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incarnateirony · 1 year

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Mm, one thing I am not looking forward to with the other GM, as much as I love him as a typist, is the inevitable backhanded BTS measure of trying to override 900 pages of story by wandering in and declaring something, and I fully expect that to happen. He is Very Proud Of Playing God, and when he realized that the way he set up Becoming God off of another character's work was being undone by the very campaign he asked me to run, because that's why he used the character's work to do it, it became WELL ACTUALLY--HE DID IT HIMSELF BEFORE THAT. AND SOMETHING ETERNAL ANNOYING LA MULANA DUNGEON.

And like, bro. You are literally not going to be able to bitch the players into hailing Lord Rando As The Supreme when they witnessed the beginning of existence and FUCK ALL, YOU WEREN'T THERE, you were just some dude in the way to get there a few times. Yeah, the moral is, as Kion said, they are all their own lords, and we together, all for one, and one as the All, creation is what we make of it. That was always the goddamn point of the device he implied made his dude god. And like. Nobody cares about your guy, guy.

It's a delivery thing he still hasn't understood, you can't just wander in and throw things and demand people care, as per the whole idea of his past "hints" that he wants people to break down to extremes as if they are by default expected to know how god "should" act and care deeply about his state, and like, fuck all no he was being an annoying douche the whole time the like. 3 times he showed up being the opposite of helpful.

Randomly declaring things once a month to assert power is not even GM attitude, it's just obnoxious player attitude. They just spent 3 months rearranging creation itself in SPITE of your dude to make the world in the image of their own dreams and learn how to build better things when they get back to ~reality, they have climbed the world trees, stood at the edge of the void, they have faced life, and death, and cosmic soup, and whatever the fuck. Why the fuck will they want to find him for any other reason than to beat his ass?

Like right now everyone's saying their tearful goodbyes to a character they helped mold over these months, and teach each other together, and hope they might meet again, or at least be allowed to not forget what happened and who they knew and what they did together. Nobody cares if your dude comes in squawking IM GOD. No the fuck you aren't, you're a pain in the ass with no establishment that keeps cropping up at bad times doing stupid shit that hampers them. They're god, or at worst, their dead friend is god, because on him the world will turn, forever, self born by his own design for everything. You're. A guy who pushed a button then tried to change the backstory three times.

Neither plots nor people work like that dude.

And he gets real proud like, LOOK HOW MUCH JALIM LEARNED FROM ZENTO while even making the bad guy blink at, how the fuck did you take it like that. ok whatever easier for me I guess. And like. Character growth is great and all, but at best that's still a player path sticking on a GM badge and calling itself god. I don't know if I'd agree with the growth since the last act he did could have severely fucked the heroes in another arrangement. Luckily they moved too fast for god's fuckup to backfire on them. But the whole "I say a speech I think sounds good, pound my chest and fuck off to the wind after making everyone's lives around me hell but swearing up and down I helped" is a player brain, not a GM.

There was even a time like, he shook a defeated enemy awake not realizing what he was doing because he hadn't paid attention to the plot for real for shit (which I understand now he didn't the first time either), and like, no your dead friend is this monster they just put down. I kept trying to deflect you doing it but you insisted and it woke up so all the heroes responded and heard your argument and realized you fucking woke Death back up. Like. Six hours after they had defeated him, no less. "Well he destroyed the pillar that had to be done" bro it was already destroyed, River destroyed it in the fight, it reconstituted as the reflection of his presence when you forced it back up. You're patting yourself on the back for making a problem then fixing it. I'm not letting you take that from the heroes or the one that actually destroyed it. That's just spinning your wheels to try to reinforce your godness.

The irony is, he swears he gets this, plays his weird version of the collective, vaguely cites the theology, but then insists on trying to come in, alone, and change everything. When literally the ending is no, you are all your own lords, the soul is supreme and in this moment, we are One. Facing the call to destruction or search for emptiness, the conflict of how everything came from the nothing. It literally required EXTENSIVE planning IC and OOC both, players coordinating deeply against seemingly impossible odds. You have said many times your character refuses to enter the city because of XYZ excuse. You insisted on trying to do this alone, against the plot morals, which is why it went bad every time, because you weren't listening or paying attention. So there's just. Twenty levels of irony.

"Well my job keeps me busy and I can't read all-" Shhh. sh sh sh stop right there. No. Almost every player has a job. One has three jobs. They manage to connect, coordinate, read along, or ask questions when they get lost, they work with everybody. So if you got the time to build the world's most retarded La Mulana knockoff to send people through, you had the time to read. The matter is, you didn't care and you thought you knew better. Now this would make an excellent narrative about demiurges/pankrators like Chuck if it was on purpose but instead you're making it a commentary on humanity because the point is sailing over your head and you keep trying to retroact him into things he literally Does Not Fit.

The whole. Oh my character was just a griffin that died and got found by a god to become powerful but a slave and met Kion and became friends and Hit The Button To Save Him In Error And Became God except SURPRISE now I"m saying it was something different vs

Developed campaign that existed before this one and before the dude hit the button on a multiplanar journey across the cosmos and ancient memory showing that the person who created The Button and the city built on his pure willpower was, in fact, always created and trained for this role (and its opposite), he fits every bill on the mythology you try to use, you don't. You played some dude that kept falling in holes to become a bigger god and are trying to claim yourself the All and Void both. And yeah the moral is the soul is always an oxymoron like that but so is everyone's. You didn't come from the void, you weren't self born, you are not The Great Dragon or The Great Teacher, you are not the Workman, or the Master Builder, you are none of the things, but saying I Am All sounds hella neat and powerful, but you're not grokking what you're even trying to fucking present while kicking in the door with a funny song to melt down five planes because YOU WEREN'T LISTENING.

Like, this be mine, and the campaign is a success because everyone, the players, AS the collective shaped it correctly. He pays lipservice to the ideas but throws out randos doing nonsense actions and calls it the collective, or insists he is The One or The All while simultaneously refusing to join the others, and so on and it's like. bro. give it up. you said you wanted the campaign, you were clearly aware of at least the base potential implied in Xorv, you don't just cling to a godtitle. And no don't say it's for GM purposes if you're only NOW thinking up a knockoff dungeon with no real form, history or purpose that will at best be highly obnoxious. Just admit you had no plan. You had 3 months while I ran this to come up with more than "my current favorite game to clone is--"

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pepsiwriteswords · 2 years

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ヾ(￣▽￣) ~ Hi!

My turn to break containment for the ask game! (Also 30!?! wips, holy shit)

15, 👀? 8, 👷? 30, 🏷️? 1, ✍️?

（＾∀＾●）ﾉｼ Hiya!

(XD I know, but like I told you - most of them are just vibes & maybe 2 characters right now lol.)

Now, somehow you managed to land on none of the WIPs you expressed interest in, which is incredible lol.

So!

👀 Can you give us any sneak peaks?

WIP 15 is Backyard Promises, & I have almost 900 words in that doc, so sure! xP

Larsen Suarez testing after eleven o'clock at night is concerning on its own, no extenuating circumstances required. Larsen Suarez texting after eleven asking about places to stay the night is more than concerning. Alice wastes precious moments looking between her phone screen and the world outside her window. Like she's actually considering not going out to talk face to face. Shaking her head at herself, she grabs her sneakers and shoots off a reply before shoving her phone in her pocket and creeping out of her bedroom. Park. 10 mins. It's the first place that comes to mind that they'll still be able to get into, aside from the singular shitty convenience store a couple blocks away. Sneaking out of her house isn't an art, or actually all that difficult. Anna will be pissed if she gets woken up, of course, and that's never great, but after three years she's more into threatening to call Alice's social worker for a new placement than anything else. She waits until she's closed the back door behind herself to put her shoes on, tucking the trailing hems of her pajama pants into them to keep them from getting wet in all the puddles she's sure she's going to step in.

👷 How has the creation of the story gone so far? Stressful or fun?

WIP 8 is Brimstone Butterflies (working title). xP This is one of those 'no words/plot, just vibes' WIPs, so. xD I don't know that I'd call it stressful, but I'm not sure I can really call it fun, either lol. It's more of a 'I figured out names of the characters & then put it on the backburner for a time' thing. (Apparently that 'time' was almost 2 years, whoops!) ...Okay, this was a short answer, so if I'd done my WIP count based on my WIP page, you would've gotten Ebb and Flow, and like. This one is also pretty 'just characters & vibes' but. I love the characters & at least 2 of them have gone & gotten married while my back was turned so it's a lot of fun! (Since my brain is being ... my brain, maybe there'll be some Ebb & Flow snippets during NaNo lol.)

🏷️ Does it have a title yet? If so, where did it come from?

WIP 30 is Ember(/Flame/Ash)! Another 'no words/plot, just vibes. XP So, yes, there is a title - potentially 3, if it turns into a series! & those titles came from the NaNo 'adopt a title' forums. Because it seemed cool & so far as I have thought of, there's some kind of rebellion & I like it. >.>

✍️ How far have you got with it?

& WIP 1 is Masquerade! & . . . how far I've gotten is hard to say. xD I get a few thousand words into a draft & take a break & then completely revamp the story & have to restart. So, right now I am ... not far. The last notes I have are about aging down the antagonist some, so she's not like, a middle-aged lady still extremely fixated on a thing that happened when she was like, 16 & harassing an 18-year-old about it, so. This may not even be a superhero story anymore! & which characters play which roles may be swapped around! I dunno! This WIP has become a mess! XD

Thank you for the ask! ♪(´▽｀)

#pepsi talks #ask game #Backyard Promises #Ebb and Flow #Masquerade #Ember #you gave me such a wide range of numbers!#& even then at most you only landed on 1 of the 4 WIPs you specifically pointed out #it's just very funny to me #as a halloween treat you can have some E&F lol #my slowly buddy!#okay hitting post before I go on some kind of totally unrelated tag ramble lol

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thisweekingundamwing · 3 years

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This Week in Gundam Wing (September 19-25, 2021)

Hey GW fandom! Here’s your weekly roll-up. Be sure to show your fellow fans some love!

--Mod LAM

Fanfiction

Sweet 18 (+/-2) by @gemstonecircles for @noirangetrois

Pairings: Duo x Relena

Characters: Duo, Relena

Rating: MATURE

Tags / Warnings: friends to lovers, first kiss, light angst, UST

Summary: As incomprehensible as she usually was, and as unfairly pretty and polished, even with her face red from the heat of the oven and her hair gathered in a very lopsided ponytail, he still could not come up with an answer for what the fuck she was doing in his flat.

Life of the Immortal Jellyfish (CH 18/35) by @lemontrash

Pairings: Duo x Wufei

Characters: 5 pilots + Relena, Hilde, Noin, Une

Rating: MATURE

Tags / Warnings: post-canon, post-Endless Waltz, UST, roommates, Preventers, slow burn, insomnia, friendship

Summary: Is it chance that lands Duo and Wufei in the same university dorm room? They’re not stupid enough to believe that but too tired to fight it. Duo’s dragged himself back from the brink of going too far and remains teetering on the edge while Wufei’s doggedly trying to prove himself to the ‘good guys’ in the aftermath of the Eve Wars. Sleep and normalcy eludes them both. As they become increasingly aware how damaged they are, they start to edge towards friendship, or something more, but all too soon the peace seems jeopardised by a new and manipulative threat.

This Story’s Old (This is the End) by @amberlyinviolet

Pairings: Duo x Wufei

Characters: Duo, Wufei

Rating: MATURE

Tags / Warnings: PTSD, trauma response, self-sabotage, codependence

Summary: He is clay in the shape of a man, without breath. Empty. He needs Wufei and needs Wufei. Duo is desperate, drowning fingers clinging to the wreckage of a ship he knows his lover will go down with. Duo wants him to. Wants Wufei next to him at the bottom of the ocean, salt for salt.

Fanart

Misc Quatre/Wufei Discord Doodles by @lemontrash

Quatre/Trowa doodle by @keiko1183

Mer!Duo Commission by @farshootingstar for @noirangetrois (commission info here)

Halloween Heero/Wufei Commission by @hasuyawwn for @perfect-justice

Heero/Relena ‘Betrayal’ by @alphaikaros

Mage Wufei by @alphaikaros

Relena, Heero, and Duo by @hokahokaseat

Duo/Hilde fluff by @gundayum

Team Champagne and the Midnight Restaurant by @twillpoint is up for sale for 900 JPY. It’s a joke game where Quatre, Duo, and Trowa go to get fast food, and a lot of things go wrong (English, Teen and Up, runs on Windows and MAC). More details on their BOOTH site.

Old Heero Yuy and Relena Moodboards by @gemstonecircles

Other Fanwork

Headcanons and Discussion

@kittykatz and @tziganecaffiends bringing this Quatre vs Treize fashion discussion back into the forefront

Other Fun Stuff

@incorrectgundamwingquotes continues to bring the funny (examples: Noin’s self-care routine, Duo’s first language)

@janaverse has been sharing screencaps of their GW sims. You can catch up on them using their Sims tag.

@noromax went to the Gundam Cafe Osaka Halloween Party and has shared some awesome pictures with us

Treize and Duo Memes by @the-reanimated-bhg

Calendar Events

Happening Now

@gwcocktailfriday is back with this week’s prompt! Be sure to post your responses on Friday (September 17) between 3-5PM EST!

September is National Prostate Awareness Month and @expewrites and @boxofhatebrains are hosting a GW Prostate Health Event at @prostatehealth-gundamwing. More info is available on the Event AO3 Page but in brief, options are to (1) create something or (2) donate to your prostate health organization of choice.

Be sure to go vote for your GW Hallows event prompts! Once we’ve got votes tallied, creation period will kick off in October with @thisweekingundamevents.

Deadline = September 30!!!

@gundamzine has opened up the mailing list, so be sure to register to get your FREE PDF on October 1! In the mean time, be sure to follow the account so that you can learn about the stellar 2021 Zine Crew members. Also consider donating to the team’s chosen charity, World Literacy Foundation (donations are optional, but encouraged).

Sign-ups are open for the 2021 Holiday Gift Exchange with @thisweekingundamevents and will close September 30. Participants will get their assignments in October, followed by the creation period November-December and finally posting in early January 2022.

@/ficwip (Twitter) is hosting a “Rise of the Dead Fandoms” event. Contributor sign-ups end on September 30, so be sure to register soon! Creation period runs September-October; posting will be in November. More info at their FAQ.

The @weedgrandpacookbook is an homage to the fanon of Mike Howard as the Gundam Wing’s chillest Weed Grandpa. Check out the Zine Calendar and FAQ for more info and be sure to complete the interest check before September 30.

Coming Up

The GW Original Character (OC) Prompt List is live over on @gwoc-october with posting throughout the month of October. The event is a chance to showcase works with your original GW characters!

#gundam wing

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pertinax--loculos · 3 years

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Update

Gonna try a new thing. I've seen these weekly updates from other writeblrs and it appeals to me because I can blather about writing or lack of writing (if it's been one of Those weeks), I can also include anything else I want, and it's a manageable goal to have for a start.

Tentatively breaking it up into writing, reading OR watching, real life (if applicable), and possibly excerpt (again, if applicable).

So! (Warning: This is long. I seriously babble like nothing else.)

Currently Writing Absent That Night (tagged: WIP: ATN)

wordcount: no clue, it's all on my phone and I've been writing scenes I'd previously written snippets for, so it's a mash-up. (Which reminds me I need to back it all up at least onto my computer.)

Proud of the short summary I did for my pinned post, so repeating it here:

Agent Latrell has been chasing the thief known as Nox for more than three years; but when bodies start turning up at his crime scenes, he’s the only one who believes Nox isn’t responsible. Unfortunately, he’s also the only other suspect. In order to clear his name, he’s going to have to find the real killer; and the only way to do that is to team up with a criminal who, it turns out, he knows absolutely nothing about.

still love love LOVING this WIP. I've got pages and pages of notes, and it is probably getting a wee bit too complex with subplots and suspects etc, but I'm an overwriter anyway so if I end up with a 200k word draft then shrug. More to work with

dunno if I mentioned or just thought it was obvious because I know it so well, but it has an enemies/rivals-to-allies(lovers?) (sub?)plot. So I've been pulling out a lot of threads there

technically I'm up to about halfway between the catalyst and break into two. Definitely not hardcore plotting but I do have an idea of the beats I wanna follow in the back of my head

Nox is still a fucking mess. I should probably stop piling trauma onto him, poor guy

my favourite creation this week is Mark Gault, who is a secondary/minor character who is amazing in every way. He is both essentially a ruthless mercenary and the "I LOVE MY WIFE" guy. (I also keep calling him Grant, instead of Mark, because he's actually the father of a character who first appears in Phase Two of CASCADE. (!!!))

basically happy with how it's all going this week. Regular writing is getting the juices flowing and it's easier to come up with ideas even when I've only got a vague notion of what is supposed to happen in the scene.

guys i am such an overwriter this is ridiculous please send help this scene was supposed to be like 2.5k total and it's turned into 4-5 scenes and is like 10k long dear god--

Currently Reading Blue Lily, Lily Blue by Maggie Stiefvater, book three of the Raven Cycle

I have not just jumped in at book three of a series, I have read the previous two.

in the last week.

I've read eleven books in the last five weeks, so that's... something.

they have all been thrillers except for this series. (And also Girl One, which despite being marketed as a thriller was definitively NOT a thriller. Which, yes, I should've guessed from the tag line, but I'm still mad about it.)

I am in love with the prose. It feels similar to mine, but Better, and I have been unconsciously mimicking it.

(which may be a problem when I finish it and am still writing ATN, but that is an issue for Future Pockets)

ngl I was not a fan of the way the first book ended. Not only did I have to reread the final line multiple times in order to even begin to grasp it, but I kinda think it's a dick move to end on a cliffhanger, even for an established author and clear indications this was gonna be a series

(but you bought the next book, didn't you? DIDN'T YOU??)

very very much enjoying the series, to be concise (ha!). Love the characters and it's all pretty tightly paced. The overarching series arc kiiinda maybe feels a bit slow/irrelevant, and some of the motivations annoy me, but I keep reminding myself it's YA in which the motivations are in character, so

not far into this one yet but so far so good

I wrote this earlier this week and since have begun thinking the series arc is becoming more relevant, but am reserving judgement. Reading slower with work and reading but still enjoying it all

Real Life

continues to be mostly a pain in the ass. Apps in for a second job, research on next year ongoing

update: may have the dream second job, basically waiting for confirmation (fingers crossed!)

one of my housemates is the literal devil, although even that is being quite kind to her. The nice one is moving out because of it. People keep asking how I've lived in this house for three years. I have no answer.

enjoying writing time in evenings and feeling mentally pretty good thanks to exercise

Excerpt Long, nearly 900 words, but a favourite of recent pieces and also something I coincidentally wrote today. Nox and Latrell's third meeting, when Latrell is still, uh... resistant to the idea of working with him:

"Why me?" Not at all the way Latrell had intended to phrase it, but he couldn't take it back. He continued, quickly, instead, jumbled thoughts pouring out of his mouth. "Surely that's the least you can give me. You come to me and ask me to fucking help you after you've made the last three months of my life living hell, you can at least fucking tell me why the fuck that is. You owe me that much. I'm not letting you fucking walk away until you fucking answer me that."

Nox was silent for a long moment. He ran a calculating gaze up and down Latrell, as if searching for something; it wasn't apparent whether or not he'd found it when he said, softly, "And if I don't?"

Latrell was abruptly very aware of the weight of the handcuffs in his back pocket. He would have to move quickly. There was every possibility Nox would see this coming, especially if he'd been arrested before. But Latrell was quietly confident. He inched his hand back, keeping it subtle, eyes on Nox's face.

"In that case," he said, as evenly as he could. His fingertips brushed warm metal. "Perhaps we should try something--"

Everything went white.

For a moment Latrell thought he'd somehow lost consciousness; that he'd underestimated Nox's affinity for violence, that the man had punched him or otherwise managed to incapacitate him without otherwise moving. Then it occurred to him that he was still thinking, which essentially took unconsciousness off the table, and he realised, vaguely, that it was an illusion.

It was very, very convincing.

The entire world was an endless expanse of emptiness. Utterly, absolutely white, a whiteness that could not and should not exist. Latrell was overcome by a sensation of falling, of plummeting into nothingness; he had to concentrate to feel his feet still on the ground, to know he was still upright. He had nothing to orient himself. There was no up, no down, no left or right. Just that endless expanse of a lack of colour. He was hanging in nothingness, or everything.

"You forget who you are dealing with, Agent."

Latrell swallowed down nausea. Nox's voice came from startlingly close, the sound of it somehow wrong, which objectively he knew came from the fact that his brain was convinced it should sound small and insubstantial in this endless void but it sounded normal because he was actually still standing in the alley. It was academic knowledge only. He still felt like he was tipping or falling or rising, weightless and disoriented. He had no voice, no ability to open his mouth.

Experimentally he tried to take a step. He couldn't lift his foot off the ground. Physically, he was sure he could -- he could still twitch his fingers, if he thought about it -- but his mind was convinced that there was nothing to step away from, nothing to step onto. Just nothing, nothing, nothing. A brightness that wasn't a light, a void constructed of the pieces between atoms.

Nox's voice came from his other side this time. "I have attempted to do this civilly, but there are other options."

It was a struggle to concentrate on his words, close as they were. Latrell tried to narrow his focus to only sound, tried to ignore the nothingness he was suspended in, tried to tell himself it was all an illusion. Just something Nox wanted him to see. The Orn, threaded through his eyes or brain or soul, acting upon Nox's orders.

It didn't help. He was still in freefall.

"Do not," Nox's voice came, a bare whisper in his ear, breath brushing Latrell's neck, "Presume to test me."

Abruptly the white disappeared. Latrell was back in the alley, trying to adjust to the change of light, trying to find where Nox had gone. Turning his head made the ground roil beneath him and he staggered, utterly disoriented.

Fingers closed around his forearm, steadying him, and Latrell looked up to find Nox inches away.

"Easy, Agent," he purred. His smile was more a baring of his teeth.

Latrell wrenched away from him, staggering until his back connected with a comfortingly solid wall. He was dizzy, brain still adjusting to reality, but he managed to straighten his spine and set his shoulders. He kept his hands in front of him. In Nox's view.

"Do we have an understanding?" Nox said, still silky and low.

"Screw you," Latrell said, voice faint and alien.

Nox's smirk sharpened. "I thought so. Lovely chat, Agent Latrell." He sauntered past where Latrell stayed pressed against the wall, hesitated at the corner of the alley. "Keep up the good work."

He stepped forward and disappeared from view.

Latrell's breath left him in a rush and he doubled over, bracing himself on his knees. His head still spun, the unpleasant sensation he'd come to expect from vertigo. The backs of his eyelids were painted with a stark blank white. Every time he blinked he was engulfed.

It was far beyond any illusion he'd ever experienced. It was approaching the type he'd only ever read about in scientific articles.

You forget who you are dealing with, Agent.

Perhaps he had. But this assault supplied more than a reminder.

It also provided a piece of the puzzle.

#we'll go with #weekly update #WIP: ATN #excerpt #pockets muses IRL #god you can't tell i'm an overwriter at all can you #somebody please shut me up #>.<

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justforbooks · 4 years

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The Italian publisher, editor and collector Franco Maria Ricci has died at the age of 82.

In sumptuously produced art books, and as editor of the bi-monthly art magazine FMR, Ricci published writing by Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes and many others over the course of his long and distinguished career. In 2019, Susan Moore visited his estate at Fontanellato, near Parma, where in recent years Ricci had constructed the largest labyrinth in the world out of bamboo; they discussed Ricci’s notable collection of largely 18th- and 19th-century sculpture and paintings, as well as his library of books published by the great typographer Giambattista Bodoni, whose works Ricci had reprinted in his first foray into publishing. The interview is published in full below.

Collecting may be read as a form of autobiography written with works of art rather than words. In the case of Franco Maria Ricci, his is a life composed of both words and pictures. He has not only published the most lavishly produced art magazine – FMR – and art books in the world, but also spent the last 50 years amassing a peerless collection of volumes produced by the great Italian typographer, compositor and publisher Giambattista Bodoni (1740–1813) and a rich, eclectic collection of some 500 largely neoclassical and baroque paintings and sculptures. Both collections are at the heart of his most recent and extraordinary venture, the creation of the immense, star-shaped Labirinto della Masone, near Parma, the largest labyrinth in the world – and surely one of the few planted with bamboo.

There is something surreal, and slightly disturbing, about turning off the autostrada and suddenly encountering this majestic bamboo structure rising 10m or more above the plains of the Po valley. For all its elegant calligraphic stems and angular leaves, this is not the sparse specimen bamboo of Chinese ink-painting, but a forest. Here, more than 200,000 of these fast-growing bamboos arch upward in their quest for light. Once I turn into the drive of what was originally Ricci’s grandfather’s estate at Fontanellato, the brilliant azure June sky all but disappears. By the end of my two-day visit, it seems that the contrasts of light and dark are an apt metaphor for the book and art collections – and for the entire complex of maze, museum, archive and chapel, the latter built in the form of a pyramid. Ricci has always been part rationalist, part visionary.

Ricci’s story begins with the book. ‘I grew up surrounded by my father’s books. Reading Shakespeare, Homer, Joyce and Dante saved me from bad taste,’ he once said. ‘It made beauty simple, familiar and immediate in my eyes.’ It was a book, too, that transformed his life and launched a long and successful career: Bodoni’s Manuale tipografico, first published in 1818. Before his discovery of Bodoni’s works in the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma in the 1960s, a career in publishing seemed unlikely. The stylish Ricci, a racing driver and a dandy with dark cherubic curls, was best known for patterning the snow in the piazza around Parma Cathedral with the wheels of his E-type Jaguar. Even Bernardo Bertolucci remembered that car.

As a young man, Ricci had wanted to study archaeology, but an uncle in the oil world persuaded him to sign up for geology instead. After three months in Turkey spent looking for oil that was not there, he realised the oil business was not for him. Yet his education proved critical in unlikely ways. He spent weekends exploring the mysterious, labyrinthine underground tunnels and caves that are a feature of the Romagna region of Italy. He also designed posters for Parma University’s theatre festival that caught the attention of an American curator preparing a show of Italian design in New York. He became, inadvertently, a graphic artist, and went on to create striking graphics for everything from Poste Italiane to Alitalia.

Ricci has long insisted that ‘Bodoni was not only a typographer. He achieved modernity and elegance through graphic art. He was, like Canova, a champion of neoclassicism but in two dimensions. I immediately fell in love with the proportions, the concept of beauty.’ Bodoni’s genius was not simply the freshness, rigour and precision of the typefaces, with their dramatic contrasts between thick and thin line, but also his sense of how to lay out a page. Texts are set with extravagantly wide margins and with little or no decoration.

Ricci decided to reproduce the master’s Manuale tipografico, although everyone told him he was mad to do it. He bought two early offset typography machines which, he noted, were ‘as expensive as a Ferrari, which I wanted to buy but never did’, and had the highest-quality paper made exclusively for the project by Fabriano. It took a year to publish the three volumes in 900 numbered copies (1964–65). ‘So I became a publisher. It became a bestseller.’

Much to his mother’s horror, Ricci decided to continue to publish very expensive books – art books printed in Bodonian style – and later, literary editions, several series of which were edited by Jorge Luis Borges, whose presence looms large in library and labyrinth. At a time when Arte Povera dominated the Italian avant-garde, Ricci chose opulent black silk covers embossed with gold, and printed on costly pale blue Fabriano paper with handmade plates. He wanted his books to be rare – printing small editions – but also surprising. He gave Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino and Borges free rein to write accompanying texts.

His wife Laura Casalis remembers having been struck by the originality of Ricci’s 1970 book on the then little-appreciated Erté – text by Barthes – before she met the publisher himself in 1975, and soon found herself working on a book on red paper-cut portraits of Mao, accompanied by 39 of the Chairman’s own poems printed in Chinese characters. ‘Little by little I slipped into publishing with him – Franco was a workaholic and I realised that was the only way I would see him. Those Mao paper-cuts were typical of the practically unknown subjects that he would seek out all his life, and we sometimes show them between loan exhibitions in the museum. Franco has l’occhio lungo – he can see beauty in something which may take others a long time to recognise.’

It is in the library I find Ricci and, indeed, where he is to be found most mornings and afternoons. It is part of a cluster of picturesque 19th-century stone buildings surrounded by lush and increasingly exotic gardens. He had begun renovating the dilapidated stables behind his grandfather’s long-abandoned villa as a summerhouse and library in the 1970s, and its enormous hayloft still serves as an idyllic open-air dining room and entertaining space, even though the couple have now moved into the main house. Inside this romantic half-ruined folly, Ricci created the unexpected: two neoclassical library rooms lined with bookshelves and marble busts, their domed and coffered ceilings reminiscent of those in the Biblioteca Palatina.

As soon as we arrive in the inner sanctum, the Bodoni library with its more than 1,200 volumes – missing a tantalising three or four tomes but otherwise complete – Ricci is immediately up on his feet and pulling down and opening cherished volumes, eyes blazing. Despite the heat, he wears an elegant embroidered linen waistcoat but not its jacket, which hangs nearby, bearing the synthetic red flower that became in effect his iconographical device. (Tai Missoni gave him a cardigan as a present: Ricci declined the gift – he does not wear cardigans – but declared that he would always wear the red flower from its packaging thereafter, which he did. Once, when he had forgotten the flower, an officer at the Alitalia desk at Milan airport said: ‘I see you are travelling incognito today Mr Ricci.’)

Now Ricci deftly presents Bodoni’s Essai de caractères russes… of 1782, and his 1789 edition of Torquato Tasso’s pastoral play Aminta, exquisitely illuminated for the Prince of Essling. These are dear friends and the joy as he handles these pages is self-evident. This is the only significant part of the collection not to have been moved down to the museum and archive complex, a short bamboo-lined drive away. It is clear that he could never bear to live apart from these books.

The impetus to create the long-imagined labyrinth, and a museum and library to house his collections and publishing archive, was a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. The couple sold the publishing house in 1982, and their house in Milan, and moved to Fontanellato. There is a fierce pride in Laura Casalis’s voice as she explains: ‘Franco wanted to do it, he imagined it, and he found the right team of people to help him realise it.’ We are sitting over coffee in the Labirinto courtyard surveying the sharp-edged geometries of its rose-pink brick buildings, a place that already has the air of a lost ancient city discovered in a jungle. Laura describes the evolution of the museum collections within, and recalls the words of the late Italian publisher Valentino Bompiani, who described Ricci as a man of courage and fantasy.

‘Whenever he fell for some subject or artist, Franco would try to buy.’ Laura continues. ‘He was never concerned with what was or was not fashionable, and never bought to decorate a house. He collected pieces that he liked that were strange or unconventional.’ He began with Art Deco, first buying inexpensive little bronze and chryselephantine dancers by the likes of Demétre Chiparus (1886–1947), as well as Guiraud-Rivière’s dramatic figure of Isadora Duncan with two bears, which dominates the central space of the 20th-century gallery in the museum.

Here, too, are three paintings by the outsider artist Antonio Ligabue (1899–1965), a tormented soul who had led a tragic life, painting and wandering around the Po valley when he was not confined to a psychiatric hospital. Ricci published the first monograph on the artist in 1967, two years after his death, a work that helped catapult the artist from provincial to national and then international fame. Two years later, he bought two of the artist’s bold, visceral close-up heads of roaring tigers, painted in the 1950s, including the key work that had been selected for the book cover. A no less bright and richly impasted self-portrait in the guise of Vincent Van Gogh followed a year later.

Ricci also championed – and collected – the work of the third dominant presence in this space, Adolfo Wildt (1868–1931), often described as the last Symbolist but one whose reputation was, as Laura puts it, ‘tarnished by Fascist association’. Ricci published a monograph in 1988, the same year that he acquired the strange masterpiece that is Vir temporis acti of 1913, a virtuoso marble bust of a Greek or Roman soldier reimagined through the combined lenses of Michelangelo and the Secessionists. The expressive anguish of this head may be seen as a symbol of the nobility and redemption of sacrifice, but it is the refined and gleaming silken surface that led to Brancusi.

Ricci has a penchant not only for sculpture but also portraits, and portrait busts in particular. ‘I have hunted portraits all my life. I never get tired of looking at them,’ he confesses, ‘and in turn, I feel observed by them.’ In the 1990s, he began following the art market and collecting in earnest. Ricci had an office, bookshop and apartment in Paris and there and in Monaco he was to acquire many of his largely French 18th-century terracottas, some of the most compelling by less familiar names. A superb example is the bust of an intense, low-browed individual, signed by one A. Riffard and given the Revolutionary date of ‘9. Fructidor an 3e’, from 1794–95.

Another naturalistic tour de force is one of very few known terracottas by Francesco Orso, also known as François Orsy, a Piedmontese sculptor also active in Paris. Orso is responsible for the rarest sculptures here: the disconcerting life-size polychrome wax portrait busts of Vittorio Amadeo III of Savoy and his wife Maria Antonia Ferdinanda di Borbone, complete with painted papier-mâché clothes. The revolution destroyed the sculptor’s courtly patronage in Paris, and he diversified into the more overtly commercial world of the waxwork with a show featuring an effigy of the aristocratic revolutionary leader the Comte de Mirabeau and popular tableaux on themes such as Marat’s assassination by Charlotte Corday.

Unsurprisingly, given Ricci’s passion for Bodoni, the neoclassical looms large. At the centre of the Napoleonic gallery, lined with marble busts – Italian, English and Danish – is a model of Canova’s ideal head of Dante’s muse Beatrice, first conceived as an idealised portrait of Mme Récamier. The display offers a witty face-off between Wellington and Napoleon on opposing pedestals, but the emperor prevails with a sequence of classicising family portraits. Above hangs the second version of Francesco Hayez’s The Penitent Magdalene (1825). Here the Romantic artist has transposed the chilly perfection of Canova’s marble surfaces into pigment.

An unusual and endearing mid 18th-century Italian group portrait presents the family of Antonio Ghidini, a cloth merchant to the Bourbon court in Parma, painted by his friend, the court artist Pietro Melchiorre Ferrari (1734/5–87). In this Zoffany-style conversation piece there is no doubting Ghidini’s business, as he points to documents mentioning his association with his trading partners in Manchester and his wife sits stiffly under her salmon-pink stomacher in sprigged and striped silk finery.

Yet it would be misleading to suggest that Ricci’s ever-curious eye never ranged beyond the 18th and 19th centuries. He owns a number of 17th-century marbles, including that of the all-powerful prelate Cardinal Paluzzo Paluzzi Altieri degli Albertoni, who effectively ran the papacy under Clement X – irresistible in profile. In the 2000s Ricci also added, for example, Ludovico Carracci’s handsome three-quarter length Portrait of Lucrezia Bentivoglio Leoni (1589), executed two years before the sitter’s death. Flanking the same door is Philippe de Champaigne’s Portrait of the Duchesse d’Aiguillon (c. 1650), and viewed beyond is an unusual sensual and erotically charged work by Luca Cambiaso (1527–85), Venus Blindfolding Cupid.

Yet Ricci has also always been attracted to what he describes as the art of visionary madness, by the surreal, and by what is prosaic and popular. The museum’s cabinet of curiosities includes a narwhal horn, once thought to have belonged to the unicorn. Its walls are lined with particularly gruesome vanitas paintings and sculptures. Centre stage among the skulls is a decomposing head by Jacopo Ligozzi (1547–1627), its flesh and rotten teeth seething with maggots and flies.

Only superficially more benign are the drawings of the Codex Seraphinianus, first published in two volumes in 1981 – Ricci’s most extraordinary publication. These meticulously detailed explications of the bizarre and the fantastical illustrate an encyclopaedia of an imaginary world conceived by the artist Luigi Serafini in the 1970s and written in a language still understood only by its creator. Certainly its pages are at home in the Labirinto della Masone complex – another visionary creation, in effect a Gesamtkunstwerk, an all-embracing art work expressing the life and taste of one man.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

#JUST FOR BOOKS #Franco Maria Ricci

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recentanimenews · 3 years

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Heroines Protect the Racetrack in Hairpin Double Short Form Anime

Okayama International Circuit - a motorsports racetrack in Mimasaka, Okayama Prefecture, Japan - is celebrating its 30th anniversary with the creation of an original short form anime entitled Hairpin Double that features racing-themed heroines and direction by one of the directors of the New Initial D anime film series. The main staff for Hairpin Double includes:

Director: Tomohito Naka

Screenplay: Tokio Nazuka (Tsumugi Akita Anime Lab Literary Division)

Original characters: Uzushiopawn

Character design: Chiyoko Sakamoto

Theme song: "Road to Victory" by PaRet

Animation production: Felix Film

Music production: Ai Addiction

The main cast for Hairpin Double includes:

M・A・O as "Red" / Azumi Shibukawa.

Hisako Kanemoto as "Blue" / Kyouko Usui.

Miharu Hanai as "Yellow" / Fumio Chitose.

Shiori Izawa as "Green" / Eri Yokosuka.

And Reina Kondō as "Pink" / Hina Kawai.

Additionally, voice actor Ryō Horikawa plays the role of Ken Horibe, the race control operator (not pictured).

The story of Hairpin Double is set at the Okayama International Circuit, a racetrack known for its two hairpin curves, on a typical race day where the circuit staff are working and the idol unit PaRet is performing on-stage. Suddenly, the racecourse is attacked by mysterious monsters intent on raiding the Mimasaka Liquid, a fantastical energy source located 900 meters beneath the racetrack. To protect the spectators and the staff, five young ladies transform into a superhero team.

Hairpin Double is scheduled to be released in the fall season of 2021.

Sources:

MoCa

Official Hairpin Double anime home page

---

Paul Chapman is the host of The Greatest Movie EVER! Podcast and GME! Anime Fun Time.

By: Paul Chapman

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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marvelaftermidnight · 4 years

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#mam #zine #rules #zine rules #zine project #comic zine #fanzine #marvel #mcu #comic #comics #616 #marvel zine #mcu zine #616 zine #comics zine #fan zine #fandomzine #fandom zine

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gffa · 6 years

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HEY, LET ME YELL ABOUT SOME STAR WARS SHIPS. THE FLYING KIND THIS TIME. One of the banes of my existences is loving the worldbuilding of a particular canon, but not having it laid out for me in a way that’s organized for me to easily find what I’m looking for at any given moment. And flipping through (the sadly no longer canon, but still incredibly useful!) Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Incredible Vehicles (see here for info!) really helped me get my head around a lot of it and finally able to organize these pages into a more “easy to find what kind of vehicle you need for a specific type of scene” list! But what I really wanted was to see a canon reference guide organized into size/use sections, to better reference when I needed either a massive star ship or when I needed to know the name of a speeder a given character might use. (This focuses on the Clone Wars era, but if you want Empire/Rebellion era or First Order era info, feel free to give me a yell.) Encyclopedia of Starfighters and Other Vehicles: MASSIVE SHIPS: ➞ Republic Attack Cruiser - “The war between the Republic and the Separatists leads to a demandfor larger and more powerful battleships. The Republic Navy expands to include the Reupblic attack cruisers, massive warships often referred to as "Star Destroyers". (Venator-class Star Destroyers can carry more than 420 starfighters (including V-wings, X-95 Headhunters, and Jedi starfighters); 40 LAAT/i gunships; and 24 AT-ETs.)" ➞ Acclamator-class Assault Ship (Transgalactic Military Transport Ship) - "These assault ships are a predecessor of the later Star Destroyers. They are built for the Clone Wars, under false orders supposedly issued by the Jedi Council. This is all part of Darth Sidious's evil plan to take over the galaxy. (During the Clone Wars, Acclamator-class ships are stationed at Coruscant, ready to carry clone troopers across the galaxy.)(Unlike many craft of this size, Acclamator-class assault ships can land on planets, where they deploy Republic forces in an effort to retake the worlds from Separatist control.)(Each Acclamator-class assault ship requires a crew of 700 and can carry up to 16,000 clone troopers.)" ➞ Malevolence (Subjugator-class Heavy Cruiser) - During the Clone Wars, General Greivious's huge flagship leaves death and devastation in its wake. Its massive ion cannons disrupt the control systems of surrounding ships, disabling their energy weapons and deflector shields. (Four times longer than a Venator-class Star Destroyer, the Malevolence has an internal shuttle train system to deploy supplies and troops and is crewed by 900 battle droids.)" ➞ AA-9 Coruscant Freighter - "The AA-9 Coruscant Freighters are originally built to haul cargo. During the war with the Separatists, the Refugee Relief Movement has them transformed into vessels that can help people in need. The freighters transport [up to 30,000] refugees from planets that have fallen under enemy control." ➞ Pelta-class Frigate (Republic Medical Frigate) - "During the Clone Wars, the Pelta-class frigate is a common sight at the edges of space battles. It is used by the Republic Navy to treat injured clone soldiers. The more honorable generals in the Separatist fleet usually don't attack it.) Each Pelta-class frigate can carry up to 900 crew, and is equipped with 16 escape pods. Phoenix Home is modified to include turbo laser batteries.)” ➞ Invisible Hand (Providence-class Dreadnought) - “Commanded by General Grievous, the Invisible Hand plays a key role in the last great battle of the Clone Wars. With the sinister Sith Lord Count Dooku holding Chancellor Palpatine prisoner aboard the failing ship, the Jedi Order must rush to the rescue. (The Invisible Hand is a difficult ship to attack. There are 20 squadrons of droid starfighters ready to defend it. Count Dooku turns the ship upper sensor tower into his lair, calling it the "Wizard's Tower".)(The Invisible Hand is controlled with a droid brain. This means that Anakin Skywalker can override controls and fly the ship. It's still a bumpy landing!)" ➞ Coronet (Personal Spaceliner) - “The Coronet is Duchess Satine Kryze of Mandalore's personal luxury spaceliner. This one-of-a-kind ship is practically a spacefaring palace. It serves as a testament to the engineering and wealth of the Mandalorians. (The lower decks of the Coronet are used for cargo transport. The ship requires a crew of 75, and has eight engines all working in unison.)" STARFIGHTERS: ➞ V-Wing - "Small, fast, and agile, the V-wing starfighter is used late in the Clone Wars by the Republic. With ltitle in the way of firepower or armor, V-wing pilots use swarm strategies to overwhelm their opponents, assisted by an astromech droid." ➞ V-19 Torrent Starfighter - "The V-19 is used during the early days of the Clone Wars. It becomes a popular fighter for the rapidly expanding Republic Navy. Originally designed to be a short-range fighter, the V-19 later underdoes a series of upgrades that make it suitable for much longer flights." ➞ ARC-170 Starfighter - "This three-person starfighter is durable and reliable. It carries a formidable arsenal, as well as sufficient supplies for five days. It should come as no surprise that the ARC-170s rapidly replace the V-19s as the Republic's primary dogfighter during the Clone Wars. (The ARC-170s are so dependable that both the Empire and rebel forces continue to use the starfighters after the Clone Wars. They become the template for the first generation of X-wings.)" ➞ Y-Wing - "Designed for bombing raids, the Y-wing is a sleek ship originally used by the Galactic Republic. Y-wings find new life as starfighters for the Rebel Alliance during the Galactic Civil War. Stripped of every non-essential system and endlessly repaired by rebel mechanics, they remain popular with Alliance pilots. (The first Y-wings used in the Clone Wars have a gunner's station above the cockpit. In later models, one operator serves as pilote and gunner.)" ➞ ETA-2 Light Interceptor (Jedi Starfighter) - The ETA-2 Interceptor's popularity with the Jedi Order earns it the nickname the Jedi Starfighter. It is one of the fastest and most responsive starships produced during the Clone Wars. Almost every Jedi flies one, customizing the craft to meet their unique skills and requirements. (The Jedi starfighter uses heavy weaponry, but the power drain prevents constant firing. Most Jedi remove the sensors and targeting equiment to save weight and space.)" ➞ Delta-7 Light Interceptor (Specialized Jedi Starfighter) - The Delta-7 is designed specifically for the Jedi and is in frequen use long before the Clone Wars beigin. As more Jedi leave the temples to join the war effort, their combat ships are swiftly upgraded to keep pace with the enemy's crafts. This prompts the creation of the Delta-7B. (There are small improvements from the Delta-7 to the 7B. The Delta-7 has a wing part for an astromech, while the 7B places the port in front of the cockpit. The Delta-7B also boasts a tougher central hull that its predecessor.)" ➞ Naboo Starfighter (N-1 Starfighter) - Bold and beautiful in its design, the N-1 starfighter is the signature ship of the Royal Naboo Security Forces. Its forward section is clad in chromium for ceremonial display, and its sleek shape is as much an expression of art as aerodynamics. (The Naboo starfighter's long tail acts as a power charge collector. The similarly shaped engine tails serve as heat sinks.)" ➞ Republic Frigate (Consular-class Cruiser) - "Used by the Jedi and the Galactic Senate on diplomatic missions before the Clone Wars, these cruisers are retrofitted as combat frigates when war breaks out. Their upgrades include armored hull plating and laser cannon batteries. (Republic cruisers that have undergone the Charger c70 retrofit for use in the Clone Wars are longer than those that have not.)" AIRCRAFT (SPACE): ➞ Stealth Ship (Corvette with a Cloak) - "The Republic's stealth ship is able to turn invisible. It is designed with an experimental cloaking device, which allows it to sneak past Separatist blockades. As well as being impossible to see when cloaked, it is undetectable by scanners and sensors. (The stealth ship cannot fire its laser cannons or proton torpedos while cloaked, but it can launch flares to confuse enemy tracking torpedoes.)" ➞ Republic Tugboat - Republic Tubgoats are used during the Clone Wars to maneuver massive warships into docking ports at space stations. These tugboats are low on shields and have no weapons but are equipped with powerful engines and tractor beams." ➞ Turtle Tanker - "Originally designed to haul minerals from asteroid mines, the bulk tankers (commonly known as "Turtle Tankers") are cheap and easy to build. This makes them a familiar sight in established space lanes. However, their lack of weaponry makes them a rare choice outside of heavily trafficked areas." ➞ T-6 Shuttle (Jedi Ambassador Shuttle) - "This innovative shuttle design has a lasting impact on starship technology. It is built by the insectoid Verpine, and features rotating wings that allows the rest of the ship an exception degree of motion. Members of the Jedi Order use the shuttles frequently." ➞ Eta-Class Shuttle (Ambassadorial Transport) - These comfy shuttles are first used by the Galactic Senate for diplomatic missions. Later on, they are regularly employed by the Jedi in the Clone Wars. Robust and suited to long-range travel, an Eta-class shuttle is chosen for a mission in Wild Space beyond the Outer Rim. (An Eta-class shuttle comfortably seats ten passengers and two pilots. There is also room for emergency transport, such as two Undicar-class jumpseeders.)" ➞ Twilight (Corellian G9 Rigger Freighter) - The Twilight is originally the property of crime lord Ziro Desilijic Tiure. It is later claimed by Anakin Skywalker, who puts it to use during the Clone Wars. This old ship is conidered massively out of date, so Anakin spends a large amount of his free time upgrading the vehicle. (The side of the Twilight is decorated with a cartoonish painting of young Anakin's podracing. The ship's upgraded weapons system causes random color shifts in the lasers.)" ➞ Crucible (Paladin-class Corvette) - "Custom-built for the Jedi in the time of the Old Republic, the Crucible has been in service for quite some time. It is used in the training of Jedi younglings, who learn how to contstruct their own lightsabers from crystals while aboard." ➞ H-Type Nubian Yacht (Shimmering Senator's Ship) - "This yacht is the personal transport of Senator Padme Amidala. It is a luxury ship, designed for comfort rarthe than combat, but does have very powerful shielding in case of an attack. The vehicle is coated in royal chromium, reflecting its owner's high status." ➞ Naboo Royal Cruiser (Custom-build J-type Diplomatic Barge) - The invasion of Naboo convinces the peaceful planet to upgrate its diplomatic vessels. Though it still travels without weapons, this barge is far faster and better shielded than the J-type Nubian starship that came before it. It also boats a range of backup systems in case of malfunctions or sabotage. (The J-type diplomatic barge has spacious interiors designed for comfort. It has room for four prestigious passengers as well as up to five crew and six guards.)" ➞ Naboo Royal Starship (Modified J-Type 327) - This sleek ship is crafted to be a visual representation of the glory of Naboo. It has no weapons, but it is shielded in case of attack. It also has multiple astromech units, each one capable of making emergency repairs. (This ship is exclusive to the royal family of Naboo. It includes quarters for the Queen and her handmaidens, equipped with climate-controlled wardrobes.)" ➞ Naboo Star Skiff (J-type Star Skiff) - “Weapons on a Naboo royal ship are unheard of until this vessel is manufactured. It also has a duller, more practical finish compared to traditional gleaming Naboo ships. Unfortunately, the Naboo have had to adapt their ship designs for the harsh realities of battle during the Clone Wars. (The J-type star skiff is designed and built for Queen Apailana, the monarch of Naboo, in the latter days of the Clone Wars. However, the ship is also made available for Senator Padme Amidala, the former queen.)" AIRCRAFT (PLANETSIDE): ➞ LAAT (Low Altitude Assault Transport) - "The dependable LAAT is one of the Republic's main deployment craft. Heavily armrored and highly maneuverable, this war transport is often sent into combat under fire. It can glide through a storm of lasers to safely land its cargo and troops." ➞ Republic Attack Shuttle - With heavier armor and shielding than most atmosphere vessels, the Republic attack shuttle is a long-range alternative to the LAAT gunship. It is replaced by other shuttle designs after the Clone Wars, but one remains in service of the rebel Cham Syndulla during the time of Empire. (The Republic attack shuttle has a tractor beam, which is usual for a transport. It also has magnetic clamps on its underside to clasp cargo and other smaller vessels. A variant Nu-class transport has an enclosed cargo bay built in between the wings.)"

GROUNDCRAFT: ➞ Clone Turbo Tank - "This 10 wheeled tank can deliver as many as 300 clone troopers into the heart of the battle in one trip. It is designed to roll over any terraing with ease and to absorb enemy fire with no loss of function. After proving effect in the Clone Wars, the tank stays in use during the age of Empire." ➞ AT-RT - "Fast, nimble, and powerful, AT-RTs are used furing the brutal land battles of the Clone Wars. A single clone trooper will usually pilot these as a scout, ranging ahead of the battlefront and gathering intel for the main force." ➞ Stun Tank - "This Republic tank is primarily an anti-aircraft weapon. It's ion cannon drains energy from the ship it targets, leaving them helpless. Despite being designed for use against droid vehicles, the tank sees little use during the Clone Wars." ➞ AT-OT (All Terrain Open Transport) - "The imposing AT-OT has an open-top design, leaving it vulnerable to attack from above. Their role during the Clone Wars is to quickly move troops, rather than engage in battle." ➞ AT-TE (All Terrain Tactical Enforcer) - "The AT-TE looks more ilke a huge robotic insect than a military transport. It is used during the Clone Wars to move large numbers of troops through battle, and to operate as a mobile command center." ➞ SPHA-T (Self-propelled Heavy Artillery Turbolaser) - "Bearing one of the bigger ground guns used by the Republic Army, this 12-legged walker is a low but steady feature throughout the Clone Wars. Its turbolaser can destroy a starship, but can only operate for a limited time. This is because each blast uses up a vast amount of energy." WATERCRAFT: ➞ Naboo Water Speeder - "The serene lakes of Naboo are the planet's most famous sight, renowned across the galaxy for their peaceful vistas. In their free time, the Naboo take luxurious pleasure speeders out onto the water, exploring the hidden coves and majestic waterfalls. (The D-11 is manufactured by the same company as the N-1 starfighter and the two craft share many design features, despite being built to operate in very different environments.) (The D-11 water speeders were build specially for the use of the queen and the royal household. A selection of the royal boathouse is set aside for their recharging and maintenance, however Padme Amidala is less indulgent than some previous queens, and the D-11s are seldom used.)" ➞ Tribubble Bongo (Gungan Bongo Submarine) - These semi-organic subarmines have hulls that are grown rather than built, so no two are exactly alike. The Gungans equip them with hydrostatic bubble shields to keep the air in and the water out, and use them to explore the oceans of their home planet, Naboo." SPEEDERS: ➞ Barc Speeder - "This powerful speeder bike is designed for use by ARC (Advanced Recon Commando) troopers, but goes on to be piloted by other Republic fighters during the Clone Wars. Ideal for scouting missions, it is also used by police patrols on Coruscant." ➞ Jedi Turbo Speeder (Praxis Mk. 1 Turbo Speeder) - "An elegantly designed turbo speeder, the Praxis Mk. 1 is piloted by members of the Jedi Order when traveling around the city planet of Coruscant. Its thing, wedge-like design cuts down on wind resistance, and the navigation systems are programmed to bypass heavy traffic. (The Praxix Mk. 1 turbo speeder is equipped with collision-detection systems to help its pilot avoid accidents. Twin repulsor generators allow the ship to run upside-down in midair.)" PUBLIC & PERSONAL TRANSPORT: ➞ CSS-1 Corellian Star Shuttle - “"Built for diplomacy rather than battle, the CSS-1 shuttle has an impressive meeting room and comfortable quarters for VIP guests. It can carry up to 200 passengers, as well as enough supplies to last for three years. It is also equipped with an unusually strong deflector shield. (Shortly after his appointment to Supreme Chancellor of the Republic, Sheev Palpatine ant he Jedi Council travel together to Naboo aboard the CSS-1 name the Perpetuus.)” ➞ Taylander Shuttle - The Taylandor Shuttles are civilian transport vehicles during the final years of the Republic. They are a common sight amongst the peaceful Core Worlds, but are even found in the far reaches of the Outer Rim." ➞ H-2 Executive Shuttle - "The senators and even Chancellor Palpatine are among the high-profile users of this luxurious ship. Palpatine's model is docked to allow direct access from his chambers in the Senate Office Building on Coruscant. It makes for a comfy escape craft if the building is attacked." ➞ Theta-Class T-2C Shuttle - “These ships are built by Cygnus Spaceworks, under special order by Supreme Chancellor Palpatine. They have never been available for purchase. The model is eventually incorporated into the Imperial fleet, but only for the highest-ranking officers." ➞ Luxury Yacht (Personal Luxury Yacht 3000) - "In the time of the Republic, diplomats use luxury yachts for meetings and travel. They become less popular during the chaos of the Clone Wars, when they are seen as easy targets for pirates and Separatists. (Luxury yachts are common vehicles in wealthier systems. Built for comfort, they include a grand observation deck and a swimming pool, as well as five personal cabins for crew and guests.)"

#star wars ships #reference #meta

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acotars · 5 years

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thank you all for 900 followers !!! ahhh!!!

i wasn’t going to do a celebration but then i hit the number and i got all excited and i decided i really wanted to start a fandom family :’)

benefits of joining:

a cute custom tag to share creations for boosting !!

a cute little spot on my ff page

an edit request just for joining!

my eternal love and affection??

rules:

mbf this goof

reblog this post

send me an ask with ☽, your name, your top three character choices, a short quote, and your edit request !!!!

track the tag #kate’s fandom fam

have a good day today

#mutuals pls boost ashdasdh #i haven't done a followers celebration in so long lmao #followers celebration #kate's 900

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ongshat · 5 years

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For a comprehensive list of most of my print work (not including magazine articles) see this list on Goodreads.

All my works dedicated to the memory of my dearly departed friends: The members of The Formless Ocean Group – Nina Graboi, Elizabeth Gips, Paddy Long, Betsy Herbert, and Robert Anton Wilson. Also to my departed friends: Dave, DW Cooper, Dr. Hyatt (Alan) and humdog.

PAST WORK

Beats In Time: A Literary Generation’s Legacy (Chapter 12 is my interview with Diane DiPrima) also to be included in Conversations with Diane di Prima to be published by the University Press of Mississippi, in 2021/22.

Transmedia: Who Invited the Lobsters Anyway?

Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong’s Hat by Michael Kinsell – While clearly this is a book about my transmedia project it also includes a lot of things that I wrote as examples, so I include it here. Metamodernism, anyone?

Rebels and Devils: The Psychology of Liberation edited by Christopher S. Hyatt, Ph.D. introduced by S. Jason Black foreword by Nicholas Tharcher contributions by William S. Burroughs Joseph C. Lisiewski, Ph.D. Timothy Leary Ph.D., Robert Anton Wilson, Austin Osman Spare, Genesis P-Orridge, Aleister Crowley, Joseph Matheny, Peter J. Carroll, Israel Regardie, Jack Parsons, Phil Hine, Osho, and many others

Black Book Omega: CIRQUE APOKLYPSIS by Christopher S. Hyatt, Ph.D. Joseph Matheny, Nick Pell, Calvin Iwema, Wes Unruh, Antero Alli (more info here)

Contributor YouTube: An Insider’s Guide to Climbing the Charts (more info here)

Introduction to The Art of Memetics Aside: When I posted about this book on Greylodge, Seth Godin references the post as a good example of “How to write like a blogger“ This made me happy. 😉

Contributor/Editor:This is Not a Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming with Dave Szulborski (Excerpt here )I edited and contributed to : “This Is Not a Game” which was included in the annual Tween market report that went to marketing executives worldwide in the toy, gaming and youth market industries. Also, I appeared as myself/in character, in person, in the “Catching the Wish” ARG by Dave.

Third Realm (The Yellow King) Written and executed by me, produced in conjunction with Foolish People http://www.argn.com/2009/10/puzzles_for_the_apocalyps

4P2 My first foray into the True Crime arena. Formula: Just put up a single, spooky web page, that purports to be a recruitment drive for an organization whose actual existence is speculative at best and at worst is fiction presented as fact or paranoid, hysterical hand-waving in the interest of selling books and you will get all kinds of reactions. In all fairness, I think the theories mentioned read as good fantasy crime fiction and this was a conceptual attempt at that very thing. Apparently, it succeeded. The unnerving side of this was the equal amount of applications I received asking to join (Really? Join a group of underground serial killers? Really?) or outright death threats by people who really believe in such things. (Someone summed it up pretty well in this article from The Fenris Wolf)

the-fenriswolf-iss-no-4-pp-87-116 PDF Excerpt

El Centro & OMEGA This was a ARG/Transmedia style story with occult/horror/conspiracy elements, started in 2004 and ended in 2006. It utilized Web, print (booklet), radio, phone trees, theater and news wire services. [A version of the doughnut shop scene from this story was used in Amsterdam production of Terra: Extremitas by Foolish People.] This project was done in collaboration my late friend Dave Szulborski. There’s a LOOOOOONG story about this project. So long in fact that it will take up at least three chapters in an future book.

Contributor: What Would Bill Hicks Say with Ben Mack, Amelia the Great and Soft Skull Press (along with Jeff Danziger and Martyn Turner; writers Neal Pollack, Robert Newman, and A.L. Kennedy; and Thom Yorke of Radiohead and others…)

Contributor: 2004-2005 Exquisite Language project for the 2004 ELfest and collected in the Spring 2005 issue of of 2 Gyrlz Quarterly. NOW AVAILABLE AT POWELLS.COM

Introduction, afterward and editing for Poker Without Cards– First Edition. I orchestrated the first release campaign for this book, with the main character becoming “real”on the Internet for a while. After the first few months I turned it over to the author. (statement regarding this work here)

GALT’S ARK: The Black Symphony, First and Second Movements Produced by Cthulhu The Players: Joseph Matheny, Christopher S. Hyatt, Ph.D., Father Daniel Suders & Nicholas Tharcher Illustrated by S. Jason Black, Jonathan Sellers, Weirdpixie & MobiusFrame

THE BLACK BOOK Volume III, Part I

THE BLACK BOOK Volume III, Part II

(The Black Books are considered the workbooks for The Psychopath’s Bible, which I wrote an infamous jacket blurb for.)

The Incunabula: Ong’s Hat Project [ Reviews | Interviews, etc. | Wikipedia | History] This was a ARG/Transmedia style story started in 1988 and ended in 2001. It utilized zines, BBS, early Internet, Web, CD ROM, CD Audio, DVD, print (book, graphic novel and magazine), radio, phone trees, fax, and news wire services. I gained and leveraged exposure in both the mainstream and alternative media to distribute over 2 million copies of CD ROM, ebook and print versions of the story combined. Story elements from Ong’s Hat were also included in the EA Game, Majestic which unfortunately ended prematurely due to 9/11. It was the subject of a full 4 hour show on Coast to Coast AM, been the subject of an article on the Weekly World News and been covered on many radio shows world wide, books, newspapers, magazines, etc. Links to media here.

Description: “…a bizarre Internet phenomenon: an “immersive” online experience—part mystery, part game, part who knows what—known as both the Incunabula Papers and Ong’s Hat. The Incunabula Papers/Ong’s Hat was, or is, a “many-threaded, open-ended interactive narrative” that ”weds an alternate history of chaos science and consciousness studies to conspiracy theories, parallel dimensions, and claims that computer-mediated environments can serve as magical tools…. the documents provoked a widespread “immersive legend-trip” in the late 1990s. Via Web forums, participants investigated the documents—manifestos—which spun up descriptions of brilliant but suppressed discoveries relating to paths that certain scientists had forged into alternate realities. Soon, those haunted dimensions existed in the minds and fantasies of Ong’s Hat’s many participants. That was evident as they responded to the original postings by uploading their own—all manner of reflections and artifacts: personal anecdotes, audio recordings, and videos—to augment what became “a really immersive world, and it was vast”. – The Chronicle of Higher Education—-

“Ong’s Hat was more of an experiment in transmedia storytelling than what we would now consider to be an ARG but its DNA – the concept of telling a story across various platforms and new media- is evident in every alternate reality game that came after.” – Games Magazine 2013

Though Ong’s Hat may not have set out to be an ARG, the methods by which the author interacted with participants and used different platforms to build and spread its legend has been reflected in later games. –Know Your Meme

The Incunabula Papers are arguably the first immersive online legend complex that introduced readers to a host of content, including what religious historian Robert Ellwood has called the “alternative reality tradition. – Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong’s Hat

As a companion piece to understanding some of the history of the transmedia work that centered around Ong”s Hat you may also want to read Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong’s Hat, reviewed here.

The Incunabula Papers CDROM was recently included in the BNF (Bibliothèque nationale de France) digital art collection.

Game Over? (currently re-vamping this for re-release)…but if you just HAVE to have it now, someone is selling one for $900 over here. 😛

What Really Happened at Ong’s Hat?

The Incunabula Papers (CD ROM) Free ebook versions here

Incunabula: The Graphic Novel Free ebook version here

Why DVD? (B and N Digital Bestseller)

A booklet published in April-99

Over 100,000 in circulation to date

Available from booksellers nationwide in October reprinted by:

DVD Creation Magazine

Videography Magazine

(printed copy sent out with each issue – July,1999)

Video Systems magazine

and many others

Convergence 2000 (B and N Digital Bestseller) Free ebook version here

Covert Culture Sourcebook

Earth Dance 2000 (Video and DVD)

The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog

Transmedia Litany (with Genesis P’Orridge)

Thee psychick bible

esoterrorist (publisher)

My idea for an Exquisite Corpse jacket blurb using faxes. (WSB missed inclusion by a day). Used on Esoterrist

Banishing Ritual (cover) with Illusion of Safety (audio here)

The Last Book

Also contributed a few articles to Bob and Arlen Wilson’s Trajectories.

A write up I did about my old friend Rob Brezsny for disinfo.com

Interview that I did with with Beat poet and author Diane DiPrima

Nina Graboi Interview, bOING bOING, Number 8 (written under my nom de plume: Michael Kelly)

I’ve contributed articles to AlwaysOn and Adotas. I’ve contributed book, music, and movie reviews to Gnosis and Magical Blend in the past as well as the old Boing-Boing print magazine and Fringeware Review. Note, in the interest of full disclosure, I’d sometimes contribute more than one article or review to a single publication and to avoid the appearance of saturation, I’d use the pen name: Michael Kelly for some of the articles.

Writing For a comprehensive list of most of my print work (not including magazine articles) see this list on Goodreads…

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annakie · 5 years

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Continued Notes on a Blog Cleanup

I started doing this a couple of weeks ago, I’m still doing it even though I’ve now passed the place I was trying to get to to find a thing awhile ago.

But now I’m in March of 2013, closing in on two years of blog cleaned up.

I’m on page 1811 of 2968 (working backwards) with 15 posts per page. My guesstimates are that since I started posting the blog cleanup I’ve generated about 100 posts, that’s probably a little on the low side, but it’s a workable number. When I started I had 3021 pages of blog, so adding in about 7 more pages worth of blogs since then, that means I’ve deleted about 60 pages worth of my bog, or somewhere around 900 posts.

Sounds about right.

Anyway, here’s a bunch more thoughts on tumblr in general, this blog cleanup, and a Doctor Who Nostalgia Rewatch.

What’s crazy is that about 1/3rd of my entire blog was done in the first 18 months of its creation. It’s now over 8 years old, but I hit the 2000th page back around November 2012, when the blog was made in May, 2011.

I’m just now getting to the point in the blog where I kept a pretty full and steady queue in the first few months of 2013, so things move faster now instead of like 100 posts per day untagged like the early days. And I didn’t post at all for most of the last couple of months of 2017 and early 2018 so, there’s a few-months gap there, eventually. But I figure... why stop the nostalgia tour now. Mostly because I’m finding things I want to organize better. I’m also finding a lot of edits or personal posts I made and didn’t tag properly in the time period I’m covering right now.

When all this is done, I’ll probably do a mass blog export again, now that I’m happier with the contents. Tumblr ain’t gonna be around forever, y’all.

Still, deleting a lot of stuff. Posts are being deleted for

Being out of date, like “Hey this game is on sale, go buy it!” or “SIGN THIS PETITION AGAINST CISPA!” or “The new season of Parks and Rec starts September 23rd" (of 2013 or whatever).

Sometimes for being a reblog of a thing that I only marginally ever cared about and no longer do at all.

Things that have now been proven false, or false alarms, or things we no longer have to worry about for whatever reason.

“Hoooo boy it’s 2019 and now THAT sure turned out to be a bad take!” (”Guys, this new show called House of Cards is on! It stars the AMAZING KEVIN SPACEY, I LOVE HIM!” OK that wasn’t verbatim but close, and Yikes.)

Still, the cringiest of the cringe. But there’s a lot less of that now, which is nice. I at some point over the beginning of 2013 started doing a lot more tagging of my own posts so the tags are a much nicer place to look than some of the terrible other-people’s tags. Although I’m still only tagging at like 60 - 70% of the time.

Observations:

What takes the longest is adding tags to posts. So for the most part tags are only getting added to things I made. About 45% of which are personal posts, and about 45% of which are mass effect creations posts, so far. About 10% are things I think I may want to find again someday, though a lot of those things are being put in the “reblogging really old stuff” queue.

The blog is like, 30% Doctor Who, 40% Mass Effect and 30% Psych/Elementary/Leverage/Misc now. It’s better.

I JUST started getting really to the part where I contributed a little more to the ME/DW fandoms besides yelling at hate-taggers. Still. Mid-2013 me is still doing that on occasion. Although now it’s sometimes about Kaidan Alenko instead of just Martha Jones. I’m still kind of torn about how I feel about all that now. I’d say that it’s funny how there doesn’t seem to be a lot of it on tumblr these days. Now it feels like we all have more important things to fight about. Also, tumblr is, you know, on life support.

It feels like my blog liked and watched Supernatural longer than I did in reality? It felt like a short flirtation to me, there continues to be supernatural content on my blog for over a year now. Pretty sure I stopped watching mid-season 9 so maybe that’ll stop soon. Still, way less than the general population of tumblr it felt like at the time.

People with names like 221BTardisImpala really were the worst about tagging their hate and other stupid stuff.

I’d somehow forgotten about that terrible, gross post twisting Kaidan into an “abuser” for stupid stuff like “He brought a bottle of alcohol (you know, the one Shepard bought him?) to Shepard’s quarters!” and “He did a bad thing at 17!” (and clearly the person we are at 17 is the same person he was at 34.) and and just the most asinine reasoning applied, and tagged. The whole “I gotta tear down characters other people like to make my fave the REAL WINNER” is just... ugh. I got back to that post and honestly, am still thinking I should have deleted the whole thing.

I’ve picked another few tags on controversial characters that I love like Jacob Taylor and scrolled through, and like I posted earlier about Martha Jones, hate tagging in general seems to just... not happen that much anymore, even after scrolling back a year or two in those tags. That makes tumblr a nicer place to be. I know we still see the occasional like, shitty shakarian shipper in the Kaidan Alenko tag (and again, that is a very small % of overall shakarian shippers) but it’s nothing like what it used to be.

It won’t be long until the WTNV explosion happens on tumblr, or maybe it had already started at this point. It took me a few months to catch on. And then I’m gonna listen to it and love it, and ask for rec’s for more podcasts, then I’m gonna get into Thrilling Adventure Hour and the blog is gonna become a much more positive place. Looking forward to getting to all that.

Does anyone know if there’s a theme or script that lets you add tags from your dash or main blog page without editing a post? I’d go back and do this again to tag some more good reblogged posts, I think. I’d probably have also deleted more stuff if I could have done it from my blog without going into editing. :p

Seriously though, tumblr feels like such a different place now. It’s... quieter. It feels almost like empty nest syndrome around here. Or maybe I’m just curating my own experience so much better. But again, when I do go look at other people’s blogs from posts I’ve reblogged, like almost none of them are still active. Although it’s also surprising the number that died just like, in the last year.

Another interesting thing has been... watching the rise and fall of a personal friendship through the first few years of the blog. Back then there were a few people who I was really close to, mostly online. I can feel the main friendship I had with that person slipping away as their life changed significantly starting the previous few months from where I am in that blog. And honestly, I did my own part of leaving them behind when I gained a whole new group of close friends from TAH. We’re still like, facebook friends, but it’s a reminder of how fluid online friendships can be.

Doctor Who Rewatch Thoughts:

I am going to catch up on my blog before I run out of Doctor Who to watch, I think. Considering things are starting to take a lot less “grooming” now on the cleanup.

I’m now about to embark on Silence in the Library. Am I ready to see River Song die again? No. I am not. This will be the first time I watch these episodes in years, probably since Matt Smith was around? Definitely since The Husbands of River Song. This... will be difficult.

Hoo boy Voyage of the Damned was bad, I’d forgotten how bad. Not Fear Her bad but, pretty bad. Though I was amused that there was a character named Foon. For some reason that word had always triggered something in my mind when they called the world that on Hello From the Magic Tavern and now I know why.

Martha Jones, still awesome in Season 4. Donna Noble shines brightly. Although I’d forgotten how much weaker the first half of her season is than the very good second half.

That was the first time I’d watched The Fires of Pompeii since Capaldi took over. Funnily, I felt like his character got more Twelve-Like as the episode went on somehow. The long scene between just Ten and Capladi’s character was neat to watch in retrospective.

#personal post tag thingy #notes on a blog cleanup

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oceanvs · 6 years

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So… I just reached 900 followers! Thank you all so much!!! 💖💖

I didn’t know what to do this time, i was working on the 800 follower celebration like, yesterday, so i am not up for making more blogrates/moodboards this soon.

What better excuse to make a fandom family, am i right? I have wanted to make my own in quite some time, but i procrastinated and then thought no one would join. Guess i’m doing it now!

So, if you are interested: 1) follow me! 2) reblog this (likes don’t count) 3) send me an ask with: -> as many characters you want lol (provided they belong to my fandoms) -> your name and pronouns 3) check here who is taken 4) track #lizasfamily (please!) that’s all!

what you’ll get: 1) my eternal love and support (and my friendship if you want it) 2) an edit with your character 3) a spot on this lit page 4) a tag to share your creations/selfies/anything you want. The tag is #lizasfamily (i know, very original 🙈🙈) 5) hopefully new friends/followers!

Thank you all so much again, i hope you have a great day! 💖💖

ps: if you don’t want to see more of this, you can blacklist “liza’s family”

#liza's family #pls don't let this flop #woke up with a round number and i'm feeling great #luizasfamily #ninasfamily #samslitfam #camillasfamily #annassquad #vivisfamily #franzisfamily #neosmythfam #reesfam #i'm so excited #lizasfamily

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justforbooks · 4 years

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The greatest year for books ever?

Several years including 1862, 1899 and 1950 could be considered literature’s very best. But one year towers above these, writes Jane Ciabattari.

The year 1925 was a golden moment in literary history. Ernest Hemingway’s first book, In Our Time, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby were all published that year. As were Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, among others. In fact, 1925 may well be literature’s greatest year.

But how could one even go about determining the finest 12 months in publishing history? Well, first, by searching for a cluster of landmark books: debut books or major masterpieces published that year. Next, by evaluating their lasting impact: do these books continue to enthrall readers and explore our human dilemmas and joys in memorable ways? And then by asking: did the books published in this year alter the course of literature? Did they influence literary form or content, or introduce key stylistic innovations?

Books that came out in 1862, for instance, included Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. But Gustave Flaubert’s novel of that year, Sallambo, set in Carthage during the 3rd Century BC, was no match for Madame Bovary. George Eliot’s historical novel Romola and Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm were also disappointments.

The year 1899 is another contender for literature’s best. Kate Chopin’s seminal work The Awakening was published then, as was Frank Norris’s McTeague and two Joseph Conrad classics – Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim (serialised in Blackwood’s Magazine). But Tolstoy’s last novel Resurrection, published also in 1899, was more shaped by his religious and political ideals than a powerful sense of character; and Henry James’ The Awkward Age was a failed experiment – a novel written almost entirely in dialogue.

And in 1950 there were published books from Isaac Asimov (I, Robot), Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles), Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train), Doris Lessing (The Grass Is Singing) and CS Lewis (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe). But other great fiction writers produced lesser works that year – Ernest Hemingway’s minor Across the River and into the Trees; Jack Kerouac’s The Town and the City, written under the influence of Thomas Wolfe; John Steinbeck’s poorly received play-in-novel-format Burning Bright and Evelyn Waugh’s only historical novel, the Empress Helena (Roman emperor Constantine’s Christian mother goes in search of relics of the Cross).

But 1925 brought something unique – a vibrant cultural outpouring, multiple landmark books and a paradigm shift in prose style. Literary work that year reflected a world in the aftermath of tremendous upheaval. The brutality of World War One, with some 16 million dead and 70 million mobilised to fight, had left its mark on the Lost Generation. In Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf created the indelible shell-shocked veteran Septimus Smith, “with hazel eyes which had that look of apprehension in them which makes complete strangers apprehensive too. The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?”

Looking inward

The solid external world of the realists and naturalists was giving way to the shifting perceptions of the modernist ‘I’. Mrs Dalloway, which covers one day as Clarissa Dalloway prepares for a party – and Septimus Smith for his demise – is a landmark modernist novel. Its narrative is rooted in the flow of consciousness, with dreams, fantasies and vague perceptions gaining unprecedented expression. Woolf’s stylistic breakthrough reflected a changing perception of reality. Proust was also all the rage at this moment, as Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Remembrance of Things Past’s third volume was just out. Woolf admired Proust’s “astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification”.

The year 1925 also contributed to the culmination of Gertrude Stein’s career. She had moved to Paris in 1903 and established a Saturday evening salon that eventually included Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound and Sherwood Anderson, as well as artists Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Stein responded to her immersion in the Parisian avant-garde by writing The Making of Americans, which was published in 1925, more than a decade after its completion. In over 900 pages of stream-of-consciousness, Stein tells of “the old people in a new world, the new people made out of the old,” and describes an American “space of time that is filled always filled with moving”. Early critics like Edmund Wilson couldn’t finish Stein’s complex web of repetition, but she has been credited with foreshadowing postmodernism and making key stylistic breakthroughs, including using the continuous present and a nearly musical word choice. As Anderson put it: “For me, the work of Gertrude Stein consists in a rebuilding, an entirely new recasting of life, in the city of words.”

Stein’s experiments with language influenced Hemingway’s signature sparseness. Beginning with the autobiographical Nick Adams stories in his first book, 1925’s In Our Time, his fiction is characterised by pared-down prose, with symbolic meaning lying beneath the surface. Nick witnesses birth and suicide as a young boy accompanying his father, a doctor, to deliver a baby in the Michigan woods. He is exposed to urban crime when two Chicago hitmen come to his small town. And as a war veteran trying to keep his memories at bay, he gravitates toward the familiar pleasures of camping and fishing: "He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him."

Modern times

The midpoint of the Roaring ‘20s was a time of rare prosperity and upward mobility in the United States. The stock market seemed destined to climb forever, and the American Dream seemed within the grasp of the masses. 1925 was special, though. In New York, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer and other writers of the Harlem Renaissance were given a definitive showcase that year in the anthology The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke. At the same time Harold Ross launched a revolutionary and risky weekly magazine called The New Yorker, which featured portraits of Manhattan socialites and their adventures and offered what would be a treasured showcase for short stories ever since.

F Scott Fitzgerald dubbed this flamboyant postwar American era “the Jazz Age”. Alcohol flowed freely despite Prohibition; flappers followed the sober suffragettes into a time of sexual freedom. New wealth was spreading the riches and opening doors to players like Fitzgerald’s immortal character Jay Gatsby, whose fortune was rumoured to be based on bootlegging. The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, gives a portrait both tawdry and touching, as Gatsby remakes himself in a doomed attempt to win the love of the wealthy Daisy Buchanan. The tarnished American Dream also was central that year to Theodore Dreiser’s naturalist masterpiece, An American Tragedy. Dreiser based the novel on a real criminal case, in which a young man murders his pregnant mistress in an attempt to marry into an upper class family, and is executed by electric chair. Also ripped from the headlines, Sinclair Lewis’s realistic 1925 novel Arrowsmith was a first in exploring the influence of science on American culture. Lewis wrote of the medical training, practice and ethical dilemmas facing a physician involved in high-level scientific research.

These books weren’t just original, even revolutionary, creations – they were helping to establish the very idea of modernity, to make sense of the times. Perhaps 1925 is literature’s most important year simply because no other 12-month span features such a dialogue between literature and real life. Certainly that’s the case in terms of how new technologies – the automobile, the cinema – shook up literary form in 1925. John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer introduced the cinematic narrative form to the novel. New York, presented in fragments as if it were a movie montage on the page, is the novel’s collective protagonist, the inhuman industrialised city presented as a flow of images and characters passing at high speed. "Declaration of war… rumble of drums... Commencement of hostilities in a long parade through the empty rain lashed streets,” Dos Passos writes. “Extra, extra, extra. Santa Claus shoots daughter he has tried to attack. Slays Self With Shotgun." Sinclair Lewis called Manhattan Transfer "the vast and blazing dawn we have awaited. It may be the foundation of a whole new school of fiction."

Was 1925 the greatest year in literature? The ultimate proof, 90 years later, is the shape-shifting the novel has undergone, still based on these early inspirations – and the continuing resonance of Nick Adams, Jay Gatsby and Clarissa Dalloway. These characters from a transformative time are still enthralling generations of new readers.

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