#like i said. so many elements to the political landscape of this story. can never keep track of all of them..

[katsuki-king-of-twinks]

Guys... I'm confused about something. Wondering if someone can explain this line in Dark Age to me.

"We were going to sell Electra to Julia au Bellona. Old debts and all."

--the Abomination explaining his intentions for the kids, had their kidnapping been successful.

What the fuck... does this mean?? What is he talking about? What "old debt"??

These books have a very complex and extensive historical and political landscape; this is hardly the first time someone has referenced some past event or grievance or feud and I've been like "wait, what?" and needed to be reminded of some influential happening. But I cannot for the life of me think of what this could be alluding to.

(I'm loathe to try looking it up bc I still haven't read Light Bringer, and I'm worried googling anything Red Rising related might spoil something for me; so it would be wonderful if someone was kind enough to explain it to me.)

[raddifferent]

I'm late but I'm in the middle of switching jobs so who cares! Here's Day Two of @rosemarymonth2021: Fantasy! This is Chapter 1; Chapter 2 will double as the Chapter 4 prompt because I want to finish this fic rather than do medieval with no fantasy elements. It's my writing project and I make the rules!!

Anyways, as usual the link will be in the replies and the fic is below the cut!

The esteemed Duchess Lepidopterina Dolorosa of the House Maryam, Baroness of the Misted Isles, Devotee of the Midnight Spiral, and Serene Lady of the Obsidian Blade, first of her name, was having a bit of a shit day. As some of her many fancy titles would suggest, she was an adept swordswoman, and she had been honored to be invited to the wedding of Duke Egbert’s daughter. She was more familiar with Lady Egbert than her betrothed, another Duchess of the Troll kingdom, despite being a troll herself. That was one of the side effects of spending an inordinate amount of time in the borderlands fighting off the blasted undead, as she found herself doing now.

Her traveling party had been journeying through the Cresting Mountains for a fortnight now, having crossed the mountain peaks worn oddly smooth by some ancient ocean and cracked in half on their tectonic ascent. The scraggly pines of its forests were dense in places and opened into large clearings in others, creating an unpredictable landscape full of pockets of zombies. Three of the party had fallen when the undead felled their horses, and she’d lost sight of the other two of her companions when the pack had separated them. Now, she fought the beasts alone.

Kanaya raised a shining hand, turning some of the undead near herself. She had a moment to catch her breath and assess the situation. A crowd of about fifteen undead humans and trolls had her backed against the base of a thick pine. At her feet lay a pile of bodies twenty-strong. Her black leather boots were shiny with rotting ichor, and splashes of guts, grime, and gore adorned her oiled outerwear. The Duchess twirled her twin blades, each a deep, midnight indigo sparkling with obsidian glitter, and also with a little magic. Her hands were covered with snugly-fit leather gloves, but beneath the animal hide Kanaya knew the sigils of the Church of the Midnight Spiral gleamed on the backs of her hands. Indeed, her skin itself glowed from the inside, although that was more of a side effect of being a Blessed Resurrectionist. Kanaya lived thirty five years, and died, and was brought back by The Bright Light in the Dark Sky to walk again some fifty more years. Those outside the Church would call her another, luckier undead. A vampire.

Her groaning, festering foes began to clamber close enough to swipe at her again. Kanaya whirled and sliced, removing limbs and heads as the undead shuffled within her reach. Eight more fell, leaving seven standing. Kanaya tried to wipe a smear of viscera from her face, but she feared the back of her sleeve only made the mess worse. She was breathing heavily. The dampness on her boots and the height of the bodies was beginning to impede her. She needed to reach high ground, and soon.

Just then, a golden light shone from deeper in the woods surrounding this clearing. Kanaya jumped to the side just as a zombie swiped at her head, leaving her in the perfect position to see a glowing arrow pin her assailant’s head to a tree. There must have only been one archer aiding her, as only one or two arrows came at a time, but they still landed more rapidly than Kanaya’s own battle maidens could achieve. In seconds, the battle had ended.

Still breathing heavily, Kanaya attempted to wipe her blades off on her jacket before sheathing them. She began to walk towards where the arrows had been coming from.

Kanaya was met at the edge of the clearing by a figure in a deep purple cloak. Her skin was a deeper, redder brown than Kanaya’s own, set in sharp contrast to their white-blond hair. Kanaya met her startlingly purple eyes, which were bright, intelligent, and a little mischievous. She had a golden lip ring down the center of her mouth, and a thin golden chain as a choker. Her clothing was modest but fine, Kanaya’s keen eye picking out expensive brocade in the shirt.

“To whom do I owe thanks for such gracious assistance?” Kanaya offered when the stranger did not speak.

The stranger spoke in a slightly raspy voice with a short, clipped affect. “Arrows rained upon your general area moments before, and yet you walk towards a potential source of danger? Moments after your own life was at risk? You must either be assured of your skill, or very stupid.”

“I like to think I am the former, although there is always time to prove the latter.”

The stranger smiled. “You think it is inevitable you will be proven unintelligent?”

“I find it imprudent to assume one will never make a mistake.”

The stranger raised an eyebrow, the corners of her mouth quirking upwards. “Ah, a pragmatist. We may get along yet.”

Kanaya pursed her lips. “I find I get along with people much better if we have something to call each other by.”

“You would still like my name, then.” It wasn’t a question. They seemed to be hesitating. “I suppose you can call me Briar,” she said with a wry smile. “I’m just a traveler in these woods. There’s nothing I have to claim that involves fanfare.”

Politely, Kanaya did not mention the clearly magical bow, or the fine clothing. “I do have a bit of a fancy title, but I think it best not to rattle off the entire thing. Suffice it to say that you can call me Kanaya.” Hopefully, her rescuer would be equally polite about her weaponry and dress.

“May I ask where you’re headed? I wouldn’t mind some company, and you certainly seem like you need the assistance.” The last was delivered with a smirk, which Kanaya bristled a little at.

“I have been traveling with several others, thank you; we just found ourselves separated after that large group of undead descended onto us. I had almost dispatched all of them when you arrived.” She made a sweeping gesture back towards the not-immodest pile of re-deceased zombies surrounding the tree she had been up against.

Briar smirked harder. “So my assistance is not desired?”

“No, that is not-” Kanaya broke off her objection with a huff as Briar began to laugh. “I would, actually, quite like your help locating my companions. However, I would like to know why you would want to help me. You seem to be taking great pleasure in needling me about needing it.”

The other traveler sobered slightly. “I just know what it’s like to be traveling alone, and the drudgery of not having someone to talk to, no stories to tell around the fire or on the road. It can be better to group up, even temporarily, just to kill the boredom.”

“Did you lose a companion recently as well?” Kanaya blurted.

Briar raised a thin eyebrow. “Not recently, as it were. But yes, I have previously parted ways with those whom I enjoyed sharing a story or three.”

“I would be happy to share tales with you, stranger. My companions would likely head towards the closest inn if they were sure they were separated from me, as that was our next destination. Does that align with your path?”

The other woman smiled. “That it does. When last I consulted my map, the next inn was a half-day’s walk up the road. Shall we?”

As they walked up the road, dappled light gently touched the faces of both travelers. Briar hummed an aimless tune, kicking up dead, brown leaves. They traveled in silence for quite some time, neither quite willing to speak up after such an abrupt introduction. About an hour into the walk, Kanaya opened her mouth and was about to begin some sort of small talk about the weather when they reached the top of a hill. Below them, the trees opened up to reveal a path curving down and around a small, ruined stone structure. What had previously been a large castle town now lay in disarray, the abbey wall crumbling and holding nothing at bay. The peasant houses must have been constructed of wood, as all but their foundations had long rotted away. All that remained was a small stone castle with a single, thin spire reaching high into the sky. Small was relative; the property would have held a baron comfortably in his keep with acres of holdings, but from the vantage point it felt like a child’s plaything.

“Well, that certainly looks interesting.” Briar broke the silence with a chuckle.

Kanaya did have to agree. Ruins such as this one, so deep in the woods, were possibly undisturbed, and might have strange and magical treasures hidden within. At the very least, there would be a few monsters to kill, and get some of her frustrations out. “We should explore it. There is still light in the sky.”

Briar’s smile faded slightly. “You know, I grew up not too far from here. When I was a little girl, we were told a tale in whispers. It was the sort of fairy tale that adults would laugh off, but forbid you from speaking about ever again. Would you like to hear it?”

“Right now?” Kanaya asked, the question coming out more incredulously than she intended. “While we’re stopped in the middle of the road?”

The smile was back. “I can walk and weave words, miss.”

“Well then, far be it from me than to stop you.”

“A long, long time ago, a young king killed what he thought was the last dragon in his lands. His fields were free from fiery terror, and his people lived prosperously for three decades. One day, a winged shadow drew over the land again, smaller than the scourge that had last plagued the land, but still enough to wreak havoc. One dragon spawn had survived, and had lived long enough to exact its revenge.”

Briar stopped to hop over a river, holding out an arm to steady Kanaya as she crossed. Her hands were warm, heat thrumming through Kanaya’s thick gear to her palm where she clasped Briar’s. She let go, and they continued. Kanaya’s hand felt cold.

“The dragon landed on the top of the castle of the now-middle-aged king, and told the king that he would leave the lands be, if only the king would offer his daughter. One life in exchange for the kingdom’s safety.”

Kanaya laughed grimly. “I suppose it was an easy deal to make with the dragon staring him down.”

“I suppose it was,” Briar replied. “He brought his daughter to be scooped up in the dragon’s claws and carried away. The kingdom was quiet and safe for another thirty years, until the king’s son had borne an heir and several daughters, and a new ruler was crowned. The dragon once again flew across the land, and once again sat atop the tower and demanded a companion. Every three decades, the dragon would return, larger than before, and more imposing.”

“And how long ago was the last time the dragon came to the land?” Kanaya asked, playing along.

“Well, that’s just the thing.” Briar held a branch up so Kanaya could pass under it. “The dragon hasn’t been sighted in over fifty years.”

“Do you know why?”

The first crumbling pieces of stone that formerly lined the road to the castle began to rise up from the sides of the road. “No one knows. Some of the bravest in our village once described traveling deep into the woods and seeing a castle with a tall tower, a sleeping monster curled around the top.”

Kanaya squinted ahead, trying to spot the castle. “Did you put much stock in their tales?”

“When I was younger? Not really. Now? Also no, not really. I think if a dragon had a castle, he’d sleep inside of it, not on top.”

Involuntarily, Kanaya burst out laughing. “That’s your justification for why they’re wrong? Not that your country doesn’t have a history of missing princesses, or that you happened to live close enough to the dragon’s castle to find it, but not so close that it bothers you?”

Briar put her hands on her hips. “Would you sleep out in the rain and the cold if you had the option not to?”

“I make a habit not to when I have the choice,” Kanaya ceded.

“Then you admit there’s some logic to what I say,” Briar smirked felinely.

Kanaya rolled her eyes, smiling. “Begrudgingly. At any rate, there was no dragon on that tower when we saw it from above.”

“No,” Briar said. “There wasn’t.”

[misiwrites]

Beyblade Week Day 3

for the third @beybladeweek2021​ oneshot set in the 4kingdoms-verse, i have a silly little story from the west. takes place at some random point before the beginning of the main fic.

~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~

Fashion / Flowers / Autumn

“Underplates… napkins… saucers… and the cup handles to the right.”

Mathilda places each piece of the set with meticulous care. After the cups and cutlery are in place, she arranges the jam and cream dish on the tray, and then, of course, the centrepiece of the table, the golden cake stand for the treats.

“Handmade by Sir Olivier!”

She giddily sets the macarons and finger sandwiches on the stand. Then a freshly brewed pot of black tea from the kitchen, and everything is ready to go. Her butterfly heart flutters with nervous excitement as she carefully lifts the heavy tray and slowly makes her way out of the servants’ quarters. She has to focus on each and every step to avoid making any silly mistakes that could end up in a tea-stained catastrophe.

It’s a lovely day in early Harvestmoon. Pleasant and still, perfect for having tea outside – not something that could be said about most days in the Country of West, usually so drizzly and grey.

Whatever the weather, Mathilda never grows tired of the beauty of the Tiger Maple Palace, and although acting as a maid isn’t exactly part of the royal page’s routine and the tray is so heavy that it leaves her arms sore, it’s an honour to be asked to serve afternoon tea to her favourite guests at the palace, Lady Chen Mao and her handmaid Julia from the mansion on Kuí.

She finds them under a canopy of branches of blazing orange and yellow, hunched over some papers and magazines on the patio floor. Mao’s holy beast companion, Galux, is having a nap on its designated cushion a few feet away.

“But there are so many different types of zan zi… Oh, look, the tea has arrived!”

Mao is stunning as always. The wide sleeves of her blue-and-orange ruqun dress billow along as she jumps to her feet; she wears her rose colour hair on two long braids today, their shape resembles chains of traditional Western paper lanterns, and Mathilda has no doubt that the style is in accordance with the latest trends of high fashion in this kingdom. The handmaid, Julia, is more composed than Mao and rises to her feet with more dignity, politely nodding at Mathilda who approaches them with the tray.

“Good afternoon, Lady Mao, Miss Fernández,” Mathilda greets them, her cheeks slightly flushed. Relief washes over her as she successfully lands the tray on the garden table. No casualties this time, and the tea is still hot.

“Hi, Matty! Is it okay if I call you Matty? It was Julia’s idea.” Like a robin, Mao soars over to the table, then quickly turns to face her handmaid. “Jules, bring the papers here so we can keep planning while eating.”

When Mao is distracted instructing Julia, Mathilda hurries over to pull a chair out for her. “Um, um, feel free to call me as you wish, milady.”

“Aren’t you one considerate sweetheart, Matty! And how lovely the tea looks! Are these macarons by Olivier again? He’s such a weirdo – I’ve never heard of a knight who’s also a cook before, not to mention a damn pastry chef! Sword in one hand, a rolling pin in the other, how reassuring.”

Mathilda says nothing; hearing Mao talk about her master in such a manner always makes her ears burn, but she can’t not admire her audacious nature all the same. That boyish edge in Mao’s behaviour must have rubbed off on her from her older brother, the Duke of Kuí, whom Mathilda has always found nothing short of intimidating.

As Julia joins Mao, Mathilda can see that the papers she has brought along include several volumes of fashion-related magazines and what look like blueprints for a fashion design project of some sort. She tries not to snoop too much, not wanting to cross her boundaries as an outsider, but she hasn’t even finished pouring the two cups full when Mao is already deliberately pulling her into the conversation.

“So about the zan zi – I was thinking I’d want it to follow the flower theme, but I don’t really want there to be too much gold… you know… and a chai would be a bit meh… Matty, what  kind of hair ornaments do you like?”

“Me? Oh…” Mathilda, who always wears her hair short and simple, racks her brain for an answer of any substance. “Well, um… um... Oh, I went to the Tianguan market square earlier this week, and there was a stall with wonderful flower zan zi from the East… made of fabric… The vendor said that they were created to commemorate the Seiryuu-ou’s late mother… They looked very lovely.”

“From the East? That’s an amazing idea!” Mao darts a triumphant look at Julia across the table. “That’s really unique! You should go check them out with Matty.”

“Of course, milady.”

“But tea comes first, obviously.”

Mathilda ends up spending a long while with the other girls in the garden, leafing through the magazines and following along in curious silence as they (mainly Mao, although she clearly holds Julia’s opinions about fashion in high regard) build their design piece by piece, element by element, carefully considering each detail to complement the big picture. Mao is sketching the design on paper herself as they go, and it’s obvious to Mathilda that she’s quite used to doing this kind of thing.

“Lady Mao,” she asks after a while, “are you perhaps planning to launch your own fashion line? A whole catalogue? You are very good at design.”

“Wow, thank you! You know, that’s actually an amazing idea!” Mao claps her hands together in excitement, her golden eyes positively sparkling at Mathilda. “Let’s make a whole line! This lotus daxiushan can be the first one. Oh, oh, Jules, we need to do the hair next!”

“Glad you brought that up, milady, I actually have several styles bookmarked that I thought you might like.” Julia whips out a HoloPad, and soon the mid-air above the tea set is filled with an array of images of the most intricate braidwork that Mathilda has ever seen, so fantastical that it’s hard to believe that these are photos of real people’s hair. (Perhaps they are not.)

“Oh my cats. Jules, you are the best.”

Mathilda chuckles in content and delight, her hands nested in her lap. These two girls are so entertaining and so eccentric, she never knew the nobles could be this fun. She enjoys their company so much – perhaps a bit too much, even, for someone in her position...

But, for now, she decides to simply go with the flow and worry about it later.

 * * *  * * *

 “Mao, what is this?”

“Shhh! Stop talking, you’re ruining the image! Stay totally still. Be like... what was the word again? Esoteric! You need to look esoteric, Rei-nii.”

Rei has no idea how a person is supposed to look esoteric, especially when he’s forced to stand still while posing in whatever unnatural stances Mao keeps coming up with, currently holding what he thinks is some sort of traditional brass instrument but the name of which he has no idea about.

The only reason he even agreed to a fashion photoshoot was that it’s Mao’s birthday and he wanted to please his childhood friend – but he wasn’t aware that in doing so, he agreed to a day-long session of acting as a doll designed by Mao and her handmaid, in a studio that they have somehow managed to build inside one of the pavilions of Tiger Maple, complete with several landscape backdrops.

It’s not that the clothes Mao is making him wear are bad; in fact, this outfit of a burgundy yichang dress and a dark blue daxiushang robe with a serpent-like lotus pattern adorning the broad yet lightweight sleeves feel rather comfortable in comparison to his usual formal robes that have an unnecessary abundance of coating, thanks to whoever in the past decided that the number of layers was a status symbol and therefore imposing a life sentence of drowning in a sea of layered silk upon the Byakko-ou... but the uncomfortably tight lace braids winding around his skull to form an enormous rosette of hair in the back of his head are a bit too much, as are the flower hairpins that nest above his temples and create a drooping curtain of red and white petals to frame his face; and, after several hours have already gone by, his arms and feet are beginning to hurt from standing still while holding whatever prop items the girls are sticking in his hands, from parasols to flutes and swords and whatever this newest addition is. He’s not used to standing around this much in his monotonous everyday life.

And even worse, Rei has already seen that Mao has an entire catalogue of self-made fashion concepts waiting that she wants to take pictures of him in.

The smallest of sighs escapes Rei’s lips. This doesn’t feel appropriate for his status. Incredible but true, he wishes he was instead having tea with Olivier right now.

“Stay still!” Mao immediately condemns him, “And stop looking so bored! You need to look more dramatic. You’re the king, Rei-nii, act more like it.”

What a long, long day this would end up being.

[verifiedaccount]

More movies (and a tv series) on youtube to keep you busy

List 1 / List 2

Here’s a third update of movies that you can watch in full on youtube since you’re stuck inside

Documentaries about movies:

Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography (1992): Featuring interviews with more than two dozen major cinematographers and a ton of clips, this is a useful and enjoyable primer for anyone interested in learning what a DoP does

Vittorio Storaro: Writing With Light (1992): This is a shorter (40 minute) television doc focusing on one specific cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, famed for his collaborations with Bertolucci and for shooting Hollywood movies like Apocalypse Now and Reds

The Epic That Never Was (1965): In 1937, Josef Von Sternberg started shooting an adaptation of I, Claudius starring Charles Laughton as Claudius. Dirk Boagarde hosts this lively documentary examining why the film was never completed, featuring the surviving footage from the 1937 shoot. 

Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film (1980): Kevin Brownlow and David Gill’s 13-episode miniseries about the silent film era is considered the gold standard for documentaries about film history, but the impossibility of negotiating the rights to all the clips used at a reasonable price has kept it off of dvd or blu-ray. Luckily, that didn’t stop someone from putting it on youtube, although episode 12 has in fact been blocked due to a copyright claim.

Buster Keaton: A Hard Act To Follow (1987) Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3: Another Kevin Brownlow and David Gill miniseries, this one, as you’ve probably guessed, covers the life and films of Buster Keaton over three episodes.

More movies:

Powell/Pressburger: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, aka the Archers, were one of the greatest writer/director teams in film history (and a favorite of Scorsese, who seemingly made it his life’s mission to ensure that their films were restored and available), and three of their incredibly charming, magical movies are on youtube. Of the available ones, I Know Where I’m Going! is probably the best to start with.

I Know Where I’m Going! (1945): Dave Kehr on the film:  “Michael Powell's 1945 film resists easy classification: it opens as a screwball comedy, grows into a mystical, Flaherty-like study of man against the elements, and concludes as a warm romance. Wendy Hiller, in one of the best roles the movies gave her, is a toughened, materialistic young woman on her way to meet her millionaire fiance in the Hebrides; Roger Livesey is the young man she meets when a storm blows up and prevents her crossing to the islands. Funny and stirring, in quite unpredictable ways, with the usual Powellian flair for drawing the universal out of the screamingly eccentric.”

A Canterbury Tale (1944):  The Criterion jacket copy: “Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s beloved classic A Canterbury Tale is a profoundly personal journey to Powell’s bucolic birthplace of Kent, England. Set amid the tumult of the Second World War, yet with a rhythm as delicate as a lullaby, the film follows three modern-day incarnations of Chaucer’s pilgrims—a melancholy “landgirl,” a plainspoken American GI, and a resourceful British sergeant—who are waylaid in the English countryside en route to the mythical town and forced to solve a bizarre village crime. Building to a majestic climax that ranks as one of the filmmaking duo’s finest achievements, the dazzling A Canterbury Tale has acquired a following of devotees passionate enough to qualify as pilgrims themselves.”

Gone To Earth (1950): Made under unhappy circumstances (David O. Selznick producing), this is a gorgeous technicolor romance starring Jennifer Jones as a nature loving young woman forced into a choice between two “civilized” men, with tragic results.

Straub/Huillet: If you’re looking for something easy and relaxing to watch during the quarantine, I’d recommend literally anything else other than the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. J. Hoberman on the couple: “Straub-Huillet, as they preferred to be called, are cinema’s conscience — an antidote to all the junk movies you’ve ever seen. Drawing on Kafka, Cézanne, Brecht, Schoenberg and Malraux, to name only some of their best-known sources, Straub-Huillet films are meant to raise ethical questions on subjects as varied as proper camera placement and the appropriate political approach to the subject.“We make our films so that audiences can walk out of them,” Mr. Straub once said, perhaps not altogether in jest.” Of the available ones, Class Relations, their adaptation of Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika, seems to be agreed upon as the easiest place to start as it’s the closest to a straightforward narrative, although History Lessons has also been recommended as a relatively easy starting place by some people. Not Reconciled, which compresses an epic Heinrich Boll novel following three generations throughout multiple timelines into 52-minutes, is not recommended to start with. MUBI did a retrospective of their works and had essays commissioned for each one to help viewers out so I’ll link those with each film. Hit Closed Captions for subtitles.

Not Reconciled (1965): Here’s a 10-minute video essay by critic Richard Brody that will help you have a slightly easier time with Not Reconciled if you decide to give it a try. Here’s the MUBI essay

Othon (1970): In the 17th century Pierre Corneille wrote Othon, set in ancient Rome. Straub-Huillet’s adaptation is shot in the actual ruins of Roman palaces with modern buildings and cars visible in the background. The MUBI essay

History Lessons (1972): An adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s The Business Affairs of Julius Caesar. From the MUBI essay: “In the film, an unnamed young man tours Rome and conducts interviews with toga-clad members of ancient Roman society on the subject of “C,” meaning of course Julius Caesar. It plays like Citizen Kane shorn of any of the flashbacks that bulk out that film: here, it is all exposition, reminisces, impressions. Interspersed through these sedentary discussions are a series of randomly protracted car rides through the city, all recorded in unbroken takes from the backseat of the young man’s Fiat 500.From this brief description alone, I’m sure you can see why structuralist-minded academics in the seventies had a field day.“

Fortini/Canti (1976): From the MUBI essay: “In Fortini/Canti, the Italian Communist writer Franco Fortini reads aloud from his Dogs of the Sinai (only recently translated into English for the first time), a memoir of his life as an Italian Jew and an extended reflection on the aftermath of the Third Arab–Israeli War of 1967 and its representation in the Italian media and by the political class. [...]  Like all of Straub-Huillet’s movies, this astonishingly combative film follows an internal rhythm born out of the particulars of landscape, of speech, and of the physiognomies of its actors. It begins with an extended recording of a television newscast about Israel/Palestine (thus distancing the audience from the warped words and images on screen), a quotation from Fortini that connects like a punch in the jaw (“People don’t like having to change their minds. When they have to, they do so in secret. The certainty of having been tricked turns into cynicism. Gain for the cause of conservatism”), and then alternates between short jabs like these and more sustained verbal and visual attacks.”  

Too Early/Too Late (1982): Serge Daney on the film: “No actors, not even characters. If there is an actor in TOO EARLY, TOO LATE, it’s the landscape. This actor has a text to recite: History, of which it is the living witness. The actor performs with a certain amount of talent: the cloud that passes, a breaking loose of birds, a break in the clouds; this is what the landscape’s performance consists of. This kind of performing is meteorological. One hasn’t seen anything like it for quite some time. Since the silent period, to be precise.” The MUBI essay

Class Relations (1984): The aforementioned adaptation of Kafka’s Amerika, often recommended as a place to start with Straub/Huillet. The MUBI essay

Hitchcock: Back to fun stuff, three Hitchcock classics.

The 39 Steps (1935): Dave Kehr: “As an artist, Alfred Hitchcock surpassed this early achievement many times in his career, but for sheer entertainment value it still stands in the forefront of his work.“

Shadow of a Doubt (1943): Kehr again: “Alfred Hitchcock’s first indisputable masterpiece. . . . Hitchcock’s discovery of darkness within the heart of small-town America remains one of his most harrowing films, a peek behind the facade of security that reveals loneliness, despair, and death. Thornton Wilder collaborated on the script; it’s Our Town turned inside out.“

Spellbound (1945): No one would argue it’s Hitchcock’s best and the psychoanalysis is very dated but with Gregory Peck, Ingrid Bergman, and Dali-designed dream sequences there’s still enjoyment to be had.

Ozu: One of Japan’s most beloved and revered filmmakers, he’s primarily known for his post-WWII family dramas, but his career stretched back to the silent era (although most of his silent films are lost). I Was Born But... is a good place to start but it’s not representative of the style he’s known for. Late Spring is where his later style fully emerges, and it’s a good place to start, so you might want to go in chronological order with these (Tokyo Story, widely considered one of the greatest films of all time, is also not a bad place to start).

I Was Born But... (1932): Jonathan Rosenbaum on the film: “One of Yasujiro Ozu's most sublime films, this late Japanese silent describes the tragicomic disillusionment of two middle-class boys who see their father demean himself by groveling in front of his employer; it starts off as a hilarious comedy and gradually becomes darker. Ozu's understanding of his characters and their social milieu is so profound and his visual style—which was much less austere and more obviously expressive during his silent period—so compelling that the film carries one along more dynamically than many of the director's sound classics. Though regarded in Japan mainly as a conservative director, Ozu was a trenchant social critic throughout his career, and the devastating understanding of social context that he shows here is full of radical implications.“

The Only Son (1936): Criterion’s jacket copy:  “Yasujiro Ozu’s first talkie, the uncommonly poignant The Only Son is among the Japanese director’s greatest works. In its simple story about a good-natured mother who gives up everything to ensure her son’s education and future, Ozu touches on universal themes of sacrifice, family, love, and disappointment. Spanning many years, The Only Son is a family portrait in miniature, shot and edited with its maker’s customary exquisite control.”

Late Spring (1949): Ignatiy Vishnevetsky: “Each shot in Late Spring is striking on its own; the mature Ozu belongs to that rare category of filmmakers whose work can be recognized from a single frame. But together—with all their abrupt shifts in visual perspective and time—they become a mosaic, deeply poignant and ultimately mysterious in the way it envisions a relationship between two people trapped by how much they care for one another. There are domestic dramas, and then there’s this.“

Tokyo Story (1953): Dave Kehr: “The film that introduced Yasujiro Ozu, one of Japan's greatest filmmakers, to American audiences (1953). The camera remains stationary throughout this delicate study of conflicting generations in a modern Japanese family, save for one heartbreaking moment when Ozu tracks around a corner to discover the grandparents, alone and forgotten. A masterpiece, minimalist cinema at its finest and most complex.“

Early Spring (1956): Ozu on the film: “I wanted to portray the life of a white-collar man — his happiness over graduating and becoming a member of society. His hopes for the future when he got his job have gradually dissolved and he realizes that, even though he has worked for years, he has accomplished nothing worth talking about. By delineating his life over a period of time, I wanted to portray what you might call the pathos of the white-collar life...I tried to avoid anything that would be dramatic and to accumulate only casual scenes of everyday life in hopes that the audience would feel the sadness of that kind of life” 

Equinox Flower (1958): Vincent Canby: “One of Ozu's least dark comedies, which is not to say that it's carefree, but, rather, that it's gentle and amused in the way that it acknowledges time's passage, the changing of values and the adjustments that must be made between generations.“

Late Autumn (1960): Peter Bradshaw: “Another gem from the Ozu canon, a masterpiece of tendernesss and serio-comic charm, as tonally ambiguous and morally complex as anything he ever made.“

And the tv series:

The Armando Iannucci Shows: You may know Armando Iannucci from his films, In The Loop and The Death of Stalin, or from some of his other television shows like The Thick of It or Veep, or from his involvement in all the Alan Partridge series with Steve Coogan. You probably missed The Armando Iannucci shows, his stream of consciousness sketch comedy that ran for one season back in 2001 (it didn’t help that it debuted in September of 2001), but it’s probably the most purely funny thing he’s ever done. 

[4homiesfilm]

5 Things - Devin 

April 9, 2021

And so it begins…

Well, I’m missing you all a ton right now, wishing I wasn’t back in shitty, smelly, stinky New York but still on the lake, ripping an apple bong, and trying to shimmy. Anyway, here are 5 things inspiring me right now, that I want to share, and hopefully some of my excitement and inspiration will rub off onto you...

1. “Films aren’t just for telling stories — they should create an impact that encourages other people to make work.” -Mati Diop. 

This wasn’t intentional, but in many ways this may just be the perfect quote to kick off this little weekly experiment of ours. This is what I want to do in general, with each film I make, but it’s especially relevant to the film we started making on this trip. Like I said the night we delved into the dark depths of how hard life has been the past year or more: we can help each other, and we can do so by inspiring one another. Mati is the perfect symbol of this for several reasons. When I first saw Atlantics, a little over a year ago, it made me think of Alisa and her style, particularly her Cuba doc. Both those films moved and inspired me in strangely similar ways, and so I had to tell her to watch it. I think it’s safe to say that Mati’s film also inspired Alisa, and then she urged all of us to watch it last weekend, and the excitement was then spread through all of us. This is so cool to me, and gives me so much creative energy. I could say so much about the film itself, and all the different aspects that moved me and blew me away, but just this rippling impact that it had on all of us makes me so happy. However, one of my favorite aspects is the music, so I will add this quote from Mati as well (which is from the same article, linked just below the quote): 

“Fatima is by far one the best musicians and artists of my generation and embodies the music of my time. I chose her because I wanted the music of the film to bewitch the audience like a djinn [genie] would, she also has an understanding of the complex geopolitical landscape of the film. My [way of telling stories] is fed by a lot of different references — European Gothic and the romantic movement, as well as my African and Muslim heritage — so I think the film is really a strange aesthetic combination. Fatima and I have a very similar hybrid culture.”

The full interview: https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/mati-diop-interview

2. Lee Chang-dong (aka... Director Dong) 

Wow, he has been such a profound source of inspiration for me these past few weeks. Each film of his we watched - and for Thomas and I it was three, yes three damn films! That’s like half his filmography! - had something different and new that blew me away, whether it was particular moments or something larger, something deeper pulsating underneath the surface. This interview he did after Burning’s release is fantastic, and these are the quotes that particularly stuck out to me: 

“To me it seems that films these days are becoming more and more simple, and the audience seems to desire simpler stories. Of course, films sort of shape the desires and the demands the audience makes, so I kind of wanted to go against this trend and see if a film can sort of throw endless questions at the audience. Endless questions about a larger mysterious world. This film is the result of that experiment.”

“[Hae-mi is] also the only character in the film who persistently pursues the meaning of life. The moment she disappears, I wanted the audience to sort of feel her absence and ask themselves what she represents and has been searching for — her presence in this film is very important, even when she's not there. The dancing in this scene really signifies her entire presence in the film.

When she's dancing the Great Hunger dance, searching for the meaning of life and really seeking true freedom, you see her doing that dance surrounded by both the lies and natural beauty that we live in. The scene being set during sunset, you see light and darkness co-existing, and you see the moon in the sky and you also see the grass swaying in the wind, you see the livestock, the farm and, of course, the Korean national flag, which symbolizes politics. You see all these elements that represent aspects of our lives — even the Miles Davis tune. I thought that through this scene I could portray and combine all of these elements together in the most cinematic way possible, so that the audience can really feel the potential of cinema as a medium and the unique aesthetics of cinema. So from the beginning to the end of the scene, I didn't want it to feel like it was directed or staged; I wanted it to feel as if we were able to capture this slice of life very coincidentally, and to capture Hae-mi's pursuit of freedom.

...The moment I thought of this image was when I first knew I could make this story into a film.”

Full interview: www.hollywoodreporter.com/amp/news/oscars-interview-lee-chang-dong-burning-1167869

3. Tsai Ming-liang. It makes me so excited that What Time Is It There? connected with Thomas the way it did, because this guy is one of my absolute favorite filmmakers. Watching that film was so inspiring and such a great way to end the trip, because it made me so hopeful about the future, and all its possibilities. In so many ways, Tsai makes the films I want to make. You all have to watch Rebels of the Neon God and Vive L’amour. Here is a quote by Tsai which is so similar to how I think about the films I make:

“When I was younger, I wanted to be a painter and I have always enjoyed looking at paintings. Viewing a film is admittedly a different experience from viewing a painting, but in my films I am continually trying to develop an experience for my audience similar to that of viewing a painting. I am more like a painter who is using the language of filmmaking than a storyteller who is using the medium of film.”

And here is Tsai talking about his star and muse Lee Kang-sheng, his star and muse who has been in every one of his films, which I also find so fascinating and, again, inspiring: 

“It’s not about a face being pretty; it is about how you frame it. The reason that I always cast Lee is his face. His face inspires me to look at film in a different way. Thinking about it, over my twenty-year career in feature films, it was never about the story, it was about filming Lee. 

[His face] evoked a particular sensation that touched me deeply, while the professional actors that I auditioned did not touch me as much. Ordinary faces, and ordinary people, tend to leave a stronger impression on me. When I chose Lee to be my actor, there was a lot of criticism. People complained that he did not have the face of a star. He wasn’t big or muscular. Yet, what deeply touched me was precisely this sense of ordinary-ness in his appearance. He was natural. Lee’s appearance in my films actually changed the whole path of my development as a filmmaker away from standard, industrial-style films and in another direction. 

As we have continued to collaborate, Lee has aged and his body has changed a lot. Usually in the film industry, when an actor ages and changes, the director will get a different actor to perform. Rather than choose that path, I chose to accept these changes and to allow the audience to watch as someone gets old and sometimes gets sick. I am using the changes in the body of Lee to have a conversation with the world. He will always be my actor. Using Lee throughout my career has been a kind of constraint because I could easily have used other professional or “star” actors. Placing this constraint upon myself was an active choice: a choice that was not driven by market forces but by what I wanted to achieve in my films.”

Here’s the full article: 

https://www.cineaste.com/fall2019/painterly-poetics-tsai-ming-liang-and-lee-kang-sheng

4. Our film, which I’ll be posting many stills from in the coming days/weeks, but for now, here are these three. 

It felt so good to be working on something new with all of you, and just be in that process, and see what comes out of it. I think we got some really exciting stuff, which I have to now go through and explore, but just the act of filming it and working together put me on such a high. Particularly that first night, when we got the blue shots of the lake (the boat going by, the green light of the other dock turning off) and then filming Thomas eat the enchilada...I get a specific creative rush when filming something that feels so exciting and new, and it’s a rare feeling, and I felt it then, and in other fleeting moments while filming for those days and nights. This is just the beginning...

5. Planning our next trip. Whether it be a road trip or just another week or so at the lake, I just want to be together again.

[queermediastudies]

The Danish Girl: yet another queer drama with a depressing ending

Review by: Kaitlin S.

SPOILER ALERT

The Danish Girl is a romantic drama loosely based on a true story of a transgender woman in the 1920s. It follows the transition of an artist named Einar Wegener into Lili Elbe with the support of her wife Gerda. Both Einar and Gerda were painters though Einar focused on landscapes whereas Gerda preferred portraits. One day, Gerda’s model was running late so she asked her husband to stand in for them wearing a pair of women’s shoes and holding up a dress so she could continue working. This posing as a woman seems to reawaken Einar’s desire to be a woman. Gerda lovingly supports Einar, helping them dress up as a woman and going out to events as things get more serious with Einar wishing to surgically transition to become Lili Elbe. While worried about what people may think or say, Gerda supports her as Lili has become a prominent and well known muse in her paintings. When seeking out doctors, many labeled Lili as crazy and tried to get her locked into an asylum until they headed to a different country and found a doctor who was willing to do the risky surgeries. Lili’s first surgery goes well and instills more confidence but also dysphoria as she still doesn’t feel quite right in her body. This makes Lili rush to have the second surgery but complications ensue. Infections run through Lili’s body and she gets to sit outside one last time with Gerda and mentions how she feels totally herself before she passes away.

This movie was released in 2015 and is said to be a biographical drama based on Lili Elbe’s life, it is actually more of a fictionalized retelling of her story. The movie itself is based on the book of the same name, David Ebershoff. While this author is part of the queer community, he appears to have been given a lot of free reign over this story and the subsequent movie adaptation. Despite The Danish Girl being a unique movie that highlights an important life journey, it must be acknowledged that as it departs from the norm, it is not “ideologically “pure”, politically progressive and ideal, or even liked” by viewers (Cavalcante, 2017). This movie attempted to do quite a lot and while some elements were successful, major shortcomings have to be addressed as well.

Before delving into the shortcomings and failures of this movie, it is only right to point out what was done well. To begin, Eddie Redmayne did a pretty good job in showing Lili’s transition along with superb acting. In a few different interviews, Redmayne did acknowledge the potential backlash that he could face for playing a transgender character, admitting that he was grateful for the opportunity to play the role, hoping that one day there would be more queer actors/actresses and that one should be able to play any sort of role as long as it is done with respect (Puchko, 2015). He also did conduct a lot of research and had many conversations with transgender women to get a modern day grasp on their stories before attempting to play Lili Elbe.

In terms of story, there appear to major elements that most transgender people go through highlighted. There are times when Lili hears her deadname and has to pretend that it doesn’t bother her as she is not and can’t really be out. She instead claims that she is Einar’s cousin so she can avoid the questions and everything. Lili also struggled with gender dysphoria up until the end of the movie following her transition where she says that she feels “entirely herself” (Hooper, 2015). It also shows a lot of what it was like to be queer during that time as when Lili is seeking help, she is quickly labeled as homosexual, schizophrenic and otherwise just crazy. In the early 1900s, if a man was attracted to another man, they actually had a female soul trapped in their body and was labeled as homosexuality until the term transgender was coined. During that time, it was also considered a sin and an illness to be homosexual. People could be sent to asylums or prisons just for that. (Benshoff & Griffin, 2004). Lili was shunned and outcast for seeking help to feel like herself, just like some still are to this day. Unfortunately, these more accurate representations end up tarnishing the movie as a whole due to their inconsistencies.

Overall, some major shortcomings are related to Elbe’s story being passed around too much along with inaccuracies in terms of what reality actually was like in that time. The 1920s was not as accepting of transgender people as most are today and so, one of The Danish Girl’s major shortcomings was in that Lili was able to avoid most persecution. While it is possible that she was able to be careful and avoid any dangers, the movie leaves some major holes as Einar is practically erased and not a single person voices any question or concern about that. Along with that, Lili is never really misidentified and only faces slight problems in the forms of doctors diagnosing her as crazy and one scene where she is attacked by two homophobes while walking. These inaccuracies are miniscule though when compared to how jumbled Lili’s story became in the movie.

https://www.express.co.uk/celebrity-news/566115/Eddie-Redmayne-beaten-The-Danish-Girl-Brussels-Einar-Wegener 

Obviously, this story initially began with a real life which was then chronicled into a narrative by Lili Elbe, titled Man Into Woman: The First Sex Change. This was published in 1931, three months after her death (Caughie et al., 2020). Nearly 70 years later, David Ebershoff wrote The Danish Girl, a fictional novel loosely based on Elbe’s life. Ebershoff did admit that it was not an attempt to tell a true story as he instead made up most of the inner details about Lili Elbe and other characters. From there, 15 years later, the novel was adapted into a film of the same name, starring Eddie Redmayne. With so much time having elapsed from when Lili was alive and countless translations and adaptations of her story, the movie is the result of a giant game of Telephone (Colangelo, 2020). The true story ends up becoming quite convoluted and yet it is still marketed as a biographical drama film.

The Danish Girl truly should not be considered a biogeographical film. Despite bringing in elements of the real story and life of Lili Elbe, the story does not even closely resemble what is known of her life. The drama label does fit though as this movie is designed to be emotional. As Doty explained in Making Things Perfectly Queer (1993), melodramas are inherently queer and linked with the community and are designed with conventions that “encourage queer positioning as they exploit the spectacle of heterosexual romance… and traditional gender roles gone awry” (p. 15). The movie plays on heterosexual romance and gender roles gone awry as a once heterosexual relationship is turned on it’s head as Lili starts her transition. It also transforms the gender and relationship roles of Lili and Gerda as Gerda ends up teaching Lili a lot about dressing and appearing feminine, almost like she was teaching a daughter instead of her husband. Eventually, their relationship deteriorates and changes further as they are not really a traditional couple but are still companions and support for one another. This movie may have not been a good possible representation of a transgender story as many elements fell flat but a clear effort was made to try and include some realistic elements faced by transgender people worldwide.

Personally, I find this movie to be a decently cute drama for background noise but focusing on it made me notice how many things were done poorly. It is a queer film for sure and does some justice in trying to bring a real story to life but so many things are omitted or softened, almost to make it more palatable to a heteronormative audience. There aren’t really scenes where Lili appears to be caught in between herself and Einar appearance wise or facing much of reality. Another major criticism of the movie itself, not Lili’s story, is that her character just dies at the end. There is a really poignant scene where Lili admits that she feels like herself before mentioning she’d dreamed of being a baby in her mother’s arms where she was Lili from the start and moments after she says this, she passes away (Hooper, 2015). It fits the common theme of queer stories not having a happy ending but honestly, with how many creative liberties were taken, it would have been nice to go one step further and brighten the ending rather than just ending on a somber note. There’s only one scene following this in which the scarf that Gerda had gifted Lili and then got back after her death blows away in the wind and Gerda believes that it’s just Lili being freed. While that is a sweet thought, personally, I feel like that attempts to make a point that a transgender person can never really be freed from their past until they are dead, which I believe could be pretty harmful to the queer community. This movie is not designed to be a bright or uplifting queer story despite the elements that make it seem that way. It instead pushes some harmful ideas along with a false retelling of someone’s real life. I believe that there has got to be some better queer movies out there that are more beneficial to the community and less problematic.

References:

Benshoff, H. & Griffin, S. (2004). General Introduction. In Queer cinema the film reader (pp. 1–15). introduction, Routledge. Taylor & Francis Group.

Cavalcante, A. (2017). Breaking Into Transgender Life: Transgender Audiences’ Experiences With “First of Its Kind” Visibility in Popular Media. Communication, Culture & Critique, 10(3), 538–555. https://doi.org/10.1111/cccr.12165

Caughie, Pamela L., Emily Datskou, Sabine Meyer, Rebecca J. Parker, and Nikolaus Wasmoen, eds. Lili Elbe Digital Archive. Web. 2020, Oct. 13. http://www.lilielbe.org

Colangelo, H. (2020, Jan. 26). ‘The Danish Girl’ and The Tragic Mistreatment of Transgender History. Medium. https://medium.com/@harmonymoon/the-danish-girl-and-the-tragic-mistreatment-of-transgender-history-e5803187f84f

Doty, A. (1993). Something Queer Here. In Making things perfectly queer: Interpreting mass culture (pp. 2-16). Minneapolis u.a.: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

Earnshaw, J. (2015, April 24). Eddie Redmayne is viciously attacked as he films The Danish Girl in Brussels. Retrieved October 15, 2020, from https://www.express.co.uk/celebrity-news/566115/Eddie-Redmayne-beaten-The-Danish-Girl-Brussels-Einar-Wegener

Hooper, T. (Director). (2015). The Danish Girl [Motion Picture]. United Kingdom: Universal Pictures.

Puchko, K. (2015, Nov. 24). Eddie Redmayne Talks Backlash, Trans Representation and the Power of the Male Gaze in ‘The Danish Girl’. Indiewire. https://www.indiewire.com/2015/11/eddie-redmayne-talks-backlash-trans-representation-and-the-power-of-the-male-gaze-in-the-danish-girl-50373/

[qtakesams]

When Life Goes On, Go with It

Two years ago this month, I moved to Edgewater, Maryland, to complete a summer internship with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. SERC, as we call it, is a branch of the Smithsonian Institution that specializes in climate, coastal, terrestrial, and various other types of sciences. Their campus is an hour east of Washington, D.C. They own hundreds of acres of land, on which they house their laboratories and fields.

It was just after my sophomore year of college ended. As with many underclassmen years, mine was turbulent. I endured a drastic shift in my social circle which had, even if temporarily, left me feeling stranded on a campus I was still learning about. I’d had a rough spring semester, finding a lack of motivation to complete any assignment.

Most undergrads face that year: the one where nothing feels right, and each path feels like a dead-end. I had applied for a SERC internship on a bit of a whim. Entering college, I’d seen myself as a fiction writer and editor, planning to end up in a corporate publishing house. Sophomore had shown me I desired other things, and I applied for SERC’s science writing internship completely unsure if I’d actually like the work. What if I didn’t? What if it felt worse than the previous semester? What would I do if I couldn’t bounce back?

All of this, I decided, would be worth the risk. When I got an email from the internship’s advisor in March, offering me the position, I accepted it. The rest, as some might say, is history.

SERC is a hard place to find until you’ve visited a few times. The brown sign is easily skipped by the eyes. Coming from the west, you approach SERC on the left side of the road. Immediately, you forget that you’re technically in the suburbs, less than thirty miles from the epicenter of political heat in America. After a few turns, you arrive at the gate. When SERC is publicly open, you drive on through. When you’re an intern coming back from the bar at night, you have to swipe your ID card. You drive a few more turns, watching closely for deer, before that final right turn that drops you into the parking lot of the intern dorms and the labs.

I fell in love with SERC within days of my arrival. There were the intimidating factors of the place: fellow interns at Ivy Leagues and respected colleges, scientific labs into which the government itself funded millions, no meal plan, and the stick shift vehicle I would drive all summer. I was terrified when my mom drove away. I explored the floor of my building, admiring the kitchen, perusing the book selection. By eleven, I was in bed. I was tried from traveling, but more so, I didn’t know what to do. I’d briefly interacted with the other intern already on my floor, but I didn’t know him well enough to go say hi. There were four interns moved in below my floor, but I hadn’t seen any of them yet. I suddenly seemed wildly out of my element, though I had felt comfortable at SERC the moment I drove through the gate.

Of course, I grew happier at SERC. The happiest I’d been in years. Within weeks, I made strong friends, adjusted to my job, and began to close my GPS when driving to the store.

My work felt good. The articles I wrote and the media I created reached thousands of people, many of which gave positive comments. My words were reaching people, and the people were responding.

I was raised by a scientist, but more importantly, by well-educated, empathetic people. Loving my planet was part of the gig when I was growing up. In high school, I began to see where my privilege in this education existed. My friends at school didn’t seem to care about the things I’d be taught to care about. Water consumption, electricity, knowing the landscape on which your house is built. I knew important moments in history, and how they affected me. I had early knowledge of politics, to the point where I knew who George Bush was before his presidency ended (when I was 10). Ignorance and empathy tend to go hand-in-hand, mostly because ignorance leads to apathy. We’ve seen this cause-and-effect equation hold catastrophic, deadly consequences in 2020.

When I arrived at SERC, it didn’t slip by me that I suddenly had access to information that most people only dream about. Many of us are ignorant (I remain ignorant to 99.9% of what happens on this Earth) by circumstance, not by choice. Accessibility is one of our biggest problems of a global society attempting to function in a digital, climate change-riddled world. Sixty percent of the globe now has Internet access, but that leaves 3.08 billion people without the knowledge they need to protect themselves from the setbacks of climate change. Most of those people, as it would turn out, are terribly affected most by war, poverty, hunger, climate, social injustice, etc. These things intertwine and cause one another. Not always, but often.

My position at SERC gifted me access to science occurring in real-time. When the Pandemic would hit a year later, it would be surprising but not shocking. On a planet where politics and science are brothers, and the population is soaring too high to properly maintain, containing a spreadable virus is like trying to hold a cup of water in your bare hands. Sooner or later, it’s going to slip between the cracks and go everywhere. If it slips far enough, you’ll never find a towel strong enough to collect it all.

In March of 2020, when I moved home to isolate, I knew the rest of college was trashed. Not my degree, necessarily, but the experience of college. I would lose that experience in its normalcy, and therefore the skills which develop from that normalcy.

I did soon realize, however, that we are not always fortunate enough to do something about mass-casualties or problems. There’s not always an answer, straightforward or not. When there is one, you should grab it with both hands.

That summer of 2020, I decided I wanted to pursue a master’s degree after college. Higher education is not unknown in my family; we boast high degrees from prestigious universities. I am the opposite of a First-Generation student (one of my great-grandparents also had a master’s degree). Graduate school had already been on my mind when I started college, but I didn’t know what for. An MFA in fiction had felt the most logical to my teenage self in 2017, but by 2018, that felt out the window. What I had realized by the summer of 2020 was that, in the midst of the chaos and absurdity, was that I could in fact do something about what was going on. I can’t solve climate change, or house the homeless, or save every polar bear, or even eradicate a virus, but I can help in my own way. On some level, I can do something about the many crises. This, in itself, is “doing something”.

Science writing is a polarizing subject, of this I have been aware my entire life. Unfortunately, we’ve made science political, though politics are generally opinion (with strong empathy) and science is fact. It’s a tough, competitive field, but so is everything else. If you want to “make it” in this world, you have to willingly shed blood, tears, and probably sweat profusely. As I watched the COVID cases skyrocket simultaneously to the people I knew who cared not to stay home, I could tell something was off. People weren’t listening. If they were, it was usually to the ignorant voices on television.

I could feel my cheeks burning as I watched the Johns Hopkins map. It seemed cruel that we, as a society, could do that to ourselves. That we could allow this virus to spread and kill, but also that we had put ourselves in this position. I had already been envisioning myself as a science writer every day since my time at SERC had begun. Finally reckoning with the knowledge that not everybody is a scientist, nor cares to be one, was the icing on the cake. I couldn’t fix it all, but I could offer my help. So, I would.

When I began this blog two years ago, it was solely for abroad purposes. It was a fabulous way to let anybody who cared know what I was experiencing and how I was handling those experiences. Studying abroad, no matter how or where or how long, is difficult. Studying in general, for any length of time on any subject, is mindboggling tedious. I give kudos to my friends and family who have any advanced, foreign, or nontraditional education.

What I discovered after I began writing blog posts and sharing my thoughts is that there’s always more to the story than the words on the page. That’s why I’ve added to this blog in the year and a half since my abroad semester ended; there is always more to tell.

In a few weeks, I begin my master’s degree at Northwestern University in Chicago. My degree is in journalism, with a specialization in Science and Health reporting. I’m nervous to my core, as I am with any new adventure. I just graduated college last weekend, so my emotions are running wild. Yet, I have a feeling I’m about to finally be where I’ve wanted to be for years. I love words. I love messing with them, shaping them, using them to fit whatever project I want. I also love science. I love knowing what is happening around me, and why and how it is. Combining them already feels like a dream come true, so I’m sure the next year will feel magical.

The classes of 2020 and 2021 are probably the most resilient in history. A Pandemic, racial and social injustice, wildfires, remote learning, wifi issues. We’ve seen it all, and it’s made us stronger every day.

I think I’ve worn this blog out for this phase of life. My thoughts on what I’ve talked about here are valid and important, but they don’t exist alone. For somebody who’s pretty much been writing since she could hold a pencil, I hate journaling. I’ve tried so many times, and never succeeded, with the exception of this blog. That said, it gave me an incredibly strong, consistent manner of getting my thoughts on the page, for which I am endlessly grateful. If you’ve kept reading my thoughts and words, you should know I’m endlessly grateful for you, too.

All of this is saying that, whether you’re ready or not, life keeps going. Life can be cruel, it can be challenging, it can be beautiful. No matter what, it keeps going. As my friend Ferris once said, if you don’t stop and look around from time to time, you could miss it. So much changed so drastically in the last year. I’m still processing it. I might always be processing it. Most importantly, I think, is that I’ve learned to flow with it wherever it goes. It’s harder sometimes than other, but the result is usually worth the grind.

You might read my stuff in the Times once day, or (my personal favorite dream) National Geographic. I don’t know honestly know where I’m going, but I’m okay with that because I do know that I’m on my way. I’m still going. When life continues, you should go, too. You never quite know where the climb will lead, but you do know that the view will be great.

[agentnico]

Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (2020) Review

If you haven’t yet came about this gem, look up the Russian submission for the cancelled Eurovision 2020. The group is called Little Big. You can thank me later. 

Plot: When aspiring musicians Lars and Sigrit are given the opportunity to represent their country Iceland at the world's biggest song competition, they finally have a chance to prove that any dream worth having is a dream worth fighting for.

I do enjoy Will Ferrell’s comedy. He has one funny bone, I tell ya that much! Obviously he’s great in all the Adam McKay films such as Anchorman, Talladega Nights and Step Brothers, all of which are endlessly quotable, and I also enjoy his lesser known outings such as Casa de mi Padre and The Campaign (the latter being a scarily realistic portrayal of the bonkers nature of American politics for a stupid irreverent comedy), however recently he’s definitely exhibited a dip in quality, especially with Holmes & Watson. That movie...........that movie.................that......movie.....can I even call it a movie? I still have no idea how in the hell that thing got green-lit? Honestly, who at Sony Pictures picked up the script and thought “hey, look at this, what a funny and original take on the classic Conan Doyle stories, this is a farcical revolution, a slapstick masterpiece, a fantastical example of burlesque interpretation.....let’s make it!!” Whoever this spherical dumbass of a producer was, he’s an idiot who should question his choices more as Holmes & Watson is diabolically bad! It’s excruciatingly unfunny! There’s a gag involving Holmes wearing a Trump-supporting ‘Make America Great Again’ hat....speaks for itself really. The movie is poop! But enough about negatives, let’s set our eyes upon Netflix’s new comedy Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga about, you guessed it, the Eurovision Song Contest! Ironically, the movie is brought to us by the US, even though America has never partook in the real Eurovision contest, nor do many American citizens even know what Eurovision is, which is probably why film critics have been so negative towards this movie, as they don’t really know what Eurovision is all about. Yes, it’s about the music and the competition, but it’s also about the over-the-top set pieces, flamboyant costumes and general acts of weirdness that make Eurovision so enjoyable to watch. But does the new Netflix spoof recapture the magic?

The movie’s biggest negative is that for a comedy it’s not that funny. There are some solid jokes for sure, but there a lot more ones that fall flat than ones that hit. It seems that due to the movie being made in conjunction with Eurovision partners, the writing team avoided to take any true risks, so as to not offend anyone. The Eurovision contest has a lot within it to make fun at to be honest, and this movie avoids that in favour of typical stupid debauchery Ferrell is known for. Even the inclusion of Graham Norton, who actually commentates on Eurovision in real life is severely toned down, and his insults are nowhere as offensive and sarcastic as in real life. And yes, at first that may seem to come off as me saying that this film is a total pile of garbage that should be buried deep at the bottom of the dumpster hidden beneath various human excrement right next to a bunch of DVD copies of Holmes & Watson (grrrrrr!), but let me hit you back with a but! Yes, there’s always a but! No, I’m not referring to one’s backside, for starters that’s a different spelling so learn your English you uneducated son of a bee, please and thank you! Anyway, I digress, the but is that even though it lacks the promised comedic punch, the movie more than makes up with it’s element of romance and, more importantly its heartwarming feel-good nature. Especially in these very strange and confusing times that we find ourselves living in, one does not need a masterpiece in film-making......though I am very much still looking forward to Christopher Nolan’s Tenet...whenever that release date finally comes to fruition. But sometimes a fairly simple film with an abundance of cliches (there’s an obligatory ABBA reference) and terrible Icelandic accents but filled with good cheerfully innocent nature is enough to please one’s mind. And you can call me sentimental at my old age (I’m turning 23 in under a week so happy birthday to me!), but I’m not going to lie, I really dug this movie. I had a good time! As I said, it’s no masterpiece, far from it actually, but it is just so pleasing, joyful and upbeat to watch!

Interestingly enough, a few films came to my mind whilst I watched The Story of Fire Saga. There’s the obvious reference to Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, another satirical film that parodies the music industry, only there the comedy worked better for me. Then also the movie has a surprisingly catchy soundtrack, with a lot of the song choices feeling like they came out straight from The Greatest Showman. There’s that element of oomph to each tune that really makes it pop! Not going to lie, I’ve been listening to the soundtrack on repeat ever since I’ve watched the movie! Also there’s a certain scene that’s a straight up knock off of the Riff-Off scene from Pitch Perfect. Then the more surprising connection is actually last year’s film Yesterday, where a man wakes up one day and he’s the only one who remembers The Beatles and their songs. The connecting thread-line is that in that movie too there is a woman who is unabashedly in love for the main guy, but he doesn’t notice it as he’s so focused on his music dream. I’ll be the first to say I did not like Yesterday. It was very disappointing in light of the calibre of talent that was involved, with Danny Boyle directing and Richard Curtis penning the script. The romantic side of that movie came as a bit of a distraction that got in the way of the potential of the main story-line involving a world without The Beatles. However in Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga that romantic thread is actually what holds the whole thing together so well. This is easily the most romantic movie of this year, and I know, I’m surprised to say so myself, seeing as this is a Will Ferrell motion picture! 

Speaking of Will Ferrell, he’s decent in the movie, if you like Will Ferrell, as he does his usual shtick, though looking unrecognisable due to the ridiculous wig. However it seems Ferrell himself realises his co-stars bring more to the table in terms of acting compared to him, as he devotes a lot of scenes to Rachel McAdams and Dan Stevens. Rachel McAdams is adorable in this movie, with such a pure and baby-like personality, and it was constantly a pleasure seeing her light up the screen. Though it is Dan Stevens who steals the show as an antagonist that is surprisingly not as villainous as first anticipated, and turns out to be a cute puppy-dog eyed Russian lion! Also, that hair style suits him well.......maybe too well. Appearances from Demi Lovato and Pierce Brosnan are welcome too, though heavily under-used. Speaking of the latter, Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga and the Mamma Mia! films are now part of the Pierce-Brosnan-has-a-dead-wife-and-ABBA-is-heavily-involved-somehow cinematic universe.

As a whole Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga is nothing groundbreaking, but a truly good time, with a soundtrack filled with low-key bangers, a visual feast to the eyes due to showcasing the gorgeous visages of the Icelandic landscapes, and is easily Will Ferrell’s best film in years! Especially with that surprisingly emotional finale. Yes, this movie is ridiculously stupid, though it’s more ridiculous how emotionally hard-hitting the ending is. The song “Husavik” does for this movie what “Shallow” did for A Star Is Born. So I say go watch this film and embrace its warm comforting feels. Perfect for a date night, me and my girlfriend can attest to that!

Overall score: 6/10

[laufire]

Black Sails s3

This one took me longer because RL got in the way LOL. I’ve loved it as much as the other two (even if I am IN PAIN over you-know-who’s death DD:). I don’t know when I’ll have the time to finish the last season, but I wanted to post about this one before starting it; otherwise it’d accumulate with the 10+ and counting metas I want to write about this show once I have the full picture LMAO.

Max

As always, I have to start with her because she’s THE FUCKING BEST. This woman is currently competing for the number one spot among fictional characters in my heart LOL (I mean. I have loved Caroline Forbes --who I actually think Max has a lot in common with lmao. Everything I love is the same, as I always say-- for too many years for her to ever be truly dethroned; unless something goes really wrong with Legacies I guess. However, it’s still remarkable that a character could make me doubt).

I’ve absolutely adored her plot this season; watching her growing sphere of influence, the way she affects and upends others’ lives. That’s very much being present since season one, especially with her and Silver in tandem (I have a lot of Thoughts(TM) about those too as a driving/disruptive force in the show --they’ll go to one of those metas--; I’m put off by the fact that I didn’t get to enjoy them conspiring together this season lol. Though her reaction to the fake Long John Silver letter was kind of hilarious xDD. Still. I kind of wish we’d seen the scene where Silver tells her he renounces to his part of the price. It could’ve been very interesting --I guess he could’ve told Jack but that wouldn’t’ve been as good, so this is my headcanon).

The most obvious storyline where this manifest is in her relationship with Anne and Jack. I love everything about it, but well. I have to admit, the ~betrayal/different sides element appeals to me xD. I like that Max prioritices herself and her safety. That she sees the writing on the wall with the English invasion or with Vane’s execution and acts accordingly, the way she calculates her decisions and forms alliances without letting past grievances get in the way --with Eleanor, Rogers, Mrs. Mapleton...--, the choices she makes because she doesn’t want to be “on the outside looking in” ever again and how they always end reverting in her benefit, ultimately (I’m getting ahead because I am spoiled of quite a few things about s4, but I LOVE that eventually she mends her relationship with Anne and Jack. Because it fits into this: how even the possible mistakes and emotional compromises she makes are within a very specific frame that works out for her in the end).

Her relationship with Anne gets even better this season. I think my favourite scene is where Max tells Anne that she nows Anne “cannot fathom leaving me”. Can I get this woman’s confidence LMFAO. But seriously. I luff them. I love how Max convinces Jack of going along her plan to replace the gold with good easier to transport (and how THAT ends up being Flint’s treasure asdñlfkasfj. MY GIRL DIRECTLY CAUSED THE EVENTS IN TREASURE ISLAND OKAY) by appealing to their mutual love for Anne. That she trusts Anne with the story about her father. That she knows just as well as Jack that Anne wouldn’t give up the treasure so easily and she’ll try to save him (and that Anne won’t stomach the thought of Jack being tortured because she couldn’t bear MAX’S torture. My heart).

Another highlight of the season for me was her relationship with Eleanor, which keeps being a huge surprise no matter what xDD (even if, again, never in a shippy way. I’m very glad the season doesn’t go there). I love the reversal of expectation in a general fandom landscape: how ultimately, Eleanor doesn’t have an emotional hold over Max (and that she lost it as early as 1x02, IMO. I’m not saying “Max doesn’t feel anything about Eleanor”, but the truth of the matter is, narratively Eleanor serves Max, not the other way around. And I’m happy and relieved about it, ngl), and that the same isn’t true the other way around. I thought two very telling scenes where a.) Max hosting parody trials of Eleanor that paint her under a completely undignified light, but clearly deriving no pleasure from it: it simply was yet another thing she does for practically, level-headed political reasons; and b.) that Eleanor orders Rogers’ men not to hurt Anne in the exchange because Max’s love for Anne.

Continuing down with Max’s relationships, I’ve grown to really like hers with Idelle. I think Max find Idelle fun, likeable, uncomplicated (the scene where Featherstone tells Idelle he hopes his pardon doesn’t diminish her attraction to her was hilarious and clearly the moment Max was enjoying herself the most in the whole season lmfao. BTW, I kinda liked Idelle/Featherstone since the moment he told Jack he wasn’t concerned because “he was in love with a good woman” and Jack was like “Idelle??”. Yes, it’s fun because client-falling-for-sex-worker is a pitiful cliché, but here’s the thing: he’s right xD. He didn’t say “I’m in love with a woman who loves me”. He said he was in love with someone GOOD and Idelle IS a good woman, dammit xDD).

Max doesn’t concern herself much with the idea of Idelle going behind her back because Idelle loves her, respects her, and is a loyal friend (and yet clearly sees Max exactly as she is and doesn’t have any delusions about it. Luckily for her Max is probably the type to feel angry but not vengeful about this lol, if only because it could reflect on her). And Max is right about that. But I love that Idelle still has it in her to take a different path by allying herself with the pirates. I’m curious about the reasoning being after Max makes Mrs. Mapleton madam again; it’s clear the girls aren’t happy about her and she didn’t seem like she took good care of them in s1, to put it mildly, so there’s some of that, but I like to think part of it was Idelle going, “seriously Max? I’m right here! I could be the Madam!” xDD.

Her dynamic with Mrs. Mapleton was really interesting too; I like how she too puts aside any old grudge and decides to put her bets with Max over Eleanor or Rogers, because she has confidence that Max and her methods (“I choose to let the players reveal themselves to me, least I make an enemy out of someone I might wish to call a friend one day”) will outlast them (btw, that line/her approach in general --as well as Silver’s “liked is a good as feared” MO--, kind of reminded me to Sansa Stark’s “If I am ever queen, I will make them love me.” line. Food for thought). Yet I think Mrs. Mapleton instructed Georgia to  attempt to ~seduce Max to get information out of her, which is very much in line with her. I loled at Max’s reaction basically being “gurl, who do you think you’re talking to. I practically invented this. GTFO” xDD

Basically, her entire storyline this season was pure gold. I love how all of those dynamics come from her maneuvers to keep herself safe, in power, and with influence (because those go hand in hand). I love her pride and her confidence, the way she refuses the scraps Eleanor and Rogers intend to give her at first (and how she firmly says to Eleanor “people do not speak to me that way anymore”, how she establishes a new normal between them), and how she pays her way out of trouble/into power with the gold she stole from Flint & co xDD.

My favourite moment of hers is devided between “in another time, in another place, they would call me a queen”, and “I AM Nassau” (that made me decide that if I ever write fic where Max needs a last name for any reason, it’s going to be Nassau. It is law), and how meta they’ll turn out to be :DD. I also have Thoughts about the evolution of her styles (beyond the obvious “omg she’s soooooo beautifuuuuul” lmao) but I’ll leave that for another show-encompassing meta too :P

Madi

She catapulted herself to Forever Fave status pretty quickly (I may have too many of those in this show.  W h a t e v e r  xDD). I love how self-assured she is (“when I speak my men listen, and they do as I say”), and how she always thinks of the big picture (like when she fought her impulse to order her men to fight against the pirates after one of them beat one of hers). And I have a lot of Feels about how this is explicitly linked to her heritage, her mother and father, their ~legacies.

Speaking of: one of the few major spoilers I seem to have avoided was that Mr. Scott was Madi’s father LOL. I was DELIGHTED by that reveal, and how it makes you reconsider his story. His relationship with Eleanor could’ve been a frankly off-putting cliché, but this completely circumvents that; it’s true that he’d shown more independence from her than I would’ve expected in another show, by leaving her side to do his own thing and further contributing to her vulnerability. But giving him a real* family, one that he prioritises over Eleanor and HID FROM HER, using her position to their benefit... That’s on a whole other level.

*I know some people are going to object to this qualifier. Fandom gets like that about found families, adopted families, etc. And I get it, but this is NOT like those situations. Mr. Scott was Eleanor’s SLAVE, FFS. That is incompatible with being her family, her father figure, no matter what she thought. And I love that the show made it explicit, when Madi tried to talk about his “two daughters” and he said “NO. ONLY YOU” in his deathbed (I might or might not have cried, okay. It may be one of my favourite scenes in the whole series). Especially when there’s a very obvious trend of characters of color COINCIDENTALLY being written as prioritizing white characters over their biological families, at the cost of their health and even their lives (I am still not over Monty being forced to kill his own mother to protect Octavia in The 100. Fuck that shit, seriously). Black Sails deciding to do the oposite here is FUCKING REVOLUTIONARY and I love it to pieces.

Another thing I loved is that they picked an actress that looks more like Mr. Scott than like her mother or Max (darker skin etc.): aka how the few black female characters that usually get what Madi will from Silver --that ~eternal devotion, willing to go against anything and anyone for her etc.-- tend to look.

Unsurprisingly, I like Madi/Silver VERY MUCH lol. I like that he is immediately ~drawn to her, in a subtle way, and viceversa (like in the scene where he’s still in the cage watching how she has trouble breathing after seeing her wounded father, or when they hug after his death). All their talks about power, responsibility, succession etc. are really good. And her concern for him is as palpable as probably inconvenient for her xD. I love the scene where she holds her hand as his leg is treated, or her worry one Silver calls himself a “one legged creature”. Though my favourite might be when he smiles when she shows concern for his state after killing Dufresne, and she’s like “well duh, if you fall apart the alliance between my people and yours is screwed” xDD

And though there hasn’t been much development yet on that side, I’m already so onboard with Flint/Madi/Silver lmfao. I love that nod of ~acknowledgment between Flint and Madi with the Maroon Queen’s voiceover about how Madi will have as much authority as Flint in his own ship xD. Her concern about Silver’s relationship with him is kind of ironic knowing that they’ll eventually find themselves more aligned between them than with Silver, by virtue of their many commonalities LOL. And there’s already traces of that ot3 feels, like when Madi tells Silver that the mistake of those “other people close to Flint” that he’s so scared of following to the grave was trying to deal with Flint alone (Madi’s seduction technique: kindness, understanding, and offers of partnership. I dig it).

I want more scenes of and with her mother, too. And between her mother and Silver, since apparently the Maroon Queen trusts him among all the pirates NOT to betray them for money (Jack saying the irony wasn’t lost on him and Flitn was hilarious xD) and that has to be thanks to Madi’s opinion of him. I’m kind of bitter we never got a Mr. Scott & Silver scene, too, especially after Silver and Madi become romantically involved. I love that stuff.

Miranda

I could just upload a bunch of gifs of various crying/in pain/etc. states here because WORDS CANNOT EXPRESS THE PAINNN. I was ~feeling Flint’s grief the entire time, I swear (though... did it have to express itself by shaving his head... asking for a friend). The violence he kept inflicting in her name (her word will be the last word); how he convinced his crew, Silver included, to go into the storm rather than surrendering, for her (and narratively speaking Silver is right, he did conjure it xDD). How fucking tired he is of it all (“you can talk your way part it”, “I don’t know that I have any more lies left in me”).

As far as I’m concerned he could be hallucinating her the rest of the show (I’m going to miss seeing her so much... especially in light of the ending), as painful as I find those scenes. At this point “But when I lost you... I am ruined over you” is an instant tear-jerker, ugh. So is Flint wantint to let go and “be with her”, and ghost!Miranda saying she’d resent him for giving up. Though my favourite is when Miranda basically describes herself as his “maker”, about how she ~shaped him *clenches fist*. I love those kinds of ships.

BTW: I think the moment Rogers mentioned Thomas, Miranda’s ghost, Flint, and I, yelled “HOW DARE YOU SAY HIS NAME” on the inside xD

Flint & Silver

Sometimes fandom gets it right because the relationship between these two is... A Lot. A LOT. I anticipate a lot of suffering on my part in the near future xD

I loved the evolution in the first half of the season, from Flint telling Silver that “in my head, you’re not welcome”, or Silver resenting that Flint’s words convinced HIM (HE’S the convincer!! It’s not supposed to happen to ME!! xDD) and rambling about how Flint is “able to ~conjure the reality he desires”, to Silver finally confessing about his part on the Urca gold robbery (which I’m at least 60% sure Flint suspected already tbh. That was not one of Silver’s best lies lbr) in order to force Flint to “account for ME” --but ofc still grabbing the nearest weapon as he confeses, just in case xDD. I am also incredibly delighted by the fact that the fandom calls that episode “shark date” asdñflkasjdf (*Flint and Silver barely manage to kill one shark*; Flint, challenging: again? *Silver grins*. Shark hunting = foreplay now, apparently).

I want it known that I end up ENRAGED every time they talk about their ~partnership lmfao. It comes off very intimate and gives me too many feelings xD. “When you and I talk with one voice, we can convince them of anything”; “your words opened that door [Flint convincing the Maroon Queen to spare their lives and join their fight]”; “you didn’t tell me the journey into the dark feels good”; “he doesn’t know how to say no to the both of us at the same time”; “I’m afraid I will be the end of you”. JUST STOP YOU ASSHOLES XDD

One of my favourite moments is when Silver convinces Flint to live. To go on, to talk to the Maroon Queen without a safeguard (that knife would’ve been his doom) and get her on their side (which Flint does with a super passionate speech about fighting England’s empire. ILH). Another is when Silver tells him he enjoyed killing Dufresne WITH HIS PROSTHETIC LEG OMFG (I personally think killing Dufresne was very valid of him lmfao), or Flint says Silver enjoyed punishing Dobbs (which in Silver fashion, worked perfectly for him because it made Dobbs MORE susceptible to him). Though obviously everything pales when compared to the scene where CAPTAIN FLINT COMES OUT TO LONG JOHN SILVER OVER A BONFIRE LMFAO. I loved that scene; it was so gentle. And then Silver made it about him and their relationship xDD (this show is not subtle). Flint’s apparent lack of concern about Silver replacing him is stressing me out though. I dread the series finale xD

Outside of Flint/Silver, Silver’s journey remains awe-inspiring. I just... love him. I love that he gave up his share of the Urca gold because he had to hold onto the crew, but that he is terrified of their bow to take care of him. His concern for his image in front of them was heartbreaking and hit waaaaay too close to home, too. And I wonder how he’s going to react to Billy’s King Long John Silver stratagem xD

BTW, I lowkey shipped him with Muldoon LOL. They should’ve had ~tender sex~~ (on screen, I headcanon it did happen off-screen, whatever) at some point (if only so there was one measly mlm sex scene in the show amidst all the rest. It’s troubling, to say the least, that there’s not a single one when it has a queer male lead tbh. And I get why they didn’t go that route with Flint outside of Thomas and can even see why they didn’t do it with Flint/Thomas even if I judge the hell out of them for it, but given how they go out of their way for the other options... yeah, I side eye them).

Jack

I LOVE HIM SO MUCH AND I WISH HE HAD MORE SCREENTIME, OKAY. Every time he opens his mouth the show gets just a little bit better, if you ask me xD. “If you’re going to behave like children, I will be your daddy” WHO SAYS THAT JACK XDD.

I loved him even more when he decided to deny Rogers & co the cache, Spanish invasion or not, to not give up and assure “his legacy”. And OF COURSE he could write his intentions in a way that only Anne would understand (Max reaaaally understimated him there). Their relationship remains the sweetest (weird adjective, maybe, but it’s true) part of the show, btw. I love that how Jack describes how hurt Anne would feel after knowing she might’ve unwittingly betrayed him. Or when he knew Anne giving up to easily meant she had a plan and he cheerfully told Rogers Anne would find a way to save him xD (the scene where he absolutely drags Rogers about his privilege --“but did I make up a lot of ground to catch you!”-- is perfect. And their reunion kiss was so, so cute.

Other highlights were when he threw away the key of the cache in front of Flint to secure it, or made his pitch to be his fellow captain in the fight. I also take a petty pleasure in the fact that Vane sacrificed himself when he went to his rescue LOL. 

I like that he convinced Blackbeard to fight alongside them, but sweetie, you have NOTHING to prove to that asshole. His opinion is worthless (between his “strife is good” and Vane’s “comfort is for women” takes... ugh. They remind me of the exact discourse among leftism I hate okay xDD. In Vane’s case I at least get where he’s coming from and I even agree in part, but Blackbeard is even more boring).

Misc

-I love Billy’s more and more insidious antagonism towards Flint lmfao (yes, Flint is also one of my Forever Faves. This is compatible AND the kind of thing that would make me appreciate Billy more. I love irreverence, period). It starts with subtle ways of trying to poison Flint and Silver’s relationship (telling Silver Flint doesn’t see him as an equal, sending Silver to deliver Flint’s message instead of Flint himself, etc.). I laughed at him saying he’s all for Flint sacrificing himself for the crew since it’d be the “first selfless thing I’ve seen him do!” lol. Or that he “wants a good view when things catch up with Flint and the world makes sense again”. And ofc, creating the legend of Long John Silver. You just know he remembered Flint’s out of left field “I AM YOUR KING” and said “not on my fucking watch” xDD. And I love the irony of him being the one delivering black spots LOL.

-Did it really took that long for Anne and Flint to share some freaking words smh. Barely, but I’ll take it. I liked the moment where Jack references Max as “Anne’s lost love” and Flint does that Closeted Queer Observing A Queer Couple Look lol (he did the same when he was witness to Max and Eleanor’s fight. You need more queer friends, Flint :P).

-I liked Mrs. Hudson from the moment that she told Eleanor that the only difference she saw between her and other ladies is that their families have better lawyer --which meant Eleanor was the first one she could be rude towards xD--, and accused her of living of her father’s nepotism LOL. I hope she ends up in a good place and safe back with her kids.

-I can’t say I care much about Vane or his relationship with Eleanor, but his death and her hand on it were very well written IMO.

-I find Rogers so inherently unlikeable in every way LMFAO. And as hypocritical as it might sound, part of it is the extramarital affair ngl. I hate storylines where a man married to a more “conventional” woman is ~attracted to one he perceives as “stronger”, “fiercer”, and more worthy of himself (as if his opinion on the matter is worth shit) --only to eventually try and make the new woman more conventional once he “has” her. This one hasn’t gone all the way there but it has traces of that trope and I loathe it with all my heart.

-The only moment I managed to pay attention to Blackbeard was when he mentioned he had shrapnel advancing towards his heart, and for anyone who knows me a little, you know it’s because my brain linked that to Tony Stark lmfao. *Sighs* I just never like any version of Blackbeard, period. I find them so boring. He’s the opposite of Long John Silver that way, because I’ve loved every single version I’ve encountered so far.

-The way Spain is portrayed in this show is so... unusual. Especially for USA content in my experience. One day I’m going to have to do some more research and write about how Spain (and in particular Spanish violence -inter and intranational) is portrayed across the ocean.

[starringemiliaclarke]

Press/Gallery: Emilia Clarke on Life After Khaleesi—Including a Historic Clinique Contract

After plotting world domination for eight seasons on Game of Thrones, Clarke reflects on her own quieter sense of ambition, rooted in the “sustainable and real,” she says. Meanwhile, a new role as Clinique’s ambassador, announced today, puts her back on the global stage.

VANITY FAIR – Call it auspicious, to sit down with a former queen on the eve of a nail-biting election. It was a clear December morning in London, a day before Britons cast their fate (and Brexit’s) with Boris Johnson, and the Protector of the Realm—to use one of Emilia Clarke’s many titles on Game of Thrones—was assessing the political landscape. “Is it a full moon?” the actor said, interest piqued. (An Instagram astrologer had told me so.) “Maybe that will kick the . . . —no,” she interrupted herself with a weary laugh. “It will just soften the patriarchy ever so lightly.”

Clarke, whose now-departed character was known to scorch entire neighborhoods with one dragonic exhale, leads with a comparatively light hand. In a November post about the UK’s voter-registration deadline, she delivered a message (“You have a voice. Use it!”) with a silent procession of cue cards. Last March, when she first revealed her tumultuous medical history—a pair of brain aneurysms in the show’s early days—she did so with a lyrical, unsparing essay on the New Yorker’s website. She isn’t much for peddling influence; instead, she reps sweatshirts for Same You, the charity she founded to support neurorehabilitation for young patients. After the GOT series finale and its torrent of press, she has kept things earnest and under-the-radar—however much someone with 26 million followers can slip into incognito mode.

That makes Clarke’s latest role—the first global ambassador for the beauty company Clinique—at once a like-minded alliance and a return to the spotlight. “You’ve got your spidey senses,” explained the actor, sitting on a gray velvet sofa (a softer iron throne) at the Edition hotel. “My gut was like, ‘You’re going to enjoy this!’ ” At a time when authentic is a buzzword on every brand’s bingo card, she manages a kind of translucent candor. (The way Clarke described the brand’s longstanding image—“completely universal, totally relatable, totally modern”—sounds like the elevator pitch for tapping the 33-year-old as a spokesperson.) A sunbeam slipped across the room, igniting her lagoon-colored eyes. I found myself lilting precipitously off the sofa, like a wayward houseplant, to avoid casting a shadow.

Clinique, founded a half-century ago as a prescient, dermatologist-backed skin-care line, didn’t set out to sell miracles. The 1967 Vogue article that helped spark the company—titled “Can Great Skin Be Created?”—laid out a practical, yes-it-can mission. Back then (and for generations of beauty inductees since), demystification arrived by way of a streamlined three-step system: cleansing bar, exfoliating toner, familiar yellow moisturizer. In lieu of the smiling perfection of beauty ads, Irving Penn photographed heroic still lifes, making saints of ho-hum bathroom essentials.

Now, in an age of algorithm-generated everything, customization is the operative word. Clinique iD, which launched last year, riffs on that original moisturizer by targeting a cross-section of skin needs: four hydrating bases, five potent mix-ins, 20 different permutations. “You have options because we all change all the time,” said Clarke, who—to echo that classic Hair Club for Men slogan—is not only the face, she’s also a client. “I used the products, and my skin got better! I’m like, ‘Yes! I don’t need to lie!’ ” she added with a laugh. “It’s all true.”

The latest addition, a BB-Gel base that suits most skin tones, reminded me of a biographical detail tucked into a cover story in this magazine. Clarke’s maternal grandmother, conceived in a subcontinental love affair, hid her half-Indian identity in a cloud of powder. “My granny kept that secret, that shame that she felt, to her grave,” Clarke said, reflecting on the pressures of assimilation. It’s a world away from today’s shade-adaptive formula, designed to meet the wearer where she is.

Even with beauty’s shifting currents, Clarke learned immutable lessons at home. Her mother, having worked with Revlon, could see through hollow sales pitches to the products that really worked. She also taught her daughter simple hacks: Vaseline as a lo-fi brow gel, and the fact that blush is just a “pigment—you can use it which way you want,” recalled Clarke. She never had a London rebel phase, a clash of Manic Panic hair. “I was a little bit emo for a while and had an obscene amount of eyeliner on, but I think I was just trying to hide.”

That impulse still resonated when GOT came to a close. The show was the centerpiece of her working life in her 20s. Playing Khaleesi had been an escape, thanks in part to platinum wigs with “magical powers” and a Pavlovian link to confidence. “When it ended, I felt like I’d been dropped a thousand feet,” Clarke said. Suddenly she found herself grappling with events she hadn’t had time to process, including her father’s death in 2016. “I slowed all the way down because I had to, to gently build it back up again.” Instead of big-budget franchises, she is headlining her first West End play this March—The Seagull, adapted by Anya Reiss—alongside a half-dozen projects underway from her production company, Magical Thinking Pictures. “Everybody in our industry had to have had some element of magical thinking to be able to make art on any level, to be able to go, ‘I’m going to be a kid forever,’ ” she said of the name.

I wondered if living so long with Khaleesi—a character defined by outsize ambition—shaped the actor in some way. “I just think that ambition for everyone looks different at different stages of your life,” Clarke mused. “When you’re young, you see ambition as quite relentless. You win or you lose with ambition.” On the far side of four Emmy nominations and two harrowing brain injuries, what matters to her now is living a normal life with well-nurtured friendships and “work that is meaningful and impactful for me. I don’t care if it’s successful.”

Mother of Dragons, Breaker of Self-Defeating Chains? Something like that. But it’s not breath of fire that is her restorative release. “It sounds really hippy-dippy, but there’s this amazing yoga position called the humming bee,” she explained, slipping her thumbs into her ears and letting out a few mini-vibrations. “It’s a completely insular thing, and I promise you,” she said, eyes twinkling as I leaned out of her light, “it just resets your nervous system.”

    Gallery Links:

MODELING, ADVERTISING, AND PROMOTIONAL WORK > Clinique > 2020 Campaign > Ad #1

MODELING, ADVERTISING, AND PROMOTIONAL WORK > Clinique > 2020 Campaign > Ad #2

MODELING, ADVERTISING, AND PROMOTIONAL WORK > Clinique > 2020 Campaign > Photoshoot

Press/Gallery: Emilia Clarke on Life After Khaleesi—Including a Historic Clinique Contract was originally published on Enchanting Emilia Clarke | Est 2012

[synoikismos]

« Τα μεγαλεία να φοβάσαι, ω ψυχή. Και τες φιλοδοξίες σου να υπερνικήσεις αν δεν μπορείς, με δισταγμό και προφυλάξεις να τες ακολουθείς. Και όσο εμπροστά προβαίνεις, τόσο εξεταστική, προσεκτική να είσαι. »

—

❛  My soul, guard against pomp and glory. And if you can't curb your ambitions, at least pursue them hesitantly, cautiously. And the higher you go, the more searching and careful you need to be.  ❜

————— now playing :  (  🎵 )  ain’t no grave — crooked still

GUEST CARD

— ✹ FULL NAME   :::   theseus — ✹ TITLE   :::   (  deposed  /  exiled  )  king of athens, prince of troezen, son of poseidon  /  sounds impressive but all of these are worthless because he’s on that hashtag Exile Livin’! — ✹ BIRTHPLACE   :::   troezen, attica — a former kingdom southwest of athens, brought formally under the athenian fold by theseus ushering in the synoikismos and dismantling cretan hegemony over the lands of attica — ✹ LAND / KINGDOM   :::   kingdom of athens  —  once a simple polis, theseus has managed to expand the aforementioned kingdom, politically unifiying the various other political units of attica into one coherent political state under athenian rule — ✹ AGE   :::   thirty-one  /  born on the henē kai nea of poseideon  /  translated: the last day of the month that is approximately december or january  

AFFILIATIONS

— ✹ PARENTS   :::   (  poseidon  /  aegeus  )  & aethra — ✹ SIBLINGS   :::   yeah .... a fuck-ton from poseidon but im not gonna list all that  /  possibly? medus? from aegeus? — ✹ LOVER(S)   :::   taylor swift vc : got a long list of ex-lovers  /  cassandra  (  arguably literally ghosted her  )  /  ariadne  (  former, rip  )  /  a fuck-ton of others probably  /  pirithous  (  technically? deceased  )  /  helen  (  he wishes  )  /  to be plotted?      — ✹ PATRON DEITY   :::   n/a  /  poseidon, you coward, give your son your patronage! — ✹ PROTEGE   :::   n/a   /   he’s accepting applications if yall want to ig???

INSIGHT

— ✹ VICES   :::   diligence  /  fortitude  /  patience  (  arguably  ) — ✹ VIRTUES   :::   greed  /  pride  /  lust — ✹ MORAL ALIGNMENT   :::   true neutral  — ✹ PERSONALITY TYPE   :::   intj-a  /  3w4 8w7 5w6 sx/sp  /  choleric-sanguine  /  true neutral  /  slytherclaw  /  spiritually a scorpio probably  /  philosophically a rational egoist  /  politically  (  and i’m going to use an anachronism here  )  a max stirner devotee à la union of egoists kinda thing? — ✹ MOST FORTUNATE MEMORY   :::   it was inevitable: the sight of the sea would always remind him of what he lost. it is a curiosity to associate such deprivation with the clearest of joys; but as he has come to learn: there is no light without dark. thus, there is no joy without despair. he thinks about stolen kisses in evergreen gardens filled with sycamore trees; he thinks about a hand clutched while whispered words tell tales of the promise of a new life; he thinks about secret meadows and fights turned into tender caresses; he thinks about labyrinths and spools of thread; he thinks about love lost and love gained and love mourned. through it all, he does not think of the memories by themselves, but of them as chapters to his narrative. his most fortunate memory isn’t any particular memory; instead, it’s the memory of memories, subtle yet succinct, ever-there but rarely felt. it is the act of remembering that moves him so: standing on a shore, looking out into the waters, the sea breeze in his hair. his most precious possession is not even a ghost; but the ghost of a ghost, like a mirror reflected on itself, the concatenation of nostalgia. for a moment—a brief, glorious moment where all is clear, all is lucid, all is bright, all is beautiful—he thinks he finally understand what his mother meant. — ✹ AN  ACT THEY WOULD ERASE   :::   verdant fields and clear blue skies, rolling around in meadows, the promise of eternity in but a single moment—the memories are still there yet the actors are gone. one has been twisted into the worst version of himself; the other is stuck still in the underworld. life cannot be lived without regrets, and theseus has many, but this is the one that always comes to mind when he thinks about his failings. there is the ghost of a whisper on his ear, his lips mouthing the words that would condemn them both: do we not deserve this? yet even as this memory stirs the most profound regret in him, a sly voice, almost sounding like himself, asks: but you would do it all over again, would you not? and he can never answer, because he does not want to lie. — ✹ BELIEF ABOUT FATE   :::   this is a story you already know, retold in a dozen different ways throughout the unfolding of history. when you play with the gods, there is always an element of danger; but what is life if not to risk daily? the god might think they are beholden to nobody, but fate is a higher order still. nature has whims all of her own, and as one system rises, so too must another fall. this is how it went from chaos to creation to the reign of the titans to their downfall in the titanomachy. destiny waxes and wanes. the future is the past is the present. there are no gods; there are no masters. there is only action. the rest is silence.

RECOGNITION

— ✹ NOTABLE PHYSICAL TRAITS   :::   there are various scars that litter his body, remnants from his many encounters of battling with monsters and other men. he doesn’t speak about it much; instead he only speaks of victories, of triumph. loss and weakness are meant for other men, mortal men, men whose veins aren’t touch by ichor’d sanguinity. — ✹ NOTABLE QUIRKS, IDIOSYNCRACIES   :::   his rather odd insistence on always having a light by him, even while sleeping—perhaps most especially while sleeping. it is an odd habit that is borne from his many months swaddled in half-darkness in the underworld, a habit that threatens to burn him and everything around him down by a mere gust of strong wind should the fates decree it so; but perhaps he would rather have such a fate than live in darkness once more. aside from that, there is his rather stunning overconfidence—almost too unbelievable to be true. perhaps it’s a ploy, some kind of scheme to make you think something about him—but to what end? and does it not seem he believes in his own myths the more he retells them? — ✹ REPUTATION AMONG MORTALS   :::   there’s a certain tenacity about him, some flavour of vivacity, maybe even some sort of sagacity. he’s the man who could, the man who did, and the man who would—even if doing all three kills him. his name is spoken of in revered whispers before his all-too sudden fall from grace. two years have passed since he boldly dared where no other would do—two years he suffered and two years he survived—and any sane man would have then lived a life of quiet, retiring into domesticity. yet here he is again, once more daring, once more cloying, once more attempting. what can one do but watch as a man tries again and again? maybe it’s with pity you choose to regard him; maybe it’s with a certain incredulity. still, you are watching him—and perhaps that’s all he ever wanted. //  tl;dr: resident florida man does it again!   — ✹ REPUTATION AMONG GODS   :::   what does one do with one who dares think he can flout the natural order? theseus is a man—nothing but a man—yet he’s descended from one of them, even if unrecognised, and he dares think of himself as heralding a new age. for now, he’s an annoying fly buzzing about, buzzing about for the next careful window of opportunity. swat him away, won’t you? you’d be doing yourselves a favour.   // aka: olympians HATE him! he tried to steal one of them with his bro and he’s still out here thriving!  && you, too, can be like him with this 5 drachmae trick! LEARN THE TRUTH NOW!  

MUTUAL HEADCANON

What man, after entering Paradise, would seek to go back to earth ? What man, having known Helen, could be content with anybody else ?

the salt-sea waves laps up at the edges of the boat and there is the aftertaste of brine in the air. around them, there are the fishermen going about their business, off to cast their nails for this early morning, heads cast down as if to ignore the magnificent sail of the ship docked in their desolate land. in the distance, a white twisted something of a tree, already dead yet still standing. troezen was no athens, no sparta, no troy: it is nothing but void, empty and barren—of heroes, of legends, of ichor. yet here they stand, two holy individuals lifted up by their divine parentage, looking like stark figures against the ashen landscape. 

(  this is not the end, this is the beginning.  )

water crash against rocks. there is the smell of a storm in the air. if he is to leave, he must leave soon—and yet, where once there is nothing but bold willingness, there is now the piquant feeling of worry, some tinge of regret. he becomes half-moored, half-alight: feet tethered to sandy beaches even as his ears welcome the call of the sea.

❛  it will be as if i never left,  ❜  he says, already knowing that it is not as easy as he makes it out to be to her. 

he unfolds his hands, revealing a sliver of a thing: an apple seed, nothing more and nothing less. he takes her hand, and puts it on her palm, closing her first around it as if it is something precious.  ❛  Τῷ μήλῳ βάλλω σε· σὺ δ΄ εἰ μὲν ἑκοῦσα φιλεῖς με͵ δεξαμένη τῆς σῆς παρθενίης μετάδος,  ❜  he says, and that is all that needed to be said.

[donnnoir]

Austin, Texas                                                                         June 15, 2019

Well on to the crux of the argument; at least by installments….

Or so it seems, now if I can spew this out on a more regular basis we will be getting somewhere.  Now as previous noted I suspect rather than a purely chronological order that I will be bouncing around quite a bit.  Because no matter how I would try I would no doubt have to constantly go back and amend any attempt at some birth to present presentation.  Besides I am not sure I could make such an endeavor worthy of you the reader’s time.  Overall I consider the majority of Life to be boring to mundane at best; into which are punctuated moments and or events that go far beyond the pale of what could possibly be part of the norm of a conservative Life.  Understanding your time is immensely valuable let us begin….

Over the years whenever I have attempted to share some of the uniqueness of the events and the accompanying knowledge associated there to. Since for a long time within Popular Culture we enjoyed and endured the TV series “The X-files”.  Seeking context and relevance to our social experience, I have asked many a person if they were familiar with the series and if so.  I am sure you have noticed the poster above Mulder’s desk in the basement of the FBI’s headquarters.  The poster with a flying saucer between some trees. The caption on the poster reads “I want to Believe”.  Because of the popularity of the series this poster and that statement have become almost Iconic.  Well as a matter of fact a good friend of mine took that photograph.  His name was Paul Villa.  I meet and knew him while he lived in New Mexico, in a little town south of Albuquerque. He was a very genuine sort of individual, the kind of man that the statement “salt of the Earth” could be sincerely applied.  Her earn his daily bread as a fabricator or if you prefer as a wielder. Back in those days, this was in the ‘70’s, within the supposed community of the UFO Phenomena were individuals who were known as contactees.  Unlike the group commonly referred to as abductees, these persons via one means or another were contacted, approached and either as part of a short period of association or as part of an ongoing relationship would be involved in a dialogue or variety of ongoing communications with beings not associated with the human population on the surface of the Earth.  Paul was one such individual.  During those years I was fortunate enough to have met several such persons.  Most were if nothing else true believers; a few struck me as being at best misguided to being charlatans.  But of all these individuals Paul was the most genuine and sincere, a man of character.  He never tried to make a profit from his experiences nor did he ever feel comfortable being the center of attention.  The particular photograph used in the poster is actually one of a group or series of photographs taken at that location and time frame.  As memory severs me it is one of the group of like a dozen to twenty pictures of that particular flying saucer at that time and location. Paul never copyrighted any of his pictures, or anything else in association with this association with these visitors.  As a consequence many of his pictures have been used in movies and books by others.  Paul, himself would have condoned and appreciated the dissemination of these.  If you had ever run into him as he was picking up his photographs from the developer; and had asked for a copy of the pictures.  He would gladly do so for the price that the developer charged him for copies.  He often said that this “friends”, those that visited him in their flying saucers wanted him to more openly show the pictures and discuss the elements of what he and them discussed.  

Recently I YouTubed Paul’s name and lo and behold if there weren’t more than a couple video spots giving a brief discussion about my friend. In all honesty I only viewed two of these, an although they do a fairly good job of offering to the public a view of Paul that is objective and honest.  I do take exception to the volume of material they cite him as having had.  I recall on my visits that he had substantially more than the narrators of either video gave him credit.  As to photo-albums containing pictures of various flying saucers, space ships, observation vehicles, sampling drones, alien landscapes, phenomena, living dinosaurs and much much more these numbered in the hundreds of albums packed full of various pictures devoted to this hobby, shall we say.  Now in immediate approximate association to these were voluminous numbers of spiral notebooks.   Hahahah….. why spiral notebooks?  Well it should be quite obvious actually, in his dialogues with the different and varying persons from elsewhere.  How does one accomplish such a feat.  The new age crowd would have us all believe that some light or telepathic communication from the “superior” being would provide the solution.  According to Paul the affair was much more mundane than all that hype.  Yes, some could simply talk in a language he understood.  However, since among themselves speech is unnecessary, their mouths are used for other things.  The process of speaking was difficult for the vast majority.  Yet wishing to dialogue; the concept of writing is not limited to the constraints of physical aptitude of the one.  It is easy enough to learn the symbols or if you prefer pictography necessary to carry on a intelligent conversation, or as intelligent as could be presumed.  Now, I meet Paul in 1973, I was thirteen years old.  Yes I was a precocious young man, however.  My introduction to Paul was facilitated by Bill Miller my friend and employer under whom I was apprenticing as a silversmith.  Bill had for some time been Paul’s friend.  So I enjoyed the benefits of their association.  It also afforded me the opportunity to peruse the large library of spiral notebooks and a few of the other artifacts Paul had on open display in his living room. I should also note here that I was acquainted with the fact that Paul would limit access to his hobby depending on who was his guest.  I also was made aware that certain photographs and or artifacts would only be shown to persons he was instructed to do so with by his “friends”.  Thus I was aware I did not have full unlimited access to what was in Paul’s possession.   This may sound odd or suspicious to some; sounds rather sensible and practical to me.  

I read many kinds of documents in my visits to Paul’s home.  Some were written to JPL or some similar quasi governmental agency or contractors.  Usually concerning developments or design flaws within any given space program or vehicle.  An as always there were the spiral notebooks, to occupy my attention.  As a general rule from what was described to me, Paul would have this overwhelming sense he needed to drive somewhere.  He would just drive out beyond the urban sprawl ultimately he would end up in a remote location where he would have an encounter of one kind or another.  He was encouraged to bring his camera and take photographs.  As these encounters came with some degree of regularity and so would the conversations; he soon learned to keep a notebook to write down questions of one kind or another in anticipation of these.  From what I could tell he usually had a dozen to a couple dozen questions ready and waiting between encounters. Sometimes a line of questioning would continue on into a at large discussion, though usually not.  Much of the material I read comes and goes in my memory of events, there are a couple of notable exceptions….

The most notable exception concerned the Flood, as in the Biblical Flood of Noah.  Among a variety of questions Paul had written down the question; where did the water for Noah’s Flood come from?  The written response was simple and succinct; Mars.  Now you the reader if perhaps you are unaware, but at the time the accepted scientific stated fact was that there was NO water on Mars.  That the observable polar caps were actually frozen CO2, common dry ice.  This was taught at all levels of academia (though there was a very small group that knew otherwise; a story for another installment in my narrations if you will) from elementary schools to universities.  I thought it intriguing and filed it away mentally.  At this point may I say that though I have always wondered of the short falls, mistakes and disinformation contained within what is presented as our collective histories and of scientific note.  I like most everyone generally accepted what I was taught in our institutions of education, all be it with more then a grain of salt.  As I discovered more and more of the Truth of the matter, I abandoned these illusions and lies only keeping current so as to maintain relevance in society and even simple conversations.  Presently as the consequence of these divergent realities presses down upon all of us, I as of late no longer share my understanding from the perspective of mere food for thought, or an alternative belief system; all the while being politely accommodating of the false or failed paradigms other hold. It is a disservice to my fellow men and women to feign such a posture for the sensibilities of those who refuse to question what is before them.  Thus upon meeting I fully acknowledge and realize that my “crazy coefficient” is ostensibly high. Any one who takes a moment to share what Life has given us, usually gives me the benefit of the doubt.  An as has been the case for the majority of my Life others shall always call me “crazy”.  Which isn’t purely a bad thing!  

As we fast forward to the present; we now know that Mars once was a great water planet.  In fact it seems it had vast oceans and water in larger proportions than does our Earth.  Which bates the question of where did it all go?  Before science made these “discoveries”; I have long believed such.  Including that the water for Noah’s Flood did in fact come from Mars.  I shall leave you with that Fact to ponder.  Because believe it or not we shall be revisiting this subject and many others, so we shall have a rich WTF content….

[apenitentialprayer]

In light of what happened on Saturday, I’m going to be telling you two stories. Both center around brave women who were inhabitants of Alexandria. They lived about a hundred years apart from each other. Both were brutally killed because they didn’t conform to the majority opinions of the societies that they lived in.

The first of these women would have been known by her friends and family as Ekaterini. She was a bright girl and a member of a noble family, possibly the daughter of the governor of the Roman province of Egypt. Early in her life, she revealed an interest in schooling and education, a passion that her parents happily indulged. By the age of fourteen, she was among the most learned individuals in the city. That was also the age that she decided to convert to Christianity.

The year 301, which would have been around the time that Ekaterini was baptized, marked the beginning of one of the darkest periods of Christian persecution in pagan Rome. Before this point Christians had been persecuted, but such persecutions had always been on a local level at the command of a regional official. This was not the case of the great Diocletian Persecution. This would be an empire-wide persecution, marked by a ferocity and intensity that had not been seen since the persecution headed by Nero over two centuries before.

This was not a sudden process; the seeds had been sown since the year 284, when Emperor Diocletian rose to power. For a long time already, Christians had come to be seen as an “anti-national” minority. Though they may have prayed for the Roman Emperor, as per Saint Paul’s orders (1 Timothy 2:1-2), but they refused to pray to the gods of the Roman elite. As such, they risked angering the gods, and thus were a threat to the metaphysical stability of the empire. Diocletian took this a step further; he identified himself more closely than any other emperor with the Divine, referring to himself as “Iovius” (Jove/Zeus) and demanding that he be worshiped as Lord.

But for Christians, Christ is Lord. He is the only Lord. And so many Christians felt that they could not venerate Diocletian in the way that he wished to be venerated. This made him very upset. First he had decided to purge Christians from the official bureaucracy and the army, but this was not enough; in the year 303, a general persecution calling for the extermination of all Christians who would not worship him was launched. This would be the political landscape that Ekaterini would have to face.

In the year 305, as the story goes, Ekaterini’s conversion to Christianity was made public, and she was confronted with this revelation. Given her young age –she would have been around 18– and the fact that she had a reputation for being well educated, she was questioned by fifty of the most influential philosophers living in Alexandria. The hope was that she would be humiliated by their skill in argument, but that did not happen; in the public debate that followed, several of the philosophers converted to Christianity, as did several hundred members of the crowd.

It was then that the governing officials switched from humiliation to violent cruelty. She was publicly scourged, and then starved while imprisoned for twelve days. During this time, she prayed, gave comfort to fellow Christians who had come to visit her, and received comforting visions of Christ Himself. The order for her execution was ultimately given, and she was beheaded. Those who had converted due to her example were killed afterwards. Today, Ekaterini is one of the most famous of all Catholic saints, Catherine of Alexandria.

The Alexandria that existed a century after Ekaterini’s death was a very different city. In the year 318, Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity and forbade further persecution. In the year 380, the Edict of Thessalonica declared that the official religion of the empire was Christianity, and that all should convert to this official religion. The roles had been reversed; Christianity was ascendant, and paganism, already dying a slow death within the Roman Empire, would never recover. By the time of our second story, which occurred in the year 415, Alexandria had become largely Christian.

Among those dissenters was a woman between the ages of 45 and 65, a remarkable philosopher and scientist known as Hypatia. Hypatia ran her own school for mathematics, philosophy, and astrology. Several major Christian thinkers are numbered among her students, and she was regarded with warmth by pagan and Christian thinkers alike. As it has been mentioned, she took on Christian students; Hypatia did not think that the gap that existed between their community and hers could not be bridged, and she worked hard to make peace between the two groups.

Unfortunately, Hypatia became embroiled in a political struggle between two Christian factions fighting over the position of Bishop of Alexandria. The dominant claimant, a man named Cyril, ultimately earned the ire of the secular ruler of Alexandria, a friend of Hypatia and a recent convert to Christianity named Orestes. As tensions between these two men got worse, rumors began to spread that Hypatia’s influence was the reason that the two groups were not reconciling.

In March of 415, a group of Christians led by a lector named Peter took matters into their own hands. Waiting in ambush, the group seized Hypatia when she was traveling to her home. They dragged her into a church and butchered her. Her eyes were ripped out, her flesh was torn open, and she was ripped limb from limb. They took her parts outside the city and burned them to ashes. So ended the career of Hypatia the brilliant, Hypatia the teacher, Hypatia the bridge-builder. And so it was decided; there would be no peace between Christians and pagans.

It’s amazing how quick the Alexandrian Church had forgotten their roots. In the course of one hundred years, Christians went from being a violently oppressed minority to a violently oppressive majority. According to the records following the immediate aftermath of this tragedy, Christians expressed their disgust and horror at what the party of Peter had done. But that didn’t change the fact that the ever-shrinking pagan community became increasingly seen as outsiders, a minority that simply could not be an acceptable element of society.

I hope and I pray that Hypatia is in heaven with her ‘sister’ Catherine; I hope and pray that she can forgive the sins of my Christian brothers who performed this act of barbarity against her. And I hope that she and Catherine are both praying for the families of those eleven people who were shot dead during their visit to the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh this past Saturday.

I said I was going to tell you two stories, but I lied. There is a third story. On Saturday morning, at 9:45 am, a man walked into a synagogue full of people getting ready to worship God. He opened fire on them because they were Jewish. He had a twenty minute reign of terror that claimed the lives of eleven people who had come to worship God. What should have been a time of peace and celebration was transformed into twenty minutes of blood, and shrieking, and horror.

In the past decade, the question of whether or not the United States was formed as a Christian country has been fielded many times. And it’s an interesting question. But here’s the thing; I don’t care whether the United States was formed as a Christian nation or not. That question is irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that we are currently the majority of this country (75% of our population at least identifies as Christian) and that means that we have certain responsibilities towards the minorities that live among us.

The mind behind this tragedy saw Jews as an anti-national force, an existential threat to the stability of our nation. Does that sound familiar? He saw Jews as foreigners, as the architects behind the decline of our nation, as the children of Satan, as the murderers of his God, Jesus Christ.

That’s right. Robert Bowers was a Christian, just like me. Beyond that, he was a Christian nationalist, someone who did not see any room for non-Christians in our public discourse. He drew upon traditions of antisemitism that run deep in my faith.

For a millennium, the Jew has been the visible “Other” that Christianity has defined itself against. The Jew has been declared guilty of murdering Christ, despite being as temporally removed from that event as you and I are today. The Jew has been slandered as a butcherer of Christian children, a mutilator of Jesus in the flesh, as a greedy parasite who has contributed nothing to society while leeching off of the ‘virtuous’ Christian man. The Jew has been rhetorically transformed into a foreigner, despite having lived among us since the beginning of our shared history. The very word “Jew” has been transformed into an insult.

And today we see the fruits of these actions. Saturday was the most devastating antisemitic attack to ever occur on American soil. But Saturday was not an isolated event. In 2017 alone, over 2,000 incidents of antisemitic crimes were reported. Rates of violence against Jewish people are at their highest since 1979. The world looks at the Holocaust as the worst that can possibly happen to a minority. And maybe the world is right to do so. But we can’t look at the Holocaust as the only bar by which we view violent suppression of minorities. When we do that, we can distance ourselves from the pain and the suffering that occur in our very midst. Because, hey, at least we’re not Nazis, right?

It’s not right. Christianity in the United States has been on the decline for decades, but we’re still the majority. And the scary thing about being the majority is that we have the option, if we so choose, to steamroll over minorities, whether by performing the acts of violence ourselves or by ignoring those acts of violence. It is so, so important that we fight that majoritarian impulse with all we have. That’s the road to madness; that’s the road to fascism. And we cannot let that happen. We have to fight against antisemitic rhetoric when we see it. We have to fight against relegating minorities to being somehow outside our national pale. Because the truth is, minorities don't merely live alongside us. Minorities are a part of us as a nation. And we have to protect our own.

[schraubd]

Vectors of Threat for Academic Freedom

The prospect that Temple Professor Marc Lamont Hill might be dismissed from his tenured university position -- the Chair of the Temple University's Board of Trustees said he would "look at what remedies we have", but suggested that many on the board and the administration would like to fire Hill -- has sparked a renewed round of the ever-popular "who's the real threat to academic freedom" game. For all the belly-aching conservatives have issued over liberal universities which can't tolerate opposing viewpoints, there sure are a lot of cases where conservatives have successfully censored progressive academics!

I doubt that Hill will end up being fired, and it's been good to say many conservative academics make clear that any such university sanction would be an egregious violation of academic freedom (see, e.g., Robert George, Jonathan Marks, and Keith Whittington -- FIRE, which sometimes is viewed as conservative though I don't think that reputation is deserved, also has come out swinging backing Hill's academic freedom rights).

But this case did help crystallize in my mind the different vectors of threats to academic freedom, which may help explain how both the left and the right think it's self-evident that the "other side" is the real danger (beyond the usual self-serving reasons I mean). To generalize:

When threats to academic freedom bubble "up" from below -- come from students or faculty -- they tend to come from the left;

When threats to academic freedom percolate "down" from above -- come from politicians or the Board of Trustees -- they tend to come from the right.

Front-line administrators (like Deans), who can encounter pressure from both sources, are "swing votes". No doubt there are exceptions. And I hasten to add that this typology only holds on a political axis -- along other axes of campus identity (e.g., racial, sexual, or religious lines), there are different stories to be told about who and what prevents certain groups from engaging as equals in campus discourse. But on the purely political side of things, and based on my admittedly non-scientific recollection of cases, this distinction seems to hold up pretty well. Start with the threats progressives face: It is the Temple Board of Trustees threatening Hill's job. Steven Salaita was "unhired" by the Univeristy of Illinois' Board, validating a decision by the Chancellor. It was UNC's board which voted to shut down centers and clinics which clashed with conservative political priorities, for nakedly political reasons. If you move over to cases of conservative academics being targeted, examples like Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State or Charles Murray at Middlebury are primarily cases of student behavior. Academic BDS campaigns almost exclusively emanate from students or faculty, while facing strong administrative resistance (see Pitzer or Michigan). And the more general claims that conservative views are "unwelcome" or that college is an "unsafe space" to be a conservative are typically directed at the conduct and outlook of students and faculty. No doubt this divergence is in large part attributable to the relative political make-up of college faculties and students versus governing boards or political overseers (in retrospect, it also explained the instincts behind my "Do Jews Need a Protest Politic" post, which posited that campus groups who protect their rights via administrative action rather than student protests will automatically code as conservative). But the differences between these threat-vectors has significant practical ramifications, that go far in explaining why both conservatives and liberals think they're the primary victims of academic freedom violations. On the one hand, it perhaps shouldn't surprise -- though many people were surprised -- that there have been more "political" firings of left-wing professors on campus than right-wing professors, and the gap has gotten bigger over the past few years. And if you think of who has the capacity to issue blunt, sweeping, heavy-handed assaults on academic freedom -- terminating employment, shuttering a program, passing a law -- then that figure makes sense. For the most part, students and faculty can't do that (or at least, not with much greater expenditures effort). So the liberals can justly point out to the conservatives that, if they're the political orientation threatened by the elements within academia that have the de jure authority to end a career or eliminate a program with the stroke of a pen, then they are the group more threatened by academic freedom violations -- period. But there's another way of viewing the problem. It's true that boards and politicians have greater blunt dominative authority which, when exercised, poses a greater threat to academic freedom than any power faculty or students hold. But it's also true that board and politicians "touch" the day-to-day operations of academia far more infrequently than faculty and students do. What the latter lack in bluntness, they make up for in terms of omnipresence -- the conservative complaint regarding the state of academic freedom tends to rely less on direct cases of censorship by administrators and more about an atmosphere or mood where certain views are shunned or difficult to air (see this profile of conservative women at UNC, or this account from NYU). It is not a single act of censorial pronouncement that silences conservatives on campus, but the constant prick and needle of dismissiveness, eye rolls, "jokes", and shunning that together creates a landscape where conservative views are effectively unable to be aired.

So the conservatives could reply by saying that a few stray bolts of administrative lightning might be flashy, but they hardly overwhelm the suffocating blanket of ubiquitous liberalism which they see as draped over their academic communities. It is nuts, they would argue, to suggest that in general academic squelches liberal ideas and facilitates conservative ones.

One reason that I suspect progressives would find this argument frustrating is that it adopts a view of power that conservatives tend not to find attractive in other contexts. When speaking of racism, for example, conservatives are not generally sympathetic to any understanding of the term other than deliberate de jure action by an official authority. The complaints about eye rolls and dismissals are -- dare I say it -- best characterized as "microaggressions", and we all know how conservatives feel about those.

This framework also has some difficulty distinguishing between bad de facto "censorship" and simple widespread negative reactions to ideas. After all, thinking "this idea is wrong" -- or even "this idea is racist" -- is not censorship, it's judgment. That one's speeches are met with protests, one's classroom contributions are met with snickers, and that nobody wants to date you after that column you wrote calling abortion murder -- none of these would be viewed as a form of oppression by conservatives but for the fact that conservatives are experiencing them.

Hence, the conservative appeal to this framework in the academic context reasonably comes off as opportunistic. It also opens the door to a more expansive liberal retort, identifying a still-further basic threat to, if not "academic freedom", then at least the diverse and pluralistic exchange of ideas. If academia is built for a particular type of student -- one who is, on average, wealthier and Whiter than America writ large, then it follows that certain types of views and arguments will most likely be systematically underrepresented and underconsidered. If, for example, campuses are poorly equipped to engage with and include undocumented immigrant students, that likely has an impact on the way campus debates about immigration will proceed. This argument relies on a similar (albeit not identical) understanding of power as does the conservative case; if they admit one, they really should have to admit the other.

Be that as it may, I do think that a focus on the vectors of threats to academic freedom -- the different ways in which those threats manifest when they stem from politicians and boards (right targeting left) versus when they stem from faculty and students (left targeting right) -- can help explain the sense of talking past each other that is so prevalent in these conversations. 

Brazen acts of censorship, firings, or political interference are more likely to stem from the right. Day-to-day discomfort, including microaggressions, and an overall atmosphere of having to "walk on eggshells" are more likely to be the product of the left -- though any consistent theory of academic freedom then has to also admit that these same dynamics might also "censor" or "chill" other campus outgroups (such as racial, religious, or sexual minorities). The former is more nakedly wrong and more individually dangerous, but also rarer. The latter is more omnipresent, but also primarily an issue in aggregate and in any event more complicated at the case level.

And then even below those, there's a whole additional layer of ideas and perspectives which are not aired on campus because their proponents never make it to campus, because campus isn't built for them. Different vectors, all threatening the pluralistic exchange of ideas in different ways.

via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/2rikS9M

[hacks-and-heroes]

Hacks and Heroes #2

So let's talk about a favorite series of mine, Fallout. And what better time? With Fallout 76 on the horizon like a mediocre tsunami, the SEO is perfect.

The question is how would one go about adapting Fallout into a tabletop setting. Well that's easy actually, plus there are a bunch of hacks out there for Fallout already. I'm gonna point out a few key things that make a Fallout setting, and then get into the hacks.

So first there's themes. The most forefront and clear theme of Fallout has always been the cautionary tale of nuclear war. Atomic annihilation and Cold War era fear mongering is shown through its mix of propaganda posters, devastated landscapes and visual aesthetics. The distinct 1950s art style, especially Vault Tec’s Vault Boy, show a campy contrast to the horrors the world shows. Things like the upbeat music and pulp sci-fi weaponry mask a dark undertone. For those who plan on game mastering a Fallout game, I highly recommend playing the first two iterations to really get a sense of this tone.

Political agendas, conflicting ideologies, fate of technology, capitalism, communism, colonialism; all play a part in a great Fallout story. A good mix of these elements will truly help bring together any Fallout story.

So let's get into the hacks:

Fallout GURPS/Exodus-

I want to start with the two oldest Fallout hacks. Fallout has a history with GURPS, being the system it was first based on. Originally, GURPS was in the title of the first game. However, after a rift between developers, GURPS was dropped. However, several years ago someone revived the idea by adapting Fallout for the GURPS RPG system. While I have never played GURPS, it seems this system is the closest you'll get to a system that feels like the original games would translated to paper.

If you prefer a system with more number crunch, GURPS is a safe bet. It's also a well made book with a lot of detail and lore. It was made around the time of Fallout 3, so it may feel a bit outdated. It does include stuff from Fallout Tactics though. So I appreciate that.

Now onto Exodus. Exodus is a “licensed" Fallout game. Or at least that was the idea. At some point during its creation, the license was pulled. So what would have been Fallout d20, became Exodus. One of the major problems with this particular game is that it is a game based off the d20 Modern system. Sadly for the old SRD games, they have not aged well, especially d20 Modern. I only recommend this adaptation if you really enjoy the old d20 games like 3.5 and Modern. Even then, the poor cover up and woeful bestiary will probably be a turn off.

Fallout 5th Edition-

To start, this is probably one of the best and most detailed fan conversions I've seen. It has so much content for what is essentially a free sourcebook. The font and graphic design is great. There is multiple racial subtypes, backgrounds, and over 100 pages of Fallout monsters. There is a piecemeal armor system that will be a nice touch for those most familiar with Fallout 4. Seriously, for a class based system, this is probably one of the best portrayals of Fallout. Hell, it has stats to play a goddamn Eyebot. Who wouldn't??

Now it isn't all perfect. The biggest flaw is that many of 5e’s base classes are considered unviable. This would be fine, should the book offer replacements. Instead the book suggests purchase of a supplement that has classes more suited for the game. I totally understand why this is such, after all it is a free fan made conversion. However, an additional class or two would have more incentivized purchase of the other book. The only other gripe is that that 100 page bestiary is a lot of the same creatures with very minute changes. Similar to the games, though in a pen-and-paer RPG it's a bit needless.

(I will have a review of that class supplement for those interested midway thru the next week.)

On a side note, while there are Pathfinder hacks for Fallout, there aren't any detailed enough to really mention. With enough effort, one could customize it to fit a Fallout setting. I may go into it in the future as I tackle other topics.

Savage Fallout-

Okay so now we get into the most extensive collection of Fallout hacks. There are a handful of these for Savage Worlds, so we’ll just go at them in no particular order.

Savaged Fallout!

When you Google Savage Worlds Fallout, this is the first one that you’ll encounter. On a blogspot aptly named, there are about 13 PDF downloads by Shane Hensley. It is clearly a passion project, having started in 2003, though it has gone dark since 2016.

I’m gonna get the bad out of the way first. This hack is ugly, poorly laid out, and sometimes confusing. The books are almost entirely black and white with a plain font. Only do the location books get anything in the way of images, though the actual maps tend to be weak. The hindrances added to the game are actually quite good, representing traits from the game quite well. The edges on the other hand...are extremely poor. Anyone who has played a lot of 3.5 or Pathfinder will start having flashbacks as they see edges boasting +1 to two skills with no flavor text. Compared to some of the later Savage Fallout stuff, it’s pretty sad. My final complaint is the Weapons Cache book is a supplement that details out things like Alien weapons, Chinese weapons, and a few other unique items from the games. However, the book is not more than a bunch of paragraphs and stat blocks.

Now onto the good stuff; both the Wasteland Survival Guide (Player’s Handbook) and Overseer’s Manual (GM’s Guide) are well made, new mechanics are introduced well, and the items will bring back fond memories of Fallout 2. The location books are a fun homebrew addition. I have not read all of them, however, they are good for brainstorming if nothing else. If you’re looking for a hack for Fallout for Savage Worlds, this is not a bad first place to start.

Wild Wastes

This one won’t come up right away, but I was quite pleased to have discovered it. If I was going to run a Savage Fallout game, I’d probably be referring to this book the most. To start, it is a beautiful two PDF set, barely clocking in at over 20 pages. The backgrounds and fonts fit the Fallout aesthetic and the layout is pleasing to the eye. It uses some licensed Fallout art in it, which helps it for sure.

By contrast to Savaged Fallout, the edges in this book are fantastic. Now okay, mechanically they aren’t much different than Savaged Fallout, but they at least look nice. There are less hindrances, but the ones that remain hold up on their own. Also the race options are fleshed out well, and there are two options for Super Mutants, if you are so inclined. This hack also introduces the Psyker. Basically this is adding psychic powers into Fallout, which may seem out of place to those who don’t know about Fallout Tactics. Truly it’s a fun idea, but whether it stays is up to your GM.

The second PDF that goes along with Wild Wastes is a 9 page add-on for equipment. There isn’t a lot to say about it besides that it is extensive. While it isn’t 5e Fallout extensive, it does have weapons, armor, and items from every game and more. If you are looking for items for your Savage Fallout game, look here.

Fallout: And How to Survive in the Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland When Your GM is a Total Dick.

Quite the mouthful there. So this hack is similar to Wild Wastes in that it uses a lot of licensed Fallout art...also it is only about 16 pages. That said, it is much more dense. The inner workings are black and white, but more well laid-out than Savaged Fallout. The font is a better choice and while tiny is laid out in a way that’s not hard to follow. This hack also stands out because it essentially works stand alone. You’ll need the core Savage Worlds book for more in-depth rules, but the character creations process and most hindrances and edges are included in the book.

One of my only gripes with this particular hack is its approach to weapons. Similar to GURPs, weapons are more or less divided into categories of damage, and then just given flavor for their look. While I can see the plus in this way, it tends to leave your players and GMs in the dark if they aren’t used to doing so. The armor is also truly wimpy (a +4 bonus for power armor??). That also extends to the races which get one trait a piece before being forgotten.

To circle back to something positive, this hack does include “tinkerin’”, a skill for customizing weapons and armor. It’s a simple enough system and more than welcome for those who like having to craft unique weapons.

Gunrocksgaming Savage Fallout

This isn’t a PDF like the previous three hacks. This one is a blog that includes very little but is worth mentioning for a few reasons. It has rules for character creation, which include playing robots, a first for these hacks. There are little in the way of hindrances but the edges are good. The equipment is sparse but well done, as are the setting rules. This hack does have another plus which it is the second of these hacks to have a bestiary. It’s hard to compare how these monsters compare to their in-game counterparts but with two hacks it probably wouldn’t be easy to make one that satisfies you.

Aaaaand that’s all for now!

While there are no doubt other Fallout hacks for other games, these were the best I could come across. I’ll cover it more in a future post, but another excellent post-apocalypse game is Apocalypse World, as well as the system it is built on. It can also be used for Fallout, with some modifications.

I hope you all enjoyed this and found it informative. Feel free to comment, send feedback or ideas for later posts. Next week I’ll be back with a different kind of post. This week was all about hacks that already exists. What if there’s a game you want that doesn’t have a hack though. Well, you’ll have to make it up yourself then! So next week we’ll tackle another Bethesda brand favorite, Dishonored!!

[ezatluba]

What Killed These Bald Eagles? After 25 Years, We Finally Know.

A perfect confluence of events created a stealth killer.

By Sarah Zhang

MARCH 25, 2021

It was 1996, Bill Clinton was president, and endangered bald eagles were dying in his home state of Arkansas.

Twenty-nine were found dead at a man-made reservoir called DeGray Lake, before deaths spread to two other lakes. But what really puzzled scientists was how the eagles acted before they died. The stately birds were suddenly flying straight into cliff faces. They hit trees. Their wings drooped. Even on solid ground, they stumbled around as if drunk.

“We weren’t in the political limelight that often,” says Carol Meteyer, who was then a pathologist for the National Wildlife Health Center, a usually obscure federal agency that investigates animal deaths. But as the toll rose, to more than 70 eagles in total, the mass die-off of America’s national bird in the president’s home state took on outsize symbolic importance. Scientists around the country were detailed to the case, but they kept coming up empty: It wasn’t botulism. It wasn’t heavy metals. It wasn’t pesticides. It didn’t seem to be anything known to man. “About the only thing that hasn’t been tested for is second-hand cigarette smoke,” an official told The New York Times in 1998. “We’ve even had people calling in suggesting that it’s radiation from outer space.”

Now, in an extraordinarily exhaustive new study, scientists have pinpointed the cause of death for those bald eagles in Arkansas. No wonder the mystery took 25 years to solve: The birds died because of a specific algae that lives on a specific invasive water plant and makes a novel toxin, but only in the presence of specific pollutants. Everything had to go right—or wrong, really—for the mass deaths to happen. This complex chain of events reflects just how much humans have altered the natural landscape and in how many ways; unraveling it took one scientist the better part of her career. “It’s just an amazing story,” says Gregory Boyer, a biochemist at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, who was not involved with the study.

Susan Wilde, an aquatic scientist at the University of Georgia and a lead author on the new study, began looking into the mysterious deaths in 2001. By then, the cause of death had a name, at least—avian vacuolar myelinopathy, or AVM, which refers to empty spaces or vacuoles found in the brains of these dead birds. This brain damage is why the afflicted bald eagles seemed blind and uncoordinated.

Wilde had a few other clues to work with by 2001. Coots, which are water birds that live on the same lakes, were also becoming sick and uncoordinated. They would “be swimming upside down and struggling to keep their heads out of water,” says Meteyer, who investigated AVM for the National Wildlife Health Center. The coots were easy prey for eagles, who ate the sick birds—only to get sick in the same way. Whatever caused AVM was likely being passed through the food chain.

And what were coots eating? Water plants. Scientists had ultimately identified AVM in birds at 10 lakes in six southeastern states—all man-made and all being taken over by an invasive plant called Hydrilla verticillata. Wilde had written her doctoral dissertation about one of the lakes before it was invaded by hydrilla; she returned to find dense mats of the hardy plants. They could thrive in the man-made lake, whose waters were too nutrient-poor for native species. She saw spots on their leaves too, which she investigated under a fluorescent microscope. “The light shone down on the leaves and I said, Wow, the leaves are covered with this species I’ve never seen before,” Wilde told me. She recognized the spots as a new species of cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, and she immediately thought they had to be important. This was 2001.

A series of experiments began to confirm her hunch. Ducks or chickens in the lab fed hydrilla without the cyanobacteria did just fine. Those fed hydrilla with the cyanobacteria got brain lesions like the eagles. Cyanobacteria do sometimes produce toxins that can kill fish and birds. But these toxic cyanobacteria typically float in the water, rather than live on plants, so this was unusual. “I can remember when Susan first identified that. There was a lot of skepticism,” Boyer says. “None of the known toxins were involved.”

Wilde and her colleagues knew they needed to identify the toxin itself. In 2011, she sent samples to Timo Niedermeyer, a biochemist now at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, in Germany, who specializes in molecules made by cyanobacteria. He and his colleagues tried to grow the species in his lab, but it grew incredibly slowly. It took two years to produce less than an ounce, which he sent back to Georgia to test in chickens. The cyanobacteria so painstakingly cultivated had no effect at all. No lesions. No clumsy behavior. “We spent two years and achieved nothing,” Niedermeyer says.

The team wondered if lab-cultivated cyanobacteria were somehow different from wild ones. But how? Niedermeyer went back to samples collected in the lakes, using a sophisticated technique called AP-MALDI-MSI—“like taking a picture but you don’t detect light but molecules,” he says—which revealed a novel molecule found only in the cyanobacteria growing on the hydrilla. The lab-grown cyanobacteria did not have it, nor did hydrilla by itself.

What’s more, this molecule had a formula never seen before, and, unusually, it contained five atoms of the element bromine. So the team tried adding bromine to its growing cyanobacteria. Lo and behold, the same strange molecule appeared, and this new batch of cyanobacteria caused the brain lesions in chickens. Another group of collaborators confirmed the team’s work further, by finding the cyanobacteria genes likely responsible for synthesizing the toxin. The team ultimately named this toxin aetokthonotoxin, “poison that kills the eagle.” Twenty-five years later, it finally had a name.

“I just have a lot of admiration that the scientists kept plugging away at this,” says Meteyer, the pathologist who helped identify AVM. Over the years, when asked about the frustrating parts of her career, she’s pointed to AVM as one of them.

Yet there are still more puzzles to solve. Where is the cyanobacteria getting the bromine? The element is relatively rare in fresh water, but Wilde says that hydrilla seems to sequester it. The concentration in the plant is 300 times higher than in the water column. How bromine is getting into the lakes in the first place is another mystery; the study authors suggest that it could be from coal plants that use bromine to remove mercury or, ironically, from herbicides used to kill the invasive hydrilla.

The key to preventing bird deaths from AVM might be simply weeding out hydrilla. The conditions that led to the original eagle deaths—a man-made lake, an invasive plant, bromine pollution—were an accidental confluence of many human choices that engineered the environment. Remaking the world for bald eagles means engineering their habitats again, but deliberately. One strategy, Wilde said, is stocking lakes with sterile grass carp, which are “shocked” with changes in temperature or pressure in the egg stage to give them an extra chromosome. These carp live several years and eat the hydrilla, but are unable to reproduce. (Lab studies on whether the toxin affects the fish have been contradictory.)

In Arkansas, where this all started, biologists stocked DeGray Lake with sterile grass carp, as well as a fly native to Pakistan whose larvae eat hydrilla. Those measures, along with a yearslong drought, wiped out the hydrilla completely. Bald eagles there are no longer afflicted by AVM. And bald eagles across the country are no longer endangered, thanks to decades of conservation efforts including the elimination of DDT. Scientists are now trying to restore the native vegetation at DeGray Lake, this time without hydrilla and its associated toxin-producing cyanobacteria.