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spicysix · 11 months

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「eddie munson X gn!reader • roadtrip!AU」

2.7k words | prev | next | masterlist | ao3 warnings: trauma bonding! mentions of violence, of torture and of near-death experiences. also, they're both kinda in a bad mood. a nightmare will do that to ya songs of the chapter: ambrosia - carole king • move on - david bowie • i wanna be somebody (and the entire self titled album) - W.A.S.P.

Friday, July 25

Eddie Munson was a hard-headed prick.

Not completely, no, you’d find out already he could be convinced at some point, but it took a while. And you figured the morning after your night in Sioux Falls that he was actually being really nice until then. Because on topics that were more important to him, the man was tougher to break than a brick wall.

One of those topics? His van.

Because Eddie’s back was still not completely recovered from the night he’d spent on the front bench of the van, and because of his nightmare that had kinda ruined his night, you told him you should drive the van to your next stop so he could get some more rest.

And, oh boy, was he relentless about that.

He wasn’t like Steve and the Bimmer, it wasn’t about jealousy or fear of you breaking something or getting something dirty. No, it had to do with the mechanics.

You had both woken up early, thankfully, for he had spent almost an entire hour speeching and groaning and basically throwing a tantrum about how the van was old, bratty, difficult, damaged, faulty. And how the van needed certain specific things to engage, to accelerate, to break, to park. And how the van had tricks and wiles and gimmicks to work.

You heard it all silently, nodding, not doubting him for a second even though his dramatics were off the charts. Only after his show was over and he had thoroughly explained everything about the van’s problems more than once, only then you asked him to show you, and if you could try. He showed you, also complaining the whole time, and then you tried.

And managed it just fine.

“Shouldn’t doubt my expertise, Eddie,” you winked at him — your grandma would call you smug — and he grimaced with a blush to his ears while you left the parking lot you were practicing on and headed for the road. You were cackling the whole time.

You took the I-90 and headed east, as Eddie had been doing since Chicago — on purpose or not, you didn’t know. Leaving the prairies behind and welcoming the great plains’ monotony, the beauty of the Missouri River once you crossed it again, the sun high and almost oppressive above you.

You were still a little tired yourself, but Eddie let you choose the music once again, bobbed his head to Bowie’s voice and hid a wide grin behind his hand as he stared at the window’s landscape, took a nap after two or three songs, and it was all right.

── ⇌ • ○ • ⇋ ──

“You ever been to Yellowstone?” he asked, reading a pamphlet while you gathered some food supplies into your basket.

You had stopped around midday in a town right by the border to Wyoming for a bathroom break and to get some snacks for lunch and for the rest of the road. The mid-summer brought its peak, and so the little town was unusually full of people going and coming from all kinds of nature adventures and travels.

“Do I look like someone who has ever been to Yellowstone National Park on a family vay-cay, Eddie?” you answered without sparing him a look, an abnormal tone of sarcasm in your voice because, yeah, maybe family vay-cays were a triggering topic to you. And you were a little hungry, which in turn got you a little over-annoyed.

Eddie didn’t know any of that, though, and you instantly regretted the way you said it.

“I don’t know you very well, sweetie,” he retorted just as ironically, the nickname raised in pure poison, and it hurt more than you cared to think about in depth. “All I know is that you’ve probably worked at every single retail job in Hawkins, that you go to mine’s to buy… stuff every four months or so without much small talk, that you, Harrington and Buckley are glued at the hip and that we’ve stopped the world from ending together. Nothing else.”

You stopped your strolling through the market’s aisle and turned to him, sighing.

“I’m sorry, Eddie, that wasn’t nice of me. No, I’ve never been to Yellowstone. I’d really like to, though.”

He seemed to be caught off-guard by your sudden sincerity and stuttered some words that he couldn’t completely form.

“And I’m sorry if I never stopped for a conversation when I went to buy stuff from you. I should have.” You took a step further, getting closer to him, and he looked truly startled. Was he really this unfamiliar with apologies?

“Yeah, no, I-” He closed his eyes and sighed loudly, “You’re alright. I was just thinking about it…” He went back to the initial topic, maybe not wanting to linger on the emotional aspect of the conversation since he’d been enough emotionally vulnerable the night before, and waved the pamphlet about tourist spots in Wyoming right in your face.

You caught the pamphlet in your hands, handing Eddie the shopping basket for him to hold instead, and examined it. You went through its pages quickly but with enough attention to catch the most important pieces of information.

“We could give it a call and see if we can make a reservation? It’s unlikely since we’re in high season, but we can give it a try?” you asked, looking at him again and he was still looking at you as if you were a hard puzzle to solve.

He cleaned his throat, “Yeah, sure, we can do that.”

“Not like we have anywhere specific to be or a deadline to meet, right?” You winked, handed him the pamphlet and took the basket back, continuing on your shopping spree, back with your enthusiasm. “We gotta stop by the camping supply store!”

His laugh reverberated through the isle and into a little warm space between your ribs as he went after you with a muttered ‘Fucking Yellowstone, man’ under his breath; following your plans once again, giving you his trust so openly, and you wondered if you even deserved it. Probably not, but you’d take it either way.

── ⇌ • ○ • ⇋ ──

Everything fell into place perfectly in a summer miracle as you used a payphone to call the reservations number for a camping ground on Grant Village, a last-minute cancellation from a couple that had given you and Eddie the opportunity of a lifetime — you were also able to make a reservation for dinner on the Grant Village Dining Room for your first night. And as it seemed, the entirety of South Dakota’s population had decided to go camping all at once and left you and Eddie the final tent to buy at the store. You also bought other basic camping supplies that you didn’t have and deemed important. That government hush money was making itself very useful.

Eddie assured you he was fine to drive and so he took the wheel for the rest of your trip for that day — it was too early to stop yet, but Yellowstone was too far away still, so you’d find another place to spend another night. Your reservation in the National Park also didn’t start until the next day, so you’d have to wait anyway.

You were once again delegated to co-pilot duties, reading the map and giving Eddie directions. You also picked a tape of his own for the soundtrack this time.

Not even an hour in, something caught your eye on the map in your hands. “Eddie, what do you think about a lake day?” He chuckled and shrugged in response. “Look, there’s a lake less than ten miles from here.”

“Let’s go, then.” He didn’t take his eyes off the road to check where you were pointing at the map, just followed your instructions.

You drove for just a little while until you reached an exit with a plaque that read ‘Pine Haven’. In about 20 minutes, after a few more turns, some decision-making about which way to go, and the payment of a fee for entering the State Park, you were the closest you could get to the lake, in what looked like a growing little town with a few houses built. Eddie parked the van a little further away from the road and you both left it, you stretching your arms and legs as he went around to meet you on your side.

A man approached you, introduced himself as Coop, pointed at his house — told you to knock if you needed anything — and then pointed to the best way to the lake (actually a reservoir). He told you all about the region, the State Park, the reservoir, his family; and you and Eddie were enchanted by his hospitality, the fact that he barely batted an eye about the weird combination that the two of you were. So when he invited you to stop by later for a shower and dinner, you didn’t hesitate to say yes.

After that, you and Eddie changed clothes to more appropriate ones in the back of the van and walked a few more minutes until you were finally facing the reservoir waters. Eddie found the nearest tree and rested under its shadow in no time, taking his notebook and a pack of cigarettes from his jeans pocket. You came to leave your supplies by his side and looked around. There were a few families, not many, it was very quiet and you were glad. On the other margin, though, you could see a few more people — Coop had told you the roads were more accessible and the state park was first established there, making it more popular. But you liked that you were on a more recluse part of the reservoir.

You stripped to the top and sports shorts you had changed into — intuitively, subconsciously, somehow you had brought many useful clothes so far — and covered yourself in sunscreen. Eddie had sunglasses on and seemed to be invested in whatever he was scribing in his notebook, but you felt his eyes burning on you from time to time as you turned your back to him. It made you smile for some reason (your grandma would call it wishful thinking).

He was still wearing dark jeans, they seemed more ripped, but less tight than the ones you had seen him using before, and so he rolled the hems up, took off his Reeboks, and buried his feet in the rocky sand. On his torso, he had a white tank — a surprisingly bright color, but you guessed an all-black look would make it unbearably hot for him. The scars on his neck that went up the left side of his jaw to his cheek were pink in the sunlight, but he didn’t seem to mind showing them off.

You approached him and offered the sunscreen: “You should take care of those battle scars, Eddie. They’ll likely be more sensible.”

He looked up at you, eyes still hidden behind the sunglasses (unfortunately, for he had pretty eyes you’d like to be seeing) but he accepted your offer and protected his scars and uncovered arms.

“How come you don’t have any battle scars yourself, soldier?” he asked, still spreading cream while you stretched your limbs.

“Mine are just covered.” You pulled up the hem of your shorts on your left leg and showed him the bite marks you had received from the bats on your first encounter with them when you all went after Steve into Lovers Lake. Turned around and pulled the fabric of your top that covered the bites on your right shoulder blade as well. “I was the one who got Dustin and Erica out back in Starcourt, so. No Russian torture for me as well, luckily.”

You draped a towel on the sand and lied down on it, ready to catch a tan. Your sun marks wouldn’t look pretty, but you weren’t so worried about that.

“If you hadn’t cut the rope, maybe we would be matching,” you said finally, before closing your eyes and enjoying the burning on your skin.

Eddie didn’t answer you. You didn’t intend for it to come out in a mean way, but maybe that’s how he interpreted it. And maybe you weren’t sorry for that — he could use a little snarl.

You were on his team with Dustin in the final battle. You were there because you had been able to protect Dustin once before, and you were trusted to do it again.

Which you did. You kept Dustin safe.

But you couldn’t keep Eddie safe, because he had cut the rope made of sheets after you fell through the portal, and left you and Dustin in the Rightside Up as he went back and faced those demonic bats all by himself in the Upside Down. If he hadn’t acted so impulsively, maybe you could have gone with him. Maybe the two of you would have been a more fair fight against the swarm of bats. Maybe he wouldn’t have almost died, maybe you wouldn’t have to see Dustin crying over his limp bloody body, maybe you wouldn’t have your own nightmares about that night.

You tried not to dwell on it.

You tried not to blame Eddie for it.

You tried not to blame yourself for it.

“You slept on my bed last night?” he chose to ask after a little while in silence, his voice a little shaky, and you bit your lip to stop your own eyes from tearing up before answering. You didn’t like talking about it, and maybe neither did he.

“No, I waited until you slept and went back to mine.”

You left out the part that you watched him sleep for hours, he didn’t need to know. You didn’t need to scare him like that. To make him aware that you were afraid he would stop breathing at any second, that his skin would go cold and his heart would stop beating. Like it had happened before.

No, he didn’t need to know that his worse nightmare was the same as your own.

He made a noise in acknowledgment and you took a deep breath and focused on the sun kissing your skin and the laughter of the kids playing in the water a few feet away. He focused on whatever he was doing, and you kept it to yourselves whatever was plaguing your thoughts. The air was crisp with tension, and you hated it, but you tuned it out. You could talk about it later.

── ⇌ • ○ • ⇋ ──

You didn’t talk about it later.

You didn’t talk about how neither of you dared to go diving in the lake, how you lingered on the margins, only going as further as to where the water reached your knees.

You didn’t talk about how Eddie didn’t take off his tank top.

You didn’t talk about how a couple walked past the two of you and stared too openly and too rudely at Eddie’s facial scars.

You didn’t talk about how you asked just as rudely what the hell they were staring at. But he smiled gratefully at you for it.

You didn’t have to talk about it. You knew how each other felt.

So he dragged you to a more hidden part among the trees and shared a joint with you. You laughed about nonsense together and went back to Coop’s house still giggling. You shared a towel for your showers because Betty (Coop’s wife) only had one to spare and you didn’t mind. You shared a couch during dinner because the table was already filled with Coop’s family and some other welcomed tourists, and you both received tight hugs from Betty before you went back to the van for the night.

You thought it best not to take the tent out of its package, both of you too high and afraid you wouldn’t be able to put it back later — and forgetting about the entirely available back of the van. Oh, well.

You both agreed to sleep on the same mattress, as much space between you as possible, backs turned to each other. After what felt like enough time, after you noticed that he was already asleep, you turned slowly not to wake him and stared at his back for a while. The repetitive movement of his muscles was soothing, and you matched your breath to his. The warmth of his skin still radiated and reached you somehow, even with the distance still fairly big between you two. And his calm, even breathing rhythm scared away your fears.

None of you had bad dreams that night.

end notes: i've made way too much research about this area of Wyoming for this chapter. Pine Haven was actually only Incorporated as a town by december of '86. I have no idea how the town looked months before that, so I didn't describe it a lot, made it vague on purpose. fun fact: Coop is the actual name of the guy who, alongside his wife Betty, founded Pine Haven back in the 50s - at least that’s what the town’s official website told me lmao. i obviously have no idea if they were actually this nice, but i wanted them to be a very wholesome and welcoming couple for the sake of the fic. also! let's suspend our disbelief, i know the chances of them being able to get a last minute reservation on what's probably the most popular national park in the US was very unlikely if not completely impossible. but everything is doable in a fic-world, right? right. to yellowstone we go, then

taglist (is open!): @amira0303 @rupsmorge @wyverntatty

#eddie munson x reader #eddie munson #eddie munson fanfic #eddie munson fic #eddie munson fluff #stranger things fanfic #stranger things fic #eddie munson x you #eddie munson x y/n #lui writes #ifligh

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lalabits · 2 months

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Holiday Break Productivity

As a lady born in the year of the "Horse" 🐎, it is a natural characteristic of ours to always do something productive, even during breaks. This holiday break should have been a rest or game day for me, but instead I practiced my drawing skill and continued reading "Ikigai," which I hadn't opened in weeks.

I've been practicing different "emotions or feelings" in chibi, as I haven't drawn chibis in a while.

I used to sketch "anime" rather than chibis or illustration back in elementary because I was a big fan of ✨ 90s anime ✨ like Fushigi Yuugi, Ghost Fighter, Ranma 1/2, Flame of Recca, Hell Teacher Nūbē, Oh my Goddess!, Sakura CardCaptor, Boys Be, Gatekeepers, Slam Dunk, HunterxHunter, Sailor Moon, and many more.

Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of my sketches today because I used to draw on notebooks or pad papers - I remember back in primary school, my classmates would pay me PHP 5.00 - 20.00 💰💰💰 (yup! business-minded since I was a kid 🤣) to draw their favorite anime which technically honed my skill in creating anime art and marketing/sales, but as I grew older, I outgrown drawing animes and now I prefer to draw still life or illustrations/chibis since I love anything kawaii and sketching beautiful landscape or places.

Book Review: Ikigai (Chapter 1 to 3)

I promised myself to finish this book by May 🎯; please don't get me wrong, on why I'm still not done reading this book its because I didn't have a time for reading this past few weeks due to my workload (my job), but this holiday I made sure to allocate 3-4 hours just to read this book and discovered that...

Ikigai is one of my favorite book out of my 7 new self-development books and I am now currently on Chapter 4: How to turn work and free time into space of growth - very timely to what I need nowadays, isn't it? 😀

To give you an idea why I love this book so far, one of the reason is that it tackles on how we determine our life's purpose and reasons to live more, like the centenarians in Okinawa, Japan. It also emphasize the importance of maintaining physical health by staying active even after we reach the age of 60, since sedentary lifestyle can lead to hypertension, imbalanced diet, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, and even some cancers. Sleep plays an important role in how we can slow the aging process and build our immune system because "melatonin" is a powerful antioxidant in our bodies that contains an ingredient that protects us from cancer, Alzheimer's disease, aging, and other diseases.

This book also discussed "Logotherapy," a therapy developed by Victor Frankl that focuses on people's search for meaning in life. Unlike other therapies, logotherapy takes a spiritual approach. Frankl's logotherapy incorporates three philosophical and psychological concepts: freedom of will, will to meaning, and meaning in life.

Freedom of will asserts that we have the ability to chose and take action in response to both internal and external circumstances.

Will to meaning states that we have the freedom to follow our goal and purposes in life, which means this is our major motive for existing and doing, allowing us to bear pain and suffering.

Meaning in life is a subjective experience, but the meanings exist within us and waiting to be realized by us in any moment or in any situation.

One of the therapies that this book also tackles is the "Morita Therapy," a therapy based on the Buddhist perspective and developed by Dr. Shoma Morita, wherein the therapy focuses more on accepting the fluctuations of thoughts and feelings, embracing negative emotions, and learning how to blend with nature - if you ask me, it is quite similar to what we've learned from Grandmaster Lao Tzu (Taoism) which is

"Go with the flow, Be like water 🌊"

Sounds very profound, isn't it? 🤔 The first time I heard that, I was perplexed: how and why be like water? Then our Grandmaster taught us the value of being fluid, soft, and flexible in any situation, just like water, which takes shape wherever you put it and can adjust to any environmental changes.

Change is inevitable and if you resist it, problems will arise in your life and that's why our ancient philosophers taught us the importance of adaptability, because change is constant and not fixed; our lives are the result of constant change in our environment, feelings, emotions, interpersonal relationships, religion, and so on, and those who adapt easily win life, whereas others rot in the past, are unable to move on with their lives, and are depressed.

Like "Morita Therapy," embrace the imperfections in your life, welcome them with open arms, and acknowledge that the sentiments or emotions you're experiencing are valid. Simply accept how things are and then figure out how to mend them or overcome your own demons.

I'm about halfway through the book, but I'm looking forward to get more insights and teachings from Ikigai.

I definitely suggest this book to everyone who has ever felt empty on the inside, unable to discover their purpose in life, or simply lost.

Sincerely, Ayei 🌻

#ikigai #self help #books #practice #digital art

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pivsketch · 2 years

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today's 45 minute work warmup was this pleasant architecture photo from gord.cook on instagram. it was nice working off something besides a fisheye landscape from mapcrunch. missed a few spots that needed that darker floor colors on it, but im ok w/ where we stopped here. with more time i think i would just start painting over everything, polishing out the lines, and gettin all the texture in. all the fun time-intensive stuff

i actually enjoyed working on this one a lot more than the previous ones, maybe its because i incorporated more "tools and techniques"? discussion about that and a timelapse video under the cut:

i started using a thirds grid "out of laziness" recently but honestly? i think i dig it a lot. the grids i used on many of the previous environment studies were really dense (csp has a max grid size of 1000 pixels... wtf) and i think that mightve actually made it harder to place things in the space. i definitely get much less distracted with the comparatively looser rule-of-thirds grid, and i dont get too stressed out/obsessed about placing everything EXACTLY correct (this was a huge problem and i couldnt figure out how to stop). things actually end up matching pretty close to the source photo in the end, anyway, so its a win-win kind of result

oh yeah, unfortunately CSP doesn't have a percentage setting for the grid like photoshop does (it really really bothers me because i used that a lot, idk, maybe i should send in a feature request or something). i looked into this a while back and found the best you can do to get a 33.33% division grid is to set up an auto-action that'll generate a 3x3 comic page panel layout with no gutters on your canvas. its not dynamic so youd have to reapply it if you crop your canvas differently, and its a layer so you have to deal with that, but hey! better than nothing. and it works pretty dang well despite that.

to get all those straight lines i maxed out post correction on my brush, which reduces every brush stroke to a flat line that goes from the start of the stroke to the end. i think it feels cozier than using a line tool or the shift line-snap thing, because you get a liiiiittle bit of pen pressure out of it. plus, removes the temptation to hold shift and snap it 90 degrees. those funky little off-kilter angles add character, or whatever. this was one of those things that i knew you could do but i never actually used it-- now that i have, i understand its utility. i'll definitely be using it anytime i need to draw a lot of hard surfaces now

#ref studies

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blind-rats · 3 years

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The Rise & Fall of Joss Whedon; the Myth of the Hollywood Feminist Hero

By Kelly Faircloth

“I hate ‘feminist.’ Is this a good time to bring that up?” Joss Whedon asked. He paused knowingly, waiting for the laughs he knew would come at the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer making such a statement.

It was 2013, and Whedon was onstage at a fundraiser for Equality Now, a human rights organization dedicated to legal equality for women. Though Buffy had been off the air for more than a decade, its legacy still loomed large; Whedon was widely respected as a man with a predilection for making science fiction with strong women for protagonists. Whedon went on to outline why, precisely, he hated the term: “You can’t be born an ‘ist,’” he argued, therefore, “‘feminist’ includes the idea that believing men and women to be equal, believing all people to be people, is not a natural state, that we don’t emerge assuming that everybody in the human race is a human, that the idea of equality is just an idea that’s imposed on us.”

The speech was widely praised and helped cement his pop-cultural reputation as a feminist, in an era that was very keen on celebrity feminists. But it was also, in retrospect, perhaps the high water mark for Whedon’s ability to claim the title, and now, almost a decade later, that reputation is finally in tatters, prompting a reevaluation of not just Whedon’s work, but the narrative he sold about himself.

In July 2020, actor Ray Fisher accused Whedon of being “gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable” on the Justice League set when Whedon took over for Zach Synder as director to finish the project. Charisma Carpenter then described her own experiences with Whedon in a long post to Twitter, hashtagged #IStandWithRayFisher.

On Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, Carpenter played Cordelia, a popular character who morphed from snob to hero—one of those strong female characters that made Whedon’s feminist reputation—before being unceremoniously written off the show in a plot that saw her thrust into a coma after getting pregnant with a demon. For years, fans have suspected that her disappearance was related to her real-life pregnancy. In her statement, Carpenter appeared to confirm the rumors. “Joss Whedon abused his power on numerous occasions while working on the sets of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and ‘Angel,’” she wrote, describing Fisher’s firing as the last straw that inspired her to go public.

Buffy was a landmark of late 1990s popular culture, beloved by many a burgeoning feminist, grad student, gender studies professor, and television critic for the heroine at the heart of the show, the beautiful blonde girl who balanced monster-killing with high school homework alongside ancillary characters like the shy, geeky Willow. Buffy was very nearly one of a kind, an icon of her era who spawned a generation of leather-pants-wearing urban fantasy badasses and women action heroes.

Buffy was so beloved, in fact, that she earned Whedon a similarly privileged place in fans’ hearts and a broader reputation as a man who championed empowered women characters. In the desert of late ’90s and early 2000s popular culture, Whedon was heralded as that rarest of birds—the feminist Hollywood man. For many, he was an example of what more equitable storytelling might look like, a model for how to create compelling women protagonists who were also very, very fun to watch. But Carpenter’s accusations appear to have finally imploded that particular bit of branding, revealing a different reality behind the scenes and prompting a reevaluation of the entire arc of Whedon’s career: who he was and what he was selling all along.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered March 1997, midseason, on The WB, a two-year-old network targeting teens with shows like 7th Heaven. Its beginnings were not necessarily auspicious; it was a reboot of a not-particularly-blockbuster 1992 movie written by third-generation screenwriter Joss Whedon. (His grandfather wrote for The Donna Reed Show; his father wrote for Golden Girls.) The show followed the trials of a stereotypical teenage California girl who moved to a new town and a new school after her parents’ divorce—only, in a deliberate inversion of horror tropes, the entire town sat on top of the entrance to Hell and hence was overrun with demons. Buffy was a slayer, a young woman with the power and immense responsibility to fight them. After the movie turned out very differently than Whedon had originally envisioned, the show was a chance for a do-over, more of a Valley girl comedy than serious horror.

It was layered, it was campy, it was ironic and self-aware. It looked like it belonged on the WB rather than one of the bigger broadcast networks, unlike the slickly produced prestige TV that would follow a few years later. Buffy didn’t fixate on the gory glory of killing vampires—really, the monsters were metaphors for the entire experience of adolescence, in all its complicated misery. Almost immediately, a broad cross-section of viewers responded enthusiastically. Critics loved it, and it would be hugely influential on Whedon’s colleagues in television; many argue that it broke ground in terms of what you could do with a television show in terms of serialized storytelling, setting the stage for the modern TV era. Academics took it up, with the show attracting a tremendous amount of attention and discussion.

In 2002, the New York Times covered the first academic conference dedicated to the show. The organizer called Buffy “a tremendously rich text,” hence the flood of papers with titles like “Pain as Bright as Steel: The Monomyth and Light in ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer,’” which only gathered speed as the years passed. And while it was never the highest-rated show on television, it attracted an ardent core of fans.

But what stood out the most was the show’s protagonist: a young woman who stereotypically would have been a monster movie victim, with the script flipped: instead of screaming and swooning, she staked the vampires. This was deliberate, the core conceit of the concept, as Whedon said in many, many interviews. The helpless horror movie girl killed in the dark alley instead walks out victorious. He told Time in 1997 that the concept was born from the thought, “I would love to see a movie in which a blond wanders into a dark alley, takes care of herself and deploys her powers.” In Whedon’s framing, it was particularly important that it was a woman who walked out of that alley. He told another publication in 2002 that “the very first mission statement of the show” was “the joy of female power: having it, using it, sharing it.”

In 2021, when seemingly every new streaming property with a woman as its central character makes some half-baked claim to feminism, it’s easy to forget just how much Buffy stood out among its against its contemporaries. Action movies—with exceptions like Alien’s Ripley and Terminator 2's Sarah Conner—were ruled by hulking tough guys with macho swagger. When women appeared on screen opposite vampires, their primary job was to expose long, lovely, vulnerable necks. Stories and characters that bucked these larger currents inspired intense devotion, from Angela Chase of My So-Called Life to Dana Scully of The X-Files.

The broader landscape, too, was dismal. It was the conflicted era of girl power, a concept that sprang up in the wake of the successes of the second-wave feminist movement and the backlash that followed. Young women were constantly exposed to you-can-do-it messaging that juxtaposed uneasily with the reality of the world around them. This was the era of shitty, sexist jokes about every woman who came into Bill Clinton’s orbit and the leering response to the arrival of Britney Spears; Rush Limbaugh was a fairly mainstream figure.

At one point, Buffy competed against Ally McBeal, a show that dedicated an entire episode to a dancing computer-generated baby following around its lawyer main character, her biological clock made zanily literal. Consider this line from a New York Times review of the Buffy’s 1997 premiere: “Given to hot pants and boots that should guarantee the close attention of Humbert Humberts all over America, Buffy is just your average teen-ager, poutily obsessed with clothes and boys.”

Against that background, Buffy was a landmark. Besides the simple fact of its woman protagonist, there were unique plots, like the coming-out story for her friend Willow. An ambivalent 1999 piece in Bitch magazine, even as it explored the show’s tank-top heavy marketing, ultimately concluded, “In the end, it’s precisely this contextual conflict that sets Buffy apart from the rest and makes her an appealing icon. Frustrating as her contradictions may be, annoying as her babe quotient may be, Buffy still offers up a prime-time heroine like no other.”

A 2016 Atlantic piece, adapted from a book excerpt, makes the case that Buffy is perhaps best understood as an icon of third-wave feminism: “In its examination of individual and collective empowerment, its ambiguous politics of racial representation and its willing embrace of contradiction, Buffy is a quintessentially third-wave cultural production.” The show was vested with all the era’s longing for something better than what was available, something different, a champion for a conflicted “post-feminist” era—even if she was an imperfect or somewhat incongruous vessel. It wasn’t just Sunnydale that needed a chosen Slayer, it was an entire generation of women. That fact became intricately intertwined with Whedon himself.

Seemingly every interview involved a discussion of his fondness for stories about strong women. “I’ve always found strong women interesting, because they are not overly represented in the cinema,” he told New York for a 1997 piece that notes he studied both film and “gender and feminist issues” at Wesleyan; “I seem to be the guy for strong action women,’’ he told the New York Times in 1997 with an aw-shucks sort of shrug. ‘’A lot of writers are just terrible when it comes to writing female characters. They forget that they are people.’’ He often cited the influence of his strong, “hardcore feminist” mother, and even suggested that his protagonists served feminist ends in and of themselves: “If I can make teenage boys comfortable with a girl who takes charge of a situation without their knowing that’s what’s happening, it’s better than sitting down and selling them on feminism,” he told Time in 1997.

When he was honored by the organization Equality Now in 2006 for his “outstanding contribution to equality in film and television,” Whedon made his speech an extended riff on the fact that people just kept asking him about it, concluding with the ultimate answer: “Because you’re still asking me that question.” He presented strong women as a simple no-brainer, and he was seemingly always happy to say so, at a time when the entertainment business still seemed ruled by unapologetic misogynists. The internet of the mid-2010s only intensified Whedon’s anointment as a prototypical Hollywood ally, with reporters asking him things like how men could best support the feminist movement.

Whedon’s response: “A guy who goes around saying ‘I’m a feminist’ usually has an agenda that is not feminist. A guy who behaves like one, who actually becomes involved in the movement, generally speaking, you can trust that. And it doesn’t just apply to the action that is activist. It applies to the way they treat the women they work with and they live with and they see on the street.” This remark takes on a great deal of irony in light of Carpenter’s statement.

In recent years, Whedon’s reputation as an ally began to wane. Partly, it was because of the work itself, which revealed more and more cracks as Buffy receded in the rearview mirror. Maybe it all started to sour with Dollhouse, a TV show that imagined Eliza Dushku as a young woman rented out to the rich and powerful, her mind wiped after every assignment, a concept that sat poorly with fans. (Though Whedon, while he was publicly unhappy with how the show had turned out after much push-and-pull with the corporate bosses at Fox, still argued the conceit was “the most pure feminist and empowering statement I’d ever made—somebody building themselves from nothing,” in a 2012 interview with Wired.)

After years of loud disappointment with the TV bosses at Fox on Firefly and Dollhouse, Whedon moved into big-budget Hollywood blockbusters. He helped birth the Marvel-dominated era of movies with his work as director of The Avengers. But his second Avengers movie, Age of Ultron, was heavily criticized for a moment in which Black Widow laid out her personal reproductive history for the Hulk, suggesting her sterilization somehow made her a “monster.” In June 2017, his un-filmed script for a Wonder Woman adaptation leaked, to widespread mockery. The script’s introduction of Diana was almost leering: “To say she is beautiful is almost to miss the point. She is elemental, as natural and wild as the luminous flora surrounding. Her dark hair waterfalls to her shoulders in soft arcs and curls. Her body is curvaceous, but taut as a drawn bow.”

But Whedon’s real fall from grace began in 2017, right before MeToo spurred a cultural reckoning. His ex-wife, Kai Cole, published a piece in The Wrap accusing him of cheating off and on throughout their relationship and calling him a hypocrite:

“Despite understanding, on some level, that what he was doing was wrong, he never conceded the hypocrisy of being out in the world preaching feminist ideals, while at the same time, taking away my right to make choices for my life and my body based on the truth. He deceived me for 15 years, so he could have everything he wanted. I believed, everyone believed, that he was one of the good guys, committed to fighting for women’s rights, committed to our marriage, and to the women he worked with. But I now see how he used his relationship with me as a shield, both during and after our marriage, so no one would question his relationships with other women or scrutinize his writing as anything other than feminist.”

But his reputation was just too strong; the accusation that he didn’t practice what he preached didn’t quite stick. A spokesperson for Whedon told the Wrap: “While this account includes inaccuracies and misrepresentations which can be harmful to their family, Joss is not commenting, out of concern for his children and out of respect for his ex-wife. Many minimized the essay on the basis that adultery doesn’t necessarily make you a bad feminist or erase a legacy. Whedon similarly seemed to shrug off Ray Fisher’s accusations of creating a toxic workplace; instead, Warner Media fired Fisher.

But Carpenter’s statement—which struck right at the heart of his Buffy-based legacy for progressivism—may finally change things. Even at the time, the plotline in which Charisma Carpenter was written off Angel—carrying a demon child that turned her into “Evil Cordelia,” ending the season in a coma, and quite simply never reappearing—was unpopular. Asked about what had happened in a 2009 panel at DragonCon, she said that “my relationship with Joss became strained,” continuing: “We all go through our stuff in general [behind the scenes], and I was going through my stuff, and then I became pregnant. And I guess in his mind, he had a different way of seeing the season go… in the fourth season.”

“I think Joss was, honestly, mad. I think he was mad at me and I say that in a loving way, which is—it’s a very complicated dynamic working for somebody for so many years, and expectations, and also being on a show for eight years, you gotta live your life. And sometimes living your life gets in the way of maybe the creator’s vision for the future. And that becomes conflict, and that was my experience.”

In her statement on Twitter, Carpenter alleged that after Whedon was informed of her pregnancy, he called her into a closed-door meeting and “asked me if I was ‘going to keep it,’ and manipulatively weaponized my womanhood and faith against me.” She added that “he proceeded to attack my character, mock my religious beliefs, accuse me of sabotaging the show, and then unceremoniously fired me following the season once I gave birth.” Carpenter said that he called her fat while she was four months pregnant and scheduled her to work at 1 a.m. while six months pregnant after her doctor had recommended shortening her hours, a move she describes as retaliatory. What Carpenter describes, in other words, is an absolutely textbook case of pregnancy discrimination in the workplace, the type of bullshit the feminist movement exists to fight—at the hands of the man who was for years lauded as a Hollywood feminist for his work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.

Many of Carpenter’s colleagues from Buffy and Angel spoke out in support, including Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar. “While I am proud to have my name associated with Buffy Summers, I don’t want to be forever associated with the name Joss Whedon,” she said in a statement. Just shy of a decade after that 2013 speech, many of the cast members on the show that put him on that stage are cutting ties.

Whedon garnered a reputation as pop culture’s ultimate feminist man because Buffy did stand out so much, an oasis in a wasteland. But in 2021, the idea of a lone man being responsible for creating women’s stories—one who told the New York Times, “I seem to be the guy for strong action women”—seems like a relic. It’s depressing to consider how many years Hollywood’s first instinct for “strong action women” wasn’t a woman, and to think about what other people could have done with those resources. When Wonder Woman finally reached the screen, to great acclaim, it was with a woman as director.

Besides, Whedon didn’t make Buffy all by himself—many, many women contributed, from the actresses to the writers to the stunt workers, and his reputation grew so large it eclipsed their part in the show’s creation. Even as he preached feminism, Whedon benefitted from one of the oldest, most sexist stereotypes: the man who’s a benevolent, creative genius. And Buffy, too, overshadowed all the other contributors who redefined who could be a hero on television and in speculative fiction, from individual actors like Gillian Anderson to the determined, creative women who wrote science fiction and fantasy over the last several decades to—perhaps most of all—the fans who craved different, better stories. Buffy helped change what you could put on TV, but it didn’t create the desire to see a character like her. It was that desire, as much as Whedon himself, that gave Buffy the Vampire Slayer her power.

#Joss Whedon #Buffy The Vampire Slayer #Ray Fisher #Charisma Carpenter #Feminist

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itsclydebitches · 3 years

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Why do people get hung up on whether a gay person in media is a good or bad representation of them? I'm gay and I can tell you we aren't all the same? Being gay is our 1 common trait. So as long as they're gay then you've done it. Gay people can be kind, mean, racist, open, kinky, reserved, shy, outgoing, sexist, and literally anything else under the human experience.

Because I am perpetually hungry, let's tell a story about cookies.

You are a bright-eyed, optimistic, baker in the making. Your goal is to wow the world with your culinary skills, so of course you head to The Best Baking School for your degree. Over the course of your studies you learn how to perfect a thousand different cakes, an equal number of pies, and more versions of brownies than most would even assume exist. But cookies... oh, cookies are your passion! You can't wait to learn about the wealth of cookies you can make too. Then, sure enough, that part of your education finally arrives.

Funny thing is though, it's just chocolate chip.

Surely there's been some mistake? The cookie experience is vast and nuanced! Why in the world are your instructors — supposedly the best in the world — reducing cookies to a single class about baking chocolate chip and chocolate chip alone? Hell, why are cookies so sparse in the curriculum as a whole? You're never asked to bake them as a demonstration, or practice with them, and they're definitely not a given across everyone else's baking experience. Cakes, pies, and brownies... they're the default. Cookies are comparatively rare and when you do get to study them, everyone is super focused on the chocolate chip.

Then you graduate and head out into the world, only to find that pretty much everyone is as cookie-blind as your school. A few years back you never would have found cookies in the average grocery store and yeah, the fact that there's a cookie section now is great, but it's, uh... all chocolate chip! Many bakeries still don't carry cookies at all, but when they do it's - again - chocolate chip. Chocolate chip out in restaurants. Chocolate chip at the bake sale. Your friend invites you over and proudly presents a massive sweets tray that includes a single, sad looking, chocolate chip cookie. They beam at you in pride. Isn't it so great?

"Uh..." you say. "Well..."

Every once in a while someone will switch out milk chocolate for dark chocolate, or add nuts alongside chocolate chips. One bakery was even crazy enough to exclude chocolate chips entirely! Crazy according to the press, anyway. Because for years now you've been shaking your head, wondering what exactly is so progressive about realizing that sugar cookies exist. You've found other bakers interested in cookies and, by god, there are thousands. So many flavors! Gluten free and allergy conscious! Someone even made a sweets tray that was predominantly cookies, can you believe it? The problem is, almost none of them are mainstream. Your friend baking cookies out of their personal kitchen is doing fantastic work, but their baking doesn't have the impact that those grocery chains and established bakeries do. Their work isn't going to fix your school's curriculum. Too many people still think that cookies are exotic somehow. They're not the default. And when they do acknowledge their existence, it's chocolate chip over and over. Until one of them adds those nuts and suddenly the whole country is losing its mind about how inspired, creative, progressive their baking is. Meanwhile, you're ready to scream because that baker doesn't even know that something as "exotic" as a gingersnaps exist!

The worst part? Most of these cookies are... bad. Like they exist, yeah, but good god most don't taste good. And that's the whole point of a cookie?? What is the point of buying cookies if the cookies themselves are awful? You go to these bakeries, these restaurants, your friend's house, and you try the very limited cookies on offer, only to find that they've been sloppily baked. Doesn't anyone care that the baker burned their cookies to a crisp? That another straight up forgot to add sugar? This one dropped his on the floor and still tried to serve it to you! But the overall sense is that you should be grateful for getting any cookies at all. "That cookie is an offense to my taste buds," you say and people shake their head at you, disappointed. "I liked the taste of it," one says. "If you don't like it, go buy a different cookie!" Well... easier said than done. "It's not that bad," another says, shrugging in defeat. "I mean yeah, I don't really like it, and the baker stopped making them two years ago... but I'm just happy to have had any cookie at all, you know?" You do know, but that doesn't mean it's any less frustrating. You look at the hundreds of cakes available, these bakers spending decades perfecting their recipes, and wish cookies had even a fraction of that work put into them. You find people who agree with you, absolutely, but there's this this prevailing sense that a cookie is a cookie. Any cookie will do. Supposedly.

Except go long enough and you feel like you're ready to lose your mind. You take some poor person by the shoulders and go, "Doesn't this bother you? Doesn't this make you furious? There is more to the cookie world than these three flavors, 90% of which is chocolate chip! And we deserve well-made cookies, not the crap they've been upholding as the next culinary masterpiece!"

But this person just shakes their head. "Well of course there's more to cookies than three flavors. There's a huge variety of cookies! I know that."

"Yes, but the world isn't selling that variety."

"Of course they are! Just last week I had an oatmeal raisin. That's amazing!"

"Yeah and how many years did it take you to find that?"

"Well..."

"And how did that oatmeal raisin cookie taste?"

Your prisoner pulls a face. "Ugh, not good. Oatmeal raisin is definitely not for me. It's hard as a rock! I really don't understand why someone would want to eat that on a regular basis."

"But it's not supposed to be hard as a rock!" you cry, waving your arms. "That's the problem! Oatmeal raisin is so goddamn rare and then the one time we get it, it was badly baked. Of course people are turned off by it. Everyone who already loves oatmeal raisin is getting pissed because their favorite cookie is misrepresented, they're unlikely to see more of them now, and everyone is still serving the most tasteless chocolate chip cookies I've ever had, acting like this is the pinnacle of cookie baking! Do you even know that a macron exists?"

The person pats your hand consolingly. "Of course I do. My roommate's sister's boyfriend used to bake macrons, you know. I don't know why you're so hung up on this. Cookies can be whatever the baker wants them to be. Provided they're a flat-ish sweet cake, they're still a cookie!"

You hang your head, giving up. "Yes, they can be so many things, but they're not. Let me know if you ever find a bakery actually making the variety you keep acknowledging exists. Bonus points if those cookies are edible. My soul if they're delicious, as a cookie should be."

"You know," they say, still patting your hand. "There's a bakery making chocolate chip with dark chocolate next year. Everyone is talking about it. You should think about buying one before they take it off the menu!"

You contemplate just walking into the ocean.

Now, incredibly long metaphor concluded... switch out "cookies" for "queer rep"! The representation matters because no, just making them gay isn't enough right now. You're right that queer people can be anything under the sun, but right now media isn't providing us with that variety. It's not enough to acknowledge that such variety exists, it actually has to make it into our books and onto our screen. Taking just characters who identify as gay and putting aside the HUGE variety of other identities for a moment (of which we are mostly lacking in terms of rep), where are the gay asexuals? The gay people of color? The disabled gays? Trans gays? Did your gay character appear for just a handful of episodes? Were they killed off? Are they nothing more than a stereotype or comic relief? Is this the only gay character in your entire story? We need to ask questions like this because though gay people can be anything under the sun, our media landscape has only shown a miniscule portion of that variety.

Today, even in 2021, our representation of gay people is still pretty limited to:

You are only coded as gay and evil

You are only coded as gay and queerbaited

You are canonically gay, but a cis, ablebodied, white person

You are canonically gay, but were written terribly/killed off/punished by the narrative/generally making the real gay people watching you feel awful about their identity

You are canonically gay, but you're not human. Gotta other the queerness by making you an alien/robot/fantasy being

You are canonically gay and that's your entire existence. There is one (1) narrative of how you knew by the time you were four, never questioned your identity after that, suffered through a family that rejected you, and now all your major arcs revolve around being gay. You are gay and that is it.

Despite being a list of six, that's still incredibly limiting. Are there exceptions to such a list? Always, but that doesn't mean the list isn't still dominating. We can look at any individual gay character and say, "Of course they can be evil/white/killed off/a joke/etc. because gay people can be anything at all," but when we look at the trends, when we look at ALL the media together, we see that gay people aren't actually depicted as being anything... they're depicted as being these handful of things, severely limiting how gayness is represented. Bad rep. If you hit up the bakery and question why there's only versions of chocolate chip available yeah, the baker can go, "But cookies can be any flavor! Including chocolate chip!" They are not, technically, wrong. The problem is not that chocolate chip exists, but that chocolate chip dominates and other flavors are rare, ignored entirely, or baked so badly it's actively damaging to that flavor as a whole. Yeah, your gay character can be mean. Or kinky. Or murdered by the story. But when so many gay characters are mean and kinky and murdered by their stories — when you're not getting other versions to balance that out and gay characters are still rare enough that it's just 1-2 characters trying to carry representation for an entire franchise — you start realizing that the claim of "Gay people can be anything else under the human experience" is an easy way to shut down the conversation of whether that variety actually exists in our storytelling yet.

It's not enough for the baker to acknowledge that yeah, of course there are hundreds of cookie flavors and of course cookies taste great! They've actually got to learn how to bake them properly and fill up their store with them.

#queer #mymetas

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radramblog · 3 years

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Halo Through its Guns: Halo CE

I think this is a bit of an experiment, but one I intend to see all the way through. I’ve been thinking a lot about this series recently, not to mention playing a lot of it, so I’ve wanted to find a way to properly discuss it. Perhaps even analyse it.

If there’s one thing people gravitate towards talking about in a first person shooter game, especially a series so long-running as Halo, it’s going to be the guns. They’re taking up a significant portion of the screen a lot of the time, and a lot of development time is going to be spent making sure they all look and sound good and are satisfying to use. As a result, I think the weapons in Halo are a good lens through which to view each entry in the series.

So, I’m going to be using one gun per game as a means to discuss each one. At this point, I’ve lined most of my picks up already (and hoping to have actually played 5 by the time I get to it), so I’m confident most of them are going to provide an interesting discussion.

Therefore, this is: Halo: Combat Evolved, through its iconic gun. No, it’s not the Magnum, it’s the Plasma Pistol.

It’s kind of hard to talk about Halo: CE without talking about all of gaming of the era, because it was kind of a huge shift in the landscape as far as FPS games went. Unfortunately, I’m too young to have actually lived through all this, but the game is kind of to 2000s shooters as Doom was to 90s shooters, and kind of as Seinfeld is to sitcoms. That is, it defined them so utterly that all the future iterations of this kind of gameplay make Combat Evolved feel a little antiquated. I suppose being a 20-year-old game doesn’t help at this point.

Something Halo: CE owes to those 90s games is the concept of the weapon sandbox. It’s the multiplayer style that I believe pretty much just Halo (and Battle Royale games, kind of) has kept going with, where you start with a couple of default, standard equipment choices and have to scrounge together the rest on the map. The majority of engagements are still going to take place using those default pieces of equipment, but either map knowledge or luck can help give you more options and turn the tide in your favour, letting you pull a more powerful weapon out of your pocket as needed.

Part of Halo’s innovation on this design is, ironically, the limitation. Specifically, only carrying two guns at a time means you can’t just run around and grab everything you see- every gun is different, and choosing to pick one up means losing the benefits of one of your others. In Team games, it pays to have different people grab different weapons, such that you’re more versatile depending on game type or what direction and distance your enemies approach from.

The important thing that Halo: CE got right, and that many future entries would struggle with, is that every single weapon in it has a unique niche. There’s only one Sniper Rifle for extreme range, only one Shotgun for unparalleled close-range lethality. The Assault Rifle is a solid medium/close range bullet hose that’s effective against both shields and unshielded players, and the Magnum is, while maybe a little too good, perfect for picking off damaged enemies at medium to long range. And also, close range, because it’s a bit much.

But of course, this is all from the perspective of Multiplayer, and Halo: CE obviously has a Campaign as well. And with the Campaign comes weapons you need to design for your enemies to wield, which brings us to the Plasma Pistol. The most common weapon in the hands of the Covenant’s Grunts and Jackals (and later Drones and Skirmishers), and one of (I believe) only 5 guns to appear in every entry in the series. (The others being the Shotgun, Sniper Rifle, Rocket Launcher, and Needler. I guess you could count the FRG but it’s only kind of in CE, and also the grenades).

A deliberate part of the design for Halo: CE’s Campaign and Multiplayer was an emphasis on player movement. This is kind of interesting, because the Chief actually moves pretty slowly compared to previous Shoot Men, but part of the idea was that every Covenant weapon would shoot visible, slower moving projectiles such that the player would potentially be able to predict and dodge them, allowing for a higher skill cap at higher difficulties. This also helps add a consistent flavour to Covenant weaponry, as bright glowing colours are both easy to distinguish and substantially different enough from the gunmetal of the UNSC equipment to feel alien. There will never be a point where you confuse a Grunt holding a Plasma Pistol from one holding a Needler, or an Elite with an Energy Sword from one with a Plasma Rifle.

The Plasma Pistol is the bread and butter of Halo’s enemy engagement design. Most of the time in enemies’ hands it’s effectively a peashooter, bright and distracting, but not dealing too much damage, just enough to be annoying, and to supplement more dangerous weapons carried by other enemies. It does, however, have the Overcharge mode, which ensures that every one of these little Grunts and Jackals remains a threat, with the ability to entirely strip your shields (or deal significant damage to your health bar) if they wise up and go for it. An Overcharging Plasma Pistol is extremely obvious, though, with a big green glow and an iconic noise making the enemy most threatening you easy to find. It means the enemy fights are never quite the same, and adds a sense of urgency to them as well, especially on early difficulties.

The overcharge is also the core of how the Plasma Pistol functions in Multiplayer as well, as well as taking full advantage of other innovations in Halo’s game design. In Multiplayer, the Plasma Pistol is easily best known for its inclusion in the “noob combo”- that is, Overcharge the shields, kill them with the Magnum. This is a highlight of the specialisation in weapons in Halo: CE- the Plasma Pistol is great against the first half of their health, in the form of the Shields, but it’s practically useless against the actual, well, Health. Because of this, the Plasma Pistol is not a default weapon in Multiplayer like it is in Campaign, it’s niche necessitates a role as a pickup weapon. You’re never going to want it if you already have, say, a Shotgun or Sniper Rifle, since those are such similarly specific weapons that your backup being a Plasma Pistol is not a good idea.

But of course, guns are not your only combat option in Halo. One of the most innovative points of design in this game is the constant access to three attack options at a time. In previous FPS games, the options for Grenades and Melee were usually in the form of separate weapon slots, whereas in Halo you have access to all three at the same time on different buttons. This gives the whole game a more fluid feel, and there’s a reason it’s pretty much now the default for games of this style- it looks cool, it’s less awkward, and it feels slick as hell. The Plasma Pistol gets to lean into this versatility nicely as well, as Melee damage or either Grenade type at close enough range will kill next to an overcharge. You’re never left with no way of hitting people’s health after you dunk their shields, especially since the Pistol works best at close range.

In summation. Halo: Combat Evolved was genre-defining as a first-person shooter, capturing what would become the default for gaming to come for a while. The Plasma Pistol is an excellent example of this, leaning into all the innovations of the overall game’s design and producing an iconic piece of video game firepower. It’s slick, it’s effective, and it looks and sounds extremely cool.

The rest of the series would never quite capture the exact same balance as Halo: CE, but as the games changed and technology improved, so too did the guns. Join me next time, when everything gets a bit more Two.

#ramble #halo #halo combat evolved #plasma pistol #video games

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gffa · 3 years

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I finished Light of the Jedi last night and it’s the first Star Wars book in awhile that I’ve been at all excited about, even if I thought it had some pretty big hills to get over, considering all it was trying to do and be. This book is the setting stage for the High Republic era, which means it has to balance the plot, the introduction to the backsdrop of the world it’s set in, introduce an entirely new set of characters, and do a whole lot of worldbuilding on top of that. Which means that sometimes the book becomes so fast-paced that it doesn’t really let its scenes breath as much as I’d have liked, it slides into tell-rather-than-show here and there, but that overall Soule’s strength in knowing Star Wars shines through, that I found this to be an incredibly minor complaint and one I was sympathetic to. It helps to go into the book looking at it as an introduction, rather than looking to get as much out of it as you would a book focused on characters and a time period you already know, where it doesn’t have to spend pages and pages giving you information about how this era works. In that light, Light of the Jedi balances the tremendous tasks it has before it, the multitude of balls it has to juggle, really well! By the end of the book, I came to genuinely enjoy the characters and would like to have more stories about them in the future! I would like to know the futures of the characters, I want to know more about Avar and Elzar growing up together, I want to know more about the early days of Bell and Loden’s Master and Padawan time, I want to know what it was like on the Starlight Beacon for those positioned there! I want to know more about the main villain’s backstory and why they’re doing what they’re doing! The last quarter of the book is when all of that really came together, everything before that was almost a little too fast-paced to really get emotionally invested, but that last quarter? Where the action all comes together and everything explodes exactly as planned? Yeah, that’s the stuff, that was where the book got me, I love a good “omg I have to know what happens next!” story and Soule really brought his A game for me at the end there. The book is billed as being about the Jedi, which it very much is don’t get me wrong, but it’s also about the Republic and what the galaxy looks like with someone much more good faith in charge, how that changes the dynamics between the public and the government and the Jedi. The Jedi, who by and large are almost exactly the same as in the prequels--there are little moments of background info woven in, where they’re adopted as children, where you have to make a choice between marrying someone else or marrying your Order, where attachment (even if the book tends to go with the “attachment = anything permanent” definition, rather than Lucas’ “attachment = the grasping, clinging need to possess someone because you’re so afraid to live without them you’d burn the galaxy down for them”, it’s not egregious) is still Not Done, where 90% of the things the High Republic era Jedi do are ones I can point to in the prequels era Jedi having done a similar thing as well. And I like to think this is at least somewhat deliberate, given that the Jedi Council scene felt very much like it was defending the Jedi’s choices to get involved more intricately with the rest of the galaxy, in a way that was perfectly applicable to the prequel Jedi’s situation. If you look at this book as an introduction or the first chapter of a much larger project, it works really well. There’s a lot of joy to be found here, that there’s a sense of delight and wonder in the author getting to explore the Force in a new era, where they’re not constrained by having to stick to leaving room for others writing those same characters, they can be definitive in how one character sees the Force here! Things can happen, characters can die, the political landscape can change, and that creates a tension that’s very enjoyable. The background details felt really well done, I actually went through and was making screenshots of the book the entire way because I want to write up a post about Force powers exhibited in the book, which is how you know I really enjoyed something. Will fandom use this book to shit on the prequels Jedi? Yeah, fandom will always take that chance. But I honestly felt like this book was a solid support for them if you look at just the content of what’s actually in the book. While I was reading, I had an amazing time imagining Mace Windu or Obi-Wan Kenobi or Kit Fisto or Shaak Ti interacting with these Jedi and all of them getting along so well. I would love to see Avar Kriss and Mace Windu have tea. I would love to see Obi-Wan Kenobi and Loden Greatstorm being obnoxiously hilarious at each other, each with a twinkle in their eye as they throw their Padawans off a ledge because they believe in them. I would love to see Bell Zettifar and Ahsoka Tano sitting down to have lunch together and complaining-slash-praising their Masters. Soule created some really great characters, really got me in the final quarter of the book (mileages are going to vary, but I thought the ramping up tension was really well done), and it just felt really nice to have a book I genuinely wanted to examine the politics and dynamics of again, that I want to yell, “OKAY, WHO HAS FINISHED THIS BOOK AND CAN YELL WITH ME? :D” in all caps at my tumblr dash.

#light of the jedi #meta #novels

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nixotinix · 2 years

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how I, an ar 54 genshin player, am farming primogems for 2.4

hey! its been a while since I've made a post here, let alone a genshin post. last time i posted anything about genshin was during raiden's banner maybe? anyways. Here's a comprehensive guide on how I'm currently farming primogems for Xiao, since I know that a lot of highly wanted characters (i.e. Xiao, Ganyu, Zhongli) are getting reruns in 2.4. If you're as unprepared as I am, you might've been searching the internet looking for ways to get primogems without spending any money. Well you're in luck. Over the span of 3 days, I've managed to go from no pulls to 23 pulls. How does he do it? Let's find out :))

Disclaimer: the sheer amount of work this requires is enough to burn a LOT of people out. I'm just sticking with it because I've wanted Xiao since I started playing in version 1.5. So if this looks like a lot of work, which it is, double think doing all of this. And if you do decide to take this on, take lots of breaks. I expect this to be at least a week-long endeavor for most. But if you have more time than money, this might just be your route to take.

first up! Dailies and events. Oh my god do not slack off on dailies and events. You get 60 primogems a day, and events can give you even more than that. The recent Marvelous Merchandise event was a gold mine for primogems. If you can afford it, the Blessing of the Welkin Moon is also a goldmine. Over the span of 30 days, you get a total of 3,000 primogems, which includes the 300 genesis crystals obtained along with the daily 90 primos.

next up! The next easiest way to farm primos is through quests. Archon quests being the most obvious, but world quests can sometimes give primos. I've included a handy list of the most significant world quests that give primogems. You can look up walkthroughs to figure out how to initiate each quest.

Mondstadt: Time and the Wind-60 primogems/Bough Keeper: Dainsleif-60 primogems/In The Mountains-60 primogems/The Festering Fang-50 primogems/The Great Mountain Survey-40 primogems/The Great Mountain Survey II-40 primogems/A Land Entombed-50 primogems/Lost In The Snow-40 primogems/Ah, Fresh Meat!-40 primogems// Total: 440 Primogems

Liyue: Little Game-30 primogems/And This Treasure Goes To...-40 primogems/A Provisional Arrangement-20 primogems/Big Business-30 primogems/Books In The Woods-20 primogems/Luhua Landscape-50 primogems/Nine Pillars of Peace-50 primogems/No Restoring This Past Land of Beauty-30 primogems/Old Tastes Die Hard-20 primogems/Overstretched-20 primogems/Share Not Your Treasures-30 primogems/The Chi of Guyun-60 primogems/The Tree Who Stands Alone-50 primogems/Treasure Lost, Treasure Found-80 primogems/The Yaksha's Wish-30 primogems// Total: 560 Primogems

Inazuma: The Seventh Samurai-30 primogems/Dreams of Sword Art-40 primogems/Treatment on the Island-30 primogems/Gourmet Supremos, Assemble!-20 primogems/Gourmet Supremos: Of Shrines and Sakura-20 primogems/Gourmet Supremos: The Seashore Strider-20 primogems/Hayashi of Tanuki in the Forest-30 primogems/Hiromi's Watch-30 primogems/Temari Game-20 primogems/Tatara Tales: The Saga-220 total primogems// Total: 460 Primogems

next! Hangout events. As of right now, there are hangout events for: Chongyun, Noelle, Barbara, Bennett, Diona, Sayu, Thoma, Beidou, and Gorou, with Noelle having two different hangouts. Each hangout gives a minimum of 80 primogems for getting every ending. This gives at least 800 primogems for doing every hangout.

now we get to the most tedious part. the next way to collect primogems is to collect any anemoculus, geoculus, or electroculus you may have missed. I prefer watching youtube videos that show exactly how to get to each. With there being almost 200 electroculi alone, with Enkanomiya on the way in 2.4, this is going to be incredibly tedious. Not to mention you need all of the geoculus for the Nine Pillars of Peace quest. But if you think this is tedious, you haven't seen anything yet.

The last and most tedious way to gather primogems is to get 100% exploration everywhere, mostly including all chests. This will take days, and I do mean days. It took me 2 hours to get halfway through Dragonspine's chests. Similar to the oculi, there are some walkthroughs on how to get every chest, along with interactive maps. This isn't completely necessary, but if you're desperate, I'd say go for it.

Good luck, and happy wishing!

#genshin #genshin impact #xiao genshin #ganyu #zhongli #primogems #primogem farming #i might post some builds for the rerun characters? like weapons and teams and artifact sets #idk tho #im just wishing for xiao

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jentlemahae · 3 years

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(Album Review) Sticker by NCT 127 – Did It Really Stick?

Just last week, South Korean group NCT 127 – numbers referring to the longitude coordinate of Seoul – released their long-awaited, third full-length album, Sticker, which immediately caused an uproar among their fans. Some really loved it, while some really hated it (and were not silent about it). It’s the so-called ‘third album syndrome’, where artists create a record that is so new even for them, that it ends up being polarizing for the fanbase. Sticker might have been just that for 127, as fans are either calling it a masterpiece or a huge disappointment – no in-between.

(Those who are already familiar with NCT 127 may skip the following section. Those who are not – buckle up!)

A beginner’s guide to NCT

For those who may not know, NCT (short for “Neo Culture Technology”) is a boy-group under SM Entertainment. The band has been able to stand out from the KPOP landscape since its very debut, and not only because of their music and talents, but also thanks to their distinctive concept. In a nutshell, the idea is that the group can have an unlimited (or infinite) number of members, as fresh new boys can be added to the lineup at any given time. So far, they have accumulated 23 members, divided into four different subunits – NCT 127, NCT DREAM, WayV (fixed units), and NCT U (rotational unit).

Each subgroup has its own characteristic sound and/or concept, but there is one thing they have in common – they are all known for going against the current, be it musically or style-wise. In fact, they are considered the pioneers of the takeover on KPOP by ‘noise music’. But what is noise music? Sometimes affectionately called ‘pots and pans’, it is a genre characterized by an expressive use of sound that is not bound to traditional music rules, and encapsulates different chords and types of notes within a song. Nowadays, it has become the main style of the 4th Generation, and NCT were the ones who truly popularized it to the current audience (despite being 3rd Gen).

NCT 127’s approach to noise music is particularly fascinating. Fans describe their sound as ‘NEO’, which is confusing and vague unless you are familiar with their discography – then it makes perfect sense! The group always takes noise music to the next level, yet manages to not make it sound completely nonsensical and (too) migraine-inducing.

Now that you are all up to speed, we can proceed with the actual review!

Sticker – peeling the songs off

After weeks of teasers and hints, NCT 127 finally unveiled to their eager, hungry fans their new single and album, Sticker. This record perfectly encapsulates the cornucopia of sounds that the band is known for, as the songs go from EDM to hip-hop to heart-warming ballads. And of course, the group’s signature sound – the pots and pans are here, louder and stronger than ever. But enough chit-chat for now – let’s go through the album together.

Sticker (8.5/10)

NCT 127 made the bold choice to open the record with the title track, Sticker. Why ‘bold choice’? Well, let’s just say the song is not exactly easily digestible… The melody is a plethora of sounds, yet feels almost empty and subdued to the vocals at the same time. It is a bacchanal of frenzied beats and a dirty bass line accompanied by a shrill flute and piano, with cut-throat raps and beautiful harmonies that are disjointed from the overall melody. Sticker is chaos, but an intentional one, thus its instability manages to captivate you whilst disarming you.

Truth be told, I was a bit taken aback by the song when I first listened to it. Nothing appeared to make sense to my ears, as they seem to be fighting with the beat (and losing) throughout the entire track. But that’s exactly the point. The disconnection between the instrumentals and the singing is clearly done on purpose, perhaps in order to further highlight the members’ impressive vocals, which overpower and outbalance the otherwise empty beat. Or maybe the purpose was just to render the song more impactful, which sure as hell worked – you may not like Sticker, but the song is likely to remain stuck in your head one way or another.

Lemonade (8.3/10)

The second track was teased by the group prior to the official release of the album with a track video, and was immediately loved by fans. This catchy B-side includes an addictive deep bass which makes the perfect beat for both powerful raps and hefty vocals, a signature cocktail in NCT music.

The song is so good that a puzzling question immediately erupted following the release of the record, and spread like wildfire within 127’s fanbase – why wasn’t ‘Lemonade’ the title track? After all, everyone likes it, both fans and non-fans, and it could easily be something you’d expect to find at the top of the charts. In contrast to Sticker, on which everybody seems to be divided. So, wouldn’t it make sense for it to be the title track, given its striking popular appeal?

The answer is no. What some fans don’t seem to understand is that when it comes down to KPOP title tracks (especially nowadays), the issue is not whether it is the best or the catchiest song on the record. The real question is, does it make an impact? Given how new KPOP groups are popping up left and right, managing to leave enough of an impression on the listeners can make or break a career. The title track needs to be instantly stuck in your mind, and for that Sticker fits the bill, as Lemonade sounds just like any other song you could hear in the first 30 minutes of Inkigayo. It’s good, but ordinary. It just doesn’t cut it, and NCT 127 clearly know that.

Breakfast (8/10)

Third song on the record, Breakfast feels reminiscent of past SM boy groups’ releases, namely SHINee’s song Prism from the album 1 and 1. The song encompasses bright melodies and retro beats with a modernized twist, which serve as a perfect mix with the members’ voices. The song’s main stars are the vocalists (particularly HAECHAN, whose tone works wonders with the genre), while the raps are tamer for the group’s standard.

Focus (9/10)

The fourth track is a mid-tempo R&B romantic song, a genre that is characteristic of 127’s B-sides and displays the group’s more soulful edge. Focus flawlessly showcases the members’ honeyed and warm vocals (especially JAEHYUN’s), and the slow lazy-like raps remind of early 2000’s sultry slow jams. This track was an immediate fan-favorite (as attested by yours truly).

The Rainy Night (9.5/10)

The Rainy Night is an R&B-tinged ballad reminiscent of boybands in the 90’s, and is the perfect follow-up to Focus, as vocals appear to be the true protagonists of both songs. In the track, TAEIL manages to stand out in particular by showing off his impressive range, with his beautiful adlibs on the suit-and-tie beat.

Far (6.2/10)

Next up is Far, characterized by a boom-clap drumline and a chanted chorus. Despite being rather forgettable, it is a good song after all – something straight out of a superhero movie soundtrack. It just sounds like something we’ve heard before at least a million times from about any KPOP boy group out there.

Bring The Noize (6.6/10)

Bring The Noize is about as NEO as it can get, with loud and thunderous beats, growling raps and sounds mimicking a car engine, which together make you feel as if your head were in a blender. Just like Sticker, this song is pure chaos, but of an overwhelming and impetuous kind because of its packed production. Yet, I think that’s where it all goes sideways – Bring The Noize is just too overwhelming, because it’s too crowded. On top of the production overflowing with sounds and effects, the vocal aspect of the song is simply too much. All members sing or rap on the track, but the variety of vocal colors is disarming and confusing to the ears in the worst way. Simply put, some members could have stayed silent in that recording booth…

Magic Carpet Ride (6.4/10)

Doing a full 180 from the previous track, Magic Carpet Ride is a ballad with pop elements, and a melodic beat that particularly shows off DOYOUNG and JAEHYUN’s vocals. Despite being a lovely song, it’s nothing particularly exceptional – it’s good for what it is, but it falls slightly flat and forgettable. Nevertheless, it does a wonderful job in proving that not every KPOP song needs a rap part…

Road Trip (7.3/10)

Road Trip shows off 127’s more boyish and bright side, with nice layers of guitar, drums and delicate vocals, proving once again how the band’s is not just a loud gimmick. The song is enjoyable – however, it’s not something we haven’t heard before from NCT. It’s sweet and lovely, but it’s definitely nothing to write home about.

Dreamer (7.4/10)

This upbeat song gives yet another sweet and poppy feel to the tracklist, with retro beats, trumpet riffs and a happy-go-lucky melody. Dreamer kinda sounds like something out of an Old Navy commercial, but I mean it in a good way – its funky, childlike charm combined with the uplifting lyrics is likely to put a smile on your face!

Promise You (7.2/10)

127 chose to end the album with a letter dedicated to their fanbase, NCTzens. Due to the ongoing pandemic, groups have not been able to meet fans in a long time as they normally would. In Promise You they sing about being separated from a loved one and then being reunited again, which is likely a nod towards their fans. Musically, the song intertwines retro-inspired beats with atmospheric synths, that give it a dreamy-like appeal. The track is sweet and serves as a great album closer, as wrapping up the record with DOYOUNG singing “So stay” in a longing yet reassuring tone, feels like the perfect goodbye.

So, did it stick?

Overall, Sticker is a very well-made album – it has ballads, upbeat tracks, addictive songs, and a decent dose of the good ol’ pots and pans. Does it sound like something we have never heard before in KPOP? No! Does it sound like something we’ve never heard before from NCT? Also… No… But whilst the record follows a similar algorithm to 127’s past albums, it is still incredibly enjoyable without sounding boring or too déjà vu. It has a good 50/50 mix of experimental songs to ballads and R&B-influenced tracks, and it leaves room for both rappers and vocalists to shine.

The album truly screams ‘NCT 127’ – it’s experimental, not sonically cohesive, confusing, and a little weird. Plus, just like all of the group’s music, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Or better yet, it’s not at first listen. Sticker might be odd and disarming, but it will get to you eventually – you just gotta let it stick.

8/10

#i had MANY things to say <3 #i hope someone liked it ^_^#btw this has not been through the editor yet <3 hope it's good :D #soph.txt

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bigskydreaming · 3 years

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I’d say the thing about some characters lending themselves better to some stories than others actually can apply to the Batfam as well, and is a sign of how well-developed they actually are. I know I’ve ranted in the past about the tendency to try and fit the Batkids into niches like the smart one and the angry one and all of that, but in terms of story TYPES, I think they do have certain niche-like feels that mean some of them are better suited to certain GENRES of story than others.

For instance....I didn’t love Grayson, but that was more due to the overshadowing circumstances and the fact that I just think King and his writing suck. A lot. But the basic premise was not at all out of Dick’s wheelhouse. He IS well predisposed to kinda globe-trotting, spy versus spy, switching disguises like they’re outfits, making the most out of his ability to make friends everywhere he goes and turn enemies into allies.....those types of stories. Not saying these should be his only stories, by any means, or that he can’t center in all kinds of other types of stories, but I’m just saying, these kinds of stories do have more of a Dick Grayson feel than they do various other Batkids.

Similarly, Jason is better suited to gothic horror types of stories than the others, just in general. His history with the Lazarus Pit, his general disposition, his THEMES, like....they speak to the same kind of aims and tones that gothic horror both births from and embodies.

This might just be me, but to me, Tim is best suited to kinda oddball, off the wall sorta stories, and that’s part of why I’m so meh on him just being shelved into the uber-genius, mini-Bruce, heir to the best detective mantle kinda thing. I’ve spoken before about how much I miss 90s Tim, but to me, Tim was always at his best, and at his best-defined, most feeling like uniquely HIM, when he was playing the underdog. When he was just this well-intentioned kid who plunged into this world that was so much larger than viewing it through his camera lens had prepared him for, but he had spunk and determination and he wasn’t about to back down or let anyone think he was in over his head so he was gonna make it through whatever the superhero life threw at him even if flying by the seat of his pants the whole way. So to that end, I mean, I think Tim is at his best when just dealing with totally WTF kinds of stories. The cross-dimensional capers, the time travel mishaps, the ‘great, I was abducted by aliens on my lunch break and now apparently I have to save planet FUBAR with nothing but my pocket knife and scathing dry wit.’

I would fucking kill for Cass at the center of noir type stories where its like, idk, the Maltese Falcon and she’s the jaded but still optimistic-at-her-core PI when trouble walks into her derelict office wrapped up in an eggplant shawl and the name Stephanie. Maybe its just that I don’t think there’s enough focus on the fact that Cass is SMART and she’s as much a detective as any of the family, does plenty of investigative work and if she’s heir to the cowl she’d be just as good at the mystery side of things as Bruce is, but just......noir stories just FEEL like dappled shadows and eerie shades of blue and black with hints of moonlight spilling through slatted blinds and all of that just screams Cass to me, faint notes of jazz in the background, a wry smile on her lips as she plays her informant like a fiddle when chasing down clues.

Duke is another globe-trotter in feel to me, like his backstory and his family and his stories with the Outsiders, like, I really want to see Duke on more superhero teams than just the Outsiders now that that’s over, because he’s better suited to stories not confined just to Gotham, I think? Like, Duke fits the conspiracy theory chasing niche to me, like, his character really comes to life when pursuing leads all across the world, digging into his past, his family’s past, seeing how it all connects to various mysteries of the DC Earth that are generations old but still affect the present....like I don’t know how many people have read Planetary, but that to me is a PERFECT fit for Duke, and I would love to see him with his own Planetary style team or even just part of one.

Damian is best suited to coming of age stories, which sounds vague, but the thing is, it really is its own genre. So much of Damian’s character, the best parts I think, are about Damian FINDING himself, DEFINING himself......he more than any of the others, debuted so clearly defined by his origins, his parents, who he was CREATED to be.....and so he more than anyone else is perfectly poised to star in stories that are all about him breaking away from that mold, from parental expectations or preplanned destinies, or even just searching for things to define him on his own terms rather than through the eyes of others. Stories that are about choosing your own path, making a self-realization or having an epiphany about who you truly are or what you want to do with your life....that to me, is Damian’s best niche. Again, doesn’t mean that other characters can’t be great in these kinds of stories as well, just that if I’m pairing one character to one genre they lean into best, this is what’s that for Damian, IMO.

Steph is a bit of an oddball for me, and I don’t quite know how to describe this, but she’s best suited IMO to those kinds of stories that like......there’s not really a specific NAME for this type, but you know them when you see them. The best comparison I can think to make is like.....the kinds of stories Harley Quinn stars in? To be clear, I’m not drawing parallels between Steph or Harley or saying they’re the same kind of character at ALL, I’m just saying like.....Harley is another character who overall is very hard to pin down in specific concrete terms, but nevertheless is centered in various stories and adaptations that are nevertheless very clearly HER.....and that’s the kind of thing I picture for Steph. She fits that niche that isn’t really a niche for anyone BUT her, because nobody else can summon that type of feel for it......the kind of story that you can’t switch anybody else in for her because the story only works with her specific kinda....energy. Bleh. I really wish I could describe it better, like its very clear in my brain, but its a story that’s more of a kind of FEEL than it is a specific description? If that makes sense like at all? LOLOL. Whatevs.

And Babs, like, I would love love love to see her centered in a proper cyberthriller. I mean, they’ve done stories kinda like that with her as Oracle, but not to the extent I’m thinking. I mean just full on cyberpunk dialed up to 11. Give me Babs enlisted by the JLA because Brainiac is loose in the internet and she has to go into cyberspace utilizing different avatars of herself and calling in allies as needed as she relentlessly hunts a villain through landscapes of data she maps and molds and turns into traps. Babs hyper-fixating on her task, her hunt, to the degree that she has to be reminded to pull herself out at times and take care of her physical needs, has people grounding her so she doesn’t get lost in cyberspace and the lure of it all, this place that’s her domain and where she shines the brightest. And so it balances that razor edge that makes for the best cyberthrillers IMO. The ones where all the possibilities of the future as embodied in technology and cyberspace are balanced with the necessity of remaining human, of being human and with roots and history embedded outside of it, in the real world. And with there being a clear juxtaposition between the two even as the protagonist goes back and forth between the two extremes of their existence, the physical and the ephemeral.

Anyway. Like I said, you can mix and match and its not like Dick can’t star in gothic horror and Jason can’t do off-the-wall dimensional hijinks or noir detective stories and Tim and Cass can’t do coming of age, etc.....its just in terms of what I was talking about, how some characters lend themselves MORE easily to certain kinds of stories than others.....this is how I perceive the various Batkids.

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lokiondisneyplus · 3 years

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Loki is the latest Marvel Studios TV series in the long-running franchise and it’s currently ongoing with five episodes so far available to stream on Disney+ Hotstar Malaysia. For previous breakdowns of Loki episodes, check out Episode 1 here, Episode 2 here, Episode 3 here, Episode 4 here and Episode 5 here.

If you want a non-spoiler guide to Loki, you can head on over here.

Courtesy of Disney+ Hotstar Malaysia, we were lucky enough to be the only Malaysian media to participate in a roundtable interview with Loki Costume Designer Christine Wada and Loki Production Designer Kasra Farahani.

This interview with Loki Production Designer Kasra Farahani has been edited for clarity.

Keep in mind that we’ll be discussing some elements from all five episodes of Loki so far, so there will be spoilers below:

Q: You’ve previously worked on Black Panther and other MCU movies. How different was the experience of working on a TV set instead of a movie’s? Were there limitations?

Yes, I’ve worked on several Marvel projects. For me, this is the most fun one, maybe because I’m in a different position than I was on the other ones. But also, just because this project is unique in a couple of ways.

Number one; it’s literally in its own timeline from the rest of the MCU. It’s separate from the stories we’ve all enjoyed and seen in the MCU so far. The other thing that this one has that’s really great is the amount of visual and narrative variety. We have this kind of base in the TVA that we spend a lot of time in but also we have all these exciting different places in the world that the story takes us to. These were great worlds to design and to imagine.

In our case, there was no difference. The thing about the Marvel series is that it’s pretty much like Marvel movies; in terms of their creative ambition, in terms of the way they’re scheduled, the fact that we have one director.

There was not much about it (Loki) that resembled an episodic project, except for the fact that it was six hours of content that we were trying to make, so it’s a very long project.

In terms of resources, I didn’t ever feel that we were unduly stretched. Always, when you get a creative brief like this, there’s always a period at the beginning of every project where you’re reconciling the creative brief and the resources that you have. That has been the case for every project that I’ve ever worked on regardless of the size. There’s this beginning phase where that’s the case and oftentimes, it’s in that process where you come up with some very great creative solutions that are a direct result of some of the limitations, actually.

Yeah, I wouldn’t say that we had some extraordinary limitations in this case (for Loki), but that’s generally true for all projects, in my experience.

Q: What were you inspired by when making designing the sets of the TVA with its retro-futuristic and anachronistic aesthetics?

In the source material, the TVA had a lot of different things going on, but one of the strong themes also was this armada of desks, which is kind of typical of a post-war era bureaucracy look. There was a grain of that in the source material but a lot of it also came from the show’s creator and writer, Michael Waldron, who described in the original document I read before interviewing for this job.

He described the TVA as a kind of mix of Mad Men meets Blade Runner. Part of these two strong visual references for us. On top of that, me and director Kate Herron, even before we met and spoken to each other, were inspired by Terry Gilliam’s Brazil also as a strong influence because of the anachronisms that that story had and also because of the clear presence of this strong monolithic bureaucracy, which is something that we have in the TVA also.

For the TVA, we were looking a lot at wanting to create a world that had a paradoxical feeling, being an imposing monolithic architectural space that has brutalist elements in them and had almost Soviet modernist elements to them. The colour palette and the materials and the whimsical patterning were much more like American style modernism.

The result was hopefully when you’re in an environment like this, you don’t know whether to feel terrified or invited. Hopefully, it creates that feeling in both the characters and the audience; this kind of cognitive dissonance in not knowing whether they can trust the TVA or not. That’s the narrative objective.

The writers came up with these ideas and the idea with that was to kind of create the bubble gum wrapper in the Renaissance era (Loki Episode 2) and the futuristic shovel in the early 20th-century farm field (Loki Episode 1). These ideas were placed there to create a trail of clues for the TVA to follow before they have clarity on Sylvie’s identity. But for the anachronisms generally, that was something we tried to do throughout the TVA to have all kinds of strange things from different timelines and different worlds popping up in terms of props, like the Infinity Stones in the mail cart and stuff like that.

Q: What was it like working with Tom Hiddleston, who is a producer on Loki?

It was very exciting to have this opportunity to take the character and his storyline in a different direction. It became all the more exciting when I read the scripts and I saw the type of journey they were going to take the character on.

Tom is a professor of Loki, basically. After all, ten years or so of playing the character; he knows it better than anybody and he has an in-depth understanding of the character and his backstory; the character’s family relationships and he was really helpful in giving a little talk to all the department heads about the background of his character, which was very informative.

Q: Recently, Loki series director Kate Herron said that 90 percent of production sets were physical. Does this include the world of The Void, and can you tell us more about how you brought it to life?

That’s true. That was what was unique about this show, because of my own design approach, and my goal in creating this large monolithic brutalist environment, I felt strongly that the sets needed to be built kinda wholly and that they needed to have the ceilings in-tact. This was also supported by Loki cinematographer Autumn, in that the way of her own style of photography is very wide and low-angled photography, which is why for both of our creative goals, it made a lot of sense to build these sets like completed and 360-degree environments.

For the TVA, that was almost always the case, with the exception of when you saw outside a window. With the Void (in Loki Episode 5), a lot of that was built practically as well. What I can tell you is that we build a large piece of this landscape on a soundstage, which was about 150 feet by 200 feet of undulating wilderness terrain. In that, we would bring in these different scenery elements on different days to make it feel like different places within the Void.

For example, one day there was the bus stop terrain where we meet Loki. One day it was the giant head. One day it was the drive-in movie theatre where we find Sylvie. All of these things were brought in and we shot there over the course of seven days. The terrain was designed in such a way that depending on what angle you shot, it felt like a very different place. Backgrounds were put in during post-production in visual effects. The Loki palace, where the Loki variants kind of hang out, the bowling alley, all of that was also a 360-degree built set as well.

Q: What was the most challenging set of the entire Loki series that you had to work on?

We had a lot of very ambitious sets but I think the city of Sharoo at the end of Loki Episode 3: Lamentis was a very technical set. The goal was to create this virtual one-in, that appears as a single shot. This was a very involved and elaborate process of choreography, basically.

All the different departments were involved to make this happen because as we watch the sequence, we see tons of actors running around, there are explosions happening, the camera’s panning up to see the planet above crumbling and asteroids pelting the surface.

There was a lot of planning that went through at the very beginning. We brought the paper models of this to Autumn, our cinematographer and creative director, to use to plan some of their shots. One day, we had some more information that fed back to the art department where we developed more involved and elaborate drawings and models which again, fed back to them. In this way, we had kind of an iterative conversation to arrive at what the design was.

So, as we start to build the set, many of the department heads came to visit and check the progress. We rehearsed what the shot was going to be, so we could exactly fine-tune the set to meet the needs of this shot and see where the edits needed to be. In order to do this, we needed to adjust the exact width of the roads or move a piece of scenery here and then figure out exactly, okay, there’s going to be an explosion coming out of the ground here and another explosion coming out of the building here and this is when the camera looks up to the sky and sees the planet explode. This is where the window breaks and this is where the guy jumps out and grabs him and there’s a fight.

There are many, many people involved; Monique Garderton, our stunt coordinator, Kate Herron, the director, and also the special effects team, and of course, visual effects, deeply involved, and Richard Graves, who is kind of our AD (Assistant Director), the circus leader of all of it, organizing everybody to kind of work on this thing altogether. It’s the sort of thing that involves so many different departments that it can only really be discovered when working in a big group together.

I would say that was maybe the most challenging technically because there were so many logistical parameters and so many moving parts.

Q: What are your thoughts on diversity in the production of the creative industry?

I think that it is critically important. As somebody who is myself an immigrant, I was born in Iran and my family moved here when I was quite young. I’m super happy to see the direction that the industry is going in. I think Marvel has been particularly excellent in providing leadership in this way and I honestly have to give a lot of credit to Kate Herron, our director.

Almost more than any other project I’ve been on, she prioritised inclusivity and diversity. I mean, lots of people, don’t get me wrong, it’s on every project and on everyone’s mind, but I think Kate went above and beyond because it’s so fundamental to her worldview and she’s such a sensitive soul in this way. One of the many ways in that it was such a joy to work with Kate and I’m very proud of the many different ethnicities we’re representing, and how many women we’ve had. In our art department, we had close to fifty men and women.

It’s important and leads to better creative results that are more fully realized and more representative of what the fans really want.

#Kasra Farahani #production design #Loki #interview

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poulpichou · 4 years

Text

Government failures and fucked-upperies in France

Ok, so I recently wrote a bit about the situation with police brutality in France, but now I would like to tell you more about WHY the government needs the police so much. A lot of my sources will be in french (and marked (F) like this) because there are a lot of cases that didn’t make it to the international press. Many sources also come from the newspaper Mediapart and require a subscription.

I’ve had a lot of people telling me “BuT It’S nOt ChInA” and let me tell you, yes I know it’s way worse in other countries (Peru, Thailand, Nigeria and so on, a lot is happening right now in the world), but where the fuck do you draw the line? The kind of things I’m gonna tell you about is unacceptable, and so hypocritical when a country calls itself a democracy and the land of human rights, and we should be angry about that and try to make it change. Here I’m talking a lot about Macron but let’s not forget that many current problems began under Holland’s presidency, who was supposed to be from the left, and even before. Alright, here we go.

President of the wealthy

Soooo let’s begin with how Macron was elected by wealthy people: half of the 16 million euro collected for his campaign was financed(F) by 1200 people, mostly living in Paris, by banks, and also by rich french people living abroad. So of course the first thing he did when he could was to reward them for his victory and he cut their taxes in december 2018. He deleted the “taxe on fortune” that was in place for 40 years (minus 3 years under Chirac first presidency) and replaced it with another that taxes way less, in the name of trickle down economy (you know, the same way Thatcher and Reagan did) saying that rich people would invest more and thus creating more jobs. Of course that didn’t happen and rich people just got way richer without any effects on poor people.

At the same time, he cut down housing benefits for students and poor people (1/4 of people between 18 and 24 are under the poverty line) and cancelled housing helps for 50,000 people. In december 2018, he wanted to pass a law that would increase fuel prices in the name of ecology, but that would once again mainly affect working and middle classes. That’s how started the yellow vest movement, because people were becomming poorer and poorer and they felt like the government only gave to the rich and took from the poor.

In 2018, 14% of the french population was under the poverty line, and 21% suffer from food insecurity and it has only worsened since.

At the end of 2019, a student even set himself on fire at his university because he was in such financial distress he couldn’t go on anymore.

Yellow Vest movement

If you have to read one article about it, it’s this one.

In 2017, Macron said in one of his speeches about a train station that it was “a place where one encounters people who are succeeding and people who are nothing”. The yellow vest movement came from these “people who are nothing”. For the first time in decades, people who were not heard, people who didn’t have a place in the political landscape in France were on the front scene. A lot of protestors never demonstrated before, or even engaged in politics. Many of them now protested because “they had nothing else to lose” (F). People were angry from not being listened to and being used only to allow rich people to get richer, and oh boy they showed it in the street.

The first protests took the government by surprise. They were not expecting the numbers of protestors, nor their determination. The protest were also completely different from the demonstration the state was used to deal with: there were no official leaders, making it really difficult for the government to negotiate, demonstrations were often not declared beforhand in prefectures (F), and people were systematically targetting (F) banks, major brands like Apple or McDonalds and luxury shops, causing millions euro worth of damages.

On the 1st of december 2018, protestors in Paris took over the Arc de Triomphe and completely overfloaded the police.

One policeman said afterward that on this day, “the Elysée could have fallen” (F). Police forces were not prepared, the right orders were not given at the right times and some police company were surounded by furious protestors. The same policeman said that in that moment, “they forgot about their code of ethics”, that they were just shooting rubber bullet wherever they could and “trying protect their life”. The following weeks, police put on steel fences around the Elysée and members of the government and their collaborators were asked to lock down and put away all of their documents(F) before the weekly demonstrations, in case the protestors were able to take over the buildings.

It was a turning point in the protests, and from then the orders given to the police changed completely. From then they’ve been allowed to litterally do whatever it took to keep the country in order. The government understood that the last thing between them and the furious people they betrayed was the police, and that’s precisely why they are trying to give them even more power today with the law on global security (see my last post, and probably a next one I’m gonna write soon because it would be too much for this post).

Since December 2018, a journalist, David Dusfresne, documents and keeps count on the police brutality, first on twitter and then on the online newspaper Mediapart(F) (TW for really graphic pictures of wounds and blood). For now he counted 4 deaths, 30 people who lost an eye due mainly to rubber bullets, 6 who lost a hand due to detonative grenades (France is being the only european country to use them against its own population), 346 wounded to the head (fractured skull mainly, due to the rubber bullets and baton blow) and a total of 969 documented reports on police brutality (and that’s only for 3 years).

Since then, a total of 9 police officers have been judged guilty, 7 of them being only suspended temporarily and avoiding prison, with only 2 of them ending up in prison(F) and being expelled from police forces.

People began to record the police more and more to prevent any brutality or to have proofs in case it happened, and then the police began to target journalists and anyone who had a camera.

They began to lie to people, telling them it’s forbiden to record the police (for now it isn’t), they forced photographs to delete their photos in the middle of demonstrations. They covered their ID number on their uniform (F), they covered their licence plates.

The government also began to talk about legitimate protest, aka the peacefull one, and put the name of “casseur” (thug) on anyone who would be too angry. to their taste, saying that the latter were taking the former in hostage. Basically they were saying tht yes, protestors took aver the arc de Triomphe, but it was only hooligans who just wanted to burn things, nothing political behind that.

Here began the preventive arrests (F) before demonstrations (arresting people who had done nothing on the only presumption they will), the arrest of journalists, the arrest of people having masks and protection glasses on them. From now on the administration can ban someone from public demonstration without going through the justice system.

Between November 2018 and November 2019, around 3,000 person(F) from the yellow vest movement were senteced to community services, fees, suspended prison sentence, and for 1/3 of them prison sentences. Those numbers are underestimated because many cases have not been judged yet. Some protestors were sentenced for shouting slogans(F), for wearing protective masks(F) (F), other were sent to prison for damaging radars(F) on highways, or for filming riots while wearing a yellow vest(F). There has been a massive tendency(F) for the state to sue people for “participation to a gathering with the intent to commit violences against persons or goods”, allowing them to give fees, community services or even prison sentences to people based only on the intent they gave them. Many people found guilty of attacking police forces were judged with the only proof being the declaration of police officers, and even though a lot of them claimed to be innocent they were still sentenced because they couldn’t bring proof of their innocence.(F) Amnesty International talks about the criminalization of demonstrators(F) that’s happening in France and warns about the instrumentalisation of laws that goes against international law. (F)

The ban on masks (they can be considered as weapons) during demonstration allows police to take protestors(F) who have some on them or in their car to the police station for a maximum of 48h for the sole purpose of making them miss the demonstration. This law is not applied nowadays because of Covid, but it still exists.

With the yellow vest movement, the part of the population who wasn’t used to the police actually began to endure what POC have been living for decades.

Racisme

France is a fucked up racist country. It was born in colonisation and slavery, and still rely on its former colonies to prosper economically. Young men perceived as Black or Arab are 24 more times likely to be stopped in the streets. The overwhelming majority of people killed by the police are black or arabic(F). When the police kills POC, the judiciary system often refuses to do a full investigation, refuses to hear some of the witnesses, refuses to watch some of the video tapes from surveillance cameras (F). A lot of autopsies are proved to be ballant lies, founding heart diseases(F) or blood infections(F) when the victim was actually killed by suffocation due to ventral tackle, a police technique that got France sentenced by the European court of human rights (F).

BAC

Since the mid 90′s, France has special police forces for working-class neighborhoods, the Brigade Anti-Criminalité (BAC), that operate in suburbs (in France rich people live in the city center and poor people in the suburbs) where a majority of imigrants and people from black and arabic descent live. BAC agents are all volunteers, they act in unmarked cars and civilians clothes and can carry weapons(F).

Their purpose is to roam the streets and to catch misdemeanor in the act, and they’ve been known (as well as regular police) to harass population by proceeding to systematic identity cheks(F) (often outside of what’s allowed by law), by insulting people(F), provoking people with racist and homophobic insults(F), by beating them(F) and charging them for “outrage” or “rebellion”(F) when they protest (charges that always give reasons to police officers when there’s no recordings of the arrest and allow them to get money for the prejudice). There have been reports of torture on adults(F), tennagers(F) and children(F), and cases where the BAC agents took victims to quiet places so they could beat them up(F). There have also been reports of agents inventing charges when their provocations didn’t push the victim to confront them(F).

They are basically above the law. There have been cases of massive corruption(F) where the agents returned to their unit(F) after the end of their suspension, and the person who leaked the info got fired.

As they are field agents, their role is also intelligence: they gather intells in the suburbs and they also infiltrate demonstration(F) and wear the attire of “casseurs”, to gather intells on violent individuals. Since the beginning of the Yellow Vest movement, they’ve participating in containing demonstrations as well even though they don’t have any training in that field.

Refugees

Police is being extremely violent against refugees, particularly in Northern France and what used to be the “Jungle” of Calais. Amnesty International reported that police had been beating refugees with baton, confiscating their clothes and tent daily during winter (it also happened in Paris(F)), urinating on their tents, spraying teargas directly in the face of sleeping men. A group of 4 associations also issued a report(F) on police harassment against volunteers who helped refugees, with as much as 646 instances of police harassment and abuse against volunteers between November 2017 and June 2018 in Calais. Human rights observers reported harrasment techniques such as body search of female volunteers by male officers, insults, pushing, threats of legal suits and threats of arrest. Volunteers who reported these behaviours were told by the police internal investigation body that the reports where defamatory and could constitute a crime.

At the beginning of the year, associations that were not approuved by the state were forbidden to distribute free meals to refugees(F).

Islamophobia

France has always been an islamophobic country but it has been more public and accepted since the 2015 terrorist attacks. Many laws promoting laicity are actually used to target Islam:

The ban of public display of religious items in public institutions (schools, libraries, government buildings) target mainly women wearing hijabs when many mayors keep on installing nativity scenes during Christmas(F). In 2016 some cities made wearing a burkini (full body covering bathing suit) on the beach illegal and we had some astonishing scenes of police officers asking a women (who wasn’t even wearing a burkini) to undress on the beach in the name of the law.

The law that says people have to uncover their face when being in a public space only target muslim women and is now completely useless as we have the obligation to wear a mask everywhere

The law that says street prayers have to be autorized in prefecture beforehand only target muslim community: when a muslim association organized a street prayer(F) in 2017 to protest their eviction from their place of cult in the city center they were charged 10,000€ (5,000€ from the association and 5,000€ from its president), whereas catholics students organized a street prayer(F) last month and didn’t face any charges. Legally, any autorization must be asked more than 3 days in advance and in both cases it was only asked on the day before.

Following the killing of Samuel Paty, a teacher who was attacked mid october for showing caricatures of the prophet Mohamed in class, four 10 years old children were arrested for “terrorism apology”(F), interrogated for 10 hours and their houses checked by police forces in full gears. The minister of interior also disolved the Collective against Islamophobia in France, saying that, since it was prottesting against anti-terrorist laws (that are super islamophobic) it was promoting radical islamism and terrorism. A minute of silence was imposed in schools and the names of people who didn’t follow the procedure were given to the minister of education, who said “none of them will be left unpunished”.(F)

To sum up: the government is being super islamophobic but muslims who voice their concerns are seen as radical islamists and are associated with terrorists. Furthermore, it’s now easier for islamophobic people in government to ban associations or to pass shady laws thanks to the state of emergency.

State emergency

Following the 2 years of state emergency (2015-2017), France passed a law against terrorism(F) that normalized a lot of the state emergency’s characteristics: it took power away from the justice system to give it to administrations, directly under the control of the government.

The government, who previously had to be accountable in front of a judiciary judge, can now do many things under the only control of an administrative judge(F). The actions of administrative judges are controled by the council of state, and the president of the said council is the prime minister or the minister of justice, named by the president.

Here is what they can now do(F):

place people under house arrest with obligation to check in police stations every day for a maximum of a year

deny or restrict access to public events to some people, or proceed to body search

make someone wear an electronic bracelet when they didn’t commit any infractions

close places of worship for a maximum of 6 months when the ideas discuted there promote hate, discrimination, violence or terrorism

require people to give their login of any account on internet to the police

investigate on civil servants using secret services files

create a national centralized file with the names of people travelling in and out of the country by plane or boat

With the autorisation of a judge of freedom and detentions, they can also search houses and seize computers or phones to inspect the contents.

If people refuse to do any of the above when they are asked to, they risk 3 years of prison and a fee that can go up to 45,000€.

The offense “terrorism apology” was used against hundreds of people, with a large proportion of them being underaged (1/3 of them in 2015), sometimes for something as unsignificant as a non-violent facebook comment, a situation pointed out by Amnesty International(F). The NGO also highlights the fact that the fear of being considered as an extremist or the fear of facing judiciary consequences sets limit to freedom of speech.

Since 2015, the government has used the power given to them by the state of emergency to place 24 environmental activists under house arrest for the duration of the COP21(F) and to search the house of people who were protesting against the construction of an airport(F), construction potentialy linked to corruption(F), and also to close temporarly more than 30 mosques and install security cameras inside(F).

The consulting national commission on human rights pointed out a “highjack” of the state emergency, that was used to silence protestors, unions and refugees with abusive means, like unnecessary handcuffing, adults and children being aimed at with assault riffle during house searches and house being damaged during searches.

2015 was also the year of the Intelligence Act, a law that allows inteligence agencies to install scanning devices on the infrastructure of telecom operators so they can collect data on communications that are likely to reveal a terrorist threat.

Covid 19

When the epidemy started to be problematic in France in February 2020, hospital workers had been on strike for 11 months(F) and were asking for doctors and nurses jobs opening, and more beds in hospital. At the beginning of february, 600 administrative hospital workers had quit(F) so they were not “accomplices of the management of misery”. Healthcare workers had been saying for years that the deterioration of the working conditions in hospitals were gonna lead to patients death.

Since the beginning of the 2000′s, 100 000 beds have been removed(F) from hospital services and there has been a budget cut close to 12 bilions euros(F) for the health services.

Then comes Covid 19, and the government asks health workers to always do more with less, in the name of common good. We applaud them at our windows every night, and then they don’t get the bonus(F) the government promised, the healthcare system doesn’t get any budget increase and even worse, it still has to face a 800 milions cut in the middle of the pandemic(F).

The newspaper Mediapart issued a report(F) exposing the lies of the government:

They decided to get only small quantities of masks at the beginning of january against experts opinion, they said the virus wouldn’t reach France.

Government lied about the usefullness of masks to prevent people asking for them when they didn’t have some to distribute to the whole population. They said it was useless, and even dangerous because we didn’t know how to use them, they actively encouraged people not to wear them, and they lied about mask shortage. I really want to insist on that point, the instensity of communication on the subject was incredible. Every day we had many different high-ranked person in the government telling us on TV, on the radio or in newspaper that we shouldn’t wear masks. They only made wearing masks compulsory in public spaces mid July, 6 months after the first case in France(F).

Healthcare workers didn’t have enough masks and thus faced higher risks of contamination but the government still allowed non essential big companies like Airbus to use milions of the precious FFP2 masks. The government still refuses to give the number of healthcare workers who died from Covid19(F), the only count we have is made by journalists, and it’s believed to be underestimated.

To this day, healthcare workers are still on strike for better working conditions and better pay. I took this pic earlier this month from one of the firestations in my city, you can read written in white paint on the doors “understaffed, population in danger”, “18 months of strike and still NOTHING”, “Covid bonus ???” and “SOS”. Firefighters also write this on their trucks and their helmets, and hospitals have had banners deployed for more than a year now. All of these people are still working to ensure everyone’s access to health services but they refuse to transfer data to the state sickness insurance for example (and they are now facing administrative sanctions(F) and are threatened to not be given cancer drugs if they don’t end the strike(F)).

Regarding Covid, we are one of the only countries in europe to use self-filled certificates to be able to go outside. These certificates are controlled by the police, and like I said earlier, increased police controls harm a certain part of the population (young people and POC). Amnesty International issued a report(F) on the violences comited during french lockdown, pointing out repetitive and significant illegitimate actions from the police, such as beatings, use of tasers, illegal arrests, racists and homophobics insults and verbal threats. In April 2020, Mohamed Gabsi, a homeless person, was killed by the police after being arrested for being outside during the lockdown(F). The officers who killed him are still in service.

The covid crisis brought us in the worst recession we had since WW2, and the Secour Populaire (french association that helps poor people) had to help 45% more people than it helped in 2019(F). In my city, there are so many people coming for food distribution on certain days they had to install permanent fences in the street so people can queue in order.

Corruption and Other Stuff

In France (as in many other countries) it’s rare to have politicians who’ve never been prosecuted in any judiciary or administrative case.

Here I’m only gonna tell you who have been accused and who have been prosecuted for what in Macron’s government, and quite frankly it’s not exhaustive because one wikipedia page just brings me to 5 more.

The following tab is quite heavy so feel free to just check the left column with the legend.

(Now let me cry thinking about this Swedish minister who had to quit over a chocolate bar)

(All my sources are from french newspapers, I can give them if you ask me but I’m not gonna put them here because there are way too many)

People who had to quit the first government were still appointed deputy governor of the Bank of France (Sylvie Goulard), president of the national assembly (Richard Ferrand) and chief of foreign affaires commission at the national assembly (Marielle de Sarnez). They are being investigated for corruption and embezzlement and they still have a successfull political career, and more important they still heavily influence the laws of our country and of Europe. Sylvie Goulard was even chosen by Macron to seat at the European Commission but european deputies decided it was fucked up and rejected her appointment (F).

In this list I only talked about members of the government but there has been other scandals linked to people around Macron.

Benalla cases: It all began when we discovered Alexandre Benalla, chief of security and travels for the president, was participating in demonstration as a policeman (which he wasn’t) and used his position to beat up protestors and passerby. The rest of the case is filled with destruction and hiding of evidences(F), illegal sharing of public surveillance videotapes by the police, undeclared guns(F), illegal but unpunished use of data by the police(F) and the Elysée(F), breaking of the judiciary control by Benalla, illegal diplomatic passports and meeting with african’s leaders, russian contracts with an alleged mafia boss(F), office searchs for a newspaper ordered by the State, who tried to seize the proofs and the sources the newspaper had on the case(F) and so on. The case involves several members of the government and members of special forces, and some journalists who were writing on it were then auditionned for disclosure of state secret(F). The case in general highlighted the impunity members of the government and police officers have, as well as anyone who is close to the president, but also the dysfunction in the justice system and the impossibility for high ranked people to face justice. The fucker is still free, taunt people on twitter and still gives interviews to national television.

Kohler case: Alexis Kohler, general secretary of the Elysee and Macron right hand man during his campain, hid his personnal links to the sea transporters MSC and then attributed them huge state funds. He also lied in his involvement in the decision. We discovered Macron sent a letter to the national financial prosecutor's office to clear him, which they did, until an anti-corruption association relaunched legal proceedings. The guy is now being prosecuted for corruption and bribery. (F) (F)

Conclusion

Fuck the police, eat the rich, let’s forbid them from being elected, a next long post on the Law on Global Security the governement is trying to pass is gonna come soon if you’re interested.

Please tell me if you see any inconsistency in this post, I tried to source it as much as I could and to verify everything I wrote but like anyone else I have bias and sometimes I wrote things at 5am so I’m aware I might be incorrect and I’m open to constructive criticism. Also sorry for my approximate english sometimes.

#France #Macron #up the baguette #yellow vest #what the france #french government #french politics #french side of tumblr

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passionate-reply · 3 years

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This week on Great Albums: a fresh look at quite possibly the 80s’ most hated band, A Flock of Seagulls! Spoiler: their music is good, people in the 90s and 00s were just mean. If you want to find out more about how having the absolute best hair in the business ended up backfiring on these poor sods, look no further than my latest video. Or the transcript of it, which follows below the break!

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums! Today, I’m going to be diving into a discussion of quite possibly the most derided and lambasted music group of the 1980s: A Flock of Seagulls. With a strange name, a perhaps painfully stylish aesthetic, and equally trendy and of-the-moment music, that was, for a time, inescapable in popular culture, their legacy forms a perfect target for the ridicule all popular things must face in due time. But even moreso than that, I think A Flock of Seagulls have become not only a punchline in and of themselves, but also a summation of everything that was dreadful and excessive about the early 1980s, with its “Second British Invasion” of synthesiser-driven New Wave. I can think of no better example of this kind of abuse than a famous line from the 1999 comedy film, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. The film is largely a love letter to the 1960s and its Mod aesthetics, and the protagonist, a super-spy unfrozen from this era in time, dismisses the history and culture of the 1970s and 80s as nothing more than “a gas shortage, and A Flock of Seagulls.” But at the time of this writing, we’re about as far away from Austin Powers as the film was from the release of this album, the band’s 1982 debut LP, so I think it’s been long enough that we can start to re-evaluate A Flock of Seagulls’ rightful place in music history.

While this self-titled album was the group’s first long-player, their first release was the 1981 single “It’s Not Me Talking.” Notably, this track was actually produced by the legendary Bill Nelson, who also released it on their behalf via his personal label, Cocteau Records. Ever since discovering this for myself, I’ve found the connection between Nelson and A Flock of Seagulls fascinating, and also satisfying. Despite the gulf between their respective reputations, I do think their work has a lot in common, at the end of the day: swirling washes of synth disrupted by screaming guitars, not to mention that shared interest in Midcentury rock and roll aesthetics.

Music: “It’s Not Me Talking”

These two acts would, of course, go their separate ways shortly after, and they ended up in completely opposite camps, with Nelson becoming a cult favourite with little crossover success, and A Flock of Seagulls going on to create what is, undoubtedly, one of the most iconic songs of the entire decade.

Music: “I Ran”

What does one even say about a song like “I Ran”? Over the years, it’s certainly gotten somewhat overplayed, but I can’t really hold that against it. It’s just a damn good song. Both ethereally menacing as well as catchy and rather accessible, “I Ran” takes the atmosphere suggested by “It’s Not Me Talking” and kicks it into another gear, with a harder-hitting hook and the introduction of that highly distinctive and of-the-moment echoing guitar effect. Some will hear it as little more than evidence that the song is hopelessly dated, but I’ve never thought of it as anything other than satisfying to listen to. If you ask me, I figure all art that exists is essentially “a product of its time”--nobody ever said Michelangelo Buonarroti’s David was a lousy sculpture, just because you can easily tell it was made during the Italian Renaissance. At any rate, I’d encourage everyone reading to go back and listen to it again, trying to maintain a little neutrality. I’d recommend the album cut of it, which is significantly longer than the single version, and features a rich intro that sets the scene before that famous guitar ever makes an appearance, which I think really adds to the experience. By some reckonings, A Flock of Seagulls are sometimes considered a “one-hit wonder,” but while they certainly are remembered chiefly for “I Ran,” this album’s other singles were moderately successful as well.

Music: “Space Age Love Song”

“Space Age Love Song” is perhaps the band’s second best-remembered single, and takes their sound in a markedly different direction than that of “I Ran.” “I Ran” won popular acclaim by finding a new home for the guitar, in the midst of a sea of synth, and pushed A Flock of Seagulls into a similar space as acts like the Cars and Duran Duran, who had enough mainstream rock sensibilities to sneak a lot of synthesiser usage onto American rock radio...much as one might sneak spinach into tomato sauce when feeding picky children. But I think “Space Age Love Song” is much more palatable to listeners of pop, synth- or otherwise. It’s softer in texture, and really almost dreamy, capturing the hazy, buoyant feeling of limerence as well as any pop song ever has. I’m tempted to compare it to another synth-driven classic, whose influence towers over this period in electronic music: the great Giorgio Moroder’s “I Feel Love.” Much like “I Feel Love,” “Space Age Love Song” combines simple, almost banal love lyrics with an evocative electronic soundscape, painting a picture of an enchanting, high-tech future where human feelings like love have remained comfortably recognizable across centuries or millennia. A similar theme of futuristic love pervades the album’s second single, “Modern Love Is Automatic.”

Music: “Modern Love Is Automatic”

While “Space Age Love Song” uses simplistic lyricism to portray the relatable universality of falling in love, “Modern Love Is Automatic” gives us the album’s most complex narrative. In a world where “young love’s forbidden,” we meet a pair of star-crossed lovers prevented from being together by some sort of dystopian authority. The male member of this union, introduced as the “cosmic man,” is apparently imprisoned for the crime of loving, but the text suggests that he may escape from this prison--or, perhaps, even be freed from it. The title, repeated quite frequently throughout the track, is perhaps the mantra of this anti-love society, a piece of propaganda being drilled into us as thoroughly as it is into these subjects: Modern love is automatic, with no need for messy, unpredictable human input.

It’s also worth noting that the song is consciously set in “old Japan,” deliberately locating it in the “exotic” East. While East Asia was strongly associated with refined, perhaps futuristic culture, I can’t help but think there’s a more pejorative sentiment operating here, rooted in stereotypes of Asian cultures unduly policing sexual freedom, and other forms of personal expression and self-determination. Ultimately, despite its futuristic trappings, “Modern Love Is Automatic” isn’t really a song about technology at all, but rather authoritarianism. “Telecommunication,” on the other hand, engages more directly with that theme.

Music: “Telecommunication”

“Telecommunication” was also released prior to the self-titled album proper, and was also produced by Bill Nelson. While structurally similar to “Modern Love Is Automatic,” with an oft-repeated title, brief verses, and a generally repetitive musical structure full of meandering guitar, its text quite plainly discusses the titular field of technology, in a seemingly non-judgmental fashion--though it could be argued that the fairly upbeat music suggests a positive outlook on things like radio and TV. The one hitch in all of it is the very end of the last verse, which sets the song in the “nuclear age”--a nod, perhaps, to the darker applications of 20th Century technology. “Telecommunication” is perhaps indebted less to figures like Moroder, and moreso to Kraftwerk, who first solidified the rich tradition of stoic synth thumpers about everyday machines like cars, trains, and, of course, nuclear energy. I’m also tempted to compare it to an earlier work of Bill Nelson’s group Be-Bop Deluxe, “Electrical Language,” another bubbly number that playfully bats this concept back and forth.

The theme of “quotidian technology” is also present on the cover of this album, which features an interior shot of a living room, centered around a television set. The TV displays a figure playing guitar--perhaps one of those heroic rock pioneers of the Midcentury like Buddy Holly, whom Nelson was so keen to imitate. But what’s most immediately striking about this cover is its beautiful colour palette, full of deep, saturated jewel tones, treated softly with an “airbrush” style effect. Despite being a somewhat mundane scene, the image also features fanciful, imaginative touches: the floor of this room is actually a miniature beach landscape, with the “floor” beneath the TV actually being the surface of the ocean, and the TV appears to be surrounded by a colourful, glowing group of birds. Given the beachy surroundings, we could perhaps interpret them as the titular seagulls. It’s tempting to think of this scene as a representation of how technology can sweep us away, out of our everyday existence and into something richer and more exciting.

But perhaps it’s not so simple--note also the open window in the top left, whose curtain appears to be agitated by some sort of motion in the air. Perhaps these birds are not the products of television fantasy, but rather have flown in from the window, and hence hail from the “real world?” Given how tracks like “Space Age Love Song” and “Modern Love Is Automatic” tackle the theme of the mundane meeting the fantastical, I think this complex and arresting image is a great fit for the album.

While their self-titled debut spawned multiple recognizable hits, A Flock of Seagulls never came anywhere close to recapturing its success. For the most part, they struggled to remain relevant as time wore on, largely abandoning the sonic footprint of their first album, and chasing after new trends in music technology such as digital synthesisers. They would eventually break up during the mid-1980s, and though they’ve reunited in order to perform live several times, the book is probably closed on A Flock of Seagulls. Personally, I can’t help but wonder what might have been if they had stuck to their musical roots a bit more. You get a bit of that on their third LP, 1984’s The Story of a Young Heart, which thankfully brings back that iconic echoing guitar, and does so without sounding too much like a simple retread of “I Ran.” Out of all their other work, it’s the album I would most recommend to admirers of this debut LP.

Music: “Remember David”

My favourite track on A Flock of Seagulls’ debut LP is “Messages”--not to be confused with the track of the same name by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark! Moreso than anything else on the album, “Messages” has this aggressive, insistent, driving quality, and feels less like yacht rock, and more like punk rock. Despite not being released as a single, I think it’s a very strong track that’s quite easy to get into. That’s everything for today--thanks for listening!

Music: “Messages”

#music #album review #album reviews #great albums #a flock of seagulls #flock of seagulls

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rachelbethhines · 3 years

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Vintage Shows to Watch While You Wait for the Next Episode of WandaVision - The 50s

So the first three episodes of Wandavision have dropped onto Disney Plus and like me you’re probably already obsessing over it. Also like me you’re probably jonesing for another fix while waiting for more as the episodes only come out once a week.

But never fear, we literally have decades of cheesy comedy sitcoms to sift through to keep us entertained during quarantine. Along with the occasional action and/or horror stuff if you’re so inclined. So if you’re trying to decide where to start I’ll be making short lists for each decade that coincides with each episode.

1. I Love Lucy (1951- 1957)

The granddaddy of all American television sitcoms staring the first lady of comedy herself, Lucille Ball. While not the first sitcom to air, tv had been kicking around since the late 40s, this show did pave the way for many technical innovations for the new medium both on and behind the scenes. As such Elisabeth Olsen cited Miss Ball’s work as one of her inspirations for her role as Wanda in the series, as do many a woman entering into the comedic field.

Also the show is just flat out funny. One of those rare 50s sitcoms that manages to overcome some of it’s more dated aspects through shear force of personality and peak comedic screwball antics. The only downside is you have to have Hulu to watch it as the copywrite is tightly controlled even to this day.

2. Amos ‘n Andy (1951-1953)

The 1950s television landscape was overwhelemingly white. It’s no secret that POC had a hard time finding work in the field of entertainment let alone be the stars of the show. Amos ‘n Andy, a spin off of the earlier same titled radio show, was one of, if not the first black led shows on television and so deserves a mention just for that alone.

Now I will not act as if this show is perfect or ahead of it’s time. The series was controversial even during its day for is depictions of racial stereotypes. Eventually the series was canceled because of protests from the NAACP despite being very popular in the ratings. However I’m a full believer that history should be observed and talked about in order to progress further so check out an episode or two on youtube and decide for yourself if it’s worth remembering or not.

3. The Adventures of Superman (1952 - 1958)

Ok, not a sitcom, but as we all know, Wandavision isn’t just a sitcom it’s also a superhero show and this is one of the first tv series in this genre. It and the Fleischer Superman cartoons from the previous decade helped to make the juggernaut industry that we know today.

Plus Superman did an official crossover with I Love Lucy, seriously.

4. The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952 - 1966)

Hardly anyone talks about it today, but Ozzie and Harriet is the longest running sitcom to date. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia being the only other show threating to up seat it come next year. However the two sitcoms couldn’t be any more different.

The series stared the real life Nelson family who had got their start in radio as comedians and singers who then crossed over into tv. While the show was completely scripted it tried to hew as close to real life as possible, kicking off American’s obsession with platonic voyeurism. Much in the way Wandavision has the meta storyline of being watch in their own home.

5. Father Knows Best (1954 - 1960)

Another radio to television entry here, however the series drastically changed the main character during the transition. During the 40s radio sitcoms were very biting and sarcastic, often either going the complete surreal screwball route or were satires of the day. This fell out of favor as tv became more dominated by commercials and advertisers feared offending their potential costumers. So things were greatly toned down as the decade progressed.

Therefore when Father Knows Best hit the small screen gone was the rude and domineering dad and in his place we got the very model tv father; affable, gentle, loving, devoted, and very congenial. All traits we love to see in Vision some six decades later.

6. The Honeymooners (1955 - 1956)

I physically can not make a recommendation list of 50s sitcoms and not mention The Hoonymooners. I just can’t. It’s one of the greatest sitcoms ever made and hugely influential. So much so that The Flintstones ripped off the series whole sale to the point that Jackie Gleason threatened to sue Hanna-Barbera. However there’s little such influence in Wandvision.

See what made The Honeymooners stand out at the time and what gave it such longevity is the fact that the main characters were poor. They lived in a cramped and over crowded sparsely furnitured one bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. They owed bills, they dressed plainly, they worked long hours at low paying jobs, and they were often dirty from said work.

Much like how Wandavision will pull back the curtain a little to see the reality hiding underneath their suburban utopia, so too did The Honeymooners defy the the ‘perfect American dream’ that was soled on tv during the 50s to show us the trauma of poverty and the only thing that you can do when you find yourself trapped within that reality, laugh.

7. Leave it to Beaver (1957 - 1963)

You can not get any more quintessentially 50s than Leave it to Beaver. The series has become synonymous with the decade and it’s take on the ideal American family life to the point where it’s become a punchline of numerus jokes criticizing the values and attitudes of the era.

Does it really deserve such mockery? Who knows. I think one needs to watch it for themselves to decide. However it slots right into the aesthetic that the first episode of Wandavision is trying to recreate and it must have been popular for a reason, right?

8. The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959 - 1963)

We featured wholesome family sitcoms and screwball comedies with married folks but we haven’t covered any surrealist humor yet, and Wandavision is seeped into that sort of stuff. That’s because there really isn’t a lot of fantasy in most 50s sitcoms. So while the trappings for episode one of Wandavision is very 50s the effects and premise is more 1960s.

That’s where Dobie Gillis comes into play. Like Wandavision, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis is based off a comic book, or comic strip rather. However that comic was very down to earth and tame compared to the tv show. More fondly remembered as the inspiration for Scooby Doo a decade later, Dobie Gillis quickly transformed from a typical coming of age show about teenagers to a surreal, sarcastic, tongue in cheek comedy, complete with get rich quick schemes, spys, bongos, and a giant chicken.

9. Bonanza (1959 - 1973)

Yeah, I know all of y’all are judging me right now. “A western in a sitcom/sic-fi list? What are you thinking?” Well one really can’t talk about 50s television and not mention westerns of some sort. They permeated all mediums and dominated the cultural air waves. And Bonanza is far more than just a western.

Bonanza is literally every thing. It’s every genre at once; western, historical drama, sitcom, action adventure, satire, crime drama, soap opera ,and yes even the occasional foray into science fiction, albeit with a more Jules Vern take than a typical spaceman theming.

If Wandavision is a melding pot of seemingly disconnected genres then it’s because Bonanza paved the way with it’s similar breakage of formula.

10 The Twilight Zone (1959 to 1964)

Yeah, you probably knew this was coming. When not being a homage to sitcoms Wandavision is a downright horror movie, but not one with gore and mindless monsters. Rather the show evokes old school surrealist horror, like that employed in the famous (or infamous) Twilight Zone.

What you probably didn’t know is that we have the I Love Lucy show to thank for it. See Lucille Ball and her then husband Desi Arnaz had created their own production company in order to make I Love Lucy. This production company, Desilu Productions, is responsible for picking up Rod Sterling’s pilot and producing The Twilight Zone.

Runner Ups

Good shows that have little to do with Wandavision but are good anyways.

What’s My Line (1950 - 1967)

Just a really fun game show. Stars of the day would sometimes appear on it including many of the sitcom comedians listed above

Have Gun - Will Travel (1957 - 1963)

One of the very few pure westerns that I can tolerate. The lead actually cares about people and justice and will stand up to bigots.

Dennis the Menace (1959 - 1963)

While I have fond memories of the 90s film, I thought it was a tad redundant to put on the list when there’s already Leave it to Beaver.

So there’s the 50s list. On Wednesday I’ll post a list for the 60s and cover some of the more obvious stuff Wandavision was paying homage to.

#wandavision #wanda #vision #sitcoms #1950s #marvel #disney #i love lucy

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