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clevercatchphrase · 3 years

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2020 Year Review~

2020. Pretty unique year, don’t you think? It’s the first year since 2002 to have only two different digits in it. After 2022, this won’t happen again until 2111. Yep. Absolutely nothing more interesting than that.

Anyway! It’s time I reflect on my 2020, look back on my yearly goals and rant about things that happened to me this year. I made a post like this last year, where I went over my 2019 goals and talked about what I accomplished and what I didn’t, and it’s only fitting I do the same again this year. Read more under the cut for a random stream of consciousness ramble!

So, first things first, let’s look at my 2019 goals;

Finish paying off that last student loan

Put more stuff on my redbubble

Illustrate my own fan fics

Sew at least one stuffed animal

Make an enamel pin

Read one new book a month

Write one page a day/Complete at least one new fan fic

Learn Python or C# for the game I want to make

Finish fully scripting Ghost Switch

Boost my patreon

Paying Off My Last Student Loan: Going down the list, I am proud to say that I FINALLY paid off all my student loans! (and not a moment too soon. The last payment I made was literally days before the first quarantine rolled out). It took me roughly 4 years on my part-time paycheck to pay off all my loans, and once I finished, I had no money to my name (literally; I had less than 1k as emergency money in case of car troubles or health issues). Heck, I’m STILL living at home as a save up for a place of my own. Finally paying off all my student loans DID activate my secret 2020 new year’s resolution, which was to adopt a cat! I did this too, literally a week later! She is the best thing that’s happened to me this entire year and I love her so much and she is the snuggliest cuddle bug I’ve ever met. I’m so happy she’s in my life now~

Put More Stuff On My Redbubble: ah ha ha ha… I thought I did this, but then I went and checked, and it turns out-! I did not. I made art I intended to go on my redbubble, but haven’t put there yet. They are all drawings of some OCs from a game I want to make, but because I haven’t progressed on making the game this year, I never got around to putting more stuff related to it on my redbubble. At the time of writing, there are 7 days left in December, so I guess I could go and put it up on my redbubble right now, but without context on where the characters are from, there wouldn’t be much point, now would there?

Illustrate My Own Fan Fics: Another goal that I was so stoked to actually do… and then just didn’t. Gee, I wonder why I couldn’t find the energy or motivation to do it this year? Truly a conundrum. (Hey, you know what? If Ghost Switch counts as a fan fiction in a visual form, then I am doing GREAT on this goal. 2.5 years in, 1 of ~4 arcs done, and still going steady~)

Sew At Least One Stuffed Animal: Okay, I have a valid excuse for not doing this one. I even knew which stuffed animal I wanted to make, and had the pattern drawn out and everything, but I had no money for materials because I had just paid off my student loans. And then, by the time I did have enough money again, quarantine was in full effect and I couldn’t go out to the fabric store. I’m still trying my best to stay out of public places even if the rules are laxer now, because I don’t want to catch the plague even if everyone in my goddamn city thinks and acts like the problem is over already. Even if they’re all wearing masks, even if they’re staying 6 feet apart, I still don’t want to risk it. I will stay inside until health experts give the all clear, and when that day comes, then I will buy some fleece and make a plush.

Make An Enamel Pin: I ACTUALLY DID THIS ONE. TWICE! Halfway through quarantine, I was feeling anxious and depressed about my job and how they were planning to have me work with the public despite climbing infection rates and positive covid cases. I didn’t quit then, but in a desperate move to try and become self-sufficient, I went to madebycooper and made two enamel pins based on some butterfly dragons I drew last year. They’re on my etsy store now! I even went out of my way to open a P.O. box just to start a small business! I haven’t sold a single pin yet, and I’m actually really nervous to sell my first because I don’t trust the efficiency of the postal system thanks to the actions of the GOP that really screwed them over this year! (If you would like to see my enamel pins, click here!)

Read One Book A Month: I did this! With dragon books I bought a couple years back! In fact, I read FOURTEEN dragon books, and still have more books for next year to read! The 14 books I read this year were:

The Hive Queen

The Poison Jungle

Wings Of Fire Legends: Dragonslayer

Dealing With Dragons

Searching For Dragons

Calling on Dragons

Talking to Dragons

The Bronze Dragon Codex

The Brass Dragon Codex

The Black Dragon Codex

The Red Dragon Codex

The Silver Dragon Codex

Dragon Strike, and

Hatching Magic

To be honest, I had read The Red Dragon Codex years ago when it first came out, but completely forgotten what it was about. I remembered liking it, and I knew the reading level was on the lower side, but the whole dragon codex series was pretty good! So far, the Silver dragon codex was my favorite, and black dragon codex was probably the worst! Hatching Magic was also really slow and bad and had plot points that went nowhere, but the book was written in the 80s, so I don’t know what I expected. The Dealing with Dragons series was very charming and great for the most part, save for one line in the last book that really rubbed me the wrong way, and all the Wings of Fire Books go above and beyond in this third arc. The second legends book could be a little tighter, though (sky and wren are the best duo and I want a book solely about them, but I honest to god do not care about leaf and ivy’s stories.)

Write one Page of any story every day/ complete at least one fic: I… did this? Okay, I kinda cheated near the end of the year. I was keeping up the one page a day thing for the first four months, but then the world went to shit and my schedule and habits got disrupted and I fell off my good track record. I completed 7 out of roughly 12 one-shots I had planned for this year (my goal WAS supposed to be one short a month, but… you know how it happens) I kept trying to catch up on this goal all year, but the days kept piling up…. Until November hit. I managed to write over 250 pages for Nanowrimo, and I consider this goal a win. 365 pages of fiction in total, which averages out to about one a day~. SHUT UP IT COUNTS.

Learn Python or C# for the game I want to make: Another goal I didn’t have the mental energy to commit to this year. Truly a mystery to where all our willpower went in 2020.

Fully Finish Scripting Ghost Switch: still haven’t done this one yet! The Snowdin arc is completely planned, but I just haven’t gotten around to getting the other areas. I’m not worried, though. I know all the major plot points I gotta hit, it’s just weaving them together in a way that flows nice is the final task. I’m not too worried though. I don’t expect to finish the Snowdin arc for another year and a half, at the bare minimum.

And my last goal of 2020, Boost My Patreon. I did this at the beginning of the year, but then very intentionally stopped about a third of the way through. It didn’t sit right with me to tell you guys to donate to me when suddenly EVERYONE was financially strained from layoffs or being furloughed. I told my patrons the same, and if you ever need to stop donating to me to take care of yourself first, then by all means, please do. I would feel much better knowing you’re using your money to see yourself fed and housed instead of given to me (where it is pretty much only used to buy gas for my car, honestly)

Welp! That was all my goals for 2020! I achieved 4 out of 10 goals plus 1 secret goal! Pretty much the same ratio as last year, but now this time I can blame all my failures on the pandemic! I don’t feel so bad about myself anymore~

ON TO 2021!

I have 11 goals for the new year, again some rolled over from this list, and some from even older years. They are, in no particular order;

Read 12 new books (roughly 1 book a month)

Finish the first draft of 2019’s Nanowrimo project and rewrite it

Script TDV

Finish Scripting Ghost Switch

Build A Comic Buffer

Sew 1 Stuffed Animal

Finish 1 Song Comic

Make another Enamel Pin

Finish 2 short original comics (this one counts as 2 goals)

Finish the 5 remaining one-shot fics

Now to go into depth on each one, more for my own sake, really. I want to know exactly what I have planned for each goal this year, and sometimes just looking at a short list doesn’t capture all the smaller details.

1)Read 12 new books. Same as last year! I The only difference is I might not be able to make it all dragon-related books. (I try my hardest not to buy from amazon anymore, but half-price-books doesn’t always have the obscure stuff I’m looking for)

2)Finish 2019’s nanowrimo project. If you read my 2019 year reflection, you’ll notice I said I wanted to do some original writing. And I did! The story I wrote for nanowrimo back then was a story I’ve been toying with since 2017, but it was only last year I finally got pen to paper. Now, you may find it odd that the keyword says “finish”. You may think, “but isn’t that what you’re supposed to do for nanowrimo?” and to that I say, WRONG! I wrote 50k words for nanowrimo, but the draft was only about halfway complete. I was kinda discouraged about what I had written last year, because I didn’t like how it was coming out, but I did manage to get it half done. Now it’s time for me to bite the bullet and just finish the thing so I can finally revise it and make it into something I DO like. (It’s still gonna be hella long, tho. That’s what I get for trying to write an epic fantasy, I guess.)

3)Script TDV. TDV is the abbreviation of the game I want to make. I… still need to do so much for this project OTL… In addition to getting the story solidified, I still need to draw art and game assets, and learn how to code for it, both of which are no small task. I keep having some sort of new year’s goal related to this on my list, and every year I just don’t hit this one. Will 2021 be different?

4)Finish Scripting Ghost Switch. (Or at the very least, get the waterfall arc completely written out). I have a plan to break this down into simpler steps, by focusing on just one arc for a month or two. Every major arc has 2 to 3 parts, broken up by flashbacks, and if I can just finish one section a month, then I should have the entire thing scripted by the end of the year. It’s not a difficult pace, but seeing if I stick with it will be the real challenge, as it is will all my goals it seems.

5)Build a Comic Buffer: I’m actually working on this one right now! Since I paid off my last loan and got a new job this year, my current Patreon goals are kind of out of date. They had all been centered around me paying off that last loan, and working towards full-time employment, but those are both completed now! So instead, I would love to get to a place where my patrons could read pages at least a week ahead, and to do that, I need to build a buffer. And since I’m working 5 full days a week now, I can’t afford to fall behind. But you can’t fall behind if you constantly stay ahead! I would like to have… a 10 to 12 page buffer. That’s roughly 3 months’ worth of pages to always have on hand in case I get swamped with work, or something. Right now I currently have a buffer of 3, which will cover me for half a January, which is better than not having anything at all, but still not the best. (ultimately, I would love to have a buffer so big, I could queue them up for the whole year. Wouldn’t that be something?)

6) Sew one stuffed animal: same as last year. ASSUMING the plague gets under control in 2021, I don’t expect to get to this goal until the summer at the earliest.

7)Finish 1 song comic: I have 7 song comics planned. One is a gift, one possibly for wandersong, one is a collab that’s currently in the works, but I’m waiting on a friend to do their part before I can continue mine, 2 are UT related, and 2 (well, technically 3, but one is the collab) are KH related. It’s one of the UT ones that will probably get finished, if I’m being honest. It’s completely story boarded, and now I just need to ink and color it. I would like to get it done for UT’s 6th birthday, since I made a song comic on the fly for the anniversary this year, and it was fun, and I’d like to do it again! So, look forward to that next september~

8) Make another enamel pin: I have a dolphin design I’d like to make because dolphins are cute, if not little murder machines. (need to save up some expendable income first, tho. THESE THINGS AIN’T CHEAP TO MAKE.)

9 and 10) start and finish 2 original short comics: I’ve got some comic ideas I want to do, but I need to get them written out first. I don’t think either would be too long. Each maybe a couple “episode’s” length, if envisioned on a website like webtoons or tapas. They’d both be heavy in allegory, but not overly drawn out (hopefully)

11)And lastly, Finish the 5 remaining one-shots I had planned for this year but never got around to. I’m going to try to write one every other month. Pure self-indulgent shipping fluff. If I finish these 5, then maybe I’ll ask other people for more prompts and ideas, which I’ve never done before. We’ll see how it goes~

Also, Like last year, I’d like to look at everything that’s happened to me this year, though to be honest, I’m not sure how much I remember/how accurate it’ll be. God, I don’t even remember what January was like. Who was I back then? Who were we all back then? I guess I’ll start my yearly retrospective in march because, heh, god we ALL know what started happening in march.

Firstly, I paid off my last student loan! Then a week later on March 18th, I drove half an hour out of my city to adopt a cat and I love her and it was the best day of this year for me. Spring break is just beginning this weekend, but the attendance at the zoo is shockingly low this year. Apparently, a lot of people watch the news, and they’re all taking precautions about social distancing. I wasn’t too disappointed. Fewer people at the zoo, the easier my job is for me. I was looking forward to getting some free overtime on spring break, since I’m broke after paying off that loan, and I’m a cat parent now and have a furry child to feed. Monday rolls around. My manager calls me and tells me that the zoo is going into lockdown until further notice. I worry for the birds I take care of, but understand it’s for everyone’s safety.

For two months I sleep in and watch way too much YouTube. I join a couple writing discords. I have nightmares about my birds escaping their enclosure and I dreamed one of the security guards I really like at the zoo gets covid and has to go to the ER. I woke up really upset.

I started and finished BBS for the first time. I also replayed and finished KH2 final mix for the first time. It had been about 5 years since I last played KH2 before my PS2 died, and it was like coming home~ I also finished tearaway, and played and beat Ryme for a second time (which I can’t remember if I did that last year, but it was a fun experience regardless)

Mid-June, and I’m allowed to start going back to work, be it on reduced hours. The zoo is still closed to the public, but I’m loving it! I get to work with full-time keepers and do full-time keeper things. It’s so much fun not having to deal with the public. August starts to creep up and there’s a rumor that the zoo will be opening to the public again, which I’m not stoked about. I don’t want to go back to standing in one exhibit all day, talking to guests who don’t listen to the rules or to me. 2 of my younger coworkers (who had both only been there a couple of months) get chosen for full-time positions, while I get passed up which really pisses me off. My other 2 coworkers quit when they think we might be reopening because they cannot risk catching the virus due to at-risk family. I am now the last keeper in the interactive bird exhibit.

I keep working, the zoo slowly opens, but with me as the only interpreter in our interactive bird exhibit, we can’t open because I can’t run the entire exhibit by myself. So my exhibit stays closed. September comes and goes, and then October starts. Now there is more serious talk of opening my exhibit before the end of the year because the zoo expects to bring in larger crowds for the Christmas lights event in November/December. I ask if I get hazard pay or health insurance since I’m doing full-time hours until they hire more staff. They say no.

I immediately start searching for a new job feeling incredibly indignant/hurt/slighted/insulted/used/abused/ALL the negative feelings at my job. I had been there for 4 years, but never got a chance to work full time, while the two newest hires who had only been there 2 months both got moved up. I can’t help but feel they were holding one mistake I made two years ago against me and never wanted to give me a chance. (that, or they knew I was reliable when it came to showing up for work in such a volatile position that sees a lot of new faces, and they didn’t want to bother going through the process of hiring someone new) I don’t want to risk my life working around guests who don’t wash their hands and don’t properly distance. I don’t want to gamble with my health when they won’t offer me health insurance because I’m part time.

Mid October, I get an interview for a full time job and get hired on the spot. I peace out at the zoo 2 weeks later, literally 3 days before they planned to open my exhibit to the public. It was a close call for me to escape before they opened to the public (and pettiness was only partially the reason I dipped out so close to opening). Sorry new hires who are now in charge of the bird feeding exhibit. I taught you the best I could in the short time I had. If the managers are struggling with what to do with one less person, I can’t say I feel bad. I can only hope they delayed opening/closed you down again for your own safety. You are not lightbulbs. I really hope the higher ups stop considering you as replaceable as one. Will I go back to the zoo to visit? Probably. But not for a year at least.

I started my new job the very next day after I quit the zoo, and have been there ever since, (which isn’t that long yet, tbh. Christmas day was my 2 month anniversary). It’s full time, but it’s also a small business, and everyone’s hours this year have been on the short side due to the plague. I understand, though. They don’t want us to work if they can’t afford to pay us. Everyone is nice enough, though some people smoke and it’s hard to avoid them with how frequently we have to go in and out, and I really don’t want to get lung cancer, sorry not sorry, please and thank you. Also, with such a small team, gossip is certainly harder to go undetected, so it’s a relief knowing people don’t talk behind one another’s backs.

I participated and beat my 4th nanowrimo in a row, I made TWO apple crisps on thanksgiving, and made baklava on Christmas and both of these recipes were my first time making them, and they both came out adequately! I voted the first day of early voting, and I did an art trade/collab with two of my friends for my birthday! (normally we would have done monthly “art days” where we get together and do art projects for fun because we’re adults and we can spend our time together however we want, but the plague said otherwise this year) We drew pokemon and it was fun! (hopefully I can show you all the results soon. At the time of writing, I’m still waiting for the last two colored parts to get back to me)

I reached 100 pages on my undertale comic, and finish the first arc out of…! (im not sure. It’s either going to be 4 or 5, I haven’t decided yet)

Over all, I managed to stay healthy as far as I know. I wasn’t as productive as I wanted to be this year, but then again, who was? (don’t answer that. I don’t need that kind of comparison in my life right now)

Will 2021be any better? Honestly? I don’t think so. Not right away, at least. Just because a new year is about to start does not mean the slate is completely wiped clean. The change of the calendar year doesn’t magically make all our current problems disappear. Covid will still be here and cases will still climb when January starts. Small business will still be strained when the month rolls over, police will still go on murdering innocent civilians and getting away scot free, amazon and disney will still be monopolizing all consumer goods and media, and I can’t help but feel like there’s an impending shit show about to go down on inauguration day. I do hope things will get better, though. It’ll be arduous and unpleasant, but I do hope things will improve, because sometimes hoping is all you can do.

Good night.

#long post #new year's resolutions #year review #year retrospective

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recurring-polynya · 4 years

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Hi, I'm late to the party but if you are still interested in doing the bookish asks: 1 and 7 + 13 + 18. I hope you have a good day!!!

It’s never too late!! (the book meme was back here, icymi)

1. Which book would you consider the best book you’ve ever read and why?

“Best” is such a subjective term.

On one hand, every single person who has ever met me in real life would call me a huge liar if I didn’t at least mention Infinite Jest. I love Infinite Jest. It blew my head off my shoulders. I think about it all the time, I talk about it incessantly. I read it twice in two years and I imagine I was absolutely insufferable at that time. It is a work of genius, an achievement beyond the bounds of normal humans. It is simultaneously extremely prescient (I have thought about the section about masks for video calls literally every day of the pandemic) and spectacularly wrong (the rise of Netflix would make people go watch a duck pond turn over, REALLY?) That being said, DFW was a very troubled man and a deeply problematic one. The book is far too white and male, and it has been championed by a particular breed of Shitty Dudes. To be honest, it’s not even a book. It’s the negative space of a book, a Fourier Transform of a book. I wish everyone would read it, and I make it a personal point to never, ever tell anyone to read it. But if you do, I am absolutely here to discuss the filmography of J.O. Incandenza at any time.

I read The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemison shortly after it won a Hugo in 2016, and I knew, upon reading it, that it was the most important speculative fiction book of my generation. It is everything specfic is supposed to be-- to challenge your place in the world, to make you feel both complicit and cheated by the systems around you, to make you rage at injustice, to make you want to change things. It is a very upsetting series-- many awful things happen to the main characters. I don’t recall it being particular gross or gory, just devastating. One of the central themes is the way that mothers try and fail to protect their children, and I read it at a time when I had small babies and I burst into tears constantly. Anyway, it’s an incredible set of books, but it’s not fun to read. As a bonus, as far as I can tell from interviews and her Twitter, N.K. Jemison is a very smart and cool person.

Finally, to round out the set: every time I read Howl’s Moving Castle, I am struck with what a perfect novel it is. It is small and cozy, exciting and sweet and weird and funny. If I could choose any novel in the world to have written, it would be Howl’s Moving Castle.

7. Have you ever despised something you have read?

Oh, boy, have I!

I can hold a grudge against a book much longer than I could ever hold a grudge against a person! In my old age, I have gotten in the habit of giving up on things that I am not enjoying, which has caused me to chill out a lot, but I do have some old hate-faves!

I used to hate Game of Thrones. I threw the second one across the room after some witch lady gave birth to some evil smoke. But these days, I just really feel for the fans, who seem like really nice folks. They got a shitty last season and they’re never going to get the last of those books. I also feel for G.R.R. Martin, because I can definitely imagine getting that far along with something and then pbbting on the floor, and I cannot bring myself to feel anything bad for him.

The Road was almost a good book. I will be honest, I only read it because I am deeply in love with the Fleet Foxes song White Winter Hymnal. The mechanics of cannibalism as so poorly envisioned in The Road. Look, I do not like thinking about cannibalism. I hate cannibalism. There are only two zombie movies I will watch and I want nothing to do with any Hannibal-related property. But The Road’s ideas about cannibalism is so bad that even I am offended by it. I was extremely gratified when my very specific complaints appeared in this classic The Toast piece.

The last book I hated was something by Brandon Sanderson that I hated so much that I refuse to look up the title. All the magic was color based, and there was one pretty cool lady fighter character who got upset because she trained so hard that she got really ripped and didn’t think she was pretty anymore. I can’t believe I finished that book.

13. How do you chose which book to read next?

I used to be a really well-rounded reader. I read a lot of non-fiction, mostly history of science, and the sort Malcolm Gladwell stuff that was popular in early aughts. Around the time of the first Ferguson protests, I made a practice of reading a lot of Black authors and non-fiction about Black people, for about a year. I would try to alternate books that met my reading aspirations with more “dessert” reading-- fluffy stuff, re-reading old faves, when something new by a beloved author would come out. I have had a couple of friends write books and I do make it a priority to buy and read them. Also, if a friend specifically asks me to read something because they want to talk about it, I will also prioritize it, this is my love language.

Anyway, after the 2016 election, my brain broke, I could no longer handle anything difficult and bad in my leisure time and I read exclusively YA for about a year. I kinda stopped reading books entirely in 2019 when I was obsessively writing fanfic, but I have gotten back into it lately. I choose what to read entirely based on whimsy. I have been reading Jane Austen books all summer, and I’m gonna read Sense and Sensibility next. It’s sitting on the coffee table, I just need to actually open it up.

18. Did you enjoy the Hunger Games?

The Hunger Games were... fine? I read a lot of YA, and they aren’t my favorites by any means, but they were exciting and I remember reading through them really fast. (I hesitate to say I *enjoyed* them, because they are not very fun books). Probably my hottest Hunger Games take is that I think they would have been substantially improved if they hadn’t been written in the first person.

The thing about Katniss is that she is honestly not a smart person. She’s a dummy. I... love this actually. Young women are so rarely allowed to stupid in media. It’s so much more common to see the Hermiones-- the girl who is smart and level-headed and sensible, where her male companions are fun and relatable and dumb as rocks. Katniss gets manipulated a lot-- that’s what the book is about, but it’s not in a dudes-trying-to-get-in-her-pants way, it’s in a society-trying-to-turn-her-into-a-tool, which is also a plotline that girls don’t get. Unfortunately, because it’s written in the first person, it’s pretty easy to get frustrated with the character, or feel like the book or the author is stupid, rather than that there is this dim bulb character getting led around by the nose. I think a third-person narration could give a more forgivable perspective on her. Katniss has a lot of good qualities-- she is brave and loyal and wants to do what’s right, and I think the books would be better served to make you, the reader, get righteously angry at the way she is being exploited, than to try to give you a view inside her head. I think this is also why the movies came out pretty good, although, to be fair, I think I only saw the first one.

#asks #book meme #i sure do have some opinions #bless you all for putting up with me

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noctem-novelle · 5 years

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“The air is thick with malice. The fire burning behind us is vicious and hungry. Even the earth—usually a calm and steady element—feels shaken.”

Book: These Witches Don’t Burn - Isabel Sterling Genre: YA Novel // Fantasy // LGBT Rating: ✩✩✩ and a half

Hannah is a witch. She and her coven are Elementals, using magic to control air, fire, water, and earth. But even in her hometown of Salem, Massachusetts, she has to keep her magic a secret. If she ever used it in front of a non-witch, it could be taken from her with a binding spell. In lieu of public displays of magic, Hannah spends most of her time working at a local Wiccan shop and avoiding her ex-girlfriend, Veronica. But when signs of dark magic start appearing all over town, hinting at the arrival of a dangerous Blood Witch, relationship drama becomes the least of Hannah’s worries.

I’m going to be honest: I thought this book was going to be incredibly cheesy. It just has that vibe, and I really think it’s because of the title and cover treatment. But you know what? I also said that about Undead Girl Gang last year (although I loved the original cover on that one) and it wound up being one of my favourite 2018 releases. And while I do have some concerns about These Witches Don’t Burn, I think this one is probably going to be one of my 2019 faves.

The story starts out pretty strong. We’re introduced to our narrator, Hannah, who is training to be a fully-fledged Elemental like her parents. She works in a witchy pagan shop (which would totally have been my dream job as a teen), has a super intimidating cool high priestess for a grandmother, and is trying to get over a bad breakup. Magic aside, I thought she was super relatable, although I found her relationship with Morgan to be a little forced.

Within the first two chapters, we’re thrown into a dramatic hunt for a dangerous Blood Witch. But things aren’t quite what they seem, and the witch hunt (haha) turns into a desperate search for an arsonist who is targeting Salem’s witches. There are a few twists and turns, some death and some grief. I was a little disappointed that I guessed the arsonist’s identity early on, but I still enjoyed the big reveal in the final chapters.

I also really liked the magic system. Hannah and her coven represent just one of three types of witch: Elemental, Caster, and Blood. There’s a lot of tension between the different groups, and a particular prejudice against Blood Witches. All of this has been passed down for generations, stemming from the witches’ creation myth. I thought it was fascinating and I hope that Sterling delves deeper into their mythology and religion in the planned sequel.

While I loved the premise, the writing, and the queer representation (lesbian love triangle and a trans side character), there was one glaring problem with this book: it was so white. So, so, so white. In fact, the only person of colour that I can recall is a girl that Veronica is secretly dating. At least, I think they were the same person; she was pretty unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

I also thought I remembered Benton being coded as brown at some point, but then I couldn’t find it again. If he was black or brown, that would be massively problematic and a giant oversight on the part of any editor. No spoilers, but it wouldn’t be a good look. I’m just hoping that there is more (positive) POC representation in the sequel, because white people shouldn’t be the only ones who get to do magic. Also, it’s 2019 and having zero people of colour in a contemporary novel is unrealistic. I’m also hoping that the sequel has some adult characters who are actually competent and not totally oblivious to danger.

Overall, I don’t think that Sterling did anything new with this book. It’s more like she brought together some popular threads and wove them into a single enjoyable story. While I don’t think it’s anything ground-breaking, I did really enjoy it. It has a lot of drama and magic, a little bit of mystery, and a lot of potential. Read These Witches Don’t Burn if you like Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Riverdale, or Misa Sugiura’s It’s Not Like It’s a Secret.

Relevant tags for These Witches Don’t Burn:

YA // fantasy // LGBT // magical realism // death // grief // romance // lgbt author // magic // witches

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tshepiso-reads-books · 4 years

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Everything I Wanted And More | Jade City by Fonda Lee

Started: July 14, 2019

Finished: July 18, 2019

Jade City [Goodreads] was pretty fucking great. It was a high octane fantasy with amazing characters, excellent fight scenes, and a great political conflict at the centre of it all. It was everything I wanted and more.

Jade City is set in Janloon, a city on the brink of all out war. The two major clans of Janloon, The Mountain Clan and the No Peak Clan, have had increasing territorial skirmishes for the past few years. In this world Jade means everything, honour, power and status. The Mountain Clan is making a bid at complete control of the country's Jade supply and the Kaul family, the leaders of the No Peak Clan, are the only ones who can stop them.

I really liked this world. It was so richly described I felt part of it. I loved learning about Jade and the politics, history, and conflict surrounding it. The level of detail Lee was able to imbibe in the story made it all feel real from the very first page. My favorite thing about this world is the urban setting for Janloon. It had all of the atmospheric trappings of an urban fantasy while existing in a completely fictional world.

The fight scenes were a particular joy to read because of Lee's magic system. With rigorous training Jade gives its wearer preternatural speed, strength, perception, deflection and agility. Every single duel in the book was tense and exciting because Lee was able to creatively choreograph dynamic action according to each character's ability. Lee established the limits of this magic so there was a real fear for each character's life during a fight because we always knew exactly when a character reached their breaking point.

I love a good political novel; seeing characters move around chess pieces to get advantages within a narrative is always fun. Lee was particularly clever in setting up her game board. Her ability to establish conflicts and work through the consequences of each character's actions lead to a really engaging book. Plot threads I forgot about were brought back for interesting twists, and she left interesting threads hanging in the balance and I'm excited to see what she'll do with them in the next book.

I adored the characters in Jade City with all my heart. This book is about family and the complicated relationships siblings have with each other. All of the Kauls are so interesting and well painted within the narrative. I got so invested with them as individuals and as a family unit. The interpersonal conflict within the family was engaging to read because I believed that the characters loved each other and the history and friction in their relationships made the emotional beats hit even harder.

I did find it a bit difficult to get into the book at first because the writing style wasn't my favorite. I felt like Lee spoon-fed us a lot of information that could be inferred. In particular when it came to character motivation. What was framed as inner monologue read more like Lee directly explaining to the reader why a character was about to do something.

Stars 🌟🌟🌟🌟½

I'll be reading Jade War as soon as my TBR allows it because I NEED to know what will happen next in this world.

#Jade City #Fantasy #Adult Fantasy #Book Review

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angelofberlin2000 · 5 years

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A wonderful article about the recent blossoming of the Keanu orchid ....

By Stephanie Zacharek

June 21, 2019

One of the great things about living in the modern world is that everyone is finally hip to Keanu Reeves. Right now he’s everywhere: Not just in the superb sequel John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum, but on talk shows, as a character in the upcoming video game Cyberpunk 2077, and as a hotter-than-hell but also endearingly insecure Canadian daredevil doll in Toy Story 4. He’s on Buzzfeed answering the public’s questions as puppies scramble around him, and he has a cameo in a Netflix romantic comedy, Always Be My Maybe, playing a version of himself, if he were sort of a jerk, which, from all reports, he surely is not. Reeves has become the Internet boyfriend du jour, thanks in part to a series of photographs swirling around the web that show how respectful he is when posing with random fans—or even with Dolly Parton—taking care to avoid anything that could be construed as inappropriate touching. Keanu enthusiasts have even launched a change.org petition to make him TIME’s Person of the Year. That choice is made solely by TIME editors, but hey, you never know.

Keanu here, Keanu there, Keanu, Keanu everywhere: This is a 54-year-old overnight sensation who has been making movies since 1986, the year he appeared in Tim Hunter’s teens-in-trouble thriller River’s Edge. At last, he’s getting the unqualified love he deserves, and those of us who have always loved him can rest easy. Now is not the time to gloat.

Who are we kidding? Of course it’s the time to gloat. There have always been people who love Reeves, ferociously and defensively, as a personality and as a vibe. How could you not like him as a time-traveling, mop-headed swain in the Bill and Ted movies, as a surfing cop in Point Break, as earnest, searching Neo, the One, in The Matrix movies? But historically, even people who like Reeves as a performer have often been quick to add that they’re not sure he’s a good actor. Before the Internet, there was a thing called dinner parties, and when the conversation turned to Keanu Reeves, you could be assured of hearing some variation of the following: He’s a bad actor. What he does is not really acting, he’s just playing himself. He’s good in action roles. He’s OK but he really shouldn’t attempt Shakespeare. He has no emotional range. He’s just bad.

The problem most likely lies not with Keanu’s gifts as a performer but with a general perception of what good acting is. People are often afraid to say anyone is a good actor, unless it’s Meryl Streep. They don’t want their judgment to be found wanting, and thus they make their own insecurities the actor’s problem. In 1993, it was almost impossible to defend Keanu’s performance as the resentful, conflicted villain Don John in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing without being laughed at. It’s true he’s not Shakespearean in, say, the Laurence Olivier mode—he hasn’t lived inside the words of Shakespeare for a lifetime, perpetually kicking away at the best and truest ways to push those words out into the world. His Shakespearean acting is a movie-star version, a kind of pop interpretation that speaks to us more through an understanding of movie images than through deep Shakespearean study.

At one point, the preternaturally miserable Don John lies on a massage table, his muscles being worked over by Richard Clifford’s Conrade, who seems to feel his friend’s unrest rippling through his skin and asks him about it. Don John springs from the table. Anger and envy have been coiled inside him like the instinctive energy of a snake—they snap out into the air, a visible force. This physical outburst sets us up for a flurry of bitter but self-aware words: “Though I cannot be said to be a flattering, honest man, it must not be denied that I am a plain-dealing villain.” The line spins out in a pinwheel of self-degradation. This Don John knows himself, and hates himself for it.

Is this good acting, merely effective acting, or neither? No matter where you stand, I don’t think you can watch Reeves’ Don John and claim he doesn’t understand the character—his intelligence works its way through muscle and bone as well as heart and head. It’s performance as vibration. This might be the key to all that Reeves does an actor, including his magnificent gifts as an action star. Movement is acting, speaking is acting, listening is acting, just being is acting: Reeves reminds us of all that, often silently. There’s thought behind everything he does, and reading those waves of thought is part of the process of watching him.

We often talk of movie stars in the old-Hollywood studio-system sense, charismatic and distinctive personalities—like Cary Grant or Barbara Stanwyck or Bette Davis—who always look like some version of themselves but who create memorable characters by layering multiple, complex veils over their own particular mysterious essence. Maybe Reeves is one of the few modern-day actors whose style fits that model. He doesn’t work elaborate origami folds to transform himself into a character; instead, he beams radio signals from within. With a trim crewcut or a lanky shag, with a stubbly mug or a clean-shaven one, with a scowl or a slow-burning smile, he’s always starting from the base camp of Keanu.

None of this, though, answers the question of why Keanu, and why now? Other actors have passed through similar portals, seemingly expendable one minute and exalted the next. Before there was a Keanussance, there was a McConnaissance, the point at which Matthew McConaughey shifted from being an efficient actor in lame romantic comedies to being taken seriously in movies like Magic Mike and Dallas Buyers Club. The catchphrase became, “Wow, that guy can really act.”

But the recent blossoming of the Keanu orchid is different, maybe because, over the years, Reeves has proved that he doesn’t always need to be the center of attention. He launched a small art-book publishing house, X Artists’ Books, in 2018. He co-produced, and appeared in, the 2012 documentary Side By Side, an exploration of the differences between traditional photochemical filmmaking and digital processes. He has always been guarded about his private life, though we do know that in 1999 his then-partner, Jennifer Syme, gave birth to a daughter, who was stillborn. In 2001, after the couple had broken up, Syme died in a car accident.

We know this because it was reported at the time, and because it’s right there on Reeves’s IMDb page. But we don’t know about it because he’s talked about it a lot—he hasn’t. Reeves has erected some sturdy barriers against us, and yet somehow the membrane between his public life and what he truly thinks and feels seems fragile and permeable. What’s more, Reeves doesn’t seem to spend a lot of time on the Internet. Unlike most of us, he lives in the real world, and he makes it seem like a pretty good and grounded place to be. When People magazine, on the red carpet for the Toy Story 4 premiere, asked Reeves how he felt about the Internet-boyfriend stuff, he responded with a ripple of surprise: “I’ve been what?” When the interviewer elaborated, he smiled quietly, as if only to himself. “That’s wacky,” he said, clearly amused as he registered this new-to-him but not-to-us information, quickly adding, “But the positivity’s great.”

He also speaks candidly—on television, in the public eye—about things that would leave many of us speechless. In early June he appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to promote John Wick 3, answering the usual questions about what it’s like to fight while you’re on the back of a horse, and so forth. And then Colbert almost stopped time itself by asking a strange, potent question, as if knowing that if anyone might have the answer, it would be this radiantly centered person sitting just a few feet away: “What do you think happens when we die, Keanu Reeves?”

Colbert presented the question jauntily, as at least a half-joke, both courting and getting a laugh from the audience. That audience may or may not have known about the personal losses Reeves has suffered; they may or may not have known that Colbert lost his father and two of his brothers in a plane crash when he was 10. But what they know or don’t know matters so much less than the way Reeves responds, with composure and generosity and grace: “I know that the ones who love us will miss us.” Keanu Reeves is the man of the moment. Keanu Reeves is trending. Keanu Reeves is hotter than hot. But when our attention turns elsewhere, as it inevitably will, Reeves will still be out there surfing, not worrying whether we’re watching him or not. Because surfing, not trending, is the way to keep going.

#keanu reeves #keanu orchid #time

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mermaidsirennikita · 5 years

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August 2019 Reading Wrap-up

Easily the highlight of my reading month was Leigh Bardugo’s King of Scars, AKA “My Monster Boyfriend: THE NOVEL”, but it was overall a decent month for me. In terms of being engrossed, I would say that Erin Ferencik’s Into the Jungle, a classic survival thriller, was probably the other major standout. Excited about fall reading this year!

Cocoa Beach by Beatriz Williams. 2/5. Virginia arrives in Cocoa Beach with her small daughter to collect upon her dead husband’s estate. The issue? Virginia and Simon were estranged. After meeting Simon and embarking on a whirlwind romance against the battlefields of World War I, Virginia discovered that he was not what she thought, and is now confronted with the realities of her husband’s life--and his death in a fire, which she does not believe was all it seemed... I never connected with Williams’s style in the book. She’s obviously talented, and I’m not against trying a different book of hers, but--much of the novel is flashbacks to Simon and Virginia’s romance, and I think you need to buy into Simon in order to enjoy the novel. I did not.

King of Scars by Leigh Bardugo. 5/5. In a follow-up to Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone trilogy, Nikola, now King of Ravka, is hiding a terrible secret from his people. Still struggling with demons both personal and literal, he hunts for a cure alongside Zoya, his adviser, while attempting to strengthen a nation weakened by war, and quell a continuing fascination among the people with the Darkling. I can’t say much more without spoiling two different series--as a main character from the Six of Crows duology is also a POV character here--but this was SO GOOD. I feel like I might have liked it more than anything else Bardugo has done? Though I did love Six of Crows so much. I feel like she’s grown a lot as a writer since the Shadow and Bone trilogy, which was honestly just okay for me--but how much of that was just me not connecting with Alina? Here we visit Ravka again, but with more compelling characters. And I adored it. Nikolai and Zoya’s side of the story is my favorite, and I need those two just MAKE IT FUCKING WORK. Can’t wait for the next book. And yes, I loved the ending.

The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons. 3/5. As World War II looms, young Tatiana lives in Leningrad with her family. In a chance meeting, she encounters Alexander--a Soviet soldier with a mysterious past--and they immediately connect, only for her to discover that he is already seeing her older sister. Once the war starts, however, Tatiana and Alexander are plunged into the realities of fighting for their lives, and while also holding back their true feelings for each other. I read this years ago and gave it 4 stars; I had to dial it back a bit here. The tension between Tatiana and Alexander is great, and I respect the way Simons portrays the horrors of war from a Soviet perspective. But the book hasn’t aged super well, not only in terms of Alexander and Tatiana being a bit cipher-y, but the very... odd way that the Russian perspective is handled. Simons emigrated to the States, but did so as a young teen from what I can tell. Obviously, for reasons her family can attest to. But I felt like I was getting a very... anti-Russian Russian perspective? And it overwhelmed the emotional aspects of the story. Plus, it was just too long for what was essentially, overall, a romance novel.

Scandals of Classic Hollywood by Anne Helen Petersen. 3/5. Anne Helen Petersen takes on scandals from the beginnings of Hollywood the the 1960s, examining what happened and how the stars--and the systems backing them--dealt with the public fallout. That’s pretty much it. This is a collection of essays, really, and while I appreciate the work Petersen put into it and the shrewd observations she makes, I would have liked a BIT more detail on the scandals themselves, versus what they meant on a larger scale.

The Whisper Network by Chandler Baker. 4/5. Attorneys at a high-powered at TruViv, Inc., Sloan, Ardie, and Grace have forged a friendship and alliance, of sorts. Then TruViv’s CEO dies--leaving the position open for Ames Garrett, their boss, to take. Sloan has her own personal issues with Ames, stemming from a years-old affair that he never fully forgave her for ending; but the women’s concerns hit a fever pitch when Catherine, a new hire, reveals that Ames harassed her. As the lawyers’ paths cross with that of Rosalita, a member of the cleaning staff, the consequences are not just high stakes, but deadly. I listened to this on Audible, and I’ll admit that my enjoyment was somewhat affected by the fact that the narrator had the most put-on Texas accent for Sloan on the face of the Earth, and I wasn’t... 100% sure about what she was doing for Rosalita either. But the novel is not only timely but exciting. Ames isn’t a cartoonish figure. Nor are the women saints. Sloan in particular can be borderline insufferable, but in a way that I found realistic for a privileged, high-powered white woman. Do I think Baker could have called out that aspect better, especially since Rosalita, a POV character, isn’t white or rich? Yes. And towards the end, there was one reveal that seemed tacked on just for the sake of symmetry. But then there was that OTHER reveal............. and that, I loved. It’s a bit of a mixed bag of a book, but entertaining and timely.

Into the Jungle by Erin Ferencik. 4/5. Nineteen-year-old Lily has lived in foster homes for all of her life. In an effort to make a new start, she moves to Bolivia for a teaching job that ends up being a scam, and finds herself working at a run-down hotel. That’s when she meets Omar, a Bolivian man, and is swept off her feet. When Omar receives news that his nephew was killed by a jaguar, his compelled to return to his home of Ayachero, a village deep within the Bolivian jungle. Despite his warnings, Lily follows him, only to find herself not only completely out of her depth culturally, but at the mercy of the jungle and all that comes with it. This book had fucking atmosphere. I felt all of it. The romance, the terror, the increasing danger of the jungle. It was kind of a classic woman vs. nature novel. It’s probably one of my favorite books of the year--but I’m held back from rating it higher because it was written by a white woman, and most of the characters are native Bolivians and I tend to wonder about how accurate or fair the portrayal of that culture is. I just felt uncomfortable at some points--but I can’t say if that was justified or not. I would recommend it as a thriller, of sorts, but not in a traditional sense. It’s certainly compelling.

Year One by Norah Roberts. 2/5. After the chance killing of a bird, a pandemic begins to spread throughout the word, killing off billions of people in a matter of weeks. Those that are left to survive do so in a perilous environment, with the Uncanny--people with magical abilities--targeted in some areas while rising up in others. Lana, a witch, traveled with her lover Max in an effort to find a safe place, alongside others who are Immune from the Doom--only to find that she’s a much greater part of the world’s fate than she would have though. The beginning of this book was great. Then the urban fantasy elements set in. I love urban fantasy, but the introduction of fairies and elves didn’t work well here.

How to Walk Away by Katherine Center. 4/5. On the day that she gets engaged to her boyfriend, Chip, Margaret is injured in an accident that will change her life forever. Waking up in the hospital with third degree burns and having lost her ability to walk, her relationships with her partner and her family are immediately altered, and she struggles to see what the future could hold. At the same time, she’s partnered with Ian, a brusque and demanding physical therapist--who ends up bringing even more questions. As Margaret seeks a new identity, she discovers support where she would have least expected it. This is a fluffy romcom of a book, while dealing with a serious issue--and though this is being compared to be Me Before You, I tend to think it handles that issue in a much healthier way. The book certainly benefits from being from the perspective of the disabled person, versus a caregiver. On the flipside, I do think that it suffered somewhat in the romantic department, which could probably be critiqued better by someone who has been in a wheelchair; part of me felt like, had there been less fluff and more physicality, I would have been more invested. But while it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, this is a nice story if you’re looking for something light and quick without sacrificing emotion.

Catherine the Great by Robert K. Massie. 4/5. A biography on Catherine the Great, attempting to tackle her as a woman. I don’t know what else to say. It was good? Nothing super in depth, doesn’t bring anything particularly NEW to the table from what I’ve read, but it seems like a good primer.

#books #reading wrap up #book recs

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megaexplorerthings-blog · 5 years

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Numerous times failed but get Padma Shri Nomination for 2019 - Rajatkumar Dani founder of The Dani Groups

Rajatkumar went from a college dropout, to be the Founder & CEO of Founder & Managing Director of The Dani Groups & Cosmagen – A multi-service groups of company and Research firm built for the modern-day. I had the pleasure of interviewing Rajatkumar, Here’s what he had to say!

Rajatkumar: Growing up, the school wasn’t a choice for me. It was mandatory. I was always reminded by my friends, peers, coaches, parents of the cliché “Go to school, get good grades, play sports, train for the scholarships, and then get your degree so you can get a well-paying job.” This never sat well with me. I never really knew what I wanted to do, but that was just about the last thing I was interested in. Interestingly enough though, that’s exactly what I did.

I quickly found out that the education system was not the platform that would teach me the proper principles of high success. I looked around and compared the habits of college students and teachers against the habits of those who had already attained high performance and success, and (not) to my surprise, I found massive differences. College is sort of like pre-school for adults. No matter how similar to the real world it may be, it’s just not the real world.

As you may be able to tell already, I think very differently than a lot of people. Instead of going out every night, I stayed in my dorm room to work on research projects and theories on Space science & Astrophysics. The work I was doing pushed me to cultivate high-performance skills and put me in a position to build key relationships. In a few months’ time, I realized if I don’t go after my passions, I’ll be stuck at a desk job paying bills for the rest of my life. So I left.

My vision to encourage successful associations with youth and Young Researchers and Non-Researchers, youth-drove associations and youth developments to additionally fortify comprehensive youth investment in the basic leadership forms. To give instructive assets, Research Team, administration openings, and a worldwide system to the up and coming age of world pioneers. There was one problem. In India, you need a license to show your talent in front of the world. But nothing stopped to change the world and I change my everything and I fell into bad habits, bad routines, and left room for complacency in my work.

I longed to know the answers to the age-old questions of “why am I here?” and “where do I come from?” Those questions were probably not as understandable in my mind as they seem when I recount them here and now, but they gnawed at me, just the same, on some primordial, undefined level of my genetic make-up. Within every cognitive, rational human being lies that dark unanswered fog that rises to the surface every so often, want to have answers. And, yet, most of our lives, we move with slow through the years, totally unaware that those desires smolder deep down inside. We subconsciously suppress any wild, weird thoughts that there just might be answers beyond the domain of what we think we already know and accept. Human Beings walk around this world feeling absolutely unconnected to the greater world and universe around them. As a race, we have forgotten how to make this connectivity, and this ties into all aspects of how we recognize ourselves, our loved ones, our politics, our jobs and careers, our deities, our personal spiritualities, our place in the Order of Things.

Sure, like many kids growing up in India during the late ‘11s and 2012s, I asked my sir who knows about Hebrew Bible and I attended him at my uncles home and he taught about the Origins of Man from a Genesis-Chapter-One perspective. But I am not agreed on some points and I am thinking about his words. And for many years of my life, that was the only source point to which I subconsciously recognized. It was as if the stories of creation were settled long ago in that unquestioning little child’s understanding of How Things Work. The curiosities and questions that rose later in life from the mental depths were somehow summarily crushed by the teachings that had been put into my head so many years earlier.

But little did I know – for it was something that was never taught, but always skipped-over, avoided, misinformed or never mentioned – that the very book from which we dogmatically drew our genesis, held secretive, mysterious, encoded messages about origins, visitations and beings not of this world. What was once accepted without question as to the mystical, magical, miraculous stuff of ancient biblical stories, suddenly took on a very different perspective once I opened myself to the idea that there was more to those stories that I had been told, and much more brewing under the surface of what I had been taught.

Remove yourself, for a moment, to a place somewhere in a more dark past, before the days of modern psychological discipline and scientific advance. A time when we, the human race, believed that our life’s fortunes, illnesses, pains, and serendipitous events were strongly rooted in the spiritual and the supernatural. As we evolved our technology and sciences, we learned more and more about the mind and body, universal expansion and entropy, geological tectonics, and the movement of our solar system around a somewhat smallish star that burned in the Milky Way galaxy. Along the way, we dispensed with our trust on the astronomical, casting aside our need for gods, devils and every cast of angel, demon, and spirit in between. We corporately tuned-out our hearts, and turned our minds to the methodological pragmatic, allowing Science and skeptical thought to successfully supplant faith in that great “Something-Bigger-Than-Ourselves.” Quantifiable Fact became the inevitable surrogate for the misty stuff of myth and legend. And while we may not have totally thrown out the baby with the bath water, we have successfully become a culture that discounts anything that cannot be measured by the Scientific Method, casting dispersions on experiential faith and even the slightest adherence to anything that smacks of an older spiritual belief system.

The supreme effort that occupies most of the recorded history of the Human Race – after the history of War, that is (which, sadly, seems to be synonymous with the History of Mankind) – is the great quest for discovery: the seeking-out of the whos, whats, wheres, whys and hows of our existence. And yet, while attempting, on that quest, to adhere to strict, quantifiable sources, we have let go the Spiritual; the innocuous, insubstantial, airborne flotsam that, when you actually look for it, seems to permeate every facet of being, down to the very spark of life, itself.

I wanted the real, raw, non-simulated experience of being punched in the mouth, and having no choice but to work my ass off to get the results I wanted. I was jolted awake by the stark reality that if I continue to allow my surroundings to dictate my actions, I would never achieve any of the goals I set for myself.

I will continue to grow and scale my agency to a National Space Agency, and hopefully, impact others on the way. I want other people to understand that we only have one life. Only one. If you don’t ever take the risk to chase your dreams, the probability of you living out that dream goes down to basically 0. So don’t be afraid. What’s the worst that can happen?

Wow! Amazing story, what are two things you wish someone told you when you first started?

80% of the obstacles you put in front of you are from yourself, and they’re fake obstacles. Just do the work.

The more time you think or strategize about what you’re going to do, some else is out there already doing it.

What sparked your journey towards entrepreneurship?

Rajatkumar: The idea that we only get one life, so we might as well make it the best life we’ve ever dreamt of. Research embodies that idea. Through massive pain and adversity, you’re able to live a life of total control and add tremendous value to other People’s lives at the same time. The most successful people live in comfort because they operate in a world of chaos.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? What lesson did you learn from them?

Rajatkumar: I’ve learned from a multitude of people. From Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawkings, etc. The list goes on. I never had a direct mentor, but I surrounded my mind with positivity. I listened to successful people online, I listened to their podcasts, I invested me to learn new things, I read their books – and then I act on that information.

#rajatkumardani #yahoo news - latest news & headlines #yahoonews

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emergentanimism · 6 years

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What is Emergent Animism?

As much as I would like to avoid it, I feel I must first define Emergent Magick (EMK). Especially considering that at this point, there are maybe about fifty practitioners of EMK on the planet. If you follow my other blog, Scroll of Thoth, you probably have some idea what it is, but I know that I have failed to define it with any concision. Part of that is because I am publishing a book on the subject, which will be released in early 2019. It really needs an entire book and more to get the concept across. Also because like any other magical philosophy, it’s slippery, and no matter how skilled I think I am as a writer, words always fail to encompass it in its entirety. And you’ve probably figured out by now I’m a wordy son-of-a-bitch, which makes it doubly hard to do this. I’ll endeavor to make it as short as possible so we can get on with the real subject at hand.

To learn more about Emergent Magick, follow my other tumblr blog Scroll of Thoth, and sign up for the EMK Facebook group.

EMK defines magick as, “The art of altering consciousness.” In essence, the universe itself is created and directed by consciousness, and magick is a way to influence that consciousness. Consciousness itself lacks universally accepted definition. For our purposes it includes any sufficiently complex system that can perceive. If you accept that sub-atomic systems are sufficiently complex, and that quantum theory proves that particles have some form of perception, this includes everything in the universe to a greater or lesser degree. Art, the activity of creation, influences consciousness. Ritual is the art of the magician, and it is specifically designed to alter consciousness.

In Emergent Magick, a magus performs rituals with the purpose of creating altered states of consciousness. The magus then takes what they learn from those rituals to build an ever more concise paradigm, essentially a model for the universe and a method to alter it. While a magus can certainly learn from the magi who came before them, it is what they learn through altered states of consciousness that best informs their magick. Since all consciousness is perspective, what a magus learns through altered states has more weight than anything they can learn by other means.

The ultimate goal of the magus is to perceive the unity of consciousness. To interact with it as part of a larger whole. This manifests in the physical plane by forming tribes of magi and working with them to experience their paradigm, form bonds of love and acceptance, and to influence the collective unconscious through the creation of culture.

At least that’s the short form description of Emergent Magick. Which finally brings us back to Emergent Animism (EMAN).

Emergent Animism is the art of communicating with the spirits.

At least that’s the one-sentence vital core of it. Some old-school magi like to have things summed up in a sentence or two (and I am one of those magi). Why Emergent? First, because I am one of the creators of Emergent Magick and it is how I currently define my practice. Since Emergent Animism is my personal paradigm, it comes from an EMK perspective. Because the methods used to explore and define the paradigm are the methods of EMK. Verified personal experience takes precedent over accepted knowledge (although there will be plenty of that). Those experiences are then shared with my personal tribe and their experiences added to the body of knowledge. You may notice the shifting tense there, because this is work that has been performed and is ongoing. In fact, the creation of this blog is a lot about me documenting my personal paradigm, and renewed awareness that I need to get back to the basics and start rebuilding things from the ground up. This blog will contain descriptions and results of my daily practice.

Which brings us to animism. Much smarter people with better sources have described animism. And I really want to just tell people to go read Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, by Mircea Eliade and Willard R. Trask, and then come back and continue reading this. But I understand that’s not a realistic expectation, so I’m gonna have to give you my woefully inadequate description. Animism has been called the world’s first religion, and from the archaeological evidence and current anthropology there is little reason to doubt that all hunter-gatherers practiced some form of animism. Animism as a world view, sees the universe as populated with spirits. In animism, all things have some vital essence that can be communicated with, from spirits of rivers, mountains, and lakes, to trees, rocks, and clouds, also the spirits of humans, animals, insects, and the spirits of those living creatures that have died. Some animists also believe in alien spirits that come from other dimensions of reality. The practice of animism is the communication with these spirits through some form of altered state of consciousness. This can be ritual, dance, music, meditation, and the use of psychoactive substances. Shamanism is a particular type of animism where individuals of a tribe use altered states of consciousness to contact the spirit realm, referred to as journeying, and petitions the spirits for the benefit of the shaman and their tribe. I do not consider myself a shaman for various nit-picking reasons that I am sure I will go into at some point.

In Emergent Animism, spirit is synonymous with consciousness. So the art of magick in EMAN terms is the art of communicating with the spirits. Which entails all forms of conversations, pacts, offerings, and all the other traditional and non-traditional methods of contacting them.

Still interested? It’s going to get better from here. This blog will mainly include my writing on the subject, and how I practice magick, along with other resources I find helpful. Know right off the bat that I don’t think anyone should try to pick this up whole-cloth and use it as their own. All magi must ultimately discover their own paradigm and follow that. But I do know it has been helpful for me as a magician to read about other people’s practice. To see what works for them and what does not and learn from it. I find the magical world to be sorely lacking in resources that describe exactly what magi are doing. There’s plenty of description of rituals and theory but little of what a magus actually does on a day-to-day basis. I hope I can add a unique perspective and inspire some people to try these practices themselves. I say don’t follow my path, but do feel free to steal anything that you think can work for you.

Why take my word on any of this? I have some credentials. I have dabbled off and on through my entire life, but truthfully, I only came to seriously dedicate myself to magick in the past decade, much later in life than most. I am initiated member of the Illuminates of Thanateros, and hold a degree in Comparative Religion. I am co-creator of Emergent Magick, and Scribe for the Order of Emergent Magi. At the risk of displaying my ego, I consider myself well-read on a variety of subjects—religion, history, anthropology, archaeology, primatology, Ancient Egyptian spiritual practice, to name a few. As a devoted magus in the service of Thoth, I also happen to believe I am a passable writer.

What I am not is a great magician. I admit that my own work is sloppy, ill-documented, lacking in discipline, and does not meet basic standards of progressive research. That’s another reason why I’m doing this. To hold myself accountable to actually doing the work the way it should be done. It’s well past time for me to get back to the bottom, and do this the right way.

Which is why I decided to make this a tumblr blog. I could have just decided to write another book, but I have plenty of other books I need to write. Doing this as a blog keeps it raw. No content editors, no limitations that come with putting things in print. I can use art that I find on tumblr to illustrate my feelings and link books, articles, and video. No need to make this a single coherent narrative. I can just fire off thoughts as I have them, long or short. Right now the goal is one long text post a day, maybe a couple of short ones, and miscellaneous re-blogs and links when I stumble across them or they seem appropriate.

For the sake of auspice, we begin on the Day of the Dead, All Saints Day. A time when so many cultures feel the nearness of the spirits and honor their ancestors.

Let’s go on a journey….

Threskiornis, “Ego Sum Legio”

Scribe of the Order of Emergent Magi

November 1st, 2018

#magick #animism #emergent magick #emk #emergent animism #eman

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sosation · 3 years

Text

Volume is Power

The following is a transcript of my "Audio Liner Notes" for Volume is Power, the album I released earlier this year under the project titled Temporal Distortions.

The album can be purchased for free on my bandcamp here: https://temporaldistortions.bandcamp.com/

and it is available on all streaming services:

-https://open.spotify.com/album/3983Bepp9uxIv1pb9qaEwY?si=qWpTAozTS2ujMQ79R_FZZg&utm_source=copy-link

-https://music.apple.com/us/album/volume-is-power/1557283830?uo=4

and music videos are up on the Local Famous Records Youtube page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRIjOlGfx0M

Volume is Power

Transcript of Audio Liner Notes and Recommended Readings

Hi. My name is Anthony Sosa and you have just listened to Volume is Power. I hope you enjoyed it. I began actively writing for this record in December of 2019. Some of the musical ideas were written in previous bands going back as far as 2009 and others were written after I had started working on the record. As you know, 2020 was an insane year. So, as you can imagine, it affected the writing and conception of what we were working on. When I began writing lyrics it was the middle of the democratic primaries for President. I was a Bernie Sanders volunteer. I wanted to talk about issues in the US and around the world. But then COVID happened and George Floyd happened, and I had to talk about those things as well--If anything, to document this moment in time. Honestly, those events backed up what I already wanted to say with this record: Our system is broken.

Sonically, Volume is Power has a lot of specific influences that influenced specific songs. For each track I tried to lean into whatever influences were present at the time and treat each piece almost as a genre study, though the genres span a narrow spectrum along the “rock” continuum. Time -- was, and will continue to be, an important aspect of the project. Temporal Distortions are happening all around us all the time. This record is essentially a series of distortions, or songs, that span, temporally, from the mid 1990’s to the late 2000’s. There are also audio clips from the 1950’s and 60’s as well as from this historic summer of 2020. Songs from my past still inspire me in the present to create an album for the future which is now here. Now, this album will exist in the past for me but for you this is your present. Maybe, if I did my job right, and you are so inclined, it will inspire you to create something in your future.

I had intended to make this album available for free everywhere, but youtube and bandcamp are the only platforms where I can achieve that. You can always email [email protected] and we will send you a free digital copy.

In this Audio Liner Notes track I intend to give credit to all of the amazing artists who helped me create this record. I am honored and privileged to know and have the pleasure of working with so many amazing people and to all of you thank you for giving me your time and energy. Chief among these is Dale Brunson, my colleague and compatriot. I met Dale in 2009 when he was playing in Werewolf Therewolf and I was playing in Housefire and The Raven Charter. We’ve been friends ever since and in 2012 we started a Top 40 cover band called Sweetmeat who is still together as of this recording. Dale mixed and co-produced this record with me and without his patience, insight and guidance this record would have been impossible. I definitely threw him some curveballs throughout this process and he has handled all of it graciously.

I, now, am going to give a track by track breakdown of the record but I am not trying to spend too much time explaining or discussing lyrics. Those are for you to interpret how you will. I’m not great at insinuation, anyway, so I’m sure you get the point. I’d rather discuss the people on the tracks and the musical influences behind them. So:

Track 1 is titled Our Streets and begins with the voice of Rod “Teddy” Smith whom I met on the streets of Fort Worth during the protests this May-July. Rod and I, as well as Defense Attorney Michael Campbell, Christopher Rose and my wife, Amber, started a non-profit organization in the wake of these protests called The Justice Reform League with the goal of advocating for evidence based socio-economic and criminal justice policies at the municipal, state and federal levels and to empower impacted communities through civic education. I, personally, believe that there needs to be more effort put toward educating our community on how local politics actually works, how it impacts us, and how we can get involved and change things. So that is what we are trying to do. I also feel that music, or art in general, can be an educator and is one of the reasons I was inspired to write this record.

In regards to the opening clip with Rod, I actually have hours of footage from weeks of protests in May and June but this clip stuck out to me particularly because it evokes Fort Worth and the particular sentiment I was wanting to express with this record. The piano was played by me, recorded here at my house. At the end of the track are protest chants from one of the larger protest-days this past summer here in Fort Worth. My wife, Amber, and I marched for about 3 weeks before actually beginning to organize. On those later days of the protests I started carrying a battery powered PA speaker on my back in a doggie backpack with a mic and using that for chants and to further project those giving speeches. The album cover is a photo by local photographer Zach Burns capturing me doing just that. Zach being another awesome person I met this past summer. Before I move on, the real first voice (and last) you hear on the album, and multiple times throughout, is of Jordan Buckly of Every Time I Die- my favorite band. Early in the pandemic I paid Jordan $30 on Cameo to say “Temporal Distortions” and to “purchase” a shitty riff idea. I didn’t use the riff, it was god awful like he said, but I made some clips of him because it made me smile.

Track 2 is Daring Bravely.

This song was intended to be a The Raven Charter song and was introduced to the band near the very end of our time together. For those who don’t know, The Raven Charter is the most serious project I have ever been a part of. It was the most important thing in my life for many years. I am not going to use this time to give a history lesson on TRC, though that would be fun. Go check out our stuff if you’re into Prog Rock. So this thing kicked around on my hard drive since 2015, I recorded multiple demos with guitar, bass and drums, over the years and finally settled on a bridge. I didn’t actually write the lyrics until I began working on this album proper in Dec of 2019.

I had the awesome pleasure of doing this song with my boys Daniel Baskind and Erik Stolpe of TRC. Daniel wrote a beautiful solo for this track. It was exactly the energy the song needed and also sounds quintessential Daniel. As I stated at the beginning, I was leaning into the genre for each track and the genre on this track was “Ravencharter” and Daniel nailed it. And Erik, I truly feel, did an amazing job in making this song more than it was. The orchestration and production aspects of his writing for this track are spot on. He really got the vibe I was going for and took it even further. It was great to get to work with both of them again to recreate some of that magic we used to make. The audio clips are from Dr. Brené Brown and her TED Talk “The Power of Vulnerability” from Jan 3, 2011. Funny story about that. When my wife Amber and I first saw Brené’s TED Talks we really enjoyed the concepts she covered. We both came away from watching those remembering the phrase “Daring Bravely,” which is why I named the song that. I like those two words together and the concept they elicit. However, when researching for these Liner Notes I discovered that all along she was saying “Daring Greatly.” She even has a book with that title. So, we’ve been saying it wrong the whole time. Regardless, I prefer “Daring Bravely” because it requires bravery and courage to dare greatly and have confidence and believe in yourself. So be brave. Dare Bravely.

Track 3 is titled Division of Labor.

What radicalized me? Working in the service industry and learning history. This song is essentially an amalgamation of that. The line in the bridge is an Oscar Wilde quote. This was just a rando idea on the guitar that I recorded into my phone on new year's day 2019. Musically, the main guitar riff seemed to me Every Time I Die influenced but when I put drums and bass to it it ended up sounding more like At the Drive In or something, to me. My demo leaned into that a lot more than the finished product. This song definitely ended up in a different place than when I started working on it which is always fun and surprising. Workers rights are very important to me and I tried to put that into this song.

Track 4 is Pay for your own Exploitation.

This is another relatively recent idea recorded into my phone on the acoustic in October 2019. I remember when I did it because my friend and fellow musician/producer Randall C. Bradley from Delta Sound Studios came over and before we could even really greet each other I had to stop and say “hold on I have to record this idea before I forget.” It kinda had an Aerosmith vibe to me when I put it all together in the demo process for the record. Like 90’s Aerosmith. I dunno. I guess really the 90’s are smeared all over this album. Another temporal distortion. And then from the bridge on it goes all ETID. The “sex organs of the machine world” line at the beginning of the song is a Marshall McLuhan quote. The bridge vocals “Politics is war without bloodshed. War is politics with bloodshed,” I heard from Adolf Reed Jr. but I don’t know if he was quoting someone else.

I had the pleasure of working with Double Bear on this song - my Local Famous Records brethren. The gang vocals in the song are myself, Michael Garcia, Brandon Tyner, Garrett Bond, Matt Bardwell, Glenn Wallace, and Dale Brunson and we’re having a lot of fun, if you can’t tell. It makes me happy that we got to work together on this project and I imagine there will be more collabs down the road.

Track 5 is We Make the Past.

This song is essentially a Bush song, or was when I wrote it. Very Pixies influenced. Dale’s production took this a lot further than I imagined in the best way possible. I also showed up to the studio thinking my lyrics were finished but realized I was missing a second verse. The demo version was just like a minute and a half and I extrapolated the rest and got it wrong. Once that started I essentially re-wrote all the lyrics on the spot. The lyrics are meant to be scattered and random, like Gavin Rossdales’, though they come from a book by the late Hatian anthropologist and historian Michel-Rolp Trouillot. Bush was one of my favorite bands growing up in the mid-late 90’s and early oughts. I’ve always liked their raw energy and lyrical strangeness. (The same could be said for my love of The Mars Volta.) So this was my homage to Gavin, Nigel, Dave and Robin and shitty guitar playing. Also, I pronounced “His-tor-icity” wrong. I said histori-ocity and I don’t know why I didn't notice it until really late in the process. Same with “commodozation” instead of “commoditization” Oh well. Making up words is fun too.

Track 6 is Serve-Us Industry. This song was fun. It originally was going to be a new Huffer song. I had the pleasure of being a part of Huffer from 2015-2018 with Chea Cueavas and Jeremy Nelson, and we were working on a new album in 2017. Between Chea and myself we had about 10-13 ideas kicking around. This was one of the ones I had thrown out there. To me it had a Foo Fighters vibe, which makes sense because Chea and I were also playing in The Foo, our Foo Fighters cover band, a lot around that time. I just thought it would be fun to sing about all the mistakes that happen while working in the service industry and having to deal with customers. These lyrics made me laugh and sometimes that’s all you can do.

Track 7 is an interlude titled Employer vs Employee. This is a clip of David Griscom from the Michael Brooks Show episode 145 - Police & the ANC & We Need a Liberation Theology ft. William Shoki & Ronan Burtenshaw recorded on June 23, 2020. I really enjoy David and even though at the time of recording he has been living in Brooklyn for several years he has never forgotten Texas. His insight on economic issues and worker’s rights is immensely important. The underlying music on this track is just myself playing bass and guitar. A bass riff I had laying around for almost a decade.

The Michael Brooks Show has greatly impacted and influenced my life since I became a Patron in Dec of 2019. I wanted to take what was I learning from Michael, David and Matt and their guests and put it into music. Since Michael’s passing in July 2020, David and Matt Lech have gone on to create their own show Left Reckoning. Check them out for leftist theory and international news and analysis regarding the global left. As Americans, we all need a lot more international and historical perspectives.

Track 8 is titled Class Struggle.

This song was influenced by Silverchair's 1997 and 1999 albums Freakshow and Neon Ballroom. At least that’s kinda what I was going for tonally. The quote being shouted by Karl Marx from his Communist Manifesto, with a slight edit. In hindsight I probably should have use “their” instead of “his or her,” but it was an effort to use more inclusive language. I feel like most people hearing this will know that that was Marx, but if you don’t now you do. This track was originally written and proposed to Huffer as an idea in July 2017 but didn’t make it further than that. Dale plays the double stops in the middle of the song.

I suppose I should take this moment to say that this album is my first lyrical endeavor. I have written personal things in the past but never anything for any of the various bands and projects that I have been a part of, save one short lived hip-hop project back in 2010 I did with Aaron Anderson which was never released. So any idea that I “proposed” to any previous band was just music not lyrics. When trying to decide what to write lyrics about it became clear to me that politics and history was what I felt I needed to talk about. As a History teacher, and someone who studied history at the graduate level, I understand that not everyone learns history by reading historical monographs--but rather through pop-culture. So this is my contribution to pop-culture and I hope some people do learn some things by listening to this. And perhaps, then inspired to do some of their own research.

Track 9 is the Stoop Romans interlude.

These are 2 clips from two different performances of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. The first is from the 1970 film and the second, I believe, is from the 1953 production. I got them from youtube and you ideally, got this for free, so hopefully no harm no foul. The piano is a repetition of the piano at the beginning of the album. And these clips, to me, summed up the sentiment of many in America in 2020.

That is another thing I want to take a moment to say. The creation of this record and the method of its release is a statement. I do not want to profit from this. That is not why I made it. I made it for the message and I want this message spread as much as possible and the best way to do that is to make it free. So it was a labor of love and I tried to reject the capitalistic game of “the hustle” that most musicians, and artists, are forced to play with their creations as much as possible. It is my gift to you and example that things can be done differently.

Track 10 is Imperialism get Fucking Bent.

Soooo I was reading a lot of Noam Chomsky at the time, what can I say. If you don’t know who that is look him up. He is an important intellectual whose perspectives on recent American history and economics are invaluable. This song was heavily influenced by ETID, though a lot more simple, and was written on the guitar in 2018.

Initially, when I began writing lyrics I wrote stuff about Magic the Gathering, of which I am an avid Commander player, at least before the pandemic. But the tone of the song didn’t match the lyrics so I scrapped them and started over. The clip in the middle of the song I got from the Congressional Dish Podcast hosted by Jen Briney, of who I am a Patron. She got it from the Senate Hearing: United States Strategy in Afghanistan, United States Senate Armed Services Committee, February 11, 2020. The two men speaking are Sen. Angus King (Maine) and Jack Keane: Chairman of the Institute for The Study of War who was appointed by John McCain when he was Chairman to the Congressional Committee on the National Defense Strategy.

If you want to know what congress is up to, which you should, then you should listen to that podcast, it is invaluable. The point of the clip is to demonstrate that these men acknowledge that we will be at war “indefinitely.” They said the quiet part out loud in an untelevised hearing of which at the end of they say essentially “let's not discuss this again publicly.” I’m not a journalist but this is me trying to do my part of getting this information out there. We, the American People, shouldn’t want “preventative war,” eternal war. IMO we should want no war unless all other options have been exhausted. Take those trillions of dollars of our money and give it back to us in the form of Medicare for All, a Green New Deal and free college. Then there will be plenty of money left over to rebuild our infrastructure and provide Universal Basic Income. I believe a healthy and educated populus is crucial to a democracy. We need that in America, desperately. And it would be a lot easier to pay for all of that if we weren’t in Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. And that is just for drone strikes. The U.S. military currently operates in 40% of the world’s nations including most of Africa and Central Asia. Check out the Smithsonian Magazine website for info on this. And read Chomsky. Book Recommendations are at the end.

Track 11 is Ka’s Dance. This is a straight up Stephen King love song. He wrote all the words and it’s the 2nd, 5th, and 8th stanzas from Song of Susannah, the 6th book in the Dark Tower series. The clip is from the audiobook narrated by George Guidall (gwidell). This song was another one that was influenced by ETID. Energetically, it reminds me of Jefferson Colby--the band I was in with Matt and Danny Mabe from 2010-2013. Those two have absolutely influenced the way I play and view music, as well as their father Mark Mabe-who taught me how to play bass. Anyway, that is a story for another day, I hope to collaborate with them again in the future. The clip at the end is Captain Janeway and Chekote from Star Trek Voyager.

Track 12 is You Opened My Eyes. I had the honor and the privilege of working with 3 amazing artists on this song: Tornup, Chill, and Canyon Kafer. Christopher Hill, AKA Chill, and I have known each other for years via Dale Brunson and we briefly worked together on a collaborative musician lottery competition thing titled DIG back in 2017 that never happened. I have always wanted to record with him and had a lot of fun doing so. He is one of the best drummers I know and his pocket gave this song the life it needed. Torry Finley AKA Tornup and I met on the streets this past summer of 2020 during the protests and I heard him speak at the public speaking event we held at Trinity Park-- and he moved me. Eventually, we started talking music and I found out he is a fellow musician and bass player as well, I thought “I definitely want to collaborate with this dude.” Fortunately, this opportunity presented itself and, as I am sure you can tell, this song wouldn’t be what it is without him. He performed the first verse. Canyon performed the sick bass solo before the final chorus and I am truly humbled and grateful to have all of these guys on this album.

Track 13 is Fight the Hegemony. This is by far the heaviest track on the album and I essentially shout out some of my influences in the lyrics. Thrice, Glassjaw, and The Used, Dream Theater, Cohoeed and Cambria and other early-mid 2000’s bands still have a big influence on me. My friend and colleague Chris Musso performed the drums on this track. Chris and I played together in Silverlode in 2004 and in The Raven Charter from 2005-2008. We still play together in the aforementioned Sweetmeat, with Dale, and I am super happy to get another opportunity to collaborate together again. As I mentioned earlier, I volunteered and canvassed for Bernie Sanders during the Democratic Primaries in 2020 and the lyrics in this song were inspired by his movement. Now that I am writing these Liner Notes in early 2021 I want to take a moment to reiterate and clarify-- in the wake of the attempted insurrection on January 6th--this song is NOT aiming to inspire violence nor an overthrow of the system by using violence. It is crystal clear to me now how people can read into things and take what they will. These lyrics are about the Bernie Sanders movement. Period.

Track 14 is Simp for the System (Free Market Capitalism Love Song). This is another one of those songs that, musically, was originally written for Huffer, well the bass part anyway. Chea and Jeremy, both had written completely different stuff but I didn’t want to rip them off so I rewrote it and made it as emo as possible. Brand New, was the band I had in mind, circa Deja Entendu. The lyrics are a joke. I was laughing out loud when I wrote them. I had considered just making it instrumental because for the longest time I couldn’t think of any lyrics to go with it. I didn’t want to do “real” emo but I couldn't think of anything else. Then I was like “ well, often these emo songs were about a girl. What if the girl wasn’t a girl but a system that people simp for all the time?” Ta-da. It was actually Dale who suggested the “Hey girl…” rant in the bridge and I think he was onto something. I hope you thought it was as funny as I did.

Track 15 is Cold War Nostalgia. This song is the oldest one on the record and has gone through the most changes- creating nostalgia for me on multiple levels. I wrote the original version in 2009 for my band Housefire. That version was more upbeat and the main verse riff was a dotted 8th note delay melody...very 2009… and Housefire broke up before it was properly recorded. I really liked the song and re-worked it several times on my own over 7 or 8 years until Huffer began working on our new record. I rewrote the track again to be more “Huffer'' sounding by making the bass carry the melody in the verses rather than the guitar. I also slowed it down quite a bit and went for a more rough sound (thinking Refused-esque) rather than polished, uber-compressed late 2000’s scene music. Chea and Jeremy weren’t that into it, and honestly even with the changes it didn’t sound like Huffer so we dropped it. Then, I picked it up again when I started working on this record and tried to put some words to it, and it has now become this sprawling lengthy piece. The original version was a tad over the 3 minute mark and it is now close to 7.

Lyrics were difficult at first. But because the song, for me, was oozing with nostalgia it seemed like a good topic to start with. I had written a paper in my final semester of Grad school in 2018 for a transnational history class about the Cold War- my area of study for my history degree. That paper is my proudest academic achievement to date, titled “National Narratives in Post Cold War America and the Former U.S.S.R.'' and was about the stories we tell ourselves. The ones we tell ourselves at the interpersonal level and the ones our culture, society and leaders tell us at the macro level--and how the totalitarian can affect those stories. This looked at Nostalgia of the Cold War and how that nostalgia is different for the US and the former Soviet states. All the lyrics from this song are taken from that paper- particularly from certain quotes that I quoted throughout. The first verse, starting with “Nostalgia then…” is either Olga Shevchnko or Maya Nadkarni (both are cited) in 2013 from Kevin Platt’s article “Russian Empire of Post-Socialist Nostalgia and Soviet Retro at the New Wave Competition” published in the Russian Review issue 72 no 3. The second verses’ “Does human nature undergo a true change in the cauldron of totalitarian violence?” is from a book titled “Life and Fate” by Vassilli Grossman-- an epic novel about Stalin written in 1960 from someone who lived under him. The only reason it was published was because a friend of Grossman smuggled a copy out of the USSR into the west. One of the few published examples from that period of people questioning the totalitarian state from the inside.

I encourage anyone interested in the full paper to read it, it can be found on my Tumblr blog- Sosations Transmissions.

Now, you may notice that there is phenomenal guitar playing on this track. That is the work of my very good friend Glenn Wallace. Glenn is one of the best guitarists I know. He and I met back in 2004 via Daniel Baskind, Erik Stolpe and Chris Musso from Silverlode and The Raven Charter. The only time we have had the pleasure of playing, or sharing the stage together was in Housefire, so I was thrilled when he agreed to do this song. Glenn was our 3rd and final lead guitarist in the band before we broke up, (following Eddie Delgado and Dusty Brooks). There actually is a video on youtube of one show we played at The Boiler Room in Denton from mid-late 2009. Getting him on this track was something that I had been thinking about for a while but the opportunity finally arose when Glenn, Dale and myself, along with the Double Bear guys: Michael Garcia, Brandon Tyner, Garrett Bond and Matt Bardwell, as well as Erik Stolpe and the resourceful Tanner Hux, decided to start our own record label: Local Famous Records. Now that this relationship has solidified you can expect much more collaboration from all of us as well as more records like this one. Starting a record label with friends has been one of the most enriching experiences of my life and I highly recommend that you try it.

Track 16 is “Be ruthless with institutions, be kind to each other” - is the final track on the album and is a brief quote from the late Michael Brooks from his talk at Harvard University titled: “Michael Brooks MLK Jr. and Love and Power | Class Warfare | Harvard” from the Harvard College YDSA youtube page, recorded on Feb 1st. 2020. I had written a blog about Michael’s passing and how important he was to me personally and to the progressive movement in America today and in the world , and it can be read at the aforementioned Tumblr. I had set this clip aside to put on this record back in May or June of 2020 but after Michael’s passing in July it became clear to me that I would close the record with this sentiment. “Be ruthless with institutions, be kind to each other” is an affirmation I will carry with me for the rest of my life and I will proselytize this message wherever I go. Humans over entities. Always. “The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over all laws and institutions.” As far as the music for this track, it was just me pulling something out of my ass to go under the quote and I did it in one take, on an untuned shitty acoustic (for those familiar, the one from high school and college with the Albino squirrel sticker on it.) I recorded the guitar without any accompaniment into a handheld recording device and just got really lucky that it was an appropriate length. I was going for a Dashboard Confessional vibe and I think I got it.

So that is Volume is Power. Thank you to everyone who helped me create this thing and to those who supported me along the way. I am forever grateful.

Thank you to my wife, Amber, for without her this would not be possible. You are my superhero-bird-watcher, my anchor, my guiding light, my soulmate. Thank you for inspiring me to dare bravely.

Thank you to my parents for allowing me to follow my dreams and drop out of college to pursue a career in music. I know it didn’t make you happy at the time but you believed in me anyway. And thanks for not saying “I told you so” when I decided to go back to school 3 years later.

Thank you to my brother David for all the love and support over the years. For your artistic contribution on Daring Bravely. And for always having the courage to be you.

Thank you to Samantha, Lauren and Matt, for being so supportive all these years. I couldn’t ask for a better step-family.

Thank you to Dale for making this record happen, putting all the work into it that you did, and for putting up with my bullshit.

Thank you to every musician I have had the pleasure of playing with, on or off the stage.

Thank you to Aaron Anderson, Jason Dixon, Andrew Del Real and Anthony Davis for being the first band of dudes I got to do real shit with.

Thank you to the Silverlode/Solace Prime/ The Raven Charter guys: Daniel Baskind, Erik Stolpe, Brandon and Garrett Bond, Brian Christie, Chris Musso, Stephen Thacker, and Brandon Bailey. You guys are my brothers.

Thank you to the guys in Dreams Like Fire, who I only had a brief stint with in 2007 but learned so much from: Alan Mabe, Dathan Martin, Ryan Moody, and Kyle Istook.

Thank you to the Mabe Family for treating me like family and for--literally--teaching me how to rock: Mark Mabe, Matt Mabe, Danny Mabe, Chris Mabe and the beloved Terri Mabe.

Thank you to Chea and Jeremy from Huffer for bringing me into your lives and music. I am so glad we got to do what we did.

Thank you to Neal Todnem and Justin Jordan for being awesome roommates and apart of memories that I will always cherish and for our Tsegull Tsunami.

Thank you to Ben Napier for being a good friend, and at times mentor, and for asking me to be your Bogus “Green Day” cover band. I appreciate our time together.

Thank you to Ansley Dougherty, Nick Wittwer and Scott White for making our rage Against the Machine cover band a real thing, even if only for 2 practices. And to Scott for being my headbang partner at our The Foo and the Kombucha Mushroom people shows. And for trusting me to record some of your demos.

Thank you to Randall Bradley for being such a good friend. I value our talks and our jams and always look forward to hearing that you are in town from Argentina. Your perspective is unique and important.

Thank you to Cody Lee and the 27’s for involving me in your record and to Jaryth Webber for being a badass academic colleague, a badass musician, and for introducing me to Congressional Dish.

Thank you to Ben C Jones for the opportunity to work together on your music.

Thank you to Daniel Kunda for the opportunity to be apart of what you’re creating and for, at times, letting me be your sensei. Your future is bright.

Thank you to Chill, Torry Finley and Canyon Kafer for taking You Opened My Eyes above and beyond where I possibly ever could have. I hope we can do it more in the future.

Thank you to all my Local Famous brothers: Dale, Garrett, Michael, Brandon, Glenn, Matt, Erik and Tanner, for believing in this thing with me and making it a reality.

Thank you to Collin Porter for being a good friend and letting me bounce creative and political ideas off you. I truly value our conversations.

Thank you to Ryan Smith for always being a good friend and for our jammy jams.

Thank you to the bands that invited any of my bands on the road with them over the years--you guys helped make my dreams a reality: Matt and Mike LoCoco, and Danny Borja from Transit Method in Austin; Nick Barton, Trey Landis, and Justin Huggins from Sleepwalking Home in Tulsa, and Johnny Hawkins, Mark Vollelunga, and Daniel Oliver from San Antonio’s Nothingmore. The memories I have from those shows and trips are truly priceless and I am thankful to have those experiences to look back on.

Thank you to Dr. Johnny Stein, Dr. Joyce Goldberg, Dr. Christopher Morris, Dr. Patryk Babiracki, and Dr. Andrew Milson at the University of Texas at Arlington for greatly influencing my historical knowledge and thought that has influenced the making of this record.

Thank you to all co-founders of The Justice Reform League: Amber, Christopher Rose, Rod Smith, and Michael Campbell. And to Thomas Moore from no Sleep till Justice. I couldn’t ask for a better group of people to start a nonprofit with and I look forward to our future.

Thank you to Michael Brooks, Hank and John Green, Dr. Cornel West, Slavoj Žižek, Dr. Kevin Dunn, Dr. Richard Wolff, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Fred Hampton, Rita Starpattern and Edward Snowden for being my exemplars, always daring bravely and inspiring me to do the same.

And thank YOU for taking the time to listen to the songs, and this Audio Liner Notes track. If you are unfamiliar with any of the influences I have mentioned over the course of this I encourage you to go listen. And if those bands resonate with you, find out who influenced them- you’ll find more awesome music, more temporal distortions, if you will. I hope you find some inspiration to create your own work, whatever that may be, and to put it out into the world.

Dare Bravely. Salut.

Anthony Sosa

12-6-2020

(Updated 2-6-2021)

Recommended Readings

Global Punk by Kevin Dunn (2016)

The People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn (1980)

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden (2019)

Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History by Michel-Rolp Trouillot (2015)

Reason in History by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1953)

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848)

Welcome to the Desert of the Real by Slavoj Žižek (2002)

Humankind by Rutger Bregman (2020)

Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman (2017)

The Hawk and the Dove by Nicholas Thompson (2009)

Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs (2005)

Tribe by Sebastian Junger (2016)

Give them an Argument: Logic for the Left by Ben Burgis (2019)

Against the Web by Michael Brooks (2020)

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher (2009)

The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization by Thomas Homer-Dixon(2006)

The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens by Bernard E. Harcourt (2018)

Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson (2014)

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff (2019)

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century: by Timothy Snyder (2017)3

Totalitarianism by Abbot Gleeson (1995)

Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post 9/11 World by Noam Chomsky (2004)

Profit Over People by Noam Chomsky (1999)

How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr (2019)

The Lucifer Principle by Howard Bloom (1995)

The Dark Tower Series by Stephen King (1977-2003)

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triplerainbowgames · 4 years

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Representing Diverse Design

Diversity is a word that’s been seeing a substantial increase in usage these days [including on our own website, where it shows up at least half a dozen times!]. It’s for good reason, too - the world is collectively becoming more and more cognizant of how important diversity is, especially in communities with many members that span multiple areas of the world [like the gaming community]. As you may have already seen on the Triple Rainbow Games site, diversity is an integral aspect of both our game design philosophy and our business practices, and this article is going to outline why that is and what it means to us!

Before I dig in, I’ll explain what I mean by diversity so we’re on the same page:

Diversity is the purposeful recognition and representation of the enormous array of humans that exist on any of myriad spectrums that define who we are, such as race, sexuality, gender identity/expression, religion, political stance, and so on. It’s critical to establish two things regarding representation here: the first is that I’m referring [now and for the rest of the piece] to positive representation of identities, ones that accept and celebrate them. The second is that I feel it’s not enough to mention something in passing or have miniscule side-character representation to display diversity in your game: it needs to be front and center, with meaningful characters and choices.

Now that the foundation is set, let’s build the rest of the house :)

Diversity is an important and often-overlooked aspect of game and character design, and I feel strongly that it should be focused on more. This isn’t to say there aren’t already a number of games doing great work on the diversity front! It’s definitely been gradually improving over time, but I think we still, collectively - as the global game design community - have a ton of work to do.

WHY IT’S IMPORTANT

Numerous psychological studies show that humans have a universal need for comfort. It’s hardwired into our brains from our evolutionary roots, and comes part and parcel with the need to achieve homeostasis. What creates that comfort is our psychological pull towards things we’re familiar with. When we interact with things that are familiar, it’s like a mental shortcut to achieving that comfort we all seek.

A personal anecdote that illustrates this is my mobile phone. I’m an avid fan of the Android OS, but that love stemmed from several years of using version 7.1.2. When I had to get a replacement phone a couple years ago, it came with Android 8, and couldn’t be downgraded to 7.1.2. I could’ve just used the phone enough to acclimate to version 8, but grew increasingly frustrated [read: uncomfortable] with various design choices made in the newer version, including some that actively harmed me [the switch away from the dark mode menu to a white-background-dark-icon one was physically painful to my eyes after a time, for example]. In the end, what I ended up doing was researching what phones available could be downgraded to 7.1.2, and selling my new phone to replace it with the 7.1.2-phone. All that trouble, just to get back to familiar [comforting] territory!

This core drive of the human experience, this need to seek comfort, is especially important in the game design industry. Games are many things to many people, but two of the primary functions they serve are being intellectual stimulation and being an escape mechanism. To both these points, it’s more difficult to interact with games on these axes [which makes it more uncomfortable to play them] when you can’t relate to the materials they present.

EMOTIONAL RESONANCE

Many people love social deduction games, like Werewolf and Secret Hitler. I do not. I feel stressed out and alienated when I play them. This isn’t through any fault of their design, but simply how my brain responds to the stimuli and gameplay patterns of social deduction games. I’m on the autism spectrum, and part of what that entails is I’m not a person that can read subtext or tone well, and I have only rudimentary ability to read body language on the best days. Thus, I generally avoid playing social deduction games in general, and instead favor games that involve resource management, worker placement, and economy engines; they suit my brain much better because I’m able to understand those patterns, as that’s how my day-to-day brain functions. It’s what is most familiar to me, and thus, resonates with me more.

That concept - resonation - is a powerful driving force for what games people will continue to seek out, play, and love. The key is that it’s not just mechanics and systems that people resonate with, but also the art, characters, lore, and so on.

Circling back to my point about games being an escape mechanism: the more you can provide an intellectual/emotional safe haven for players, the more emotional resonance they’ll have with your game. That’s what leads to lifelong players and fans; the players that sing your praises from the rooftops, and try to get all their friends to play with them! This is magnified for players in marginalized and underrepresented groups, who often [always] have less privilege and fewer resources to access those “escapes.” Those things that are familiar and comforting, be they games or otherwise, are an integral aspect of feeling safe and cared for. When you see yourself represented in way fewer things than the majority of people, you can’t help but feel like an outsider.

REPRESENTATION

With the percentage of people who identify as gamers/game-players increasing year after year and representative of many different demographics compared to outdated stereotypes, it’s critical that we as game designers ensure that we’re representing and celebrating as many different demographics through our characters and lore as possible.

Representation is, at its core, acceptance of the massive range of identities one can possess. Especially concerning those that often feel like outsiders for not being part of the social norms they’re surrounded by, this is also a celebration of their identity. Celebrating those that are different from you is the first step in creating true equality, I feel! This is especially true in media and entertainment, where SO many things are made for and by the most privileged groups of the populace. Speaking from experience as a queer, nonbinary person on the autism spectrum, having any amount of entertainment celebrate your identity that is predominantly shunned elsewhere is a wondrous miracle!

Just like there’s a difference between diversity as token representation and meaningful diversity, so too is there a world of difference between passive and active diversity. A couple of side characters or passing mentions of marginalized peeps is better than nothing, sure, but it rings hollow if every playable character/game piece is a member of a privileged group. The best way to get people to care about your game isn’t just to let them SEE themselves, but let them PLAY themselves!

DIVERSITY BENEFITS EVERYONE

Here’s a slightly-paraphrased quote from Magic: the Gathering’s lead designer, Mark Rosewater, in his 2019 article Why Diversity Matters in Game Design where he talks about all the less-obvious benefits of diversity in game design:

“It adds variety to your game. It makes things feel more unique. It also allows all of your players be exposed to things they might really enjoy. Everyone likes seeing themselves represented, but most people also find it freeing to see OTHERS represented too. Maybe it can educate them about something they were previously unaware of. [You might even show someone something that teaches them that they identify with this too, or helps them figure out a different aspect of theirself!] Possibly it can entertain them by allowing them to see things through a different lens. Diversity is not just about letting people see themselves, it’s also about allowing other people to see them as well.”

The enemy of understanding is fear, and people fear the unknown. In my time figuring out best practices to promote understanding and inclusion in my personal life after I came out as nonbinary, the primary conclusion I came to regarding diversity is that it must be based on normalization. When it’s the norm for every identity to be represented and none to be marginalized, it naturally creates a culture of acceptance and understanding.

Media and entertainment that can expose people to genuine representation and celebration of both their own identities [to create that emotional resonance] and those of others [to educate them, and create emotional resonance and a feeling of empowerment for people within those identities] is, in my opinion, the biggest driving factor to promoting diversity in our daily lives. The more we can normalize identities that are currently marginalized and underrepresented, the more we can educate and empower people, create those safe havens for underprivileged demographics, and promote inclusion of, and for, everyone in meaningful ways.

Games, in particular, are a powerful force for this kind of change; it’s one thing to be able to identify with a character you read about in a book or see on a screen, and it’s an entirely different tier to be able to represent the character in an interactive and repeatable manner. I believe games are one of the most effective tools we have in our culture today to spread this understanding, and Triple Rainbow Games is going to lead by example with their entries into the gaming world to forward our goals of diversity and inclusion.

Living in a more accepting world benefits everyone of every demographic. When the minority among people is disrespect of identities instead of the identities themselves, I’ll feel we’ve achieved our goals. Thanks for reading! <3, Jamie

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thesnakesaid · 5 years

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1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

#44: A book that was originally written in a different language

Oh man... I feel like it is so appropriate that I finally finished my 2015 (!!!) book list with this book because I have such a long history with it, and that history only got longer as I read it.

I’ve probably written on here before that I had a creative writing professor in college who once said that the first and last lines of your story are your “prime real estate,” and that you have to make sure that you fill that space with something good. I think that 1Q84 has to be the best example of this I’ve ever experienced, because my first encounter with it was when I randomly plucked it off the shelf at Barnes and Noble due to its rather striking cover. The opening chapter (which really is equivalent to the first line of a short story, given that this book is well over 1000 pages long) introduces the reader to Aomame, who is dressed to the nines in a taxi on her way to what she describes as a business venture, but you later find out is actually a hit job. She finds herself stuck in standstill traffic and is worried about making it to her destination on time when her cab driver lets her know that there is an emergency stairway leading from the freeway to the street below that she can take if it’s a dire emergency. She agrees that this is her best course of action, but before she leaves the cab, he issues the following warning:

...you’re about to do something. out of the ordinary. Am I right? [...] And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than they did before. I’ve had that experience myself. But don’t let appearances fool you. There’s always only one reality.

I didn’t get much farther than this the first time I opened the book. I didn’t get to the part where you discover that her “meeting” at the hotel was really so she could kill a man, or the part where you learn that she is a hired assassin who strictly targets men who have committed violence against women. I didn’t get to meet any of the characters I would go on to love, such as the Dowager, the rich old woman who runs a battered women’s shelter and hires Aomame to take out domestic abusers, or Tamaru, the dowager’s gay bodyguard who quietly and professionally arranges everything necessary to make these hit jobs a success. I didn’t learn about any of the strange magic and alternate timelines that would have me on tenterhooks for the rest of the story in this first chapter. All I got was this enigmatic warning from a taxi driver that going down this particular stairway at this particular time of day might create a change in reality worthy of being forewarned about. But this was enough to keep 1Q84 in the back of my head for the ensuing years between the first time I saw it on the shelf and the day I actually picked it up to read it for real.

That was probably back in 2011 or 2012. I picked the book back up in October 2018 and instantly became enamored with Aomame, and found myself reading passages about her to Zebby so frequently that after only a hundred or so pages, she asked me to start reading entire chapters aloud to her. It wasn’t long ago that we had a great time reading Good Omens aloud to each other, so we ended up taking on the extremely daunting task of reading the next 1000 pages of the book aloud to each other.

That took five months.

And now I’m here, writing a review for this book, and I still haven’t talked about what the book is about nor stated directly how I feel about it.

Well, with regards to the plot summary: I’ve omitted that on purpose. The deepest, most essential storyline in this book is very simple: Aomame and Tengo are two people who fell in love when they were ten years old, and seek to find each other after 20 years apart. However, this storyline is inextricably wrapped in many other stories, and I know that no description I could think of would possibly do the plot justice without making it seem convoluted. Suffice to say that this book is a love story, yes, but also a science fiction, an adventure, a mystery, and a fantasy story all rolled up into one.

And regarding my feelings on it: I LOVED it. There were so many moments throughout these pages that I found myself gasping and screaming because of some narrative gambit Murakami had pulled - a sudden crossing of two storylines or the introduction of just the exact right piece of information to make 12 other things fall into place. There was so much in this story to think about and obsess over. Zebby and I probably spent hours cumulatively stopping to discuss what just happened or speculate what was going to happen next. It was unlike any book or story I’ve ever read before.

All this being said, I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone - the pace of the story is slow even though a lot of things happen in it, and the ending left a lot more questions unanswered than I would have liked. Zebby and I discussed this too when we finally reached the end. But what I said to her is what I will say here: 1Q84 won my allegiance early on. There is very little he could have done with the ending to make me end the book feeling like I didn’t love it.

Plus, there is one more factor working in this book’s favor that has nothing to do with the book at all -

I’M DONE WITH MY 2015 READING LIST!!!!!

As a random note to anyone who might actually read these, I made myself a book list based on a Pop Sugar reading challenge way back in college and have been using it to guide my reading ever since. I have developed this crazy system of rules for myself with regards to how to proceed through the list: I use a number randomizer to choose which book I’m going to read next, no skipping or reading ahead on the list unless I’m about to go on a long drive and the book I randomly selected doesn’t have an available audiobook, and no quitting on books. Despite all these rules, I have no qualms about reading books that are not on my list when the spirit moves me, and I never intended to even attempt to read the entirety of a given list in one year, so I don’t care that I finished my 2015 reading list in 2019.

But now that I’m done with this list, it is really cool to look back on how my life has changed since I started the list. Among other things, I

Graduated from college

Moved to a new city

Started and finished grad school

Moved again

Started at a job that I love and I’m good at and I’ve always dreamed of doing

Reignited my love of reading

To be clear on that last point, I really never lost my love of reading, but like most people at least at some point in their HS/college careers, I definitely stopped reading for fun for a long period of time. Starting this challenge literally flipped a switch for me, and I went from reading very few books per year that weren’t assigned by a class to reading 20+ books a year consistently for the last 4 years (and given that I’m at 8 books so far in February, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to match that pace this year!).

So I’m grateful to have read 1Q84 and I’m grateful to have started and finished this challenge, and I’m grateful to be proceeding on to the 2016 reading challenge!

February 24, 2019

#1q84 #haruki murakami

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tshepiso-reads-books · 4 years

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My Favourite Books of 2019

I had a pretty good reading year in 2019. Formulating my favourites list this year was definitely harder than it was in the past couple of years. This list has changed and shifted drastically as they year went by (if you’d like to know my favourites in the first half of the year check out this post).

I agonized for weeks trying to rank my favourites and eventually had to give up entirely. I read so many different books this year across genre and form and it was absolutely impossible to rank and compare them. So this year I’ll be talking about my favourite books from four categories: fantasy, science fiction, comics and contemporary. This is going to be a long one, so gird your loins.

Fantasy

2019 was a fantastic year for adult high fantasy. I finally dipped my toes into this category after years of hesitancy and discovered stories filled with rich worlds, pulse-pounding plots and fantastic characters.

The Fifth Season · N.K. Jemisin

If I had to choose a singular favourite book of 2019 The Fifth Season would definitely be it. Every single aspect of this novel was done to perfection our characters were fully rendered, the plot was absolutely gripping, and the worldbuilding so fleshed out and unique. This book was so perfectly realized and is truly a feat of master craftsmanship.

Circe · Madeline Miller

Even after all these months, Circe is still a stand-out story. Miller’s prose was breathtaking and cutting and our main character, Circe, so all-encompassing and well explored. The lens through which Miller views greek mythology was fascinating and the way she explored characters we already had preconceived notions of was fucking brilliant.

Jade City · Fonda Lee

This book was the perfect blend of inciting action, gripping family drama. The multi-layered and ever-changing landscape of the plot of Jade City kept me flipping the pages of this book, but the strong interpersonal relationships between the family at the center of this book kept me connected to every single plot point.

The Diviners · Libba Bray

The Diviners is the only YA fantasy on this list and I think it truly speaks to the heights that this book reached. What stood out most to me about this book was how politically relevant it was. Bray’s focus on the bigotry and hatred in America in the 20’s time felt pointed and relevant today. With fantastic characters, atmospheric writing and engaging mystery to boot The Diviners was a truly great story to read.

Foundryside · Robert Jackson Bennett

Foundryside was a genuinely fun time from beginning to end. I was gripped by Bennett’s unique magic system which I can only describe as “coding… but magic”. The great character work and entertaining character dynamics added to my absolute enjoyment of this story.

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Sci-Fi

I got really into sci-fi for the first time this year and absolutely adored so many of the stories in this genre. I glad I dove into this genre more in 2019 because I discovered some fantastic stories.

The Wayfarer’s Trilogy · Becky Chambers

The Wayfarer’s trilogy was like a warm blanket to me this year. Every time I picked up a new book in this series its themes and messages filled me hope and joy. Chambers is really writing the sci-fi we need in 2019. I loved every book in this series, but I wanted to shout out A Closed and Common Orbit in particular because it was definitely my favourite.

Ninefox Gambit · Yoon Ha Lee

Ninefox Gambit was a late entry into my favourites, but damn did it hit with a bang. It was certainly one of the most challenging books I read this year, but the reward for sticking through it all was just priceless. Lee crafted such an intricate world and delving deeper into it as I kept reading was enthralling.

Sleeping Giants · Sylvain Neuvel

It took me a while to fall for Sleeping Giants, but once I did I fell head over heels. Neuvel weaved in an interesting story through the interview format he utilized. I’m awed by his ability to capture the scope of the world and create a heart-pounding plot and intriguing mysteries exclusively through interviews.

Time Was · Ian McDonald

Time Was was an excellent novella. It captured everything I adore about time travel stories and historical science fiction. In a few pages, Ian McDonald sold me completely on every aspect of this story. I loved the sweeping romantic atmosphere imbibed into the story.

The Calculating Stars · Mary Robinette-Kowal

Another historical science fiction made its way into my favourites list and it truly deserved to. The level of detail poured into The Calculating Stars is amazing; Mary Robinette-Kowal delved deep into the space program and her accuracy to the time is astounding. Her ability to make me care about the minutiae of daily life is a credit to her character work because the protagonist of this book, Elma, was so charming and real that I couldn’t help but be invested in her story.

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Comics

I read comic books for the first time this year and absolutely loved most of what I read. I discovered some fantastic authors and artists telling amazing stories and hope to only increase my comic reading in the coming year.

Nimona · Noelle Stevenson

What more is there to say about Nimona. I raved about it so much both online and in my personal life. Noelle Stevenson is writing the kinds of stories that sink their way into my heart and stay there. I adored every single panel of every single page in this story and encourage every single person to pick it up as soon as humanly possible.

The Vision · Tom King & Gabriel Hernandez Walta

I don’t even know what to say about The Vision other than, wow. This dark, psychological, tragedy affected me so deeply. It’s one of the three books I actively cried while reading this year and to this day I can’t eloquently express why I adored it so much. King really makes you care about the family at the center of this story which makes the tragic outcome of the story and the inevitability of that tragedy all the more painful.

Hawkeye · Matt Fraction & David Aja

I love Clint Barton with my whole heart and Hawkeye is the reason why. Fraction and Aja demonstrated a true understanding of Barton as a character and through their three-year run, they crafted what I believe is the best story about him out there.

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Contemporary

This year was pretty light on contemporaries both in number and quality but I did discover amazing stories that spoke to me deeply.

Radio Silence · Alice Oseman

Radio Silence is a book that directly spoke to an exact moment in my life. I read this at the start of my final exam season of high school so the failure of the education system really resonated. Oseman managed to capture the rat race that is school. This book was deeply affecting and emotionally resonant which is probably why it’s one of the books that made me cry in 2019.

Fangirl · Rainbow Rowell

I’m kind of cheating by putting a re-read on this list, but I found rereading fangirl this year to be so impactful and moving that it would feel a right shame to leave it out of any ‘Best of 2019’ list. Fangirl spoke to me so much harder in 2019 than it did when I first read it. Rowell perfectly captured the reasons we go to fandom for solace and community and the struggles Cath faces in this book are all the more relatable with time.

Autoboyography · Christina Lauren

YA contemporary captures the melodrama of teenagerdom in a way other subcategories of YA never really do. Autoboyography distils the essence of what it feels like to be a teenager so well. And not only does it do that it also contains a beautiful love story at its center.

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Honourable Mentions

I read so many fantastic books this year and this list would feel incomplete without some honourable mentions. All of these were so close to making it on to my final list but sadly didn’t make the cut.

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So, that was my extensive favourites list for 2019. I had such a good reading year in 2019 and I want to bring that energy into the new decade. I’d love to hear about all your favourite books of the year in the comments below so please feel free to share them.

Happy reading!

#Books #Reading #Favourites 2019

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moodboardinthecloud · 4 years

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The life you thought you were going to have is gone

LORI FOX

SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL

PUBLISHED AUGUST 14, 2020, UPDATED AUGUST 15, 2020

Lori Fox is a writer based in Whitehorse.

I know what you’ve been going through these past five months; it’s the same thing we’ve all been going through.

Stripped both of structure and spontaneity, a day could feel like a week and a week like a month, yet two hours could evaporate in a puff of anxiety as you googled COVID-19 symptoms and compulsively streamed The Great British Bake Off. It was always 7 p.m. on a Sunday, no matter what day of the week it actually was. Confined inside for days on end, you came to loathe the colour of your bathroom, the texture of your carpet, the sound of your upstairs neighbour walking above you. No matter how essential the errand, leaving your home made you feel both anxious and guilty.

Now, the game is changing again. For better or for worse, things are reopening; Toronto, one of the hardest hit cities in the country, recently entered “stage three,” meaning bars, movie theatres and restaurants are open. Although everything still has a faint, palpable air of dread – the lull in a horror movie where the plucky teens foolishly believe they’ve escaped the monster and the viewer, helpless, is just waiting for it to come crashing back on screen – the stranglehold of total social isolation is loosening for many people. The fear and worry and loneliness are still there, but blunted by changing circumstances and normalization.

But that other thing, that quieter ache – that smouldering coal deep in your chest you fear would ignite and devour you if you dug it out and examined it – that’s still there. If anything, that pain might be sharper, more acute than before.

That feeling is grief.

We can go out and get a coffee, we can walk in the park, we can drink a beer on the patio, but it doesn't really matter.

The world we knew is gone.

The life you thought you were going to have is gone.

The lives we all thought we were going to have are gone.

And, maybe, that’s a good thing. A good – and very hard – thing.

Since COVID-19 first emerged sometime toward the end of 2019, more than 741,000 people have died and 20 million have been infected, with 121,000 infections in Canada alone. With people locked into their homes, sick or afraid of getting sick, the economy came to a grinding halt, a shockwave of lost jobs and reduced or redistributed consumer spending. Canada lost around two million jobs in April, with the hardest hit – outside of people who were already un- or underemployed – being low-wage workers, of which women and younger people comprise a large portion, groups that were already at an economic disadvantage in the Before.

Those jobs aren’t just going to just magically reappear as we reopen; COVID-19 has reshaped consumer demand and will continue to do so into the future. Many small businesses – restaurants in particular – are permanently closed, and it will take time for something to replace them, if such a thing will even be possible in the near future.

Things aren’t going to go back to “normal.” There’s no “normal” to go back to.

More importantly, this pandemic has kicked open the factory doors of our culture and allowed us to see how the sausage is made: on the backs of the people whose labour, time and bodies we deem to be worth at or around minimum wage, but without which we absolutely could not – cannot – make it through this crisis.

Current conversations around the “safety” of going back to work right now are simply not for the lower classes. While many middle and upper class people worked from home, working class wage earners – grocery store clerks, delivery drivers, food and agriculture folk – continued on as “essential workers,” dispensing and producing the goods and services on which our entire culture runs, all the while risking continuous public exposure. They went to work – and continue to go to work – because they have to, and will continue to have to, even as we see infections spike, something we should prepare to happen, given what we are seeing in other nations, such as Germany and Australia.

For the working class who have lost their jobs due to the pandemic, discussions around CERB – which some claim is a disincentive for people to return to work – and how some people, particularly millennials, spend that money, only serves to make the deep-seated class divide in this country more apparent. If $2,000 a month – about $12.50 an hour, or around $24,000 a year before taxes for a full-time worker – means that people are making more money than they were before, the problem is not CERB, but that workers are not fairly compensated for their labour with a living wage. Anyone who would weigh in critically on how that money is spent, moreover, should ask themselves if they believe that only the wealthy deserve financial autonomy, and the pleasure and dignity of human comforts, or if CERB is really just a subsidy for landlords.

That these are even conversations to be had demonstrates a tremendous failure of understanding – and compassion – about the realities of working class life, and the message it sends is clear: Get back to work, plebes.

The destabilizing effect of this pandemic has laid bare the economic inequality on which our society functions. Class disparity, the resistance to universal income, systemic racism, the militarization of the police and the rhetoric of the current political climate are not the result of the pandemic; they are the endgame of capitalism. We’ve merely paused the machine long enough to see them clearly.

This is my own tiny, selfish dream:

I want to meet a nice femme and get married and have a modest house with a little yard. I want to make my future wife coffee in the morning and kiss her goodbye, and go off to work writing articles and books, because it’s a useful occupation that makes me happy. I want to take my breakfast in a diner on Sundays while I read the paper, and make my wife laugh, and put butter on hot, fresh bread, and throw a ball for my dog. I want a couple fingers of whisky, clean sheets and a book when I go to bed at night.

My dream, in short, is to have enough, with the time to enjoy it. To have a life that has love and dignity.

It’s so small, when you say it like that, but for so much of my life it has seemed impossibly out of reach. At the beginning of March, things were finally starting to look up for me; that dream felt a little bit closer. When the pandemic hit, every certainty I had worked so hard to build for myself was swept from the table.

Now, here in August, that dream feels even further away than before. I don’t know what your own little dream is, but it probably feels distant – perhaps even unreachable – now, too.

I’m really sad about it, and I think we should be allowed to be sad right now.

Grief is a chance to get a hold of that hurting thing, to look at it fully and carefully, to take what’s left of what you’re grieving for and make it into a part of yourself you can take with you.

Grief isn’t about expulsion and denial. It’s about consumption and reflection.

Things are scary. We are allowed to be anxious and afraid right now.

We have lost a world. You’ve got permission to grieve.

But in doing that, we might ask if the world we have lost is really as good as we remember, if it was serving the life we hoped we would have. I’m working class. I’ve experienced homelessness and poverty. I’m queer. I’m non-binary. I’m female. I know – have known for most of my adult life – that in this world some bodies are worth more than other bodies. Some lives are worth more than other lives. Some happiness is worth more than other happiness.

What we are seeing, now, in this crisis, is a perfect distillation of that, of the ways the world before did not serve – did not care about – everyone equally. This is a chance to rethink that; perhaps not only can we not return to the world before this, but maybe we don’t really want to.

Capitalism demands constant, accelerating growth; a black magic trick that flies in the face of nature, in which no such thing exists. Even SARS-CoV-2 – itself a phenomena of nature – must adhere to these rules, and in many ways the virus is a metaphor for capitalism itself. It seeks perpetual increase without regard for the host organism, and eventually it will reach a point where it can no longer continue its present rate of infection; either it will use up all its resources (all the host organisms are all already infected or dead) or it will be contained or even eradicated by adaptations on the part of the host (that’s us).

That we see, plainly, how fragile and unfair our way of life really is, is part of the collective grief. Even if we did all agree to go back to the way things were, they can never actually really be that way; the illusion has been dispelled.

So go ahead and grieve now. Think carefully. Fill in the holes the world before has left.

Adapt.

Be good to your neighbours and friends. Take care of them as best you can. Don’t let them go without, if it’s possible. We’re going to need each other more than ever.

It will take a lot of hands to build a new and better world with new and better lives for each of us.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-life-you-thought-you-were-going-to-have-is-gone/?fbclid=IwAR1rIo_kJT0VzLC_hEaGMrcls8KHYooVLETX2PxVN6wVQpzkhSlJh4bjfzU

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pryngols · 4 years

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“A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.” ― Ian McEwan, Atonement

2019 favorites shortlist

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope 2020 has been kind to you so far. As promised, here I am with my 2019 wrap-up. As you can tell from the above photo I had a tough time coming up with a strict Top 10 favorites. From my initial list of 40 I was able to narrow it down to 24, then down to just 10. It was really challenging but lots of fun, too. I am happy to report that I have been successful with my 2019 reading goals: 1) to read diverse authors and genre, 2) to reach my Goodreads goal of 100 books 3) to build my Netgalley profile and 4) to join blog tours.

I am a mood reader so this will be a diverse list. As a friend of mine once said, one can never know what I’ll be reading next. I hope you connect with some of my favorite books, too. Without further ado– presenting my Top 10 Favorite Reads of 2019, in no particular order:

My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier – was absolutely stunning, the perfect mix of romantic gothic mystery. It’s a tragic but beautiful tribute to the female charm and power.

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff – a hypnotizing tale of a unique marriage between two very intense forces. This book is on point about everything that a marriage is and is not. Though I found the first part a bit dragging at times, the second half of the book simply took my breath away. There is no love story like Lotto and Mathilde.

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is a short but intense scifi read that leaves you wanting more. It’s an epistolary romance that surprised me with an unexpected level of passion.

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson – as I have discussed on a previous post, this book is a heady meditation on language and memory, as we follow the story of a mother and daughter living on a boat by a river. It’s an intoxicating mix of folklore, contemporary and magical realism.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote – This book is more than your average crime thriller, not only because it is based on a true story, but because it is a lengthy meditation on a nation’s culture of violence, the insufficiency of justice systems, and explores the reader’s limits for empathy. ⁣

Atonement by Ian McEwan – is perhaps the saddest love story ever told. It’s simply beautiful, heartbreaking and unforgettable. The best thing about it is how the author used the form and structure of the novel to get his message across. Remarkable.

Solanin (Solanin #1-2) by Inio Asano – though not as polished and sophisticated as some of Asano’s popular novels, this one has become my favorite among his works. The raw emotions and simplicity of style made the story not only more relatable but also showcased the artist’s storytelling prowess, without his usual embellisments.

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank – I honestly felt like I had a wonderful friend in Anne Frank while I was reading her writing, and it is such a privilege to be able to do so. These are thoughts of a brilliant young girl, way ahead of her time. I devoured all her entries as though I was the one who needs comfort, and not she. Though I knew how it all ends, I was not prepared with the amount of tears I shed on the last few pages.

Miracle Creek by Angie Kim – is the book that surprised me the most this year. It is an intricate and soulful tale that will challenge the way we see humanity: its relationships, its sense of justice, and the consequences of our actions no matter how big or small. I talked about this in length here.

The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson – I love the build up of tension, the quiet sadness and the terror of human loneliness. It is one of those rare short stories collections wherein all of the stories are equally great, or at least wonderfully curated to make the whole thing a cohesive masterpiece. I talked more about this book here.

Of course I just can’t limit my favorites to just 10 (I’m so sorry!) I still have a lot more to recommend, so here are some of the honorable mentions:

CRIME/THRILLERS

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

Twisted by Steve Cavanagh

FANTASY

Castle in the Air (Howl’s Moving Castle #2) by Diana Wynne Jones

A Hat Full of Sky (Discworld #32) by Terry Pratchett

GRAPHIC NOVELS

Patience by Daniel Clowes

Smashed: Junji Ito Story Collection by Junji Ito

Sleepwalk and Other Stories by Adrian Tomine

QUIET BLOCKBUSTERS – These titles are not so popular, and they are not action-packed or exciting or thrilling, but I love them for being beautifully and skillfully written, with exceptional insight to the human psyche.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

A Separation by Katie Kitamura

Rosalind by Judith Deborah

WORTH THE HYPE

Illuminae series (The Illuminae Files) by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

HARD TO READ FAVORITES – These titles are some of my most loved reads this year, and they did not make the Top 10 list only because they were not as effortlessly enjoyable as the others, and have taken me a lot longer to read. But they are definitely more than worth it.

The Vorrh (The Vorrh Trilogy #1) by Brian Catling

Fire & Blood (A Targaryen History #1) by George R.R. Martin

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Below are some screenshots from my favorite bookish tracking app/community Goodreads. If you are also a member there, let’s connect! Add me here.

Some interesting statistics!

I have read a total of 151 books. 151! My personal best. ⁣ ⁣ 2020’s goal is to actually read less. As much as I love reading, I think last year has been more of a therapy for me, a sort of escape from reality. 2019 is the worst year of the decade for me and my mental health. So I’d like to DO more this year. I’m hoping to do online courses, go back to running, travel, more projects!! Wish me luck.

I remember how when I first started my bookstagram and this book blog, one of my main reasons for doing so is that I wanted to have a platform where I can talk about books. Before all this, when I finish a book I just mark it as “Read” on Goodreads and then move on. I am somehow left with a feeling of loss because I knew I might eventually forget how or why I loved a certain novel. Currently, I am at least comforted by the fact that I now belong to a community that celebrates the same passion for reading, that always welcomes me when I have all sorts of book hangover. I can now say farewell (see you later!) with ease to these stories, and most importantly–I don’t feel so alone anymore.

All I am trying to say is thank you for being here and for tolerating my bookish obsession. Being a part of the bookish and blogging communities has not only motivated me to read more, but has also encouraged me to do more of what I love. I have learned how to be comfortable with my own thoughts, and to be more open to other’s as well.

⁣I appreciate each and every one of you. Care to share some of your 2020 goals, bookish or not? Let’s chat in the comments! 🥂⁣

Princess & Pages Year in Books 2019 “A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's.

#book review #Bookstagram #goodreads #new year 2020 #year end wrap up

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