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writerkenna · 5 years

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The Light of the Stars and The Glitter in Your Eyes Chapter 2

In order to pay honor to MY god of lesbians, this was written listening mostly to Tegan and Sara.

Also lemme know if y'all want my GammaHammer spotify playlist, I'll post it with the next chp.

Please excuse any errors, this is un-betaed since I was just so excited to publish another chapter! (lol sorry @get-lostsquidward I’ll send you chp 3)

The sight of the mess hall, which was filled to the brim with Asgardians, was heartening for Thor to see. There was a bustle of noise passing through the room, bits of conversations that mingled into one sound that washed over him. The corners of his lips stretched out wide.

“These, Bruce, are my people!” he said, his arm waving out across the room. Bruce looked up at Thor through half-lidded eyes. He was tired but more himself now, right-leaning smiles and soft wrinkles in his cheeks abound.

“They’re great,” Bruce patted Thor’s arm and Thor felt a light tingle rush the spot, “I’m gonna find myself some food, okay?”

Bruce made his way to the start of the food line. They had been able to use a combination of the food stored on the ship and what they had managed to get while rushing off their planet to make an approximation of Asgardian dishes. It was close enough, Thor hoped, to what Bruce ate normally. Thor was finding that since their time on Sakaar, he had developed a compulsive need to keep Bruce from having a freak out, maybe out of some lingering guilt for asking for the Hulk over Banner, maybe a naturally ingrained sympathy for someone who needed it so much as Bruce.

“Hey, Thor. Me and Meek were just looking for you, buddy.” Korg and Meek were in front of him suddenly and Thor took his eyes off Bruce. Meek issued a squeak of a hello and waved a blade at him. Thor took one pace back.

“I’m doing well, large worm, thank you,” Thor said to Meek with a nod. He caught a glint of black and the sheen of leather, and began to change course, “We will continue this later.”

“Okay. Let’s talk soon. We’ve got some big, uh, military ideas for you Asgardians, alright?”

Thor halted himself. Political strategy had been absent from his head for a long time, dispelled with trips through the galaxy and banged out through raging battles with monsters and fire demons and trolls. He hadn’t considered needing it again for a long time, hoping for centuries more of Odin’s rule. He never had understood those who chose politics.

“Can’t wait!” Thor says as he pushed out an over the top grin. Korg gave him a thumbs up and Thor turned away as he suppressed a wince.

“Those fools,” Loki muttered under his breath once Thor had settled into the bench seating, “from the Grandmaster’s trash pile approached me wanting to work on the defense council. That is ridiculous, and I hope you will not be allowing it.”

“They are not fools. Korg is a friend. And, as for the council. . .” Thor trailed off, and then diverted, quick, “By the way, were you and the Grandmaster, like, a . . . ?”

Loki looked down and pushed at the food on his plate. His lips shifted against each other.

“I did what I needed to do to move up the ranks. The Grandmaster had very specific requirements for those ranks.”

Thor smiled to himself, which faded into slight horror as his head formed an image of Loki and the Grandmaster together. He was developing a taunt for Loki to expel the idea from his mind as Loki spoke again.

“Do you think it’s very wise to have him on the ship with us?” Loki asked and Thor tracked his eyeline. It was focused on Bruce.

“Banner? Um, yes? Is that a trick question, brother?”

“I’m not so worried about the doctor. It’s the beast part that I’m concerned about.” Loki was still staring at Bruce and Thor swore he saw the small wisps of fear passing under his eyes. Thor let a hint of a smirk loose. He looked at Bruce again, who was half way through the food line and talking to Valkyrie over the meats section. His shirt was dwarfing him, Thor had overestimated the size, and he didn’t believe it was possible to fear any part of this curly haired, droopy eyed man.

“He won’t be a problem,” Thor grinned at Loki.

“I just . . . I’m not sure about all these foreigners with us. Humans, rock-things, all of them,” Loki grumbled into his palm.

“Well, you are, in a loose definition of the word, a ‘foreigner’ as well,” Thor added, but regretted it as soon as he saw Loki’s eyes narrow into disquieted, aghast slits and the side of his mouth flatten out against his face, “Sorry, you are . . . I didn’t mean . . . you’re my brother, Loki, and an Asgardian, of course, and I-”

Thor was thankful to be cut off from his ramblings by Bruce’s arrival with a hefty plate that fell heavy against the table.

“Uh, hey there, Loki,” Bruce said, voice half there. The two eyed each other back and forth, a conversation of mutual fright and distrust, before Loki stood up, turned, his greasy hair tossing with him, and was running off. Bruce looked to Thor with puffed out cheeks.

“Jeez, I didn’t mean to . . .”

Thor shook his head at Bruce’s words, giving him a light smile, then looked over his plate, which was coming over its edges with food. Bruce blushed and released a laugh from high in his lungs, one of his main repertoire of laughs. This one always made Thor laugh too, in a short burst that he just couldn’t keep in.

“I . . . after I go all Hulk-y and stuff, I’m really hungry, alright?”

Thor nodded, smirking, and small breeze of a chuckle passed out of his lips. Bruce responded back with a push of a laugh. The laughing started to feel like a conversation, a puff of something around Bruce’s bite of ambiguous meat, a groan of a giggle as Thor dipped his fork into the pile of Bruce’s food.

“A warrior’s meal,” Thor said, eyes on Bruce, after they had devoured the plate as a team. Bruce shrugged, but he was smiling.

Bruce went back to the room after their monumental meal, and as much as Thor would have liked to as well, he got caught in a mix of questions by his citizens the second he stood.

Hemidhall pulled him from the swarm of mothers asking about education and beefy men and women wanting to reestablish the warrior force. Thor was glad for the rescue, but only briefly, for he was less than happy when Hemidhall spoke.

“Tomorrow morning, early, meeting with the councils of defense and diplomacy. We need to get a handle on this before we land.”

Thor agreed, against his heart and his happiness, on the meeting, and snuck out the side of the hall to his room.

When he entered, Bruce was standing in front of the bed with three holographic, torso-sized screens spread out around him.

“The ship-it has, like, Earth internet! Like academic databases and stuff! I think it might have non-Earth internet, too, or the equivalent of internet, I guess.”

Thor came up behind Bruce. The screen glow shrouded them both of a blanket of light.

“Show me,” Thor said, his voice restrained as the idea of council meetings fuzzed out his focus. Bruce enacted some flicks of his fingers and one screen showed a page titled The Five Greatest Mysteries of Antimatter .

“I was actually writing a paper on this before I was the big guy for, ah, two years, so I’d thought I’d pick it up again. I don’t really remember what my thesis was, but, uh, I’m trying.” Bruce tried to focus back on the screen, his eyes going into tight slits as he pressed a bit closer to it.

“Are your eyes alright, Bruce?” Thor asked.

“Uh, yeah, I just don’t have my glasses.”

“I’ll get you some.” Thor had no idea how he would get glasses on this ship if he couldn’t manage Midgardian clothes, but the authority of telling Bruce he would was a boost to his ego he needed to have. Bruce mumbled an ‘m’kay thanks’ and turned back to his screen. Thor took the hint and started on his way to the bed, catching himself in the mirror.

Loki was correct, Thor looked exactly like a young shadow of father. A shadow, though, who had failed to leech off any of its owner’s wisdom. He furrowed his brow and brought his palm up to cover the patch. He sighed and dropped the palm, falling heavy onto the bed.

They were silent for a while, outside of Bruce muttering things to himself in excited hushes, and Thor fell into the vacuum of his head.

It felt like it had last time, his return to Asgard after Ultron when Odin had once again offered him the throne. He had ran then, and he wanted to run again, one more time, just deny a bit longer so he can soul search and wander and sleep around and be unplaced. Thor had never been particularly interested in the ‘king’ title once he had delved into what it entailed. ‘Prince’ was nice, it was royal, but vague on the responsibility, freedom and respect in a balance that fit his sensibilities. ‘King’ was too heavy on his shoulders, like a cloak he could never remove, cursed by heredity.

Thor sighed rougher than he had meant to and Bruce turned to him.

“Thor?”

Thor snapped back to the voices that existed outside of his head, “Huh?”

“You doing alright over there?” Bruce asked, stepping to the bed. Thor jolted up and fixed his spine to a ridgid straight line. He snapped his face into something neutral.

“Yep,” he said through tight lips. The bed dipped behind him and he turned to see Bruce next to him.

“You sure?”

Thor paused, then huffed and tossed his legs back up on to bed. Bruce echoed him and then they were close enough to touch shoulders, a head on each of the two pillows and four feet at the foot of the bed.

“I have a meeting with my councils tomorrow. As king.”

“That’s cool,” Bruce offered but Thor shook his head at the suggestion, “Oh.”

“I don’t know what I’ll say. They will have questions about our ‘future’ as a people and Earth’s systems, surely, and-and what am I supposed to say to that?” Thor said in a long chain, a release. He glanced over at Bruce, who was taking the wave of it with a smile.

“Well, what are your policies? Education? Defense?” Bruce was leaning into Thor, and Thor felt a warmth sprinkle across his cheeks. He turned his face down.

“Uh, teach good people, punch bad people?” Bruce gave him a wide-eyed look, on the brink of either a laugh or gasp, “One of your Peee-H-Dees isn’t in Asgardian government, is it?”

“Can’t say Penn State offers that one,” Bruce laughed lightly. Thor slammed a fist onto the bed, head swimming.

“Damn politics!” The words bellowed out of him, bursting tension that had been too compressed, and he felt a shift next to him. Bruce was pulling a knee up to his chest, face tucked behind it. Thor winced, “Sorry, I, Bruce-”

“Fine, it’s fine,” Bruce tossed his hands up about himself as his knee lowered. Thor’s shoulders slumped, “I can look some stuff up, if you’re, ah, that upset about it.”

“I’d thought I’d have longer, that Odin would be around longer, and I wouldn’t have to . . .”

Thor’s heart thump-thumped against his ribs as Odin, oppressive and all-knowing, took over his head. Odin the fighter, Odin the stoic, Odin the bold, Odin the gone.

“We can talk about your dad, if you want?” Bruce said. Thor had to think. Odin wasn’t ‘dad’, he was father, allfather, king. He tried to think about Odin in that context, ‘dad’, which felt foreign and dissociated to what his childhood had been.

“Father was a very good king. Powerful warrior, good with policy, good with the people, and . . .” Thor halted. There was something pushing at the front of his mouth, desperately, something fighting to be voiced. He realized, quite abruptly, what he meant to say, “and, he taught Loki and I none of this. He was this cold, confusing man, because everything was for the kingdom. Kingdom this, kingdom that! It was ridiculous. To him, we were the issue of my mother, and my mother, she was . . .”

Thor could see Frigga exactly in his mind’s eye. He felt the blonde curls she had been kind enough to pass down to him as they rested upon his shoulders. She was with him at all times, she had kissed his head before every battle, escorted him to every diplomatic dinner and grand ball. When he thought of Asgard, rather than the people or the place or the palace, it was her he saw. He wanted to cry, but blinked that away with more anger.

“My mother was a perfect woman, and I want so, so much to thank her, every day, but-but she did that without help. Father never helped. He was busy, with meetings, and that fucking, damned Odinsleep. He gave up us for Asgard, but I-I can’t! I won’t do that, I can’t be that king, I-I . . .”

Thor’s supply of bitter fuel died out and his words went with it. He was sure he must look spent after that, haggard deep in his soul after such a centuries old cleansing of thought. He whipped his head over his shoulder to check on Bruce. Thor found him with his head dipped down to the sheets, hands picking up clutches of it. Thor paled.

Thor had ruined it. He had scared off his only real Midgardian friend. He was a raging, screaming, rambling God that had terrified this fragile mortal. Thor scrambled on his feet for some grand apology, but stopped when Bruce lifted his head up.

“You-you don’t have to be your dad, okay? To rule, you don’t have to be him,” Bruce said, up on his feet by the end and coming closer to Thor. All Thor could do was nod as the silent, shaky force approached him.

“You’re gonna be a different a different king than Odin. My dad w-was awful, really awful, and I-I’m not him, right? I’m not awful, right? So you don’t have to be your dad,” Bruce barreled. Thor and him were staring at each other, brown burrowing into Thor’s blue with all its might. Then, Bruce faltered, and Thor was lost, “Sorry, I-this was about Odin and, ah, politics and Asgard. I made it about me again, didn’t I?”

Thor ducked in towards Bruce and placed a hand on his shoulder, quick to counter that.

“No! No, no, no, my friend,” Thor rushed.

“My dad-he . . . he did some really bad things,” Bruce whispered. Thor didn’t press past that. He knew he shouldn’t, not then. He was surging with an overpowering need to shelter Bruce from this, and his instincts told him that shutting up and letting Bruce say what he wanted to, if he wanted to, was the way to do that.

Thor felt something in his hand and glanced down to find Bruce’s palm in his own. Thor shared a quick exchange with Bruce, whom was equally shocked by the development, they both countered back and their hands were wrenched apart. They both laughed once they are seperated, like a balancer to their biting anger, and jumped to speak.

“I have research that-”

“I should go check on-”

Thor cut off first, smiling and giving Bruce a small nod, and head for the door. He didn’t know where he was going to go, but he did know he needed to keep Bruce to see just how much he was blushing.

#gammahammer #thorbruce #mcu #marvel #thunderscience #thruce #mutual pining #my sweet bois with daddy issues

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dotthings · 6 years

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Okay, about this “g*ncest” thing that just cropped up which makes me feel like I splintered back to the year 2006 and aren’t we over this by now...what that is is a bona fide example of toxic masculinity attitudes at work and being valorized by a small number of fans, mostly female.

First off, as far as I’m concerned, you are free to enjoy or write any type of fic you want, I don’t care. I’m not judging your fic tastes. I won’t insult you as a human being, attack you, send anon hate, or put this post on your tags or even any shared tags. Which is more than antis have done to respect my shipping but whatever.

However I disagree with the idea that there can be no discussion when fandom reinforces certain biases or ideas and tries to normalize them, without realizing how they’re reinforcing some real world level stuff that needs to be questioned. The discussion itself is valuable if you aren’t being a dick about it.

So you know how D*stiel fans get accused all the freakin’ time, endlessly, ad nauseam “you don’t respect male friendships! male friendships are rare and precious commodities in the media! why do you have to ruin it by making it gay!” (Sorry I need a moment to stop laughing). When the fact is D*stiel fans openly own their slash and own the gay and fling glitter, they don’t tend to apologize for it, instead of trying to mask the fact that it’s slash. Nobody is denying that close platonic male friendships can exist, either. But guess what, it is outright not toxic masculinity to see past heteronormative defaults to see how shipping two male friends together and seeing the potential for romance instead of by default ruling it out just because people are the same gender. It’s just not. It gets concerned trolled into the freakin’ ground as reinforcing toxic masculinity. It isn’t.

Which brings us to this g*ncest thing which, I stfg I thought we’d left behind in 2006. It’s an old fandom term that has outlived its need and outlived the context of the mores in fandom and society at the time that created it, like its related fic label concept, “smarm.”

“Smarm” isn’t the same definition as “smarmy.” The fandom definition of smarm is fic that depicts two people of the same gender being emotionally and physically close who are not in love and the intent is not romantic and not slash.

In other words, gen fic.

It depicts a platonic friendship or sibling bond.

It’s..gen fic. But for some reason, some felt they had to call it “smarm” because either it’s difficult to grasp that two men can be physically or emotionally close without it being slashy, or, fans who wanted to slash but self-shamed for it. They wouldn’t just call it a slash fic. Just like, it’s not w*ncest it’s g*ncest!!! Which somehow seems to assume itself a fest safe for anyone who isn’t into incest and just wants to celebrate the platonic sibling bond and...no, really, no. Probably be smarter to just host a Sam and Dean Gen Fic fest, which I’m sure exists, and hey, something for everyone, I’m not saying the g*ncest fest shouldn’t be allowed to continue, just pointing out why some people are bothered by it for reasons other than “you are ship shaming meanies!!”

There’s a big aspect of shame in smarm, and I’m arguing, to g*ncest.

The recent uptick of intensity in SPN fandom where w*incest fandom stans determinedly turn every single canon Sam and Dean moment into incest, and insist every story, every fic, every image, every concept about Sam & Dean’s bond is emotional w*incest is part of this toxic masculinity thing, the g*ncest issue, the smarm issue. A Sam and Dean image, boom, incest! The brothers are so in love! D*stiel fans are considered horrible for, y’know, reading romance into a shit-ton of usage of romantic tropes, canon pining, plot and dialogue and long arcs that map to romantic tropes, even overt shout-outs from other characters to the idea that Dean and Cas are a thing, but if Sam and Dean so much as stand next to each other it’s incest ftw.

There is such a thing as pre-slash and I find it a whole lot less squicky than smarm or g*ncest. I kind of like pre-slash because it owns the fact that romantic relationships don’t always have to manifest as sexy times, but why did we even call it pre-slash, why not just slash at a G or PG rating? I think this is becoming more of the norm, with slash shippers unapologetically posting slash fic at a G or PG rating. Readers are free to read into whatever they want into a gen fic, but if the author ships it and intends to put romance into it, but it isn’t about how the characters have sex or even kiss, they’re still romantically in love and they’re going to label it slash or pre-slash. I don’t see the need for the “pre” in that any more. No they aren’t kissing yet, no they aren’t having sex yet, but they are in love nonetheless.

Let go of the idea that a kiss or having sex is the only way to verify characters being in love.

Toxic masculinity isn’t the removal of heteronormative goggles that were probably fused to our faces from birth because that’s how our society is and being capable of imagining that two male friends in a story can fall in love the same way we imagine a man and woman can.

Toxic masculinity is when you are so determined that men--be it friends or siblings--cannot be close and it be, in fact, friendship or sibling love. It’s the equating of all male intimacy with a sexual and/or romantic bond. And I feel that a false narrative’s been allowed to prevail in SPN fandom that D*stiel fandom is deeply guilty of this when it’s not, while other groups that are doing this chronically, get a free pass.

I’d say it’s a pretty major example of toxic masculinity to insist that platonic w*incest is a thing, instead of just, y’know, Sam & Dean loving each other as siblings without hints of a romantic or sexual element. It’s toxic masculinity to slap the -cest slapping on every-freakin’-thing and then claim you’re being ship-shamed because you actually gate-keeped against fans who really just appreciate the sibling bond and don’t need any -cest to appreciate how close Sam and Dean are and appreciate that bond, and it’s pretty toxic to keep flinging a trigger in people’s faces every five minutes, openly, as if you own the entire fandom, and insist canon backs you up when in fact it’s gently shut you down on multiple occasions, and then expect absolutely nobody to be upset at you ever, and if anyone gets upset they’re ship-shaming you. That’s quite a big amount of entitlement, to assume that people aren’t allowed to be uncomfortable with something like incest.

Especially when you try to force LGBT ships that are non-trigger into the same mode, force a false equivalency, thus fetishizing the LGBT ships, and get offended if someone points out why a differentiation is sensible and necessary.

If you’re into Dean and Cas’s friendship and don’t see any romantic element, that’s gen. No really. It’s friendship fic. That’s not pre-slash. That’s not platonic D*stiel. You see a friendship. There is no such thing as platonic Destiel. Now, this gets tricky, because while that is 100% valid to feel that way, D*stiel is reaching a stage where not-shipping it is cool and all that, but if you vehemently deny there is any reason for other people to see more to it, you’re kind of having to ignore a hella lot of canon to keep those heteronormative goggles fused to your face, and no I am not accusing people who don’t ship it of being homophobic. Or of unconscious biases of being homophobic. We all have them. Talk about it, don’t insult people or shame them, sometimes it just takes a little bit to get people to understand. Others will never get there no matter what. Depends on the person.

There’s any number of het ships where I have eyes, I can see canon intent, I see they’re into each other, but I don’t care and I don’t ship it and I might enjoy genfic about that relationship or have them wind up as friends, I don’t ship it. There’s non-canon popular slash fics I don’t feel it or see it. I don’t yell down its shippers though. Its that simple. My advice is just don’t go screaming down D*stiel shippers with why must you ruin their friendship or claiming it’s toxic masculinity and going on about the sanctity of platonic male friendship which is just such a rare and precious flower in the media (sorry. pausing to lmfao again).

I also literally do not care how you see Sam and Dean’s relationship or if you ship that. I honestly do not care and I don’t make assumptions about you as a person (your fandom behavior over your ship might make me decide things about you). But...it’s still incest. I’m not ship-shaming. It’s incest. Why does this have to be explained over and over. You can ship whatever you want and should be allowed to have safe spaces for it but this assumption that everyone has to be 100% cool with such an obvious trigger and societal taboo or they’re hypocrites who don’t really believe in the “ship and let ship” they believe in...come on. “Ship and let ship” doesn’t mean be inconsiderate and it doesn’t mean you have to be comfortable with every ship in the fleet.

But SPN fandom has this lingering thing it can’t seem to let go of where systemically, it thinks incest and an LGBT ship should be treated exactly alike, and it has this thing where incest is being intrusively slapped onto every-freakin’-thing about Sam & Dean in spaces where fans can’t avoid it and it’s not behind a cut tag it’s not labeled, and if you aren’t into it you get mocked, and if you don’t watch only for the brother bond you get mocked, and this is coming from many of the same people who think an LGBT ship is identical to incest and from many of the same people who get offended if you point out why an LGBT ship isn’t like incest, and who get offended people ship that LGBT ship as well as from generalized anti-shippers who treat being a non-shipper like a superior badge of honor and who reinforce the gatekeeping that virulent incest shippers aim at D*stiel shippers while valorizing an incest ship, but this breed of anti-shippers are in total denial about doing it. (Note the distinction between anti-shipper and non-shipper).

But taking what is actually just gen fic about Sam & Dean being emotionally intimate or showing physical affection and insisting it needs a -cest on the end instead of just, y’know, being about a sibling bond...that’s where toxic masculinity comes in. Isn’t one of the whole major points of SPN’s narrative to deconstruct these perceptions of masculinity? To debunk the idea that men can’t be emotionally intimate? And please miss me with the idea that shipping D*stiel is somehow contrary to this. D*stiel is a part of that debunking because neither Dean nor Cas act like the media stereotypes of what bi (or ace or pan or whatever Dean and Cas might be) looks like. They started as friends, and became emotionally close before SPN canon got into the zone where it seems a lot more serious about possibly openly vocalizing or consummating the subtextual pining. Friends-to-lovers isn’t insisting all friends must be lovers. It’s fans identifying something in this particular pair of friends and in the narrative, in the canon, and don’t discard it just because of a heteronormative default that buys a slow burn will-they-won’t-they for m/f but sneers that same-gender potential romance is delusional.

Likewise if it’s Dean and Cas and someone slaps some form of slash label on it while refusing to own that they ship it and refusing to own there could be sexual attraction, instead of simply saying “it’s a gen fic I love their friendship” would also an example of toxic masculinity ideas and probably a lot of self-shaming about seeing and enjoying the slash in the first place. Dean and Cas friendship enthusiasts and Dean and Cas shippers actually get along pretty well (assuming no one is acting like a dick) and that, I think, is because there is such a powerful emotional component to the ship, and Dean and Cas friendship enthusiasts tend to be non-virulent and tend to be open-minded about why the shippers see more in it even if they don’t.

This should be also true of w*ncest fans and enthusiasts of the sibling bond because again, massive emotional component as common ground, but I feel like what’s happening is the more intense and virulent w*ncest fans are trying to draw such a hard line that if you aren’t into incest, there’s no space for you. This goes hand in hand with the virulently pro-codependency fans, who romanticize mental illness and then can’t seem to figure out why anyone is upset with them, and who think that anyone who isn’t into romanticizing mental illness hates the bro bond so they’ve swept out plenty fans who adore the sibling bond with their virulence.

Personally I find uncomfortable when fans insist that gen fic about two dudes being close needs to be some kind of pick-your-fighter-label form of slash instead of just owning it’s a celebration of close male friendship. Bromance is a stupid term and IMO part of toxic masculinity too.

There’s also the erasure of the fact that D*estiel is one of the least smut-driven ships. A recent study of ships with the highest smut content found w*ncest at the top and D*stiel barely even rated, and here’s the ironic part: virulently anti-destiel w*ncest fans and ship shamey non-shippers slapped D*stiel with a default assumption that it’s all about fapping material and two dudes getting it on and you just want to make spn into a porno and accuses D*stiel fandom of fetishizing m/m relationships when w*ncest is at the top of the smut pile. No I am not shaming you for enjoying smut. No I am not saying that a ship is superior for being less smutty. I’m very clearly objecting to the shaming and misconceptions of D*stiel fandom, which are often willfully perpetuated.

This misconception has stubbornly stuck in spn fandom and it’s incredibly annoying. Please join us in the year 2018. When so much of D*stiel is Dean and Cas not having sex but just being ridiculous and making heart-eyes and in denial and trying to figure this out and maybe they brush hands and blush, it’s almost Victorian. (Y’know, like the canon ha ha. Oh wait that’s not funny I’m serious). A lot of D*stiel fans write slash fic so they can get them to talk honestly with each other.

So sure, have your ficfests how you like, but I think it’s worth at least pointing out that this fixation with slapping the -cest label on everything is an example of toxic masculinity concepts at work, is normalizing incest to a ridiculous degree, is de-normalizing fans who really just appreciate a sibling bond, what with the stans insisting that w*ncest is just another term for their close emotional bond, *splutter* I don’t watch SPN for ships how dare you instead of, y’know, having the balls to own the fact that they’re intrigued by the incest ship. They shove it everywhere and disown it all in the same breath.

#mildew

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telugumovies2017jlxk417-blog · 5 years

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Some Brown followers and mystery aficionados may well sit and expend a full two plus a half hours and regard the Film as way too bland or way too… anti-climactic. Let's be obvious: “The Da Vinci Code” is undoubtedly an adaptation, so comparing the monitor Edition to your book won't make A lot feeling. Sure, be expecting the Motion picture being the same as All those Harry Potter publications, in which You can also find portions not included in the picture.

Around I have nothing versus guides becoming transformed into films, I beg to disagree about the argument that “The Da Vinci Code” just isn't loyal to the novel. If nearly anything, I feel movies counter 2019 the gist getting offered and held alive on the display is just appropriate and fitting, especially for whoever has not gotten near hearing the author’s title. Mainly, the plot requires a head get started in on the list of Louvre’s chambers, wherever a curator is murdered and has still left different enigmatic messages within the museum’s interiors for his granddaughter, Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), and symbologist, Robert Langdon, to find. In endeavor to find the offender, the pair is led right into a maze of clues and anomalous and elusive figures. Ultimately, These are attended by Sir Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellen), who turns out to become the nemesis (or even more suitably, considering the fact that this isn't that kind of pumped-up movies counter 2018 download suspense — the antagonist) ultimately.

As I've pointed out, this isn't precisely comparable to All those substantial-flying experience or sci-fi hits, with the many explosions and remarkable stunts, so anticipate zilch of These. It is possible to assume, even though, some vehicle chases during the streets of France and in the woods. But which is all contained while in the novel, in any case, and I doubt Howard would would like to considerably disappoint the viewers with a completely manufactured-above picture. I guess it is fairly sensible, in this feeling, to think that the film lacks some creatively driven climax or maybe a superior momentum. Certainly, these shortcomings all boil down to the pre-existence of The premise of The full Motion picture — the best-seller ebook.

What seriously will make the image worthwhile may be the mental stimulation you can get from absorbing all These facts and data in one sitting. Amazingly, the clarity and simplicity by which the data together with other historical accounts are laid out are commendable. Concerned about everything spiritual controversy? I assure you, there’s no must be queasy or not comfortable regardless of what religion (or not enough it) you belong to. Akiva Goldsman, the film’s screenwriter, has done a good work of making certain the audience also are retained on track Along with the plot rather than wander away with seemingly unfamiliar labels for instance Priory of Sion, Opus Dei or The Knights’ Templar.

Another place wherever “The Da Vinci Code” is considered to surpass other movies in its genre could be the computer graphics. I am not speaking about action-run, egoistically snazzy consequences. Just the inclusion of electronic graphics in the course of the brainstorming times of Langdon are by now and definitely extraordinary. The crew also deserves a thumbs up With regards to the remarkable established and background. I comprehend it is challenging to recreate a church’s inside, particularly if You're not allowed to shoot in a single (the original location, that is certainly). Not to mention that concurrently, you can also be embarking on One of the more predicted Film ventures of the final two many years (given that the discharge in the e book).

Alternatively, the main points may also look a tiny bit as well bluntly or certainly laid out, in this type of way that these are definitely alleged to be The complete place from the film. Properly, the details are of the essence, but as reiterated, the producers could have long gone a little farther, say an insertion of some inducing tunes or some scene-improving things, to lessen the monotony or even the tone down the nerd-like excellent of your movie. Some scenes could also do without the excessive drama or intellect, if you will, much like the 1 exactly where These are purported to retrieve the curator’s security deposit box and enter a specific code (lest They could never ever obtain use of the Significantly-coveted cryptex at any time). On the other hand, these are typically the directorial endeavours in putting some spice (or action) in the thriller hunt.

In regards to casting, “The Da Vinci Code” brings alongside one another an international cast, all of whom are fitting and outstanding in their roles. Pressure in the novel’s track record may have performed an element, but all in all, the actors are convincing as they may be and the Motion picture treats all characters on an equivalent footing. Certainly, I are unable to do without the need of commenting on Audrey Tatou’s attempts at English or perhaps the lousy haircut Tom Hanks has from the Film, but truth of the matter of your make any difference is, all of these shine inside the parts in which They may be designed to be shining. Heck, I even forgot my earlier distaste of Tom Hanks becoming casted as Langdon Once i saw how other actors are ideal for their respective roles. Choose, As an example, Ian McKellen. I can really truly feel his laid-again nevertheless enthusiastic solution, not only to your job from the Grail’s obssessive collector, but additionally in enjoying the element in the summer season Film.

Normally, “The Da Vinci Code” deserves an applause, not just for its relatively loyal adherence to the very best-vendor, and also for bringing together an ensemble efficiency and story that substantially understood (and shipped) the popularity and magnitude of your undertaking.

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youmightfindyourself · 7 years

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What follows is a version of a lecture given to the students of Columbia University’s writing programme in New York on Monday 24th March 2008. The brief: “to speak about some aspect of your craft.”

1. Macro Planners and Micro Managers

First, a caveat: what I have to say about craft extends no further than my own experience, which is what it is—12 years and three novels. Although this lecture will be divided into ten short sections meant to mark the various stages in the writing of a novel, what they most accurately describe, in truth, is the writing of my novels. That being said, I want to offer you a pair of ugly terms for two breeds of novelist: the Macro Planner and the Micro Manager.

You will recognise a Macro Planner from his Post-its, from those Moleskines he insists on buying. A Macro Planner makes notes, organises material, configures a plot and creates a structure—all before he writes the title page. This structural security gives him a great deal of freedom of movement. It’s not uncommon for Macro Planners to start writing their novels in the middle. As they progress, forwards or backwards, their difficulties multiply with their choices. I know Macro Planners who obsessively exchange possible endings for one another, who take characters out and put them back in, reverse the order of chapters and perform frequent—for me, unthinkable—radical surgery on their novels: moving the setting of a book from London to Berlin, for example, or changing the title. I can’t stand to hear them speak about all this, not because I disapprove, but because other people’s methods are always so incomprehensible and horrifying. I am a Micro Manager. I start at the first sentence of a novel and I finish at the last. It would never occur to me to choose among three different endings because I haven’t the slightest idea of the ending until I get to it, a fact that will surprise no one who has read my novels. Macro Planners have their houses largely built from day one, and so their obsession is internal—they’re forever moving the furniture. They’ll put a chair in the bedroom, the lounge, the kitchen and then back in the bedroom again. Micro Managers build a house floor by floor, discretely and in its entirety. Each floor needs to be sturdy and fully decorated with all the furniture in place before the next is built on top of it. There’s wallpaper in the hall even if the stairs lead nowhere at all.

Because Micro Managers have no grand plan, their novels exist only in their present moment, in a sensibility, in the novel’s tonal frequency line by line. When I begin a novel I feel there is nothing of that novel outside of the sentences I am setting down. I have to be very careful: the whole nature of the thing changes by the choice of a few words. This induces a special breed of pathology for which I have another ugly name: OPD or obsessive perspective disorder. It occurs mainly in the first 20 pages. It’s a kind of existential drama, a long answer to the short question What kind of a novel am I writing? It manifests itself in a compulsive fixation on perspective and voice. In one day the first 20 pages can go from first-person present tense, to third-person past tense, to third-person present tense, to first-person past tense, and so on. Several times a day I change it. Because I am an English novelist enslaved to an ancient tradition, with each novel I have ended up exactly where I began: third person, past tense. But months are spent switching back and forth. Opening other people’s novels, you recognise fellow Micro Managers: that opening pile-up of too-careful, obsessively worried-over sentences, a block of stilted verbiage that only loosens and relaxes after the 20-page mark is passed. In the case of On Beauty, my OPD spun completely out of control: I reworked those first 20 pages for almost two years. To look back at all past work induces nausea, but the first 20 pages in particular bring on heart palpitations. It’s like taking a tour of a cell in which you were once incarcerated.

Yet while OPD is happening, somehow the work of the rest of the novel gets done. That’s the strange thing. It’s as if you’re winding the key of a toy car tighter and tighter… When you finally let it go, it travels at a crazy speed. When I finally settled on a tone, the rest of the book was finished in five months. Worrying over the first 20 pages is a way of working on the whole novel, a way of finding its structure, its plot, its characters—all of which, for a Micro Manager, are contained in the sensibility of a sentence. Once the tone is there, all else follows. You hear interior decorators say the same about a shade of paint.

2. Other People’s Words, Part One

It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone. I gather sentences round me, quotations, the literary equivalent of a cheerleading squad. Except that analogy’s screwy—cheerleaders cheer. I put up placards that make me feel bad. For five years I had a line from Gravity’s Rainbow stuck to my door:

“We have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world, draw our own schematics, getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error, trying to learn the real function… zeroing in on what incalculable plot?”

At that time, I guess I thought that it was the duty of the novel to rigorously pursue hidden information: personal, political, historical. I say I guess because I don’t recognise that writer any more, and already find her idea of the novel oppressive, alien, useless. I don’t think this feeling is unusual, especially when you start out. Not long ago I sat next to a young Portuguese novelist at dinner and told him I intended to read his first novel. He grabbed my wrist, genuinely distressed, and said: “Oh, please don’t! Back then, all I read was Faulkner. I had no sense of humour. My God, I was a different person!”

That’s how it goes. Other people’s words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that their words prompted you to write. Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before. Other people’s words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you’re going.

Recently I came across a new quote. It’s my screen saver now, my little scrap of confidence as I try to write a novel. It is a thought of Derrida’s and very simple:

“If a right to a secret is not maintained then we are in a totalitarian space.”

Which is to say: enough of human dissection, of entering the brains of characters, cracking them open, rooting every secret out! For now, this is the new attitude. Years from now, when this book is done and another begins, another change will come.

“My God, I was a different person!”—I think many writers think this, from book to book. A new novel, begun in hope and enthusiasm, grows shameful and strange to its author soon enough. After each book is done, you look forward to hating it (and you never have to wait long); there is a weird, inverse confidence to be had from feeling destroyed, because being destroyed, having to start again, means you have space in front of you, somewhere to go. Think of that revelation Shakespeare put in the mouth of King John: “Now my soul has elbow room!” Fictionally speaking, the nightmare is losing the desire to move.

3. Other People’s Words, Part Two

Some writers won’t read a word of any novel while they’re writing their own. Not one word. They don’t even want to see the cover of a novel. As they write, the world of fiction dies: no one has ever written, no one is writing, no one will ever write again. Try to recommend a good novel to a writer of this type while he’s writing and he’ll give you a look like you just stabbed him in the heart with a kitchen knife. It’s a matter of temperament. Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra—they’ll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even. I am one of those. My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigour when I’m too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I’m syntactically uptight. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying so much about what Nabokov would say; pick up Dostoyevsky, patron saint of substance over style.

Yet you meet students who feel that reading while you write is unhealthy. Their sense is that it corrupts voice by influence and, moreover, that reading great literature creates a sense of oppression. For how can you pipe out your little mouse song when Kafka’s Josephine the Mouse Singer pipes so much more loudly and beautifully than you ever could? To this way of thinking, the sovereignty of one’s individuality is the vital thing, and it must be protected at any price, even if it means cutting oneself off from that literary echo chamber EM Forster described, in which writers speak so helpfully to one another, across time and space. Well, each to their own, I suppose.

For me, that echo chamber was essential. I was 14 when I heard John Keats in there and in my mind I formed a bond with him, a bond based on class—though how archaic that must sound, here in America. Keats was not working-class, exactly, nor black—but in rough outline his situation seemed closer to mine than the other writers I came across. He felt none of the entitlement of, say, Virginia Woolf, or Byron, or Pope, or Evelyn Waugh or even PG Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. Keats offers his readers the possibility of entering writing from a side door, the one marked “Apprentices Welcome Here.” For Keats went about his work like an apprentice; he took a kind of MFA of the mind, albeit alone, and for free, in his little house in Hampstead. A suburban, lower- middle-class boy, a few steps removed from the literary scene, he made his own scene out of the books of his library. He never feared influence—he devoured influences. He wanted to learn from them, even at the risk of their voices swamping his own. And the feeling of apprenticeship never left him: you see it in his early experiments in poetic form; in the letters he wrote to friends expressing his fledgling literary ideas; it’s there, famously, in his reading of Chapman’s Homer, and the fear that he might cease to be before his pen had gleaned his teeming brain. The term role model is so odious, but the truth is it’s a very strong writer indeed who gets by without a model kept somewhere in mind. I think of Keats. Keats slogging away, devouring books, plagiarising, impersonating, adapting, struggling, growing, writing many poems that made him blush and then a few that made him proud, learning everything he could from whomever he could find, dead or alive, who might have something useful to teach him.

4. Middle-of-the-Novel Magical Thinking

In the middle of a novel, a kind of magical thinking takes over. To clarify, the middle of the novel may not happen in the actual geographical centre of the novel. By middle of the novel I mean whatever page you are on when you stop being part of your household and your family and your partner and children and food shopping and dog feeding and reading the post—I mean when there is nothing in the world except your book, and even as your wife tells you she’s sleeping with your brother her face is a gigantic semi-colon, her arms are parentheses and you are wondering whether rummage is a better verb than rifle. The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen in it. Time collapses. You sit down to write at 9am, you blink, the evening news is on and 4,000 words are written, more words than you wrote in three long months, a year ago. Something has changed. And it’s not restricted to the house. If you go outside, everything—I mean, everything—flows freely into your novel. Someone on the bus says something—it’s straight out of your novel. You open the paper—every single story in the paper is directly relevant to your novel. If you are fortunate enough to have someone waiting to publish your novel, this is the point at which you phone them in a panic and try to get your publication date brought forward because you cannot believe how in tune the world is with your unfinished novel right now, and if it isn’t published next Tuesday maybe the moment will pass and you will have to kill yourself.

Magical thinking makes you crazy—and renders everything possible. Incredibly knotty problems of structure now resolve themselves with inspired ease. See that one paragraph? It only needs to be moved, and the whole chapter falls into place! Why didn’t you see that before? You randomly pick a poetry book off the shelf and the first line you read ends up being your epigraph—it seems to have been written for no other reason.

5. Dismantling the Scaffolding

When building a novel you will use a lot of scaffolding. Some of this is necessary to hold the thing up, but most isn’t. The majority of it is only there to make you feel secure, and in fact the building will stand without it. Each time I’ve written a long piece of fiction I’ve felt the need for an enormous amount of scaffolding. With me, scaffolding comes in many forms. The only way to write this novel is to divide it into three sections of ten chapters each. Or five sections of seven chapters. Or the answer is to read the Old Testament and model each chapter on the books of the prophets. Or the divisions of the Bhagavad Gita. Or the Psalms. Or Ulysses. Or the songs of Public Enemy. Or the films of Grace Kelly. Or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Or the liner notes to The White Album. Or the 27 speeches Donald Rumsfeld gave to the press corps during his tenure.

Scaffolding holds up confidence when you have none, reduces the despair, creates a goal—however artificial—an end point. Use it to divide what seems like an endless, unmarked journey, though by doing this, like Zeno, you infinitely extend the distance you need to go.

Later, when the book is printed and old and dog-eared, it occurs to me that I really didn’t need any of that scaffolding. The book would have been far better off without it. But when I was putting it up, it felt vital, and once it was there, I’d worked so hard to get it there I was loath to take it down. If you are writing a novel at the moment and putting up scaffolding, well, I hope it helps you, but don’t forget to dismantle it later. Or if you’re determined to leave it out there for all to see, at least hang a nice façade over it, as the Romans do when they fix up their palazzi.

6. First 20 Pages, Redux

Late in the novel, in the last quarter, when I am rolling downhill, I turn back to read those first 20 pages. They are packed tighter than tuna in a can. Calmly, I take off the top, let a little air in. What’s amusing about the first 20 pages—they are funny now, three years later, now I’m no longer locked up in them—is how little confidence you have in your readers when you begin. You spoon-feed them everything. You can’t let a character walk across the room without giving her backstory as she goes. You don’t trust the reader to have a little patience, a little intelligence. This reader, who, for all you know, has read Thomas Bernhard, Finnegans Wake, Gertrude Stein, Georges Perec—yet you’re worried that if you don’t mention in the first three pages that Sarah Malone is a social worker with a dead father, this talented reader might not be able to follow you exactly. It’s awful, the swing of the literary fraudulence pendulum: from moment to moment you can’t decide whether you’re the fraudulent idiot or your reader is the fraudulent idiot. For writers who work with character a good deal, going back to the first 20 pages is also a lesson in how much more delicate a thing character is than you think it is when you’re writing it. The idea of forming people out of grammatical clauses seems so fantastical at the start that you hide your terror in a smokescreen of elaborate sentence making, as if character can be drawn forcibly out of the curlicues of certain adjectives piled ruthlessly on top of one another. In fact, character occurs with the lightest of brushstrokes. Naturally, it can be destroyed lightly, too. I think of a creature called Odradek, who at first glance appears to be a “flat star-shaped spool for thread” but who is not quite this, Odradek who won’t stop rolling down the stairs, trailing string behind him, who has a laugh that sounds as if it has no lungs behind it, a laugh like rustling leaves. You can find the inimitable Odradek in a one-page story of Kafka’s called “The Cares of a Family Man.” Curious Odradek is more memorable to me than characters I spent three years on, and 500 pages.

7. The Last Day

There is one great advantage to being a Micro Manager rather than a Macro Planner: the last day of your novel truly is the last day. If you edit as you go along, there are no first, second, third drafts. There is only one draft, and when it’s done, it’s done. Who can find anything bad to say about the last day of a novel? It’s a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word. The last time it happened to me, I uncorked a good Sancerre I’d been keeping and drank it standing up with the bottle in my hand, and then I lay down in my backyard on the paving stones and stayed there for a long time, crying. It was sunny, late autumn, and there were apples everywhere, overripe and stinky.

8. Step Away from the Vehicle

You can ignore everything else in this lecture except number eight. It is the only absolutely 24-carat-gold-plated piece of advice I have to give you. I’ve never taken it myself, though one day I hope to. The advice is as follows.

When you finish your novel, if money is not a desperate priority, if you do not need to sell it at once or be published that very second—put it in a drawer. For as long as you can manage. A year or more is ideal—but even three months will do. Step away from the vehicle. The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat backstage with a line of novelists at some festival, all of us with red pens in hand, frantically editing our published novels into fit form so that we might go onstage and read from them. It’s an unfortunate thing, but it turns out that the perfect state of mind to edit your own novel is two years after it’s published, ten minutes before you go onstage at a literary festival. At that moment every redundant phrase, each show-off, pointless metaphor, all the pieces of deadwood, stupidity, vanity and tedium are distressingly obvious to you. Two years earlier, when the proofs came, you looked at the same page and couldn’t see a comma out of place. And by the way, that’s true of the professional editors, too; after they’ve read a manuscript multiple times, they stop being able to see it. You need a certain head on your shoulders to edit a novel, and it’s not the head of a writer in the thick of it, nor the head of a professional editor who’s read it in 12 different versions. It’s the head of a smart stranger who picks it off a bookshelf and begins to read. You need to get the head of that smart stranger somehow. You need to forget you ever wrote that book.

9. The Unbearable Cruelty of Proofs

Proofs are so cruel! Breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain. Proofs are the wasteland where the dream of your novel dies and cold reality asserts itself. When I look at loose-leaf proofs, fresh out of the envelope, bound with a thick elastic band, marked up by a conscientious copy editor, I feel quite sure I would have to become a different person entirely to do the work that needs to be done here. To correct what needs correcting, fix what needs to be fixed. The only proper response to an envelope full of marked-up pages is “Give it back to me! Let me start again!” But no one says this because by this point exhaustion has set in. It’s not the book you hoped for, maybe something might yet be done—but the will is gone. There’s simply no more will to be had. That’s why proofs are so cruel, so sad: the existence of the proof itself is proof that it is already too late. I’ve only ever seen one happy proof, in King’s College Library: the manuscript of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. Eliot, upon reaching his own point of exhaustion, had the extreme good fortune to meet Ezra Pound, a very smart stranger, and with his red pen Ezra went to work. And what work! His pen goes everywhere, trimming, cutting, slicing, a frenzy of editing, the why and wherefore not especially obvious, at times, indeed, almost ridiculous; almost, at times, indiscriminate… Whole pages struck out with a single line.

Underneath Pound’s markings, The Waste Land is a sad proof like any other—too long, full of lines not worth keeping, badly structured. Lucky Eliot, to have Ezra Pound. Lucky Fitzgerald, to have Maxwell Perkins. Lucky Carver, we now know, to have Gordon Lish. Hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable—mon frère! Where have all the smart strangers gone?

10. Years Later: Nausea, Surprise and Feeling OK

I find it very hard to read my books after they’re published. I’ve never read White Teeth. Five years ago I tried; I got about ten sentences in before I was overwhelmed with nausea. More recently, when people tell me they have just read that book, I do try to feel pleased, but it’s a distant, disconnected sensation, like when someone tells you they met your second cousin in a bar in Goa. I suspect White Teeth and I may never be reconciled—I think that’s simply what happens when you begin writing a book at the age of 21. Then, a year ago, I was in an airport somewhere and I saw a copy of The Autograph Man, and on a whim, I bought it. On the plane I had to drink two of those mini bottles of wine before I had the stomach to begin. I didn’t manage the whole thing, but I read about two-thirds, and at that incredible speed with which you can read a book if you happen to have written it. And it was actually not such a bad experience—I laughed a few times, groaned more than I laughed and gave up when the wine wore off—but for the first time, I felt something other than nausea. I felt surprise. The book was genuinely strange to me; there were whole pages I didn’t recognise, didn’t remember writing. And because it was so strange I didn’t feel any particular animosity towards it. So that was that: between that book and me there now exists a sort of blank truce, neither pleasant nor unpleasant.

Finally, while writing this lecture, I picked up On Beauty. I read maybe a third of it, not consecutively, but chapters here and there. As usual, the nausea; as usual, the feeling of fraudulence and the too-late desire to wield the red pen all over the place—but something else, too, something new. Here and there—in very isolated pockets —I had the sense that this line, that paragraph, these were exactly what I meant to write, and the fact was, I’d written them, and I felt OK about it, felt good, even. It’s a feeling I recommend to all of you. That feeling feels OK.

#writing #wall of text

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pelikinesis · 5 years

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They taught me how to write. BIG mistake (verily and forsooth, I am high).

Maybe because there are people out there who want to believe, that beings who appear to be monstrous, beings for whom all observable characteristics of their physical forms activate responses of disgust and fear, individuals who can be kinder and more knowable than the majority of their kind, people who can be a source of safety rather than danger, of joy rather than suffering. Maybe that’s the closest that their sense of self-preservation will allow their hearts to get to that amplitude?

Or maybe because monsters and aliens and demons, etc. are hot? Did you ever think about that?

Okokoakokyokokokayokokyaokokokyaokokyaokyaok but. But. BUT. BUT.

Wait no I’m forgetting it no I remember yes okso can you remember like the dumbest thought you’ve ever had? The most mundane surprise or sensible chuckle or blandest slice of cheesecake you’ve ever had, you know some real good shit that falls into the continuum between first world problems and a damned good day. Or just like, the worst pun you’ve come up with. That one time you actually stopped and smelled the roses instead of continuing with your policy of ignoring all cliché advice or just assuming said cliche advice is not worth doing at least as far as you’re concerned.

That mundane thing, that experience of remembering the reference to the movie Shrek that happened within the movie I Am Legend, for no reason, while stepping into the elevator for the parking lot of the shopping plaza off Main Street you used to go to in high school, that memory, that moment of experience which cooled down and air dried to become that memory, and also this whole fucking ping pong match of rocket-boosted travesties against the noble effort of articulating coherent thoughts as sapient beings in order to externalize the internal phenomena into a shared reality woven by our interactions with others of our species.

All that stuff happened, and could potentially happen again and again every freaking time someone reads this, or arrives here anyways through completely different means unassociated with this piece of writing and this act of writing and your experience of reading (except you aren’t but others are unless none of them did), as a result of the process that formed the known freaking Universe with stars and comets and Mars and Venus and Pluto and black holes and supernovae and the skeletons of all those dogs and chimpanzees some of the first unmanned but not un-animal’d space probes contained, and that one birthday balloon that the laws of probability dictate must either have existed, must inevitably exist, or currently exists right now, which floated away from the hand of its birthday girl and up into the sky and got blown even upperwards (which is a perfectly cromulent word) by a freak gust of wind into space, that ballo either is or will be up in space as well, and all that 99% of existence which is extraterrestrial in nature and astronomical in scope. Alllllllll that.

And all that was created in the same event and continues as the same process which were necessary for this piece of writing to exist, and for you to be born and educated in order for any of that to matter (as far as you’re concerned, also, hi. How ya doin’? I hope you’re living and loving [originally I misspelled ‘living’ and decided to keep the typo in] in a world that’s gained more than it has lost than the one I’m writing this from. I’m afraid it won’t be. Remember to stay hydrated, and time out of your day to do a little something for yourself, if you can afford to. Everything stops sounding cheesy once you remember how ephemeral our existences are. Don’t be afraid to like and be moved by things. Unless the thing is bigotry or fascism or whatever sociopolitical poison is fuelling and amplifying the ills of your time. Something like Trumpanomics, or neoneoneoliberalism, or Let’s Continue Never Progressing Past Societies With Egregious Wealth Disparities, Political Corruption, Concentration Camps, and Genocide Denial, Because That Sounds Hard And Like We’d Have to Work On Our Enormous Collective Flaws In Part By Shining A Spotlight On Those Responsible As Well As The Systems That Perpetuate and Incentivize Them. Be moved in the opposite direction of those, because they suck. I really hope you don’t have to deal with any of that over when you’re from. Anyways, I hope you feel a little braver after reading this. I have no idea why you would, it’s not like I began writing this thinking “I feel like trying to inspire the HELL out of some kid taking a Early 21st Century Literature Class right now” because I am reasonably confident, at the time of this writing, that no one else EVER has had that thought, and if I’m wrong, then clearly I’m too committed to my own particular latitude of willful ignorance and desperate sense of self-importance to entertain that alternative possibility, but I have to say, this feels pretty good. Maybe because being high feels good. But not too high. But WHY does being high feel so good? Well, it does to me. I have a lot of friends who do not share that opinion. I guess it’s like asking why some people think celery tastes good, when they’re wrong.) And if nothing else, this is still easier to read and understand than 99% of books and articles written by philosophical scholars, even if it’s not as profound. But if this isn’t profound but what they say is profound then what is profundity and why do I need to pretend to like it?

As for why I just took a teensy hit from my vape pen (HAHAHHAA yeah, suck it, nerds and students of the future! I, Marc Cid, who is clearly a revered and iconic author of the new millennium [unless the millennium beginning in the year 2000 AD is no longer considered the new millennium in which case wow holy shit, what year is it over there? I’m impressed that you’ve managed to translate what to you is our equivalent of Ye Olde Englishe, unless you didn’t, in which case this looks like a bunch of gibberish and your finest paleolinguistic scholars have all been staring at this fossil of a text file all like “Ah yes, the fabled shibboleth of The Mad Poet, Marc--I mean, of the Incredibly Mildly Pleasant, Profound, and Manbun-sporting Poet, Marc Cid. For centuries, scholars of yore thought it lost to the sands of time, in the wake of the great InternetQuake of the year 2030, predicted by him in the very fabled shibboleth of which I am currently gawking at in a museum in the future but I can’t read that this is totally going to happen at a period in time far beyond its writing.

...Okay, that one got away from me and it would take soooooooo much effort to try to wrestle it back. If it really bothers you, then YOU can finish it, I don’t even care. Hey, English professors in the future! Yeah, I’m talking to you. Make this an assignment for your students, that they have to finish that last paragraph. In the English of my time!!! Or whatever other contemporary languages, that wouldn’t be fair to people from other places that don’t speak what I supposed I’d have to describe as “Future English” because even though I’m predicting all of this with absolute confidence it will happen, I can’t predict the exact name of “Future English.” Well, I don’t mind taking a guess, or three. Okay here goes, 1-2-3: I think Future English will be called Quenya, Sindarin, or It’s Not Delivery, It’s DiGiorno.

#highblogging #nobody should read this ever #anime was a mistake #Cukoloris #gibbous #Dr. Robert Liston

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foolish-arachni-blog · 7 years

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eleven Origins of eleven Super Mario Characters' Names

Nintendo heroes produce their VR (arcade) debut with fresh Vive-driven Mario Kart

Bandai Namco revealed a virtual simple fact model of Mario Kart, Mario Kart Arcade GP VR, that is going to make the debut of its over a VR arcade the company is opening using Tokyo, Japan next month.

The game appears to mark the VR debut of one of Nintendo's flagship franchises, nevertheless, it's essential to observe it's licensed by Nintendo as well as developed by Namco - just like the non-VR predecessor of its, Mario Kart Arcade GP.Few specifics are still obtainable in English concerning the game, nevertheless, it's mentioned around the arcade's site as running on HTC Vive headsets and also specially-designed racing seats.

Nintendo has so far been publicly reticent concerning the promise of VR - previous year frontman Shigeru Miyamoto told investors that for VR wearing particular, we're continuing our research, along with looking into enhancement and have a thoughts to how the present key products of ours are meant for being played for a rather lengthy period of time of time.

We're exploring the options of providing an experience that offers value when played for a short time, he continued. And the way to do away with the concerns of long-duration use.

When I found that out I did 2 things. For starters, I whipped out my copy (yes, I keep it that real/nerdy which I continue to have an old NES hooked up in my room) and made certain I will be able to beat the game at will. (I can. Childhood not wasted.)

Secondly, I launched down a rabbit hole of looking through Mario internet sites as well as Wikis and Articles. In the operation, I stumbled upon the etymologies of the labels of several of the main players in the Mario universe. Consequently, in honor of the video game that changed the world, in this article they are, presented in handy 11 item list form.

Mario.

When Mario debuted to the arcade game "Donkey Kong", he was just known as Jumpman. (Which even happens to be the generic brand regarding that Michael Jordan spread leg Nike logo. Two of the most legendary icons ever both have generic versions of themselves known as Jumpman. But only one has today arrived at the effort of simply being so impressive that he shaved himself a Hitler mustache prior to filming a commercial and the balls were had by not one person to correct him.)

In 1980, as the Nintendo of America crew brought in Jumpman to lift him straight into a franchise-leading star (Hayden Christensen style), an individual noticed that he looked like their Seattle office building's landlord... a guy known as Mario Segale.

Mario Segale did not obtain a dime for becoming the namesake of probably the most famous video game persona ever, however, he probably is not very concerned; in 1998 he sold the asphalt small business of his for more than $60 million. (Or 600,000 additional lives.)

Luigi.

Luigi actually has one of probably the weakest name roots of most of the mario brothers characters in the Mario universe (once again displaying exactly why, in life that is real, he'd have a greater inferiority complex compared to Frank Stallone, Abel or even that third Manning brother).

"Luigi" is simply the product of a team of Japanese men attempting to consider an Italian label to enhance "Mario." Why was that the Italian brand they went with? When they all moved from Japan to Seattle, the pizza area closest to the Nintendo headquarters known as Mario & Luigi's. (It has since gone from business.)

Koopa.

Koopa is a transliterated version of the Japanese name for the opponent turtles, "Kuppa." Stick with me here -- kuppa is the Japanese term for a Korean plate known as gukbap. Basically it's a cup of soup with elmer rice. From what I tell it's totally not related to turtles, above all malicious ones.

In an interview, Mario's author, Shigeru Miyamoto, stated he was deciding between three labels that are distinct for the race of evil turtles, each one of which have been named after Korean foods. (The alternative 2 were yukhoe and bibimbap.) Which means among two things: (one) Miyamoto likes Korean food and needed to give it a tribute or even (two) Miyamoto thinks Koreans are evil and must be jumped on.

Wario.

I sort of overlooked the debut of Wario -- he debuted in 1992, right around when I was hitting the era just where I was too awesome for cartoon y Nintendo games. (Me and my middle school buddies were into Genesis just. I was again on Nintendo within four years.)

Seems his name operates both in english and Japanese; I kinda assumed the English way but did not know about the Japanese element. In English, he is an evil, bizarro world mirror image of Mario. The "M" turns to be a "W" as well as Wario is born. The name additionally works in Japanese, when it is the variety of Mario and "warui," that means "bad."

That is a pretty good situation, since, as I covered extensively in the list 11 Worst Japanese-To-English Translations In Nintendo History, don't assume all language distinction finesses back and also forth very smoothly.

Waluigi.

When I 1st seen "Waluigi" I believed it was hilarious. While Wario became an all natural counterbalance to Mario, Waluigi believed so comically shoehorned (just tacking the "wa" prefix before Luigi) -- like a huge inside joke that somehow cleared each and every bureaucratic phase and cracked the mainstream.

Well... in accordance with the Nintendo men and women, Waluigi is not only a gloriously idle decision or maybe an inside joke become massive. They *say* it's based on the Japanese phrase ijiwaru, which means "bad guy."

I do not know. I feel like we'd have to cater for them more than halfway to get that.

Toad.

Toad is built to look as a mushroom (or toadstool) because of the gigantic mushroom hat of his. It is a great thing the games debuted before the entire generation realized how you can make penis jokes.

Anyway, in Japan, he's called Kinopio, which happens to be a blend of the name for mushroom ("kinoko") as well as the Japanese version of Pinocchio ("pinokio"). Those combine to be something around the collections of "A Real Mushroom Boy."

Goomba.

In Japanese, the men are known as kuribo, which regularly results in "chestnut people." That is sensible because, ya know, if somebody requested you "what do chestnut individuals look like?" you would most likely reach something nearly like the figures.

When they had been brought in for the American version, the staff stuck with the Italian initiative of theirs and called them Goombas... primarily based off of the Italian "goombah," which colloquially means something like "my fellow Italian friend." Furthermore, it sort of evokes the picture of low-level mafia criminals without too numerous competencies -- such as individuals younger brothers as well as cousins who they'd to work with or perhaps mom would yell at them. Which also goes for the Mario Bros. goombas.

Birdo.

Birdo has practically nothing to do with this particular initial Japanese title. Right now there, he's considered Kyasarin, that typically results in "Catherine."

In the training manual for Super Mario Bros. two, where Birdo debuted, the persona explanation of his reads: "Birdo believes he's a girl and additionally would like to become named Birdetta."

What In my opinion this all means? Nintendo shockingly decided to generate a character that battles with his gender identity and referred to as him Catherine. In the event it was time to show up to America, they got cold feet so they determined at the last second to call him Birdo, though he's a dinosaur. (And do not provide me the "birds are descended from dinosaurs" pop-paleontology series. Not shopping for that connection.) In that way, we would just understand about his gender confusion if we read the mechanical, and the Japanese were fairly certain Americans were sometimes too idle or perhaps illiterate to accomplish that en masse.

Princess Toadstool/Peach.

When we all got released to the Princess, she was regarded as Princess Toadstool. I guess this made good sense -- Mario was put in the Mushroom Kingdom, so why would not its monarch be named Princess Toadstool. Them inbreeding bluish bloods are always naming their young children immediately after the country.

Nobody seems to be sure why they went the guidance, however. In Japan, she was regarded as Princess Peach from day one. That name didn't debut here until 1993, when Yoshi's Safari became available for Super Nintendo. (By the way -- have you played Yoshi's Safari? In an off-the-wall twist it is a first-person shooter, the only one in the entire Mario times past. It's like the equivalent of a country music superstar putting out a weird rock album.)

Bowser.

In Japan, there is simply no Bowser. He is simply called the King Koopa (or maybe similar modifications, including Great Demon King Koopa). And so exactly where did Bowser come from?

During the import method, there was a problem that the American masses wouldn't see how the little turtles and big bad fellow could certainly be known as Koopa. So a marketing team developed many options for a name, they adored Bowser the very best, and slapped it on him.

In Japan, he is still rarely known as Bowser. Over here, the name of his is now extremely ubiquitous that he is even supplanted Sha Na Na's Bowzer as America's many prominent Bowser.

Donkey Kong.

This is a much more literal interpretation than you think. "Kong" is based off King Kong. "Donkey" is a family-friendly method of calling him an ass. That is right: His label is a valuable model of "Ass Ape."

Fantastic Mario Bros. is a video game introduced for the family Computer and Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985. It shifted the gameplay far from its single-screen arcade predecessor, Mario Bros., along with instead highlighted side scrolling platformer concentrations. Though not the very first game on the Mario franchise, Super Mario Bros. is the most famous, along with introduced various set staples, from power ups, to timeless adversaries as Goombas, to the standard premise of rescuing Princess Toadstool out of King Koopa. Along with kicking raised a few inches off a complete number of Super Mario platformer video games, the wild good results of Super Mario Bros. popularized the genre as a complete, helped revive the gaming sector as soon as the 1983 footage game crash, and was mainly accountable for the first good results on the NES, with that it was bundled up a launch title. Until eventually it had been ultimately surpassed by Wii Sports, Super Mario Bros. was the very best marketing video game of all of the time for almost three decades, with more than 40 million duplicates sold internationally.

#mario brothers characters

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