeah, I like Wrestling’ but I hope it helps people to understand what drives me to write about it, why I enjoy watching this often joked about form of entertainment and why I think people could probably appreciate it more.

My messages are open if anyone wants to ask me any questions about wrestling or share stories about your own experiences, favourite matches or even stories that you would like me to cover, and I will try and find something to contribute to the page if possible.

Please read through the posts, like and share if you enjoy and leave comments if you wish to appreciate, critique or contribute towards the stories if you know anything I may have missed out.

Thanks!

[darkestwolfx]

Grandma Tourismo - Re-Review #44

Wouldn’t we all love to have a Grandma like Sally? Yes everyone, meet Sally. It was, after all, about time someone gave her a name besides ‘Grandma’.

“It’s Sally. Call me Sally.”

For the record, I still adore these dice. They are exactly the type of thing I can imagine fitting in with the Tracy boys lives. I think they belonged to Jeff, or the boys’ Granddad.

And the rescue operation is in full swing!

“Virgil are you fully prepared for today’s mission?”

“Everything’s A-Ok, John.”

“Sure you don’t need backup?”

“Situation under control. Cargo pod is go.”

Yes! Hang on... cargo pod? Yeah, not quite the rescue I originally thought they were setting it up to be.

Those dramatics zooms! It’s only Grandma, remember!

“Let’s do some shopping!”

“This is going to be so much fun.”

I don’t think you could possibly be any more sarcastic, Virgil.

And let the shopping list of Tracy Island be unveiled. P.S. I always thought it was a shame that the paper covered up whatever grand expression Virgil probably made at the sheer length of it.

Suppressant something (Grandma’s hand is in the way)

Toilet Paper

Hairspray

Hawaiian Shirts (this one makes so much sense after ‘The Long Reach’ too, but really, where were the Pink Flamingos? Still raging)

Plant food

Protein Powder

Celery crunch bars (um, last episode’s vow forgotten so speedily Gordon? That’s the last time luck with give up promises ever works for him)

Toothpaste

Piano Strings

Fire Extinguishers

Tanning lotion

Tofu

Multivitamins

Snooker cues

Apple Pie

Bagels

Lemon squeezer

Pillow case

Anti-rust spray

Extra cable

Oh, I know - let’s play a game! Assign someone to every item on the shopping list. I know I have my ideas about what is for whom.

Also, it’s nice to see a really sneaky TOS nod there.

Played in ‘Operation Crash Dive’, ‘Move and You’re Dead’, ‘Security Hazard’ and ‘Thunderbirds Are Go’. I believe there was also a scene shot for ‘Edge of Impact’, but I can’t remember off the top of my busy head whether it made in into the final cut or not. So, I wonder where they’ve been hiding this on Tracy Island?

“Grab some of that super shine gel for Scotty. I’ve never seen a boy spend so much time combing his hair.”

This. This is one of my absolute favourite lines ever in the history of TAG. Because we all knew this was Scott without it needing to be confirmed - and this is also definitely where Gordon gets his nickname streak from.

“Detour!”

Grandma really is a task shopper. And you know what, I love how Virgil knows exactly what that sole word means.

Remember this scene from ‘Unplugged’? Well, this is that episode, but in series 2 and a lightly new form. The thing which has stayed the same? The team up of Virgil and Grandma. Interesting choice for that pairing, but it makes so much sense for it to be Virgil. He’ll joke, but never at her expense, he defends her cooking, he accompanies her on shopping trips, he listens to her, he even seems to take after her. At this point in time, I always thought this was just a nice way to explore that relationship - by the time we get to ‘The Long Reach’ it’s a whole lot more than that. One thing that storyline didn’t disappoint on was tying up this relationship in a neat little bow.

“We’ve got a situation.”

Of course we do, because this family can’t even get through shopping without interruption - which I’m guessing might be the norm as they speed out of the shop with non-paid for goods (note, us normal humans would all be arrested on the spot for this, so do not attempt it in your local store).

“Hey!”

“Put it on our account!”

Or maybe they - like many others - just didn’t want to argue with Grandma. Wisely so.

“This is my job, Grandma.”

“And worrying about you boys is mine.”

Just a really nice little family moment here. The nuggets like this are part of what made this show for me. They tell more than any massive display could.

What a great landing - in fact, there were many great landings in this episode.

Talk about just going along for the ride, hey? I think there was a lot more than that on display.

“I can’t be two places at once, Thunderbird Five.”

“You don’t have to be, I’ll go.”

“Grandma there’s no way you can steer through a storm.”

“Isn’t that what you have your fancy autopilot for?”

“She’ll be safe in Thunderbird Two.”

“The ship will do the work. I’m just going along for the ride.”

“Okay, I’ll program the autopilot to take you straight there and back. You won’t need to touch anything.”

I love how all that concern was disguised with the same look he gives Gordon to not touch his ship.

“Look after her.”

After all these years, I still can’t work out exactly who this line is for. It’s one of those beautiful lines which has such a lovely level of ambiguity. It’s obviously about Grandma, but it also references his ship and there is just a gorgeous level of family and responsibility balanced out in this episode.

“Grandma...”

“I didn’t touch a thing.”

And lovely little chunks of humour interspersed.

“Can you reprogram the autopilot to do that?”

“No. For that we’d need Virgil to pilot remotely.”

Even the communications were all go in this episode. Honestly, sometimes John is so much more than  go-between.

“Is Grandma ok?”

“She’s fine, but she needs your help with the rescue.”

“The storm’s about to hit here. I need to get these guys out.”

“The storm’s already here. And this young woman isn’t going to make it, unless you help me get this ship to her.

“Sorry guys, this will just take a minute. Someone needs are help.”

“Go for it.”

Well, those guys weren’t really in a position to say no, were they? I mean they need IR’s help too, and I probably would have been tempted to leave them there if they started getting on their high horses. Good people besides the Tracy’s do exist in the world of TAG and this episode had a really nice mix of them. No obnoxious rescuees.

“Let’s just hope I can do this.”

“I heard that. Of course you can do it.”

“Perfect!”

“You did it!”

Of course he did. He’s Virgil Tracy of International Rescue, and that’s his Grandma.

“There’s no getting out in this! We need to stabilise the building.”

“John, we’re gonna’ have to ride it out down here. Can you make sure Grandma stays put?”

“I’ll tell her to put on the coffee pot.”

“You’re with International Rescue?”

Never judge a book by it’s cover.

“You could say that. I’m the Tracy boys Grandma.”

“Kate. And I’m really pleased to see you Grandma Tracy.”

This was so interesting to watch! What you do when you’re stuck in a Thunderbird.

“I’d offer you something to eat, but I’m all out of homemade cookies. As the boy’s would say, lucky for you.”

And one of my favourites;

“John, be a dear.”

I love it when Grandma says that! We saw her do it in ‘Volcano’ too and it was grand.

“Now if we’re lucky all we do is sit here until this blows over.”

I’ll just clear my throat at the idiocy of saying that as Virgil slides expertly across the floor to hold the roof up. And yes, it was possible to do and type this sentence in the time that move took.

“International Rescue, we have a situation.”

“I think our luck may have just run out.”

Predictable...

“The shifting sands are putting extra weight on the structure. It’s not gonna’ hold much longer. John, if we don’t find a way out of here, we’re not gonna’ make it!”

“Yes you are! I’m coming to get you!”

“Grandma, there’s no way. The storm is interfering with my autopilot, and I’ve got my hands full. I can’t remotely fly you back.”

“Don’t need remote control or autopilot. I’ll do it.

“You?”

“Have a little faith, boys.”

Yeah, have some faith. I think there’s a song lyric there;

You gotta have faith

Back to the conversation at hand;

“Who do you think taught your Dad to fly?”

“But that was a single engine plane.”

“And a long, long, long time ago.”

We so often see Grandma sat here at the desk (like above), so in this episode it’s really nice to see her in the driving seat. Age doesn’t have to stop anyone, and this episode was a brilliant piece of script writing to showcase Grandma’s place in IR. She is far more than just anyone’s Grandma and I love how the tension of this episode really built up with the pressures of duty and family.

Oh, the history that is here! I adored that little chunk of life we got a look into.

“You’re following your dream. Good for you.”

Do this, people, it’s one of the best pieces of advise on the planet. I’ve been doing it, and it’s working out pretty well for me so far. I’ve interacted with animals I honestly thought I would never meet, met amazing people and seen the world from many angles. Whatever your dream is, it’s worth doing it.

“Was this your dream?”

“It was my son’s dream, to help people. And now it’s my Grandsons. And I’m happy to support them.”

“Virgil, how are you holding up?”

“Oh, it could be better.”

“Well don’t you worry, I’ll be there any minute. You tell the others.’“

“My Grandma says don’t worry. She’s coming to pick us up.”

“Your Grandma?”

The look on Virgil’s face which just speaks not to underestimate her.

“I can do this. I think.”

“I heard that. Of course you can do it.”

“Of course I can.”

This moment is the sort of writing I live for. It was so nice to see Grandma’s own words thrown back at her. Everyone needs a little positive reinforcement from time to time. I’m sure Virgil can forgive the little scratch on Two’s paintwork.

The hats! It was a really nice touch and look at how happy Grandma looks in hers. Kate doesn’t know what she’s got herself in for in meeting this family. Little taps of those dice for luck.

 “Hurry, Grandma, CO2 levels are critical.”

“We’re not gonna’ make it.”

You were saying?

“I’ve never been more glad to see anyone’s Grandma in my life!”

Too right you haven’t. And Virgil had move moves than Kayo in this episode, even with all his equipment on. I love the fact that Virgil is holding the dice now! Oh, they were so a small thing, but they managed to make them matter so much. Sometimes it’s the little things which matter the most.

“Not so fast! We gotta go back and finish our shopping!”

I think that might be the face of someone who would prefer another rescue than a conclusion to the never ending shopping trip from hell!

Oh well, Virgil’s still in one piece for episode 19 so he must survive and get that shower at some point.

This is another of my favourites though really. The balance of family and danger and normality and duty was just spot on.

[arecomicsevengood]

TOP TEN OLDER MAINSTREAM COMICS I READ THIS YEAR

I kept track of all the comics I read this year, and not all of them were new. I have no idea who this will help or benefit but at least the circumstances of me only listing the completely arbitrary older work I read for the first time this year will deter anyone from arguing with me. However, for the sake of possibly being contentious, let me mention two comics that fall outside the top ten, because they’re bad:

Trencher by Keith Giffen. David King did a comic strip about Keith Giffen’s art style on this book in issue 2 of But Is It... Comic Aht that everybody loved, and made me be like, ok, I’ll check it out. But it’s basically just a retread of Lobo in terms of its tone and approach, but without Simon Bisley. I don’t really know why anyone wouldn’t think Bisley is the better cartoonist. Also, those comics are terrible. Thumbs down.

The Green Lantern by Grant Morrison, Liam Sharp, and Steve Oliff. I bought the first year of these comics for a dollar each off a dude doing a sidewalk sale. Found them sort of incoherent? I haven’t liked a new Grant Morrison comic in ages, with All-Star Superman being really the only outlier since like We3. This is clearly modeled off of European comics like Druillet or something, and would maybe benefit from being printed larger, I really dislike the modeled color too. But also it’s just aggressively fast-paced, with issues ending in ways that feel like cliffhangers but aren’t, and no real characters of interest.

As for the top ten list itself, for those who’ve looked at my Letterboxd page, slots 10-8 are approximately “3 stars,” 7-4 are 3 1/2 stars, slots 3 and 2 are 4 stars, with number one being a 4 1/2 star comic. The comics I’m listing on my “Best Of The Year” list that’ll run at the Comics Journal alongside a bunch of people are all 4 1/2 or 5 star comics. This is INSANELY NERDY and pedantic to note, and I eschew star ratings half the time anyway, because assignations of numeric value to art are absurd except within the specific framework of how strong a recommendation is, and on Letterboxd I feel like I’m speaking to a very small and self-selecting group of people whose tastes I generally know. (And I generally would not recommend joining Letterboxd to people!) But what I mean by all of this is just that there is a whole world of work I value more than this stuff, and I’ll recommend the truly outstanding shit to interested readers in good time.

10. Justice Society Of America by Len Strazewski and Mike Parobeck. Did some quarantine regressing and bought these comics, a few of which were some of the first comics I ever read, but I didn’t read the whole thing regularly as a kid. Parobeck’s a fun cartoonist, this stuff is readable. It’s faintly generic/baseline competent but there’s a cheap and readable quality to this stuff that modern comics lack. Interestingly, the letters column is made up of old people who remember the characters and feel like it’s marketed towards them, and since that wasn’t profitable, when the book was canceled, Parobeck went over to drawing The Batman Adventures, which was actively marketed towards kids. It’s funny that him and Ty Templeton were basically viewed as “normal” mainline DC Comics for a few years there and then became relegated to this specific subset of cartooning language, which everyone likes and thought was good but didn’t fit inside the corporate self-image, which has basically no aesthetic values.

9. The Shadow 18 & 19 by Andy Helfer and Kyle Baker. I’d been grabbing issues of this run of comics for years and am only now finishing it. Kyle Baker’s art is swell but Helfer writes a demanding script, these are slow reads that cause the eye to glaze over a bit.

8. The Jam 3-8 by Bernie Mireault. I made a post where I suggested Mireault’s The Jam might be one of the better Slave Labor comics. Probably not true but what I ended up getting are some colored reprints Tundra did, and some black and white issues published by Dark Horse after that. Mireault’s art style is kinda like Roger Langridge. After these, he did a crossover with Mike Allred’s Madman and then did a series of backups in those comics, it makes sense to group them together, along with Jay Stephens’ Atomic City Tales and Paul Grist’s Jack Staff, or Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, as this stream that runs parallel to Image Comics but is basically better, a little more readable, but still feeling closer to something commercial in intention as opposed to self-expression. Although it also IS self-expression, just the expression of a self that has internalized a lot of tropes and interests in superhero comics. If you have also read a lot of superhero comics, but also a lot of alternative comics, stuff like this basically reads like nothing. It’s comfort food on the same level of mashed potatoes: I love it when it’s well-done but there’s also a passable version that can be made when depressed and uninspired. But drawing like Roger Langridge is definitely not bad!

7. WildC.A.T.S by Alan Moore, Travis Charest, et al. I wrote a post about these comics a few months ago, but let me reiterate the salient points: There’s two collections, the first one is much better than the second, and the first is incredibly dumbed-down in its nineties Image Comics style but also feels like the best version of that possible, when Charest is doing art. Also, these collections are out of print now, a friend of mine pointed out maybe they can’t be reprinted because they involve characters owned by Todd McFarlane but Wildstorm is owned wholly by DC now.

6. Haywire by Michael Fleischer and Vince Giarrano. I made a post about this comic when I first read a few issues right around the time Michael Fleischer died a few years ago, but didn’t read all of it then. This feels way more deliberately structured than most action comics, with its limited cast and lack of ties to any broader universe, but it’s also dumb and sleazy and fast moving, and feels related to what were the popular movies of the day, splitting its influences evenly between erotic thrillers about yuppies and Stallone-starring action movies. The erotic thriller element is mostly just “a villain in bondage gear” which is sort of standard superhero comics bullshit but it’s also a little bit deeper than that. The first three issues, inked by Kyle Baker, look the best.

5. Dick Tracy by John Moore and Kyle Baker. These look even better! A little unclear which John Moore this is? There’s John Francis Moore, who worked with Howard Chaykin and was scripting TV around this time, but there’s another dude who was a cartoonist who did a miniseries for Piranha Press and then moved on to doing work for Disney on Darkwing Duck comics. Anyway, Kyle Baker colors these, they’re energetically cartooned, each issue is like 64 pages, with every page being close to a strip or scene in a movie. I’m impressed by them, and there’s a nice bulk that makes them a nice thing to keep a kid busy. (For the record, my favorite Kyle Baker solo comic is probably You Are Here.)

4. Chronos by John Francis Moore and Paul Guinan. I was moving on from DC comics by the late nineties, but Grant Morrison’s JLA was surely a positive influence on everyone, especially compared to the vibe there in the subsequent two decades. These are well-crafted. There’s a little stretch where it uses the whole “time-traveling protagonist” thing to do a run of issues which stand alone but fall in sequence too and it’s pretty smooth and smart. The art is strong enough to carry it, the sort of cartoony faces with detailed backgrounds it’s widely agreed works perfectly, but that you rarely see in mainstream comics. The coloring is done digitally, but not over-modeled enough to ruin it.

3. Martha Washington by Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons. A few miniseries, all of which sort of get weaker as they go, but all in one book it doesn’t feel like it’s becoming trash as it goes or anything. When Miller dumbed down his storytelling in the nineties it really was because he thought it made for better comics, the tension between his interest in manga and Gibbons’ British-comics classicism feels productive. I do kind of feel like the early computer coloring ruins this a little bit.

2. Xombi by John Rozum and JJ Birch. Got a handful of these on paper, read scans of the rest. This is pretty solid stuff, not really transcendent ever, but feels well-crafted on a month-in, month-out level. I read a handful of other Milestone comics, and a lot of them suffered from being so beholden to deadlines that there are fill-in issues constantly. This is the rare one that had the same creators for the entirety of its run. There was a revival with Frazer Irving art a decade ago but I prefer JJ Birch’s black line art with Noelle Giddings’ watercolors seen here. They’re doing an early Vertigo style “weirdness” but with a fun and goofy sense of humor about itself. I haven’t read Clive Barker but this feels pretty influenced by that as well. (The Deathwish miniseries is of roughly comparable quality. I read scans of the rest of that after I made my little post and, yeah, it does actually feel very personal for a genre work, and the JH Williams art with painted color is great.)

1. Tom Strong by Alan Moore, Chris Sprouse, etc. I got bored reading these as a teen but getting them all for cheap and reading them in a go was a pretty satisfying experience. It’s partly a speed-run through Moore’s coverage of the concept of a comic book multiverse seen in his Supreme run, minus the riffing on Mort Weisinger Superman comics, instead adding in a running theme of rehabilitating antagonists whose goals are different but aren’t necessarily evil. It’s more than just Moore in an optimistic or nostalgic mode, it also feels like he’s explaining his leftist morality to an audience that has internalized conflicts being resolved by violence as the genre standard.

[willow-salix]

Isolation update!

Day 89 of Isolation on Tracy Island and we discovered something today.

John was in desperate need of some peace and quiet after Alan’s cooking disaster, then his avoidance of dishwasher duty yesterday and had talked me into a walk around the island. The island, being a little on the large side, had plenty of places to explore and discover, personally I’d probably seen about twenty percent of it. Granted most of it was jungle and rock but I was assured that it still held a few surprises.

We had a leisurely brunch, managing to actually eat without the others stealing all our food for once and then headed off for our little wander.

We lapped the beach, just enjoying the peace and taking advantage of the chance to actually breathe and relax a little.

John's comm beeped and we settled on the sand so he could check in with EOS. As he worked I indulged in a little sightseeing while sitting still, I'm a woman, I can multitask. I'm also lazy, very very lazy. I wasn't moving if I didn't have to.

My eyes tracked over the greenery, mapping out the rocks that jutted out here and there, looking for nesting birds or anything of interest- what was that?

I nudged John and nodded towards the little domed structure, perched atop a set of spindly legs, set in amongst the trees.

He glanced over to look at what had caught my interest then held up his finger indicating he'd be one minute.

He finished talking to EOS and turned his comm off.

"What the heck is that thing?" I demanded to know.

"That's one of the beach huts Dad had commissioned as part of our cover. It was to make the island look more realistic as a resort that a rich widower and his playboy sons would own."

"Playboy sons, have they met any of you?"

"Hey, we could be playboys if we wanted to. Lots of people find us wildly attractive, I'll have you know."

“They wouldn’t if they saw Gordon giving himself a pedicure on the couch,” I argued.

“That’s very true,” he acknowledged, shuddering briefly like he'd just got an unsavoury mental image.

“So what do you do with these mysterious and previously unheard of beach huts?”

He shrugged. “I’ve no idea, to be honest I had forgotten they even existed. To my knowledge we’ve never used them.”

I clambered to my feet.

“Where are you going?”

“Where are we going,” I corrected him. “I’m curious now, I need to know what they’re like inside and more importantly, can I do anything with it. Imagine making it into a studio for Virg for his birthday or something. He’d love it and he’d get some peace.”

“That’s actually a pretty good idea,” John acknowledged standing in one flowing motion, showing far more effortless grace than I could ever hope to in a million years and brushed sand from his trousers.

We trekked our way through the bush until we stood looking up at the hut. It wasn't that big, maybe the size of a large bedroom, not tiny but definitely not in the realm of ever being used as guest quarters. There was a ladder leading up and John grabbed on, swinging himself up onto the first rung and was halfway up before I could blink.

“Are you coming?” he called down.

“You do know I’ll probably fall to my death, don’t you?”

I heard his sigh clearly as he climbed back down to join me on the ground.

“You go first, I won't let you fall.”

“Promise? You’re not planning on making it look like an accident?”

He snorted. “ I’ve put up with you for almost three months without a break, if I was planning on ridding myself of you now I could think of a number of ways that would be easier.”

“Good point,” I acknowledged. “OK but I warn you, I’m unfit and climbing is not my friend, neither is height.”

“Noted, now get going.”

I climbed up slowly and carefully, actually finding it easier than I expected it to be and soon enough we were hauling ourselves in through the huts doorway.

I don’t know what I expected to see, maybe just an empty space, dusty with sand and cobwebs, maybe some bird poop, but nope.

It was spotlessly clean, what we could see of it anyway as most of the space was taken up by an array of strange bottles, pipes, heating pads and bubbling glass jars.

“What the heck is this?” I asked, utterly stunned by what looked like a crude laboratory hidden away in a hut on the side of the island.

“I think…” John paused and crossed over to one of the jars and sniffed at the escaping steam. “I think someone is brewing beer in here.”

“Beer? Why is someone taking the time to make beer when Scott alone has two crates hidden in One’s hangar?”

“I have no idea, maybe they got bored.”

“Who’s your money on?”

“You mean who is responsible for this?”

I nodded.

“Unfortunately, in my family it could be anyone,” he sighed.

“True this. So, what do we do?”

“We could just ask everyone, tell them we found it.”

“Or we could have a little fun…”

“Something like this would need daily checking...” he agreed, catching on to my train of thought.

***

We may have had to wait for three hours on a hard floor, but it was so worth it to see the look of utter shock on Gordon’s face when his head popped up in the doorway and he saw us sitting there.

Apparently he’s making it for when lockdown is over, to celebrate. I’m pretty sure that it’s gonna kill us all but what a way to go and at least he's being creative with his time.

[tomakeitbeautifultolive]

Tagged by eagle-eyed @tatticstudio55 ♥

Rules:  Ask 11 bloggers 11 questions

1. Would you rather accomplish something you'd be really proud of, or win a huge amount of money?

The former, for sure. Money is nice, but it wouldn't be as fulfilling to just get a chunk of it for no reason, and think of all the estranged family members who would come out of the woodwork that I'd have to ignore?! My social anxiety can't handle that haha.

2. The desert or the North Pole?

Under almost every circumstance, the North Pole! I mean, c'mon!:

But you know what, I'm currently totally into the theory that the Richat Structure, the “Eye of the Sahara” is Atlantis, so I wouldn't mind going there and excavating? With lots of sunscreen.

3. A formality that you find stupid/unnecessary?

I hate "bless you" after sneezing. Hate. It. It's so incredibly dumb and meaningless, but I hate looking like an asshole so I still say that shit. Also, the exchange of "how are you?" between strangers who don't actually care or want an answer.

4. You're stuck on an empty boat for thirty days. Do you bring a book, an animal or a friend?

I mean, probably a book. I wouldn't want to subject an animal to that sort of thing. I'd bring a friend but would I have to pee in front of them?? This is the sort of stuff I have to consider, man.

5. A book you'd turn into a movie if you could?

Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer or Falling Angels by Tracy Chevalier.

6. Dragon or elephant?

Err... Elephant. I've got a big soft spot for pachyderms in general.

7. Would you rather travel as much as you could, or learn as much as possible?

Well... I suppose travel, since you can learn a lot from traveling?

8. There's only three food items you can eat for the rest of your life 😵 what would you pick?

Little Caesar's Crazy Bread, Chicken Phillys from DiBella's, and the Chicken shawarma from Bucharest Grill in Detroit

9. In general, what catches your attention the most, things that are really big, things that are extremely cute, or things that are very beautiful?

Probably cute things - If there's an animal around, where it be a dog out for a walk, a stray cat or squirrel or fox - I immediately turn my head and go "Awww!"

10. Something that bores you, but that most people enjoy?

Parties or bars? *yawn*

11. A place, or a castle in TWOIAF that you'd like to visit?

Oh gods, can I give you eleven of those?! The Nightfort, Winterfell Crypts, the Five Forts of Yi Ti, Isle of Faces, Water Gardens in Dorne, High Heart, Greywater Watch, Hightower, Dragonstone, the Ruins of Valyria, and the top of the Wall! (Gods I'm a nerd)

Aaaand here are my questions for my tagees:

@thescarletgarden1990 @got-addict @puke-silver @farrison-hord @through-my-shadow @mamadragon-daenerys @geekyfeminist-love @adecila @drakhus @mmazzeroo @beautifuloutkasts @rone-of-house-targaryen @callmedewitt and naturally... @revansnow ♥ (I’m tagging a ton of people in shit lately, I know... fill these out only if they interest you!)

1. If you could choose your own name now, what would you pick?

2. What's the one thing you can never say no to?

3. Do you have a signature fragrance?

4. What's the weirdest thing a stranger has ever said to you?

5. Favorite board, party, or sleepover game?

6. What conspiracy theory do you find most plausible?

7. Do you collect anything?

8. What's your biggest irrational fear?

9. If you could watch any historical event in history, which would it be?

10. What's your favorite song to sing along to?

11. Post a gif that makes you feel nostalgic!

[signor-signor]

Chibi stickers, anyone?

Are you into Japanimation/anime and manga style? Looking to decorate your school binders, lunch boxes, or whatever smooth-surfaced itmes you have? Ever wanted stickers with a wide variety of characters from WOY? If your answer is “yes” for all three, you’re in luck. @topoconsombrero’s side blog, @onewoydrawaday, has a decent number of chibi stickers with “save WOY” on them. As you will see, this colorful collection is still growing and not fully complete, but there’s quite a bit of detail added to each sticker illustration.

You’ve got the important characters: ⦁Wander ⦁Sylvia ⦁Lord Hater (the eye structure might be a little off, but oh well) ⦁Commander Peepers ⦁Lord Dominator (who, as we all know, officially debuts in season 2)

And a whole lot of others you might be looking for… Notes: * = sketched but not yet finalized ** = might be taken into consideration ~ = variant of existing character

⦁King Bingleborp ⦁A Doom Dragon** ⦁The Butterfly-Whale-Like baby and its mother** ⦁Emperor Awesome ⦁A Fist Fighter ⦁The Celestial (Star) Being* ⦁Any certain significant characters from The Fugitives** ⦁Any certain significant characters from The Good Deed** (like Fleeblebort** for example - he has his own picture in The Tourist) ⦁The Fortune Teller** ⦁Captain Tim (the arachnomorph, not the deceased captain) ⦁Badlands Dan ⦁Oink** ⦁Papa Doom* ⦁Prince Cashmere ⦁The Troll** ⦁A Lord of Illumination* ⦁Westley the Watchdog ⦁Rongruffle ⦁Killbot 86 (there were also 85 other predecessors - the 85th was obliterated during a fight with Sylvia over a bounty in the past) ⦁The Potted Plant ⦁Beeza ⦁Buster ⦁Brad Starlight ⦁King Dracor (that’s how the credits spell it, apparently) ⦁Princess Demurra (since she’s married to aforementioned king, she could be queen) ⦁The Pit Monster** (from The Birthday Boy) ⦁The Cashier ⦁Olive** (name unknown in The Nice Guy, known in The Fremergency Fronfract) ⦁Harvax and Stok* ⦁Sourdough the Evil Sandwich (Originally a spirit that inhabits anyone or anything every thousands years - previously inhabited Queen Entozoa before winding up in a sandwich. New name revealed in The Axe) ⦁A Beefeater** (they happen to be Entozoa/Sourdough’s underlings) ⦁Kragthar (first shown in suit in S1, then shown normally in S2) ⦁The Black Cube of Darkness (featured look inspired by ending of his own episode in S2) ⦁Trudi Traveler* ⦁Planet Janet** ⦁Maurice** (Janet’s moon) ⦁The King of Flendar ⦁Huckleberry Knucklehead ⦁The Lost and Found Guy (that’s what the credits call him) ⦁The Intergalactic Guru ⦁Destructor ⦁Thrax* (he has the most dialogue of the five tough guys shown in The Buddies) ⦁Electric Bird and Three Chicks** ⦁Little Bits ⦁General Outrage ⦁Brainz ⦁Wild Card ⦁Clipper ⦁The Restaurant Manager** (from Okeydokia, the planet where inhabitants don’t need any help) ⦁Michelle** ⦁A Cluckon** ⦁A Mooplexian** ⦁Ryder (I’m pretty sure his pants were reddish-brown last time I checked; the rest of him is still accurate, though) ⦁The Scuzzbuckets** (four of them together) ⦁Frederick ⦁Dr. Scrivellix** (the dentist in The Fremergency Fronfract) ⦁Gelatinous Bob** (animatronic) ⦁The Curator of MOGA (Museum of Ginormous/Giant Antiquities)** ⦁Dr. Screwball Jones ⦁Helpless Wander*~ ⦁That one alien queen** (from The Axe - the storyboard refers to her as “Alien Queen”) ⦁Stella Starbella (in her off-duty robe) ⦁Mittens ⦁The King of Sherblorg 7 ⦁Mandrake the Malfeasant ⦁General McGuffin (as he appears before getting zapped into a bucket of chicken pieces in The Battle Royale) ⦁Something the So-and-So ⦁Major Threat/Jeff ⦁A Schmartian* ⦁Stacy* (No colors officially shown, but this could be interesting if this gets made. Also, I wonder what the Black Cube’s new girlfriend, Tracy, heard in the credits animatic, looks like.) ⦁The Three Teens* (leader in the middle, weaselly one on the left, obvious one on the right) ⦁Andy the Watchdog (It’s possible his first appearance was in The Gift) ⦁Clancy and Nancy Schmancy** (they’re supposedly the characters who “have been talked about since Season 1”) ⦁That Camera Family** ⦁The Hat Shop Owner** (the Mad Hatter-esque fellow, complete with an Ed Wynn-esque voice) ⦁Cartoon Lord Hater~ ⦁Cartoon Commander Peepers~ ⦁A Cartoon Watchdog~ (fun fact: I once mistook him for Moose) ⦁Cartoon Wander~ ⦁Cartoon Sylvia~ ⦁Bot 13/Beep Boop (as portrayed after crashing on Seacironicus 12) ⦁Bill, Gil, Phil** (if it’s true what @wanderin-over-yonder’s calendars suggest, this arrangement is set as it is no matter where they are) ⦁Dorothy ⦁Gram** ⦁Angela** ⦁Melodie** ⦁Jamie and Hank** ⦁David** ⦁Giant fuzzy Wander plus Hater*~ (Hank’s portrayal of the legend) ⦁Radical Wander*~ (Jamie’s portrayal of the legend) ⦁Anime Wander with Silver 7*~ (David’s portrayal of the legend) ⦁Cursed Wander*~ (Melodie’s portrayal of the legend) ⦁The Butler** (he and the following two names shall have censored faces) ⦁Gluteus Maximus/Todd** ⦁Rear Admiral Keister Von Derrière** (since he’s the one who speaks for the High-Gnee council) ⦁Admiral Admirable** ⦁Orbble Wright and Wilmur Wright** (when viewing them from the front, Orbble’s the taller on the right and Wilmur’s the shorter on the left) ⦁Chad** (Brad’s cousin, in case you haven’t guessed) ⦁The Slug Boss** ⦁Ripov (first appeared briefly in The Waste of Time, sources show first name to be Emily) ⦁The Arachnomorph Queen** ⦁A Phantomime* ⦁Ms. Myrtle the Eternal Turtle* ⦁Neckbeard* ⦁Robomechabotatron* ⦁Dominator Mecha*~ (Dominator’s ship in robot fight mode)

Quite a big list, isn’t it? Maybe as an added bonus, there could be the space ape**.

If you should decide to have them printed as stickers, make sure you keep topoconsombrero’s signatures intact. Whenever new ones come up, you can be sure this post will be updated. Also, there might be a few I left out. A lot of characters have no offical names - sometimes I think of coming up with some, but that’s another post for another time.

To topoconsombrero: Yes, I am the one you call Coach Anon. I’m sure this list will be enough to inspire you and many other artists looking to draw WOY characters in their own special way. Some will do Funko POP! variations, Disney emoji variations, and what have you. If I had my own way to portray the characters, I’d go for the style of one of my favorite animators, Eric Goldberg (who works at Walt Disney Animation Studios).

[aion-rsa]

Charlie Jane Anders on Writing the YA Space Opera Her Teen Self Would Have Loved

https://ift.tt/3uLMjra

Charlie Jane Anders is making her first foray into YA with Victories Greater Than Death, a space fantasy adventure about a teen girl named Tina who happens to be the clone of a legendary alien captain and is faced with saving the universe from an alien organization known as the Compassion (good branding, I know). Luckily, Tina isn’t alone. She’s got her best friend Rachel, a group of brilliant teen humans from around the world, and what’s left of the Royal Fleet, a Starfleet-like space organization on its last leg.

While the Compassion may be Tina’s main nemesis, she also has the internal struggle of living up to the very high expectations set by both the members of the Royal Fleet and herself. Raised by her adopted mother on Earth, Tina has always known the story of her out-of-this-world origin, and that she would one day be called upon to claim the memories of the alien captain she was cloned from and use them to save the universe. When things don’t go according to plan, Tina may have to learn to embrace a different kind of destiny—or die trying. You know, classic teen stuff.

Victories Greater Than Death is set in a vivid and diverse world, and is only the beginning of a planned sci-fi adventure trilogy. If you’re a fan of Star Trek or other space operas, Victories Greater Than Death is both familiar and probably not quite like any other fictional world you have seen or read. I had the chance to talk to Anders about what it was like to imagine this vibrant and hopeful world to life.

Den of Geek: Your first two books, All the Birds in the Sky and The City in the Middle of the Night were adult novels. Why did you decide to write a YA novel with Victories Greater Than Death?

Charlie Jane Anders: I’ve been a big fan of YA for as long as I can remember. A lot of the most interesting stuff happening right now is happening in YA. I really loved The Hunger Games books, and there are so many great YAs coming out right now, like Legendborn by Tracy Deonn and Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger.

One thing that made me feel like now is the time for me to do a YA was just noticing that YA had taken a turn more towards fun, action adventure stories. The one that comes to mind is Warcross by Marie Lu. A lot of people who don’t keep up with YA think that YA is all dystopias all the time, like Hunger Games or like a bunch of other books that came out after Hunger Games, but really for the last at least three or four years, there’s been a ton of YA that’s just about a group of kids having an amazing adventure.

Warcross is just a book about gaming and it’s like e-sports, but it’s in virtual reality and it’s just kids competing in a tournament. That’s the whole book. Somebody is trying to sabotage the tournament, but it’s just really fun and fast-paced and exciting and entertaining. I was like, “You know, I feel like the kind of books that I loved when I was a kid, not just even books for teenagers, but books for adults, the fun, fast-paced adventure stories that I really love are happening in YA right now.”

I’ve always wanted to do my own space opera thing that’s along the lines of Star Trek or Star Wars or Guardians of the Galaxy, and I felt like YA was a place that I could do that and actually have a lot of fun with it. Once I got into it, I started thinking about my teenage self and what my teenage self would have wanted in a book. What my teenage self really wanted was a book about escape and getting away from this planet and going off and living among the stars.

You mentioned in a recent episode of your Our Opinions Are Correct podcast that, when you set out to write Victories Greater Than Death, you laid out a bunch of YA books on the floor of your apartment to study the voice and pacing and other structural elements of YA.

Yeah, I had a pile of YA books and I was like, “OK, how many of these are in third person? How many of them are in first person? How many go back and forth? How many of them are present versus past tense? How long are the chapters? How do they work into the good pacing and tone and stuff?” I found a real range. It’s actually interesting that there’s many different ways to write YA that are successful, but the fast-paced, short chapters and the emotional immediacy and the “something is happening” are [usually important].

On any page you open it to, something interesting is happening. Some of the books had a snarky tone or a self-mocking narrator. Some of them had a narrator who was just really angry or really determined. Just looking at the writing style helped me to think about it. Then I had a moment or I had many moments where I was like, “I want to write in a YA style and tone, but I also really want this book to be the book that if you had liked All the Birds in the Sky and you wanted a young adult book by that author, this is what you would get.”

I wanted it to be recognizably by me and have some of the same feel and the whimsicalness and the whimsy and the lightness that people seem to respond to in All the Birds in the Sky—that kind of humor and that kind of feel. I really tried to find the YA version of that voice, I guess. My voice.

You have this great group of teen humans in the book that become the heart of the story and they’re from all over the planet. How did you go about choosing which teens you wanted to have representing the youth of Earth?

It was really important to me to have kids come from all over the world for a few reasons. First of all, I mean, originally I was like, “Oh, maybe Tina, the main character, maybe she just goes up into space with a group of teens from her own high school.” But I don’t know, every way I tried to write that, it just didn’t seem as interesting. It felt a little bit boring.

I liked the idea of teens coming from all over the planet because then you could have teens who are geniuses in their own right and who’ve been selected through the process that we have in the book. I feel like if you are going to get the best and brightest, they should come from all over. I also feel like when you’re having humans interact with humanoid aliens, one of the dangers is that you start projecting onto these humanoid aliens in a way that makes them representatives of real ethnic groups on earth.

You see that in Star Trek a lot. I think that one way that you can get away from that is by really representing the actual diversity of humans and making the aliens of aliens as alien as you can. Making the aliens really alien and making sure that, instead of having aliens who represent Asians, you have Asian people, you know? I really wanted to do that. The thing is, I didn’t want these characters to be just along for the ride.

I didn’t want them to be just random teenagers who happened to get swept up in Tina’s adventure. I wanted them to have their own reasons for leaving Earth. A lot of the thought that went into it was like, “OK, what’s an interesting, compelling little backstory that gives this person a reason to be like, ‘I’m leaving the planet now’? Like, ‘Oh, this flying pizza tray just fell out of the sky and landed in front of me and I’m being told that I will leave home forever if I get on it.'”

Stuff like Wang Yiwei just had a giant fight with his girlfriend and she broke up with him and he’s just like, “Well, screw it. I’m leaving the planet now.” That made sense to me and then he has other reasons once he’s in space for wanting to be in space. He’s gets really obsessed with a lot of stuff that he’s learning in space. I just wanted the characters to have their own origin stories that were more distinct.

It felt like having them make this choice to get on this circle, even if they don’t know what’s going to happen next, added a little bit more fun to it as well.

Yeah. I also like how there are “Chosen One” elements in this story with Tina and how her character is viewed by so many people and even sometimes by herself, but there’s also, I think a rejection of that. I like that both those things exist in one story.

Yeah. Thanks. That was something I thought a lot about. Obviously, we’re all thinking about “Chosen One” stories right now and how to do them better or how to maybe replace them with something else.

There’s a lot of moments in the book where Tina is like, “I’ll handle this. Everybody else stay back.” Or she’s like, “I’ll go down to the planet. All the other humans should stay on the ship because it’s not safe.” Or, “I’ll protect you.” She’s always like, “I’ll protect you.” To everybody. By the end of the book, hopefully there’s a moment where she realizes and everybody realizes that she’s stronger and that she’s only going to be able to win if she actually trusts her friends and relies on them and doesn’t just treat them as her sidekicks or as people that she’s going to protect or boss around. That she actually needs to let them be part of it.

I think that I’ve been in a lot of conversations about replacing the chosen one with the chosen family where you have instead of one person, who’s the special person who everybody else is their sidekick, everybody is special or everybody gets to be important in their own way. It’s more of an ensemble versus the one special person.

We get that so early with Tina and Rachel’s relationship. Rachel just really advocating for herself and being like, “Well, I want to go too. You don’t get to make this decision for me.” Their friendship is great. I’m really enjoying that so far.

Yeah. I had a lot of fun with Rachel. I think Rachel is probably my favorite character in this book. She’s one of the main characters in the second book. We get her point of view. Rachel was a lot of fun. Again, there are certain tropes that it’s so easy to fall into and in some cases, I had to really stop and think about how to not fall into them. For example, in the case of Rachel, so there was a version of the book where she gets on the ship with Tina. She comes up to the ship with Tina and she’s immediately like, “I want to go home. When can I go home? Let me go home. I’m scared. Let me go home.”

I don’t know, it turned her into a wet blanket for one thing, but also, it wasn’t as interesting and it didn’t feel real to me. When I thought about Rachel and who she is and how she wants to be and experience all this stuff, and so she’s passionate about developing her art, and what could be cooler than going into space and seeing all the cool stuff in space so she can draw it and so that she can be the first human being to draw something in space?

I was like, “Of course you would want that.” I thought it added a really good complexity to her character that she’s somebody who when there’s a bully, a kid her own age calling her names or maybe harassing her in some way, she runs and hides. But when there’s an alien monster trying to kill her, she stands her ground because it’s a different situation. People aren’t as simple as just they always run and hide or they always … People are different in different situations.

Sometimes people can handle psychological attacks differently than they would handle physical danger. I wanted to have that complexity in there.

Yeah. You mentioned the second book, this is going to be a trilogy. Was it always a trilogy?

It always was going to be a trilogy. I think part of it was just that I wanted to create a really big universe that I could explore over a few books. I spent honestly so much time coming up with very complicated backstory for the Royal Fleet and for all the different aliens in the book. There’s so much stuff that I came up with that’s not on the page at all, but it’s just in my notes. I created a Wiki for all of the world building and all the creatures and all the stuff.

I really wanted to be able to do a big story with a big mystery. There was just a lot of stuff that I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get to in the first book. For example, the second book, which I just handed in a new draft of, the second book basically answers all the questions that are raised in the first book. We get to see all the stuff that was hinted at in the first book. It’s a lot of learning more about the world and understanding this mysterious thing that we find out about at the end of the first book.

Then basically everything is answered in the second book. Then there are new questions that are raised at the end, which I would say by the middle of the third book, most of those questions are going to be answered. There’s a lot to unspool there.

Yeah. You can tell how much world building you did. Actually, one of my questions was, was it hard to hold back those details? Because I feel like every time you introduce an alien, I can feel how much you know about them.

Yay. I’m so glad. I’m glad that that worked. Yeah. I mean, everything has to be about the characters. Everything has to be about moving the story forward and all the little details are just there to ground you in the world and keep you in the action.

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Books

Read an Exclusive Excerpt From Charlie Jane Anders’ YA Debut

By Kayti Burt

Books

Charlie Jane Anders’ Victories Greater Than Death Audiobook Gets Adventure Time Narrator

By Kayti Burt

Are these alien ideas that you’ve had for a long time or are they ideas that you were brainstorming as you were writing this first book in this world?

I was brainstorming as I was writing. I feel like I just spent a lot of time trying to come up with aliens that I hadn’t seen before, or that felt like their own thing, that felt like they were a different idea. When I submitted the book to my agent and then eventually to Tor, I had a giant document with everything there is to know about a bunch of alien species plus the history of the galaxy and just a ton of other stuff, because I wanted the publisher to know and I wanted my agent to know there’s actual stuff here. I didn’t just come up with a bunch of random names and just throw them in there.

I’m having a lot of fun in the third book, because there’s this species called the Aribentors. They’re the people who look like skeletons kind of, and we learn a lot about them in the first book. Then we learn a little bit more in the second book, but in the third book, I’ve got a thing where the group of heroes now includes two Aribentors who hate each other.

They’re members of the same species. They belong to the same civilization, but they just each think the other is just full of shit. It’s actually really fun to have the two of them just be like, “No. You’re the one who doesn’t understand.” Because when you only meet one member of a particular species or a group, they can tell you whatever about how things work in their culture and you’re just like, “Oh, OK. That thing.”

Once you got two of them together and they can argue with each other and we can see that, “Oh yeah. Just like everybody else, different people have different viewpoints.”

It was actually really cool to read this book right after I read the ARC for First, Become Ashes because both books have characters introducing themselves along with their pronouns. When did that become a part of this?

I’m trying to remember how that came about. I think it was that I was just thinking about this universal translator that they have, the EverySpeak, how a universal translator would work. It would have to use telepathy or limited telepathy because otherwise, there’re so many languages. You think about just how many languages there are on Earth and then you’re like, “OK, now there’s like a million other worlds and they each have the same number of languages per world.”

There’s no way that you would just have a device that’s just like, “Oh, we have a database of every language in the universe and we’re just going to translate automatically.” It would have to be telepathic. So I thought, “Well, if it could do that, maybe it could prevent other kinds of misunderstandings.” One of the main misunderstandings is if you get someone’s pronoun wrong or if you misgender somebody. It just made sense that the technology would be able to do that.

I very carefully in the first book say that not everybody hears the pronoun spoken out loud. I think in the second book we get other points of view and some of the characters are not hearing the pronoun spoken out loud. It’s just that they are aware of a person’s pronoun when they meet someone. I’ll just be like, “I met up with so-and-so.” Then in parentheses I’d have their pronouns at the start.

It’s just like the translator’s letting you know their pronouns, but I didn’t think it should be the same for everybody necessarily, but I thought it was just really important. There’s a certain amount of wish fulfillment and utopianism in stories like Star Trek and like Victories Greater Than Death. I feel like one of the things that is a piece of wish fulfillment for me is just living in a world where nobody ever gets your pronoun wrong.

I loved that moment in Star Trek: Discovery where Adira tells everybody on the ship that they’re now using they/them pronouns and nobody bats an eye. Everybody’s like, “OK” That’s the whole conversation. There doesn’t have to be a giant discussion about it.

In Victories Greater That Death, characters have different greetings for different situations that reminded me of the Vulcan “Live long and prosper/Peace and long life.” Do you have a favorite of the ones you came up with?

Yeah, I really like “Clueless enemies and forgiving friends.” I think that’s still in there. I mean, I wanted the Royal Fleet to just have a lot of elements that were fun and colorful. Instead of it just being a grim “we’re all just saluting and saying jargon to each other,” it’s funny. I watched this show, The Last Ship, which has a lot of problems, but it was made I think with the cooperation of the U.S. Navy and it had extremely accurate and very well-done naval battles, which actually really helped me thinking about space battles, even though obviously a little bit different.

Part of what The Last Ship really shows is the level of the rituals and all the little observances and rituals and somewhat whimsical stuff that people do in the military. Just the thing where they don’t say, “What’s your location?” They say, “What’s your whiskey?” I think I’m getting that right. I thought, “They should have their own little rituals and their own little observances.” It should be something that’s fun that people can be like, “Oh, I’d want to be part of that, because that seems like a fun thing.” I’ve tried very hard in general to avoid the grim, “we’re just all gritting our teeth” thing all the time.

Star Trek was obviously a big touchstone for this book and world. What elements of Trek did you want to emulate or explore and which elements did you maybe want to push back against?

I definitely grew up loving Star Trek and definitely Star Trek is still super important to me, especially now. I feel like Discovery has really rekindled my love of Star Trek and I’m loving Lower Decks. [With Victories], mostly what I wanted to do was write something that nobody would be like, “Oh, you just completely just copied Star Trek.” I didn’t want it to be like oh, instead of Vulcans, there’s like Vercans or whatever. You know?

I was trying really hard to not just do the Star Trek thing up the wazoo. I think one thing that I wanted to do differently is that in Star Trek it always seems like humans are in charge of everything. The Federation is basically humans and then other groups get to be a part of it, but the humans are always the one calling the shots. I thought it was way more interesting if humans are just there—like, we have our human kids, but everybody else is an alien and aliens have been doing this thing for a long time and they’re in charge. They have their own knowledge and they have their own establishment. That was the thing that I thought was more fun or was fun to do differently.

I think to some extent when I watched Star Trek, especially the original Star Trek, but really all Star Trek, to some extent the Federation and Starfleet feel like they’re representing America. I feel like, to some extent, the show is about America and American power and influence in the world. So you have this thing of the Prime Directive. The original Star Trek has all these stories where it’s explicitly about basically proxy wars fought, except instead of fighting proxy wars in Latin American countries, as you know, we were with the Soviets, we’re fighting them on a planet with the Mugato and everything, and against the Klingons. The original Star Trek very much commented on the Cold War with the United States represented by the Federation and Starfleet. I inevitably had to think about the Royal Fleet and what it stands for.

To some extent it does, in my mind, represent America a little bit or represent the Western powers. You see some hints in the first book. I’m not going to spoil it too much, but you see some hits in the first book that the Royal Fleet has some problems and has some shortcomings. We learn a lot more about that in the second book. Part of what I love about Star Trek is that it’s so idealistic and that Starfleet is usually good and just and usually does the right thing.

But sometimes Star Trek does delve into how the Federation sometimes does the expedient thing rather than the right thing, or sometimes it makes mistakes. Picard really goes into that with the Federation basically just abandoning the Romulans and retreating into isolationism a little bit after this disaster that happens. Anyway, so basically I wanted to interrogate that a little bit more and if this space fleet, in my case, the Royal Fleet, is representative of the United States, is standing in for the United States, what do we think about that? Is it necessarily all good?

Before you go, I like to ask the people I interview what they are a fan of currently…

I’m really loving Batwoman. I like the new season a lot. I finally just finished reading The Folk of the Air trilogy by Holly Black, who I’m going to be doing an event within a few days. That was amazing. It was so great. I love her writing so much. I love A Song Below Water by Bethany C. Morrow and I love The Stars and the Blackness Between Them by Junauda Petrus. Those are a couple of young adult books I read recently that I was just like, “Wow. These are so amazing.”

It was so nice to talk to you.

Good to talk to you too.

Victories Greater Than Death hit bookshelves tomorrow, April 13th, and is available to pre-order now.

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The post Charlie Jane Anders on Writing the YA Space Opera Her Teen Self Would Have Loved appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/2Qdxpep

[russianbarbiedoll]

Trixya One-Shots - Part One: We met at the Club

(Those One-Shots are from my Wattpad https://my.w.tt/UiNb/8L7RUEsNmI ) Trixie PoV

I always hated clubs. Drunk girls, horny boys, the smell of alcohol and drugs. It was too much for a country boy like me.

So when Pearl, my roommate and best friend, took me out of my beautiful and comfortable bed, forced me to dress up and put on makeup and pushed me out of my home I just wanted to kill her.

I work almost every weekend at a club and going to one on my free day surely wasn't in my schedule. She insisted on going in drag, but it would took too long and she wanted to leave in less than an hour.

"Trixie please get in the car"

Pearl screamed, while putting on some pair of white high heels and jumping around the room.

"Okay bitch, but you own me one!"

We got to the car and we drove to the club, Pearl talking no sense the whole journey as usual.

When we arrived at the club, we passed the queue (drag queens privilege) and we entered the room, already full of people screaming and dancing.

"Come on girl, let's go dancing!"

Pearl pushes me into the crowd and she starts to move her body in a weird kinda robot moves. I started to laugh and to imitate her. If we have to be weird, let's be weird together right?

After a few minutes Pearl was dragged away by a girl, or a drag queen I couldn't tell she was fishy.

So I prefered not to be alone in that sweaty club and I decided to go outside to take a deep breath.

The back of the building was certainly quiter than I expected, with only a few people smoking and two couples making out. I was looking at my phone, while I was resting against the wall, when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

"Sorry babe, do you have a lighter? I forgot mine in the dressing room"

I turned around to see two breathtaking big green eyes. The guy in front of me had a perfectly structured face, with dark blonde hair and a beautiful smile.

It took me a few seconds before answering

"No sorry, I don't smoke"

He took his hand away from my shoulder, still smiling

"It's okay honey, I can forgive you just because you're an attractive guy. What's your name?"

Me? An attractive guy? Girl please!

"Oh well thank you, you are not so bad yourself. My name is Brian"

"I know I'm beautiful and really? My name is also Brian!"

"You can call me Trixie, it's like a nickname"

"I'm gonna call you Tracy"

This guy is weird, but so interesting.

"Okay then Queen of England, your choice my majesty"

I reply, while doing a bow.

Brian starts to laugh uncontrollably, shaking his hands and jumping like a kangaroo.

I love his laugh.

"So what are you doing here Tracy?"

"My friend wanted to go parting and she pushed me here. We go here often because of our job and today is my free day so I wasn't really in the mood"

"And what job do you do?"

Deep breath, let's drop the bomb.

"I'm a drag queen and my drag name is Trixie Mattel"

Moment of silence. Brian smiles. Oh that smile is going to kill me.

"Omg really? I'm a drag queen too! That's why I'm here tonight, I just finished my show. My drag name is Yekaterina Petrovna Zamolodchikova, but you can call me Katya"

"That's amazing! I bet you are fantastic"

"And you think right. Personally I think I'm the best. Hey do you wanna see my show tomorrow? It's at this club at nine"

"Sure thing! It's kinda late now, I should probably go to find my friend. So see you tomorrow Brian"

"For sure! I can't wait!"

He pulls me into a hug and I hug back.

After we broke the hug he smiles one more time before heading to his car, as I watched him entering the parking lot.

After almost fifteen minutes I find Pearl talking with some people but as soon as she sees me she says goodnight to everyone and grabs my hand.

Once we arrive at the car she speaks

"I'm so sorry that I left you Trixie, did you had fun anyway?"

I could tell by her tone that she was worried.

I was about to answer when I put my hand in my pocket to find a lighter with a piece of paper that read:

I had a lighter, I just wanted to start a conversation with the handsome boy that you are. Call me tomorrow morning? ; )

With a phone number.

I smiled like an idiot and I looked at Pearl, who had a pretty confused look on her face, and I answered

"Can we come back tomorrow?"

This is my first Trixya Fanfiction

Hope you liked it♡

[copperbadge]

Hi Sam! I'm curious about your magical time management skills: you have a full-time job, are super active in fandom, answer countless asks, write fanfiction and books, and still have time for jogging and many other stuffs. How do you organize yourself? I feel super overwhelmed due to lack of time and end up not doing what I want do. Do you allot time to do stuff? How does your typical day looks like? And any useful tips for us slackers.

I dunno how helpful it’ll be – I mean, some of it is time management, and some of it is that I have spent a long time working on arranging my life so that I have as much free time to pursue my own interests as possible. This hasn’t consciously meant giving up things like close brickspace friends and romantic relationships but in some ways it has kind of worked out that way. (Not that I couldn’t have those things if I chose to work towards them, in other words, but they don’t come naturally to me and I don’t mind the lack.) 

So, I will give you a rundown of my average day, but before we begin, I will also give you some context! And this will be long so I’ll put it under a readmore. 

I have at present no romantic partner, no children, no pets. This sounds sad, but I’m not complaining; I could work towards those things and choose not to, for a variety of reasons, some good, some not. I would like to have a partner, but honestly at this point in my life it’s as much because it’s cheaper to cohabitate; I am very independent and not, I suspect, built for the kind of daily intimacy that romantic cohabitation requires. 

If I were to get a pet it would probably not be a dog, since when I was dogsitting for R I had real trouble with the concept of properly caring for a creature whose life was so scheduled, who required specific attentions at specific times – I have owned dogs before and love them deeply, but never in an apartment or as a solitary person. I would probably get a cat or an axolotl (axolotls: like being alone, require very specific but easy-to-procure stimulus, look like tiny water dragons, sound like fantasy aliens). 

I have very few close brickspace friends, not by design but just because I’m kind of a private homebody, and my extensive network of online friendships is satisfying in that regard. But online friendships, while not LESS of a time commitment, are a different kind of commitment – you can multitask while hanging out with online friends, you don’t have travel times, if they’re running late you’re not stuck waiting and vice versa. 

I also am not in school, which is much more life-consuming than many jobs. School is a way of life; work can be, but doesn’t have to be. And I am very fortunate (in the literal sense of ���it is luck that brought me here���) to have a job where I spend the vast majority of my time a) on a computer and b) in self-directed, non-public-facing work. For most of my day, every day, I guide my own workflow, I choose what to work on and when. Of course I have deadlines, but within the strictures of those deadlines I am free to triage my time as appropriate, and because I’m on a computer with unrestricted internet access, I can take ten minutes to log onto tumblr, read some things, respond to some things, and then go back to my work. 

So I am starting from an advantageous position: few personal commitments, unstructured time throughout the day, and a job where when I leave for the day, work stays at work. 

So here’s what a normal day is like for me. Bear in mind this is for comparison purposes rather than because I think it’s particularly ideal.

I wake up around 4am; if I haven’t slept well or feel like I need it, I may go back to sleep for about an hour. Normally when I get up I either work out from 4-5 (weights, running) or I sit on the couch with my laptop and check out what’s been going on while I was asleep. We’ll circle back to this, but I go to bed quite early, so at this point I have generally had at least seven hours of sleep. Also, I am a morning person, so I go straight from zero to lucid, which is nice. 

I answer email, check tumblr, check my RSS feeds (podcasts, news, fanfic, a couple of NSFW blogs that I can’t have on my tumblr feed because I read it at work). I look at my calendar so that I know what’s on offer for the day – my calendar doesn’t cover work stuff, but primarily anything I want to or need to do after work. My family has a mutual Google Calendar that we all use to schedule stuff the others should see, like whenever I take a vacation, and my parents also use it as their central calendar, so I can see what they’ll be up to on any given day. I’ve been thinking of switching over to a private Google Calendar, but out of habit for years I’ve used a custom-built spreadsheet, now in Google Sheets, that looks like a calendar: 

That’s July. This kind of layout works well for me because it’s easy to go in and change things, and I get a good “high level” view of the month. As you can see I’m traveling quite a bit; I’m tracking new TV shows, peoples’ birthdays, events I may attend (I will probably not be at everything happening in evenings on the week of the 10th), baseball games I have tickets for, and possible plans for camping. Google Calendar would work as well and would have some significant advantages, I just haven’t got off my ass to switch over. 

Around five, I usually get up and fix breakfast; often I’ll put on something to listen to while I cook and/or eat. If I’ve been working out, all the stuff I did – checking email, tumblr, etc – is pushed forward, and I do a bit less of it. But essentially from 4-6 I’m working out, eating breakfast, and getting a start on the personal-life aspect of my day. In terms of social media, this is the time I’m most likely to like something or save it to drafts to deal with later; I don’t spend brainpower on responding this early in the morning, usually. 

I have some fairly…prescriptive routines for the rest of the day, and that works for me, I like structure. Other people may find this sort of thing doesn’t work for them, and that’s okay. This is, again, for comparison purposes, not to dictate how your life should be. 

At six o’clock my alarm goes off, warning me that I have nine minutes before I need to stop what I’m doing and start getting ready for work. This is by design, so that I have a buffer zone in which to shift my mental attitudes from morning routine to something more focused. I hit snooze on the alarm and then at 6:09 I turn the alarm off and get in the shower. I shower, brush my teeth, and get dressed in clothes I laid out over a rail the night before (I have an electric heated towel rail, one of the best random-ass things my mother ever gave me, and in winter I turn the heat on so I come out of the shower and into warm undies; in summer it’s just a convenient place to hang clothes). I dress, grab my bag, take my keys off the doorknob and put them in a pocket of the bag, and I’m out the door around 6:25. I catch the 6:40 express bus to work. I usually read on my tablet on the bus (currently reading The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier after remembering how much I loved her prose in Girl With A Pearl Earring) and I get to work around 7. 

At work I have routines too: I set down my bag, hang up my jacket, and before I do anything else I get my 32oz mug and go to the kitchen to get ice water to sip on throughout the morning. I come back to my desk, turn on my monitors, and log into my computer. 

I check my work email first, to make sure nothing is on fire from yesterday, since I leave work quite a bit earlier than most of my colleagues. If nothing is urgent I delete anything irrelevant to me, respond to anything that needs immediate response, and move on to a quick glance at email and tumblr, then I open my “daily bookmarks” folder. My daily bookmarks folder is mostly stuff that either I can’t or don’t want to put in my RSS reader: a couple of messageboards, a few real estate sites I’m watching for my dream home to show up, a couple of tumblr tags (I don’t follow tags on tumblr because I don’t like seeing shit recur constantly on my dash), and some activism facebook pages because I despise facebook but it’s the only site some of these organizations use. If it’s Monday, I also open my Monday bookmark folder, which is a combination of sites that rarely update and “event” sites (the cinema I’m a member of so I can see what new movies are coming, the calendar of a local band I like, the events page of various cultural centers). I review these quickly, closing most tabs and setting aside anything I need to look at more indepth like an event I’d like to attend. Usually basically I fuck around on the internet until about 8, unless work has something urgent for me. 

The one scheduled task I have daily at work is news clipping, where I read several news sites and save off articles of interest to our staff, which need to be turned in by mid-morning. Realistically this could take 15 minutes of focused work, but I like to read the news, too, so from eight to eight forty-five or nine, I’m usually reading a very specifically aimed sort of news, saving off articles, and archiving them appropriately. 

After that, the day is, in many ways, mine to do with as I please.

I organize my life by using Google Tasks, which is a little pop-up to-do list in gmail. I have a to-do list for every day, and anything that doesn’t get done one day gets moved to another day, depending on how urgent it is. So at nine or so, I open Google Tasks and start moving each task around based on how urgent it is or how quickly I can do it. Urgent work and fast tasks go at the top; less urgent work, stuff I’m less enthused about, and stuff I can’t do at my desk (buying a card for Father’s Day, picking up groceries after work, etc) goes at the bottom. Some tasks are recurring – every Monday, for example, Radio Free Monday is at the top of the list because it’s time-sensitive. 

You can see RFM there at the top; I have to email some information about a 5K to a friend, but I need to get his email from another friend first; I have some registration and hotel issues to attend to for an upcoming conference; I have to write up some evaluations, and do some reading for a presentation I’m giving. I should stop by my PO Box after work. Other stuff will no doubt be added when I check my work email (documents to be prepared, research requests) but this is where I start the day. You can also see I have stuff with pushed out deadlines – Credit Cards is a monthly reconciliation for my corporate card, which I will do ON the 26th rather than BEFORE it, and quarterly I check my 401K, so I won’t need to do that until August 7th.

“PRESENTATION: Reading” will probably get pushed to another day, because by the time I get down that far on the list, I won’t have a ton of brainpower left to do a lot of reading and analysis. It’s ok, my presentation’s not due until the 30th.

And then I just work through my to-do list. Some days I’m really good at getting it done. Some (rare) days I spend most of my time reading tumblr and fucking around because I’m not having a good focus day. But again: this is a job in which I have the luxury to do that, and I’m very lucky. 

Rather than take a traditional lunch, I usually eat two small meals, at 11am and 2pm. Usually I bring most of my lunch for the week on Monday and just reheat tupperwares as I go, augmenting them with cheese and crackers; sometimes I’ll throw in a protein bar from a stash I keep in a little box on my desk. Most of my lunches are cooked on the weekends, when my time is a lot less structured. You’ve probably seen my COOKING DAY posts; sometimes I just set aside a day to cook and rest.

I’m gonna tackle fandom and social media here because truthfully my job has enough spare time built into it that this is when I do the majority of my fannish activity, at work, in small chunks. And yes I am very active in fandom but occasionally in very limited ways.

I don’t read a ton of fannish blogs. I have a limit on my tumblr of following 99 people, and I choose those people very carefully. Some are friends, but those who aren’t personally known to me are people who post both low-volume and things that are of interest to me. I do not follow people who flood dashes not because I disapprove but because I don’t have time to wade through ten million gifsets of things that I’m not concerned with. I also follow a few artist or writers, but again, only if they’re of relevance to me. I follow Skottie Young because I really like his art and think he’s a cool dude, and most of what he posts is his art. I don’t follow Matt Fraction because while I think he is also a cool dude and I enjoy his writing, his tumblr wasn’t generally speaking about his writing or him, it was aesthetic stuff I didn’t care for and it was A LOT OF IT. 

I don’t read a ton of fanfic. I have a couple of tags fed to my RSS reader and I subscribe to a couple of fics and fic writers, but even then I skim for interesting summaries and tag combinations I don’t find offputting. I don’t read fanfic at work, full stop; when I find one I want to read, I set it aside for a time when I’m at home and feel like reading fanfic.

Throughout the day I will check in on tumblr, in a very systematic manner: I read my dash, only the posts, and like or queue anything I want to reblog or examine later. I read my inbox and try to respond, but some asks don’t get answers for a really long time, because they require more focus or time or whatnot. I read my Activity page and open any reblogs with commentary; I set comments aside to be responded to en mass. I check my likes and try to clean out anything I’ve liked that could go in drafts or queue; I check my drafts and try to move just one draft into my queue (I constantly have a draft backlog). This all takes about ten minutes, then I go back to work.

I get AO3 comment notifications throughout the week, but generally I set aside a block of time either on Friday (if work is slow) or on Sunday to “clear out” my comments; every week I go through my comments, re-read each one, and either delete it or respond to it and then delete it. I don’t reply to a vast majority of them simply because I don’t have the time to respond to each one (I have tried, it was very stressful) and also because most of them don’t really a require a response. For everyone’s patience in this, I thank you.

So work is a long series of multitasking, breaks, deadline work, procrastination. It’s about average, I’d say, with anyone else in my situation. If I’m doing something after work, I check to make sure I know how to get there and what’s going on; if I don’t have all the info I need, I prepare a “brief” that has maps and directions and anything else I need, print that out, and toss it in my messenger bag. And then around 3:45 I pack up my bag, make sure I have my phone, and I head out to either (usually) catch the 4pm express bus home, or catch transit of my choice to whatever I’m doing after work. 

If I don’t have something I’m doing after work, I come home, take my keys out of the bag pocket, hang them up on the doorknob once I’m inside, and set my bag down. I’m very specific about my keys here, as I was up above, as a way of demonstrating that I live a very habitual life. Stuff like keys, phone, wallet always has a specific place it goes, and it stays there if I’m not using it. I used to lose shit a lot, and rigidly adhering to “if this is not in your hand, it should be in X pocket” is what saves me. 

I change into more comfortable clothes, usually yoga pants and a t-shirt. I make something for dinner and eat it, I unpack anything that needs to come out of my bag and pack anything that needs to go into it, and then usually these days I fuck around on the ukulele for a while. I don’t set a time limit on it, so sometimes I do it for half an hour, sometimes for ninety minutes. It’s a way of unwinding and finding stress relief, so it’s entirely voluntary and anything I do during this time is being done because I want to do it. I think it’s the only thing in my life where there are no external pressures anywhere and I have set no goals for myself. 

I don’t think external pressures and goals are inherently bad. The goals I set for myself in my other hobbies, like writing and running, being in fandom, going to movies and such, are good goals and they help me do well. External pressure is something that exists in every human interaction; that’s just the nature of being a person in society, and likewise isn’t a terrible thing. And not everyone needs a release from those things, or finds that release in the same way. I like a lot of my life; I wouldn’t do things if I didn’t like them. But I have found that it helps to have one thing which only belongs to you and which has no goals or benchmarks. For me that’s currently the ukulele. 

In the later evening – and let’s be clear, I get home at like 4:30 so “later” to me is 6ish – I’ll hop back on tumblr, maybe do a little writing, or attend or host a stream. I’ll chatter with people, respond to emails and posts, read things I had set aside for reading earlier in the day; it’s probably my most socially active time.

When I was in my twenties I did perfectly fine on five hours of sleep a night, but as I got older that stopped being comfortable, and also I started realizing that after a certain point in the day, I not only wasn’t doing anything useful or interesting, I wasn’t having a good time. I was being awake for the sake of not going to bed. So I adjusted my life to going to bed at nine, and when I started getting up earlier to run, I adjusted again. In order to do that, I created an evening routine, because going to bed is easier if you start out by doing other shit BEFORE going to bed. 

Now, generally, I log off between 7 and 7:30. Sometimes I go to bed that early, but that’s when I close down social interaction. Not necessarily turning off the computer, but just gently shutting down on being “around” other people. I log off chats, I stop responding to emails and tumblr posts. I set them aside for the morning. I might continue to read my dash or listen to podcasts or whatnot until eight or so. 

I change into pyjamas, wash my face, brush my teeth, lay out my clothes for tomorrow, and get into bed, usually with my tablet to do a little reading. It’s a very rare evening I go to bed any time past 8:30.  And that’s my day.

I have actually some reasoning about why I go to bed so early, but I think it’s the most important part of a post that is REALLY LONG and otherwise devoted to the boring details of my day, so I’m going to make it a separate post. 

I hope this has helped, Anon! As you can see, what helps me organize and sort out all my time commitments is schedules, lists, and an adherence to several fairly rigid habits – this may not work for you, and I don’t recommend it for everyone. But for me, it’s really the only way I can stay on top of everything, especially in cases where I’m dealing with some particularly intense depression. I’m happy to answer questions, though if people have commentary about the post they should remember to reblog or comment, since I don’t repost asks sent to me about other asks. 

[darkestwolfx]

Power Play - Re-Review #41

Woah, I honestly didn’t expect to get this far! I know I haven’t been able to reply to everyone individually last week, but I’ve read every piece of feedback/comments that came my way. Seriously, thank you all so much for supporting this series, because else the Re-Review’s would have died out long ago! Anyhow, here we go;

Doesn’t thisstart make the episode just look lovely?

Attack of the giants! It’s like someone’s found and used a growth serum- oh no, we have to wait another two episode for that!

Honestly though the behind the scenes features for this episode did look pretty awesome.

But the actual episode is what we will now discuss.

Oh, lookie here, a problem! Send in the Thunderbirds (like with most episodes)!

“What’s going on down there?”

“I’m not the one in charge of the floodgates! You tell me.”

And what a response that was. Almost typical really.

“You’re going to have to close the floodgates manually.”

“Wait, something’s here. What is that thing? We need help!”

“This is International Rescue. Help is on the way.”

So we’ve got a dam that’s on the way down and some strange presence within it... interesting.

I can’t keep up with Brains and type so basically, it’s one of the largest dams in the world and it’s cracking!

“This will need all of us.”

Family outing!

I’m sorry to say it though, but did Scott wobble in his launch sequence? Seriously I’m hyper aware of it at the moment for some reason. I blame @tsarinatorment​ - stop putting ideas in my head! (I’m only kidding, please don’t stop). But I think you’ll find there was a wobble there.

Playing skipping rocks with Thunderbird Four? Seriously boys, hold off on the Gordon cruelty! After all, that’s the job of us fanfiction writers.

Interestingly, Alan was playing skipping rocks in the 2004 ‘Thunderbirds’ movie.

“I just have one question. If you drop me off, how are you going to get the pods out?”

“Glad you mentioned it. Better hold onto something.”

“Hey! What are you?”

“Ok, that was awesome, but a little more warning next time.”

“It was Alan’s idea. Sorry Gordo!”

Nicknames are back! And that little bit of music accompanying it was perfect! One of my favourite moments for sure!

At least Gordon was planning on going for a swim, unlike Scott here.

“What’s the next fastest way inside?”

“You’re looking for the auxiliary entrance to number six.”

“I wasn’t planning on going for a swim, John.”

“My scan say it should be dry.”

“Ok.”

The should gave it away for me.

“I wouldn’t want to be in here when someone turns on the tap.”

That for me was Scott really pushing his luck.

“Ur... guys, I think I’m about to take that swim after all.”

Well, you did push your luck.

“Meaning?”

“Something inside that turbine room is taking all the power!”

And who else could that be, but this guy.

“This means The Mechanic is here.”

And um, he’s still got that hacked link into their systems from ‘Up from the Depths’. Seriously, I thought Kayo was on that? Do a better job the second time around please?

“We need the GDF here and fast.”

“They’re arriving now.”

“You gone up against this Mechanic guy before, Captain? I hear he makes The Hood look soft.”

“The Mechanic will get what’s coming to him.”

Yes, I’m sure he will. Especially with the return of Captain Foster... Did anyone else worry at seeing her face?

“We’ve got nothing to fight these things with.”

“Speak for yourselves.”

Did anyone else feel the suspicion in that as well? I know ‘she’s’ a Captain, but the GDF wouldn’t only arm one person if they had the weaponry to fight The Mechanic. At least, my logic tells me they wouldn’t.

“I’m not waiting any longer. I need to get these people out of here.”

“Thanks. Scott Tracy, International Rescue.”

“Captain Foster. I got you covered, Tracy.”

Good deeds! Captain Foster helping with a rescue. That would’t normally be a new thing for the GDF.

“Looks like the GDF got some upgrades!”

Yeah, one person, Scott, and really did that not set alarm bells off? Who (other than Brains) is the only person we know capable of fighting The Mechanic? And um... who was wearing Captain Foster’s face the last time we saw him? I mean, there was of course every chance the real Captain Foster could have showed up and forced him to chance faces, but I think The Hood is more practical a thinker than that.

“No matter. I got what I came for.”

And that fact really does set off alarm bells. What does The Mechanic want super-super-super-super-super-super-super-super-super... imagine the rest- super-charged batteries for?

“So did I. We’re leaving!”

“I’ll take care of The Mechanic.”

“It’s not worth it. You don’t have to be a hero.”

“I’ll leave the hero business to you, Scott Tracy. My business is a very different kind. Unfinished.”

“The Hood!”

But, oh no, green is so not his colour!

It’s like Battle of the Bad Guys - I imagine that is actually much better than battle of the bands too...

And maybe a little bit like an episode of Eastenders..? I’ve honestly never watched it, but I’ve seen trailers in between other programs, and this first part of dialogue just seems like the sort of conversation that might appear in an episode. Let me know if you have seen it. 

“You’ve been mascaraing as a GDF officer all this time just to find me?”

“I consider it a public service. Though I admit I expected more of a challenge when I did.”

“Now that I know what I’m dealing with I’ll make it one!”

After their ‘break up’ at the mid-point of Series Two, I suppose a scene like this was inevitable. The big thing is, however, we still don’t know entirely what set these two against each other. Okay, The Hood’s horrible insults might make it onto that list, and obviously we know there’s some kind of influence/control going on with that golden eye of his (nice little nod to TOS there, even though they’ve taken all the magic and wonder out of it by replacing it with ‘cybernetics’). Big reveals are on the way though!

“Sorry pal, but I don’t want to stick around for the light show if you know what I mean.”

“Brains, I need you to keep an eye on things here.”

“R.A.D.”

And here’s the big reveal I mentioned;

“You should have left well enough alone.”

“I never forgive and I never forget. But I have to give you credit, whatever you have planned has made me quite curious.”

“You haven’t figured it out yet? It was your idea.”

“Project Sentinel?”

“Sentinel?”

Sentinel you say, Brains? Sentinel was the original name of the US Navy ship which shot down Thunderbird Two in the TOS episode ‘Terror in New York City’.

“You must be joking. I decided that was far too extreme. Even for me!”

The Hood thinks something is too extreme for him to use even though he originally planned..? Interesting.

You see - this debate will be fully taken up in that other post I keep talking about, which will appear eventually - this is where my issues with The Hood’s ultimate ending in TAG come around. There’s a great bit of writing here, with two feuding bad guys, which I’m still completely believing. I can’t quite remember what I felt the first time I watched this episode, but having seen the final and knowing how The Hood’s big career speech turns out, this loses all potential power for me. Someone who was just out for revenge and always seemed to never have a conscience compared with the great Jeff Tracy doesn’t seem like the sort of guy who would say this.

Also, with the great revelations we get on The Mechanic, his reply also seems out of place to me now. Okay, we could claim it’s because The Hood’s control over him is driving him mad, but even so, the fact is that they’ve shown The Mechanic to be able to think of his own accord still and he’s had other opportunities to get The Hood which wouldn’t have involved endangering the planet. I don’t know, it just seems to me like someone crossed their wires when writing these characters, or just forgot to re-watch Series 2 before writing series 3..?

“I, on the other hand, have no such reservations. It would have been building it for you after all. Now there’s nothing to stop me picking up from where we left off.”

“Except for me!”

“He’s fighting The Hood in there, remember?”

“As if this day couldn’t get even more interesting.”

Yes, so let’s take a look at the rescue effort for the dam in detail;

“Virgil, are you sure you don’t want me to take the pod?”

“Not this time.”

Wait, Virgil’s willingly handing over Thunderbird Two? Get the record books out. And all because he wanted to inspect the damn personally... He really is a structural expert.

“It’s pulling me off the dam!”

“Bulls-eye!”

“Nice going, Alan.”

So Alan gets Scott’s aim as well? Seems a little unfair.

“It seems to be working. I just hope I don’t run out.”

We went a couple episodes without jinxing things, and so now we’re back at jinx central.

Meanwhile whilst Gordon is fighting mechas underwater whilst trying to attach cables to the damn, Virgil is sitting pretty here... until... down they both go!

“Fancy meeting you here.”

I think that’s pay back for the dropped landing earlier.

“Alan I sure hope you’re in position. Things are about to get wet!”

I’m guessing this wasn’t the ultimate end game plan though... You okay chilling down there?

“I’m ok. I think.”

Okay, we’ll just leave you there for a minute then, so that the battle of the bad guys scene can happen.

P.S. Look at poor little beached Thunderbird Four.

In fairness though, probably neither was this;

“This stuff washes off right?”

The fact that Gordon has asked that immediately gave me the answer.

No.

“Um, no, that’s the point.”

“Oh, ok, just checking.”

“You didn’t get any on Thunderbird Four, did you?”

“Let’s focus on the positives!”

Which means: yes.

“We can’t let him or The Mechanic leave with those power cells!”

“Seal off the area. Nothing gets in or out of here!”

And bye-bye goes The Mechanic.

 Another job well done by the GDF!

Scott’s face as The Mechanic’s ship vanishes.

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to help Alan.”

“Why? What’s wrong with Alan?”

“Oh nothing.”

This Kayo and Scott exchange reminded me a little of conversations in TOS episodes ‘End of the Road’ and ‘Attack of the Alligators’ - you know where the big brother’s are doing the thing of wondering about the younger brother’s dating prospects.

And just a question, do we think that guy in the green shirt who came out to go fishing at the start of the episode has just been sat there watching the whole time? Because I do. Trainspotting? How about IR spotting?

So, humour aside, let’s explain what Project Sentinel is;

“What is it? Some kind of engine?”

“It’s a laser. The most powerful one I have ever seen. In the wrong hands it could be dangerous.”

This is a great episode, don’t mistake me on that. It’s got a nice rescue, balanced out with some smashing moments and a bit of bad guy brawling... but somehow, even though this episode is lighter, it’s not all fun and games. It’s a filler really, but it doesn’t portray itself in the typical way we usually see episodes of that type done. It pushes the plot forward just enough without giving away everything and ties up the remaining lose ends from ‘Escape Proof’. The comedy hits and it’s definitely less tense than some of those before it, but it’s still ultimately setting up some serious events to come and that always makes me a little worried. 

[ecotone99]

Humor [HM] Fantasy [FN] Chapter 3 - Bards, Shrooms, and Zombies Cadorna Keep - A Dnd GameLit

One of the two great doors of the gateway hung broken and tired at a possibly impossible angle. The other lay more certainly upon the ground, straggly grass curling up and over its edges in a grasping and wispy grab for sunlight. The place was in rough shape.

Ya know, Yenrab thought, shading his eyes from the glare of the overhead sun, it doesn’t look that dangerous. It just looks sad . . . and in need of a fix up!

They all stood clustered about the opening in a mob with Bern Sandros watching the right flank and Wex monitoring the left as Yenrab sheltered the spell casters Tracy and Carric in the center. They all stood in awe, mouths open and drooling.

An open air dungeon! Yenrab enthused, trying to put a positive spin on his earlier thoughts. No cobwebs, no goblin zombie lords or skullator gem monsters under tons of rock and dirt. Just a brisk jaunt through a disaster 20 years passed. We don’t need that stupid fireball spell. We’ve got this and then some!

The rest of the party EoTtHUaARB must have come to a similar conclusion because they oohed and aahed along with him at the adventure complex before them. They oohed because it lay completely deserted, filled with old and uninhabited buildings strewn throughout and peppered by thin reedy stalks of grass. They aahed because each and every one of them imagined individual specific treasures within each of those buildings, somehow ungotten by that legendary adventuring troupe, SOG. Then they shivered because the wind blew mournfully as if sad about the place’s tragic past. A shutter banged on warped hinges, turning smiles to frowns and giving the place a bit more character than any of them wanted it to have.

Yenrab stared daggers at Tracy as his emotional arc finished its rollercoaster course. He was back to feeling a mite grumpy about the needless waste of powerful magic.

“Tracy, ya know, we might well have needed that spell,” he nagged to the unlistening hippy from Freemeet. “I’m pretty certain the SOG didn’t all get lost. It’s not a big island.”

Tracy looked about, his goatee a blowing a little in the wind. He threw out his arms in an exaggerated gesture and scrunched his face in tremendous confusion.

“You hear anything?” Tracy yelled to no one in particular. “Because I sure don’t. I’ve got this thing, this curse, where I can’t hear nags or even recognize that they are there.”

Bern watched on with a small half grin playing at his lips. From the other flank of the group Wex snorted and then laughed, enjoying Yenrab’s discomfort.

The big half-orc sighed. Jerks he thought fondly, thinking over all they had already been through together.

“Well, someone tell Tracy to be careful anyways. We need to keep tactical,” Yenrab announced to them all, authority surrounding him. Then he paused and looked off for a bit. “Pillion isn’t around anymore to show us the ropes and, ya know, you all made me captain so let me captain us. Tracy stay in the middle, Carric move to the rear, Wex stay left, Bern stay right, I’m gonna stay as the front. Let’s move together and everyone keep a look out. Someone tell Tracy to tell someone to tell me since he can’t hear or even recognize that I’m here.”

“Maybe someone should tell someone to tell that nag that I can’t heat that maybe he needs to apologize?” Tracy stated to the sky, stroking his goatee in philosophical thought.

“Mates, maybe I should sneak around a bit and see what I can see?” Bern Sandros asked, a greedy glint in his eye.

“And deal with some accidentally summoned monster or demon for our troubles? Again?!” Carric laughed. “Once is enough of that, good sir.”

“Don’t call me sir. I work for a living,” Bern retorted.

“Power to the people!” Tracy agreed.

Doesn’t that power to the people stuff ever get old the Gamer Chief asked at some celestial table far away. Never replied the Gamers with a laugh.

“Look,” Carric said, his face now serious, “this place is strange and I don’t believe for one second that it is empty. Let’s listen to Yenrab and stay together. My bard powers work better with a group anyways. Maybe you can do sneaky rogue stuff when we get to the actual keep up ahead.”

He pointed to the far end of the complex. There the keep stood solid despite its age, grey stones with grey mortar for the gaps, nary a crack in sight. Only its gates looked warped and bowed, but they stood closed and were perhaps stout. It was hard to tell from this distance.

“Ag, man. Shame. Alright mate. I guess I can hold my horses til then,” Bern Sandros agreed. “We stay tight for some bliksem then I sneak when we get close. Got it.”

“Rattle ya dags, bro!” Wex stated, looking back behind them, where the plant life was slowly meandering over to where they stood. “Else we’re gonna cark it.”

“Um, right?” Carric agreed. The common tongue his friends used was sometimes quite foreign to him. But he thought he understood the context. “Let’s move on and let those plants lose interest then, shall we?”

With Yenrab in the lead the five of them headed forward, all tense and at the ready. Ahead the gloomy and fire blackened yet sturdy barracks houses of the immediate garrison hung dark and gritty, their very visage a warning to would be seekers of fortune. The shutters clacked again against their sides in the freshening gust of lake born wind.

“Maybe Bern really should go ahead and scout things out,” Wex suggested with a mask-hidden grin.

“Sard-off mate,” Bern chuckled. “If you thought it’d be safe you’d volunteer yourself off next to me.”

Carric smiled, “Sounds like neither of you has the guts to go forward.”

“Ya know, if I were mocked by a bard,” Yenrab nodded, to Carric’s drooping face, “I’d feel the need to push ahead and prove myself.”

A staccato of more distinct Gamer voices blasted into hearing. The party members winced.

That’s cruel, man.

Nah, that’s realistic. Bards suck.

You suck.

Your mo-

Guys stop it. Look, how about Carric goes forward and shows us what guts really are.

Okay, I guess I will!

“I, uh, I feel like I should have a bit more choice in this matter,” Carric protested to no one in particular. “But I guess it’s my turn in the forefront.”

“Carric! Carric!” Tracy cheered on in support. The bard gave him a panicked shush and hurried himself forward to get it all done with.

***

Carric stealthed ahead as well as he could. He couldn’t hear his own steps, so that was probably a good thing. The wind gusted again, briefly, as if in response to his brave foray forward.

This is not good. Not good not good not good he thought to himself in fright. He looked back at the party, growing a bit smaller as they got more distant. Tracy danced and waved.

He was next to the first of the two military structures. They weren’t that big, really, but he imagined that soldiers were like clowns in that they could all pile into those tiny enclosed carts in impossibly compact knots of people encompassing a hundred or so individuals. He certainly wasn’t looking forward to clacking a shutter fully open against the walls and poking his head in.

The bard took a quick stroll around the building, giving himself a quiet sigh as a gift for such bravery. Then, again in the eyes of the party, he fully opened one of the shuttered window apertures and peered inside.

The interior was filled with broken and splintered wood, the remains of the bunks and chests of the original defenders. They were indeed stacked together quite tight, perhaps capable of holding thirty defenders? It was hard to tell, though, because the place looked well smashed up and looted.

The bard looked back and yelled out to them.

“It’s well clear you bunch of yellow-bellied chickens. You are welcome.”

Yenrab started laughing, striding ahead in eager pace. There was some distant muttering, and also the loud cheering of Tracy, as they all moved forward.

That’ll teach them to besmirch my honor he chuckled to himself. Shown up and mocked by a bard?! How pathetic!

***

The party checked out both of the barracks buildings from the outside quite thoroughly before readying themselves for the interior. Whether it was the shame of being shown up by a bard or perhaps a lack of things to say nobody could tell you, but Wex and Bern kept their mouths shut through the whole process. It wasn’t until they were standing before the actual door to one of the structures that Bern, the noisier of the two, finally spoke.

“I’ve checked it this way and that, mates. Free from traps, good as platinum in my pocket. If there is anything dangerous here, it is going to be spooky and not at all in my department of things to deal with.”

Yenrab stretched and Carric swung his harmonica bar across his face, its burnished surface catching in the sun for a momentary bit of glare. Next to him Tracy rolled his hands in slow purpose around a dim and pulsing ball of flame. It was a definite zeroth level cantrip but something probably useful against all manner of spooky things.

“Well I guess now might be a good time for us to go in then?” the barbarian asked them all, looking back and forth between those on either flank.

Tracy shimmered by in rainbow-glittered robes, taking an advantageous angle. “Let’s do this,” the sorcerer grinned, glowing orb pulsating more brightly, possibly leveled up from its earlier state.

“Right. Yeah, ya know, I think I’d like it better if this place were full of zombies,” the big man complained in response. He reached one meaty hamlike hand forward though despite his reluctance and threw open the door. But there was nothing.

“Bro,” Wex whispered, “this is spooky.”

Then he found himself stumbling into the room, shoved by some unseen force. He looked back in panic and saw Bern Sandros stifling a laugh. The glee of the merry man was infectious and Wex smiled back while digging about quickly and thoroughly for hidden treasures. The rest swarmed in to do the same.

“I found a button,” Tracy called out in glee.

“Yuck,” Carric called out, holding a moldering scrap of soiled underpants.

“Well that’s enough of that,” Yenrab affirmed, waving everyone out. “We’ve still got a whole keep to search.”

***

The buildings closest to them were the stout and stone castle-like kitchen, some lanky and disused stables, and what looked to be the remains of a silo, one that must have been quite tall a few decades ago. At present, what was left of it was stunted, the majority of it having collapsed during the battle for the keep or soon after. It was at a distance but they could see that the silo was bereft of anything but a field of large mushrooms, growing through bare earth and out of the cracks of broken rubble.

“Jol!” “Mean as!” “Sweet!” the bard, the rogue, and the cleric all yelled at the same time, then laughed, making a beeline for the silo.

“Oh no,” Yenrab moaned, shaking his head slowly as the party hunched over their find, daggers in hand, ready to prune. “Not again,” he added, giving a bit of mystery to the interested reader as he or she or they hunched over the flickering light of their dying kindle, or the stout pages of the published novel.

Tracy eyed them over, the Gamer rolling enthusiastically as he tried to figure out what it was. The 20 sided die clicked and rolled off of the cosmic table.

“Noni Moss,” Tracy said, a 13 blazing in his mind’s eye. “Not a real moss, but one in name. Eating it makes you a bit wiser and have a good taste in novels for a while, but it’s not gonna get you all high.”

“Are you being straight up?” Wex asked, his eyes suddenly empty of their former joviality. “Brah, I really thought we had something here.”

“No worries, mate, this stuff here sounds good regardless,” Bern opined, to Yenrab’s nodding approval.

“Yeah, I bet we can sell it big at some market somewhere and use that money to get the good stuff,” Carric laughed, making the barbarian frown all over again.

The big guy didn’t stop them though from gathering all they could, stuffing one small travel pack and then the other full of the delicious-looking fungi. He too could hear the clink of gold coins in his head as the useful fungus was bottled, bagged, or otherwise stored.

Indeed, so absorbed were the party in the collection and perusal of the task at hand that they didn’t realize it when the ground behind them tore open, silent and deadly. Nor did they hear the click of bones and the rasp of dead flesh as zombies and skeleton crawled on out to do battle. They only realized their danger when Carric screamed, punched in the back of the head by a skeletal fist. He stumbled, but he did not fall.

Roll initiative! a distant voice called in their heads.

“To arms!” Yenrab yelled, fumbling with his axe straps in surprise.

Chapter 1 = https://www.reddit.com/r/shortstories/comments/edngy6/humor_hm_fantasy_fn_cadorna_keep_chapter_1_a_dnd/

Chapter 2 = https://www.reddit.com/r/shortstories/comments/eecc7d/humor_hm_fantasy_fn_cadorna_keep_chapter_2_a_dnd/

submitted by /u/damienleehanson [link] [comments] via Blogger https://ift.tt/2MHs1LX

[dorcasrempel]

Data-mining for dark matter

When Tracy Slatyer faced a crisis of confidence early in her educational career, Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” and a certain fictional janitor at MIT helped to bolster her resolve.

Slatyer was 11 when her family moved from Canberra, Australia, to the island nation of Fiji. It was a three-year stay, as part of her father’s work for the South Pacific Forum, an intergovernmental organization.

“Fiji was quite a way behind the U.S. and Australia in terms of gender equality, and for a girl to be interested in math and science carried noticeable social stigma,” Slatyer recalls. “I got bullied quite a lot.”

She eventually sought guidance from the school counselor, who placed the blame for the bullying on the victim herself, saying that Slatyer wasn’t sufficiently “feminine.” Slatyer countered that the bullying seemed to be motivated by the fact that she was interested in and good at math, and she recalls the counselor’s unsympathetic advice: “Well, yes, honey, that’s a problem you can fix.”

“I went home and thought about it, and decided that math and science were important to me,” Slatyer says. “I was going to keep doing my best to learn more, and if I got bullied, so be it.”

She doubled down on her studies and spent a lot of time at the library; she also benefited from supportive parents, who gave her Hawking’s groundbreaking book on the origins of the universe and the nature of space and time.

“It seemed like the language in which these ideas could most naturally be described was that of mathematics,” Slatyer says. “I knew I was pretty good at math. And learning that that talent was potentially something I could apply to understanding how the universe worked, and maybe how it began, was very exciting to me.”

Around this same time, the movie “Good Will Hunting” came out in theaters. The story, of a townie custodian at MIT who is discovered as a gifted mathematician, had a motivating impact on Slatyer.

“What my 13-year-old self took out of this was, MIT was a place where, if you were talented at math, people would see that as a good thing rather than something to be stigmatized, and make you welcome — even if you were a janitor or a little girl from Fiji,” Slatyer says. “It was my first real indication that such places might exist. Since then, MIT has been an important symbol to me, of valuing intellectual inquiry and being willing to accept anyone in the world.”

This year, Slatyer received tenure at MIT and is now the Jerrold R. Zacharias Associate Professor of Physics and a member of the Center for Theoretical Physics and the Laboratory for Nuclear Science. She focuses on searching through telescope data for signals of mysterious phenomena such as dark matter, the invisible stuff that makes up more than 80 percent of the matter in the universe but has only been detected through its gravitational pull. In her teaching, she seeks to draw out and support a new and diverse crop of junior scientists.

“If you want to understand how the universe works, you want the very best and brightest people,” Slatyer says. “It’s essential that theoretical physics becomes more inclusive and welcoming, both from a moral perspective and to get the best science done.”

Connectivity

Slatyer’s family eventually moved back to Canberra, where she dove eagerly into the city’s educational opportunities.

After earning an undergraduate degree from the Australian National University, followed by a brief stint at the University of Melbourne, Slatyer was accepted to Harvard University as a physics graduate student. Her interests were slowly gravitating toward particle physics, but she was unsure about which direction to take. Then, two of her mentors put her in touch with a junior faculty member, Doug Finkbeiner, who was leading a project to mine astrophysical data for signals of new physics.

At the time, much of the physics community was eagerly anticipating the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider and the release of data on particle interactions at high energies, which could potentially reveal physics beyond the Standard Model.

In contrast, telescopes have long made public their own data on astrophysical phenomena. What if, instead of looking through these data for objects such as black holes and neutron stars that evolved over millions of years, one could comb through it for signals of more fundamental mysteries, such as hints of new elementary particles and even dark matter?

The prospects were new and exciting, and Slatyer promptly took on the challenge.

“Chasing that feeling”

In 2008, the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope launched, giving astronomers a new view of the cosmos in the gamma-ray band of the electromagnetic spectrum, where high-energy astrophysical phenomena can be seen. Slatyer and Finkbeiner proposed that Fermi’s data might also reveal signals of dark matter, which could theoretically produce high-energy electrons when dark matter particles collide.

In 2009, Fermi made its data available to the public, and Slatyer and Finkbeiner —together with Harvard postdoc Greg Dobler and collaborators at New York University — put their mining tools to work as soon as the data were released online.

The group eventually constructed a map of the Milky Way galaxy, shining in gamma rays, and revealed a fuzzy, egg-like shape. Upon further analysis, led by Slatyer’s fellow PhD student Meng Su, this fuzzy “haze” coalesced into a figure-eight, or double-bubble structure, extending some 25,000 light-years above and below the disc of the Milky Way. Such a structure had never been observed before. The group named the mysterious structure the “Fermi bubbles,” after the telescope that originally observed it.

“It was really special — we were the first people in the history of the world to be able to look at the sky in this way and understand that this structure was there,” Slatyer says. “That’s a really incredible feeling, and chasing that feeling is something that inspires and motivates me, and I think many scientists.”

Searching for the invisible

Today, Slatyer continues to sift through Fermi data for evidence of dark matter. The Fermi Bubbles’ distinctive shape makes it unlikely they are associated with dark matter; they are more likely to reveal a past eruption from the giant black hole at the Milky Way’s center, or outflows fueled by exploding stars. However, other signals are more promising.

Around the center of the Milky Way, where dark matter is thought to concentrate, there is a glow of gamma rays. In 2013, Slatyer, her first PhD student Nicholas Rodd, and collaborators at Harvard University and Fermilab showed this glow had properties similar to what theorists would expect if dark matter particles were colliding and producing visible light. However, in 2015, Slatyer and collaborators at MIT and Princeton University challenged this interpretation with a new analysis, showing that the glow was more consistent with originating from a new population of spinning neutron stars called pulsars.

But the case is not quite closed. Recently, Slatyer and MIT postdoc Rebecca Leane reanalyzed the same data, this time injecting a fake dark matter signal into the data, to see whether the techniques developed in 2015 could detect dark matter if it were there. But the signal was missed, suggesting that if there were other, actual signals of dark matter in the Fermi data, they could have been missed as well.

Slatyer is now improving on data mining techniques to better detect dark matter in the Fermi data, along with other astrophysical open data. But she won’t be discouraged if her search comes up empty.

“There’s no guarantee there is a dark matter signal,” Slatyer says. “But if you never look, you’ll never know. And in searching for dark matter signals in these datasets, you learn other things, like that our galaxy contains giant gamma-ray bubbles, and maybe a new population of pulsars, that no one ever knew about. If you look closely at the data, the universe will often tell you something new.”

Data-mining for dark matter syndicated from https://osmowaterfilters.blogspot.com/

[lewishamledger]

Grove is in the heart

Grove Park Youth Club was once the beating heart of the local community, but closed its doors in 2013. Now, as a campaign to save it from demolition gains momentum, people who visited the club share their memories of the space

Words Alice Troy-Donovan; Photo Rob Clayton

Tracy Strudwick was 12 when she started religiously attending the Monday night discos at Grove Park Youth Club. “This was the mid-1970s and I remember lots of glam rock,” she says. “They were almost always fancy dress and they did special themed ones like Halloween.”

The club’s main hall hosted two discos on the same night for “juniors” and “seniors”. They drew in kids from the neighbouring Chinbrook Estate and from further afield, including Mottingham, Downham and Eltham.

“It was a real focus for the community,” Tracy says. “I was a quiet person and it did me a world of good mixing with all sorts of people.”

The club hosted its first dance on July 30, 1966 and was formally opened five months later by the Right Hon Angus Ogilvy – cousin of Queen Elizabeth and chairman of the National Association of Youth Clubs at the time.

Tracy’s mother Ann Strudwick got a cleaning job at the club in 1968, when the building still felt new and her daughter wasn’t old enough to hit the parquet dance floor.

“I polished that floor every Monday,” she recalls. “They rented out the hall for weddings and parties at the weekend, so it had to be cleaned each week.”

Tracy has since moved away, but the Strudwick family – including Ann, her husband George, who coached the Grove Park Youth Club football team for two years, and their daughter Sandra – still live in Merryfield House, one of the Chinbrook Estate’s attractive medium-rise blocks about 50 yards from the club.

Aside from disco night, Tracy spent three less structured evenings at the club every week, enjoying the “general social atmosphere”. “It was just a good place to meet rather than hanging out in the street. It did a lot for me [at that age],” she says.

“I remember some of the older boys would walk us home after the discos. I went to a girls’ school, so the youth club gave me an opportunity to socialise with boys – not just as boyfriends, but as friends.”

Jill Austen was a frequent attendee at the club in the six months after it opened and met her future husband, Morris, at a Saturday night dance. She remembers the initial excitement of a purpose-built youth club hosting grown-up dances.

“It was such a nice place to be – I remember everything looked so very modern and bright,” she says. “It made you think, ‘Is this really for me?’

“There were other ballrooms around, like the Black Cat in Woolwich and one in Welling called the Embassy. But [as a teenager] you felt slightly out of place in those. Grove Park Youth Club was highly unusual – it was built for young people but it felt a bit sophisticated.”

Spread over two storeys with inward facing windows to contain the noise of late-night socials, the youth club was the final addition to the Chinbrook Estate, which is situated in the south-east corner of Grove Park.

The estate had been planned from 1961 and was finished by London County Council in 1965. The youth club’s architect, Leo Hallissey, was one of a world-renowned team working for the LCC’s education department, and says he drew inspiration from the Bauhaus movement and mid-century modernist architecture for the building’s design.

“[The LCC’s] was the largest architectural practice in the world and the mid-1960s was an exciting time to be part of it,” he says.

“We used to have regular visitors from around the world interested in so-called ‘state architects’: France, Germany and Holland, even Japan. We were quite proud of what we did and wanted to show it off.”

From the initial 1961 plans, the Chinbrook Estate was to include facilities for all ages in the community, including an old people’s club room and a purpose-built youth club. The youth club itself was designed to accommodate up to 100 people and comprised a main hall, coffee bar, “girls’ room”, leader’s office and a series of lock-up garages.

“It was planned with every care and attention to detail,” says John Boughton, a social historian whose blog Municipal Dreams profiled Chinbrook and the youth club last year. “For me, the whole estate exemplifies the quest for community in council housing that emerged in the post-1945 period.”

Compared to the bleak interwar estates criticised by sociologists and residents for their lack of communal facilities, Chinbrook exemplified a collective desire for reform.

John says the estate was one of the post-war rehousing programme’s “practical dreams”, implemented by a progressive council with the support of a government determined to rebuild a better country. “‘Placemaking’ is a contemporary term,” he says, “but that’s exactly what they were doing back then.”

In 2013, the club was closed by Lewisham Council, who stated that it was no longer financially sustainable. Prior to this, it had served the Chinbrook Estate and the wider south Lewisham community for almost 50 years – from casual table tennis sessions to keep fit classes for adults.

A computer room materialised in the latter years where a hairdressing salon had been, but Michael Beale, who attended from 1986 to 1996, remembers football and uni hock in the main hall as well. He played football there with older boys before later embarking on a professional career in the sport.

He says a large number of young families moved into the estate in the 1960s, “with hundreds of kids within a five-year age group”. “My nan lived just adjacent to the club, and my aunt and uncle had gone there in years past,” he says. “An old lady working there at the time knew three generations of my family.”

The old people’s club room was demolished and replaced by flats in 1999. When similar plans for the youth club were proposed by Lewisham Council, a volunteer youth worker, Tommy McNally, went to the press with the story.

“I had been coaching football to a variety of ages there for the past six months, and I knew how important it was to those kids,” says Tommy, who now lives in Orpington with his family and volunteers at a local youth club there.

Around that time a 14-year-old boy who was stabbed outside a youth club in Ladywell was found by a youth worker, who saved his life. The incident prompted Tommy to take action.

“I knew it was the only safe place for [kids] to go in the area,” he says. “My mum used to run a youth club, so I knew how important it was – not only as a safe place, but somewhere with a positive influence.”

But it wasn’t until 2015, when local resident and mother of five Farrah Thomas contacted her local councillors and MP about the lack of local youth provision, that the Save Grove Park Youth Club campaign was launched.

A community consultation was held by councillors and Heidi Alexander, following an announcement by the council at a local assembly meeting that they intended to demolish the building.

“There’s this idea that the club was nothing more than table tennis and kids hanging out,” says Rob Clayton, a local resident, father of two teenage daughters, and chair of the youth club’s Building Preservation Trust. “But, in a way, spaces for young people to hang out is still what’s most required, so they can congregate and make things happen.”

The Trust was set up by Rob and Stephen Kenny – who grew up in Grove Park and moved back in recent years – in 2016 as a campaigning body aiming to protect the building as a local heritage asset and reopen it for the community.

Property guardians are currently occupying the building, but the campaign has gained momentum in the past six months and the group are now working with Lewisham Council.

They are in negotiations with a variety of organisations to take over the day-to-day running of the club, and are putting in funding bids to get the project off the ground. Rob is hopeful that it could reopen in the next year.

An increasingly critical level of young victims of knife crime has brought the campaign into broader conversations about young people’s safety. In March, Stephen was interviewed by BBC London News outside the club alongside the Green Party’s Sian Berry, who has been lobbying Sadiq Khan to invest in provision for young people since late 2016. Garfield Clarke, a local resident, also appeared in the feature speaking about how some of his five sons used to use the club.

Roc’Kye Halladeen-Brown, 14, attended for three years before the club closed and remembers horse-riding outings, snooker games, and graffiti art sessions. His mother, Latoya, hopes he and his four younger siblings will be able to use the facility again.

“The youth club provided a safe and secure way for them to be doing something productive, especially during the summer holidays,” she says. “I would love for my children to be part of that again.”

“The club was built because, at the time, it was felt that young people needed a safe place to go where they could socialise, learn and play,” says Stephen. “And that is still what’s needed.”

Six years before the club was opened, the Albemarle Report was published, which formed the basis of statutory youth provision in Britain.

“It’s so striking that Albemarle recommends a generous and imaginative building programme as essential to rehabilitate the youth service and enable its expansion,” says John Boughton, who sees a strong link between the report and the construction of Grove Park Youth Club.

Around 14 youth clubs were built in London between 1964 and 1966 by the LCC’s education department. Stephen suspects Grove Park Youth Club is one of the few remaining, and perhaps the only one with original features still intact.

But, as the Strudwicks recall, the club was always a hub for the whole community and not just its young people. During the day it was used for adult education, including sewing classes, ballroom dancing lessons, and a choir.

War games were a very popular event, held once a month on a Friday. And, of course, wedding receptions and engagement parties at the weekends (the Strudwicks alone had a 21st birthday party and two wedding receptions there in the 1980s).

Rob and Stephen hope the new youth club will offer employment opportunities for young adults and a place for the community to congregate. First and foremost, however, it will exist to serve local youth.

“Youth clubs do have a bit of an old-fashioned label to them,” says Rob. “However, they’ve been denigrated and closed and knocked down and people have forgotten what youth clubs can be. When you speak to people over 30, up to the age of maybe 60, there are many people with great memories of how much they meant to them.”

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Forest Preschools Let Kids Run Free, But Can They Change to Reach Diverse Families?

A 2½-year-old boy named Ben was ankle-deep in a Jefferson County creek when suddenly he lost his footing and plopped onto his bottom in the cold shallow water. The fall didn’t faze him. Neither did his dripping shorts. He got up and kept playing.

About a dozen children frolicked in or near the creek that day — making pretend tea in small metal buckets, building dams with sticks and mud, or inspecting bugs that flitted nearby.

It was a typical day at Worldmind Nature Immersion School, one of a growing number of programs where toddlers, preschoolers, and kindergarteners spend all their time outside — no matter the weather.

“When children look like they’re playing in nature, huge amounts of learning is taking place,” said Erin Kenny, founder of the American Forest Kindergarten Association and the co-founder of a pioneering outdoor preschool program in Washington state.

Established first in Scandinavia, such “forest schools” occupy a steadily expanding niche in the American early-childhood landscape. But even with the movement’s popularity, advocates wonder if it can reach beyond the homogenous slice of families — mostly middle-class and white — it now serves.

Advocates like Kenny lament the academic push found in many traditional preschools and say that young children thrive outdoors — developing independence, resilience, and other valuable social-emotional skills.

Parents say their kids like the expansive space, non-stop play, and dearth of rules in outdoor classes. And as long as they’re dressed for the conditions, they take rain, snow, or frigid temperatures in stride.

Megan Patterson, the founder of Worldmind Nature Immersion School, pretends her preschool students are penguin chicks. (Photo by Ann Schimke/Chalkbeat)

“I think it’s great to come in bad weather,” said Denver parent Tracy Larson, who has two children in the Worldmind class. “It makes us go outside when we’re at home in bad weather too … You’re not afraid of it.”

Forest schools nationwide face significant regulatory and logistical barriers to expanding their footprint — and serving students of color and those from low-income families.

“This movement is not going to move forward or it’s going to be stigmatized if we don’t rapidly move the needle from white middle-class to all-inclusive,” said Kenny.

Perhaps the most immediate problem is that states have no rules for outdoor-based programs that serve young children and thus, no way to grant them child care licenses. Besides signaling that programs meet basic health and safety rules, a license opens the door to state subsidies that help low-income families pay for child care.

In Colorado, the inability to get licensed means that forest schools can only have up to four young children in a class or, as is the case at Worldmind, must require parents to stay for each session. But licensing rules here could soon change. The same is true in Washington state, where there are dozens of outdoor preschool programs.

Government officials in both states are working with outdoor preschool providers as part of pilot programs that could lead to creating a child care license for outdoor preschools. The idea is to ensure children’s safety without stamping out the creek-wading, tree-climbing sensibilities that make the programs what they are.

Kenny said there are now around 50 forest preschools in the U.S. and another 200 “nature schools,” which put a major emphasis on outdoor learning but have buildings, too. Colorado and Washington are the only ones she knows of that are actively exploring special licensing classifications for outdoor preschools, but hopes their pilot programs will build momentum nationally.

“I used to feel I was riding the crest of a wave,” she said. “Now I feel the wave has crashed and it’s moving in ripples everywhere.

TESTING THE MODEL

In Colorado, two providers — Worldmind and a Denver-based program called The Nursery School — are participating in the state pilot program. It starts this month for the Nursery School and in August for Worldmind. Both providers will be allowed to serve up to 10 children ages 3 to 6 during half-day sessions without parents present. The schools must adhere to a staff-student ratio of 1 to 5 — stricter than what is required in a traditional preschool.

They’ll also have to abide by other rules, including keeping tree-climbing children within arm’s reach and seeking indoor shelter in extreme weather.

In addition, both programs will track heaps of data, ranging from hourly weather changes to the circumstances behind any wildlife encounters or potty accidents. State licensing officials will also visit each program regularly. The pilot will run through February — to capture all kinds of Colorado weather — with a licensing decision possible in the summer of 2019.

Matt Hebard, a former preschool teacher and early childhood school district administrator, launched The Nursery School with Brett Dabb last fall at Denver’s Bluff Lake Nature Center. In recent weeks, the handful of children enrolled there have spotted newly hatched goslings and mule deer, and made “snowmen” with fluff from cottonwood trees.

The two men first conceived of the school in 2013 during their time in an early childhood leadership program and soon after discovered the long, bureaucracy-laden road to state recognition. There were waiver applications, denials, a hearing before the state attorney general, and even a look at whether state legislation would further the cause of outdoor preschools in Colorado.

“It’s been slow going,” but worthwhile, Hebard said. “It’s going to allow other practitioners to open outdoor preschools … It’s going to give parents another option.”

A child plays in the limbs of a tree at Matthews/Winters Park in Jefferson County. (Photo by Ann Schimke/Chalkbeat)

Megan Patterson, a former elementary school teacher in Alaska and Colorado, launched Worldmind in 2015 — complying with state rules by offering “child and caregiver” classes at local parks and botanical gardens in Boulder County and metro Denver.

“I studied urban ecology in Boston and after that I realized … how important it is to connect kids to places around where they live,” she said. “I finally found the type of education I believe in 100 percent.”

State officials say they have been approached by other outdoor preschool providers interested in the pilot, but don’t plan to expand it beyond the two programs, and the roughly 40 children they’ll serve during the pilot period.

“We feel the model needs to be even more rigorous in the state of Colorado,” said Erin Mewhinney, director of the state’s early care and learning division in the office of early childhood.

She said while forest schools are popular in United Kingdom — where leaders of Worldmind and The Nursery School have both attended special teacher training courses — Colorado weather and terrain pose different challenges

“We all love the outdoors, but we all know how dangerous it is and we’re trying to strike a balance with that license type,” she said.

A SENSE OF FREEDOM

The recent Worldmind class where 2-year-old Ben plopped in the creek took place at Matthews/Winters Park in Golden on a warm, sunny May morning. While Patterson offered some general structure to the dozen kids in attendance — a snack break, a brief discussion of a picture book they’d read, and a chance to feel animal pelts, the kids were mostly free to do what they wanted.

Their parents lingered nearby, chatting with each other, chasing after younger siblings, or joining their kids in the creek or on a green tarp laid out nearby. It felt like a big, free-flowing playdate in the woods.

To be sure, there were the usual little-kid frustrations. One small girl, after repeatedly scrambling up the bank of the creek without much trouble, was reduced to tears once her hands went from merely dirty to muddy.

Worldmind’s upcoming pilot program class will look similar to the child and caregiver class, though without the parents. It will take place at Denver’s City Park, with the adjacent Denver Museum of Nature and Science serving as a backup in case of extreme weather.

Several parents who attended the recent class at Matthews/Winters Park said they planned to send their children to the pilot program. They often used the same word to describe why they liked the outdoor classes: Freedom.

Brittany Courville, of Lakewood, said she brought her 5-year-old daughter Siena to her first Worldmind session after the family relocated to Colorado from Texas a few years ago. The move had been jarring for the then 2-year-old, but the outdoor class seemed to restore her spirits.

“She loved it … It was freezing and she didn’t want to leave,” said Courville. “You know, you go to library story times — ‘Sit down. Do this. Do that’ — and she came here and there were other kids she could play with and also be herself and just explore.”

A girl plays during a Worldmind Nature Immersion School class at Matthews/Winters Park in Jefferson County. (Chalkbeat/Ann Schimke)

Brit Lease, a Denver resident and the mother of 2-year-old Ben, has friends who are excited that their daughter’s preschool has pledged she’ll be reading on a first-grade level by the time she starts kindergarten. But Lease doesn’t want that for Ben.

“What social-emotional learning did they miss out on or interpersonal kinds of things did they miss out on because they were so focused on learning how to read?” she asked.

While she talked, Ben growled like a tiger and showed off his “sword” — fashioned out of two thin branches bound together with black cord.

“My theory right now is just let them be kids as long as they can because it does start sooner,” Lease said. “Kindergarten is no joke anymore.”

A BIGGER TENT

While Patterson launched Worldmind with a primary focus on getting kids outside, she’s lately shifted her goals. The organization is revamping its mission to aim for racial and ethnic, socioeconomic, cultural, and ability diversity.

If Worldmind becomes licensed, she also plans to accept state child-care subsidies. Tuition for four half-days of forest school during the fall semester of the pilot project runs about $2,900.

But like other outdoor preschool providers, Patterson knows the typical part-day forest school schedule doesn’t work for everybody.

In part to accommodate working parents, Patterson hopes by the fall of 2019 to open a brick-and-mortar child care center that would still focus on outdoor learning, while enabling Worldmind to serve infants and toddlers, and offer full-day care for children up to age 6.

Megan Patterson, the founder of Worldmind Nature Immersion School, talks with two children while others play nearby. (Photo by Ann Schimke/Chalkbeat)

Hebard said he doesn’t plan to accept child-care subsidies because they come with requirements he thinks don’t apply to an outdoor preschool model. These include evaluating students using a state-approved assessment tool.

Still, he would eventually like to raise money for a scholarship program. But with only a handful of tuition-paying families enrolled now and much of his extra time spent working nights at UPS Inc., that reality could be a ways off.

“It would be nice to have a broader demographic,” he said. “It’s a good opportunity for any child.”

Nationally, some forest preschools have come up with creative ways to open their doors to a wider slice of their communities. For example, the Forest Freedom School, based in Oakland, gives students of a color a 30 percent break on tuition. It’s billed as the “Struggle Is Real” discount.

Aside from financial obstacles, there can be cultural barriers that make outdoor preschools perplexing or unthinkable for some families. These may include worries that children will get sick if they spend time in the rain and cold or simply the sense that school isn’t an outdoor activity.

Hebard said a colleague at another organization told him about concerns voiced by parents about plans to replace the preschool’s brightly colored plastic play equipment with a nature-themed playground. Some of the parents worked outside all day and were put off by the idea of their children playing in the dirt at school.

Overcoming those perceptions will take parent education and outreach to local groups that work with communities of color, forest school leaders say.

Kenny said programs must be aggressive about serving all kinds of families. And it’s not just tuition help that’s needed, she said. Because children are outside in all kinds of weather, families may need help ensuring their children have access to high-quality clothing and gear.

“It’s incumbent on these schools to offer some kind of assistance because right now the government’s not doing it, nobody’s doing it,” she said.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Forest Preschools Let Kids Run Free, But Can They Change to Reach Diverse Families? published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/