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maxwell-grant · 3 years

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Having asked your thoughts on designing Frankenstein's daemon, might I now ask your thoughts on bringing Count Dracula from the written word into illustration? (I'm definitely in favour of the 'Hairy Old Mountain Man of Horror pretending he's people' look from the original novel; one of the small tests too many Draculas fail to pass is an absolutely tragic lack of the Evil Beard and/or Wicked Moustache explicitly described by Mr Stoker).

Unlike with Frankenstein, where I think the design needs to be painstakingly thought out in order to achieve the best balance of the creature's traits for horror and tragedy alike, I think with Dracula you can actually just take an approach of "whatever works". Because as I mentioned before, I think much of the appeal and longevity of Dracula is how the character's both a layered villain as well as a shapeshifting narrative force that can be tailored to whatever you want to do with. Granted, there are bad or dissappointing Dracula designs, of course there are, but in regards to the leeway you get for reinterpretation, you get a lot more of it with Dracula than with other literary icons.

Like with Frankenstein, I'm gonna bring up how I'd tackle a less grim, more comedy-centric Dracula first, one that's less a force of horror and more of a charismatic villain, and I think to that end I definitely agree that people are sleeping a lot on the hairy old man barely-passing-off-as-humanoid of the original story. Despite very much loving these performers, I'm actually not a fan of takes that mold Dracula too closely to people who've portrayed him, like Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, partially because I think it's a waste of an opportunity to create your own Dracula design. Since I can't draw (yet), I'll do what I usually do and make a board of images to try and convey some of my thoughts on one way I'd design Dracula.

(Pictured: Kiwi's design for Dracula, Hotel Transylvania concept art, Nandor, Castlevania Dracula, Charles Dance in Dracula Untold, Vladislav, a Transylvanian rug)

I used the images in my other Dracula post and I’ll post it here again because I absolutely adore @kiwibyrd's designs for Dracula and it's main heroes, in particular I love the way it strikes a good balance at making sure Dracula looks distinctly separate from the humans, but not too much that he couldn't conceivably operate in society as just a harmless old man. I also adore the mustache and bushy eyebrows and pointy ears and I think these three are wonderful features to keep on any Dracula design. I'm also very partial to the Hotel Transylvania concept art, even if it makes me incredibly depressed to look at all the great designs they had for Dracula that they threw in the trash because they somehow decided making him look like Adam Sandler was the idea to go with.

I deeply adore What We Do In The Shadows, both the movie and the show, and Jemaine Clement's Vladislav is one of my favorite (maybe even my actual favorite) on-screen Draculas. But I also enjoy Nandor just as much, and I think it's really great that as a character he's completely different from Vlad while also being ostensibly a take on Dracula, and in particular I bring up his Jersey look because "Dracula in common clothing" is a criminally underrated concept for a joke.

As a character, I'm very partial to comedy takes on Dracula that play him up as a decadent aristocratic supervillain, the kind that can get away with talking in third person. I also have this idea for a version of Dracula who dresses ostentatiously in finely-broidered Romanian or Transylvanian patterns, maybe even wearing a rug as a cape, claiming that he's carrying the legacy of his people on his back. And of course he's lying, he's not Vlad Tepes and he's not even Romanian, he is just a parasite pretending to have a history to be proud of, but good luck getting him to admit that. And finally, I'd like this version to be played by Charles Dance, and I consider it a tremendous crime against humanity that he has yet to play Dracula proper even despite being in a film with the character's name on the title.

So that's kinda how I would design a take on Dracula for something more comedic or more based around him as this guest character and personality on-set. Now, if we're talking a more serious version, I think the possibilities increase, and I won't be getting into all of them because I may prefer to keep them to myself, but I'll elaborate a few ideas.

For example, the edition of Dracula I personally own comes with these really scratchy, really creepy B&W illustrations related to the story, that I can't find scanned online so I'm uploading them here so you can look at. They don't necessarily depict the scenes but rather some of the story's moments, like Van Helsing staking Lucy, Renfield in a straightjacket, Dracula as a coachman, and they are more focused on conveying the horror of the concepts at play.

Dracula never looks the same way in any of the illustrations, in fact you kinda have to piece him out of them by trying to find teeth or capes or eyes or bat-features to see where he's hiding this time. In the first, it's the half-man half-bat, in the 2nd, he's the shrieking bat silhouette next to Renfield, and in the latter, he's the gaping jaws and eerily humanoid eyes in the wolf. The effect to me almost feels like if you were to look at a bunch of tv static and then see a humanoid shape form for a split second before everything went back to normal, something like you'd get from Slender Man or other modern creepypastas, and I’ve argued before that Dracula’s form of horror is a very modern one.

In terms of illustrations of Dracula that keep up the original traits while still pulling off horror, I definitely have to hand it to the one at the left of the image above, drawn by regourso on Deviantart (account deleted at present). Going back to Castlevania’s many takes on Dracula, two in particular that stick out to me would be Castlevania: Judgment’s armored dress Dracula, who’s got this great twisted heart/rose motif going on in his outfit, and Dracula’s final form in SOTN where he just sits in his throne and his cape twists into all these monsters, particularly how it’s depicted by witnesstheabsurd’s depiction.

I’m not particularly a fan of how Dracula’s “final form” in these games is usually just some big demon, and part of what I like about his final form in SOTN instead is that, while it’s not a particularly challenging final boss, I do find it interesting the idea of us never actually getting to see what Dracula’s true final form looks like, only an ever-shifting pitch-black torrent of teeth and claws and bloody veins pouring out because that’s ultimately what Dracula is and brings to the world.

On the flip-side of the rotten old monster, we have the charming seductor Dracula, and while I’m really not a fan of how various adaptations have convinced people that “the point” of Dracula is that he’s a seductive force and an allegory for Victorian xenophobia and I’m reeeally even less of a fan of adaptations that make Dracula some misunderstood tragic hero (and I think I’ve made rather violently clear my feelings on interpretations that play up a romance between him and Mina), that the seductive force part exists is impossible to deny, so conversely, while on one hand we can have Dracula as the gargantuan whirlwind of predatory violence, we can also go for Dracula as the tantalizing lover.

I’ve seen a lot of opinions proclaiming Frank Langella as the best Dracula because he was the best at actually being seductive while still playing Dracula, although I haven’t yet seen his performances. If I had to point at one picture I look at and do buy for a second the idea of Dracula as a romantic character, it would be that particular still of Raul Julia in the left of the above image. And it’s strange for me to think of Raul Julia as attractive because I mainly associate him with his brilliant comedy performance of M.Bison (I know it’s far from the highlight of his career but, look, I grew up with Street Fighter, I can’t help it) but those eyes are definitely looking pretty convincing to me, if nothing else.

And I’ve included this still of Sebastian Stan in the right because, during a conversation between me, @krinsbez and @jcogginsa about who could be a good fit for Dracula, jcog suggested Sebastian Stan, partially because he’s Romanian, and I’ve learned recently that Stan was actually interested in playing the character in Blumhouse’s upcoming remake. And you’d think I’d hate this idea considering how much I don’t care for tragic anti-hero Draculas, but who says that’s what he’d have to play?

Do you have any idea how much actors, who are traditionally known for heroic or supporting roles, usually LOVE it when you give them a chance to cut loose as the main villain?

I’d want Sebastian Stan to put all of his charm, all of his talent, all of his good looks and etc, into playing the absolute most vicious, bloodthirsty and irredeemable Dracula put on screen. Someone who is exceedingly, eerily good at being a lovable protagonist, who’s all smiles and charming eyes and politeness mannerisms and maybe even a funny accent, and then it isn't as funny when he's flying through your window intent on kidnapping babies to feed to his brides, except he may take a moment or two to do so because he's feeling pretty hungry himself right now.

Now, admittedly this is kind of a lot to juggle in regards to a single character, which is why my answer for questions like these inevitably has to be “depends on what I’m going for”. That being said, if I was going to try and cast someone who I think could both look the part of Dracula, as well as respectively, play “cartoon aristocrat” Dracula, “mercurial embodiment of evil” Dracula, as well as realistically be an attractive, even seductive performer who can charm viewers even as the character descends into horrible villainy, and juggle these performances even?

I think I’d have to go with Mads Mikkelsen. Not specifically because of Hannibal (I actually haven’t watched it yet), although it’s definitely a factor, the thing that actually made me pick him specifically is, other than his looks, his voice, his reputation for playing sinister characters, the fact that he loves the role and wants to play it, or how many people are deeply in love with this man, or that people already joke that he looks like a vampire, was watching him in Another Round, and specifically that glorious final scene where he’s just dancing to his heart’s content and just, moving with such spring in his step and such joyful vitality even though he’s past his mid-fifties, and that was the moment where, in regards to how much you all love this man, I went

And now I am going to add “casting Mads Mikkelsen as a dancing Dracula” to The List of Reasons Why I Became a Filmmaker.

#replies tag #dracula #horror tag #bram stoker #charles dance #sebastian stan #mads mikkelsen #castlevania #raul julia #wwdits #what we do in the shadows #vladislav #nandor

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theholycovenantrpg · 3 years

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CONGRATULATIONS, MIMZ! YOU’VE BEEN ACCEPTED FOR THE ROLE OF RAPHAEL.

Admin Rosey: I never really thought that Raphael’s application would be so f u n to read. Macabre? Absolutely. Impassioned? Of course. But hilarious to the point where I was giggling? Definitely unexpected but that is what made this so enjoyable and it is ultimately why this application received a r e s o u n d i n g yes from each of us. There was a perspective that I always envisioned for Raphael but was never able to articulate it myself until you laid it out, word by word, with this application, Mimz. Raphael is such a multi-faceted and character that holds so much potential, and the way that you wove it into every aspect of the application made this so fun to read. Thank you so much for taking the time to produce such a wonderful application! Your faceclaim change to Kendrick Sampson has been approved. Please create and send in your account, review the information on our CHECKLIST, and follow everyone on the FOLLOW LIST. Welcome to the Holy Land!

OUT OF CHARACTER

Alias

mimz

Age

Personal Pronouns

she/her

Activity Level

i’ll typically check the dash every day, and i try not to keep replies stewing for longer than a couple of days! that said i can be a little slow, especially around exam seasons.

Timezone

pst

Triggers

REMOVED

How did you find the group?

miss minnie bleubeard’s blog

IN CHARACTER

Character

raphael, with a fc change to kendrick sampson

What drew you to this character?

short answer: divine amorality sexy HAHAHAHA

long answer: there was something i read a little while ago about some of the best surgeons being able to dehumanize their patients to a rather frightening degree. there’s a level of abstraction that you need in order to not let your empathy get in the way of the practice of medicine; ultimately, a body is a body is a body, right? and then there’s the moral quandary of healing - it is a doctor’s duty to heal, but what does that actually mean? to what extent is a doctor’s duty to relieve suffering? to obstinately prolong life? if the body heals but the mind still ails, is a person healed? what i’m getting at, here, is that in some ways the healer is the most dangerous character of all.

when i read raphael’s bio, there was a quote in that article from a surgeon named david cheever that came to mind: “as a result of anaesthetics, the surgeon ‘need not hurry; he need not sympathise; he need not worry; he can calmly dissect, as on a dead body.’” to me, raphael is an explosion and expansion of this concept. raphael is, quite literally, a medical ethicist’s worst nightmare, and to me, that’s absolutely fascinating. without sympathy, what separates a healer from an educated control freak with a god complex? with raphael, we can extend this concept to its furthest extreme. raphael isn’t even human - how could he even begin to sympathize with an experience so foreign to him? why would he worry about something trivial as human suffering when it essentially exists as a theoretical concept to him? divine beings have no reason to play by human rules, and as a creature raised by god’s side raphael was so far removed from the concept of human suffering that it’s sort of a no-brainer that he developed a sick fascination with it, like a child who managed to con their parent into buying a grand theft auto game and is obsessed with running over pedestrians because the stakes never quite feel real. it’s a perspective i’d absolutely love to explore in a group rp setting because the nature of rp means that it’s kind of...completely unsustainable? like as writers we’re shoving these characters together, which means that raphael will have to be exposed to mortals. there’s room for a lot of character development there, and it seems like something extremely interesting to explore.

BUT HERE’S THE THING⁠—and this is where the character gets really fun, in my opinion. i’ve talked a fair bit about god complexes already, but when applied to raphael an interesting question is raised: how much is a complex, and how much of it is actually being divine? what really made me want to get my grubby little hands on the reins of raphael’s story was seeing the disconnect between the way his connections are written from raphael’s perspective versus the other character’s perspective. it’s a fun little hubristic shade that makes him an unreliable narrator and infinitely more interesting than a simple morality thought experiment. i think it’s easy to see raphael as this super cool, all-powerful master manipulator (i think that’s a pretty accurate take on his self-image, in fact), but he’s not the only player in this game. for every pawn he’s trying to move, there is someone else trying to use him in a similar way, and i don’t know that he truly understands the ramifications of that. see, i think it’s easy to reduce raphael to the points i discuss in the previous paragraphs because that’s what he wants you to think of him. but this is a world of gods and superpowers and magical political intrigue and game of thrones doesn’t exist so nobody can tell him that he’s on the path to becoming a cersei lannister (admittedly i haven’t watched got so this reference might not be right but i feel like it’s right so uh. yeah!). maybe i just like to see arrogant men getting knocked down a peg? this might be a projection of that. i dunno. i just know that there are quite a few mind games and mental gymnastics to untangle with raphael and that’s fun. he’s fun.

also. i would like to once again reiterate: divine amorality sexy. it’s not good, to be clear, and i don’t condone it, but i’m just saying.

What future plots do you have in mind for the character?

WHEN THE CITY CRUMBLES AROUND YOU AND YOU HOLD ITS VESTIGES IN YOUR HANDS, WHOM DO YOU BLAME?

i think Raphael’s big character arc revolves around a simple question: how far are you willing to go to achieve what you want?

ostensibly, it’s an easy answer: very far. but when your desire is antithetical to your very purpose, when chasing it puts you at odds with the thing you’ve worked to build, do the goalposts move?

(the correct answer is that raphael did not build caelum. he simply destroyed god.)

let’s say, hypothetically, that raphael gets what he wants. the world is thrown into war and chaos and destruction, yadda yadda, raphael gets his blood and his suffering, great. he’s lived through this before (a couple times, actually), so you think he’d realize by now—eventually, the dust will settle. people will tire of suffering. and where will that leave raphael? how many times will you remake the world to watch it burn? can you ever be fulfilled chasing a temporary high?

(the correct answer is no, but raphael is an immortal being. more importantly, he is a patient one. he will wait a million days for rome to be built, if only to witness the single day in which it will burn.)

i think raphael needs to reckon with these questions. i think he’s lived far too long with his mentality unquestioned and that has made him both insufferable and a major threat to society. this is a long and pretentious way to say that raphael honestly kind of needs a hobby whatever the thc-verse equivalent of therapy is, but i think any sort of positive character development is contingent upon a recontextualization of suffering and chaos and raphael’s masks.

of course, this isn’t to say that introspection will only lead to positive character development. perhaps a raphael who looks deeper into his psyche will come to understand that his desires outweigh his role; perhaps such thoughts will push raphael over the edge of propriety and into something more outwardly despicable. no matter what, though, i think that the direction of raphael’s character development will be largely shaped on how he decides to prioritize his⁠ roles and goals.

FOR WHOM DO THESE HANDS HEAL?

let’s discuss the archangels, shall we? despite it all, raphael genuinely loves his brothers. i would argue, even, that raphael believes that his scheming is in service to the other archangels; he’s not blind to the way complacency has softened the angels. at this point, the only true threat to the angels is themselves—if michael wants to to unlock a state of sanctifying grace, it will happen at the hand of one of his kin.

i spoke earlier about raphael’s goals ultimately being futile. this is largely because they are diametrically opposed to michael and gabriel’s goals, and while raphael knows this intellectually, i don’t think he’s quite thought about what the long-term implications of that conflict entails. he’s so caught up in the conflict between michael and gabriel that he’s neglected to consider how he factors into the dynamic. could he be the common ground that brings michael and gabriel together? could he be the final straw that breaks them apart? he is excited for the fighting, the fallout; but has he stopped to consider what the long-reaching effects of such a rift may be?

raphael is breaking his family apart because he loves them. will that be enough, when he is sent to pick up the pieces? whose side will he fall on, if he is to pick a side at all?

DID PYGMALION FALL IN LOVE WITH THE BEAUTY OF HIS CREATION, OR THE BEAUTY HE CREATED?

i said this in the previous section but i’d like to reiterate it: i think a big reason raphael is Like That is because the stakes have never quite felt real to him. raphael’s a pot stirrer, but he’s not a creature of action. to this, i say give him real stakes. to be honest, i don’t know exactly what that entails, because i could see a number of ways in which tangible pressure manifests itself for raphael. perhaps his meddling with michael and gabriel steps too far, and his brothers perhaps the angels become suspicious of his maneuvering, in which the spider is drawn into his own web of intrigue. maybe we apply positive pressure, where the ails of the world require a healer and raphael is tapped to higher purpose⁠—and higher power. maybe raphael will find himself tempted by the very demons he holds in contempt.

the point is that raphael has largely been a character who acts through others. even now, we see this through his grooming of romilda, with his subtle manipulation of michael and gabriel. i want him to become a more active character, either by his own volition or by his hand being forced.

similarly, i’m extremely interested in seeing how raphael navigates the political elements of this verse. i expect it stings a bit to be the only archangel not given a position of leadership; perhaps he holds lingering resentment toward zadkiel for being given a role raphael had expected to receive. does he subtly undermine zadkiel’s leadership? i want to watch him play up tensions with the vices, to hide a vicious war-hawk perspective under the guise of a concerned healer. i want him to smile in abaddon and samael’s faces and plot their suffering in his mind. i want to see the snake slither in the grass, to return to his original form as a spider spinning a web of intrigue across his court. yes, i want a more active raphael, but i think the political drama is ripe for development, as well.

WHEN I SPIT UP MY SINS AND BEG FOR REPENTANCE, WHAT WILL COME UP?

this one’s a long shot, but i could maybe...see...raphael……..falling. i can guarantee you that the idea has never even crossed raphael’s mind, and that he would literally rather be smited than be cast out of caelum, but i can see it. i think he might be happier, actually; if he fell, he could really lean into the chaos and suffering thing without any compunction.

of course, this is something infinitely easier said than done. were raphael to be cast out of caelum, he would have nowhere to go. infernum would never take him⁠—he’s made far too many enemies among their ranks. he could wander the holy land, but he’s far too proud to bind himself to its existing social systems. (he wouldn’t be able to look gabriel in the eye.)

raphael would have absolutely nothing.

but he would also be free.

that’s right, i think that a horsemen-style liberation arc would be an absolute banger for raphael. again, i don’t think it’s feasible unless a very specific set of circumstances happen, but just imagine a raphael with nothing to lose, free to go absolutely apeshit. his only prerogative is to make sure you have a bad day. he is free to sow whatever chaos, whatever suffering he so wishes across the land. WHEW.

Are you comfortable with killing off your character?

yes, but i don’t see him going down easily.

IN DEPTH

Driving Character Motivation

entomological curiosity, in short. consider: why did god leave the apple in the garden of eden? why do humans keep animals in glass cases? why do children burn ants with magnifying glasses?

raphael wants to observe the world. a good healer must understand his patients at a fundamental level, and such truths are only revealed when the subject is broken down to its basest parts. you see, raphael was weaned on temperance and virtue; there is a lush decadence to emotional extremes that he finds most fascinating. they are debased. they are crass. they are wantonly sentimental, in a garishly beautiful way.

but this is not all. he wants to stave off boredom, and these are the tools he has to play with. for all of his machinations, raphael is a simple being. raphael has no grand ambitions, no lofty ideals, and that is what makes him so dangerous. he wants to be amused. he wants to be stimulated. he wants to observe a world in which things happen.

ostensibly, this is not as selfish a motivation as it may seem. as a healer, raphael knows something that many do not: serenity cannot exist in perpetuity. it is impossible for the world to remain unchanged⁠—even if the change is not evident, it is happening. an eternal peace is all but a stagnation of the kingdom; the only thing stagnation breeds is degradation. the angels are weakening because they are not being challenged. michael and the virtues may be doing extensive research to find an alternate explanation, but raphael knows this to be the truth.

of course, the irony underlying the selfless explanation of raphael’s motivations reveals the truth of the matter: it is a farce. perhaps it is a lie that raphael has even convinced himself he believes, but it is farcical nonetheless. raphael claims he wants to invoke change because stagnation is dangerous, but riddle me this⁠—if this is true, why has raphael never changed? centuries upon centuries have passed, and the world has changed around him, but raphael himself has remained largely unchanged. he is the orchestrator of change, not its agent nor its subject, and that is just the way he would like things to stay.

Character Traits

CHARISMATIC - there’s a reason very few have cottoned on to raphael’s true nature, and it’s not (just) his pretty face and magical girl-esque aura. there’s something effortlessly captivating about raphael, a pace to his cadence that has you hanging on to his every word, a lightness to his smile that makes you want to coax it out whenever and however you can. everything about raphael puts people at ease, except for his eyes, which tend to put people on edge if he’s not careful. he’s not gregarious or the outgoing sort of charismatic by any means, but he does manage to exude an overwhelming charisma.

PATIENT - it’s important to remember that before raphael turned on god, he waited for him. raphael performed healings for centuries and never raised a hand against his father in that time. think of all the angels that fell, that rebelled; raphael was not among them. no, raphael played the dutiful son, allowing his resentment to fester and boil deep underneath his skin, but never to surface. for centuries he served loyally, biding his time. remember: lucifer fell. raphael did not. which one killed god? as i mentioned in the plot section, raphael will wait a million days for rome to be built to witness the single day it burns. prolonged suffering is perhaps the most beautiful of all. fortitude goes hand-and-hand with patience.

INTELLIGENT - in a few ways. raphael is well-studied, with extensive knowledge of biology and chemistry and history and politics. raphael is emotionally intelligent; he hides his true nature behind a veneer constructed to meet expectations. he may not be as talented as gabriel in this regard, but it is a skillful construction nonetheless.

MANIPULATIVE - i mean. yeah.

ARROGANT - he thinks he’s smarter than god???????????????? tbf god was a bit of a headass in this universe but we’ve all read enough tragedies to know where this kind of hubris ends up going.

CRUEL - there’s a bit to unpack here. i’d argue that there are two types of cruelty: malicious cruelty and callous cruelty. raphael is certainly capable of both, but i think he embodies the latter. with certain notable exceptions, raphael’s cruelty is rarely personal; it is a thoughtless sort of cruelty, the type inflicted upon beings considered expendable. raphael is selfish and petty and powerful, and these traits coalesce into a casual cruelty.

In-Character Para Sample cw: light gore

Look at how they look at him. God’s good little lambs, lined up all in a row, passive and pliant and patiently awaiting benediction. Patiently waiting for Raphael.

Raphael hates them.

No. This is false. It is difficult for Raphael to muster up stronger feelings toward mortals than a vague sort of amusement, the sort of affinity one might have for a particularly stupid kit when it does something surprisingly clever. In this regard, he understands that he differs from his kin. Gabriel, in particular, has developed a particular fondness for the mortals. Why anyone would wish to strip mortals of their most fascinating behavior⁠—to the point of openly defying their Father⁠—is beyond Raphael. He has given up on trying to reason with his brother on the matter.

The first supplicant is beckoned forward. They pray to the Lord and Raphael touches their forehead with one palm, cups their chin with the other. His fingers splay carelessly around a throat all but bared to him and the ceremony is so mechanical Raphael allows his thoughts to wander⁠.

How easy it would be to tighten his grip. How beautiful it would be, to watch the lamb’s naive adoration flash into fear, to watch fear darken into betrayal and resentment and the most beautiful emotion of all: despair. He can feel the pulse at his fingertips. It would quicken in a stress response, he knows. It would quicken, then it would pound, and then maybe it would stop. It all falls to Raphael’s whim. In this moment, Raphael holds their life in his hands. They have all but laid on his sword for the promise of absolution and when they look up at Raphael with their dumb, trusting eyes he can see the sparkling tracks where tears once fell, down the hollow of a cheek into the pool of a collarbone. He finds himself overcome with the desire to trace the fall with his tongue. “Give me your pain,” he murmurs. Let me taste it. Let me understand.

He takes it. He does not taste it. He does not understand.

He releases the mortal. Those beautiful tear tracks are already fading. “The Lord be with you,” he says, and perhaps he even means it. His Father’s gaze burns into his back, even from a world away. He’d laugh at the irony, were he free to. Is this the weight you so desire? he wants to ask the devotee. No, Raphael knows the truth: God’s love is a shackle. God’s love is a leash and it is holding Raphael back from his fullest potential.

“And also with you,” the lamb responds. Their head is bowed obediently in prayer and they shuffle away, appropriately awed. The next supplicant is beckoned forward.

The light of Raphael’s presence obfuscates the darkness in his eyes.

—

Later, much later, Raphael finds himself studying his hands. He flexes them, balls them into fists, stretches his fingers as far as they will spread.

How easy it would be to tighten his grip.

The hand is at once an individual unit and a summation of individual parts. The hand contains twenty-seven bones and thirty-four muscles connected by over a hundred ligaments and tendons. Wrists connect to metacarpals, which connect to carpals, which taper off into delicate phalanges. Individually, each of these parts are largely useless; were Raphael to take a scalpel and drag it through a tendon, across the joints, the strings would be cut and the puppetry would cease to dance. You would be left with a small pile of carpals and metacarpals and phalanges, loose strings of muscle and tendon. At times, it is difficult to fathom how such mundane component parts are the instruments of extraordinary acts.

Raphael flexes his hand, watches bone shift under skin. If he remembers correctly, mortals have an idiom about knowing your hands, or something along those lines. He will not pretend to be familiar with mortal culture. Did you know that, wings aside, mortals and angels all have the same bone structure?

Of course you did. It is common knowledge that God made all beings in His image, or so the story goes.

This is an easy answer, but one with interesting implications. Let us extrapolate. If mortals and angels are essentially biological mirrors, and each are made in the image of God, does that mean that God will bleed like His creations? Slide a scalpel across God’s knuckles—will His puppets cease to dance?

Raphael could find out. It would take only a single blade, sliced through a single tendon.

Now, Raphael is not so arrogant to believe himself the blade. He would not even consider himself the hand. Such a role requires a particular kind of conviction—

( —and that sort of conviction is made manifest in bitter disillusionment⁠—the sort inflicted upon Michael. How easy it would be to find himself in his brother’s ear, whispering of their Father’s capriciousness and the unnecessary cruelty that resulted for the poor, poor humans— )

( —and that sort of conviction is made manifest in righteous anger⁠—the sort inflicted upon Gabriel. How easy it would be to find himself in his brother’s ear, whispering of their Father’s neglect and the unnecessary cruelty that resulted for the poor, poor humans— )

( —and that sort of conviction is made manifest in a whetted hunger⁠—the sort God gifted to each of His angels. Hunger breeds hunters and heaven is full— )

—that Raphael simply cannot embody. Rage has never been his forte.

Consider, however, that the hand is controlled by nerve impulses. A spark is all the hand needs to transform from a collection of bone to an agent of action. Yes. He clenches his fists. Here are the bones, the veins, the tendons, the muscle. Angels and mortals all share the same bone structure.

Does God?

Extras

pinterest.

raphael has classically beautiful wings. i’m talking TEXTBOOK cherubic angel wings, with the sweeping white feathers and all. raphael kind of hates them, though he takes a great deal of pride in them.

raphael doesn’t have a signature weapon. he’s proficient with blades, yes, and fights with a surgeon’s precision, not the strongest nor the fastest but eerily efficient in his blows. but he is a healer—at the end of the day, his empty hands are all he needs. (his empty hands are what you should fear.)

raphael hates the heretics pro forma but. but. he cannot deny a certain...fondness for them. the heretics exhibited such dedication to a futile cause; they believed their suffering to be something noble. it’s a laughable notion, certainly, but a sentiment so distinctly human it’s almost charming. should they wish to return, to throw themselves on the knife over and over and over, well. raphael shall not complain. he shall smile beatifically, perhaps abate their suffering, even⁠—and watch them do it again.

in a modern au, raphael is a reality tv producer. ok actually he’s probably a surgeon but i think he’d make a very good reality tv producer. alternately, there is a universe out there where raph fixated on like...baking, or k-pop, instead of suffering. those are good timelines, i think. maybe not the k-pop stan timeline.

raphael is the living embodiment of that dwight schrute “we need a new plague” meme.

#accepted #accepted: raphael

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irandrura · 4 years

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More detailed, spoiler-full thoughts on Xenoblade Chronicles 2:

One of the things that always fascinates me, when I compare JRPGs and WRPGs, is the sorts of conflicts they’re interested in, or the sorts of questions they ask. XC2 is yet another example of a JRPG that asks a question that simply never seems to arise in Western games. That question is: is there an ethical basis for the world’s existence? Is there a justification for the world continuing to be? Is existence, being, even a good thing at all?

XC2 is fascinated by this question, and even by the more narrow questions of “is it a good thing for humans to exist?” or “is it a good thing for people in general to exist?” It takes these questions very seriously, to the extent that characters who firmly conclude “no” are treated as sympathetic antagonists, rather than madmen.

Western games only rarely raise similar questions. Every now and then you get a madman in Fallout who thinks humanity is a scourge and should be replaced by some other race, or the likes of Archaon in Warhammer, who seeks to destroy the world because the gods demand it – but these characters are generally not treated sympathetically, and very little time is spent refuting them. Of course you stop the guy who wants to destroy the human race. What, you need a reason? Here’s one: you’re human, so are people you care about, end of story. There’s not much to engage with there. In the likes of Skyrim, when Arngeir suggests that maybe the right thing to do is to allow the world to be destroyed, the player’s response is incredibly perfunctory. “I like the world. All my stuff is here.” What more could you possibly need?

But justifying existence seems like a more central question to JRPGs. Not only XC2, but if I think back to, say, Final Fantasy X, or Final Fantasy VII, or Final Fantasy VI, or, well, half the games in that entire series, a frankly bizarre amount of time is spent arguing with nihilists who believe that the world and/or the human race should be destroyed, because... um, suffering exists, or the world is meaningless, or people are awful, take your pick.

My usual approach is to just attribute these differences to religion. The West is deeply influenced by the Abrahamic tradition, in which God creates the world and pronounces it good. There can be no real question of whether existence is good or not. To even ask the question is blasphemy. This instinct now seems so deeply-rooted that even atheists, who outwardly reject all religion, just take it as read that existence is a good thing. By contrast, Japan still has a historical Buddhist influence, and Buddhism is much more skeptical of the value of being. If you could destroy samsara... would you? Is the goal of the spiritual life to escape, to obtain release from the shackles of the world? The Buddhist tradition contains significantly greater ambivalence towards the world.

In XC2’s case, I think it’s a little more complicated, because XC2, like XC1, is heavily influenced by Gnosticism. I am far from the first person to suggest a similarity between Christian Gnosticism and Buddhism, of course, but here I think the Christian imagery comes to the fore. Klaus is a demiourgos, the Architect of this world, standing in the place of God despite not being truly divine himself. This flawed creator goes on to let loose his own trinity – Ontos, Logos, and Pneuma; Being, Word, and Spirit – but nonetheless is full of regret, unsure as to the value of the world he has tried to build. God himself is not visible; only this broken man trying to fill in for God. Even he is not convinced of the world’s goodness!

(And while we’re on the topic of Christian imagery, yes, I know, Pyra and Mythra’s core crystal is cross-shaped, and Pyra is symbolically crucified like four times in the plot, it’s not subtle.)

But to step away from religion for a moment and look back at specific characters...

What drives most of the central characters of XC2 is, initially at least, the desire to cease. Amalthus believes that the world is nothing but a vale of tears, and regards the world with little but hate and disgust. Malos is corrupted by Amalthus’ hate and believes that justice requires the world be destroyed. Jin is driven mad by the cruelty of the world, comes to hate the Architect and seek to destroy him. Even Pyra, our ostensible heroine, wants to reach Elysium in order to beg the Architect for permission to commit suicide and cease to be.

As such, the heart of the story of XC2 is responding to all this with, “No! Life is worth living!”

It seems like such a banal message. If anything, it’s doubly so because the game’s protagonist, Rex, is the most relentlessly optimistic and upbeat person in the world. Rex is the sort of person who’ll respond to all the above with an innocent, “Well, that’s how life is, you know? You’ve gotta take the good with the bad.” He has no darkness in him at all. Even Shulk, who was a total sweetie-pie, was willing to go on a quest to flat-out kill someone for revenge. Rex is truly a beautiful cinnamon roll, too good for this world, too pure. Heck, one of his lines in battle is a completely unironic “We’ll beat them with the power of friendship!”

That’s one of the odd things, for me. Rex himself does not struggle with inner darkness, or with anything I’d recognise as suicidal tendencies or depression. He searches for an answer to justify the world to Malos, but ultimately doesn’t come up with anything more coherent than, “There are wonderful, valuable things in this world, and I believe people can change, and I know that you once believed that too!” This isn’t a story where Rex finds a substantive answer to the question, or one that would satisfy a philosopher. Rather, he ‘solves’ the puzzle through sheer force of will. He ends up convincing the Architect that the world has merit not through anything he says, but through what he does – through his selfless optimism and belief in other people.

Just as Amalthus and Jin concluded the world needs to die not because of philosophy, but because of traumatic personal experience, Rex concludes the world needs to live because of positive, uplifting personal experience. The answer to the dark impulse that would destroy the world is to point to positive relationships within it, even in the lives of the people trying to destroy it: Mikhail and Patroka, or even Jin and Malos, have genuine friendships. (The moment where Malos stops to hug Jin, even as he heads off to destroy the world, is surprisingly touching.)

On one level this really works. It fits surprisingly well with the overall Christian themes: the answer to “why should the world exist?” is “loving relationships”. Pyra’s answer, in fact, is “I love this world because you’re in it.”

On another level, it feels a touch disappointing, if only because it means the climax of the game is just a reiteration of what the player’s been hearing for the past fifty hours: yes, love and friendship and bonds are good things!

Where Xenoblade 2 works, I think for me, is where the specifics of the relationships feel powerful enough to make those clichés feel fresh. The game’s world sets up a number of reasons to despair (the world is slowly dying, the titans are dying, people are warring over the declining and limited resources, etc.) and then sets up a lot of obstacles to relationship (the Blades, immortal, but having their memories wiped every time their closest friends die, feel quite tragic), and then shows love and friendship perpetually overcoming them. The game’s strongest moments are those where, at a point of despair, somehow love saves the day again. Chapter seven stands out here: both the moment where Nia reveals her true identity, and where Rex practically raises Pyra from the dead by standing over her body and talking about how much he believes in her. Naturally, then, the game ends on the emotional high of the entire playable cast flying off into the sunset, looking fond of each other, Pyra and Mythra’s miraculous return, and the closing line: And thus, boy met girl. Like any good love story, it works only if you buy into the characters’ emotions.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2, summarised: “Should you commit suicide? No, because love.”

Now that said, two other random observations:

In the first Xenoblade, I really disliked the Klaus twist at the end. It felt like it came out of nowhere, required a large exposition dump, and didn’t add much to the plot. For me, the first Xenoblade felt pretty much entirely downhill after the defeat of Metal Face. Xenoblade 2 still has more-or-less the same backstory with Klaus, but here I thought it was contextualised much better and was more effective. The revelation that the Architect is the torn remains of an ancient scientist, trying to rebuild the world from scraps but now half-given up on the whole project as a waste, feels like it fits much better with the world that we explored.

Xenoblade 2’s world always felt somewhat artificial, and from the very start of the game it was evident that there was a previous world before this one. There’s something beneath the Cloud Sea, and whatever it might be, it was evidently once technologically advanced. Making Rex a salvager was a good move to emphasise that, and the way that so much of the world’s economy depends on salvaging the ruins beneath the sea reinforces the sense of the world as being in decay. The Architect is mentioned at the start of the game, so you know that the world was made or at least modified by someone for an unclear purpose, and the World Tree is mysterious enough. So when later in the game you do go below the Cloud Sea and discover the remains of ancient cities, and then find that within the World Tree is an advanced scientific installation, it doesn’t feel like it came out of nowhere. Indeed, the final revelation – that ages ago a scientist accidentally destroyed the world in an experiment, and this is his imperfect attempt to fix it – feels both like a genuine discovery, but also something that, well, makes sense. Of course it was that. Of course! That explains so much about why Alrest is the way it is.

The second observation is... okay, so, XC1 and XC2 are in continuity, that’s all good. How does XCX fit in, if it does at all? I was a bit disappointed when Klaus’ flashback mentioned ‘Saviorites’ attacking the experimental station. Who are they? I wanted to assume that Klaus’ experiment was some sort of cutting-edge secret research immediately before the Ganglion attacked at the start of XCX. That way the aliens attack and start to destroy the Earth, in a panic Klaus tries to accelerate his experiment, hoping he can use the power of the Conduit to save the world, he screws up and ends up splitting the Earth off into two parallel dimensions, creating the worlds of XC1 and XC2, and meanwhile the survivors of Earth in the home dimension escape on their Ark Ships and go and do XCX. That would fit all three games together pretty elegantly, and Conduit-related weirdness might also help explain what the heck is up with Mira in XCX.

But there doesn’t seem to have been any room left for that, so I guess XCX is a completely different continuity? That just... also contains Nopon, who for some reason have heard of Shulk and the Monado? Who knows?

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teaandgames · 4 years

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The Summer of Demos

As summer gets into its stride and the heat begins to rise, it’s nice to know that Steam at least is looking out for us. It started a Steam Game Festival this month, full of demos to try. I had a flick through the pages and picked up six, mostly at random, to try. It’s quite a mixed bag so I thought I’d give my thoughts. First up is…

Ghostrunner

Not sure what the ghost part of Ghostrunner is going to turn out to be (presumably the protagonist or the big scary face at the end of it) but I’ll be damned if it didn’t feel like the ghost of Mirror’s Edge. Five seconds in and I was wallrunning all over the place. It felt pretty good, particularly as you can naturally chain together wallruns. It was pretty satisfying to jump, wallrun and then slash.

Speaking of slashing, the combat is pretty nifty too. Despite being first person and full of parkour, the thing it reminds me of most is Hotline Miami. You die in one hit but so do your foes, so it’s a case of getting your sword to flesh before your robotic bodice is riddled with bullets. Parkour plays a big part in that, as enemies are firing flashy futuristic bullets that move a little slow, plus you can slow things down even more while in the air. You can even dodge left and right, which is a bit funky.

It presents a pretty nice image of a man firing desperately at a blur only to be sliced into ribbons. Rather perplexingly though, you can only use this power while in the air. That leads to a lot of bunny hopping in combat, particularly when more than one opponent is in the mix. What doesn’t help is the rather drab level design. It’s cyberpunk but in the Hard Reset way of being set in rather dull surroundings. Hopefully that’s just confined to the demo and things get a bit more interesting in the main game. Ghostrunner Developer: One More Level, 3D Realms, Slipgate Ironworks Release Date: 2020

For The People

Bit of an odd one this one. For The People puts you into the shoes of a politician who’s just been installed as the mayor of an eastern bloc city called Iron-1. As you might expect, it’s an old industrial town that’s fallen on hard times, mostly due to the previous mayor's actions. It’s your role to bring it back up to code, especially now that the party is going through some restructuring. While I doubt our new mayor’s role is entirely voluntary, he seems to take it in good spirits.

His day is a busy one. He starts off sitting down with lobbyists from various sectors of the city: police, firemen, health, etc. Of course, budgets are not going to stretch to shoring up all of them so your first being decision is who gets the bucks. I went with the police - figuring that they’d be good to have on my side - and the fire service. Because a burned down city is not worth being a mayor of. After that, you make a number of smaller decisions each day about where to divert funding, whether to allow this or that and general decisions that keep things ticking over.

It’s a promising start but For The People is very rough around the edges. The translation from Russian isn’t foolproof, for example, leading to many awkward sentences and others that straight up don’t make sense. It’s a little worrying to see in a demo, which is after all supposed to sell your game. Hopefully they get a bit of cash to spend on the localisation aspect. It also has a few design issues, for one thing it’s hard to tell who’s speaking at times. The art style - being the requisite grey - also doesn’t excite much. The cutscenes are done in an odd, drawn-by-hand style that doesn’t quite fit. Interesting premise, wonky execution it looks like. For the People Developer: Brezg Studio Publisher: 101XP Release Date: 2020

INMOST

If you’ve followed me for any length of time then you’ll have noticed that I’m a pretty pretentious guy and so tend to navigate towards pretentious games. Truth is, I very rarely have any idea what they’re on about. I feel like that’s going to be the case with INMOST, a game ostensibly about loss but is mainly full of scary black goo monsters. In its defense though, it is doing a lot more with itself than throwing around goo.

It opens with a girl escaping a room. She falls out of a grate and hobbles her way to the front door, while light bursts through the room behind her. Then, before we know it, we’re in the shoes of a bloke exploring a goo-filled nightmare world. At one point we see him as an old man, hobbling down steps and petting cats. What’s going on? Who knows. But I do know it’s genuinely unnerving. Both in setting and because of the weird things that happen. Like the spindly bloke with a mask for a face. Didn’t enjoy my time with him.

The INMOST demo doesn’t give too much away but it seems to juggling quite a few balls. We end the demo playing as a bloke with a sword and grappling hook, which was rather unexpected. Presumably it all ties together and, I must admit, it does have me rather hooked. The platforming, however, is a bit awkward. You jump in a fairly rigid arc, which led to a lot of trial and error when trying to navigate the heavily goo filled levels. Still, I imagine in a title like this, we’re in more for the atmosphere than for the sick jumps. INMOST Developer: Hidden Layer Games Publisher: Chucklefish Release Date: 2020

Hello Guest

You know it didn’t click for a long time that this is meant to be a companion game of sorts to Hello Neighbour, a game about breaking into our neighbours house to find out what’s in the basement. I’ve not played that game but it did explain why Hello Guest has some impressive visuals to it for an alpha. It’s even got an intro cutscene where our doofus protagonist clocks into his job as night watchman at an abandoned amusement park. It may not seem like a necessary job but apparently everyone hates this park.

Your job is to patrol around scaring away the masked vandals who will drop down into the park with the express mission of kicking it to pieces. They must’ve made the stands out of the ends of matches because they burst into flames real quick. You basically have to jog around with your torch and flashlight, scaring them away and using your paycheck to buy more supplies. All the while avoiding the creepy beak man who runs around the park. He’s your biggest threat and where the horror comes from.

It’s a self-learning AI, supposedly, so the more you chase him away the smarter he gets. Certainly, he got better at hiding from me, culminating in a moment where I placed a camera, checked the screen and just got the chance to see him tearing up behind me. Sounds nice but the truth is that I really don’t find Hello Guest scary. It could be the screechy, static-like sound that bird boy emits - ensuring you know his location at all times - or it could be that the core gameplay loop is just kinda dull. It’s a midnight stroll full of booting vandals and staring at birdboy. I ended up rather bored, I’m afraid. Hello Guest Developer: tinyBuild Release date: Unknown

Touch Type Tale

I went into Touch Type Tale with a huge amount of skepticism. It billed itself as a typing-based RTS and that was a strange marriage to me. RTS games require you to think of about three things at once and the mouse is the perfect conduit for that. Quick click and you’re done. Typing is a more laborious process and requires you to think about the word. I’ll be damned if it doesn’t work though. So well that it’s the only one of these games that I added straight to my wishlist.

Touch Type Tale’s missions are split between resource gathering and battling. To gather resources you have to head to the mine, start your cart and then type out the words on the veins. Then you gotta type more words to hire workers or sew the farms to make money during the night. All while the enemy is bearing down on you. So you better type up some barracks. There’s a lot to do but Touch Type Tale simplifies things. The only resource is money and troops build automatically once you have enough cash. That simplification allows you to keep on top of things.

Warfare is similarly streamlined. Once you have your guys, you type the word on the road you want them to go to. Pitched warfare really racks up your words-per-minute as you coordinate your front line while trying to get reinforcements on the move too. Units such as cavalry also bring in flanking bonuses, so you can split troops up for the pincer movement. For such an original premise, Pumpernickel Studio seemed to have pulled it off rather well. It’s even got an interesting plot, though things like writing polish and voice acting are still waiting for completion. They’ve got time. I’ll be waiting!

Oh and this is quite possibly the pettiest gripe I’ve ever indulged but the title to me is so dry. It’s a bit too on the nose. Better to have an exciting title as the bait and the intriguing core mechanic as the hook. Touch Type Tale Developer: Pumpernickel Studios Release Date: 2020

Trepang2

Now I know every person who played the Trepang2 demo said the same thing but I’ll add my voice to the crowd: it really does feel like F.E.A.R. Whether or not you found F.E.A.R scary, you have to admit it had pretty sexy gunplay. Bullets felt like they propper impact both on the enemies and on you. Not many games really captured that after F.E.A.R - at least ones where you weren’t fighting demons. The Trepang2 demo does it pretty well, with a reasonable selection of guns to do it with. I love the shotgun, I love it a lot.

It also has the slow-mo gimmick from F.E.A.R which is just as fun here, especially combined with the fact that you can grab people to use as human shields. Add in the cloaking mechanic and boy you have some good gunplay. Go invisible, sneak behind a guy and grab him as your human shield then slow mo. Shoot all of his friends at your leisure, with the measly few bullets they can get out thudding into your human shield. Then, when you’re done, snap your meatshield’s neck and go about your day. Nice.

Unfortunately, the gunplay really is all the demo has going for it. It’s set in boring, white painted rooms for the most part, with very little divergence unless you count a few offices. It feels like it’s been constructed entirely out of stock assets, which doesn’t give me much hope for the full game. Nor does the enemy AI at the moment, which often has bad guys staring into walls, snappable necks exposed, or bundled up on a door. It also, at one point, pulls a hallucination section out of its arse which also worries me. I hope it doesn’t fly too close to F.E.A.R. Trepang2 Developer: Trepang Studios Release Date: TBD

Well that’s the demo round-ups and honestly, it was (mostly) all good. I’m more excited for some than others but it’s good to know that, despite everything going on, there is still a lot of talent doing good work out there.

#Trepang2 #Touch Type Tale #Hello Guest #INMOST #For the People #Ghostrunner #Demo #Steam #Article #Gaming #Games #Video Games #Tea and Video Games

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mentalmimosa · 6 years

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the here and now

Prompt: Established relationship when one person gets amnesia and forgets everything until just before they started dating. Prompt from this generator.

“You were somebody before you met me, you know.”

Steve blinks up at him, doe-eyed and serious. “I have to take your word for that.”

“God, Steve, you can’t...you can’t be fucking serious with this. You can’t.” There’s a clutch around Tony’s heart, like a chestbuster, like ten seconds from now he’s gonna go John Hurt all over his nice, shiny clean sheets. “There has to be something--!”

“I’ve been lying here for an hour knocking marbles around in my head, Tone. Believe me, if there were anything left, any memories of me before you, I’d have found them.”

This is the thing about dating Captain America, about being head over heels stupid in love: the man is calm about everything, takes all but injustice in stride. Hell, Tony gets wound up when they’re out of blonde roast coffee, or when JARVIS gets a little too snide; there are a lot of things he can handle in the moment that might make other humans go weak in the needs, but the little everyday hiccups that have nothing to do with good, evil, or world domination? Those jack Tony’s anxiety up to the max.

But Steve? Steve freaking Rogers, Mr. Star-Spangled Shorts himself? It take a hell of a lot to get him riled up, to get him well and truly freaked. The last time Tony saw him well and truly bugged out was after Clint insisted they all watch The Exorcist, because Clint is an idiot with a thing for the '70s devil oeuvre. Tony had seen in middle school (long story) and after one too many scotches, had slept through most of the thing curled up in Steve’s lap, ignoring Nat’s derisive whoops and Banner’s nervous attempts to science himself out of being scared. But Steve--dear, sweet, lionhearted Steve--had been scared out of his wits, unsettled to the point of not sleeping, and it’d taken Tony a drunken blowjob and a couple of hours of cuddling to get the flag bearer of the free world to finally try closing his eyes.

All that over a movie and yet apparently waking up with no memory of what had happened in his life before he’d met Tony--before he’d starteddating him, oh christ--wasn’t even cause, in Steve Rogers’ book, for raising his goddamn voice.

“How the hell could this happen, though, huh? You swallow a mind-sifter in your sleep, babe?”

“I don’t know what that is, so I’m gonna guess no.”

Tony kisses Steve’s nose because that little smile (how is Steve smiling?!) gets him every time. “Low-resonant Star Trek reference. Forget it. But seriously. Any ideas? You piss off any magicians lately? Because that’s what this feels like, right? Some sort of weird kooky magic?”

Steve brushes his knuckles over Tony’s jaw, over the sleep marks there, the scratch of his overnight scruff. “Maybe.”

“Not buying that one, huh?”

Steve shrugs. “Maybe.” His hand opens and he’s holding Tony’s face now, balancing one whole cheek in his palm. “Or maybe I hit my head at just the right angle on this here headboard when you were inside me last night.”

“Huh. That’s”--Tony huffs out a laugh, ignores the greedy jerk of his hips at the memory--”that’s a hell of an alternate theory.”

“Well,” Steve says, in that same impossibly placid voice, “as I recall, you were trying to fuck me through the mattress."

“As I recall, you asked me to. Loudly. On a vociferous and ongoing basis.”

“Mmmmm.” A rumble that Tony wants to curl into, turn himself into a little ball and tuck up inside. “Yeah, I did.”

Steve’s thumb finds Tony’s mouth and those long arms reel him in, those last, precious centimeters between them dissolving. “So it’s your fault, maybe, that I’m like this. That there’s nothing left in my noggin before I first knew that I loved you.”

“I thought you said you couldn’t remember anything before we started dating.”

He can feel Steve’s smile, which is even worse that being able to see it; the way his lips curve up, sneaky, the unfairly sweet way his mouth bows between the lines of his beard. “Eh. Same difference.”

And then they’re kissing and that’s probably bad. Probably. Making out with somebody who’s been hoodoo-d or who’s got a real specific concussion is not standard medical procedure--of that Tony’s pretty damn sure. He should be hauling Stars and Stripes down to the infirmary, out of this nice warm bed and into some clothes and at least some flip-flops because god knows what’s on the floors in the hallway; there’s a chance he dropped a screw or something he’d carried up from his workshop, and Steve’s had enough issues this morning--a puncture wound is the last thing he needs.

“Tony,” Steve says, hoarse and beautifully breathless, “ok, fine, hospital in a minute, but I need you inside me first.”

“Sorry, sorry. I’m babbling. I didn’t mean to--”

Steve’s fingers grab his wrist, steel, and drives it between their bodies, pushes it into the tight hitch of Steve’s thighs. “I know, I know you didn’t, I just--Can I have this first, please?”

Tony’s whole body stutters at the first stroke, the first hint of the mess he’d made of Steve, the wet stretch he’d left behind. “Baby,” he gets out, rubbing the word against Steve’s throat, “look, you’re not in your right mind, you’re--”

“I’m fine,” Steve says, desperate. “I remember you, I want this, and the rest of it, we’ll find a way to fix, ok? After. After you--god, Tony. Please.”

He makes it a litany, a long, fevered chant, that doesn’t stop until Tony’s put him on his back, put him on his back and scrabbled for the lube and worked back inside him and he’s so wide like this, Steve, so open and unafraid, always, but especially now, when they’re tangled together, their legs, their hands, each and every shivering breath.

Steve never looks away when they fuck, no matter who’s on top; he beams with the same kind of light, the same searing intensity, the same love that seems to come from everywhere in his being at once.

“You know when I first knew I loved you?” he says in Tony’s ear, those warm, strong hands holding tight to Tony’s ass. “The first millisecond I knew?”

“I didn’t know there was one.” He kisses Steve’s cheek, rubs his mouth against the crest of Steve's beard. “Should I have?”

“Mmmm, no.” Steve arches his back and lifts his hips, the weight of his cock hot against Tony’s stomach. “I guess--I guess I never said.”

“‘K. Higher brain functions are not really an option at the moment, baby, so don’t ask me to fucking guess.”

“You told me no. That’s when I knew. I asked you if you wanted to have dinner with me and you turned me down flat.”

“What?”

“I know, I know it sounds dumb, but it’s true. I asked you out and you turned me down and I felt so bad , Tony. Like you’d kicked me in the damn teeth.”`

Tony laughs, the sound cut up and desperate. “I was mad at you! You asked me out in the middle of an argument, jesus. What the fuck did you think I was going to say? ‘Buy me dinner and all is forgiven’?”

“Kind of,” Steve pants. “Yeah.”

They’d been toe to toe in the Quinjet, Tony good and riled up, Steve actually deigning to raise his voice. There’d been a disagreement in the field, a last-minute change of position, and Tony was hot about it, pissed, ready to throw down the second they’d finished the fight.

And he’d relished it, arguing with Steve--not the first time, sure as fuck not the last--because Steve had been visibly angry, cutting Tony off every 10 seconds and almost shouting in front of everyone, for god’s sake, losing his shit like that in front of the whole team and Tony remembered some part of him marveling that he could wind Cap up this hard, knock him so far off his cool and collected game.

He’d enjoyed that fight, was the thing, taken some real pleasure in watching Steve’s blood fucking boil--over nothing, over strategy, over shit that mattered not fucking at all--and then, while he was in the middle of a really good, '90s Dennis Miller-esque rant, Steve had interrupted, had said:

“Can I buy you dinner, when we’re on the ground?”

Tony remembered his bewilderment, the way the words had skittered sideways out of his mouth and poured onto the floor. “What?”

“Once we land,” Cap had said, still right there in his face. “A steak, maybe. A bottle of wine? Or maybe a fancy hamburger.”

Tony had been the one to step back, the one to gape and stumble away. “Get real,” he’d stuttered. “And get fucked, Rogers. Next time you pull a stunt like that, I’m not saving your ass, you got that?

“Seriously?” Tony says now, biting at the turn of Steve’s shoulder, snuffling back a laugh. “Then? God--you, Rogers, you, are a goddamn weirdo, you know that?”

He shifts his hips and Steve groans, tips his head back and does it again. “Right there,” Steve whispers. “Oh fuck, Tony. Don’t stop. There, that feels--”

He gets a hand on his dick, that big, gorgeous curve, and Tony follows his tempo, gives him the same rhythm, the same stroke inside and out, and when Steve gets close, starts racing for it, Tony finds his mouth and licks the pleas out of him, sucks at every shiver, every sigh.

Steve comes like he’s dying for it, like he’s been holding back for months; it’s always like this with him. There’s a frantic nature to his orgasms, a gorgeous, uncontrolled thrash, and even when he the one holding Tony down, when he’s ostensibly in control, in the moments before he loses it, it’s clear--sky blue, clear crystal--that he’s not.

Maybe neither of them are, when they’re like this. Maybe that’s what makes it so good.

“Yes,” Steve mumbles when Tony stills, when he shouts, when he gives Steve all that he’s got, “yes, Tony, god. Just like that.”

“Should I be worried?” Tony asks later.

“Huh?” Steve’s fingers are tracing over Tony's back, lazy. “About what?”

“The black holes in your memory, dear.”

“I guess. I should get looked at.”

“But? I distinctly heard a but there.”

Steve chuckles and nudges a kiss against Tony’s temple. “But there are worse things that could happen to a guy, right? Forgetting who I was before I loved you.”

“Hmmm.”

“I mean it. Lots of--lots of not great things happened to me in the past, Tony.”

Tony thinks of the faded photographs his dad kept, enough to fill an archive. “Lots of good stuff, too.”

Steve makes a noncommittal noise. “Yeah, but believe me, there’s something to be said for starting over in the here and now. With you.”

There’s a whole novel there, Tony can hear it, caught up in those few lines, but he’s warm and Steve’s holding him and the damn universe and all its problems--including Steve’s magical concussion or sex injury or whatever--can fight through its own bullshit for five more minutes, right?

Goddamn right.

“Well,” he says, settling sweet against Steve’s side, “Swiss cheese brain or not, I love you, Rogers.”

Steve’s arms go impossibly tight for a second and his lips brush Tony’s hair. No words, but a clear message: I love you, too.

It's too easy an answer, always; but the best and the simplest, too.

"Fine," Tony sighs. "A nap and then we tap on your noggin, all right?"

But Steve, bless him, doesn't agree. Or argue. Because Steve's already asleep.

#stony #established relationship #amnesia

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thespoonplayer · 5 years

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(DJ) Spoon’s Review of 2018

This year I haven’t listened to much music at all, at least not in comparison to previous years and I certainly haven’t been to many gigs. I’m sure this won’t last but this year I’ve been busier at work so less likely to plug in, I’ve stuck to the radio in the car just to keep up with how messy Brexit really is (ooer a bit of politics) and my runs have been 100% fueled by podcasts so music has just taken a backseat. However, I couldn’t let the year go past without some kind of list...so here is a pot pourri of my favourite discoveries of 2018.

1. Podcasts

Seeing as these have been so important this year I’ll start here...and cheat slightly by bigging up some oldies, but good enough to bang on about again.

Old favourites : Running Commentary (Comedians Paul Tonkinson and Rob Deering take you on their runs and chat sometimes about running, but always about life, kids, comedy and anything that pops into their heads), Adam Buxton (always entertaining ramble chat from Dr Buckles whoever is on, I’ve learnt stuff and I’ve laughed a lot), My Dad Wrote a Porno (Sheer filth as ever but genuinely caused me to LOL during my runs, wondering if people can hear that I’m listening to chat about vaginal lids).

New entries : Off Menu (Ed Gamble and James Acaster opened their genie run fantasy restaurant a month ago and it has quickly become one of my favourite podcasts ever. Eclectic guests pick their fantasy 3 course meals, simple premise and it works. The Scroobius Pip episode was a perfect clash of two excellent pods), Blank (another late entry into 2018 from Jim Daly and Giles Paley-Phillips ostensibly about blank moments in life but just rammed with infotaining chat from ‘non standard’ guests including a jaw dropping episode with Michael Rosen and fun with Gary Lineker and Susie Dent), Poddin’ on the Ritz (sadly now finished with maybe its only series) this pod recorded backstage at Young Frankenstein by Hadley Fraser and the sublime Ross Noble made me laugh more than any other in 2018, it might be about musicals but their search for Kenneth Branagh’s snowglobes and Lesley Joseph adoration was a joy.

2. Board games

They say a family that plays together, stays together. Well we are together more than you can imagine. We’ve played over 220 games this year! Here are our favourite new games into our collection:

The game of the year is Azul, a seemingly simple tile grab and place game, building up a mosaic prettier than anyone else, is full of strategy and a little (but not too much) shafting of others. If you really want to shaft your fellow players though then pick up Unstable Unicorns, a card game where you aim to grow your stable of unicorns, whilst stopping others filling theirs. SO many different cards, tactics and ways to mess it up, you will swear at some point. Discovered in the excellent new board game cafe The Dice Box in Leamington, we bought Meeple Circus before we left, it’s that much fun. Rehearse and perform the best tiny wooden meeple circus performance, accompanied by a bespoke playlist. Stack the acrobats, balance the lions and raise the bar. Another board game cafe, Chance & Counters in Bristol introduced us to the frantic game of Klask, a cross between air hockey, pool and table football. Slide the magnets around to flick a ball into your opponents hole, avoid the magnetic biscuits and don’t KLASK! When is a game not a game? another game of the year has been played a lot in our house, and it’s The Mind. 100 cards numbered 1-100, no words between players and a tense task to lay cards in ascending order. Simple? yes? possible? nope! but it’s sure to cause fun and arguments. The final two of MY favourite sadly aren’t quite as loved by my family, but I’ll get them there. Sagrada is a similar game to Azul with you attempting to build a beautiful stained glass window with coloured dice. More variations and thinking needed than Azul which adds to the challenge. And finally and lovely chess like 2 player game which transports you to the sun dappled Greek island of Santorini. Take the powers of a god and build the traditional blue domed white houses of the island whilst trying to stop your opponent climbing onto a roof. A lot of ‘aha, you’ve stopped me’ moments.

3. TV

It’s been a long old year at work, and in the world of parenting so we’ve found ourselves flopped on the settee many evenings just soaking up great drama, comedy and chilling ;o)

We are very late to the party with Suits but that means we have 8 series to wade through! Really neat writing, bants and relationships between characters, a ‘don’t worry they will always win’ calmness about it and you get to see the Queen in her knickers...ish. Another Netflix treat this year was Magic for Humans with Justin Willman, a hugely likeable and funny magician pulling off tricks that constantly make me smirk with a huge dollop of WTF? amazing. A huge recommendation. A late entry to my TV highlights of 2018 is from the warped warped mind of Charlie Brooker...of course with Bandersnatch. An interactive choose your own adventure TV ‘event’ (I know) that had us hooked for the full 90 minutes (only if you want to see how much bloodshed you can invoke!). Completely on the other end of the spectrum was the sublime and minimalistic Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing. I don’t like fishing and why would I find two old mates just teasing each other for half an hour entertaining? No idea but it was beautiful. Like Radio 4, comforting and perfect. Then a few suspenseful dramas that got us on the edge of the settee, Killing Eve (quirky AF), Bodyguard (did they really kill Keely Hawes that early?) and Informer (bleak bleak bleak) and sweaty bullocks in ‘should be in the next section really’ Bird Box (made Informer seem like a giggle fest).

4. Films

Really haven’t been to the cinema much in the last 12 months and only once to see a ‘grown up’ film I think but kid’s films are SO good at the moment that’s ok. A few stand out films for me were:

Ralph Breaks the Internet, much better than the first one, lots of #lolz internet jokes and more than a little heart. Wrap me up in a duvet and give me a hot cocoa and Paddington 2 any day, tears at the end. A little more sighing but just as much emotion in Christopher Robin, not sure why Eeyore had an American accent but the characters were spot on and nicely faithful to the original concepts. The one time I did venture out for an adult (it’s a 12 so almost ;o) and saw Ready Player One I was delighted, yeah it might not be a) as good as or b) anything like the book but a visual treat and an enjoyable romp.

5. Books

I read A LOT, until my Kindle donks me on the head in bed anyway...literally a tiny selection of books that have kept me awake.

The Secret Lives of Colour - Kassia St Clair. They say never judge a book by its cover. Well that didn’t work...I bought this purely because it is a beautiful package, the hardback a lot more pleasing imho. Simply 2 coloured pages about how each colour was discovered, invented and introduced throughout history. I never really gave it a thought that colours were...made. Weird and fascinating.

This Is Going to Hurt - Adam Kay. A hilarious ‘secret’ diary of a junior doctor that horrifies at the same time. I think we all knew it was a hard life but bloody hell, if you didn’t love the NHS before you will after this. A thoroughly enjoyable and insightful story of Adam’s journey through medicine. And that ending...wooof.

Moose Allain - I Wonder What I’m Thinking About. I love Moose, I love his colour-me-advent calendars, I love his tweet threads that show the best in Twitter, I love his cartoons and this book is all of those wrapped up in one. And a certain Mr Spoon is to thank for the publication, find me in the back of Unbound funders! An inspiring book for anyone who loves art, creativity and childish humour.

Factfulness : Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World - Hans Rosling. A brilliantly clever and educational book about why the world is NOT as shit as it might seem some times. It’s all backed up by real data and lovely lovely graphs!

Lee Child and Ian Rankin. A highlight of the year is the next Reacher and Rebus novels and these two didn’t disappoint. Rebus’ latest adventure Past Tense, is a self-contained story that could introduce anyone to the man machine that is Jack Reacher. Rebus however is back, retired but won’t lie down, in In A House of Lies, an old case comes back to haunt him and will this finally be his downfall? I doubt it!

6. Music

As mentioned, I haven’t ‘been into music’ as much in 2018 for various reasons but I’ve still enjoyed some great new discoveries:

Barns Courtney - The Attractions of Youth, discovered via the use of Glitter and Gold for the theme tune of Netflix’s Safe. An album of ‘cheesy, commercially viable blues and folk rock’ apparently. I just liked the visceral nature of some of the tracks and it always fired me up at work on slow days.

Isaac Gracie - Isaac Gracie, a rare listened to recommendation from my wife. Isaac is everything I claim to like, fragile thin sensitive boys with acoustic guitars....and I do very much with this. Painful screeched out tales of heartbreak. Sublime.

R.E.M. - Live at the BBC, 104 rare and live tracks from arguably one of the best bands ever. Some of the tracks I haven’t heard since my bootleg cassette buying days at Sheffield Uni, when the world was in black and white. Not all tracks are of the greatest audio quality but bliss for a fanboy like me.

Creep Show - Mr Dynamite, a spin off project for Mr John Grant and even from the eclectic crooner this is an odd one. Glitchy electronica with vocoders all over the place. Weird and very Marmite.

Public Service Broadcasting - Every Valley and everything else. The latest offering from the other PSB was a trip through the miner’s crisis and Thatcher years. Bleak? yup but fascinating snippets of well, public service broadcasting and guest stars including the obligatory Welsh rockers the Manics. This album is perfect by itself but it ‘forced’ me to go back and really discover all the PSB albums. The Live at Brixton release is a huge recommendation, I wish I was there.

Rex Orange County - Apricot Princess, maybe I just added this in to seem cool as Rex, aka Alexander O’Conner, was ‘one to watch in 2018′ from the BBC. A multi-instrumentalist that dabbles with hippity hop, R&B and piano pop. The first track alone contains about three musical styles if you wait.

7. Food & Drink

I run, because I really like food. And thankfully I’ve run a lot in 2018 so I got to enjoy a lot.

I was introduced to the weird fermented tea monstrosity that is kombucha by my sister-in-law. Vinegar tasting drink that may or may not help your gut that grows in your living room. WTAF? However, health benefits aside the LA Brewery Strawberry and Black Pepper drink is something, alongside my pilgrimage to Leon, worth going to London for. I’ve heard it’s also for sale in Solihull but I don’t often travel that far beyond my class ;o) I’d say, try it...but I suspect 9/10 people with hate the flavour.

I suspect 10/10 people that try the Aldi Black Forest Mince Pies would love them, but you won’t get a chance as I’ve bought them ALL. Aldi are a bugger for getting you hooked then never restocking. I only managed 10 boxes in 2018 and we’ve rationed well so have 12 left to get us through the bleak January weather. Cherries, Dark Chocolate, Chocolate pastry and a smidge of mincemeat. Perfect!

There are many ingredient delivery services available and I’ve only tried Gousto but I don’t know why you’d go anywhere else. 33 recipes tried and 32 of them I’d have again, with the one not so good one was still far better than anything I’d cook by myself. So easy, so tasty and if you want to try it I can give you a big discount that will help us buy another box, a tad expensive without a discount but worth a treat every so often.

Genuinely I traveled to London just to visit Max’s Sandwich Shop...kinda. It was certainly the deciding factor in a day out at the Summer Exhibition (see below). I downloaded the Kindle version of this book when it was promoted in an email, I bought some Scampi Fries and made a Fish Finger sandwich, I crumbled up some Ginger Nuts into a Mascarpone and Jam sandwich and I made a Fried Egg, Shoestring Fried and Gammon sandwich then I NEEDED to go and see how it’s really done. Amazing over the top sandwiches in a rough little hipster cafe in Stroud Green (no me neither and it’s a long walk from the tube!). So good I had to a) buy the hard copy of the book and b) carry half the sandwich home as even I couldn’t manage it all...not with deep fried macaroni balls filling me up ;o)

8. Places

A family that plays together, stays together as a great man once said. And we don’t just play inside, we love adventures so adventures we had.

I’d never been to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, as it’s in that there London which often seems hundreds of miles away...but I’m so glad that I visited this year. A trip with a good friend with neither of us knowing quite what to expect. We saw, and laughed, and marveled at, paintings, sculptures, videos, photos, models, and weirdness by Banksy next to Joe Lycett next to Grayson Perry next to Harry Hill, next to me mate Lorsen Camps from Coventry. The SA allows ANYONE to submit artwork for consideration and anyone can be accepted. I think this has to become a yearly visit, awesome.

My parents have been wanting to take our kids, and their big kid, to The Forbidden Corner in North Yorkshire for a few years now...and I’m so happy we finally got round to going. Started as a folly to entertain his children this huge labyrinthine site is crammed with strange sculptures, mazes, tricks and squirting fountains. Many hours were spent squeezing through holes, getting lost and getting wet. Beautifully eccentric.

A family holiday to Brittany meant we could visit the loopy city (it’s their phrase!) of Nantes and more importantly Les Machines d’Ile. Ostensibly the workshop of a group of engineers and artists that make huge animatronic machines and animals...that you can ride on! Needs to be seen to be believed, the Elephant brings out the big kid in everyone...and we can’t wait to go back in a few years when they’ve built a huge forest over the river with ride on caterpillars and dragonfly. Incredible. The city itself is dotted with crazy art and interactive pieces encouraging play, I know a city closer to home that should be the UK Loopy City of Culture!

Luckily Tilly is a Harry Potter obsessive AND it was her birthday last year so it gave us the excuse we didn’t need to visit the Warner Brothers Harry Potter Studio Tour. Wow, just wow. The incredible detail in everything made for the film, the engineering, the amount of artists involved and the presentation of the exhibition blew us away. I’ve enjoyed everything in this list but this maybe was the most magical in the best way.

Many many amazing experiences warrant a mention, but I just don’t have enough words, include Talking Birds - Walk with Me, Print Manufactory Darkroom Workshop, Ludic Rooms Random String Festival, Go Karting with Tilly, some dancing balloons in Broadgate, Godiva Festival with Tony Christie et al, Bristol Gromit trail, Disc Golfing with my girls, Edinburgh Fringe with Dick and Dom and with another wonderful dick from Coventry starring in Bon Jovi musical We’ve Got Each Other, Pandas! at Edinburgh Zoo, Matilda the Musical with Tilly at last, running the Coventry Mile with the girls’ school, Dippy the Dinosaur in Brum, Wicksteed Park (amazing family fun theme park like what they used to be), Cycling on Stratford Greenway in the sun, Autotesting at MotoFest, Bourton-on-the-Water (it’s just a shame 3 million other people know about this gorgeous village), Giant Pac Man in the city centre, Pork Pie making with a good friend, CET several times, Novelty Automation in London and being on The One Show, a couple of Hope & Social gigs and much much much more fun with my wonderful fam and friends. Roll on 2019!

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libraford · 7 years

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So I am no longer in charge of Slime, which if you’re not familiar with that story I would get yourself a snack and give it a read because.... it’s long. It’s a long, long saga of slime. Instead, they’re having me do the Saturday morning kids classes. Or rather, they’re continuing to have me do the morning classes because... why train someone else to work with unattended small children when we’ve already broken this one’s spirit?

And if you were internetting at the same time I was last night, you were probably aware that my girlfriend and I were making friendship bracelets. Which is very cute, but the reason we were doing that was because today I was supposed to teach little kids how to make them. I’d never made one successfully before and the directions were super unhelpful, so she was showing me how. (Well... it’s still pretty stompin’ cute in the context).

So what I learned last night was that they really are a labor of love because if you tried to sell them at the fair cost of labor, no one would buy it at that price and you really gotta like that person to put in all that work and then give it away for free.

“Oh, how shall I, a mere child, show the bonds of our unending friendship? I shall develop early stages of carpal tunnel syndrome as a symbol of our platonic love!”

This is a childhood experience that I never had. Ostensibly because I was the crafty person in the school and I had all of two (2) friends and ... eh. Eh. It was the 90′s and my homework already resembled a mountain, so... eh.

Anyhowdy.

The bracelet that I was supposed to make was a chevron, but it looks more like argyle. Which is a look I dig but I’m mentally preparing dialogue for when someone is upset it doesn’t look like it should.

There is no way in the squishiest layers of Hell that a four-year old is going to figure out how to make this. I’m 30 and I’m screwing up, so I figure I’ll have a couple of simpler options. Basically, I would have them braid their colors together and put beads on it. Seems simple, right?

... ha... haha... oh.

I’m sure that my plan would have potentially worked if there were different circumstances, but here we are...

I had... no students.

Until...

11:45, fifteen minutes before I was meant to close up. And then I had two. Then five. Then seven, nine, ten. As soon as I gave kids instructions to pick out their colors, more would come in. So half the room was bored and waiting for me to start and the other half was spending a lot of time trying to decide which color pink they want. One of them has her arm in a cast. Something wasn’t thought through.

It is 11:55 when I finally get started.

“Measure the length from your wrist to your elbow, and then double it.”

Three adults failed this part.

“Fold it in half and tie a knot at the top.”

One kid failed this part.

“Do y’all know how to braid?” A mix of nods and shakes. “Okay, if you know how to braid, go ahead and braid your colors together.”

Three adults failed this part. I had to teach one kid how to braid because his mom refused to show him and eventually just took over herself. None of the parents were willing to help their kids learn, because they insisted that they already knew but clearly did not. I had to teach some of the adults.

About halfway through this, a kid says “when are we going to make the slime?”

...

“Slime isn’t until one-o-clock.”

“We thought this was the slime thing.”

How do you get halfway through a friendship braid tutorial and realize that it isn’t slime? Did you think we were going to put it in the slime? Did you think that we were going to dip it in borax and it was going to suddenly be slime somehow? Did you miss the part in the beginning when I said ‘are you here to make friendship bracelets?’ Because I said that to literally everyone that came in through the doors.

“Okay, now you’re going to put your beads on.” This part they knew how to do. “And when you’re done, you’re going to put a bead over one end and tie a knot around it, then do the same on the other side.”

All of the adults failed this part.

Around this time, three girls abandoned the craft for their mom to finish in favor of watching whatever mindless children’s entertainment was being played in the baby carriage belonging to a completely different family. So they’ve just left the whole thing to their mother, who is frantically trying to finish because these kids have already learned the age-old art of ‘make someone else do it.’

We’re down to seven people and one of the youngest says ‘face painting.’

“The ad said that there’d be face painting.”

“Face painting?”

“FACE PAINTING YAY!”

Suddenly they all want their faces painted. It is 12:25, the class ended 25 minutes ago, I’m supposed to clock out in five minutes, and seven kids are now under the impression that we’re doing face painting.

“Face painting isn’t until next week. Next week.”

And now... tears.

The one that brought it up knocked over a bucket of perler beads. The mom is now screaming at her, everyone is upset and I am now ten minutes late to clock out. Some of them are still asking about slime, so now they’re alternating between slime and face painting and the truth is that they want both, but I’m giving them neither and oh man... toddlers are not a pleasant sight when you tell them that they don’t have any choice in the matter.

They finally figure that the best thing to do is leave, no one is happy, and I’m pretty sure the little one is grounded.

All of this- all of this

All of this could have been avoided if you’d shown up fifteen minutes later, but sure- Zerg rushing the teacher seems like a way better plan, doesn’t it?

As I am cleaning up the string mess, a line is forming at the door.

“Is this the slime thing?”

“It hasn’t started yet.”

“I’ll wait.” Haha. I’ve played this game. You’ll wait, but you’ll complain to my manager that we made you wait for the event to open before letting you in.

I finish cleaning up, I get out the door, and the same woman jumps to get into the classroom.

“It doesn’t start until one, ma’am.”

“It said noon!”

“One to three. The event is one til three.”

I know that the color ‘puce’ is hotly contested in terms of it’s actual definition, but her face turned the puciest color I have ever seen. Her son is tugging impatiently at her pant leg. She tells her tiny human that he has to wait longer.

Haha, don’t care. I’m out, kiddos!

This post is brought to you by Children’s Tears.

#retail hell

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junker-town · 4 years

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Super Bowl commercials, ranked

Screenshot: Cheetos

You’ll cry, you’ll laugh, you’ll yawn.

The Super Bowl is here, which means we have the most-watched TV program of the year. With all those viewers comes an exorbitant advertising cost, up to a record $5.6 million for a 30-second ad.

Spending all that money brings with it a ton of eyeballs, and brands try to make it worth it with their most ambitious spots. This year’s Super Bowl commercials run the gamut, from tear-jerkingly sweet to face-punchingly infuriating. Here’s a look at the most memorable — good, bad, and in between.

The home runs, best of the best

Loretta (Google)

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Several of the commercials on Super Bowl Sunday have an A-list cast, with our most recognized stars trying to get us to buy something. But sometimes, the most simple approach can be beautiful.

I first saw this commercial as a pre-roll ad before a different YouTube video. It was so beautifully haunting that I couldn’t bring myself to click “skip ad” once the obligatory five seconds lapsed. Each piano key strike was foreboding, but I couldn’t click away from this poor old man, simultaneously attempting to fend off memory loss and trying to remember his dead wife. A valiant fight against the ravages of time but one we are all destined to lose.

Because I use humor — or “humor” if you prefer — to cope while processing actual human emotion, the main thing going through my mind as tears streamed down my face was that Google should have titled this commercial “Get Back Loretta,” but probably didn’t want to pay exorbitant license fees for Beatles music.

The very Good Dog (WeatherTech)

This ad is tearjerking in a different, more uplifting way. This is a commercial for WeatherTech, but not really about their company at all. WeatherTech CEO David MacNeil used his 30-second spot to thank the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine for saving his dog Scout, who suffered from cancer of the blood cell walls. The commercial promotes a WeatherTech website for donations to help the school, and if that isn’t uplifting enough just look at this sweet, beautiful dog:

Photo: WeatherTech on YouTube

Groundhog Day (Jeep)

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It just feels good to see Phil Connors and Ned Ryerson again, and both look 27 years older. There was no The Irishman-style CGI de-aging here. The added weight of all those years make the dread on Connors’ (Bill Murray’s) face that much more real, when he wakes up at the beginning of the commercial. But his day becomes less hellish once he spots a new Jeep, then proceeds to steal along with Punxsutawney Phil for a joy ride.

This is only the second Super Bowl to fall on February 2, so perfect timing to resurrect the classic film. The other Groundhog Day Super Bowl was in 2014, when a defense with Richard Sherman obliterated one of the most dynamic offenses the NFL has ever seen. Hmmm.

Getting the message across

Katie Sowers (Microsoft)

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This is a longer version of an ad that has been running throughout the NFL playoffs, expanded for the Super Bowl — a national introduction to Katie Sowers, the offensive assistant coach for the 49ers, and her road to coaching. Sowers is the first female coach and the first openly gay coach in Super Bowl history.

“People tell me that people aren’t ready to have a woman lead, but these guys have been learning from women their whole lives. Moms, grandmas, teachers. We have all these assumptions about what women do, and what men do,” Sowers says. “I’m not trying to be the best female coach. I’m trying to be the best coach.”

The message is as clear as it is inspirational. Solid work all around.

The Secret Kicker

youtube

This features an anonymous placekicker nailing a field goal, but once the helmet comes off to reveal it was Carli Lloyd (joined in the commercial by her USWNT teammate Crystal Dunn), the crowd is at first shocked, then applauds her successful kick. The slogan “Let’s kick inequality” is strong, and it dawned on me — of all the commercials, this has maybe the best chance of coming true. Lloyd clearly has the leg, nailing a 55-yarder during an Eagles' practice in the 2019 preseason. It’s not that farfetched that a soccer star could eventually make it in the NFL. Or maybe once Lloyd is done with soccer she can shift to basketball instead.

Make Space for Women (Olay)

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This has the best tagline from any of these commercials — “When we make space for women, we make space for everyone” — and the ad features a real astronaut (Nicole Stott) among the all-female cast. The empowering commercial also touts a #MakeSpaceForWomen hashtag, with Olay donating up to $500,000 to Girls Who Code.

Bizarre, but good

Rick & Morty (Pringles)

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I love the manic energy here. Though this is an ad for Pringles, it might as well be a commercial for "Rick & Morty." If the show is anything close to this chaotic, I’m in.

An SNL skit, but funnier

Sam Elliott reciting "Old Town Road" (Doritos)

youtube

The regular commercial was fine, featuring a dance-off between Lil Nas X and Sam Elliott, plus haunting mustache CGI work. But for me, the better ad is the one above.

Hearing Sam Elliott read the phone book would be a treat, but hearing him act out lyrics to Old Town Road by Lil Nas X is a delight. The way the others in the bar react to Elliott’s character makes it clear he’s a man to be respected. I can’t help but wonder if this is simply world building, creating a backstory to the character of Wade Garrett so we can finally get that Road House prequel we’ve been clamoring for for decades.

Smaht Pahk (Hyundai)

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In theory, this ad should not work as well as it does. The three lead actors — Chris Evans, Rachel Dratch, and John Krasinski — are all from the area, so it adds some authenticity to their exaggerated Boston accents. The commitment to the bit is very strong (I counted 15 times the word park — or rather “pahk” — was used), and that’s what sells it for me. The only better use for a Boston accent in a commercial would have been if Chipotle bought time to apologize for child labah violations.

Plus, this kind of car commercial is a welcome reprieve from the usual type we get during football season, with folks buying giant-bow-adorned cars for their spouse.

Can’t Touch This (Cheetos popcorn)

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You had me at M.C. Hammer. That could have been the entire commercial — it basically was, with the main character getting out of various tasks because of the orange Cheetos dust on his fingers — and I would have been fine. But what sold it for me was after the trust fall, the poor guy who fell to the ground, not caught by the orange-fingered culprit, expertly delivers, “Why?” I don’t know why it made me laugh, but it did.

I can’t unsee this

The Shining remake (Mountain Dew Zero Sugar)

Had Bryan Cranston retired after Malcom in the Middle he still would have been revered for playing one of the most memorable and hilarious television dads in history. But Breaking Bad will lead his obituary, and for good reason. Cranston is a wonderfully gifted actor, and his channeling Jack Nicholson in a remake of The Shining for this commercial — the slogan is “as good as the original, maybe better?” — is quite good. But I will not be able to shake this image out of my head for some time:

Screenshot: Mountain Dew on YouTube

The Doppelgänger

This isn’t a commercial at all, but rather a tweeted tease from Honda before the game. I couldn’t help but notice the Helpful Honda guy looks a hell of a lot like Brutus.

Photo: Honda on Twitter

Photo by Justin Casterline/Getty Images

Snoozefest

Typical Americans (Budweiser)

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I appreciate the sarcastic irony of the ad, using footage of good deeds and various accomplishments, with bonus points for using USWNT Instagram stories from the post-World Cup celebration (but they should have found a way to work in “You’re welcome for this content, bitch!”). But still, this commercial falls flat. It’s probably the best of the boring subgroup here for at least having the decency to avoid jamming some shitty Lee Greenwood song into our ears.

Sonic the Hedgehog

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This is a combination commercial and trailer for the upcoming "Sonic" movie, but is probably the most sports-relevant of the ads so far. Michael Thomas of the Saints, Christian McCaffrey of the Panthers, Olympic sprinter Allyson Felix, and NASCAR driver Kyle Busch are known for speed in their respective sports, but all sing the praises of the movie's main character, Sonic the Hedgehog. The inclusion of said athletes does nothing to save this commercial from being boring, however.

By the way, I hope there eventually is a sequel to this "Sonic" movie, just so it can have the tagline “The Sega Continues.”

Jimmy Works It Out (Michelob Ultra)

youtube

There are a ton of people who find Jimmy Fallon funny, so this is probably fine for them. This has everything a Super Bowl commercial is supposed to have: elaborate production, cameos from athletes and stars. But I can’t shake the fact that Jimmy Fallon tries too hard; the payoff just isn’t there for me. Maybe I still see him as the guy who laughed through every "SNL" sketch he was ever in.

Ostensibly this is an ad for Michelob Ultra, but it might as well be vanilla beer to match the bland Fallon.

Please, God, go away

Gabe Gabriel is my mortal enemy. He is unavoidable on Super Bowl Sunday, so stay safe out there everybody.

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thenichibro · 7 years

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Fall 2017 Anime First Impressions

And so here I am again, three weeks late because I can never keep up. Fall 2017 thus far doesn’t seem too, too bad, but I’m sure that will change, considering the multiple original shows on my watching list. Luckily there’s plenty of cute girls doing cute things shows, which is all I need, really. As usual, here’s what I’m watching, with MAL links and original shows marked: Osake wa Fuufu (MAL) Starting off with a short show this time. Osake wa Fuufu follows a wife, Chisato, and her husband, Sora. Sora likes making drinks, and Chisato likes drinking. Match made in heaven, if you ask me. The show even includes drink recipes depending on the featured drink, and a food pairing with it. It's a three minute show about a cute, drunk wife. What's not to like?

URAHARA (MAL) Taking a sharp departure from the calmness of Osake wa Fuufu, URAHARA involves three fashion-loving Harajuku girls saving the planet from aliens. This show is Harajuku personified. Everything from the character design to the OP explodes with a bubbly, colorful atmosphere, wrapped up in a beautiful watercolor aesthetic. ORESAMA's fantastic brand of electropop is the exact cherry on top the art style needed. Rito is the skateboarding, soft-spoken girl with demon horns, Kotoko is the peppy blonde kemonomimi, and Mari is the twintailed idol who also owns the clothes shop the girls work at. After aliens sucking up cultural landmarks appear, an American girl wearing a talking fried shrimp shows up, gives them "physical manifestations of imagination," and they promptly transform into magical girls and fight the aliens, making them explode and turn into donuts. Sure, that made no sense at all, but everything's so colorful. Capped off by a similarly bubbly ED, this show is just outright fun. If it stays about three cute girls happily fighting fashion-stealing aliens, I'm in.

Dies Irae (MAL) Just as an FYI, Dies Irae aired an episode zero prequel, but I've waited until the formal episode one before doing any impressions, seeing as the prequel was a complete clusterfuck anyway. Now then, after the prequel involving Nazi supermen, Dies Irae's main series cuts to the future and the protagonist Ren, a solemn oft-hospitalized teen. Plenty of mysteries abound - a sudden murder, a strange vision at a museum, a runaway friend, a girl calling him Cagliostrio in a dream - interspersed throughout an otherwise thoroughly boring slice of life. Following that, the episode alos teases plenty of the insane bullshit the prequel was few of. In one line, one character drops 5 proper nouns we have had zero interaction with, with the off mention of one name from the prequel episode. Foreshadowing is fine; introducing three characters in the span of 15 seconds and then talking about 5+ more of them is a bit much. The art is nothing special, and the orchestral soundtrack is unique enough, but if the prequel was any indication, this show is going to get insane, really fast. And not insane like the fun, rollercoaster ride kind. More like the trying-too-hard, unnecesarily edgy, impossible to actually follow kind.

Net-juu no Susume (MAL) Ah, the MMO spin on the isekai genre. Net-juu follows Moriko, a NEET woman living alone who devotes her time to playing a guy (Hayashi) in an MMO. She meets with an amazingly cute girl, Lily (who later we see to be a guy IRL), and they start adventuring together. Cut to 70-odd levels of grinding, joining a guild, and an upgraded PC later, Moriko/Hayashi has settled in just fine. First off, Lily's VA is the fucking cutest, holy shit. My reactions about echoed Moriko's anytime she was being cute. Other than that, the first episode was surprisingly sincere. Relatively light on the "MY REAL LIFE IS ON THE INTERNET!!" in favor of Moriko just being more of an awkward, lazy video game nerd. Using video games to not have to deal with real life is nothing new, but the heart with which Hayashi/Lily meet and grow in just one episode impressed me. This could go either way, and I'm hoping it stays a interesting vignette on the trials and tribulations of the two lives Moriko lives.

[ORIG] Just Because! (MAL) Next up, Just Because sees Eita Izumi returning after four years to his locale's high-school, reuniting with people he lost touch with. The first episode sees a wonderful moment of return, as Eita practices with an old baseball friend, leading the practicing band to strike up into the chorus they played at games, seeminginly on their own. The trumpets flowing into the full orchestral matches the rising tone perfectly. Juxatposed with a Photography Club facing termination and a former class prez buried in obligations, a web of connections lies in wait, ready to reaccept Eita. The art is quite muted, and even with complaints about the hot weather, the sun is behind clouds and the cityscape is grey, as opposed to the beating sun we often see. Just Because's first episode, while not telling much, showed plenty, and indicated what the main issues would be and who would be involved, and that's exactly what a first episode should do. If an original work is showing that early on, maybe it has more direction than most - and that's a very good thing.

[ORIG] Two Car (MAL) Sidecar racing is something I haven't seen, for sure. The island of Miyakejima, with its uncontrolled speed limits, is home to famous sidecar racing, or "kneeler racing" competitions, and the show follows the endlessly arguing but amazingly similar local team of Yuri and Megami. A bouncy pop soundtrack plays over the high-speed racing, creating a light yet competitive tone that perfectly fits the colored visuals, featuring the same artist/production company as Masamune-kun no Revenge from a few seasons ago. Discord has cropped up between Yuri and Megumi due to their beloved coach leaving for greener courses and the feelings they had for him as he left. The cuts between the high-speed raising and the melancholic, reflective flashbacks does quite well in explaining their movements throughout the race - catching us up to speed, so to speak. The tone of the show comes across perfectly as the episode closes, backed up by the fantastic soundtrack and beautifully done OP and ED. You just feel this show is time spent on an island, split between relaxing and racing. It's wonderfully done. It remains to be seen if this show will echo others like Minami Kamakura and Bakuon and go really into the mechanical aspect of sidecar racing. However, this show is a surprisingly emotionally-based piece where emotions are expressed on the race course - and I'm interested in more.

[ORIG] Animegataris (MAL) Minoa is our orange-haired, ahoge-sporting protag, called out by the school princess Kamiigusa to talk about anime, of all things. Go figure. Coming off the trash that was Gamers last season, the blonde perfect girl actually being a huge nerd is already tiring. Minoa is looking for the name of an anime that moved her as a kid, and to do it suggests to get the anime club back in action, then promptly gets roped into leading it. Her endless optimism isn't original but it's always refreshing, and the use of anime to let Minoa see "more of Kamiigusa's faces" is a bit better than just having the red face of a normally "perfect" girl besmirched by the recognition she likes anime. Also there's a huge-headed cat and a somehow magical beret, which came out of the blue just a bit. We get a sneak peak of the future members, ranging across all archetypes and social cliques, and then the magical beret comes back and the cat now talks. Interested to see where the hell any of that goes, but if this stays more comedy and less Gamers romance-misunderstanding bullshit, I'll be satisfied. Also, both the OP and ED (especially the OP - GARNiDELiA is so good) are great. Some very strange plot choices, especially worrying in an original work, but if they pay off this will be enjoyable. Let's just hope they do.

Mahoutsukai no Yome (MAL) Backing off the slice of life, Mahoutsukai imagines a modern day world intertwined with fantasy - beastmen, magic, and the few humans who can see it - one of them being Chise Hatori, ostracized for her power until she is bought at an auction by a legendary mage, Elias, who aims to make her his apprentice. Chise is actually a "Sleigh Beggy," a rare being that attracts "faries and mysteries," whatever that will eventually entail. Mahoutsukai thus far gives off a kind of Uchouten Kazoku vibe as Chise moves into Elias' tranquil house. An ostensibly normal-looking environment inhabited by mystical beings, and a duality of calmness and turbulent themes below echo Uchouten's politics. The juxtaposition of the forcible buying of Chise versus the welcoming environment she is brought in creates an interesting dynamic that I'm interested in seeing played out. The animation is beautiful, and the small switches to a more chibi style aren't disruptive in the least. Aside from some confusion about the initial setup of the world, if this show becomes a magical slice-of-life with even a fraction of the heart of Uchouten, I'm in.

Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou (MAL) Two girls in old-school fatigues, cruising around a cold, apocalyptic, industrial wasteland. Sounds cool to me. Chito is the collected, tired foil to Yuuri's galavanting, charismatic self. The animation is a bit divergent, in that while the landscapes are detailed in their greyness, the art of the two girls echoes something like Hidamari in its style. While initially strange, it didn't become anything more than just "noticeable." The muscial backdrop is a flowing, airy tone that fits well with the girls having fun praticing shooting or walking around looking for supplies.The music and the attitudes of Chi and Yuu create an atmosphere to the point that doesn't feel like a depressing, sober look at war. Seeing it through the eyes of two children also puts the concepts of war and conflict in eerily simple terms, providing a new look at a concept done to death, so to speak. There's a strangely relaxed feel despite the landscape and color scheme. It remains to be seen if this will go the route of Made in Abyss, especially with an out of place scene at the end of the episode, but while MiA was fucking phenomenal, I could do with less bawling two seasons in a row. This is a strange one, but the simple story of Chi and Yuu trudging across the snowy landscape is appealing.

Konohana Kitan (MAL) Cute fox girls working at a traditional Japanese hot spring hotel? I'm in. Yuzu is the nervous newbie, Kiri is the charismatic head attendant, Natsume is spunky and atheletic, Satsuki is responsible to a fault, Ren is the doll-like one whose personality doesn't match her cute exterior, and there's the diminutive, quiet Sakura. The personalities of the girls are varied and interplay nicely, and I look forward to seeing how Yuzu fits in. Moreover, the art is fantastic. The character designs echo perfectly the individual personalities, and the landscapes of cherry blossoms are stunning. I personally love the traditional Japanese aesthetic the inn and surrounding town embody, and it obviously fits well with the fact that the girls are all kitsunes. Konohana seems to me like a slightly less energetic/comedic Urara Meirochou, which is a good thing. The aesthetic is great, the girls are cute - this is a show for healing, and I need it.

Blend-S (MAL) Maika, a perpetual job hunter with her naturally scary eyes, finds her home at a cafe where all the waitresses are archetypes, as the sadistic one. Blend-S is almost like a more overt version of the varied personalities in Working!, with all comedy and less romance. I quite like the juxtaposition of the girls' normal personalities when talking to each other and their work personalities (especially when the line blurs). While usually its a cute girl who's actually evil or something and used as boring shock value, being the point of the show pivots the concept into a new way I enjoy. Even moreso, Maika especially has plenty of quirks that bely her role as the "normal" main character. The art is clean and sharp, and the girls have great character designs - I really like the facial designs. The OP, by the VAs (which is always a plus), is fantastic both in design and music, and compliments the more relaxed ED (which is also by the VAs). Overall, this show is friendly and the girls are cute. Sounds good to me.

Boku no Kanojo ga Majimesugiru Sho-bitch na Ken (MAL) Adaptations with stock character protagonists and plenty of overt fanservice. Yay. I'm amazed this isn't from an LN, because it is exactly that kind of show. Shobitch begins with our MC Shinozaki confessing to Kosaka, which she accepts. Then she learns "how to be a good girlfriend," which far more often than not involves plenty of fanservice. Also, despite him having a girlfriend, there's a whole variety of other girls interested in him - the childhood friend and imouto get ticked off the list int he first six minutes. On the bright side, the art is great. Character designs aside from the protag are varied and well-drawn. Kosaka's earnestness with which she wants to be a good girlfriend is endearing in itself, but the 100% focus on sexual themes is just a bit tiring. Sort of like how Kuzu no Honkai went from seriously emotional to reducing any character motivation to "the only way I can be loved is physically." Regardless, you know exactly what you're getting into with a title like this show. There are some genuine emotional moments, but they are few and very far between. Otherwise, Shobitch is a well-drawn yet bland ecchi definitely-not-LN adaptation.

Inuyashiki (MAL) Last but not least, adding to the limited action slate I'm watching this season, we have Inuyashiki. Inuyashiki is, for lack of a better term, strange. It begins with nearly all CG, but then transitions to a mix of normal animation and CG for the rest of the episode. The first half of episode one is one of the most solemn, depressing sequences I've seen, and that's blown away by a whirlwind of aliens, body-swapping, and mechanical bodies. While the tonal shift is quite jarring, the change wasn't anything completely incomprehensible. The problem will be where this will go, now that Ichiro, our man with months to live, is now equipped with alien technology. I'm hoping that within the mix of action there will be a sense that Ichiro, now unshackled by sickness, can make concrete steps to make his life better. While the action shots were nice-looking, and the CG actually doesn't look half bad, with how emotionally powerful the first half of episode one is I want to see more of that as well. Either way, Inuyashiki has my attention, and I'm eager to see where Ichiro goes.

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niamsuggitt · 7 years

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The Ides Of August 2017

Yo! What’s up? I’ll tell you what’s up, and it’s the goddamn Ides of August! Yeah, that’s right, I’ve written some words about all of the various media I’ve been checking out for the past 30 days. It’s been a bit of a rough month personally (hence this being late), but that does mean I’ve had a lot of time to watch a lot of films, including, for the 2nd month in a row, a trip to the actual in-the-RL cinema.

There’s also the small matter of the return of Game Of Thrones, more Nintendo fun and an intriguing fantasy novel from one of my new favourite writers.

Let’s do this thing.

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Movies

Lots of movies to talk about this time around! I’ll start with more of my Universal Monsters Box-Set, as I watched 2 of ‘em. First up was The Invisible Man (James Whale 1933). I thoroughly enjoyed this film. The special effect of making Jack Griffin ‘invisible’ were very impressive for the 1930s, and it was refreshing that the main character was basically just an unrepentant dick with his power. He really is a darkly human monster and Claude Rains is a lot of fun and gives a great performance, especially as you never see his face until he’s dead. It was in line with my only previous experience with the character, Moore and O’Neill’s League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which takes it even further (that rape sequence is horrific). I was also very pleasantly surprised to see Henry Travers, Clarence from It’s A Wonderful Life appear as Dr Cranley.

I then watched Bride Of Frankenstein (James Whale 1935) which was also very good. I really liked the opening sequence, which shows us the real world origins of Frankenstein, as Mary Shelley tells her story in the Villa Diodati. It’s a great moment when it’s revealed that the same actress, Elsa Lanchester plays Shelley and ‘The Bride’. I was less keen on the scenes that basically undo all of the ending of the previous film, as both Frankenstein and the Monster survive, but once Doctor Pretorius appears and the story really kicks in, I was back on board. The main thing people talk about when it comes to this film is the queer subtext, and it really is strong. Pretorious is a very gay-coded character, and you really can read a lot into his and Frankenstein’s relationship. Boris Karloff’s performance as the Monster is just as iconic as ever, and it was great to see him do a bit more in his scenes with the blind hermit. They were like an extended version of the little girl in the first film. I was actually surprised by how little we see of the title character, she appears, screams and dies. But still, it’s another iconic horror moment and an all-time great look. I would say overall that the first film is better, but I can see why some people prefer this film, if you like the auteur theory, there’s a lot more of Whale in this one.

I stuck with the monsters, but got a lot more contemporary next, with Kong: Skull Island (Jordan Vogt-Roberts 2017), which was a lot of fun, if flawed in some ways. I am a big fan of King Kong, going back to some GCSE coursework I did comparing the original film to Peter Jackson’s remake. One thing I appreciated about this film was that it wasn’t a remake, but instead used everyone’s favourite giant Ape to tell a new story, and in particular, an anti-War story. The decision to set this during Vietnam is a great one, and it gave us some fantastic imagery of Kong fighting helicopters. The action scenes here really are great, very stylish and fun. The Vietnam setting also provides a truly great soundtrack that thankfully doesn’t go full-on Suicide Squad in terms of needle-dropping. The main flaw with this film is that some of the characters, in particular Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson, who are ostensibly the leads are boring and don’t actually do that much. You probably could have removed Hiddleston entirely and it wouldn't change much. Thankfully, the rest of the cast helps to elevate things, with Samuel L Jackson, John Goodman and particularly John C Reilly, who plays a WW2 soldier who’s been trapped on Skull Island for decades delivering great performances. But the real star here is of course Kong, who not only looks real, but is fucking huge, way bigger than other versions. Any time he’s on screen is brilliant, and the fights are, as I said, incredibly cool. I was initially a little wary of this being a shared universe with Godzilla, especially as the tone of this and Gareth Edwards’ film are very different, but I can’t deny that the end credit sequence was cool and the prospect of this Kong and that Godzilla fighting each other is tantalising. I suppose it’s the same as the Marvel and DC cinematic universes, just the idea of Batman Vs Superman or King Kong Vs Godzilla is enough to at least pique my interest. So far the so-called ‘Monsterverse’ is better than the DCEU, but far off the MCU. But it’s only 2 movies!

Speaking of Marvel, I then watched Logan (James Mangold 2017) and was absolutely blown away. It’s not only the best X-Men movie by far, but also one of the best superhero films I’ve seen, and I have seen pretty much all of them at this point. I think what makes Logan so good is that it really has that weight of history that the best superhero stories have behind it. We’ve seen Hugh Jackman as Wolverine and Patrick Stewart as Professor X on our screens for 17 years, nearly 2 decades now. Some people who were able to go to see Logan in the cinema were not even born when X-Men came out. So seeing these characters and actors age and (eventually) die really has an impact on us as a viewer. It also allows Jackman and Stewart to deliver far more nuanced and powerful performances. I can’t see it happening, but Stewart deserves awards recognition in my eyes. His senile Professor X is just heart-breaking. The other great performance in the film comes from Dafne Keen as Laura/X-23, who is fantastic, despite not saying much at all. Her action scenes in particular are excellent and surprising. That applies to much of the film, which really does have some impactful scenes, I really don’t think Logan’s claws caused so much blood to spray in previous films! The story here is refreshingly simple and light on mythology, but it works, and helps tie the story and character into the classic Westerns Mangold is drawing on. There’s a reason why they watch ‘Shane’ in the motel. Wolverine is comics’ original ‘Man with no name’ and this film really is true to those roots, delivering some truly iconic images of the character for me. I really can’t wait to watch it again, but Logan really is a great reminder of how great a character Wolverine is. I love that in 2017 the X-Men franchise, which has given us a fair amount of pablum is, with this and Legion and even Deadpool are stretching the kinds of superhero stories we get on screen.

One director who also stretched the superhero genre is Christopher Nolan, and up next I took a trip to the cinema to see his latest film, Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan 2017) which really gave me a lot to think about. I’m still mulling it over weeks later, which to me is the sign of a good film, and whilst I am conflicted about some of the messages, I really think it’s an incredibly profound and effective experience that really got across the horror of war and the Dunkirk evacuation in particular. Everything, from the soundtrack to the cinematography really put you in the shoes of the soldiers and I felt incredibly tense throughout. I particularly liked that this was a WW2 movie where you don’t see a single Nazi soldier. You see some planes, but that’s it. The threat they pose is all-encompassing, and you don’t know where they are coming from. All you get is the bombs, or the bullets coming through the hull of the ship. It really helps the paranoia and isolation the men must have felt, and means you can buy the scene where Harry Styles thinks Aneurin Barnard might be a spy (he turns out to be French). The way Nolan shot the aerial battle sequences and the sea also contributed to that feeling, where they are actually rather empty. At times, the English Channel looked like that endless ocean planet from his previous film, Interstellar! I thought the performances from everyone were very strong, whether from acting heavyweights like Branagh, Rylance and Hardy, or the younger actors. I mentioned Harry Styles earlier, and he’s actually very good here, and I think his casting works on a meta-level as well, because if Styles were to have been alive back in 1940, he wouldn’t have been able to become a popstar, he would have gone off to war. It really made me think about, despite the many problems of 2017, how lucky we are to be around today as opposed to then, something I was already thinking about given that the 100th Anniversary of Passchendaele happened the same week. My great-grandfather fought there when he was younger than I am now! That’s why I think the message of Dunkirk is a powerful one, it shows that even in retreat, we hailed these soldiers as heroes and eventually regrouped and won the War. It’s not jingoistic like many war films, contrary to what Nigel Farage may tweet! My only real issue is that it took me a while to work out how all of the storylines were taking place at different timescales and not at the same time, so when Cillian Murphy interacted with Fionn Whitehead’s character I was very confused, but I think that’s more on me that the film! Overall, Dunkirk worked for me, and is probably my favourite Nolan film since Inception.

Things are getting a bit heavy, so let’s lighten up with Moana (Ron Clements and John Musker 2016), another thoroughly delightful Disney musical from the same team that gave us Frozen and Tangled. This was a funny and fun romp with some great animation and a very strong vocal performance from The Rock as Maui. One thing I appreciated about this film is that it bucked the trend of Disney Princess stories and didn’t feature any romance at all really. Moana’s journey is to help her family and her people, not to fall in love, which is a modern touch I appreciated. The music was good, nothing here is quite as immediately iconic as ‘Let It Go’, but I found ‘How Far I’ll Go’ and ‘I Am Moana’ to be powerful songs. I’m obviously not the target audience for these films anymore, but this is certainly one of the better kids cartoons I’ve seen lately. There are enough jokes to get you through, and like I mentioned, the animation and look of this is brilliant. At times it reminded me of The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker, and there can’t be much higher praise than that!

Nearly done! I then watched The Incredible Jessica James (James C. Strouse 2017) on Netflix, and found it to be a very strong, modern romantic comedy with a truly great central performance from Jessica Williams. I had liked Williams as a correspondent on The Daily Show, but she really shows she can act here, as she really shines in every scene of this. She’s not only very funny, but able to handle the more dramatic parts of the story too. Not that this story is incredibly dramatic, it’s actually very straight-forward, and I imagine that many people are sick to death of hip sexy young people falling in love in Brooklyn. For me though, the performance of Williams elevates this above those familiar elements. The supporting cast is also strong, Noel Wells from Master Of None is great, and whilst I still find it weird that Chris O’Dowd is getting so many Hollywood Rom-Com roles, he’s great too. And of course Lakeith Stanfield is good as Jessica’s ex, he’s showing up in more and more lately, and he’s always good. It’s going to be a long wait for more Atlanta. I also liked how this film used social media. So much of modern romance is done online, and making Tinder, or unfollowing your ex on Instagram a plot point was intriguing, and something I want to see more of. It felt much more true to life than many films, and hopefully won’t date things too much. This isn’t ‘You’ve Got Mail’.

And finally, I re-watched Get Out (Jordan Peele 2017) again on DVD and enjoyed it just as much the second time around. Particularly how knowing the twist allows you to see earlier scenes in a new light. Like when you first see Allison Williams convince the Cop not to check Chris’ ID, you think she’s being cool and not-racist. But then you realise… she doesn’t want the Cop to know Chris was with her so they can trap him! Genius.

Television

There’s really only one place to start with TV, and that’s the return of Game Of Thrones (HBO) for it’s penultimate season. I am sort of conflicted about the season so far. On the one hand, GoT remains the best-looking, most lavish TV show on the air right now, and it’s gotten even bigger this year. The Dragon attack on the Lannister Army in Episode 4 was one of the most epic things I’ve seen on the small screen, and can probably rival most movies in terms of the CGI on the Dragons. It’s also been fantastic to see so many long-awaited moments and reunions, it’s been literally years since the likes of Arya, Bran and Sansa have been in the same place. The same goes for Tyrion and Jaime. And it’s been a lot of fun to see Daenerys actually interact with characters she’s never ever met before like Jon Snow and to see the series really cut to the meat of the story there. But therein lies my big issue with the season, and I think it’s because we really are ahead of the books now and we lack that wider context for these bigger moments. Because the show moves at a much quicker pace and has changed a lot of elements, previously, when they did that, we as fans knew the wider context and meaning because we had seen it in the books. But now, we haven’t, so things are just… happening. Awesome things for sure, but I can’t help but think that George RR Martin’s original versions will be better. The books have always been more humane and had more heart than the show, which takes the cynicism and darkness a bit too far. It’s odd, initially I thought that the show getting ahead of the source material would lessen my excitement for Books 6 and 7, but it’s having the opposite effect, I now want to read The Winds Of Winter more than ever. It’s certainly going to be different, especially because the show has cut so much meat off the bone. But I’m supposed to reviewing the show, not hypothetical novels. What else? I think the show has taken another step up in terms of editing and directing, I think that freedom from the novels has allowed them to do different things, like the toilet cleaning montage with Sam in the Citadel. That was a great sequence, and one I think they should do more of. Not the shit, but the montage, especially since so many people are complaining about how quickly people seem to move across Westeros now when compared to previous years. I don’t mind that too much, but it does add to that feeling off things just happening. But nevertheless, Game Of Thrones remains one of the best things out there in any media. I can’t quite believe there’s only 2 episodes to go this year. Hopefully by the time Season 8 rolls around my issues will have been resolved because I’ll have ben able to read that book!

Also in terms of new stuff, I watched the premiere of the revived DuckTales (Disney XD) and very much enjoyed it. Like most people of my age, I watched the original when I was a kid (even though it ended in 1990, UK Kid’s TV still repeated it a lot), particularly the movie where they get a Genie Duck, and as an adult I’ve gained a new appreciation of the Duck Family thanks to learning about the importance of the Carl Barks and later Don Rosa comics. I try to fight against my own nostalgia a lot of the time, but when that classic theme tune hit, I was hit with a proustian rush of it, it was great. But even as an adult, this new show has a lot going for it. It’s funny, the animation is strong and the voice acting is great across the board. David Tennant as Scrooge McDuck is one of those choices that is almost too good and having Danny Pudi, Ben Schwartz and Bobby Moynihan play Huey, Dewey and Louie is also great fun. It is a bit weird that Donald Duck is the only one to speak in the classic way, but I think it works because Donald really is a unique weirdo. The show isn’t back properly until September, but I’ll certainly watch it, if only to hear Paul F. Tompkins appear as Gladstone Gander.

Now for another cartoon about kids going on adventures with an older relative that has an entirely different tone… Rick And Morty (Adult Swim) is properly back for Season 3 now after the premiere on April Fool’s Day. So far I’m really enjoying this year, because it’s just as insane as previous years, but also delving far more into the darkness at the heart of the characters. This week’s superhero episode was just fantastic, not just because the superhero parody element was so good, but also because of how Rick was just straight up the villain. Pickle Rick was also a standout episode. The violence was insane (I think the rat slaughter shocked me more than the Dragon War in the same night’s Game Of Thrones) and the discussion of therapy at the end was just incredibly bleak. I can understand why some people are thinking the show has been fumbling a bit this year, but I’m still digging it, and it’s certainly not going down the same path Season 3 of Community did. At least not yet. I hope Dan Harmon can break his cycle of going up his own ass, and so far, for me, he has. Perhaps it’s going up Justin Roiland’s ass instead? And that’s just a better ass?

In terms of continuing shows, Preacher (AMC) is still thoroughly enjoyable in Season 2. I am a bit disappointed that we aren’t actually getting to the road trip aspect of the show, and instead have spent most of it inside a dingy New Orleans apartment, but I suppose that’s budgetary. The actual story has been very good, with the threats of the Saint Of Killers and Herr Starr and The Grail being handled very well, and faithfully to the comics. The character work has also been very strong, Jesse, Tulip and Cassidy have all had to deal with some heavy shit, and it’s been very interesting. I’m particularly worried about what is going to happen with Cassidy and his son Dennis, who has become a Vampire too. It’s going to be tragic. This character focus is really the best thing about the show, because like I’ve said before, whilst, story-wise, it’s very different from the comics, in terms of characterisation and tone, it’s incredibly faithful to Ennis and Dillon. I think that’s why I don’t mind the divergences here as much as I do in Game Of Thrones.

Now for my catch-up viewing! I finally got around to the last 3 episodes of the first series of Inside No. 9 (BBC Two) on DVD, and thoroughly enjoyed all of them. It’s just great to have each episode be entirely different. ‘Last Gasp’ was perhaps the worst of the series, but it was still enjoyable and had a great performance from Tamsin Greig. ‘The Understudy’ was a great Shakespearean send-up and man, the final episode, ‘The Harrowing’ was a real shock. It was barely a comedy, just straight-up horror. I kept waiting for the comedic twist to come, and it never did! Brilliant stuff. I have Series 2 to watch and then I’ll have to buy the 3rd. I really can’t believe I didn’t watch this when it originally aired, what was I thinking?

I’ve also finally tackled Vikings (History Channel) Season 3. I watched the first 2 seasons in fairly quick succession last year, but somehow never found the time to continue. Now I have that bit of time, and also an iPad so I’ve been streaming the shit out of Ragnar and his friends. I really enjoyed this season, Vikings has always been very consistent, but it took a step-up here I think. Travis Fimmel’s Ragnar remains a very underrated performance, you never know what he’s planning, and I also continue to thoroughly enjoy King Ecbert’s scheming. It’s going to be very satisfying if and when he finally gets his. I also like how the series continues to surprise by having events that you’d think would be save for a climactic finale happen at unusual junctures. Big characters that have been around since the first episodes die in the 3rd and 6th episodes of the season, and it really does keep you on your toes. So much so that I almost bought Ragnar’s ‘death’ in the finale, before realising it was just a ploy to get into Paris. The whole Paris storyline was great, in particular the battle scenes. The one that took up pretty much an entire episode, ‘To The Gates’ was just brilliant, and really bears comparison to some of the best battles in Game Of Thrones or Spartacus. The new French Villains are less exciting (Count Odo’s sadomasochism came a bit out of nowhere, and it was weird how only that scene in the entire series had nudity right?) but I imagine they will be fleshed out in Season 4. The same thing happened with The Saxons. The only real negative in this season was the weird appearance of Kevin Durand as a character who might be the actual Odin. In a series where the conflict between the Norse Gods and Christianity plays such a big role, having one side appear as ‘real’ just didn’t work for me.

Music

Only one CD to talk about this month, but it’s kind of a big deal, in that it’s the new one from Arcade Fire, one of the world’s biggest bands. So far I haven’t been able to listen to Everything Now (Sonovox/Columbia 2017) as many times as I’d like (though I am listening to it now as I type this. Right now. Right… now) but I think I like it rather more than what the general consensus seems to be, and certainly think it’s a return to form after ‘Reflektor’ which I never fell in love with. It’s not up there with ‘The Suburbs’ or ‘Funeral’, but frankly, few albums are. For me, this is a very enjoyable record with some interesting new developments for the band. Yeah, the title track does sound rather a lot like Abba, but I don’t mind that, and I would put ‘Signs Of Life’ up there with Arcade Fire’s best songs. You can really tell that Thomas Bangalter from Daft Punk produced those tracks, they feel much more dancey. I do think some of the meaning behind the songs and the cultural commentary is a bit wanky, but on the record itself, it doesn’t get in front of the music itself. I think Arcade Fire are kind of suffering from Jonathan Franzen-syndrome, where people focus way more on the interviews and news around the work, than the work itself. Who cares about fidget spinners and whether or not they enforced a dress code or if it was a joke or not. Just listen to the music and forget about ‘the discourse’. I know it’s hard, and I’ve certainly failed to do that here, but still, I’m going to make an effort.

Books

I’m going to keep this short because I wrote more general thoughts last week, but I really did blast through the back half of 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History Of Protest Songs (2010) by Dorian Lynskey. It’s a fantastically readable book and even though it’s over 500 pages long, it never felt like a chore. I was up the the 1970s last time, and this month I read from then, through the 80s and 90s and up to Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’. The focus of the book spreads a bit wider, as the focus of the protest movements becomes harder to define and the culture as a whole became more diffuse. So the chapter that is nominally about U2’s ‘Pride (In The Name Of Love)’ is actually more about Bruce Springsteen and Live Aid than those loveable lads from Liverpool, and the Steve Earle track becomes about the musical response to 9/11 and the Iraq War as a whole. It’s still interesting, but does lack the immediacy of the anti-Vietnam and Civil Rights songs from earlier. If anything, that’s my only criticism of the book, in that Lynskey’s history only goes up to 2003, and is a bit too much a part of the ‘end of history’ neoliberal consensus era. With recent events showing that to have been completely wrong-headed, this is one history that will certainly benefit from an update in a few years, once we’re able to see the true impact of Trump and Brexit and all of the other huge events. That’s if there any good protest songs to come of the current climate? Last month I said there aren’t any and that’s still the case. Maybe Lynskey could sub in a podcast and write about Chapo Trap House?

I then took a turn back into fiction, in particular fantasy with Saladin Ahmed’s Throne Of The Crescent Moon (2012). I picked this up after being very impressed by the first few issues of Ahmed’s Black Bolt, which he does, along with the amazing artist Christian Ward for Marvel. He’s giving new life to the Inhuman King, and it’s probably the best comic to come along as part of the big Inhuman push we’ve had over the last few years (I sort of don’t count Ms. Marvel or Moon Girl as Inhuman books, even though I probably should). This novel is a fantasy, but what sets it apart from the standard is that it isn’t set in a quasi-medieval European setting, but in a Middle Easternish universe. A lot of fantasy novels have these oriental settings, but most of them are set apart from the ‘real’ action, like Game Of Thrones’ ‘Essos’, but here, the main focus is the magical Arabian Nights, and I found the setting to be very interesting, and something cool and different. But setting is only a part of it, the characters Ahmed uses to populate his world are well-developed, and I found Adoulla to be a very strong central character that went against cliche. He’s not a young chosen one, he’s a middle-aged magician who can’t really be bothered. I think the closest comparison I can think of for Ahmed’s book is Scott Lynch’s ‘The Lies Of Locke Lamora’, as both are not sprawling epics where people go on quests, but tighter stories where the action mainly takes place in a bustling metropolis. The scope of this story is a lot smaller than I expected, but that just means the focus is sharp. You can certainly tell there is a wider world going on, and I am excited to see how that is developed in future novels. If you like modern fantasy and what something with a little different spin on it, this is definitely worth a read, and it won’t take 3 months to read like a lot of others. And seriously, pick up Black Bolt, it is great.

Games

I feel like I’m finally getting into the real meat of The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild (Nintendo Switch 2017) as I’ve actually started to do the main quest instead of randomly dicking around Hyrule. I’m now doing one of the ‘Great Beast’ stories having accidentally ran into a Zora during some of that aforementioned dicking around. It’s a bit of an adjustment going to a bit more of a traditional Zelda structure here, but I do welcome it. At times, the sheer scale of the game can be a bit overwhelming and I can't decide what to do. I wen through the same thing with GTA V if I recall correctly, before eventually knuckling down and completing the thing. I don’t have anything else to really say about how good this game is though, it’s superb and at this stage I’m just going to be updating you on my progress. I hope it doesn’t take too long, it took me over a year to beat Ocarina Of Time, and that’s a much smaller game! But then again, I was 12 then.

I’ve also played a bit more of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (Nintendo Switch 2017) as my Cousin is back from China and wanted to play. It’s so much fun, particularly on multi-player and I’m enjoying slowly but surely unlocking more cool vehicles and extra stuff to play as. I also really like the fact that some classic tracks from older games are on here. I didn’t realise how well I remembered Mario Kart Super Circuit from the GBA, but it’s been buried there in my sub-conscious all this time.

And finally, I bought an Apple iPad this month! I’ve been meaning to get one for ages and I had a bit of a cash surplus so decided to be spontaneous. So far I’ve mainly used it for streaming video and surfing the web, but I do have one game, Football Manager Touch 2017 (iOS 2016). So far I’m very impressed, it’s exactly the same as the classic Football Manager… only on the iPad! For me, FM has gotten a bit too fiddly on the computer in the last few years, so this slightly more streamlined version is welcome. I just hope I don’t get too addicted like I have to past incarnations. I’m thinking the portable nature of the iPad will help with that, I can’t play for hours on end because the battery will run out! I’m only in pre-season with Sheffield Wednesday so far, but I did win one friendly 5-0, I’m definitely going to smash promotion, I can tell.

—

So there you have it. I’ll be back in September. Dunno what I’ll have to talk about, I’m in a bit of a funk so probably just… ‘I played Football Manager for a month straight and now it’s the year 2040 and everyone’s a regen’. I saw an article on Vice the other day where 2 guys played a Management sim for a thousand in-game years. This is my goal.

See you then!

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lifeonashelf · 4 years

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CKY

Do any of you remember a film from the ‘90s called Shazaam?

Allow me to refresh your memory: Shazaam was a vehicle for C-list comedian Sinbad, who is perhaps best known for starring in a 1994 sitcom that was creatively titled The Sinbad Show—which I never watched because the show starred Sinbad. The Sinbad Show didn’t even last a full season on the FOX network (probably because the show starred Sinbad), but sometime either shortly before or shortly after that program was cancelled, its namesake landed the lead role in a film entitled Shazaam, a part which allowed him to stretch his acting chops by playing a wisecracking genie who acted exactly like Sinbad.

I distinctly remember seeing the trailer for this cinematic tour de force. To the best of my recollection, the plot revolved around two precocious children—one girl and one boy, naturally, to ensure that twice as many kids would beg their parents to buy the tie-in merchandise that would inexorably be produced if the film was successful—who one way or another encounter a djinn named Shazaam. Though their initial meeting befalls as a startling surprise for all parties concerned, they quickly become the best of pals and Shazaam subsequently convoys his youthful comrades through a rote series of comical PG hijinks. The specific nature of their shenanigans has been lost to the haze of time, but those details don’t matter much; a mid-‘90s movie built upon that scenario and geared toward that audience sort of writes itself (I doubt there was a subplot about Hungarian sex traffickers, for instance). I’m sure Shazaam helps the moppets surmount some sort of reasonably benign conflict and everyone learns a lesson about the true meaning of family by the time the credits roll. I’m assuming a clever dog is also involved in some fashion, and I’m confident the film features at least one protracted flatulence gag. Mind you, this is all just speculation; I can’t verify any of it since I never actually watched Shazaam (I decided not to because the trailer revealed that the film starred Sinbad).

Perhaps you already know where I’m going with this, but in case you don’t: Shazaam likely qualifies as the least successful celluloid offering ever concocted, because it is a movie which literally nobody watched. Oddly, this dearth of viewership didn’t have anything to do with Sinbad starring in it; the main reason nobody watched the film Shazaam is because the film Shazaam doesn’t actually exist. And I have a real difficult time wrapping my head around this, because not only am I ABSOLUTELY FUCKING CERTAIN that I remember viewing the trailer I’ve described, I can also readily visualize the VHS case for this movie that was never really a movie on the shelves at Blockbuster Video (imagine my incredulity when I learned that Blockbuster Video never actually existed, either). And even stranger, there are evidently thousands upon thousands of people who recall the existence of this movie that does not exist as vividly as I do.

If you kept up with the brief internet furor about this topic which arose a couple years ago, you’re undoubtedly aware the Shazaam phenomenon has been explained away as some peculiar mass delusion known as the Mandela Effect—apparently, so many human brains muddled the title and star of the ill-advised Shaquille O’Neal genie flick Kazaam that our collective hive-minds fabricated an illusory film to match our erroneous memories. (Of course, this begs the question: do those of us who remember Shazaam subconsciously wish there was a film in which Sinbad plays a sassy, flatulent genie…?). This clarification makes a kind of sense, even though my vague recollections of the corporeal Kazaam and my lucid recollections of the false Shazaam differ substantially (in my brain, Sinbad never raps or does karate in his movie, yet both disciplines factor into major plot-points in Kazaam—and Shazaam doesn’t meander into a baffling second-act detour about Hungarian sex traffickers like Shaq’s film inexplicably does).

So here’s the reason I’m bringing this up here: when I sat down to write about the band CKY, the paramount thing I intended to delve into was how I was introduced to their music. Do me a favor and keep that in mind—this information will come in handy later.

When I was a twenty-something in the very late 1990’s-slash-very early 2000’s, I worked at Domino’s Pizza as a delivery driver, which was a really excellent gig at the time. I had almost no bills and gas was a buck a gallon, so I only needed to work about 20 hours a week to earn enough money to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle. And like most twenty-something males who make their living as pizza conveyance professionals, when I wasn’t on the road, my comfortable lifestyle mainly entailed spending inordinate amounts of my free time listening to a bunch of punk rock, smoking a bunch of pot, and playing a bunch of video games.

[To be clear, not all of my co-workers at Domino’s did even one of these things. There was Dennis, for instance, who to the best of my knowledge did not enjoy punk rock, marijuana, or video games. He did, however, regularly come into work with cartons of expired baked goods that he extracted from the dumpsters behind Vons, which he would then rinse in the sink to make them “fresh” again. The prevailing rumor about Dennis’s backstory was that he was a former surgeon who had a nervous breakdown after losing a child patient on the operating table. I’m not so sure that was true, although I am very sure that he once brought in a plastic grocery bag filled with vomit instead of pastries and attempted to rinse that in the sink, too—which is why I tend to lean more toward believing Dennis was probably just fundamentally insane. There was no preamble to his unambiguously unhinged act; the dude simply strolled into the prep area at the start of his shift and said “hey, Taylor” to me like it was any other day… except he was carrying a sack of upchuck with him, clutching it right below the straps, as if girding the parcel to ensure he wouldn’t spill any of his cargo. My manager sent him home when she saw what was in the bag, but Dennis came back to work the very next afternoon—sans puke satchel—and the incident was never spoken of again. To this day, I cannot fathom how Dennis accumulated all that vomit, why he was hauling it around in his car, or what he was hoping to accomplish by soaking it in the same basin where we washed our pizza pans. Anyway, what I was getting at is that he didn’t especially fit the stereotype I outlined. We got along okay, though; I always made it a point to be really nice to the guy—you know, considering his alarming derangement and all.]

One of the staples of my Playstation habits in those days was the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series. Despite having only spent a combined total of maybe zero-point-three hours on an actual skateboard in my entire life, my best friend Andy and I logged approximately 19,000 hours guiding the avatars in those seminal games through a multitude of gravity-and-logic-defying feats which no human being could ever possibly achieve with or without a skateboard. In the real world, I probably couldn’t even pull off an elementary trick like an ollie—but in the realm of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater I was a four-wheeled fucking god who could effortlessly grind up the side of a building, soar off the opposite edge, perform roughly nineteen twisting flips on my way back down, then execute a perfect landing on the downslope of an opportunely-placed ramp so I could launch off that and catch enough air to do nineteen more flips. Though I have never been an aficionado of that particular sporting pursuit, the Tony Hawk games were incredibly fun and offered endless replay potential due to the almost pornographic extremity of their facets. The conscientious city planners in THPS’s utopia were mindful to randomly insert dozens of half-pipes and empty swimming pools all over their towns, and none of their edifices featured a single surface that could not be utilized for some sort of astonishing aerodynamic exploit.

Instead of composing an original musical score for the series, the developers of the Pro Skater franchise rather ingeniously opted to license fifteen-or-so songs by relatively popular bands for each installment. These tunes supplied the background inspiration during gameplay, and were ostensibly chosen because they represented genres which the skater demographic enjoyed—unsurprisingly, the soundtracks predominantly relied on crowd-pleasing punk and hip-hop material (although one of the sequels featured a song by Powerman 5000, whose fanbase was roughly equivalent to the number of people who have watched Shazaam). However, a cycle of only fifteen tracks doesn’t go a very long way when it’s entirely feasible to play 100 rounds in one sitting—as Andy and I regularly did. So as you might suspect, we ended up hearing the same song-batch an incalculable number of times throughout the course of any given session, which inevitably burned every one of those tracks permanently into our brains. This is how I became intimately familiar with the band CKY, whose cut “Flesh Into Gear” appeared in one of the Tony Hawk releases and was consequently submitted for my listening pleasure hundreds upon hundreds of times.

Luckily, “Flesh Into Gear” is a really cool tune, a prime slice of appealing proto-metal with an insidiously catchy chorus and a snaking stoner-rock guitar riff that would undoubtedly inspire anyone in their right mind to rail-slide across a chain of forty conveniently-equidistant park benches. I could hardly believe a song this excellent and shrewdly-crafted was coined by an outfit like CKY, since the group’s foremost point of notoriety at the time was their drummer’s family ties to one of the cast members of Jackass—an obtuse reality television showcase for the misadventures of a squad of unabashed idiots whose misguided testosterone impelled them to launch bottle rockets out of their rectums, drink animal semen, and obsessively scour the ends of the earth searching for various objects to pummel each other’s testicles with.

My persistent exposure to “Flesh Into Gear” via Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater eventually motivated me to purchase CKY’s 2002 release Infiltrate-Destroy-Rebuild, the album the track was borrowed from. I have been spinning that disc repeatedly since I started writing this, and—while the rest of the band’s material is satisfactory but un-extraordinary—every single time “Flesh Into Gear” comes on, it instills me with a rush of delightful nostalgia. I cannot remember the last time I played any of the Pro Skater installments, but with “Flesh Into Gear” navigating my recollections just like it navigated my board-wielding avatar seventeen years ago, I can still clearly visualize the games’ indelible imagery and virtually weave my way through the vast intricacies of those levels I traversed countless times back then. And these evocations are accompanied by a flood of additional splendid reminiscences, snapshots from a far simpler and more idyllic time—perhaps my very favorite phase of my life—an era free of real jobs and real responsibilities, when on any given day my best friend and I could unreservedly spend endless hours engrossed in Playstation, and the most critical concerns in our purview were what combination of toppings we should order on our pizza and whether or not we would be able to track down an eighth so we could smoke a bowl before watching that evening’s new episode of South Park.

This is the true and immeasurable splendor of music. Even this many years removed, I can still listen to “Flesh Into Gear” today and instantly be enveloped in those potent and wonderful memories, transported back to a comfortable living room in Lakewood, sitting in front of a big-screen television beside someone who is closer to me than a brother, our fingers frenetically tapping on the joysticks which control our destinies on the monitor, beautifully oblivious to the evaporating hours because we are twenty-one and our time seems infinite and our futures are wide open and we have a whole lifetime of escapades ahead of us. On these glorious occasions, Andy and I weren’t just mindlessly zoning out on some silly skateboarding game. We were ardently devoting ourselves to having fun, pure and unadulterated fun, the kind of serene merriment you only get to have for a woefully short yet richly blessed period of your existence, the kind of immaculate and untroubled amusement you don’t realize you won’t ever experience again until that phase of your life imperceptibly cedes to the next and the ravages of the real world begin to methodically devour your body and your soul. We were also laughing, a lot, often so vigorously and exuberantly that our giggle-fits overtook us in irrepressible paroxysms that brought tears of elation to our eyes. Simply by being in the same room with each other, we were celebrating just how special a friendship that spans literal decades truly is, and how singularly magnificent it feels to spend time with people whose mere presence has the ability to make you happy. So, it didn’t ultimately matter how many times we heard “Flesh Into Gear”. I never got sick of that song. Who could ever get sick of laughter and happiness?

The list of CKY’s quantifiable merits isn’t an especially long one. Nevertheless, they created something which conjures a surge of jubilant memories that I will never forget, and would never want to. Thus, they will always occupy a warm place in my heart, a place where they are inextricably tied to one of the most joyful epochs of my life: those euphoric and carefree days when my best friend and I had all the time in the world to listen to “Flesh Into Gear” over and over and over again while we were playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.

Okay, are you ready? Here comes the Sinbad part…

In the interest of accuracy, I went online to look up the Pro Skater series and clarify which installment this particular track was used in. As I said, each of the Tony Hawk releases featured a different assortment of songs, and since Andy and I enthusiastically immersed ourselves in all of them as they came out, we heard and re-heard the music on all of those playlists accordingly. I was fairly certain “Flesh Into Gear” was part of Pro Skater 3’s soundtrack, but I wanted to verify that it hadn’t instead appeared in one of the previous games before I started waxing nostalgic here.

What I found out is this: CKY’s song “Flesh Into Gear” did not appear in any edition of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. The band did indeed supply a track to THPS3, but it was an entirely different cut called “96 Quite Bitter Beings”, which I do not have in my collection because it isn’t even on the same album as “Flesh Into Gear”. This means that for the last however-many years, I have been assigning a reverent sentimental significance to a song that, for all intents and purposes, has absolutely no relevance to the detailed web of memories I have snuggled around it. The crystal-clear recollections I have of guiding a pixilated daredevil through a labyrinth of nosegrind-ready obstacles while “Flesh Into Gear” churned in the background never happened.

Shazaam.

For the record, Andy is still my best friend, and has been for 33 years and counting. Our lives have changed significantly since our Pro Skater era, but our bond has not. Though we are only able to hang out every couple months or so at present, whenever we do, we still play video games. And we still watch South Park. And we still approach ordering pizza like the medley of toppings we select are variables in an intricate and vitally-imperative equation. And we still laugh a whole fucking lot.

Sure, I miss the old days—anyone who doesn’t miss the old days obviously wasn’t doing the old days right. Yet, despite only seeing Andy a handful of times a year and having to drive two hours to Oceanside to do so, I never get so wistful for the way things were that I neglect cherishing the way things are now. I love Andy’s wife, Neisa, and I love having a front-row seat to the incredible and inspiring marriage they have built together. I absolutely adore the two remarkable humans they created, Shae and Nixon, and I consider it the most profound honor of my life to be their Uncle Taylor. There are plenty of things I would change about my own contemporary reality, but there isn’t a single thing I would change about theirs.

Still, every now and then, I do find myself wishing I could revisit that living room in Lakewood, settle down in front of that big-screen TV with Andy, turn on the Playstation, and feel as infinite and invincible and utterly content as I did back when I was a twenty-one year-old pizza conveyance professional whose universe was far too harmonious and secure to generate even an inkling of anxiety about the present, let alone the future. If I did return to that time and place, it wouldn’t be so I could instigate any sweeping amendments or pass on some sage piece of cautionary wisdom to my younger self. No, I think I would let the pages of that chapter turn exactly the way they did. Because, all things considered, spending entire days on end doing something as enchantingly frivolous as playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater with your best friend in the world isn’t really all that irresponsible—it’s probably precisely what life is all about. And, you know what, it wouldn’t matter to me one bit which CKY song was on the soundtrack, just as long as Andy and I were having fun while we listened to it.

I hope you enjoyed this piece. Even though it starred Sinbad. If you don’t mind, I’m going to go ahead and roll the credits here on that poignant note. I’ll save the story about my run-in with Hungarian sex traffickers for another time.

July 21, 2018

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flauntpage · 6 years

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NBA Summer Vacation Watch: And Now Our Watch Has Ended

Ah, the fleeting glance of summer. The already fading warmth from your skin, the trips that seemed like yesterday receding into memory like the once frolicked in ocean tides. The outfits saved special to match the ancient frescos on narrow, cobblestone streets where one posed casually as if it were routine (*cough* Jimmy Butler), the foam party raves attended in Ibiza (James Harden), the beaches chilled upon, the sea-doos ripped, the joy of chillage—all these memories made will stave off the biting chill of winter and may we hold close the easy-breezy, best versions of ourselves that we got to know in these months, even as the NBA season begins and with it the upsets, disappointments, and probably dumb things said.

But don’t despair. The end of NBA summer vacation means the end of NBA Summer Vacation Watch, but with it come the accolades we’ve all been waiting for. Who takes the title of NBA SVW MVP 2018? Is it summer vacation’s favorite son, Patty Mills, who romps around in board shorts for three months straight and basically lives on the beach? Or will it be upstart sun and fun-seeker, JaVale McGee, who showed up all offseason in improbable locales, up for anything? Jimmy Butler and Joel Embiid are also in the running, both serving looks and the same dedication to their seemingly never-ending vacations that they show for the game.

Read on, vacation watchers, for the last drops squeezed out of summer and for this year’s king of the beach.

Klay Thompson

In some ways, we all end where we begin. So it’s only fitting for SVW to come full circle back to Klay, doing circles on a camel in Qatar with Tracy McGrady. Summer Klay is made of different material, summer Klay loves to sit in the sun and bake. Soon regular season Klay will return and that smile will fade like a suntan, replaced by a face permanently fixed in the middle distance.

Rating: We’ll miss you summer Klay, but we’ll see you next season.

Jimmy Butler

Leave it to Jimmy to say au revoir to the summer in literal Paris, France, with a dramatic black and white vignette and his back turned to the camera so we know where he is in case we somehow do not see the tower, right there, that he is dunking on. Do not feel sad for Jimmy. From solo gondola rides down the canals of Venice, to posing on the beaches of Mykonos, to casually strolling the rainy hills of Tuscany, to Paris—Jimmy had a summer. And whatever this year looks like for him, we can agree that his real season is summer.

Rating: Ne me quitte pas.

James Harden

The Beard took a big yacht to Providenciales, Turks and Caicos, to stand majestically in the sea in a matching splatter ensemble, looking like Poseidon himself come up from the waves to say what's up.

Rating: I would not recommend this to literally anyone else, but maybe James Harden should go to one beach rave every summer, just to get his whole entire psyche this properly tuned for the rest of the year.

Victor Oladipo

Well that only took all summer but behold, we’ve finally got Victor Oladipo right where we’ve always wanted him: on a beautiful beach in Mexico gazing out to the horizon and making his caption an inspirational quote from a song in Disney’s Moana.

Rating: You can exhale now, thwart is officially over.

Carmelo Anthony

Hoodie Melo was last season, this season it’s Ghutra Melo.

Rating: When your whole regular season is also summer vacation the offseason doesn’t quite mean the same, but you can still be an inspiration to the rest of us.

Chris Paul

CP3 took every single Houston Rocket to the beach and, lord, we might be thanking him for the rest of our lives.

Rating: I dare any conspiracy theorist to deny this inspirational travel and subsequent beach landing ever happened.

Pau Gasol

Pau’s stay-cation continues, however he is using the whole entire country of Spain for his low-key jaunts instead of a trip to the local museum or sad public pool like the rest of us. Gasol has also used his perpetual travel to perfect the quintessential vacation photo pose of looking slightly back at the camera, face caught between a breathless smile, a relaxed little laugh, and a moment of awe.

Rating: Not to start any additional retirement rumors, but are we sure Pau has not already joined Manu in going off into the sunset, or in this case, Barcelona at dusk?

Andre Drummond

Finally, it happened to me right in front of my face and I just cannot hide it—Andre Drummond is on a beach somewhere (who cares where!!) with his top right the hell off, shorts way the hell on, sun shining down on sand spraying all over while he brings his rando tug-of-war team of whoever the heck these people are to victory.

Rating: The sand spraying wildly around in this video is the equivalent of a Microderm abrasion for your soul—close your eyes and enjoy it. But not for too long, you need to see the video.

Pascal Siakam

As far as I can tell Pascal has dedicated his summer vacation to getting gigantic instead of relaxation, but here we have the two culminating in a very natural, extremely powerful way. There’s the ocean, there’s some palm trees, this can count as a vacation now.

Rating: A vacation AND a scientific breakthrough—congratulations to Siakam for discovering that the human body is capable not just of an 8-pack of abdominal muscles, but a 16-pack.

Marcin Gortat

We go live to Gortat showing off the typical Polish vehicle of leisure, a souped-up part riding mower, part ATV, part civilian tank, best loved for the mileage it gets traversing rugged hills and ostensibly allowing its rider a moment of triumph wrapped in, I want to say, terror. Gortat is also in Florida for no good reason, AKA the only reason to ever really go there.

Rating: Comforted to know that when basketball’s behind him, Marcin has a retirement career of casual arms/car dealer in front of him.

Thon Maker and D.J. Wilson

A two-fer! A rare summer vacation occurrence as special as a July strawberry moon. Thon has been keeping a low profile all summer after pummeling the Philippine basketball team very early in the offseason, so it is very nice to see him perched atop the back of a speedboat with D.J. Wilson in Miami.

Rating: But was the Thon song playing?

Bojan Bogdanović

Here we have the elder Bogdanović of the league floating in the Adriatic Sea. Overall this is looking a little too much like an alternate poster for The Meg for my liking, but Bojan seems to be having a good time.

Rating: Honestly this photo makes my heart rate speed up but for all the wrong reasons! The mysteries of the deep are not to be toyed with!

Bogdan Bogdanović

The younger Bogdanović, of no relation to the former, was leading a hike of chums through the hills of Montenegro, on a kind of Fellowship of the Ring journey complete with one real dwarf-lookin’ dude.

Rating: What is the Serbian film scene like and would they buy rights to this recreation?

C.J. Miles

Miles is having a dad of a summer, which mostly means trailing his beautiful family around, just happy to be along for the ride. Speaking of rides, earlier this summer C.J. rode a horse in a tank top and I don’t think I’ve had a bad day since.

Rating: 🎵 I can tell you my love for you will still be strong/After the dads of summer have gone 🎵

Miles Plumlee

Just when you thought you’d get through an entire summer vacation without seeing what fresh hell a Plumlee is up to, there’s one of them working out at Burning Man.

Rating: Not only is this family cursed, but it insists on cursing itself anew at every opportunity.

Maurice Harkless

But how’s this for a cranial cleanser after a Plumlee tried to go scorched earth on summer vacation—Maurice Harkless staring wistfully out from a balcony into a tropical pastel sunset, periphery lined with gently whispering palms and a majestic peak of unknown origin in the distance. Truly there is no better image to leave you with as a parting gift and tribute to this time we shared together.

Rating: Like a dusky purple sun sets into a calm and clear sea, summer vacations must come to an end and Maurice Harkless and I will be there, watching.

AND THE 2018 NBA SUMMER VACATION WATCH MVP IS…

JaVale McGee

Congratulations, JaVale! You did not take this title by simply hopping on a pool inflatable and cruising into it. You put in tireless training all offseason long by working your smile and suntan overtime in many an exotic locale and it’s paid off. From the airports of Qatar, to South Africa, to swimming with pigs and romping with iguanas in the Bahamas, and even your local mall—you really did it all. You are an example to us all when planning summers to come because you proved a vacation can be anything so long as a bucket hat and chill attitude are along for the ride.

NBA Summer Vacation Watch: And Now Our Watch Has Ended published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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Every week, critic at large Todd VanDerWerff and internet culture reporter Aja Romano get together to discuss the latest episode of HBO’s sci-fi drama Westworld. This week, they’re discussing the second season’s eighth episode, “Kiksuya.” Spoilers follow! Proceed with caution if you haven’t seen the episode!

Todd VanDerWerff: “Kiksuya” could have — and probably should have — gone so, so wrong.

For as much as I admire Westworld’s attempts to depict a kind of uber-struggle for respect, autonomy, and self-definition that represents every oppressed person in the history of humanity, by using the hosts to stand in for all of them (and often explicitly coding them as such), there have been plenty of times when the show has tossed these balls in the air and then had no idea what to do with them, just barely catching them on the way down instead of starting to nimbly juggle.

When you mix that with the idea of an episode about the Native American “Ghost Nation” hosts, performed almost entirely in Lakota, there are so many places where the whole enterprise could absolutely shatter into tiny pieces . That’s before I even start in on some of the episode’s creative decisions, like the fact that it’s basically an episode-long flashback ostensibly delivered as an expository monologue to a young child (who is actually an ancient host, but you know what I mean).

Yet when you consider that Westworld’s primary storytelling mode is, “Here is what’s happening and why,” it’s not surprising that an episode that is mostly exposition works as well as this one does. I wouldn’t call “Kiksuya” perfect, but it does fill in some gaps in the Westworld timeline, occasionally too conveniently — see also that encounter with Logan out in the wilds of Westworld. It also offers a couple of terrific scenes, including a nighttime meeting between Akecheta (Zahn McClarnon) and Ford (Anthony Hopkins) that takes place amid a gruesome tableau of Ghost Nation hosts frozen in place and has more of the horror and eeriness of the “creation meeting the creator” feeling the show strives for than almost any other scene of its ilk. I even liked the sense that Ghost Nation had adapted the circumstances of what happen to hosts after they die into its mythology.

All told, it’s a little languid and could have lost 10 minutes without too much trouble. (There are a lot of gigantic landscape shots, which eventually grew repetitive.) But “Kiksuya” has the visceral emotion that the series often lacks, and McClarnon is a terrific leading man. This is probably my favorite episode of the season so far, which I would not have expected going in. What did you think?

Lots and lots of wide shots… HBO

Aja Romano: I definitely agree. McClarnon is a superb actor and this episode could have fallen flat in multiple moments, but I felt like it was all held together by his dawning realizations and the tremor of understanding in his eyes.

The moment in the scene where he meets Ford, when Ford orders him to analyze and he realizes that he can’t fight his own programming, is as close to pure horror as Westworld has ever gotten for me, and the writers (Carly Wray and Dan Dietz) get there mainly by reliance on character and emotion. That’s a strong choice, and shows just how much they had to work with in McClarnon, because the narrative of this episode otherwise gives us more of Westworld’s tendency to really drag out explanations and plot reveals. But ultimately, even when I noticed the lagging pace and the redundancy of the exposition, I just didn’t care because I was enjoying the characterization and the emotional impact of the story so much.

I think where this story loses a little bit of momentum is in how it ultimately connects with its two contemporary tentpoles — Emily’s love/hate relationship with her father, and whatever the hell is going on with Maeve. Akecheta’s encounter with Emily felt anticlimactic and cryptic, and it didn’t tell me anything new about either character. (She’s definitely a hybrid, though!)

I feel like the reveal that he was attempting all along to protect Maeve’s daughter, not steal her, is too easy, sidestepping some of the the complicated implications of how season one habitually framed his actions as threatening. And it implies that Maeve may have somehow had racial biases programmed into her reactions to him, which is a huge thing to hint at but gloss over.

Of course, his framing of the narrative could well be false, especially given what we see of Maeve at the end of the episode. I’m not entirely sure what to make of their exchange, mainly because I’m not sure what he gained from it. She gained a new ally, and he gained the chance to explain himself. But it didn’t seem to move the plot forward at all. What did I miss?

Take my heart with you when you go. HBO

Todd: I guess the implication here is that Maeve and Akecheta now form an axis of power devoted to escaping the park before “the deathbringer” (Dolores) destroys everybody. As story development goes, this isn’t bad, but it relies too heavily on us thinking Maeve might really perish, a victim of Delos’s disinterest in preserving anything but her rogue code, and I just don’t think for a second Westworld is going to unceremoniously kill off its second lead.

One of the things that frustrates me about “Kiksuya” is the way in which much of it seems to exist solely to prove to skeptics that much of the story was planned out from the beginning. That made for some gorgeous imagery — Maeve confronting the maze in the dust chief among those images — but the way that Westworld can feel a little schematic, like assembling a piece of furniture where it’s not quite clear how everything fits together until the end, is heavily tied to this sort of planning. I haven’t quite been able to escape the idea that the show thinks its core audience is everybody who reads the Westworld subreddit. And, honestly, maybe it is.

Still, I have to agree that the episode came as close to being a horror tale as Westworld ever has, rivaling even some of the darker moments for Dolores in season one. Akecheta’s journey to the underworld in search of his disappeared love was weird and gorgeous and mythic, one of the few times this season that the mash-up of very old stories and very new technology has hit its true potential to reveal the messy underside of both aspects of the show. When he came across her frozen, empty body, standing amid so many other decommissioned hosts, boy, McClarnon makes every single second of that revelation play. It’s horror and myth and tragedy all at once, hitting the sorts of heights I wish the show was able to attain more often.

There’s been a lot of speculation that Ghost Nation would tie a lot of this season’s mysteries together once its backstory was revealed, and I guess “Kiksuya” sort of does this. Now that we know the maze is something Akecheta and those he “woke up” are deliberately spreading and that he’s come to think of his “tribe” as encompassing all awakened hosts around the park, certain aspects of the series make more sense. And I love that he’s the one who first came up with the idea of a “door,” when he saw a massive construction project and realized he lived in the wrong world. I just wish the maze felt to me like something more than a cool image, that it felt like an actual symbol for something deeper than a riddle.

But that’s all quibbles. The idea that the world is wrong has always been a potent one on this show, and season two has drifted from it just a tiny bit. I’m glad it had such centrality here, and even if I’m not sure why Maeve and Akecheta are teaming up, I’m glad they are. Somebody has to stop the Deathbringer. We’ve only got two episodes left, Aja, so where do you think all of this is headed? And is there any way to redeem my onetime favorite Dolores?

Aja: I think if we keep thinking about the mythology of Westworld, we end up where we started, enmeshed in cyclical pathways, probably with a giant inferno in the bargain, given how much fiery foreshadowing we’ve been treated to this season. Given where we seem to be headed — a giant cast reunion in the Valley Beyond — my speculation is that the question of Dolores’ redemption might be answered through the maze itself.

At this point, the only thing that could really redirect her course is to be faced with a direct threat that requires her to join forces, with the other hosts or the humans or both. And we know that at the center of every proper Grecian labyrinth is a proper Grecian minotaur. It seems to me that the best method to bar the way out of Westworld, introduce an escalated conflict for season three, and give Dolores a chance to redeem herself, is to unveil the bull at the center of the maze in the final act — whether it’s Ford 2.0 or something new.

Of course, this could also be a feeble attempt on my part to play Westworld’s game of catering to its subreddit. I hope not, because the lovely thing about an episode like this one is that its emphasis on character development reminds us that the emotional and socially conscious core of Westworld is much more rewarding than the endless gamification of its story about gamification.

Season two has been steadily leading us toward an intersectional awareness of systems of oppression, in which we see characters like Akecheta — and Lee, whose abrupt tearful apology to Maeve I didn’t wholly buy, but which seemed in keeping with the episode’s theme — becoming aware that their problems aren’t solely their own.

That intersectionality is almost certainly going to end up manifesting physically in the final episode. Whether Dolores gets on board or not, it seems fitting if, ultimately, we learn that the only way out for the characters we’ve met along the way is to wage an even bigger power struggle against a monster yet unseen.

Original Source -> “Kiksuya” is Westworld season 2’s best episode so far

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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recentanimenews · 6 years

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Bookshelf Briefs 2/12/18

Ace of the Diamond, Vol. 8 | By Yuji Terajima | Kodansha Comics (digital only) – After a great deal of effort, Tanba shows himself to be in excellent shape for Koshien. This, plus the trust his teammates have in him, makes it even more devastating when he’s hit by a ball in a practice game right before the tournament begins, fracturing his jaw. He’ll be able to return by the quarter-finals, but meanwhile it’s up to the younger pitchers to keep things together until then. I’m a sucker for a good training montage, so enjoyed Chris drilling Furuya and Sawamura on their control and defensive fielding skills. The coach has some nice moments where he shows appreciation for both the team and the female managers, and it’s also satisfying to watch Seido crush their first-round opponents. In fact, this is quite a satisfying volume all around, aside from a couple of grammatical errors in the translation. – Michelle Smith

Gabriel Dropout, Vol. 2 | By Ukami |Yen Press – There’s very little actual forward plot here—the series runs on its gags, so mostly what changes is the situation. We see the girls going to the beach; the story of how Gabriel and Vignette first met; the absolute ludicrousness that is Satanya buying a gun (no, not a real gun); Halloween costumes; and the class president, who is 100% human and a bit horrified by the out-of-context dialogue between the class angel and devil. Of course, the question here is “does it work? Is it funny?”, and the answer is yes, this is still funny. Raphael and her trolling continues to be my favorite, though we do see she does have one weakness. If you like light fluffiness and laughs, this is an excellent series to pick up. – Sean Gaffney

I Hear the Sunspot: Theory of Happiness | By Yuki Fumino | One Peace Books – One of the debut manga from last year that left the greatest impression on me was the deceptively quiet I Hear the Sunspot, so I was very happy to discover that it had a sequel, Theory of Happiness, that would also be translated. While ostensibly a boys’ love manga, the beautifully nuanced, evolving relationship between the series’ two leads—Taichi and Kohei—is rarely at the forefront of the story. Even so, it remains an essential underlying component constant to both the narrative and its characters. Theory of Happiness also introduces Maya who, like Kohei, has partial hearing loss, but whose experiences and perspectives are uniquely her own. As was the case with the first volume, Theory of Happiness is an exceptionally lovely and thoughtful manga with marvelous characterization. Apparently there is at least one more volume in the series; I hope to see it released in English, too. – Ash Brown

Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic, Vol. 28 | By Shinobu Ohtaka | Viz Media – The war ended up being a bit of an anticlimax, mostly as we find out late in the volume that Harukyuu had a ringer from the start who was going to make the outcome obvious. I continue to wonder if Sinbad is going to end up being the major antagonist of the series, but I suspect that may have to wait till Alibaba’s return. Which isn’t happening just yet, though his chibi-doll form is certainly proving more mature than the petulant Judar. As for the war itself, I definitely enjoyed the character development for Kogyoku, who is forced to fight and kill in order to protect those closest to her and make sure they don’t lose themselves. It’s a big step forward for the former petulant princess. As for Aladdin… he’s still a bit lost. Great stuff. – Sean Gaffney

Murcielago, Vol. 5 | By Yoshimurakana | Yen Press – Kuroko may be the star of the series, and she’s very good at being clever and solving the problems the police give her, but she is an absolutely horrible, despicable person. The only reason we read this series is because her over-the-top horribleness is so hilarious—when she sets out to seduce the mother of the missing nine-year-old girl who’s been captured by a serial child killer, your jaw wants to drop but you can only laugh. I actually wondered why we never got a follow through on it, but given the volume starts with Kuroko in bed with the victim from volume four, I may simply have to wait patiently. This is not a series for the timid—the graphic child strangulation is as bad as it sounds—but oh my god, it’s fun if you have a certain twisted mindset. – Sean Gaffney

My Hero Academia, Vol. 11 | By Kohei Horikoshi | Viz Media – The grimness of this arc doesn’t let up—Bakugo is rescued, but the sacrifices are significant. I appreciated their teacher explaining that if they weren’t in a very unusual situation right now, he would have expelled the entire class except for those kidnapped and/or injured. Being a hero means following the rules—that’s why they aren’t vigilantes. (No, I haven’t read the side series yet.) We also get some home visits to the class’s parents, which range from hilarious (Bakugo) to dramatic (Izuku) to rather sweet (Kyoka). Next time we should get preparation for provisional hero licenses. In the meantime, enjoy the best thing about the volume, which I never mentioned: the epic All-Might fight in the first half. (OK, yes, and the new dorm chapters.) Top-drawer Jump. – Sean Gaffney

No Game No Life, Please!, Vol. 3 | By Kazuya Yuizaki and Yuu Kamiya | Yen Press -The laughable schedule of the NGNL novels, which have been delayed so often that people now simply roll their eyes, means that this third volume of the spinoff introduces characters from novels which aren’t out yet, and expects the reader to be familiar with them. That said, hardcore NGNL fans are famous for boycotting the Yen Press novels anyway, and are likely getting this solely for the laughs and the fanservice. There’s plenty of both, so they should feel at ease. We do see a bit of the point of this series, which is trying to give Izuna more experience. But for the most part it’s a goofy spinoff manga, not to be taken seriously and meant to be forgotten after it’s read. It does what it wants to. – Sean Gaffney

Orange Junk, Vol. 3 | By Heldrad | Chromatic Press – Oft described as a love letter to shoujo manga, Heldrad’s ongoing webcomic Orange Junk is a wonderfully energetic and addictive series. The third volume sees the conclusion of the male modeling competition which Bruce initially entered in an attempt to pay his mother’s hospital bills. Miles, the son of the man who financially ruined Louise’s family, unexpectedly turns out to be Bruce’s rival in the contest as well as in love. Louise, of course, remains rather oblivious to that particular fact; she hasn’t realized that Bruce has romantic feelings for her and the grudge she holds against Miles and his family overshadows most everything else. Orange Junk is intentionally ridiculous and melodramatic with explosive chemistry and surprising friendships among the increasingly large cast of strong personalities. While it isn’t exactly a parody, the series is most definitely a comedy, and a highly entertaining and legitimately funny one at that. – Ash Brown

Plum Crazy! Tales of a Tiger-Striped Cat, Vol. 4| By Natsumi Hoshino | Seven Seas – You’d think that I, a fervent cat lover, would adore Plum Crazy!, but sadly that is proving not to be the case. Maybe the problem is that I love cats for how they actually are, but that the cats in Plum Crazy! are given so much inner dialogue and human motivation that they hardly feel like cats anymore. They exchange Christmas gifts, for example, and there’s a running gag (I use the term loosely) where Plum is concerned about the environment. Occasionally there are some cat-like behaviors, like Plum getting stuck above the ceiling (this really happened to a cat of mine!) and Snowball’s search for a snuggly sleeping spot, but they’re just not enough to make up for the rest (and it bugs me that nobody tries to correct Snowball’s bad behavior). Alas, I think I might be dropping this series. – Michelle Smith

The Promised Neverland, Vol. 2 | By Kaiu Shirai and Posuka Demizu | VIZ Media – After a fantastic and surprising first volume, I have no excuse for being taken completely unawares by the big reveal in this volume, and yet I was. The nuanced way Norman managed to turn this information into an advantage was well handled, and boy, do I have sympathy for his position going forward. Meanwhile, a game of tag with Krone reveals it’s not impossible to get the jump on her, and the three leads decide to bring the next oldest pair (Don and Gilda) into the loop. The thing is… they don’t tell them the whole truth, and I’m sure this is going to come back to bite them, especially since Don is potentially about to discover it on his own by snooping in Mom’s secret room. What a cliffhanger! – Michelle Smith

Welcome to the Ballroom, Vol. 9 | By Tomo Takeuchi | Kodansha Comics – STILL no amazing breakthrough, though it’s hinted we may FINALLY see it next time. Instead we mercifully get a bit less of Tatara and Chinatsu torturing themselves and more perspective from the rest of the cast, who can’t take their eyes away from this train wreck. We also see the return of Chinatsu’s rival Akira, who gets a flashback which shows, unsurprisingly, that her attitude stems from a severe case of hero worship gone wrong. (It could also be read as sort of yuri if you want to, but I suspect that’s not what the author has in mind.) There’s also a lot of dramatic dancing here, with lots of the art that is probably the best reason to read this title. I’m still reading it, but mother of God, END THIS ARC! – Sean Gaffney

By: Michelle Smith

#Anime #News #Manga Bookshelf

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doedipus · 7 years

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LP D&D: Tumble in the Tundra

It’s like the Rumble in the Jungle, except not in central Africa.

Something about the concept of magic items really tickles my fancy, moreso than a lot of other fantasy tropes. Stuff like the Moonlight Greatsword from the Dark Souls games, Link’s heaping arsenal of hyper-specialized tools, and Guts’ berserker suit and robot hand strike me as being super cool. If I had to rationalize it, I guess it comes down to gadget-based heroes being more fundamentally human in my mind than someone with the innate ability to light things on fire with their brain, and in the context of tabletop games, magic items can provide some more flavor to combat and river crossing puzzles than a party of totally mundane humans. Like, the time when Coy ended the battle at the late Lord Hier’s dinner party by crashing the airship through clever use of the teleport hat was wayyy cooler than the dozens of other encounters the party just brute forced their way through.

One of these days, I really want to run a campaign in a low-genre game like Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green or something, and use quadcopters or smartphones the same way our DM in this game uses the helm of teleportation or the cloak of the bat.

I’m bringing all this up because the map the party had been carting around this whole time is basically a smartphone. As usual, content under the break.

Teller redrew the map

While he was drawing, a woman’s face appears in the map and speaks to the party

Her name is Natalie

She’s the map

Of Amarak //The last empire to control western Faerun

Natalie is having none of our berk questions

Connie asks about the sisters, Natalie gives an info-dump

They were anti-imperialist

Minnia formed a pact with some demons

Amarak successfully repelled them, and recorded their strategies in Natalie

Lucas asks about Minnia’s location

Apparently she was split into 5 pieces, and her remains scattered

One near Luskan and Syrup Leaf

One near Calimport

One near Shulk

One near Amathar

One in Winterkeep

One in Candlekeep

Natalie can give the party more detailed advice as we get close

“You seem kind of full of yourself. I like that. I’m also kind of full of myself”-Lucas

Coy asks Natalie what she knows about what’s-her-name

My responses are limited. You must ask the right question.

Max works through his headache and remembers names

Natalie has an image of her on file

Graham realizes something is off about the map

Coy and Graham take a closer look

The kingdom of Demara was apparently bigger in the past

It was slightly smaller than Amarak, and its ally

Graham puts his ear to the map

Natalie recommends he clean his ears

He does. On Natalie.

Natalie is violated

Lucas tries to concuss Graham, but he’s doing the dance of his people

Natalie dislikes being called “Map”

Coy recommends the party go check out the giblets at Syrup Leaf

Lucas is confus. What’s a syrup leaf?

Coy attempts to explain

Natalie wants to map out a relationship chart for the party

Esmeralda is a lady

no srs guys

Telepathy sex dungeon //from Sigil trip one

Lucas denies any knowledge of this “Rolen” //Rich also denies any knowledge of this “Rolen.”

He literally has no knowledge of Rolen

Or the drow attack on Amnswater

Graham reveals he’s never learned anyone else’s name

Coy considers storage options for Natalie

Can we laminate her?

Can she survive in a bag of holding?

Natalie the smartphone can keep track of our quests. How convenient! //Not like we tend to think in terms of “quests” anyway. We mostly just bumble around and then things happen

Connie asks about the Sigil portal

The ruins of the Sigil-Amarak trade hub is nearby

It’s by the crags

Graham has a question for Map

Where’s Catarina?

There isn’t one lol

It’s recently independent obvs

What’s the dog to milk ratio?

It’s 3:1, Rap

Coy asks for a brief overview of the war

Amarak allied with nearby kingdoms

They cornered Minnia in Beydale and dismembered her

There was also a golem army, which Natalie can activate

Escrima asks about extraplanar creatures

They came out through the underchasm

He asks about mother

Apparently, she patroned a few generals during the war

Callie Thorngage, Nedda Brushgather, and Escrima Smith

Natalie shows images of said generals

They bear a striking resemblance to Graham, Connie, and Escrima Smith, respectively

//From what little we know so far, Callie Thorngage was ostensibly a cis woman. The implication is pretty clearly that the members of the current party are reincarnations of these other three folks, with Escrima being the Gordon Freeman to MOTHER’s G-man. So like, why would Graham’s previous incarnation be a cis girl? Wouldn’t it make more sense if the old Graham was also a dude, and the trans thing happened because he was literally a dude dumped into a girl’s body? I swear, cis folk have no idea how to write this sort of thing.

They made it out of the war okay, and joined mother in the ether

Escrima accuses Natalie of tripping balls

She is a map. She does not trip

Amarak awarded mother some sort of reward for its assistance

Other team photos are revealed

There’s doppelgangers of Greg and Eva too.

Greg’s clone being the son of Theodin, King of Amarak

In a painting of the dicing of Minnia, a soldier uses The Cleaver to cut up Minnia’s body

The Cleaver is stored near the Sea of Fallen Stars, in a vault

Vaults are scattered around the continent, full of puzzles and treasure

Well ain’t that somethin’!

Graham and Escrima develop a plan to shoulder check the sisters and the bits of Minnia into the ocean, and then burn down the ocean. They will play their victory jingle on a triangle made of snakes

The hammer is also a snake

Coy accidentally lets slip that she has a soft stummy

Graham wants to touch it

Coy tries to be intimidating, but fails

Lucas prays to Oghma to try and figure out all that Rolen nonsense

All his memories are starting to get fuzzy, come to think of it

Eva’s are getting pretty strong, though

Lucas decides to take a look

She kept a Lucas shrine back in Candlekeep

She reduced it down to a drawing of Lucas, hidden in her cape

Lucas finds the picture. It’s of the two of them getting married.

The gang interrupts Lucas’ meditation session

He’s crying a bit, so he tries to use thaumaturgy to cover it

He makes flames come out of his eyes (by accident?)

Coy throws a potion of healing in his face

He feels very healthy

Coy explains to Lucas about the information the gang gleaned from the map

Lucas would rather Natalie just give him the information herself

Natalie recalls MOTHER as the “entity of dreams”

Lucas wants to know if it’s good or evil.

Natalie gives him a cryptic answer

It’s a force of stability more than anything

Lucas asks Natalie if the Escrimas are the same

The one in the painting was 23 at the time of the war

Escrima always assumed he was 18

Natalie displays the group portrait with the generals, not-Greg, and not-Eva

not-Greg was named “Silifrey”

not-Eva was named “Merla Terlef,” and was married to Silifrey

Coy is irritated she doesn’t have a double

Lucas Explains Proskur to the party

He regrets getting involved, and blames himself for Eva’s pseudo death

Lucas goes to bed, as does Coy

Connie goes to the bathhouse

There’s a human man and an elf woman in the bath already

They’re married. Damn.

They’re here to open their business selling devices, gadgets and things

It’s a clock, but portable. Astounding!

Escrima wants to talk to Natalie

Coy opens the map, and prudently decides not to let Escrima touch it

Escrima asks about the generals

They were adventurers before joining the war

Lots of dragons killed, innocents saved, etc.

He wants to know about Callie Thorngage

She was a lady knight in the army of Amarak

Part of the agreement between Theodin V and mother was for the three to become generals

He asks to see the stats of the sister’s army

Several million gnolls, orcs, drow, and, oddly, fiends

The sister’s army had some generals too

They’re doubles of Lucas and legacy edition Coy. what?

//Again, why would Coy’s past-self-apparent be a dude? Grumble grumgle grumble

not-Coy was named “KUNG” in all-caps. Most dragonborn were on the sisters’ side. KUNG was killed in battle

not-Lucas’ name was Cefrey, who was the lead mage in their army. He was a necromancer who led a legion of undead

He looks like edgiest Lucas

Escrima and Coy go show Lucas

Lucas is appalled at Cefrey’s fashion sense

Lucas contemplates joining Minnia

The trio contemplate soul recycling, and realize it’s totally possible

Something or other did this intentionally

Natalie points the gang towards the planes

Lucas asks Natalie who put her in the box

It looks like Rocky. It’s probably Rocky.

Torix resumes control

Zerander heads for the bathhouse

The gang manages to sleep soundly for once

Lucas dreams about spiders

Connie has her recurring dream again

The next morning, Lucas goes to the scroll place. He spends the day copying spells

Zerander visits the blacksmith

He wants to get a silver zweihander

The smith agrees to make it out of the silver the gang sold to the armorer

Connie wants to take Nat 20 to the library

She tracks down Coy, and retrieves Natalie

She makes her way to the library in the main castle

Nat 20 has limited space, and can only absorb like 50 books

Connie feeds her a bunch of atlases and encyclopedias

She takes a bit too much pleasure from absorbing books

Zerander and Coy continue shopping

He visits an apothecary looking for alchemist’s fire

Coy bought all the fire in town

Graham goes looking for a way to upgrade grey matter //His hammer

Most of the people he asks are kids for some reason

He ends up at the blacksmith anyway

The smith upgrades it a dice class

In order to reduce the price, he spends the day working under the smith

Zerander goes looking for firearms

A shop sells old-timey hand cannons

The cannon and five rounds are 650gp

1d12 + 6 blunt damage!

Zerander talks the shopkeeper down to 600

He also goes to buy some basic supplies

He gets some holy water from the temple of Oghma

The priests want a donation of knowledge as payment

Zerander tells them about the time he fought a bear

Escrima spent the day swimming in the boiling hot river

He finds 5gp

He also finds a constitution saving throw

The water he drank is... not great

His goal was to get all wrinkly, and counts that as a success

During the night, Graham goes to check on Escrima

There’s puke everywhere. It smells disgusting

A maid tries to clean it up

Escrima asks Graham how he’s handling Nat 20’s info dump

Graham can barely understand a ham sandwich

Escrima suggests they go to the bathhouse and turn it into puke water

They instead decide to try to become frogs

For some reason, they are unsuccessful

They’re not even green

Mother tells Escrima that she has more things to do

Escrima feels rebellious. He wants a piercing.

Graham considers having the blacksmith make Escrima a lily pad-shaped helmet

Lucas tries to relax in the hot spring

Distracted by current events, he fails to notice Coy and Zerander in the springs when he got in

Zerander explains the boomstick

Lucas doesn’t pay attention, and is instead transfixed by Zerander’s giant dong

It’s like, the size of his leg

“Eyes up here!”

Lucas comments that Coy looked better when she was a guy //Damn it, Rich

Lucas and Zerander fail their diversity training courses miserably

//Specifically, Zerander calls Coy “it.” Of all the shitty things to call a trans or intersex person, “it” stings the most in my mind. We’re human too, damn it. I’m still a bit sore about this whole interaction, but I guess this is the sort of thing that happens when you hang out with cis people in stealth. Since opening up to the players about being trans, it really hasn’t been an issue.

The gang goes to retrieve the items they ordered

Graham also has the lily pad hat made

He dubs Escrima “Sir Escrima of the Lotus Helm”

He tries to remove the hat, and fails

Lucas is informed of the frog plan, and polymorphs him into one

Graham kisses frogscrima, returning him to normal

Lucas turns him back in the middle of this

Lucas then polymorphs Graham

Graham attempts to pee on Lucas

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Coy buys a crossbow that she can fire grappling hooks out of

Zerander goes to find a boxing ring

He meets a half-orc boxer named “GGrumsh”

GGrumsh wants to fight. The organizer sets up a match for that night

The whole of Neverwinter will be there

Connie asks Nat 20 about airships

Invented by dorfs on the continent of shulk

Big business in Neverwinter

Denyr’s Mechanical Marvels

The gang heads over to the shipyard to check things out

Their couches are okay

The boss mentions that they’re manufacturing ships for the sisters of dawn

Coy remarks that the sister’s ship was poorly made, having had firsthand experience

Coy has Connie message Rocky about the appraisal of the diamond

Janice, Rocky’s secretary answers back, which is odd

It was worth 1,125,000

The gang asks about types of construction

They gravitate towards rune-fueled, heavier than air flight

They pass a few of the sister’s ships on the way out

As Lucas wraps up, he hears some murmurs about the fight between GGrumsh and a foreigner. It’s starting soon!

The gang goes to watch the fight

Zerander strips down to boxing gear

The crowd cheers for GGrumsh

They boo Zerander as he enters. He flips them off

Graham bets on Zerander, and Lucas bets on Zerander’s dick

Battle against Ultraheavyweight GGrumsh of Neverwinter

Zerander pulls a “Well! What is it!” to try and goad his opponent into attacking

...which he does.

Zerander trips GGrumsh

GGrumsh regains his balance and attacks

He calls his attacks like a true monk

Zerander tries to trip him again, but sneak attacks only work once!

He then tries to grapple GGrumsh, and again fails

GGrumsh releases a flurry of blows, wounding Zerander

Zerander pins GGrumsh to the ground and slugs him several times

GGrumsh tries to get up, but is unable to get out from under the goliath

Zerander continues to pummel GGrumsh

GGrumsh manages to land a solid hit from his compromised position

He continues to try to escape the grapple, but fails

Zerander continues to pulverize GGrumsh

Zerander pulls out an elbow drop!

GGrumsh yields to nobody

Zerander picks him up, and slams him into the ground, knocking him unconscious

Zerander is awarded a belt adorned with the crest of Neverwinter

It grants +1 CHA

Also 250gp

Graham won 80gp on the fight

Escrima christened him “Dong, Champion of the Crucible”

The crowd begins calling him that, angering Zerander

The next day, Zerander goes to the smith, and asks about melding it into his armor

You can’t do that

Coy has pancakes

The gang heads to the old trade hub

It’s abandoned

They venture deeper into the castle, and find a courtyard

The castle is covered in seals of Amarak and other kingdoms

The party is curious as to why the castle was abandoned, and consult Nat 20

It has teleportation circles to Calimport and Baldur’s Gate

Lucas asks Natalie whether or not we could easily travel back and forth from Calimport

Probably, if the return portal is still active

Escrima expresses distress at the idea of going back to Calimshan

The temple Escrima was living in was ransacked, and the perpetrators are likely still there

He fled with another acolyte from Calimport to Candlekeep

“Now I gotta go take a shit in that bush”

Lucas opens the door to the portal rooms

There are a number of safety measures in the complex designed to brutally murder invaders

DAE acid?

As they go deeper, they hear a deep moaning noise coming from the portal room

Lucas uses an arcane eye to see into the portal room

There’s a beholder in there!

END

#let's play #dungeons and dragons #d&d #d&d5e

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