#its the least polished for sure but MAN i like clara | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

deathbyvalentine · 5 years

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Random Prompts

The Fragile

Asa sat in the clearing, plaiting long strands of grass together, brow furrowed in acute concentration. It was the type of preoccupation one learnt as a child, something to do with your hands while you had little else to do. Asa, physically no longer a child, delighted in making all manner of daisy chains, plaited grass and laurel crowns. There was rarely a day where he wasn’t covered in pollen.

Oko had only been in the clearing for two moments before Asa was on his feet, hurtling towards him and wrapping his arms around his middle, squeezing tight. Oko laughed, bowing his head to kiss the smaller boy on the crown, rubbing his back. “It hasn’t been that long.”

“It’s been ages!” “It’s been a week!” He disentangled himself, moving to sit, crossing his legs. Asa mimicked him, eyes wide, attention rapt, body vibrating with the effort of sitting still. Oko, watching him out the corner of his eye, pretended not to notice, carefully adjusting his pouches, his scabbard. Finally, Asa could take no more. “What did you bring me?” “Who says I brought you anything?” Oko could only keep up the charade for a second before Asa’s expression made him relent. Out of one of the pouches he pulled a pale pink seashell, twisting to a fine point, without a single crack or chip. Asa turned it over with incredibly careful hands, fascinated. “Put it to your ear.” “Why?” “Just do it.” Cautiously, Asa held it up to his ear. His eyes widened and his mouth fell open in delighted surprise. “What is that?” “That’s the sound of the sea. The shell remembers it, even when it’s far from home.” Asa removed the shell and stared at it with renewed awe. He had never seen the sea. He likely never would. He tackled Oko with a hug once more, the two boys tumbling against the grass in a storm of laughter and joy.

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White Cloth

She scowled at herself in the mirror. She didn’t know how either of her sisters did it. It was a specifically feminine witchcraft she had never managed to learn and now she was trying, she felt ridiculous. The way she had brushed her hair hadn’t tamed the waves, it had only loaded it with static. She had struggled into her corset, tying the ribbons into something that approximated knots. The overdress was the customary white, but she had already caught the lace of her sleeve against a candle, blackening it. If she held her shawl just right, she could disguise the blemish.

Looking in the mirror, she didn’t look like a beautiful debutante. She looked like a frazzled young girl. It was bloody useless. In a fury, she ripped the ribbon from her hair, tossed the gloves to the side. Of course, it was precisely this moment Edith chose to come in, her own dress pristine and hair falling in delicate curls. She widened her eyes, shutting the door behind her. “Clara!” “What.” She replied, sulky to even her own ears. “What happened?” “I tried to look like you and instead I look ridiculous.” “You don’t. Not completely. Come here, I’ll help.” She sat her in front of the mirror, running a scented oil through her hair. When it was brushed next, it stayed sleek and shiny. “Why are you dressing like me anyway? What’s wrong with your usual dresses?” Clara said nothing, her attention apparently occupied with playing with the jar of rouge on the dressing table. Edith raised an eyebrow, watching her younger sister’s expression before realising something. “Is it because James is here?” Clara’s eyes immediately lit up with fury, confirming the accusation more than a verbal assent would. “No!” “Oh lord, it is! You should have just said. Wait right there!” She dashed from the room and came back a moment later, arms laden with petticoats and ribbons and perfumes. Clara’s eyes widened in fear. Edith’s mouth widened with delight.

An hour later and Clara could barely move. She was correctly tied into her corset. Her hair was styled and set into something elegant. Her dress was stiffened with starch and looked brand new. Her hands were weighed down with rings and gloves, fans and clutches. She felt ridiculous, but even she was forced to admit when she looked in the mirror, she looked like a new woman.

James’s eyes widened when she stepped into the busy drawing room. He had paused mid conversation and the banker continued on, oblivious to the young man’s lack of attention. She felt her cheeks heat up under the rouge and carefully pretended not to notice his reaction, accepting a flute of something bubbly from the serving girl. The party continued.

It was just past eleven when he finally asked her if she’d take a turn outside with him. Truthfully she was glad for it. She was sweating in her layers, headachey from all the scents on people’s skin and feet aching from the heels they had been subjected to. As soon as they were outside, she held up a finger. She tossed her shawl aside and peeled off her shoes, leaving them on the porch. Not yet done, she pulled the pins from her hair and hitched up her skirts so they sat just above the knee. As they stepped onto the road, she didn’t even notice the train dirtying itself in the dust. “That’s better.” She said, finally exhaling. “I’d say.” He eyed her as she was now and grinned. “Why were you like that anyway? You looked like Edith.” “Isn’t that a good thing?” “I mean, it ain’t bad. But she’s her and you’re you. I like you in your farming clothes. The breeches?” Stunned, she stopped dead. Then, huffed and started walking at some speed, leaving him looking rather baffled. Over her shoulder she called; “COULDN’T YOU HAVE SAID THAT EARLIER?”

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A Day in the Life of a Ship’s Cat

Hammocks were not ideal to sleep on. But then, neither were ships. Whiskers had certainly not picked a comfortable life. His mother would argue that he had picked no life at all, rather, that he had stumbled blindly into whichever was available to him in that moment. She would not be wrong.

But the ship life was not all bad. The food for example was exceptional. Fish heads, scales, shrimp, salted meat, rats fat on grain. He had become rather rotund himself over the months, the sun and sea air suiting him just fine. The pirates too were a perk of the job. Only the cook didn’t appreciate his constant presence but then, Whiskers didn’t care for his attitude, so the disdain was mutual.

His favourite place to lounge was on the deck, just below the ship’s wheel, safely out of the way of any rogue waves in all but the most treacherous of weather. When the wind picked up and the salt came a-knocking, he disappeared below decks, hiding in chests full of clothes or spare sails, thoroughly coating the fabric in fur.

When the ship came into port, he wasn’t even sure he would bother stepping paw outside. What could the island offer him that the ship didn’t? Apart from solid ground, obviously. He was by now, a creature of habit and little curiosity. He had heard what happened when one of his family got curious after all. He did not intend to follow them into their graves. At least, not when he was in a place well equipped with both cushions and laps to perch on.

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Whisper Secrets to the Water

Curiously, the dark pool reflected no stars. Look up at the sky above and there they were, omnipresent and silent as always, twinkling. But in the still water, there was nothing but a deep, inky blackness. In the daylight, would it reflect the sun? It was hard to tell. Nobody had ever been here before night had fell. Nobody ever would.

This was a place where the desperate came. Pregnant women wishing for blessings, girls asking for adventures, boys asking for love. The ill for cures, the sad for happiness and all the other problems that have plagued humanity since the first ape stood upright.

You could have been forgiven for thinking the newest arrival was a ghost rather than a nymph. Her dress was white, her skin was black, her hair was dotted with daisies. Her feet made no sound on the soft grass. Antlers curled upwards from her curls, lending an explanation for her grace. She approaches the edge of the water, kneeling and leaning over the water, the ends of her hair trailing into the liquid. She knelt closer still until her lips were only a breath away from the pool.

It was impossible to hear what she whispered but suddenly the clearing was listening. The trees ached with it, the branches leaning forward, the sky pressing closer. When she was done, the pool gave no indication of judgement, good or bad. There was no ripple, no movement. She sat back on her heels, closing her eyes for a minute. Goosebumps trailed up her skin, a sudden chill being carried in on the wind. It was done. And there was nothing that could pervert the course destiny was about to take.

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The Dusk Riders

The horizon stretched so far it curved, the desert and sky combining to create a frown of a landscape, a dark slash in a bright world. The night was creeping in from above, robbing the sky of its roses and lilacs, replacing them with a deep navy spotted with stars. Soon, the air would turn cold, though no more unkind than the baking sun of the afternoon.

It was when the sun had disappeared from the heavens but the colours hadn’t that they appeared. Four of them, starting as tiny dots and growing closer by the second. Hoof beats like thunder. It was not the ground but the sky appeared to shake. Their horses were not just black. They seemed to absorb light, even their eyes reflecting nothing. By contrast, the riders were cloaked in white so white it blinded. The light bounced and refracted so it was impossible to see what lay beneath their hoods.It could have been nothing at all, spirits wearing the mantle instead of flesh.

Behind them, night fell.

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The Sharpest Suits in the Room

The bar was stained a deep oak and polished to a high shine. None of the plastic shit you found in downmarket places, the sort that got tacky once you spilt a drop of beer on it. Along with the gas lanterns and the silk wallpaper, it spoke of wealth. Of an owner who was not worried about damaging the items because it would cost him nothing to replace them.

Owen leaned on the bar, shoe pressed against the brass foot rail. studiously ignoring the leather stools. He was nursing his whiskey and had been for some time, occasionally attracting the dubious glances of the bar tender. Owen paid no mind. He had been coming to this place for years and it wasn’t to get drunk or to spend money. It was to meet people, discreetly. The police didn’t come here. Mostly because their commissioner very much did. Therefore it was the perfect venue for meetings, deals and alliances. Enemies didn’t come here. The owner would be very upset if blood stained his silk.

He had been waiting long enough that the soft crooning from one of the performer girls on stage was beginning to grate, although not as much as the plinky soft jazz coming from the accompaniment. Just when he was getting ready to quit, the man he had been waiting for arrived.

On first glance, it might look like he and Owen were dressed almost identically. Both in pinstripe suits, both in brogues, both with golden watches glinting on their wrists. But a second glance was all it took. Owen’s watch was gold plated, his suit a little bit too big around the shoulders. It was the appearance of wealth, not the reality. There was nothing superficial about Quentin’s wealth. It wasn’t just in his clothes. It was in the cadence of his voice, the posture in his back, the drinks he ordered. If Owen could be like one man in the world, it wouldn’t be the president or a genius. It would be Quentin.

Quentin took his place at the bar beside him, signalling to the bartender for his usual. Owen pretended not to watch him, while studying him intently. By the end of the night, Quentin would be dead. By the next morning, he would be resurrected in a different country with a face that heavily resembled the conman’s beside him. So it goes.

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Mattias Has Some Loot

This was definitely some wish fulfilment he didn’t know he needed. Lying on his silk sheets, covered in gold bracelets, bangles, necklaces, chains and earrings. All looted from dead Grendel soldiers. He was starting to see the appeal of this soldiering business. He didn’t have to spend a single ring, he was technically helping the Empire and he got a ton of pretty stuff. At his heart he was truly a simple changeling.

He wondered, vaguely, if he could melt down enough of the tat to make a house made of gold. And then consecrate it to Prosperity. That would be a perfectly suitable abode for someone like him, who enjoyed the finer things in life. He liked silk, jewels, perfumes, spices. He liked well carved wood and heavy fabrics. He liked wearing his success on his sleeve, so one glance at him could tell you how Prosperous he was. And as it turned out, war could be pretty damn prosperous. Why had nobody told him earlier?

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The Day the Moon Ran Away

She was not naturally rebellious. In fact, quite the opposite. She was so obedient she tended to disappear, the way good students often did around their more needy counterparts. She did her work, she practised her powers and she did not break the rules.

So therefore it was more than a little unusual that Constance was climbing out of her bedroom window at 3am on a school night. She managed to catch hold of the nearby drainpipe, sliding down it inexpertly and landing with a hard thump that froze her both out of worry someone had heard her and the jarring sensation that hit her bones. When the building didn’t stir, she dusted down her skirt and keeping low, flanked the building in hurried footsteps. When she reached the shadow of the manor (cast by a silver moon) she bathed herself in it, and in this way managed to reach the woods undetected.

When she reached the trees, she could stand up straight and breathe just a little. She preferred the night to the day and the lonely to the crowded, so this forest felt like a warm bath to her soul right now. She liked the quiet, the idea that nobody was watching her or judging her. She never lived up to those expectations. She was perpetually disappointing.

She found the clearing she was looking for and knelt, her knees sinking into the soft black soil a little. They weren’t meant to use their powers unattended. They also weren’t meant to explore the grounds after dark. She was disregarding both for now. She buried her hands into the soil, taking a breath as she felt the earth get under her nails. She closed her eyes.

It was a new trick and one she found equally soothing and disturbing. It made her feel connected to the world around her in a way. Often feeling like an outcast, this was invaluable. But the connection came with a cost. She breathed out and cast her mind out like a net into the soil below her. Nothing for a moment, nothing at all. Then the net caught the first rabbit skeleton. Died due to a cat. The second died due to old age, crawling into its burrow and falling asleep. There might have been living things in the burrows - she wouldn’t know. They weren’t her domain.

Bird bones and swarming insects and foxes and badgers. The soil was a natural history of the area. And she felt the deaths of every single one. Not as much as if they were humans - that would be far too overwhelming. But enough that her mind became a wild thing too, full of echoes of fighting and mating and digging and dying. She pulled back after a moment, gasping a little, mind overwhelmed.

The thing is about ghosts is that they were everywhere. They were everything. Constance sometimes thought they were souls. Souls couldn’t just be destroyed. And so they lingered on, like treasures waiting to be found.

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Sound of Silence

She held the piece of wood between her teeth, trying not to gag on the musty taste. It was a little bloated with water and her teeth sunk into it. Despite the disgust she felt, it did its job. It muffled the broken sound that followed the needle pulling thread through her flesh. The gash had missed the artery in her thigh, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t still a danger. She needed to keep moving, and she couldn’t do that with blood pouring down her leg. She had packed it with antler moss, soaked in salt water. It wasn’t a bandage but it was the closest thing she could have to one.

It’s just like sewing a dress. She thought, desperately. A dress made of leather. It didn’t help as much as she hoped it would. Especially when she glanced down and saw the thick blue thread holding her skin together. The needle caught and she muffled a gasp, closing her eyes tightly against the pain. A noise would be fatal. Outside, the hunters roamed, their sonic detectors low to the ground. She worried her heartbeat would be enough to tip them, the sound of her blood dripping onto the floor of the wooden shack.

She cut the thread with her penknife, bringing her knee up to her chest and pressing her mouth against it, gritting her teeth. She didn’t want to cry. Especially not from something as trivial as pain. Wounds healed or they killed you. Crying would do no good either way. She pulled her trousers back up, wincing at the rustle of fabric. She refused to just lie here and wait for them to find her. She had to do something.

#prompts #prose #larp #short stories

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anniekoh · 6 years

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stadium boosterism

Buried in my posting queue... two articles on stadium boosterism. See also the cautionary tale of Atlanta’s stadiums.

Stop Airing Propaganda For New Stadiums

Drew Magary (9/14/17, Deadspin)

That new Atlanta stadium, by the way, was due to cost Atlanta $200 million in public funds before cost overruns jacked up the public burden to nearly $700 million. Will NBC mention any of that? Fuck and no, they won’t. That’s not how the grand opening of a new NFL stadium works. You won’t hear about funding. You won’t hear about faulty exits or big lines for the toilet. All you’ll get is a bunch of fellatio from announcers who will gladly trade their dignity for a free tour and an open invite to the pigs-in-a-blanket tray in the owner’s suite. About 1.4 million people didn’t have power in Georgia this week and Arthur Blank is gonna get his asshole polished on live TV. Even Sean McDonough, who I normally like, got in on it on Monday Night Football by fawning over the Vikings’ stadium. Every new stadium is presented as gift from an owner to the fans, even though fans are paying every step of the way. It’s fucking gross.

First impressions are the only impressions that matter. All you see are the shiny surfaces and luxe seating. Everything that can and will come after the fact is gleefully ignored.

The 49ers opened a fancy joint in the boonies three years ago and half that stadium is already uninhabitable. You legitimately can’t sit in an exposed area of the Niners’ place without suffering 12th-degree burns. An audit found that the Niners have already cheated Santa Clara out of millions in back costs. The team tried to seize youth soccer fields and turn them into parking lots. If any of this ever gets mentioned on the air, it’ll be in passing, treated as a mild inconvenience that will surely be dealt with. It certainly won’t be granted the same kind of adoring spotlight that the stadium’s debut received. Remember all that bullshit about the Niners having the first “smart stadium”? Does any fan in the Bay Area give half a shit about the stadium app while frying out there? Of course not. The team is a failure and so is its new stadium, and that is obvious everywhere but on television.

What you will see Sunday Night is a paid advertisement…a glowing tele-brochure that presents the opening of a new stadium as a moment of grand symbiosis between an NFL team and the city it calls home. A communal rebirth. It is in line with the Great American Myth of the industrial giant—a man who changes the world and lifts up all the little people while also just happening to amass a fortune along the way.

I am drawn to these places even though I know the truth: Outside of mild diversions, stadiums give nothing.

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Nothing but Net Profit: Property Taxes, Public Dollars, and Corporate Philanthropy at Chicago’s United Center

Sean Dinces (May 2016, Radical History Review)

In 1997 Crain’s Chicago Business lavished praise on the developers of the United Center, the home arena of the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) Bulls and the National Hockey League’s (NHL) Blackhawks, which opened three years earlier on Chicago’s Near West Side. The weekly newspaper joined a chorus of boosters in asserting that Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf and Blackhawks owner Bill Wirtz had “performed a public service by showing . . . the city and the state that private— rather than public—stadium ownership is the only rational approach to building a new sports facility.”1

The boosters omitted, however, that Reinsdorf and Wirtz had convinced state lawmakers to authorize public subsidies for the arena in the form of property tax breaks that saved the owners at least tens—and more likely hundreds—of mil- lions of dollars. In spite of the subsidies, the state did not secure rights to any arena revenues. And to this day, many fans and journalists operate under the assumption that the arena has incurred few, if any, public costs. At least part of this ignorance owes to the diversion Reinsdorf created by way of a savvy public relations campaign touting the Bulls’ philanthropic efforts.

For students of “neoliberalism” in the United States, surely this story comes as no surprise.

...

But for all the talk of free markets, business has fought successfully for the expansion of state expenditures intended to enhance its pro tability. Of course, “corporate welfare” recipients have shifted the conversation about market freedom away from themselves, so as to obscure the contradiction between their ideological pronouncements and their actual relationship to the state.

14-15: The history of the United Center neatly encapsulates this “neoliberal turn” and makes several contributions to our understanding of the history of the sports business and of capitalism in general. Most basically, it confirms a trio of important claims by economists about the transformation of public subsidies for sports facilities after 1980: first, that reports in the mainstream press of a recent decline in the average public share of funding for major-league stadiums tend to ignore significant “hidden costs” such as property tax exemptions; second, that despite spending unprecedented amounts of taxpayer money on state-of-the art stadiums, local governments increasingly abandoned the practice of making subsidies contingent on public rights to a significant portion of stadium revenues; and, third, that the mechanisms through which those governments approved and delivered stadium subsidies became more complex and further removed from democratic control. While this analysis finds much common ground with economists, it also details how their typical explanation for the growing boldness with which stadium owners have exploited taxpayers—the allegedly special monopoly power wielded by the sports business—is less than the full story. Placing the United Center tax breaks in broader historical context reveals that this shift stemmed not simply from monopoly powers particular to sports teams but also from recent changes in the structure of capital accumulation writ large. The breaks were just one example after the late 1970s of a dramatically expanded array of government subsidies for major firms inside and outside the sports business that transferred public assets into the hands of private corporations.3 Finally, this article uses the United Center as an entry point for the recent history of the sports business’s involvement in corporate philanthropy. Current scholarship dismisses critiques of the “underside” of corporate philanthropy as over- blown “muckraking.”4 But the history of philanthropic contributions made since the 1990s by United Center ownership—and by Reinsdorf in particular—suggests that there is good reason for cynicism with regard to such efforts. These relatively paltry donations constituted part of a strategic public relations campaign that ultimately distracted from the arena owners’ tax avoidance.

... Reinsdorf’s repeated use of his contributions as occasions for deriding “welfare” captured the simultaneous move by economic elites of all stripes to rede ne philanthropy as a relatively low-cost replacement for publicly funded social welfare programs.

#sports #capitalism #stadium #urban planning

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elizabethrobertajones · 6 years

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13x08 watching notes

You guys, I literally can't cope with Sam dressing like this much longer. I am being personally attacked. WHo EVEN SELLS ORANGE PLAID.

expectations: best case scenario, some literally unholy lovechild of 7x20 and 12x12.

Heists mean side characters and good heists mean fun side characters. From the promo stuff it looks like we have a couple of quirky side characters, who aesthetically vaguely reminded me of the Doctor Who bank heist episode from the Clara period of the show, just because quirky side characters to bolster a heist episode. It's probably quite easy to beat the mood and justification of ridiculousness from Doctor Who, especially peak Moffatt era nonsense, out of the water, but this is Glynn so I'm expecting good characters, good characterisation, but pooossibly some random plot hole or some sort of back and forth of characters/scenes that's hard to follow that doesn't necessarily hurt the episode but does make it a headache later :P

[note with hindsight: *just hands Glynn a trophy for it and walks off*]

It's essentially the same thing you forgive under Dabb vs cars (aka not a problem unless you make it one), but it doesn't really lend itself to writing a heist either so this is in no way the same level of "Uhoh" as a Buckleming episode but it is a hmmm I hope people aren't arguing in circles about some way the plot worked and ignoring the good stuff when I get online comment :P

I wasn't sure how this fit into the overall picture of wtf the demons were up to before yesterday, but with the promo scene with Bart, selling him as essentially the new (I mean... potentially since season 6) king of the crossroads but maybe not styling himself that way, we may or may not get another overt canon dive like 12x12 showed us how Crowley got his upgrade, to tell us how long this guy has been around behind the scenes (and SENSIBLY staying off the Winchesters' radar), but this character very literally is Crowley2.0 as people have been calling him in the sense that he is what Crowley was when we met him both with the actual job title AND narratively, and in this case probably very content with his job as it is especially with the danger at the very top, and I hope for his sake he doesn't get ambitious, because it would be great to have a character like this survive just for story stability - yeah even though he's another white dude might as well just lump it unless this episode immediately replaces him with someone better but intent on doing the *exact same* job properly - just to have some stability and a second player in the Hell storyline. Especially if they maintain an uneasy relationship with him that he really is the last resort for help Crowley really wasn't since like season 10.

It establishes another position of power in Hell's hierarchy and it's a fairly safe job where a smart demon can accrue a lot of power - Crowley was shown to have a whole bunch of resources and a lot of it predating becoming King of Hell, specifically because it was stuff gathered as a crossroads demon/through controlling that flow of trade. TBH it's better placed than whoever is trying to lead the demons because they have all the resources. I think in 11x23 Crowley said his minions took everything and ran? This dude would be one of the key placed people to do that because he has all the stuff and connections to all the souls collected in deals. Whether that comes up or not I'm just going to assume he did :P

Anyway in the story it creates another character where we basically already know everything about how they function, because Crowley, both on a random world building and originally how Crowley was in the narrative sort of level. It sucks he's getting replaced on a "I did actually quite like him most days" level, and it's definitely a "get 2 people to do the same job 1 man was doing" thing but then the writing had been so bad to Crowley for a couple of years since they ran out of things for him to do that maybe stripping back to basics to get the narrative role he used to offer without all the baggage is sensible >.> If a character takes on so much of a life of their own they can't do the stuff they used to offer without it being an issue like removing any tension about giving them magic things they couldn't obtain themselves, or offering sincere opposition and attempts to kill them from the throne of Hell, then unfortunately for Crowley, this is a great choice. Asmodeus represents all the shit I didn't like that they kept making Crowley do, Bart represents the side of Crowley introduced by Edlund and maintained at least until Edlund left the show (Crowley was his baby even more than Cas was - he just dipped in to write the best Cas episodes but he introduced and pushed Crowley as a character... funnily enough at the end of season 8 both their natures were changed dramatically and permanently). Based on 1 promo scene, I have to admit, Bart is all the bits of Crowley I liked best, while coming across as a bit of a cheap knock off in the way he tries to butter up to the Winchesters, a bit too knowing, a bit too under-informed, while Crowley ran loops around them just in their opening conversation.

OMG it's sleeting so I am going to roll the dice and get a lift to yoga from the same person who plain forgot to pick my mum up and take her wherever they were going for about 2 hours last week when I wisely decided to get the bus. See now I have extra time, the episode is downloaded, but... I don't have enough time. Nooo way :P

Other generic pre-ep thoughts: this concept is goofy but I seriously don't trust it to stay that way because you never trust this show to stay that way. We haven't seen Asmodeus in a non-BL episode and while he is essentially their pet character he's still plot relevant. I'm not exactly on the side of "we HAVE to get Casmodeus before this is all said and done" as in I'd really love it but it seems so easy to bungle in a BL episode. On the other hand, just because Cas is locked up doesn't mean we can't see Misha in an episode while this state of affairs continues (and just because there's no spoilers doesn't mean it's not happening) and Glynn having a crack at Casmodeus sounds like a perfect set up for the kind of stuff we'd want to see out of it, and be a curveball to throw in here.

I'm just going to assume we're not seeing Mary again for a while and this is all set in the main universe.

I assume Jack isn't in the episode but we may or may not get a lead on him at the end, or else be left on "well we have a lead/half a lead on him" because I sort of feel like if he literally breaks the universe next episode after this he'll be pretty easy to find again :P

This may all be some way to force some conversations about how Dean and Sam feel about Jack on the other side of the turning point, especially if it's our last chance for them to be in the limelight until the other side of Wayward Sisters midseason fun. And if Jack has broken the universe next episode, we need to have their current stances laid out before they go rushing in to deal with that. So this could be a fairly light episode for character discussion.

HI back from yoga

the recap immediately gets into Jack stuff so hey maybe he is in the episode, maybe it's just explaining better why he is not in this episode because the reason why NOT is just as important.

Then just way too much having to recap last episode to get us up to date on what Sam and Dean have been through with all that. I like that they included that Ketch said he was his own twin considering Dean says "twinsies" in the promo scene, as, of course, this may be a really important theme. Twins that aren't actually twins. Cas and the Empty, Ketch and "Alexander", Dean and Crowley2.0, Dean being fed up of things that look like other things and the shapeshifter & ghoul...

Anyway. "NOW" - Cambridge, England. Okay then. Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuure. *rubs a Union Jack on it to make it more British*

This is your weekly reminder to read these notes in a shrill British accent.

Whoever this is outside looks like she's up to something.

This mueseum:

https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/130991708770/justanotheridijiton-jerry-wanek-on-supernatural

I'm not gonna read into that immediately because its been completely dressed up for the vampire!Dean episode and it's been polished up for this episode. But we get a long look at the stained glass roof and that was a centrepiece for the vamp episode.

*she continues to be up to something*

Wow, great security. Bust open a door and no alarms go off? It's the 2nd door that doesn't work, after Dean failed to get the automatic door to open for him in 13x05.

Mmmm drawers of old scrolls and spooooky writing.

Just... shove it in your handbag.

Oh yep she's a demon, that's surprising.

This is a great way to do a robbery, tbh. Ethics about possession aside, you can burn a vessel and let them take whatever physical damage or legal ramifications of being found in the room where something was stolen, but if you run into problems, just possess the next person. Especially someone with clearance, if you couldn't find them earlier...

I suppose her not being able to open the door earlier was an omen for her not having all the information - not knowing that Bart was going to stab her as soon as he had what he wanted from her, and that she wasn't working for Asmodeus's whim at all, but Bart was going rogue with it. This is another suggestion of the dramatic irony at work - Dean couldn't open the door, he had no faith, and it seemed like to HIM that no one was helping him. But of course Cas had already come back, the automatic door had opened in that sense, but he didn't know so he's encountering this block. This demon powers through it as well without setting off any alarm bells and she should have had some about the whole double cross coming. Likewise, Dean's surprised by Cas's return.

Bart establishes himself as a Crowley-alike instantly, by having a random demon minion to double cross, and to go to the Winchesters. He already has Dean on speed dial which means his number must get circulated among the demons, or Bart has sought it out already from their sources. Whether he's had it a while and just decided to pounce...

I guess it's also like the opposite of Cas phoning him and we don't hear that side of the conversation - I mean we hear Dean on the phone here, but we're staying on Bart's side of the camera, and he's enticing him in with what he needs to find Jack. Again, more dark mirrors of stuff that's already happened... Dean getting a lot of phonecalls he needs to follow his faith on.

Dean immediately on screen in his bi plaid doing that thing with the gun that's... suggestive. Sitting there obessesively cleaning his gun.

Sam emerges, in a shirt that is going to be a Problem.

*mutes Sam*

Sam was the one who talked to Cas. I wonder if Asmodeus phoned Sam up rather than the other way around. Like, don't be suspicious, just check in every day and see how they're doing... Just phone one of the brothers at random.

Anyway we already know, of course, that it's not Cas, and here we are with more dramatic irony, the same problem as Casifer before they knew, and it's underlined by Sam being the one to talk to Casmodeus instead of Dean. Fewer opportunities based on what we see on screen for Dean to work it out.

And now we see the other side of the phonecall, tracking back in time to show us the same thing over again, but now we have Dean's POV on it too and he's not at this disadvantage, at least, with the way it's all been set up. He gets to snark back etc although Bart has the right word to stop Dean hanging up on him.

I do like the snark about Hell street locations :P

Sam's like "a demon!" whispered even though it's obvious and I think Dean clued into it which means once again Sam's being the GA, or a filter for them, and even though he says it silently, he's still spelling out what he thinks it is when it's blatantly obvious to us what it is as we watched the cold open and his side of the start of the phone call already.

"if I had a way to find *your boy*" - that parenting theme again, and he's addressing it to Dean since that's who he thinks he's solely on the phone to.

We get a look at a ton of shop fronts and I suppose they're all made up?

The Smile Diner is already incongruously happy - more irony, just that it's all smiles for what would be an understandably tense meeting.

Anyway: "BANGTOWN beauty & barber" "Fine art bartending LEARN TO BARTEND", a restaurant...

A Chinese-owned phone shop "Ketaiya" which I suppose is selling phones, as it says "iphone8.8" in the window but also would fit an idea of calling home, as shops like this exist for most immigrant populations, as a place where they can make cheap phonecalls home. In this part of the country I'm most used to seeing Arabic, Slavic or Eastern European versions of this but I assume it's the same deal. We get cage imagery over the front of this shop, obviously as protection for it as it has a bunch of iphones in it, but the idea that Cas can't call them because he's in prison is right there, and it makes him the lil green mascot in the window.

And then the smile cafe is the next thing along. :)

"He could work for Asmodeus" smart, but wrong *as far as we know*, and Sam is like "what if he's telling the truth", so this scepticism seems to be flipping their roles from last episode, buuut on the other hand Dean is being defensive and practical and Sam is again entertaining things villains tell them.

"After Crowley I told myself no more demons" it STILL sounds like bitter but civil exes. And you'd bet that "after Crowley" is not "in the last month since he died" but "since that time we had a wild elopement"

but hanging a lampshade on exactly what Bart is doing for them in the narrative, and of course that Dean is going to be predisposed to see him as a Crowley2.0 exactly as we do, so that adds even more depth to the promo scene.

Sam like "you said we need a miracle, maybe this is it" and then Dean calling out that demons don't give miracles - they give deals they can SELL as miracles. Who of the two of you has been jerked around more by demon deals? Oh yeah the one of you who sold your soul because your father's demon deal spiritually broke you already. (I mean yeah Sam has had it PLENTY hard in other ways but Dean and crossroads demons is a very different story to Sam)

"Let's hear the guy out." "And after that we kill him."

I continue to be enraged that Dean is wearing sensible black and at least MUTED purples and Sam's wearing the orange jacket and a plaid with like, hazard day glo orange strips sewn into it.

:) Smile Diner :)

it's horrifying, but it has homemade burgers. I have no clue if this is something they scouted out or repainted but the brickwork having yellow lines is like WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING in film language, like DO NOT ENTER police tape coding. IRL it would be whimsical, especially with all the smilies. On screen, it it horrifying. There's red signage and green neon boxing the window I think they're gonna sit in, and red and green are the poison codependency colours I think? According to Zerbe? I don't know if that's the dynamic here but it's certainly not GOOD, especially boxed in by yellow and black hazard warnings.

There's a pretty bridge and a sunset/rise in the sign. It's incongruous to the smile theme at least because it doesn't directly relate to smiling, and is just a random image. I would assume it's symbolic in some way... Cas is of course the sun, this does mimic the Gas n Sip logo (especially as it has a maroon version), and the road seems to lead away from the sun across the bridge. They're not helping Cas going in here, that's for sure :P

Lots of potted plants in here, and one behind Bart.

"The famous Winchesters!" "Some random demon." Dean is in a power play with him and now they're face to face rather than at a disadvantage over the phone, he's gonna win this one. Watch.

Bart offers a nickname to them, which could be a power play to say hey I'm so powerful we get on nickname terms because I allow you and you should be grateful or whatever, but his name sounds like an old powerful demon name (he and Asmodeus both have old school "us" endings to their names) and so he's actually neutering the part that makes his name sound powerful and impressive. He may be preempting Dean's infamous nicknaming habit, but Dean does it to be dismissive or to humanise. And he's not gonna get the latter treatment :P

Again, offering them to sit and then trying to get Dean on his side with pie - gesture after gesture of power, being the one in control, and knowing them, and the pie is the first sign he's done his Winchester Homework, which bad guys notoriously get wrong or misread. In this case, he's got Dean down as the stupid dumb muscle who can be bribed with pie, and I assume missing aaall the complexity of why demons fear him so much.

He labels Dean a "disrupter" when Dean has been tasked with maintaining the natural order. Dean has only ever tried to STOP bad stuff happening, and though he's ACCIDENTALLY helped unleash a bunch of stuff, it's never been because he WANTS to. He's helped cause a lot of the disruption in Hell with his actions, but that's because Hell is bad and he wants to stop it doing bad things. In general Dean's big victories have been to try and secure the natural order staying as it is, with his two biggest victories being Swan Song and settling things with God and Amara.

I love how the framing here has all that green light behind the Winchesters, but aside from a line of green behind Bart's head, he's got this innocent white flowery wall and some roses behind him.

Again, Sam snatches up the spell, Dean doubts immediately, I guess if not that the spell is real that why a demon would just GIVE it to him without ulterior motives. Just be upfront about the ulterior motives :P

He re-introduces himself as first a cross-roads demon and then THE cross-roads demon, a clarification again. He doesn't say king of the crossroads, but he does smirk at Dean, and says helping people is what he does... Yeah, to a degree. They have to PAY for it. But it's that smarmy salesman charm, this time mixed with someone who looks like a thug boss, the sort who dresses nice but has goons.

I mean we KNOW he does, but his look is very typical of nice suit, close-cropped hair, and just generally heavy set like he's used to being intimidating more than relying on his words, when you go to cast this guy.

Dean says they don't listen to/help demons, just kill them, and for one thing Bart's got to know about Crowley, but he says "How Dean of you" like he knows Dean is the one who just threatens to/will kill demons and not think about it. I mean Dean could be showing he's learned from experience. But of course then, the great meta about him negging Dean, by switching focus to Sam, who's already been established even before they get in the diner that he's going to be more willing to listen, that he's the "smart one" aka the one more likely to make a bad decision by listening to people he shouldn't while trying to help.

And, of course, Dean eats his pie, and we already made the parallels to other scenes like this in diners, but Ishim stands out the most, throwing money at Dean to shut up and buy himself some pie. In this case the pie is already here, and Dean's allowed to be suspicious but also eat the pie because hey, it's here.

Bart treated Dean like he was the stupid pie guy so Dean, who doesn't trust him an inch, acts like the stupid pie guy, while not giving any ground. He is not bribed by the pie, but Sam can't believe Dean's eating it.

There's a world of metaphor there about Dean and seduction. Because of course Bart came on strong to Dean, but Dean wasn't buying that either, the coded second layer of the conversation about him being Crowley2.0 and thinking maybe he can find a way to unlock Dean's interest in dudes... by offering pie of course. Doesn't work like that, you have to earn it. And the coming on too strong is the first weakness he has in not measuring up to Crowley, despite how it all seems like he has the ~perfect plan~ in place.

They're STIIIILL in these shirts

Wow, that's some old Biblical stuff. Guess that explains why Dabb tweeted that, pretty quickly. I don't know much about the Queen of Shiba but the idea she's a nephilim is kind of amusing.

I'll have to leave that to the experts but anyway, more douchey guys, although this time King Solomon is keeping tabs on someone like a dick, so um. Welcome to the club of symbolism this part of the season? I assume this is the same guy from the Song of Solomon that we saw Jack glance at in 13x02, and it's more romantic stuff as well.

Sam's like "Jack is out there in the world, and he's alone and he's scared and he's dangerous", which is exactly Dean's stance from 13x01 saying better to keep Jack in the Bunker with them so the only people he'd hurt are them. Yes Sam still seems to care about Jack, but he is also now valuing him practically, and seeing he's dangerous, and it's caused this flip in his attitude to one mirroring Dean's but obviously with much less hate and upset about what happened to Cas etc

Heist HQ!

Quirky random demons! Hat and headphone demons.

Hahahah they're called Smash and Grab. Smash has flowery DMs so I love her. Grab is wearing that hat voluntarily so I am not so sure about him at all.

PS: in America has flipping the bird with 2 fingers become a thing or was that a peace sign? When I was a young'un I was told that you always had to do peace signs palm out because showing the back of your hand with the exact same gesture was as bad/worse than giving someone the finger.

Is Smash human? Since he said Grab is a demon that leaves an empty space over what she is.

Lol, Dean realising it's a heist. "What is this, a heist? Hold on, is this a heist?"

Hahahahahha his favourite My Little Pony... Come on Dean, you kept the little pony you cut off that car in 7x06. You literally can not throw stones in this house.

Luther Shrike looks like if he was on UK TV he'd be played by the guy who played Walder Frey (David Bradley).

There's some stuff on the board that looks like the Sumerian(?) that Kevin translated the angel tablet into. Since we already had Kevin back on screen, it seems superfluous to mention, but it gives me a 4 in a row for mentioning Kevin in an episode this season so BINGO and more dramatic irony that Sam and Dean don't know he's responsible for Lucifer coming back, or, indeed, that Lucifer is back.

(With a bonus grumble from me that it's a reminder, in this season about a nephilim, that we still don't know what the angel fall spell's specific wording was)

Oh boy the "hell and back" thing. Ouch. So we're apparently delving THIS now? Is this penance for 11x10 and Dean not seeming too bothered to go back down there aside from token nervousness about the whole thing in the acting? Anyway getting flashbacks to that out of the blue... Look I am a smol sensitive Dean girl you can't just throw that at me. D:

It's interesting the perhaps king of the crossroads can't swing this with a random soul. I would assume it's specifically blood of someone CONDEMNED to Hell and saved/brought back. And woah I have it paused right after the flashback to collect myself, but either this has to get a Cas mention or it's one heck of an empty space in the story that Cas saved Dean and is the reason he's viable for this.

And lol lol lol lol see above like THREE PARAGRAPHS AGO I am never ever going to be over the angel fall spell and the fact it required grace in such... suspicious... circumstances of nephilim and cupids, and the whole theme of clarification, and how we have these such specific spells - virgin blood in 12x22, archangel grace last episode, and human who has been to hell and back now...

I'm just saying, I'm gonna be on my deathbed when I'm 150 like "the angel fall spell needed the grace of an angel in love with a human, come fight me, Carver" and then I give up the ghost just so I can go beat him up in the afterlife.

Bart beams at Dean, wanting his blood. Dean offers it up just to get this over and done with, but he says, no, straight from the tap and anyway you two are extremely competent in a weird crisis, why the heck would I not exploit that I need your manpower for this?

Shrike is human who has been to hell and back - obviously a dark Dean mirror because apparently he's a sadist and murderer, and Dean's entire thing is whether he's a killer or not for doing this job he does and I have gifsets and meta blahing on and on about that but yeah basically 2x03 set up that for Dean about how you do the job because you like/need killing or you do it to save people, and his torturer arc, and his Mark of Cain/demon descent... Nuff said for now.

UGH so Sam pulls Dean aside and says, "we want that spell - we NEED that spell" which is a huge clarification, and literally the want/need theme you are probably aware I bang on about a weeeeeeeeeeeee little bit. In general it's the "use your words" theme which does not harm Sam for the reminder but also is a huge Destiel theme because the need/want thing is from the crypt scene/10x19 with the call out on the crypt scene from Dean's subconscious and the ongoing issue of whether Cas feels needed or wanted, with the fact he feels "needed" called out in OH WAIT 13x04, aka last time out for Glynn... the fact the clarification is coming now in the other direction is because this is a Sam thing anyways, and - UGH I have it paused with him on screen and he seems to have an even worse shirt on? - it's not about Destiel subtext for him it's just using your words and in general bolstering the presence of the theme. Of course they don't just want the spell for kicks, they have a serious reason for needing it. In fact Sam's concern about Jack going from emotional concern for Jack himself to seeing Jack as a dangerous crisis is encapsulated in turning a desire into an obligation.

"He'll never see us coming"

"they're coming"

More dramatic irony, immediately showing us that on the other side of the story the bad guy has more information than they think he does, and that they aren't going to have it as easy as they think. That Bart has already been made as a traitor and that Asmodeus knows his next move will be exactly this.

Asmodeus may not even be *on screen* in this episode and he's being written as more intelligent than he has been in both Buckleming episodes, which is super unfortunate that he's supposed to be an intelligent character and we have to judge the characterisation of these unfortunates who are main BL property off their depiction in OTHER episodes...

And yeah Shrike may chat with demons but he has demon traps, exorcisms memorised and he toes the line of a horrible human being but not demonic himself, but such a hair's breadth away that demons and demon interactions and generally knowing wtf is going on with demons is just his life.

He has a really pretty grate which I think is specifically in the hall so that he can exorcise demons out through it. It probably goes straight to Hell

His windows also have bars on them which look like random jumble to an unfamiliar eye but are of course iron warding

I think he also has grapevines. He lives on a vineyard with barbed wire and demon traps on the gates.

The metalwork is the coolest thing in this episode and this episode is not half bad so far

Oh my god Dean called out poor Smash for her amazing boots and called her "Winona" - she DOES bear a passing resemblance, but hey leave the boots alone.

Anyway that moment just to show they're top and tail under a blanket in the back of the Impala which is pretty funny to me - I'm never sure you can actually fit anyone in there like that but they want to prove me wrong.

I'm like 1000% sure Sam's ruse doesn't work, because Shrike knows they're coming but he's let in anyway because why not. Let's have some fun. Interesting that Sam's the one made to do this. Having to lie and we already KNOW he's been caught out.

Anyway more focus on the boots... 3 times and I'm super worried we're gonna have to identify some remains by the flowery boots >.>

Or more positively it could be used to fuck with us in some way

"Dean? Don't get dead." "you too." Aw.

Is Grab in the trunk of the car?

Iron warded door. Yeah, that's normal.

For these guests, the rug is pulled back, the demon trap is plain to see on the floor. We see Sam from above, like he's being watched.

Shrike's front room/office is like Metatron's desk? I swear he had that lamp. Cuthbert's house... I swear that's Bobby's wallpaper or one in a similar hue with appropriately similar patterns to at least make a sort of sense of familiarity.

Awww Dean and Smash. He calls her weird but then spots she's drinking the delightful sounding does what it says on the tin NERVE DAMAGE, and then he says he used to live on it as a kid, despite its illegal amounts of caffeine.

Ew and she's getting it expired on ebay.

Dean, she may be bonding with you, but don't drink it. It's literally called Nerve Damage.

Welp

he's gonna be bouncing off the walls after 1 sip

OH they have to summon Grab I guess?

"Cool."

Hahahaha

Dean's babysitting the weirdoes.

Heh, calls Dean "chief"

HAHAHAHA Smash told Grab off screen that Dean was just a pretty face :P

WHOOPS looks like Dean just got puppeted by his own blood. Like a couple of weeks ago or something I was writing about a worst case scenario for Jack's powers being that they completely overwhelm him and he's like, inside waiting to be busted out, perhaps as a conclusion of the crypt scene/swan song repetitions from an external evil possessing and controlling to an internal force making it happen - a slow process but it really has switched, and it has been a fairly smooth slope down :D

Also that was hilarious. Poor Dean.

Dean's being poisoned with NERVE DAMAGE and Sam's being poisoned with homemade gin. If that's what it really is.

Hahahahahah Sam picking up a basilisk fang. We've all seen Harry Potter

LOL Sam knows random knowledge about basilisks and gorgons. Of course it's a test, and Shrike would know what it was, but good on Sam for recognising it. I watched Tall Tales so recently I'm still giggling about him recognising a crocodile belly scale, but now I just think Sam has an affinity for identifying the weirder monsters. He must have read a load of junk about them in the MoL bunker.

His persona as the collector guy wanting to sell to Shrike is basically Sam but with a bit more nervous bluster, which might be explained by knowing how dangerous this guy is and that Sam is having to pretend. He's not even wearing clothes as a get up here.

OH BOY Sam's big gambit is Ruby's knife... I remember in my 8x02 watching notes (hi Dabb) I was amused that they kind of forget that that knife is one of the most valuable things they own and they just dropped it in the weapon bin with a warning, rather than considering even trading it for the tablet or whatever even as a ruse... Just the idea they go around laden with magical artefacts that help them all the time like this which would actually be priceless to collectors - like in 12x06 Asa having an angel blade on blue felt in a glass case.

I don't think there's been a strong bias about which one of them has an angel blade and which one still uses this knife in fights since Carver era, but Dean took it to Purgatory, while Sam seemed to have more consistent possession of it for a while, Dean was the one who wrangled it from Ruby in 3x16 and sort of formally took ownership of it on behalf of the Winchesters.

Given the emotional background to this season of Sam's powers being explored through Jack, though, it is interesting (since they have enough angel blades they could just swap to using them all the time instead of this knife, which is a relic of Sam's darkest times) to just give it up, but quite aside from its worth to the right market, it has an enormous emotional weight of the season 3-4-5 drama for the Winchesters, and remembering it as Ruby's knife ties it to Sam. He still uses her knife and keeps her memory close, perhaps just as a reminder. But that weight is there and bringing it up is a reminder of all that, because so often we just see it as a tool, but this is asking us to stop and CONSIDER what that knife actually means, how much it's worth, and how even though they could stop using it these days, they don't, but what it would mean to Sam to give it up.

Dean reeeally not getting along with Grab. Who, of course, is the demon in this mix. The fact Smash is not a demon is only brought up in that scene where Dean is talking about her working with demons - it's taken for granted that she's human and perhaps that is the default, but not when you're expecting a room full of demons as we might be when meeting them. So. More empty space fill in the blanks, use context and people using or not using definitions to not be surprised that she's human.

Anyway Grab calls Sam stupid and Dean gets so angry he stops and turns around even though the spell's been dragging him along so there's a ridic Swan Song mirror for the collection - while "puppeted" by the spell, "defensiveness" of his brother halts Dean's progress...

Aaaand he's off again. Not enough? :P

Hey creepy underground cellars. That's never bad.

LOL Dean gets called HANDPUPPET

Mr Fizzles can tell when you're being a liaaaaaaaaaaaaaar

"I will kill you." "I bet you say that to all the girls." Awww and here was I thinking Dean wouldn't get flirted with any more this episode.

That was literally from the Crowley handbook - 9x10/9x11 made a huge point out of it.

This murder cellar connects to 12x01, 12x12, and 12x20, with the cellars being where Sam was kept and the twig people were made, and 12x12 for the basement Ramiel kept his shit in. Crossing them all over into this is super fun.

I guess this is where Smash does her thing?

GREAT door.

I hope that thing doesn't bite

It almost certainly bites

Oooh Shrike thinks Sam is a demon.

He didn't see him not get stuck in the demon trap out in the hall.

He has some of the info but not ALL of the info - in this way, while Bart sent them to deal with curveballs, Sam has turned out to be the curveball instead.

Ow that's a big hole to blow in the books, that were nearly Sam.

He conveniently slides back to his knife.

On the other hand re: curveballs, if Shrike thinks he's a demon, that shotgun blast wouldn't have killed a demon but it will kill a Sam.

Sam just goes and stabs the dude.

"As long as I'm on my property I can't die."

Well that's annoyingly cheaty

I wonder if it's symbolic of something but I can't instantly link it to anything so I have to move on.

There's something very like the Cain stuff with Dean in 9x11 between Sam and this guy, especially as they matched up as equals in knowledge about gorgons or whatever earlier.

MAW

DEAN LOOKS INTO THE MAW

Dean does not like spiders.

Hard same.

Why is he always so relatable

I'm cackling so much at his reluctance to put his hand in there. It's like the not wanting to go in the hole in 13x06 but so much funnier because... spiders.

There was an eel tank at the local aquarium when I was a kid which had a game EMBEDDED in the side of the eel tank to put your hand in and feel what an eel feels like.

I'm having, like. PTSD flashbacks to this and the Tiger Head in the museum which terrified the living daylights out of us as children and we wouldn't even go past it because it looked so fierce with its big open mouth

this is literally combining two of The Most Horrifying Things about my childhood into one

Plus biting for blood = needles to draw blood which is a rather more recent thing what with recently coming down with a mystery chronic illness and spending 2 years fishing around for a diagnosis via endless blood drawing, so put that one on the list

I believe in you, Dean. You're stronger than me.

He's stronger than me

I love him more than I have ever loved him in this exact moment

He had to account for the fact that Shrike might regularly go in here so of course it won't take YOUR HAND or something.

Of course it's a massive suspense thing for a teeny weeny pinprick. Of course.

This is like the dead opposite of the Werther Box - it's just a key for the lock, not like... the entire murderous thing Cuthbert designed

NINJA reflexes to save Smash there

Bye Grab. You were a dick.

OH NOES Shrike is here, with the demon knife, covered in blood. That's not worrying for Dean to see AT ALL.

Smash just legs it.

Awww she seemed to care about Grab at least a little... They had matchy matchy names.

Dean wants to go watch Game of Thrones.

Walder Frey knock off prefers to read the books

how did Sam get here.

I'm gonna assume like... not!Sam for now, since he saved the day so fortuitously.

Bart lurkin' outside.

Not surprising at all that Smash has a deal with him. I doubt he's letting her off easy, either, she's going to be sent right back.

Does Shrike just walk through this thing and ignore all the darts because they can't kill him?

"Shrek"

Sam sure has some quick and easy insights into the keypad.

"Like in Entrapment"

"Did you just say Entrapment?"

... Did Sam just get busted over his pop culture knowledge, by Dean, slower on the uptake than what I thought was weird for Sam?

Omg they're sending Shrike through because the darts can't kill him. This is ridiculous

That *was* ridiculous, but funny

Winchester problem solving.

Awwwww Smash is back, if it's really her.

Sam figures out she has a deal.

He also has a real side-eye of Dean. If he's actually Sam I got to re-evaluate him through this section :P

If not, I have another case of something impersonating Sam while doing The Eyebrows

More horrifying: this is Sam actually doing The Eyebrows

Oh god it's full daylight all of a sudden and Sam's plaid

is orange

under the orange jacket

I hate Sam Winchester

undying feud levels

Guess this is the edge of the property where he can't be killed? Be hilarious if they get him over the line somehow to kill him

STUNT DRIVING

Suddenly backstory and emotional music plays.

Starting to think nothing’s up with Sam though, like, if he actually was replaced or not, because it was really funny imagining it and not letting them get the drop on me if it happened, and Sam being called out on his references etc, but we're getting pretty far into it all like leaving the property, having this moment, etc, so maybe it was just a fake out and Sam BAMF'd himself free off-screen or was never even tied up

Seems to just be a story of life, though that Shrike's kid died so soon after he was saved, and it was a "waste" of a demon deal. He seems like he must have already been a certain sort of person to know how to MAKE the deal...

What's in the trunk...

Ooh I wondered if it would be as soon as Bart wasn’t forthcoming. So a 6x04 parallel as well (or 6x10, which dealt a lot more with them having to work for Crowley).

Oooh they were off the property. WHOOPS. It *was* the gates. I thought so but I didn't figure he'd be so stupid to face them head on.

Although it was over Bart's bones so it was a risk he had to take to leave?

And now we have a new problem :P

Awww poor Smash

And there's the rest of the spell. Do they take it?

Oookay I was thinking Sam would have to be Sam for this part and he and Dean are making emotional decisions together and Sam's picking the correct path so... I guess I have to assume 100% this is Sam again? Mittens isn't talking to me about stuff from this episode like there's too many spoilers for her to humour me about stuff. Even what I thought were silly things.

And now Smash/Alice is in peril after they made the decision that they do not want to get involved in Bart's shit because he's a shitty person.

Bye bye Bart :3 Nice move, Dean.

So basically, yep, Bart tried so hard to be what Crowley was to Dean in their opening interaction and all his set up to come across as like... something Dean had been missing? That Dean might WANT a demon ally to be on the hook with/have on his hook, even just have on his SPEED DIAL, because to him that probably meant being able to manipulate the Winchesters and so on...

But as I figured from the opening, he just completely underestimates them, including that Dean is way way way waaaay smarter than he gives him credit for, so OF COURSE Dean wins by outsmarting him, by doing what soulless!Sam STOPPED Dean from doing in 6x04 and just torching Crowley on the spot because what did they REALLY owe him and how much loyalty could you really have from a demon as uneasy business partners... So Dean outwits him, and in a move almost exactly like 13x06 he sets up the tools and someone else gets the kill but it's Dean who outsmarted the monster.

And whooops half of half a spell? Not even half... it's all gone.

Whoooops. Well at least they saved Alice. And they're putting her on a bus, as they usually do with characters they won't see again.

There's like 2 minutes left, which is always an ominous sign.

Anyway *waves goodbye to Alice*

*Dean pats Sam on the shoulder and we get the last look at Sam smiling*

Aaand to the Bunker, where Dean is getting them some beers while wearing his black Henley.

Like the whole thing resolved with that dude and Bart is dead and all (... they better find someone to replace him although constantly subbing in random "I'm the new king of the crossroads" characters might get a bit ridiculous, we know there's going to be an opening someone will take... I really hope that was a cue to get us to whoever takes over... If not they just make it even more frustrating that I’ve been waiting 7 years to know if someone replaced Crowley or he was doing both jobs, and now it’s made even more clear there’s a job for a secondary powerful demon in hell to show up in this role and the head crossroads demon is a serious position with power and such... It’s such a frustrating hole in the world building to overlook and I've been over-thinking it for longer than I’ve been on tumblr by a good few years.)

anyway Sam n Dean are talking

Is Sam going to explain how he escaped from being knocked out and showed up with perfect timing, or was that the plot hole?

Nah, they just have a nice talk about the job and how saving people is fun, and all. And Dean being optimistic. Yay! It's a similar call out to 13x06 and why Dean was so obscenely happy in the cowboy room, but Sam is now seeing that Dean is permanently feeling better even in ridiculous situations, and his mood really has permanently resettled to optimism and cheerfulness again and it is NOT just the cowboys.

Okay so I probably need to watch the last part of the episode again but I am now weirdly curious about what happened to Sam - though we know he's great at escaping things, but Shrike put his life into doubt to Dean, and we had no reason to assume he'd leave Sam in a place where he could easily get out, I'm guessing now that the way he showed up looking like he COULD have just killed and/or maimed Sam with that bloody knife, and I even pointed out that to DEAN'S eyes it would look sooo much worse than if it was as simple as Shrike knocked Sam out, and immediately legged it to the safe to check on it while just hoping unconsciousness would be enough to keep Sam down. (He has an iron skull after being knocked out so many times - like that thing where you kung fu your hands to have tons of micro fractures in order for the bones to heal stronger? That's Sam's head.)

He seemed to be put into question after he showed up again and I began to doubt it again as soon as they left the property because it would make no sense to leave Sam behind and just take a fake with them for the emotional resolution of the episode. Especially once they got into it and it was blatantly a straightforward emotional resolution to the episode that Sam had too much of a stake in for it NOT to be him at that point.

BUT Dean questioned Sam's reference to a thing right after he showed back up, while Sam was coming up with some hilarious ideas for solving things in a way written which you COULD think he was not!Sam and someone with more info/their own stake in this (e.g. the worry Asmodeus was coming) just because it was Sam at his most mercenary to come up with the "just send the guy who can't die over the traps to spring them all" plan... We KNOW Sam can be like that but at the same time... Sam being like that can also be some other person who would think like that as the LEAST WORST thing they thought that day instead of the actual worst.

Anyway it was all set up in such a way that Dean calling out something he didn't expect about Sam means he's questioning the people around him when they behave uncharacteristically - because he KNOWS his loved ones. He understands when they aren't behaving like themselves. He gets a secret out of Sam that he watched something he'd never normally watch just for Catherine Zeta-Jones, which Dean has to concede, while struggling with how much to mock Sam. It's interesting they use the empty space of Sam arriving without explanation to cast him into doubt, then have him doubted, verbally putting something out there that Dean stopped to question what Sam was saying. They brush it off, and it ends up being nothing, but considering the looming possibility of Casmodeus - and the fact that Sam started the episode saying he'd talked to Cas so they have literally been decieved THIS episode without knowing it (and Dean didn't get to verify if it was Cas or not - another reason to phone Sam instead of Dean)...

I wonder if it is leading up to Dean calling out Casmodeus about not being Cas? That this fake out might have been a time it really was Sam, but we and Dean were given a set up to doubt Sam was there in one piece, us with dramatic irony and Dean with just plain not knowing, and so they could play with this concept and it just tapers off - maybe we take the reaction about C Z-J as proof, maybe we eventually decide Sam has to be Sam after all and there's nothing going on here because he's involved earnestly in the emotional decisions at the end of the episode.

But it was interesting. Unlike with Ketch and his twin, it was the sort of set up where I wasn't certain we wouldn't finish the scene and then cut to Sam tied to a chair and bouncing it over to a nearby sharp object to saw himself free and run and stop the drama, at least until the end of that part of the episode. Once we were back out in the clear light of day it was like Sam's disgusting plaid was all the proof we needed it was really him :P

#13x08 #season 13 spoilers #*quietly sets Sam's wardrobe on fire*#my stuff

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years

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The Last Works Before the Renaissance

By 1993, textual interactive fiction was reaching the fag end of the unsettled, uncertain half-decade-and-change between the shuttering of Infocom and the rise of a new Internet-centered community of amateur enthusiasts. Efforts by such collectives as Adventions and High Energy Software to sell text adventures via the shareware model had largely proved unfruitful, while, with the World Wide Web still in its infancy, advertisement and distribution were major problems even for someone willing to release her games for free. The ethos of text and parsers seemed about as divorced as anything could possibly be from the predominant ethos in game development more generally, with its focus on multimedia, full-motion video, and ultra-accessible mouse-driven interfaces. Would text adventures soon be no more than obscure relics of a more primitive past? To an increasing number even of the form’s most stalwart fans, an answer in the affirmative was starting to feel like a foregone conclusion. Few text-adventure authors had serious ambitions of matching the technical or literary quality of Infocom during this period, much less of exceeding it; the issue for the medium right now was one of simple survival. In this atmosphere, the arrival of any new text adventure felt like a victory against the implacable forces of technological change, which had conspired to all but strangle this new literary form before it had even had time to get going properly.

Thankfully, history would later mark 1993 as the year when the seeds of an interactive-fiction rebirth were planted, thanks to an Englishman who repurposed not only the Infocom aesthetic but also Infocom’s own technology in unexpected ways. Those seeds would flower richly in 1995, Year Zero of the Interactive Fiction Renaissance. I’ll begin that story soon.

Today, though, I’d like to tell you about some of the more interesting games to emerge from the final days of the interstitial period — games which actually overlap, although no one could realize it at the time, with the dawning of the modern interactive-fiction community. Indeed, the games I describe below manage to presage some of the themes of that community despite being the products of a text-adventuring culture that still spent more time looking backward than looking forward. I’m fond of all of them in one way or another, and I’m willing to describe at least one of them as a sadly overlooked classic.

The Horror of Rylvania

The hiking trip across Europe has been a wonderful experience for two recent college graduates like yourself and your friend Carolyn. From the mansions of England to the beaches of Greece, you’ve walked in the footsteps of the Crusaders and seen sights that few Americans have ever seen.

Carolyn had wanted to skip the Central European nation of Rylvania. “Why bother?” she’d said. “There’s nothing but farmers there, and creepy old castles - nothing we haven’t seen already. The Rylvanians are still living in the last century.”

That, you’d insisted, was exactly why Rylvania was a must-see. The country was an intact piece of living history, a real treasure in this modern age. If only you hadn’t insisted! As night fell, as you approached a small farming village in search of a quaint inn to spend the night, the howling began. A scant hundred yards from the village, and it happened...the wolves appeared from the black forest around you and attacked. Big, black wolves that leaped for Carolyn’s throat before you could shout a warning, led by a great gray-black animal that easily stood four feet at the shoulder. Carolyn fell to the rocky path, blood gushing from her neck as the wolves faded back into the trees, unwilling, for some unknown reason, to press their attack.

If she dies, it will be your fault. You curse the darkening sky as you cradle Carolyn’s head, knowing that you have little time to find help. Perhaps in the village up the road to the north.

The Horror of Rylvania marks the last shareware release from Adventions, a partnership between the MIT graduate students Dave Baggett and D.A. Leary which was the most sustained of all efforts to make a real business out of selling interactive fiction during the interstitial period. Doubtless for this reason, the Adventions games are among the most polished of all the text adventures made during this time. They were programmed using the sophisticated TADS development system rather than the more ramshackle AGT, with all the benefits that accrued to such a choice. And, just as importantly, they were thoroughly gone over for bugs as well as spelling and grammar problems, and are free of the gawky authorial asides and fourth-wall-breakings that were once par for the course in amateur interactive fiction.

For all that, though, the Adventions games haven’t aged all that well in my eyes. The bulk of them take place in a fantasy land known as Unnkulia, which is trying so hard to ape Zork‘s Great Underground Empire that it’s almost painful to watch. In addition to being derivative, the Unnkulia games think they’re far more clever and hilarious than they actually are — the very name of the series/world is a fine case in point — while the overly fiddly gameplay can sometimes grate almost as much as the writing.

It thus made for a welcome change when Adventions, after making three and a half Unnkulia games, finally decided to try something else. Written by D.A. Leary, The Horror of Rylvania is more plot-driven than Adventions’s earlier games, a Gothic vampire tale in which you actually become a vampire not many turns in. It’s gone down in certain circles as a minor classic, for reasons that aren’t totally unfounded. Although the game has a few more potential walking-dead scenarios than is perhaps ideal, the puzzles are otherwise well-constructed, the implementation is fairly robust, and, best of all, most of the sophomoric attempts at humor that so marked Adventions’s previous games are blessedly absent.

That said, the end result still strikes me more as a work of craftsmanship than genius. The writing has been gone over for spelling and grammar without addressing some of its more deep-rooted problems, as shown even by the brief introduction above; really, now, have “few Americans ever seen” sights advertised in every bog-standard package tour of Europe? (Something tells me Leary hadn’t traveled much at the time he wrote this game.) The writing here has some of the same problems with tone as another Gothic horror game from 1993 set in an ersatz Romania: Quest for Glory IV. It wants to play the horror straight most of the time, and is sometimes quite effective at it — the scene of your transformation from man to vampire is particularly well-done — but just as often fails to resist the centrifugal pull which comedy has on the adventure-game genre.

Still, Horror of Rylvania is the Adventions game which plays best today, and it isn’t a bad choice for anyone looking for a medium-sized old-school romp with reasonably fair puzzles. Its theme adds to its interest; horror in interactive fiction tends to hew more to either H.P. Lovecraft or zombie movies than the Gothic archetypes which Horror of Rylvania intermittently manages to nail. Another extra dimension of interest is added by the ending, which comes down to a binary choice between curing your friend Carolyn from the curse of vampirism, which entails sacrificing yourself in the process, or curing yourself and letting Carolyn sod off. As we’ll shortly see, the next and last Adventions game perhaps clarifies some of the reasons for such a moral choice’s inclusion at the end of a game whose literary ambitions otherwise don’t seem to extend much beyond being a bit of creepy fun.

The Jeweled Arena

You let out a sigh of relief as you finish the last paper. “That’s the lot.”

“Good work, ma’am,” says Regalo, your squire. “I was almost afraid we’d be here until midnight.”

“Don’t worry, Regalo, I wouldn’t do a thing like that, especially on my first healthy day after the flu. In any case, Dora wants me home by eight. The papers look dry, so you can take them to Clara’s office.”

As Regalo carries the papers to the adjoining office, you stand up and stretch your aching muscles. You then look through the window and see a flash of lightning outside. It looks like quite a storm is brewing. “I’m beginning to think my calendar is set wrong,” you say as Regalo returns. “Dibre’s supposed to be cool, dry, and full of good cheer; so far, we’ve had summer heat, constant rain, and far too many death certificates. Perhaps this storm will blow out the heat.” “I hope it blows out the plague with it, ma’am. I’ve lost three friends already, and my wife just picked it up yesterday. No one likes it when the coroner’s staff is overworked.”

“It doesn’t help that Clara and Resa are both still sick. If we’re lucky, we’ll have Resa back tomorrow, which I’m sure your feet would appreciate. I presume Ernando and Miranda have already left for the day?” “Yes ma’am.”

“Now I’m really worried. The only thing worse than being the victim of one of Miranda’s pranks is going a day without one of her pranks -– it usually means you missed something. Perhaps she decided to be discrete [sic] for a change.”

“I didn’t get the impression her sense of humor was taking the day off, but I don’t know what she did. It can wait until tomorrow. Is there anything else you need me to do before I leave?”

Written by David S. Raley, The Jeweled Arena was the co-winner of what would turn out to be the last of the annual competitions organized by AGT’s steward, David M. Malmberg, before he released the programming language as freeware and stepped away from further involvement with the interactive-fiction community. Set in a fantasy world, but a thankfully non-Zorkian and non-Tolkienesque one, it’s both an impressive piece of world-building and a game of unusual narrative ambition for its time.

In fact, the world of Valdalan seems like it must have existed in the author’s head for a long time before this game was written. The environment around you has the feeling of being rooted in far more lore and history than is explicitly foregrounded in the text, always the mark of first-class world-building. As far as I can tell from the text, Valdalan is roughly 17th-century in terms of its science and technology, but is considerably more enlightened philosophically. Interestingly, magic seems to have no place here, making it almost more of an alternative reality than a conventional fantasy milieu.

The story takes place in the city of Kumeran as it’s in the throes of a plague — a threat which is, like so much else in this game, handled with more subtlety than you might expect. The plot plays out in four chapters, during each of which you play the role of a different character. The first chapter is worthy of becoming a footnote in interactive-fiction history at the very least, in that it casts you as one half of a lesbian couple. In later years, certain strands of interactive fiction — albeit more of the hypertext than the parser-driven type — would become a hotbed of advocacy for non- hetero-normative lifestyles. The Jeweled Arena has perhaps aged better in this respect than many of those works have (or will); it presents its lesbian protagonist in a refreshingly matter-of-fact way, neither turning her into an easy villain or victim, as an earlier game might have done, nor celebrating her as a rainbow-flag-waving heroine, as a later game might have done. She’s just a person; the game takes it as a given that she’s worthy of exactly the same level of respect as any of the rest of us. In 1993, this matter-of-fact attitude toward homosexuality was still fairly unusual. Raley deserves praise for it.

Unfortunately, The Jeweled Arena succeeds better as a place and a story than it does as a game, enough so that one is tempted to ask why Raley elected to present it in the form of a text adventure at all. He struggles to come up with things for you to really do as you wander the city. This tends to be a problem with a lot of interactive fiction where the puzzles aren’t the author’s primary focus; A Mind Forever Voyaging struggles to some extent with the same issue when it sends you wandering through its own virtual city. But The Jeweled Arena, which doesn’t have a mechanic like A Mind Forever Voyaging‘s commandment to observe and record to ease its way, comes off by far the worse of the two. Most of the tasks it sets before you are made difficult not out of authorial intention but due to poor authorial prompting and the inherent limitations of AGT. In other words, first you have to figure out what non-obvious trigger the game is looking for to advance the plot a beat, and then you have to figure out the exact way the parser wants you to say it. This constant necessity to read the author’s mind winds up spoiling what could have been an enjoyable experience, and makes The Jeweled Arena a game that can truly be recommended only to those with an abiding interest in text-adventure history or the portrayal of homosexuality in interactive media. A pity — with more testing and better technology, it could have been a remarkable achievement.

Klaustrophobia

You are standing at the top of an ocean bluff. Wind is whipping through your hair and blowing your voluminous black cape out behind you. You can hear the hiss of the surf crashing far below you. Out towards the horizon, a distant storm sends flickers of lightning across the darkening sky. The last rays of the setting sun reflect red off the windows of the grey stone mansion to the East. As you turn towards the house, you catch a glimpse of a haunting face in one of the windows. That face, you will never forget that face......

> wait The surf and cliffs fade from sight............ You awake to find yourself in your living room,lying on the couch. Your cat, Klaus, is chewing and pulling on your hair. Static is hissing from the TV, as the screen flickers on a station long off the air. You look at your watch and realize that it is 3 AM. You must have fallen asleep on the couch right after you got home from work, and settled down to read the newspaper.

I noted earlier that the Adventions games are “free of the gawky authorial asides and fourth-wall-breakings” that mark most early amateur interactive fiction. That statement applies equally to The Jeweled Arena, but not at all to Carol Hovick’s Klaustrophobia. The other winner of the final AGT competition, its personality could hardly be more different from its partner on the podium. This is a big, rambling, jokey game that’s anything but polished. And yet it’s got an unpretentious charm about it, along with puzzles that turn out to be better than they first seem like they’re going to be.

What Klaustrophobia lacks in polish or literary sophistication, it attempts to make up for in sheer sprawl. It’s actually three games in one — so big that, even using the most advanced and least size-constrained version of AGT, Hovick was forced to split it into three parts, gluing them together with some ingenious hacks that are doubtless horrifying in that indelible AGT way to any experienced programmer. The three parts together boast a staggering 560 rooms and 571 objects, making Klaustrophobia easily one of the largest text adventures ever created.

Like the Unnkulia series and so much else from the interstitial period, Klaustrophobia is hugely derivative of the games of the 1980s. The story and puzzles here draw heavily from Infocom’s Bureaucracy, which is at least a more interesting choice than yet another Zork homage. You’ve just won an all-expenses-paid trip to appear on a quiz show, but first you have to get there; this exercise comes to absorb the first third of the game. Then, after you’ve made the rounds of not one but several quiz shows in the second part, part three sends you off to “enjoy” the Mexican vacation you’ve won. As a member of that category of text adventure which the Interactive Fiction Database dubs the “slice of life,” the game has that time-capsule quality I’ve mentioned before as being such a fascinating aspect of amateur interactive fiction. Klaustrophobia is a grab bag of pop-culture ephemera from the United States of 1993: Willard Scott, Dolly Parton, The Price is Right. If you lived through this time and place, you might just find it all unbearably nostalgic. (Why do earlier eras of history almost invariably seem so much happier and simpler?) And if you didn’t… well, there are worse ways to learn about everyday American life in 1993, should you have the desire to do so, than playing through this unforced, agenda-less primary source.

The puzzles are difficult in all the typical old-school ways: full of time limits, requiring ample learning by death. Almost inevitably given the game’s premise, they sometimes fail to fall on the right side of the line between being comically aggravating and just being aggravating. And the game is rough around the edges in all the typical AGT ways: under-tested (a game this large almost has to be) and haphazardly written, and subject to all the usual frustrations of the AGT parser and world model. Yet, despite it all, the author’s design instincts are pretty good; most of the puzzles are clued if you’re paying attention. Many of them involve coming to understand and manipulate some surprisingly complex dynamic sequences taking place around you. The whole experience is helped immensely by the episodic structure which exists even within each of the three parts: you go from your home to the bank to the airport, etc., with each vignette effectively serving as its own little self-contained adventure game. This structure lets Klaustrophobia avoid the combinatorial explosion that can make such earlier text-adventure epics as Acheton and Zork Zero all but insoluble. Here, you can work out a single episode, then move on to the next at your leisure with a nice sense of achievement in your back pocket — as long, of course, as you haven’t left anything vital behind.

Klaustrophobia is a game that I regard with perhaps more affection that I ought to, given its many and manifest flaws. While much of my affection may be down to the fact that it was one of the first games I played when I rediscovered interactive fiction around the turn of the millennium, I like to believe this game has more going for it than nostalgia. It undoubtedly requires a certain kind of player, but, whether taken simply as a text adventure or as an odd sort of sociological study — a frozen-in-amber relic of its time and place — it’s not without its intrinsic appeal. Further, it strikes me as perfect for its historical role as the final major statement made with AGT; something more atypically polished and literary, such as Shades of Gray or even Cosmoserve, just wouldn’t work as well in that context. Klaustrophobia‘s more messy sort of charm, on the other hand, feels like the perfect capstone to this forgotten culture of text adventuring, whose games were more casual but perhaps in some ways more honest because of it.

The Legend Lives! A pattern of bits shifts inside your computer. New information scrolls up the screen. It is not good.

As the impact of the discovery settles on your psyche, you recall the preceding events: your recent enrollment at Akmi Yooniversity; your serendipitous discovery of the joys of Classical Literature – a nice change of pace from computer hacking; your compuarchaeological discovery of the long-forgotten treasures that will make your thesis one of the most important this decade. But now that’s all a bit moot, isn’t it?

How ironic: You were stunned at how *real* the primitive Unnkulian stories seemed. Now you know why.

David Baggett’s The Legend Lives! is the only game on this curated list that dates from 1994, the particularly fallow year just before the great flowering of 1995. The very last production of the Adventions partnership, it was originally planned as another shareware title, but was ultimately released for free, a response to the relatively tepid registration rate of Advention’s previous games. Having conceived it as nothing less than a Major Statement meant to prod the artistic growth of a nascent literary medium, Baggett stated that he wished absolutely everyone to have a chance to play his latest game.

Ironically, the slightly uncomfortable amalgamation that is The Legend Lives! feels every bit as of-its-time today as any of the less artistically ambitious text adventures I’ve already discussed in this article. Set in the far future of Adventions’s Unnkulia universe, it reads like a checklist of what “literary” interactive fiction circa 1994 might be imagined to require.

There must, first and foremost, be lots and lots of words for something to be literary, right? Baggett has this covered… oh, boy, does he ever. The first room description, for the humble dorm room of the university student you play, consists of six substantial paragraphs — two or three screenfuls of text on the typical 80-column monitor displays of the day. As you continue to play, every object mentioned anywhere, no matter how trivial, continues to be described to within an inch of its life. While Baggett’s dedication is admirable, these endless heaps of verbiage do more to confuse than edify, especially in light of the fact that this game is, despite its literary aspirations, far from puzzleless. There’s a deft art to directing the player’s attention to the things that really matter in a text adventure — an art which this game comprehensively fails to exhibit. And then there are the massive non-interactive text dumps, sometimes numbering in the thousands of words, which are constantly interrupting proceedings. Sean Molley, reviewing the game in the first gush of enthusiasm which accompanied its release, wrote that “I certainly don’t mind reading 10 screens of text if it helps to advance the story and give me something to think about.” I suspect that most modern players wouldn’t entirely agree. The Legend Lives! is exhausting enough in its sheer verbosity to make you long for the odd minimalist poetry of Scott Adams. “Ok, too dry. Fish die” starts looking pretty good after spending some time with this game.

And yet, clumsy and overwrought though the execution often is, there is a real message here — one I would even go so far as to describe as thought-provoking. The Legend Lives! proves to be an old-school cyberpunk tale — another thing dating it indelibly to 1994 — about a computer virus that has infected Unnkulia’s version of the Internet and threatens to take over the entirety of civilization. The hero that emerges and finally sacrifices himself to eliminate the scourge is known mostly by his initials: “JC.” He’s allegedly an artificial intelligence, but he’s really, it would seem, an immaculate creation, a divinity living in the net. An ordinary artificial intelligence, says one character, “is smart with no motivation, no goals; no creativity, ya see. JC, he’s like us.” What we have here, folks, is an allegory. I trust that I need not belabor the specific parallels with another famous figure who shares the same initials.

But I don’t wish to trivialize the message here too much. It’s notable that this argument for a non-reductionist view of human intelligence — for a divine spark to the human mind that can’t be simulated in silicon — was made by a graduate student in MIT’s artificial-intelligence lab, working in the very house built by Marvin Minsky and his society of mind. Whatever one’s feelings about the Christian overtones to Baggett’s message, his impassioned plea that we continue to allow a place for the ineffable has only become more relevant in our current age of algorithmization and quantization.

Like all of the Adventions games, this one has been virtually forgotten today, despite being widely heralded upon its release as the most significant work of literary interactive fiction to come along since A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity. That’s a shame. Yes, writers of later text adventures would learn to combine interactivity with literary texture in more subtle and effective ways, but The Legend Lives! is nevertheless a significant way station in the slow evolution of post-Infocom interactive fiction, away from merely reflecting the glory of a storied commercial past and toward becoming a living, evolving artistic movement in its own right.

Perdition’s Flames *** You have died. ***

All is dark and quiet. There is no sensation, no time. Your mind floats peacefully in a void. You perceive nothing, you feel nothing, you think nothing. Sleep without dreams.

All is hazy and gray. Sensation is vague and indistinct. Your mind is sluggish, sleepy. You see gray shapes in a gray fog; you hear distant, muffled sounds. You think, but your thoughts are fleeting, disconnected, momentary flashes of light in a dark night. Time is still frames separated by eons of nothing, brief awakenings in a long sleep.

All is clear and sharp. Sensation crystalizes from a fog. You see, you hear, you feel. Your mind awakens; you become aware of a place, and a time.

You are on a boat.

Last but far from least, we come to the real jewel of this collection, a game which I can heartily recommend to everyone who enjoys text adventures. Perdition’s Flames was the third game written by Mike Roberts, the creator of the TADS programming language. While not enormous in the way of Klaustrophobia, it’s more than substantial enough in its own right, offering quite a few hours of puzzling satisfaction.

The novel premise casts you as a soul newly arrived in Hell. (Yes, just as you might expect, there are exactly 666 points to score.) Luckily for you, however, this is a corporate, postmodern version of the Bad Place. “Ever since the deregulation of the afterlife industry,” says your greeter when you climb off the boat, “we’ve had to compete with Heaven for eternal souls — because you’re free to switch to Heaven at any time. So, we’ve been modernizing! There really isn’t much eternal torment these days, for example. And, thanks to the Environmental Clean-up Superfund, we have the brimstone problem mostly under control at this point.”

As the game continues, there’s a lot more light satire along those lines, consistently amusing if not side-splittingly funny. Your goal is to make the ascent to Heaven, which isn’t quite as easy as your greeter implies. Achieving it will require solving lots and lots of puzzles, which are varied, fair, and uniformly enjoyable. In fact, I number at least one of them among the best puzzles I’ve ever seen. (For those who have already played the game: that would be the one where you’re a ghost being pursued by a group of paranormal researchers.)

Although Perdition’s Flames is an old-school puzzlefest in terms of categorization, it’s well-nigh breathtakingly progressive in terms of its design sensibility. For this happens to be a text adventure — the first text adventure ever, to my knowledge — which makes it literally impossible for you to kill yourself (after all, you are already dead) or lock yourself out of victory. It is, in other words, the Secret of Monkey Island of interactive fiction, an extended proof that adventure games without deaths or dead ends can nevertheless be intriguing, challenging, and immensely enjoyable. Roberts says it right there in black and white:

Note that in Perdition’s Flames, in contrast to many other adventure games, your character never gets killed, and equally importantly, you’ll never find yourself in a position where it’s impossible to finish the game. You have already seen the only “*** You have died ***” message in Perdition’s Flames. As a result, you don’t have to worry as much about saving game positions as you may be accustomed to.

I can’t emphasize enough what an astonishing statement that is to find in a text adventure from 1993. Perdition’s Flames and its author deserve to be celebrated for making it every bit as much as we celebrate Monkey Island and Ron Gilbert.

Yet even in its day Perdition’s Flames was oddly overlooked in proportion to its size, polish, and puzzly invention alone, much less the major leap it represents toward an era of fairer, saner text adventures. And this even as the merciful spirit behind the humble statement above, found buried near the end of the in-game instructions, was destined to have much more impact on the quality of the average player’s life than all of the literary pretensions which The Legend Lives! so gleefully trumpets.

Roberts’s game was overshadowed most of all by what would go down in history as the text adventure of 1993: Graham Nelson’s Curses!. Said game is erudite, intricate, witty, and sometimes beautifully written — and runs on Infocom’s old Z-Machine, which constituted no small part of its appeal in 1993. But it’s also positively riddled with the types of sudden deaths and dead ends which Perdition’s Flames explicitly eschews. You can probably guess which of the pair holds up better for most players today.

So, as we prepare to dive into the story of how Curses! came to be, and of how it turned into the seismic event which revitalized the near-moribund medium of interactive fiction and set it on the path it still travels today, do spare a thought for Perdition’s Flames as well. While Curses! was the the first mover that kicked the modern interactive-fiction community into gear, Perdition’s Flames, one might argue, is simply the first work of modern interactive fiction, full stop. All of its contemporaries, Curses! included, seem regressive next to its great stroke of genius. Go forth and play it, and rejoice. An Interactive Fiction Renaissance is in the offing.

(All of the games reviewed in this article are freely available via the individual links provided above and playable on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux using the Gargoyle interpreter among other options.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/the-last-works-before-the-renaissance/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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