#my love to Warcraft universe began from it actually

[doli-nemae]

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans

[ink-and-flame]

Kinktober Day 5: Nukklebust Productions Presents

Kinktober Day 5 Prompts: Kneeling ~ Triple penetration ~ Video (being recorded) Fandom: Original (Auchendale Archives) Tags: exophilia, m/f, slight f/f, orgy, triple penetration, kneeling, video recording, pornography, group sex, anal plug, sex toys, Pairing:GoblinM/HumanF, GoblinM/ElfF, HumanF/ElfF

[Authors Note: This is purely self indulgent smut that I have written for my own personal enjoyment and it is loosely based on a dream I had a few weeks ago. I was torn between putting this in Warcraft or not and I decided to put it in the Auchendale universe so I can use Ember since I kind of fell in love with her, which was unintentional since I made her on a whim. Vyzzie was borrowed from a friend with permission.]

The owners of The Scarlet Eclipse had some very firm rules on photography and video being taken in the club. The top rule was that in general it wasnt allowed. This was to help enforce privacy rules and ensure that the people who came to the club felt safe. The exception to the rule was, of course, pornography. The owners had a relationship with a few directors in the industry and allowed some of their rooms to be used for photo shoots and film shoots as long as nothing got out of hand and it was kept quiet. The location was never allowed to be revealed. 

There were limitations of course, no large productions, and only so many rooms could be rented out for this purpose. The club still needed to cater to its own clientele of course, and it opened up the opportunity for people to explore their own exhibitionist and voyeuristic fetishes. Once it became known, it was an open secret around the club. Privacy was still respected, but the owners invested in a remodel that turned a couple of the rooms into permanent filming areas. They could be accessed through a special door and from the outside and the area could be locked down if needed.

When not in use by professionals, the owners allowed club members to book the rooms for a fee and they would get a copy of the finished product for their own personal enjoyment. Some allowed their amateur films to be released online, most kept them private. VIP members of the club were allowed to use these areas for free with enough prior notice. As it was, there was a waiting list, and sometimes it could take a few months to gain access to one of the rooms, especially if you needed a specific one. 

The club owners had made it easy to check the availability of the rooms online, and there was a link to the waiting list. Anyone already on it could also check their place in the queue. Vyzzie had been checking every day for the last few weeks to see if his request had been bumped up in the queue. He had paid extra and used his friends VIP access to cut in line as much as he could. He was eager to do the scene and had been making preparations for almost two months now. The preparations had to be changed multiple times already as people had backed out and Vyz knew the longer it took the harder it would be to do.

Thankfully his friend had promised not to back out and had even suggested bringing someone along so she wasn’t the only female in the scene. It meant they could do much more with what they had left and the plans for the scene had begun to change. It was shaping up to be one of his better ideas, he just had to make sure the people still on board stayed on board. 

The idea had come about after a wild night with two chicks he didn’t really know well. He ended up getting kind of close to one of them and she had expressed a desire to have another threesome but with two guys instead. He knew someone that would be interested and it had been fun, but then they got to thinking, why not invite more people, and the idea developed into something that Vyz was quite eager for, as was his new friend Ember. 

Vyzzie had promised that he would only invite people she trusted, and Ember offered to bring her elf friend from the first time. It was shaping up to be quite a scene and once it was settled the negotiations began and everything was put in place with an understanding of what was expected of everyone. Simple color codes would be used instead of safe words so that everyone could be on the same page and no one got lost or confused.

When the day finally came Vyz could barely contain his excitement. He had gone over the details with Ember so many times that they both decided to share control of the situation. It also lead to copious amounts of sex between the two of them as every time they discussed it the conversation would inevitably arouse one or both of them. They had pretty much fucked on every surface in Vyzzie’s apartment, including his roommate's bed. That one he wasn’t particularly proud of when it was discovered and he had to do a lot of apologizing to make up for it. 

With Ember in tow and some luggage Vyz arrived at the club a few hours before the filming was going to start. This was pretty standard to give them time to set up, and get everyone ready. He was practically vibrating with excitement the goblin looking up at his human companion with mischievous violet eyes. 

“Ok, so it’s gonna be an hour before the others show up. I thought we could get everything set up and go over the negotiations one last time. Make sure nothin essential god missed.” Vyz opened the door to the main room and dropped off his bags before peeking into the equipment room off to the side. It housed all the recording equipment, back up servers, everything they needed but it was empty. “Ok looks like the crew ain’t here yet. S’fine, gives us a bit more time.”

Ember moved around the room checking things out and setting her luggage near the back wall and out of the way. She could change later. For now the room needed some work. The bed would be plenty large enough for all of them, not much else in the room would make it into the shot, but it was still worth it to spruce up the room and make it look nice. Despite what they were going to be doing, Ember wanted it to have a soft feeling and she began digging through the chests full of props and accessories to see how they could alter the look and feel of the room.

“Whatcha got there dollface?” Vyz had slipped up behind Ember, placing a hand on her ass and peering into the chest she was digging through. 

“I was hoping to find something to help the room look less plain and sterile. The bed is nice, its a good size. The furniture all matches and it looks ok. Has a bit of a hotel feel which might be on purpose, but I was kind of hoping for something a little different?” She looked at him and rolled her eyes when she felt him rubbing her ass. “You are getting awfully friendly there Vyzzie.”

“Yer my friend.” He quipped and pinched her. “Don’t worry. I remember. No attachments. Doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy the benefits package.” Smirking he dug through the chest with a free hand, black claws catching on some fabric. “I trust your taste. I know we were only at your place once, but I liked it. Lots of lights, colors. Had that weird gothic rainbow vibe going. You got a unique style Em, that is for sure.”

“How about we change the lamps, throw up some lights on the wall, drape some fabric around and soften the whole room up a bit. Considering what we are going to be doing, it will be a really interesting contrast I think.” Ember pulled some sheer fabric from the chest and began draping it on the headboard.

“I like how you think. Let the room be soft, the actions hard.” Vyz helped change out the room decor to match her vision. It was getting close to when the others should start arriving. “Hey, uh.. Emmy? You know if you aren’t sure about this or need to change some stuff I will understand. You know that right?”

Ember laughed. “Emmy?” She stepped over to Vyz, running a hand through his dark blue hair. “Yeah Vyz. I know. I wouldn’t have agreed to this if I didn’t trust you.”

“I will make sure your boundaries ain’t crossed. I know ya got some hang ups and all that. Don’t want there to be any pressure in the moment to do anything you ain’t sure of. I know how it gets once a scene starts and ya get caught up in it. Don’t want that ta happen here.”

Ember nodded. “That is why I brought a precaution. I really don’t like anal, and I won’t be able to relax if I worry that it might happen, even accidentally. So I brought a plug with me to help. If something is already there that I am comfortable with, then nothing else can go in and I can relax. I know it sounds counter intuitive and it took me a long time to get to a point where I can even use it, but it actually helps and functions in a way that lets me maintain control over it.”

“Not weird, makes a lot of sense actually. You control its size, when you use it, and it prevents anyone you are with from just having an ‘oops’ moment or doin the whole ‘it's better to ask forgiveness than permission’ nonsense. I hear ya, I support it. Need any help or just some privacy?” 

“I can go put it in myself, wont take me too long I prepared myself for it but didn’t want to have it in all day. Give me a few minutes to get ready if you want to finish the room?”

“Sure, no problem, I can get it done.” Vyz went back to putting the finishing touches on the room when the crew arrived. 

They began setting up the cameras at the goblins' instruction and made sure all the equipment was well hidden so as to not ruin the scene. There would only be so many angles shot and the final product would time some time to edit and put together into something polished and finished, ready for release, but Vyz was fine with waiting. 

He had initially thought to hire a scene director, someone to keep everyone on track, but instead chose to work through the scenario with everyone, set a basic structure, and then just let things happen naturally. He wanted it to be real, visceral, and that wouldn't happen if there was a script or strict direction to follow. 

Ember came back into the room with nothing but a mask and some thigh high socks on. The masquerade mask was small, simple, and not too bulky. It would stay on easily, and leave her mouth and nose free. The thigh highs were a request from Vyz. The only other things she had on was special body make up that would hide her tattoos and dried down so it wouldn’t smear. She had practiced with it before, going through an intense sex scene to see how well it held up to sweat and other body fluids along with friction. It held up well enough that she was confident in being filmed. She knew her tattoos were recognizable enough that she just wasn’t willing to risk it since Vyz made it clear this wasn’t going to stay private.

The muscular goblin let out a low whistle when he saw Ember. The thigh high socks were perfect. A soft looking material, black, and they hugged her thighs in a way that made it clear they wouldn’t move. The mask was black with silver accents and it made her look elegant. “Damn, you sure do make a pretty picture there Em. So uh, when is Vela gonna arrive?”

“She should have already been here. I told her she needed to get here early to get ready. I hope everything is ok. Let me text her real fast.” Heading back to her bags to grab her phone Ember didn’t notice the door opening again.

The rest of the goblins arrived as a group. Vyz greeting his friends and acquaintances with a smile. “Glad ta see ya made it boys. Ember is in the back finishin up and we are just waitin on Velasara. I think you only met Ember though” Vyz commented to his friend. 

Coming back out Ember paused to see a room full of goblins standing around. All eyes were suddenly on her and never before had she felt more like prey. The moment passed quickly but it was hard to shake as a few sets of eyes lingered. 

“Here lemme introduce you. Ember you already know Krazz from the party. Those two are Riznik and Viznik, twins if it wasn’t obvious, and that is Zorblix.” Vyz finished the introductions.

“Just Blix.” 

Ember nodded and waved. “I would appreciate it if my name wasn’t used during filming, if it is all the same.”

“Sure thing, not a problem. Anyone else?” Vyz knew that both women would be in masks, but he wasn’t sure about anyone else.”

“I’m good with not using names. We all wearing masks or just the girls?” Krazz rolled his shoulders  and looked for a place to set down his bag. “I brought one with me just in case. No offence but I am not sure I want to be recognized.”

“We can just avoid names entirely if it helps. I can’t imagine there is gonna to be much talkin” Vyz chimed in, his accent sounding much thicker in comparison to his friend. 

“I don’t really give a shit either way. Not my first rodeo, so it is all fine with me.” Blix moved off to the back of the room and began stripping. 

There was a knock interrupting the conversation and the door slowly opened. “Hello? I am sorry I am late.” Vela stepped in looking a bit frazzled. “Sorry got caught up and it took me some time to get everything together. I hope I didn’t put us too far behind?” 

“Nah, yer good, we ain’t even started.” Vyz waved the lithe elf over and gestured to the back. “Go get ready and we can do a final run through and just make sure everyone is on the same page before we begin.” Vyz moved back to the recording room and spoke to the staff there, making sure that they would be ready to go as soon as the group finished their preparations. 

While Vyzzie was busy, the rest of the goblins stripped and got ready for the scene. The twins were engaged in a bout of rock paper scissors to decide who got which girl to start as they wanted some separation to start. Krazz slipped on his own mask, looking a bit like a corvid with the beak design. It was a little flashy for porn, but it went well with Ember's mask. He hoped that he would get a shot with the human at some point as he had been attracted to her since they met at a party Vyz had invited him to. 

Blix was busy strapping on his harness and cock ring. Fully prepared for taking over should the others struggle with any part of the scene. Of all of them he had the most experience performing for the camera,  he knew the best angles, how to position himself, and all the tricks needed to not blow his load too quickly. Considering how hot the girls were in this scene, those were some tricks he was going to have to utilize. 

Velasara came back looking an almost striking opposite of Ember. Her thigh highs were white with ruffles, her mask had white feathers and delicate gold filigree. She was taller than Ember with a lithe and delicate frame and soft features. Comparatively her body was a bit more slender when compared to Ember's more generous curves. The contrast made the pair enticing to look upon and the goblins in the room struggled to remain professional. 

Ember leaned up and tugged Vela down to whisper in a long ear. The tittering laugh from the elf filld the room as both women seemed quite amused about something. It made Vyz a little suspicious and he hoped that this wasn’t going to be something he needed to worry about later. 

“Ok, so here is the scene. I figure it will be easier if we don’t all start at first. I was thinking the girls could have a solo scene together or with one other person involved, then we can introduce some others, or if we are worried about time, then maybe we all just start? Opinions?” Vyz was looking around at the people gathered and realized how this looked. He hadn’t meant to only invite goblins, that was how it worked out. With all the cancellations and rescheduling, this was the group he ended up with and looking at it objectively, this would probably end up in a fetish category when released, even if there wasn’t a ton of kink involved. 

“Well are you looking to build a plot or not? Like do we want to have dialog, a wisp of a story, or just get to the fucking already?” Ember asked as she leaned into Vela

“Good question, uh, any thoughts, I know we ain’t got a ton of time. I booked us for the rest of the day, but gettin shots set up can eat into that, and we don’t really have a script. I kinda wanted this ta feel natural, a bit more amateur and spontaneous.” Vyz admitted.

“Eh, speaking as the one with experience here. Neither are going to work. It is too late to try and fudge a script and just jumpin in is going to get someone injured. I say let the girls warm each other up, that should also warm the rest of us up and get the mood set. I can tell first timers when I see em and there are some nervous faces in this group.” Blix walked up to Vyz and gestured to the setting. “Plus, with a setting like this, it just screams lesbian porno. So why not start that way? Then we transition into the spit roasting, the group sex, multiple penetration shots, all of that.” He shrugged and his eyes widened. “Oh, condoms? We doing condoms or creampies?”

“Creampies” Vyz interjected. “That is why this took so long. Everyone had to test clean and have alternative forms of birth control. We can switch to condoms if anyone is still uncomfortable with sloppy seconds or had some questionable interactions since getting tested.”

“Ok so it seems like we are ready. Vela, after you.” Ember gestured to the bed and smiled as her elvish friend climbed up on the bed. Ember followed staying on her hands and knees while Vela got situated. 

“What the fuck is that?” Blix blurted out and both girls fell into hysterical laughter. 

It took several moments for them to calm down enough for Ember to speak. “I have some hangups where anal sex is involved. I felt the only way I would be able to relax is to ensure that it couldn’t happen, even accidentally. Thus, an anal plug.”

“Ok, yeah, I get it, makes perfect sense. What I meant, was why is it flashing like a rave?”

Ember fell over laughing again and just shook her head, it took her a bit to compose herself. “Look, it is a thing with me. I never do anything even halfway normal. You see my  hair. My house look like a goth and a unicorn got into a fight. I like bright shiny things and honestly with the lights on it shouldn’t even be that noticeable or a distraction. I set it to slow strobe and match the lights hanging on the wall above the bed.”

“Ok, alright. One more question. Where did you get it and how much?” Blix was laughing and shrugging at the stares he was getting. “What? I wanna add one to my collection ok?”

“Let's talk after. I can give you all the details.” Ember slid up next to Vela and gave her friend a gentle kiss. 

Both women were clearly nervous to start and Vyz knew that the first several minutes of footage probably wouldn’t be used. Watching them slowly explore each other was a different kind of arousing entirely, and it was difficult not to get caught up in the moment and just be content with watching. The slide of their bodies together, the soft moans, the way the colors of their limited clothing contrasted, it was a truly beautiful sight. One that Vyz was loathe to interrupt, but knew he would have to if they were going to get to the point of the scene. 

The others held back waiting for Vyz to give the signal, It was hard not to be entranced, watching the women together. Especially once it was clear that they forgot where they were and were simply focused on the pleasure. Vyz held off a bit longer, watching with a slow smile as the women rocked slowly together at first, then sped up. The sound of their shared orgasm rang through the room snapping the goblins out of the spell they had been under. 

Ember lay next to Vela, her breathing slowing to normal as they nuzzled and kissed each other. Hands still exploring as they enjoyed the afterglow of their shared pleasure. Ember would have to remember this, maybe invite Vela over sometime to just see how things might work out between them. Up until this moment Ember was certain her elvish friend was straight, maybe that was not the case now and it was something worth exploring, only later. 

The bed shifted slightly as Vyz hopped up on the bed, crawling over to Ember and nipping her shoulder and neck. Pulling her gently and slowly to another part of the bed. The only way this would work was with a bit more space between the woman. Krazz was next on the bed, slipping up next to Vela and stroking over her sides and hip, his hands slipping up to her breast, fingertips teasing over her nipple. 

Riz and Blix joined Krazz by the elf, all of their touches light. Wanting to start slow, ease into it. Viz, was the last to join, slipping up next to Ember and Vyz, nuzzling at the human’s ample chest. Everything was slow to start, no one wanting to be the first to break the soft moment that had somehow been created. Vyz was the first to lose his battle with desire and pushed Ember onto her stomach, slipping a pillow under her hips and angling her face away from him. 

It was simply impossible to resist her, the scent of her, the sight of her, Vyzzie buried his face against her nether lips and pushed his tongue in, tasting her depths. Lips crooked up in a half smile at the sound of her moans suddenly being muffled. He didn’t have to look to know what had just happened and he was excited at how much Ember seemed to be enjoying it. Cutting his oral exploration short, Vyzzie lifted up and angled himself behind her, pushing his hard cock against her slick opening. She was so wet, so much wetter than he had expected and found it was far easier to slide in that usual. 

While the flashing light was a bit of a distraction, Vyz found it easier and easier to ignore the deeper he slid into Ember until he was balls deep and groaning. His claws dug into her skin as his control slipped for just a moment and he had to pause before thrusting. His ears twitched at the sounds coming from the other end of the bed and he risked a glance over at the elf. The sight was almost enough for him to lose it right there and he had to snap his gaze back down to Ember. 

Vela was up on her knees, Riding Riz, with Blix behind her, and Krazz standing with a firm grip on her head as he thrust into her mouth. Blix was still gently preparing her with some lube and a finger while he encouraged Riz with a quiet voice to keep a slow pace and to gently stimulate her clit. Blix knew that increasing the elfs pleasure was going to keep her relaxed and make penetration much easier. The extra lube helped as well and he wanted to make sure that she was fully ready before even attempting penetration. His experience was why he was the one handling preparing her and subsequently the one to be granted the pleasure of having her that way. 

Viz was careful, his hands resting on Ember’s head more than holding it as he thrust into her mouth. He was originally going to let her set the pace, and at first he did, but found that it just felt too good and he could not resist the urge to move his hips. He was focused, entirely on her and how it felt to be so far in her mouth and pushing into her throat. The feeling was unlike any other he had experienced, as this was his first time really trying anything with a human. He had a preference for orcish women, but now he wasn’t so sure that would be the case going forward. There was something softer, sweeter, more delicate about a human and he was eager to have his turn with the elf as well. 

Ember’s eyes rolled back in her head as Vyz snapped his hips forward hitting that spot so deep that only he ever seemed to hit just right. The feel of someone both in her throat and fucking her was becoming overwhelming. It was everything she had wanted from this experience and a little more. She could tell Viz was going easy on her, and she tried to encourage him when he began thrusting into her mouth. Closing her eyes she swallowed around him, letting her throat constrict around the head of his cock making him moan. It clearly worked to erode at his control as his hips snapped forward suddenly. She opened her eyes and looked up at him, his expression was one of slight concern. She just nodded, hoping he understood. 

It was pure heaven when Viz finally took the hint that she could handle it and threaded his fingers tighter in her hair, getting a good grip and tugging as he pushed his cock deeper into her throat. She was no longer giving him a blowjob, he was fucking her face, and her moans got louder and louder as she drew closer to release. The feel of her friend fucking her so hard and deep, his balls slapping against her clit as his sharp claws left little pinpricks of pain in her hips increased the sense of euphoria washing over her. Ember slipped into a more relaxed state, letting her body go slightly limp so that she could more easily be penetrated by both goblins. Soon her nose was pressed into the dark curls above Viz’s shaft as she felt his cock swell in her throat. A loud sharp moan from above her and the sudden heat in her throat let her know the goblin had reached climax.

Rope after rope of cum was pumped into her throat as Viz pulled out, some of his seed coating her mouth and lips, some hitting the mask as he fell back panting, clearly worried that he was choking her. With her airway free Ember could be better heard as she also reached climax almost the same time as Vyz did inside of her. The combined pleasure of dual penetration and stimulation was more than enough to send Ember over the edge hard. Vyz hunched over her back as he found his own release. 

Vela was on edge as well with Krazz thrusting more firmly into her mouth while Blix had slowly pushed inside of her. The feeling over all her holes being filled was one she had never thought she would enjoy and was now worried she would become addicted to. Somehow Riz and Blix found a Rhythm that kept almost constant stimulation within her, an almost overwhelming sensation as she was filled beyond anything she had ever experienced before. Surprisingly Vela was the first to reach release, easily, as Riz had continued stimulating her clit while she rode him. Since they were not closed to finished, the goblins did not stop and continued to fuck the elf right through her first orgasm. 

Blix helped Riz by taking over the clitoral stimulation so the other goblin could get a better grip on the elf to thrust deeper and faster up into her. Krazz kept his movements slow, despite wanting to just let go. He wanted to keep an eye on her to ensure that she remained ok, and he wanted to draw this out as much as possible. Vela was well on her way towards a second orgasm when Riz thrust up hard into her with a loud cry, his body shaking slightly as he emptied his seed inside of her. He could tell that Blix would probably be next and helped by reaching up and teasing Vela’s nipples to see if he could send the elf over the edge again.

Vela came almost at the same time as Blix who had snarled as he finally came, almost biting her and stopping himself at the last minute as he just pressed his forehead against her back and rode out his own pleasure while pumping his cum deep inside of her. The contractions of her body milking him for every drop he had as his grip on her remained tight. Krazz was the last to release, finally letting himself go and speeding up, pushing almost his full length into her throat with a loud cry. He almost fell over from the intense pleasure as he had unintentionally edged himself for the last bit of it. 

Carefully the goblins pulled out of their partners and all that could be heard was the sound of light panting and breathing normalizing. Vyz was the first one to speak. “Ok swap? Who wants to swap.”

Krazz raised his hand. “I call your position.” The others laughed at how quickly he responded. 

Blix shook his head. “I am good where I am if there are no complaints?” 

“Nah, I’m good, I’ll swap.” Riz offered. “Unless you want to stay with Ember Vyz?”

“That would put you and your brother on the same girl, that ok?”

“I don’t care, as long as our balls don’t touch it ain’t gay right?” Viz offered as a joke, he new that gay wasn’t the problem in that scenario, but it wouldn’t be the first time they had shared.

Ember lost it a little bit at that and then so did Vela. The boys had to wait for the giggling to die down before new positions could be achieved. Krazz rolled Ember onto her side, moving the pillow. 

“This ok?” He asked before positioning her leg up on his shoulder. 

Ember nodded and tilted her head up at Vyzzie. She had expected him to take a turn with Vela, and maybe he would, the night was young and there was no reason that they wouldn’t swap positions a few more times, especially with some of the ideas Vyz had shared with her during planning. He was smiling at her, stroking her hair away from her mask and carefully wiping the cum from it. Ember realized, from the look in his eyes that they might need to have a conversation later. It was clear an attachment might be forming and she just wasn’t ready for another relationship. Something she hoped wouldn’t ruin the friendship they already had. Glancing down she could see the eager look in Krazz’s eyes as he gazed down at her, positioning himself against her cum soaked folds. Ok, strike that, maybe a conversation with Vyz could happen after she got him and Krazz alone sometime and had them fuck her absolutely senseless. She had a feeling this was going to be a bit of a wild ride and while she still could she glanced over to see Vela being re positioned, clear glee on her friends face, even with the mask there was no missing that expression. 

The night was filled with the sounds of moans as the group quickly forgot the cameras and worked on trying as many different positions and combinations as they could before eventually collapsing in and exhausted heap and snuggling up together before the staff gently reminded them that closing time was less than an hour away. 

Overall, the experience had been one that wouldn’t be easily forgotten and new friends had been made from the most unlikely of scenarios. They all agreed that this was something they would like to try again, maybe with a script and more elaborate costumes, but that was a conversation for a later date when everyone was clean and well rested.

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #398

“freedom is just man’s invention, & a soldier is just a slave”

What do you do the most when you’re online? Watch/listen to YouTube. Do you have a bobblehead? No. Have you ever spent your birthday alone? No, that sure would suck. Were you afraid of heights as a child? Actually no, but NOW I kinda am. Have you ever had a lead role in a play? No. Would you ever take a solo road trip? No, that sounds super depressing and lonely. Do the mountains fascinate you? Of course! So much history built into a magnificent, awe-inspiring piece of nature. Have you ever been insulted or called names by a significant other? Wow, no. I wouldn't tolerate that for a second. What’s your favorite movie battle scene? The fight between Simba and Scar is very powerful imo. Have you ever been to a same-sex wedding? No, but not because I'm opposed. I'd love to go to one and be the photographer. What’s your favorite Marvel movie? Probably one of the Spider-Man films. I don't remember which it is, and I don't want to spoil it by explaining what I do recall. Did you have a Walkman when you were a kid? No. What’s the most difficult experience you and a significant other have gone through together? Being long-distance when we really wanted each other's physical comfort. Have you ever attempted to pick a lock? Did you succeed? Yes, because Ashley locked her keys in the car. I don't remember if it worked, actually. Have you done the Bratz doll challenge for YouTube? No. I've seen a couple people do it, though, and it's both cool and creepy. Does the hospital in your town have a good reputation? NOOOOOOOOOOOO. What is your favorite nickname that you’ve had? "Bee" from Megan. Have you ever gotten a professional massage? No. I would be SO uncomfortable. If you had braces, do you wear your retainers still? No. :/ Well, the one you put in, anyone. I have a metal one behind the front row of my bottom teeth. If you had braces, have your teeth moved since you got them off? Yes. Do you know anyone personally who’s lost a child? I know way too many people who have suffered miscarriages. Do you take your medications regularly? Yes. What’s one luxury item you wish you could afford? An actually nice house. What’s your favorite thing to do in a swimming pool? Just kinda casually swim around. Have you ever been abused by a cop? No. What is one thing that you took to show-and-tell as a kid? My Snorlax plushy. Do you remember losing your first tooth? No. In the summer would you rather have the windows down or the A/C on in the car? I strongly prefer A/C. Have you ever been addicted to a game? What game? I had a long-time addiction to World of Warcraft for a couple years or so. I still play it now, but I'm not addicted to it anymore. As a matter of fact I get bored of it easily now. Which was better: the original The Lion King or the sequel? The original, but I love both very much. Do any of your grandparents have a tattoo? I don't know if any did. Do you believe that your pets feel love towards you? Roman, 120%. It is so obvious. Venus, no, as reptiles are literally incapable of experiencing that emotion. I do, however, know she trusts me. Are you proud of your body? FUCK no. Have you ever been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance? No. How do YOU believe the world & universe started? I don't know. I feel like MAYBE there is some sort of ultimate intelligence that formed the universe (maybe prompted the Big Bang, though I've always been dubious of that occurring naturally), but I don't think of this topic frequently at all. Does it really matter, after all? We're here, so just focus on that and live in the now. Have you ever stuck gum under a desk/chair? NO, that shit grosses me the hell out. When shopping at a grocery store, do you return your cart or just leave it? Return your fucking cart, please. It is NOT that difficult. What is one thing you’d never want your parents to find out? Certain places I've, uh, "done" things. When you were little, did you like Dr. Suess books? Yep. I seriously loved Green Eggs and Ham. What would you consider unforgivable? Rape is #1. Would you rather give your food to a homeless shelter or money to charity? Food to a homeless shelter, but I'd love to do both. What was your least favorite year of your life so far? 2016 was a fucking NIGHTMARE. Have you spent money on a game online? On one occasion, I asked if Mom would reactivate my WoW account, and when two expansions came out, I asked if she could buy them. I HATED asking. Thankfully, now, I'm rich enough in the game to pay for the "token" currency, which renews your subscription for a month, so I essentially play for free now. Have you been called a bad influence? Yes. Have any self-done piercings? Noooo. I only trust professionals. Ever pierced someone else? Again, no. Leave it to professionals, as well as someone without tremors. If you had a child with down’s syndrome, would you keep him/her? IF I wanted kids, of course I would. It really, REALLY bothers me when DS is the reason behind abortion. Mind you, I am pro-choice, but come on... Don't treat down's syndrome children as a curse. If someone tried to murder your child, do you think it would be wrong to expose them publicly and talk about it on social media? Of fucking course I would. I'd damn that person to hell myself. Is there a toxic person that you miss? I sometimes miss Colleen. Are you still contemplating going back to someone you shouldn’t? With Jason, yes. If he actually wanted me back (that will never happen, but anyway), I fear I'd say yes and probably would, realistically. When was the last time you had a new crush? When I realized I was bisexual. Do you want Jesus to come back soon? Back when I was a Christian, I was terrified of Judgment Day. I don't believe in it now. What is something you can’t wear because of your body type? I COULD wear whatever the hell I wanted, but I refuse to wear crop tops or strapless tops (or strapless bras). Oh, and thongs. No thanks. If you have curves, do you like them? I'm not curvy naturally, I'm just fat. Have you ever worn matching pajamas with someone? No, but that'd be cute. Has anyone ever mistaken you for being anorexic? No way. What fast food place do you avoid at all costs? Arby's, to name one. Are you afraid of deep sea creatures? Yes, especially giant squid. Have you ever agreed to purchase something on Ebay and got scammed somehow? Ugh, I got Ico THREE TIMES and they were ALL broken; they'd freeze in the first few minutes. Has anybody ever given you a promise ring? No. What is your favorite kind of cake? Red velvet. Honestly, have you ever eaten raw cookie dough? Yeah, multiple times. Were you outdoors or indoors more as a kid? I'd say it was a split down the middle. Have you ever had a relationship that began via text? Jason, Tyler, Juan, and Sara all began over text. Girt asked me out over Facebook Messenger. Do you think sloths are cute or ugly? They're cuties! What eyeshadow suits you best? I only wear black eyeshadow. Do you watch the show Wizards of Waverly Place? I did as a kid and really liked it. Have you ever been to the rainforest? No. I don't think I could handle the humidity, though I'd love to see all the beautiful wonders. Are you a member of any clubs? No. Would you shave your head with a friend who had cancer? If it was someone I was very close to and they were extremely self-conscious about it, I'd probably be willing to get very short hair, but I don't think I could handle no hair at all. How did you meet your pet? Roman was one of the kittens of Ashley's mother-in-law's cats. She has way too many cats and needed to get rid of the kittens, and I'd been wanting one like mad. I found Venus via the online reptile-selling hub called Morph Market, and I became VERY interested in the many, many ball python morphs, and when I saw her, I immediately knew that was my baby. Did/Do you have any PEZ dispensers? I did as a kiddo. What are some of the phrases in your personal ‘bingo’ card? "Mood," "can't relate," "hi, how are ya," "jinkies," "yikes," "oof," shit like that. Have you ever been through a trap door? No. Do/did you have to wear a uniform to your high school? No, only middle school. How many video games do you own? A whole lot. Have you ever visited a sex shop? No. Have you ever ridden a bicycle through a busy city? No, I'd be very scared to. Do you use Instagram? How often do you post there? I have two for my varying photography subjects. I post very rarely on both. Have you ever had a scary encounter with a wild animal? I have not.

[thestylesindependent]

Inside Eroda, the fictional Harry Styles island that’s baffled the internet

Full Text from The Telegraph 4/12/2019

It all started on November 20. A Twitter account opened in October released its first post: “The Isle of Eroda’s rich history is embedded in daily life as the ruins of many structures from the past remain standing across the land. #VisitEroda”

It looked like a new marketing campaign for a little-visited, off-beat beauty spot. But a quick search would show it didn’t actually exist. Yet, Eroda had a website. Advertisements for the place were popping up on Facebook and Google. People interested in all manner of nerdy subcultures were foxed – it had the whiff of a clever marketing campaign about it, but what was it for?

Within hours, an Eroda subreddit had been created to discuss it. People dived deep into web hosting details, and only became more baffled as they seemed legitimate: “it ain't no kid doing a school project”. Was it a scam, a game, an elaborate prank? Some were convinced it was the beginning of a new Cloverfield film, World of Warcraft, a new Channel 4 series or even a means of human trafficking.

Meanwhile, scores of “Harries”, the sub-group of Directioners dedicated to Harry Styles, were piecing bits of evidence together. The pop star was due to release Adore You, the second single off his forthcoming sophomore album. “Adore” backwards was “Eroda”, and the video, released on November 23, looked like it had been shot in St Abbs, the Berwickshire fishing village where Styles had been spotted shooting in August. As Eroda claimed more of the internet, Harries  – some of the most forensic fans in the world – were sent into a flurry of investigation.

The goliath churn of a pop star marketing campaign is fairly familiar by now: cryptic social media teaser, excitable release date news, lyric video, full video, rinse, repeat.

Styles, who will release sophomore album Fine Line on December 13 and Adore You on Friday, satisfied many speculating fans on Monday with a near-three-minute-long trailer for the single, along with an illustration of the star standing in the ocean, surrounded by fish.

To those who had been studying Eroda for the past 10 days it was the confirmation they had been hankering for: Eroda was a Harry Styles project, and it confirmed what they had always known – that he is an artist beyond the normal realms of pop frippery (by contrast, former bandmate Louis Tomlinson spent the same afternoon releasing a video in which he sings in a bunker wearing a Stone Island parka).

Styles’ trailer introduced Eroda, showing it to be an island in the middle of the Irish Sea “shaped unmistakably like a frown, it is home to an all-but-forgotten fishing village that has had perpetual cloud cover for as long as anyone can remember”. Scenes appear of a typical coastal village, with crashing waves and brave little houses facing them. It gets increasingly weird: we learn that it is bad luck to “mention a pig in a fisherman’s pub” and to “whistle in the wind, in case you turn a gust into a gale”; the island mustn’t be left on odd-numbered days.  

The inhabitants of Eroda’s village always frown, calling it “resting fish face”. Until, that is, a beaming baby appears amidst the gloom. Deemed “peculiar” (a word that pops up a lot), the boy – who grows up to become Harry Style – was outcast, leading him to deal with his angst by screaming into jars. “He had lost his smile, and without it, the world grew darker, the wind colder, and the ocean more violent” the pan-European narrator explains. “Loneliness is an ocean full of travellers trying to find their place in the world”, she continues, as Harry finds himself bonding with a stubborn fish, before the film ends “to be continued…”

So far, so intriguing. But delve a little deeper into Eroda and you may find yourself wanting to visit. The island’s website – beautiful island views and a template dating back to the late Noughties – looks remarkably similar to those for any other charming coastal holiday destination, say Bute or Oban. “No Land Quite Like It”, reads Eroda’s strapline, before offering a familiar-enough menu: Accommodations, Attractions, Guide, Home and About Eroda. The video is similarly convincing: “Make memories for your senses at VisitEroda.com”, a dulcet-voiced woman encourages over shots of crabmeat and speedboats.

It didn’t take long for the Harries to take over the Eroda subreddit, moderators becoming increasingly rigid in ruling nuggets of unrelated Eroda flotsam irrelevant to the cause of discovery (such as the user who wanted to discuss Eroda, but without any intervention from the Harries). Tumblr users were similarly invested: “What do the ominous references to Him portend? What are they serving at those town dinners? You think it’s a cute little coastal AU [alternative universe] but upon closer examination it’s full-on Wicker Man meets Hotel California meets Nightvale in the afterlife (which is what most of those places are anyway so sure why not),” posted 1D Discourse of the Day.

The whole thing is littered with wordplay. Eroda, for one, is Adore backwards (Harry’s next single is called Adore You). But, as Directioners have pointed out, the copy throughout the website nods to forthcoming Styles songs: The Fisherman’s Pub is located on the corner of Cherry Street and Golden Way (Cherry is one new song, Golden is another); the album will be released on Friday, 13 December and Eroda recommends avoiding a departure on an odd-numbered day. Eroda’s fishermen wear a single gold earring for good fortune – a look historically sported by Styles.

Directioners went further still: the hosting for VisitEroda.com and Styles’ website, doyouknowwhoyouare.com, were owned by the same company, MarkMonitor.inc. Social media pixels linked pages about Styles with Eroda. Fans became suspicious over Visit Eroda adverts appearing not on their social channels or YouTube, but, of all places, on Wikipedia. “I'M FROM FRICKING PORTUGAL,” a baffled Reddit user posted. “NOTHING EVER HAPPENS HERE. WHY IS THIS HERE”.

Eroda had analog presence, too. A4 pamphlets – the kind of thing one could make on MS Publisher circa 1998 – appeared in the freesheet boxes on the pavements of Manhattan. At a promo event in Paris, Harry was asked about Eroda by a fan. He remained silent, but those who were there claim he “made a face”.

By November 29, more evidence arrived. A short film “advert”, which used footage from the trailer released on Monday, was screened by a new Harry Styles fan account from “Eroda”. They said the film appeared in a cinema in Kinlochbervie, on Scotland’s northern coast; the Eroda account then started to tweet about cinema screening times.  Eagle-eyed fans were swift to post screengrabs, showing similar island formations in the background of both the Eroda advert and that featuring Styles. The two were linked.

Kinlochbervie was, fittingly, a bit of a red herring: the footage shown in both the advert and the video trailer was actually taken in St Abbs, a picturesque fishing village in Berwickshire that’s no stranger to a rolling camera – it was “twinned” with New Asgard after being used as a location for Thor’s new home in Avengers Endgame.

Styles was there in August, shooting, it appears, a few things for the forthcoming album campaign. He and his crew used Angela Morris’s cottage, in St Abbs’ Sea View Terrace, as a green room during the three days of filming in the village, after Morris had responded to a note being popped through the door from a filming company. “One Thursday I was just coming home from work and there was Harry walking into the house,” she tells me. “All of the costumes were in the living room, make-up was going on in the kitchen.

“I asked if I could wait in the garden before my husband and I went out for the evening, so I just sat there when Harry came out,” Morris said. “I think he was having a coffee, and he sat down and chatted, asked me about bits and pieces about the village. I was talking to him about his Gucci clothes and we had a bit of a laugh. I wasn’t too starstruck, really, and I think he appreciated that.” Later on in the shoot, Styles invited Morris and her husband to share a glass of champagne with him and the crew.

While the shoot interrupted the sleepy pace of life on St Abbs for a few days – Morris says that visitor numbers had already been boosted by Avengers Endgame but small crowds of teenage girls began to crop up after word spread of Harry’s location – most villagers, she reckons, are pleased to see the place put on the map: “Most people I saw were embracing it and interested to see what was going on.”

A German artist named Mario Klingemann was, however, more incensed when his holiday collided with the shoot: “I didn't know who Harry Styles was until today when I learned that he's the guy who blocked off the entire St Abbs harbour and prevented us from enjoying our fresh crab rolls," he posted on Twitter, aggrieved.

But Morris found out about Eroda much like everybody else – through Facebook. “It’s really odd,” she assess. “Lovely footage of beautiful St Abbs, though.”

Long-lens pap shots from that shoot certainly seem to match up with what we’ve seen of Eroda so far. Styles gangles around in Seventies suits, befitting the aesthetic of his trailer. The smoking gun, though, is the presence of a young woman with hair that brings to mind a Dr Seuss illustration, or the hat Princess Beatrice wore at the Cambridges’ wedding. VisitEroda’s “about” page explains: “The primary occupation in Eroda is fishing, however, the island’s art scene has recently started to develop. In particular, Erodean hairstyles have become a rather bold expression of self amongst the island’s youth”. Clearly, these are scenes of Eroda that are being filmed.

There’s an unmistakably ominous air to Eroda, and some believe the video for Adore You will see some misfortune befall Styles – there were reports of a (fake) gunshot being filmed in St Abbs while he was there.

But what happens next is arguably less intriguing than what we’ve been given with Eroda so far. We are well-used to being nudged and prodded by pop stars ahead of a new release. Major albums aren’t so much brought out as “dropped” or “leaked”, arriving online in the middle of the night before their fans disseminate them through the internet. Fans, rather than critics, are given early listens – and under tight NDAs. Artists will clear their channels to mark a new direction, only to give us elaborate photoshoots and contrived poetry to create a “concept”.

Eroda is undeniably a “concept” – themes of loneliness, peculiarity, conformity and happiness have been woven into the fictional island from the off. But it’s been artfully done; look deep enough into the Reddit forums and you’ll see non-Styles fans begrudgingly accepting that this is the work of a former boy band frontman, rather than that of a somehow more “serious” game creator, filmmaker or even musician. Furthermore, it’s fun – and that’s all too rare in a pop world where things have become obsessed with authenticity, and a rogue comment can result in “cancellation”. One Directioner popped up on a thread only to add, “As someone who works in marketing/promotion... This is fucking genius. Harry Styles' team is tops”, and it’s difficult to disagree.

After a decade in which stars have had to up their social media presence to survive, tweaking and teasing their listenership in ever-increasing desperation to retain shrinking attention spans, Styles is closing out the 2010s with the greatest album campaign we’ve seen so far. As an artistic statement, it suggests the 2020s will be his to claim.

[duraxxor]

Ooc Rant: WoW and Writing

Hi, Duraxxor’s mun here. Some of you may know me as Dura, Kaos, or even Batdad. I’ve come to a realization today that it’s time I’ve been open and honest here in light of recent events. While I was on vacation, I noticed that Blizzard had decided to have Ion announcing the upcoming patch to Battle for Azeroth dubbed Visions of N’zoth. At first, I was very excited, we were finally going to face off against an Old God and the Black Empire. There was so many types of great promises with the announcement and I was honestly pumped to hear it. I thought to myself “ Perhaps Blizzard has finally learned from their mistakes? “

Well, my followers and friends, I feel as though I was wrong due to the recent discussion in the subject of the Hearthstone championship. I’m not going to go into details since this is a dead horse but. . . It truly saddened me. Not just as a player but as a writer. I’ve paid 15$ ( 16$ because of state taxes by the way ) to do so much all these years. I’ve been passionate about World of Warcraft since TBC. And yet, now. . . Because of this negativity, I realized that I haven’t been happy in WoW for a long time. Battle for Azeroth let me down pretty harshly I just admit. I’ve watched as so many people from the community either quit or migrate to another game. A year ago, I was one the few who tried FFXIV ( and liked it for the most part for the game. I haven’t really been able to get into RP. ) Eventually, I had to make a choice and choose WoW not because I disliked FFXIV, but because of finances and the fact that WoW felt like it was my home.

Then, Classic WoW rolled around and I got to have a true vanilla experience. It’s fun, but it lacks the genuineness I was expecting in all honesty. My warlock sits at 42 because I just can’t find the drive to go further than that. It truly is a time investment, just like it was back in the day, something I don’t have a lot of through the weeks.

Now, here I am, coming home and feeling unmotivated to play the game at all. And to add to it, I feel like I’ve lost most of my motivation to continue the WoW aspects of RP. I don’t mean prompts and writing with indidvuals. I’m referring to the will to create personally story within that universe. I’ve been putting out a single chapter once a month if I’m lucky and I am way behind in terms of time. I haven’t even caught up with Naz’jatar in the timelines.

Now, before I get to my point, I want to take the time to thank @safrona-shadowsun and @sanguinesorceress for actually being there for me when I began to feel distraught and confused about what I must do with myself. You two have no idea how much you saved me from having a internal fit of anxiety.

So here it is. I think it’s time I stop focusing on Blizzard’s Warcraft and how it affects my story, and start looking more towards what Duraxxor/Alphus Durand Daevara/Batdad is about. It’s time to step away from World of Warcraft, and focus on bigger, better things alongside all of you lovely people, no matter the universe or timeline.

It’s time for Dura to go back to where he came from. Thank you all, for listening and reading.

- The Mun

[metriorhynchus]

Video Game Questionnaire

Tagged by @cyrraluu, thank you!! :З

I'm sorry it took me a little longer than I expected. :D

Games

First game you ever played: damn, I remember it like it was yesterday. It was Sonic the Hedgehog on SEGA MD. I was about... 4-5 years old, I guess. And of course, it was too hard for a little brat like me. But then, years later, I killed the last boss anyway. And was very proud of myself. :D But my love for this franchise has remained to this day (may the gods save Sonic from SEGA and Sonic Team please.......)

Favorite game: let me think... well, if I have to choose, I’ll choose Mass Effect 2. It doesn't mean I like other games less or anything. I don't know. This is a difficult question, ahah.

Game you’ve played through multiple times: SWTOR, Warcraft III (both RoC and TFT ofc), Mass Effect trilogy, DAO, DA2, Oblivion and Skyrim from the TES series, Bioshock trilogy, Borderlands 2 and many other games.

Game you hated at first but now love: Warcraft III. :D I don’t really like RTS. And I didn't like Warcraft either at the first launch or at the second. But I really liked the setting itself. So I forced myself to play. Now this is one of my favorite old games that is always installed on my PC and that I return to from time to time.

Game you used to love but now hate: TES V: Skyrim, I guess. It's not that I hate this game. But after all these years, I was very disappointed in it. I began to see problems that I hadn't noticed before. Now I have more experience, knowledge about the game industry, and more space for comparison. Let's just say that Skyrim is quite low on my list of preferred games. Not exactly, you know... hate.

Your favorite game atmosphere/setting(s): hmm. If we are talking about the atmosphere, it’s definitely a RDR2. If we are talking about the settings... it’s a Warcraft and TES universes.

Game with the best group/companion(s): Mass Effect 1-3 (for personal reasons I ignore Andromeda as much as I can), DAO, DA2, DAI, SWTOR.

A game with your favorite ending: The Last of Us.

A game with the worst ending: Mass Effect 3. Don't get me wrong, I love the Mass Effect trilogy with all my heart. But what they did with the ending of the third part... it just doesn't fit in my head. It was a magnificent rise and a really shitty fall. And for me, it was like spitting in my face. Not the same as the fact of Andromeda's existence, but also quite unpleasant. In russian, we call it “пёрнуть в лужу” - “fart in a puddle”. Literally.  

Best character customization: predictable The Sims 4 and BDO.

Heros and Companions

Your favorite playable character: fem!Hawke from DA2.

The funniest playable character: my smuggler from SWTOR. Both of them actually. :D

Your favorite companion(s): hmm... Garrus Vakarian and Liara T’Soni from Mass Effect, Varric Tethras and Leliana from Dragon Age, my guardian-druid friend from WoW, ahah.

Companions you could live without: the most part of trooper’s crew from SWTOR to be honest...

Relationships

Favorite game friendship(s): my fem!Shepard and Garrus Vakarian. 

Favorite game relationship(s): Tyrande Whisperwind and Malfurion Stormrage. I don’t really like Tyrande or Malfurion themselves, but their love for each other really kinda inspires me.

Favorite companion banter: yeah, that’s definitely Dragon Age. Especially DA2. :D

A relationship you weren’t sure of but loved: my fem!Shepard and Garrus Vakarian. It’s still not my headcannon, cuz it’s just the best friendship in the entire universe, but one of my walkthroughs showed me that it’s a really great romantic relationship.

A character you wish you COULD romance: Tallis from the Mark of the Assassin DLC for DA2.

A minor character you wish could be a companion: I dunno, to be honest. Probably, there are none. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Fun

Shoutout to a random NPC: Shademaster Kiryn from WoW.

A game you love watching playthroughs for and want to play: The Wolf Among Us.

Love watching playthroughs but won’t ever play: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. I still haven't got my hands on it. :’D

Online gaming or solo?: hmm... That's... a complicated question. Online, I guess. 

Why do you play video games?: video games have been with me all my life. This is my favorite hobby. Helps me get distracted, learn something new. Make a lot of good new friends. I dunno. Video games are just an integral part of my life and I'm completely happy with it.

[wowheadquarters]

I have a little idea for the 1k followers. As I followed this blog recently, I was wondering about his history. If you feel like it, could do a summary? Like, why did you start it? Your first joy/disappointment. Any thing that we haven't see that you might want to share. Absolutely anything about the blog and you. (If you're comfortable with it of course)

This is a very good idea, lovable anon, I’ll try.

History:

It was 17th November 2015, somewhen in Tuesday afternoon. I don’t remember what exactly sparked the idea of starting this blog, but I can say for certain that it was heavily inspired by the @bleachlists (which is, if you ask me, better humor than canon Bleach). And thus the first list was born.

(I never expected this blog to get famous. Or followers besides bots for that matter. I hoped, maybe, for a little circle of, like, 5 actual readers. I certainly didn’t think I would keep this blog for longer than 4 months. That’s how it is with me usually, I have bursts of inspiration but lack long-term dedication. The fact that this blog is still going is a miracle.)

At first the lists were written in the “chat” style. I had to make up my own prompts, because the two followers or so only hearted the posts but didn’t interact with me at all otherwise. That’s why the activity was very irregular at the time, I was writing when I was inspired and thus a month could pass without a word from me and then boom, three posts in a week. Additionally, I wasn’t writing only lists, but also short stuff, kind of like “Slice of life from Azeroth.” Of these the most famous is Chromie and Dragons and in my opinion the best one and not enough appreciated one is Kel’thuzad’s Heard Of Sylvanas’ Plans.

The first breakthrough came in January 2016 when an anon, who made me happy so much that I called them “lovable” in the list and kept on doing so for all following anons, requested the very first requested list, the Care of Babies list. For a long time this has been the list with the most notes. Now there are too many lists to keep count and Tumblr doesn’t do “the best of your posts,” but still it is one of the most popular posts I have and along with the Chromie and Dragons it still pops up in my notifications. Around April 2016 I had stable enough queue of requested lists to stop making up my own prompts, thus I could completely rely on prompts from followers, most of them from anons.

Another important milestone was August of the same year: First of all, I came up with a posting schedule (Fridays and Mondays, but two months later I understood that was too fast - It ate the prompts faster than they were prompted, and I wasn’t managing it). Then Taedal was added to the lists, at first he was meant as a joke, as I keep reminding him and everyone else, and somehow it happened he stayed here. Additionally, Varian and Vol’jin’s deaths were acknowledged, putting Anduin on the list. Soon after, Garrosh joined in from beyond the veil to annoy Vol’jin in his afterlife.

About this time the blog began to create it’s own lore (and not only the L.O.R.E.), and I even had the (short-spanned) will to mystify people that Taedal is going to get his own expansion. I even had a sideblog dedicated to Taedal (in fact, it was Taedal’s own blog, intentioned as a RP blog but somehow it never…got much traffic) and even a wiki. The wiki still exists! I like to think of this as the Golden Age of HeadQuarters verse, when I even got fanfics on AO3 and a dozen of drawings for this blog even. This blog lives in an alternate universe where there is a new isle west of Pandaria and Garrosh adopted 37 dead children in the afterlife and learned to be a better person (not necessarily the same as good person, but let’s not lose hope).

I don’t remember exactly on what occasion in the 2017 the Interviews were added, but they were the first not-list which were requestable (that is, they weren’t the short filler stuff I used to make before). I think it was to celebrate the first 100 followers but I might be wrong. The first Interview was held with Taedal, by my decision, and ever since then the Interviews went by request every twenty days, moved to every other Wednesday, later as of not-so-recently, every other Tuesday. In the history of the Interviews, there happened to be only one which wasn’t published, because nobody asked any questions. (It was Interview with Kel’thuzad, pt. 3, and I jokingly said that “ when we met, the Archlich thought I used the Interview as an excuse to go out for a date with him and things went awkward” which resulted in this Top N list).

From there things went rather fast. To here actually. As a celebration for 600 followers (or was it 500? Memory fails me) I began writing Top N, sort of as of a filler in between the Interviews, so actually now this blog has moved back to the biweekly posting scheme very close to the one from 2016. Earlier this year (2018), there was a list about attack on not-Theramore, where I made up a character especially for my timeline speculations - because timeline shenanigans, it is a bronze dragon, and because it is representing me, the character is called Authormi. That is a very poor play on the word “author” (because I am the author of this blog) and the “-ormu/ormi” suffix characteristic for the Bronze dragonflight. Coincidentally, it was also the first time I have referred to myself with any sort of name here on this blog (besides the FAQ where is a link to my main blog) and I am using it since.

An important part of the blog is post maintenance when I try to at least twice a month (but if I’m very responsible, then every Friday evening) go thorough the blog, update the Interview, Top N, and L.O.R.E. pages, delete old request asks and so on. However, over the years a good number of not-request asks had piled up in here. They were…not filtered here and the blog seemed messy with them. Which is why Authormi vs. Inbox tag was created and from time to time when too many not-request asks pile here, I dump them into these post as a sort of archive. I admit that it is not, uh… ideal in case you are looking for something specific, but it keeps the blog clean. Well, cleaner.

The most recent new development of the blog was the addition of the Allied Races leaders - Alleria Windrunner for the Void Elves/Ral’dorei, High Exarch Turalyon for the Lightforged, Jaina Proudmoore for Kul Tiras, First Arcanist Thalyssra for the Nightborne Elves/Shal’dorei, Mayla Highmountain for the Highmountain Tauren Tribes, Overlord Geya’rah for the Mag’har Orcs, and Princess Talanji for the Zandalari. The choice of the leaders is taken from the information on the Allied Races from Wowpedia.

Speaking of Wowpedia, it is my primal source, besides personal experience, when it comes to writing the lists. I used to rely on WoWWiki, but, uh… that one turned a bit messy a couple of years ago and I never get around to check on it now. When I don’t know something, I look it up on Wowpedia. If it’s not on Wowpedia, I consider it a Free Real Estate lore wildcard, which means I can bullshit it out as long as it is lore/character consistent. I pride myself on giving the characters (leaders) some actual character, because, now correct me if I am wrong, Blizzard writers confuse character personality for that wind flapping pole. I am not saying that I am writing “good” or “pure” characters. They have faults, they are prejudiced, foolhardy, depressed (in not romantic ways), mean, holding grudges. Some, like Garrosh, Genn or Gallywix, are more straightforward in their flaws than others, but I am pouring a cup of sour traits to everyone here. (What I am saying here is: Be critical when you read your favorite leader’s opinion. They might not be right and/or honest.)

Overview, as of today, Monday 19th November 2018:

Published 174 lists, 24 more in the queue + bunch of requests hanging in the asks among the posts. (Somebody needs to do their maintenance)

Published 25 Interviews, 9 more in the queue + some in the asks too, I think I saw one request or two.

Published 21 Top N lists (most favoured number for N is 10), 0 in the queue.

1009 followers, woooo! I love you all. Except the 1009th one who is a porn bot, you can go fuck yourself. ‘Xcuse me. 1008 followers now!

The blog is 3 years and 2 days old. Happy birthday!

Authormi’s pick of lists to read (besides the one linked):

What they say far too often: Vintage one, so you see what the old style was like.

What do the think of the heroes: Meta one!

Their pick for a movie night: There were no guesses on what movie is a Ayeroth-verse of what Earth-verse. I am proud of some of those titles.

No Orc Invasion: The first timeline speculation, which I really lvoed. If somebody was to write that AU, I’d read it actually.

If they could erase one person from existence: Another timeline speculation. I like making those!

Draw the squad: Maybe you could draw the squad?

Watching Les Misérables: This one was an especially important journey for me, because this list is why I saw the musical in the first place. Later I read the book too (I love the book), got into some Les Mis RP, made some very good friends out of that… Yeah, I owe this one lovable anon who requested it a lot. (More or less, now I am also a professional Valjean RPer, except I don’t get paid for it. Whenever somebody who knows me joins a new RP server and they haven’t got Valjean, they usually ask me. Like… what? How? Why? Why do you all think I am a good Valjean? Why- Never mind, this is a Warcraft blog. Moving on.)

Spell of the Violent Tongue: The first time it has been brought to my attention that I think about the characters in a way a lot fo other people doesn’t, because this list surprised a lot of readers, and by surprised I mean hit into feels so hard they complained to me. I talked about it with my mum later (family support is an important thing for me and mum is fan of Warcraft), and I’ve been told that “I treat the characters maybe a bit too realistically.” PSA for everybody: Warcraft is a story about broken people and violent racism.

Their God Tier: For the people who are fan of Homestuck too. (Homestuck itself is good. The fandom is weird)

Garrosh’s 37 ghost children: By which they became more or less canon on this blog, a regular stuff which is to be counted with.

How do they insult people: The most recent popular post.

Interview with Azshara: My personally favorite thing I have ever written for this blog, as in, I don’t think I am going to peak it.

Interview with Luxien: Because I want to press Taedal’s story and “expansion” to everybody, read the interview with his older evil sister.

Top 10 favorite characters: I suppose you are a bit curious who my faves are, so here you go.

Top 10 changes to the story I would do: By heart I am a storywriter. I give such things a lot of thoughts. But as I’ve mentioned earlier, lack of dedication is… making things hard.

Other cool stuff to check out (maybe?):

Taedal’s expansion wiki, of course. I have a lot of thoughts about that world and story and… I would love to went about it a bit, too.

This very cool fanfic on AO3.

The official portrait of Taedal.

The official portrait of Authormi.

The description of this blog, as taken from my personal blog:

wowheadquarters (WoW HeadQuarters, World of Warcraft Headquarters, WoWHQ) is by far my most popular blog, despite being younger than SNTS. I add new content twice a week, on Tuesday and Friday. I never thought I’d make more than 10 posts in total, but there we go. I admit that the original idea comes from bleachlists, but it has sort of evolved since then. I am trying to keep the blog not contradicting the canon, but some things in the HeadQuartersverse might not always agree with the official lore

Final words from Authormi:

Oh my fucking god, this is really unbelieveable that this thing is still going on. I never expected this blog to live beyond a month. I never thought I’d get more than 20 followers. I have 1000 now? That’s… is that Tumblr-famous? I’ve never had this many followers. Do you all read this? All the stuff? Am I shaping your view on the Warcraft universe? This is too much power for one person to have.

You want to know what’s actually my happiest memory connected to this blog? It was actually some time back (because my memory is a mess, I can’t tell you how far back), I had a really, really stuffed couple of weeks. A lot of to do, but also mentally exhausted, I was in a bad place for a bit there. Usually I am able to kick myself in the ass, sit down and make up the list on the go, even if it is bound to be miserable wreck of text, I write it. Sometimes when I am super done and tired, I write it on Saturday evening and pretend it’s Friday and so far everyone’s been so kind and there’s been no comment to that. But in those two or three weeks I just… couldn’t. Even clinging to this self-made structure was too exhausting. I wasn’t on Tumblr for basically the whole time (my main blog was fuelled by the queue). Sometimes when I am in a good place, I write lists in advance and schedule them, but at that time no such a thing took place, so this blog went silent without announcement and I couldn’t care less. When I finally found it in me to come online, my inbox greeted me with various people who were asking me if I was okay and whether or not I am still alive written in a very worried manner. And you know… reading that helped me a lot at the moment. It was a reminder that somebody here cares for me and cares for what I do and… Yeah, it was a damn motivation to get myself together a bit and write stuff and do some stuff. Since then I’m trying to announce in advance if I think I am not going to make it, and even then I am still trying to write the list as soon as possible when I am fit to.

A story for your amusement on this “write it when possible” note. This summer I was with my 4 younger siblings (my oldest sister, still younger than I, turned 18 last Thursday, the youngest sibling who also happens to be a sister is 4, but I don’t live with all the siblings, blah blah divorced parents blah blah, not related) and dad and grandfather in the beautiful village (or town?) of Au in Austria. I took my old laptop with me (I’ve got a new one recently) which had battery that could live on it’s own for, like 10 minutes. The house we were living in had no wi-fi, but there was a village-wide public wi-fi… which din’t reach the house. The nearest was at the bus stop, but that one was shaky, and the good reliable hotspot was at the park, 10 minutes of walk away from the house. Now, it was nearly Friday and I needed to post the list. So I wrote it int he laptop’s notepad, then turned off its life support, took it and dashed across all of Au to the wi-fi hotspot, formatted the document into a list, and hit post. About 2 minutes later, the laptop died.

I am thinking about making another blog directly meant for the asks, request or not, and those would stay there. What do you all think? Maybe I would lose things there, I am quite capable of it.

I’d love to talk about Taedal and his demons and his entire story a bit more. But I haven’t got, like, a reason to do so. I am sort of insecure in this matter, I sort of have the feeling that nobody really cares for Taedal here. “What are you thinking, a ‘good demon’ OC?” (Ask me about Taedal and his faction and the Broken and Distant Worlds expansion. I have an expansion and half planned in my head.)

There is some kind of an expectation or anticipation in me to have someone from Blizz discovering this blog and some big consequences happening. I am not sure whether I want it to happen or not. I mean, I am a bit… too-critical of their work in attempt to please the crowd here. (It’s easy to search for flaws when you take the good stuff as the norm. You are actually doing a good job, Blizzard, in the terms of game developing and marketing. But there is that one post going around which says that Warcraft lore/story is written by 9 people who cannot talk to each other. In this spirit, I am sure that there are 4 people writing charcter psychological profiles who don’t know of each other’s existence. Your animation is a snack, though.)

Wow. I suck at summaries. This is as brief as it gets.

[swampgallows]

it’s becoming harder and harder for me to find solace in places. the guilt inside me is becoming heavy. i know that if i want something, i need to make it happen, but i am so exhausted of having to do everything myself. and the things i do get help with i feel grateful, of course, but then so guilty that i’m needing to be helped that it’s incapacitating. i’m just so late in the game to everything. i’m so outside of life and what other people are doing. i’ve always felt that way, though. i’m never gonna snap into place like they want me to. 

i need to pick a career and stuff. i just have to like shot in the dark pick something at this point because there isn’t going to be some divine calling, my pittance from art commissions is not gonna be enough to sustain me (and i dont think i can get to a point where it will), im just so bogged down knowing that everybody is fuckin poor. 

part of me wishes i could wake up and just ‘be normal’. that i could throw away all the weird stupid shit in my life. the trashy little kid bracelets, the clown clothes, the nerdy interests, the ugly monsters (what on earth is an ‘orc’?), the hundreds of heavy and just plain weird records that are sooo boring and irritating and repetitive and loud and obnoxious. all the shit i’ve internalized about stuff i am beyond passionate about, the only fuel that keeps me alive and gives me a reason to wake up in the morning. i read once about brain trauma, that someone suffered an injury and when they woke up, all of their interests changed completely. they were a classically-trained musician, iirc, and ended up just selling all of their instruments and getting rid of all their books etc because it had absolutely no value to them anymore. they were completely changed. i dont remember what their new interests became, but... the thought of that has haunted me for over a decade. maybe someone will hit me in the head just right until i wake up and be a normal person who cares about normal, accessible things instead of all this fringe and abrasive fantasy bullshit. what if i woke up one day and became a devout christian? i roll over and my room is foreign to me, along with everything in it, and then i just throw it all away? i start over, stripped clean. tabula rasa. i get good interests instead. relatable adult things, like gourmet food and backpacking. i titter with the girls at the office and wear pencil skirts and focus on landing me a tall dark and handsome. 

the thought of becoming that thing is heartwrenching. painful. but it’s all obvious, of course, why i would ever have that masochistic fantasy of completely disowning my worthless oblong self. a me that isn’t ‘ruined’. 

i went through my kandi stash the other day trying to find all my kandi with bells on it (I could have sworn i had more). and going through a lot of it was a flood of memories. high school, college, raver days. when i was in high school, all by my lonesome, the only candy kid or rave-associated ANYTHING in my 4000+ fellow students, i had to wear a lot of my own kandi. and i did so as a beacon, a lighthouse, hoping that i could be a beaming signal to any other candy kids who might be in hiding. and i got so dizzy and self-consuming with my repressed interest that i became a zealot about it, being extremely rude and elitist about my interests because i felt a need to protect them. i felt the pressure of them looking to be watered down or erased. i was the same with warcraft. 

ten years later i’m not as rude about it, but i feel exactly the same way. in high school i had to wear my own kandi, would have it ripped off of my arms in big fistfuls by those who ostracized me, and had to be tongue-in-cheek and submissive about my passion, my very real and non-ironic DEVOTION to this. thank god on tumblr i can write 4000 word dissertations about garrosh hellscream and some of you crazy fucks actually bother to read it, but sometimes i still feel like that kind of pariah for having a very niche and very specific fixation. 

even people who played warcraft when i was in high school told me i took it too seriously because i roleplayed; and even roleplayers in the game told me i took it too seriously because i didnt want to sit around for 6 hours pretending to drink alcohol and trying to get laid, except as an elf. the fact that i really wanted to discuss the lore and delve into the story and the universe of azeroth, of how it would feel to be in that place, to live that life, ostracized me even from the people who claim to feel the same way. but roleplay was never about focusing on how our veins dont surge anymore as undead, how your digestive organs need to be removed post-undeath so they dont explode and rupture and hang out of your bowels like the abominations in the Undercity, how the undead are technically still the same citizens of Loraderon but are being ousted by their living counterparts in neighboring kingdoms. it was just “haha im a funny dead pirate man and i’m going to womanize 12 blood elf women at once behind all of their backs.”

in trying to become a gabber dj too, i felt like i had to take it upon myself because nobody else plays the music that i like. but alll of these things... it feels like i’m just building a house by myself. i feel like nobody truly, at the core, appreciates the intersection of interests that i have, or can only smile and nod at my fervor but not really understand it. and it’s nobody’s fault, nobody is obligated to feel what i feel. 

i’m glad people enjoy the garrosh posts and art that i make. and i’m glad that my friends make kandi with me now and encourage me to play gabber. i’m happy when i get some really good RP, even if i have to be the one to walk up every time. i’m glad that people want me to “do the thing”. i just feel like... there is no payoff once it’s done. everyone gets glad that it’s finished, and they enjoy it then, but then it dissolves. nobody is invested in it but me.

i know the solution is to be more accessible, but i can’t seem to imagine anything other than swinging the pendulum in the opposite direction. like, all or nothing. either you take all of my german expressionism with the warcraft meta and the rave shit, or you get nothing. i dont know how to dilute myself and that’s part of what was killing me at my job. i felt like a novelty. a doll. but it wasn’t their fault.. they couldnt relate to what i was talking about and passionate about, and it’s not their fault. they liked me because i was well-spoken and funny and a diligent worker, which are all nice and accessible things, but when nobody can cathect with me, really empathize with me, i feel like a jester. a consumable. 

my college roommates would tell me that they loved me because i was so funny. and that’s it. i existed as entertainment, but anything human about me—my passions, my interests, my insights, my memories—meant nothing. even my family will ask me a question and then cut me off in the middle of my sentence, expressing more of just their disbelief or confusion about something than actually seeking information. it’s why i stopped answering customers when they’d ask “how did you dye your hair?” and, like an idiot, i attempted to explain the process to them, thinking they actually wanted to know. but a few words in and their eyes glazed over, probably because they weren’t expecting a “real answer”. i began to accept that any questions directed toward me were closer to passive acknowledgements of me just standing there and existing in their field of vision than any sort of actual desired input from me. it’s like when people ask “how are you?” and you are obligated to say “fine” because it is the rote response. if you actually start talking about how you are doing, you are violating the socially agreed upon script of pleasantries. 

i cant do small talk. i cant do scripts. i dont get it. it doesnt make sense to me. and i think retail killed me because of that. i wasn’t a person. i wasn’t even an NPC. i was just a doll. an actor. a pull-string action figure with 5 fun phrases. i was so wacky and weird with my green hair and my silly bracelets and funny observations. ho ho what fun it is to work here with our personal jester to tell us funny stories about her cuh-razy antics she gets up to!

like how nate said “the craziest thing of someone’s year will be seeing someone play the legend of zelda theme on an accordion at a convention and for us that’s just like a walk down the street”. 

my feet straddle two divergent worlds and i cant pick just one but im about to fall in the crevice.

man i fuckin love ratatouille man. i fuckin love that film. i cant choose between two halves of myself. even when the halves want the other half dead.

i need a liaison. where’s MY linguini????

[allisonperryart]

The Business of Art w/ Jeremy Cranford (Blizzard Entertainment) @ The Art Institute of California Inland Empire (7/29/17)

Special thanks to Jeremy Cranford and Thomas Brilliante for making this event possible. For more updates on future events like this in the southern California area, please consider following Inland Arts on FaceBook. (Text-only version of this document available on FaceBook)

James Cranford’s life

Humble beginnings: migrant parents, food stamps, etc.

Attending college was difficult because of finances, but he ended up studying graphic design because he got a scholarship

After doing graphic design for years, he got an art directing job with "Magic the Gathering” and working in games/illustration since 1996

Worked on “Metal World” style guide for “Mirrodin” set (2002)

What would environments look like on a metal planet? Rust, things hovering with magnetism, rolling silver plane, big metal spikes, mercury seas, retina green forests

Environments help you solve what the humanoids/creatures will look like in the environment

The humanoids/creatures? Enamel/scabs is replaced with metal, big metal bracers on humanoids

Also worked on "Spirit World” style guide for "Kamigawa” set (2003)

Started with the desire to help MtG sell better in Japan, which was a challenge because traditionally MtG is based on Arthurian lore/visuals

Unsure about just having American/Western artists riff on Japanese imagery, so he hired some Japanese artists to create more authentic content, which resulted in a very different feel

Example of a brief he didn’t like that he turned around into an engaging project

Also worked on “Ravnica” style guide

Brief: “overdeveloped urban fantasy setting”

Mountains = smelting buildings

Lead was very against having buildings on land cards, but this is an example of Jeremy challenging convention… why could land cards have buildings!?

Risked his job on this point because he really believed in it, and it ended up being a great decision

The creative solution may be an uphill battle, but it will always win out

Plains = created by the tops of buildings, inspired from looking out at the city from the World Trade Center

Swamps = city sewers, obviously

Forest = where they grew their food

First set when they started mixing colors (which are like “cultures” in MtG lore), which was an awesome opportunity to expand and develop new ideas

Blue/green = technology elves

Black/green = voodoo elves (inspired by New Orleans)

Black/red = fire demons, obviously

White/black = basically Catholicism

Red/white = military

Blue/red = mage + technology

First set to have a promo video (inspired by game cinematic trailers, intended to introduce the world)

Began working on World of Warcraft at Blizzard when they released a trading card game

Style was a bit of a learning curve (less realistic, more stylized)

Soon after, started working on miniatures game, which taught him a lot about manufacturing and allowed him to travel to China, etc.

He took a risk and left Blizzard to start a start-up with his friends called Solforge

It was fun for about 6 months, but he never regretted the experience because he learned a lot 

Goal was to push things more sic-fi (nuclear winter world) 

His philosophy over the years has been to take risks, embrace junctures in life, and have faith in the direction you’re going

Every time he took a risk, the pay off ended up being worth it 

The universe has a way of showing you the path that’s most right for you 

He says most of what he’s tried never works out, and he just ends up doing the next best thing - which turns out to be his career 

Doesn’t always know what he wants to do, but definitely knows what he doesn’t want to do 

Always wants to challenge convention 

“Don’t try to make the art you do what you think it should do, rather let the art take you where it wants to go.” - Ben Thompson 

“Leap, and build your wings while you’re falling.” - Ray Bradbury Finds inspiration from Borge Ousland (first human to go from Russia to Alaska)

Saw people’s discouragement as feedback/critique 

Constant failures for 10 years, but learned a little every step of the way that led to his eventual success 

Stick with it

Also finds inspiration from Richard MacDonald (inspirational sculptor, experienced a lot of misfortune, embodies the blind faith Jeremy talks about)

Advice for mastering your craft, building a portfolio, and being a professional

Being an art director is like being a coach - if the product isn’t performing well, the company looks to replace the art director 

It may take you longer to master your craft than 4 years in college (DaVinci took 7 years)… be patient with yourself! 

When he looks for an artist, he looks for a professional

Master your skills

Master drawing, anatomy, and rendering light onto form

Go to life drawing regularly… even if you’re not in school 

He oftentimes looks at the hands

Master design, not just drawing realistically

Creaturebox is a great example 

Large, medium, small shapes 

High density detail (busy) vs. low density detail (rest)

Master painting and color theory

Nathan Fowkes is a great example 

The best color is not always the most “realistic” colour

Master composition, eye flow, value groups, and negative shapes

Wayne Reynolds and Frazetta are great examples 

If you’re struggling, check out Edgar Payne’s book on composition 

Have a plan before you paint and add all your detail 

Jomaro adds “working in threes” is a good idea - working in twos becomes “equal” and too “balanced”

Master story, emphasis, mood, and point of view

Ian McQue's work in the “John Carpenter” art book is a great example 

Just because your rendering is perfect doesn’t mean people will care about what you’re drawing 

What are you trying to communicate? Write that down and make sure you execute it! 

Creating without a clear objective is a waste of time

Don’t cheat yourself - if you’re trying to hide your flaws… fix them!

Don’t use effects/tricks to hide your shortcomings

After you master your skills, target a market and advertise yourself (ArtStation, DeviantArt contests, etc.)

Send out cold-emails 

See if you can get current employees to refer you to art directors 

If you get rejected, evaluate your work and actually assign yourself tasks to improve on it

Pro life tips!!

Don’t be a drunk (why party when you can improve your skill?) 

Dedicate yourself to your career/something higher/something you love 

Have some range (in your portfolio) - never say “that’s not my style!”

Consider: reality vs. fantasy (in content), realism vs, abstraction (in style)

“I’m on it!” Never be an emotional tax on your team/leads - art directors will always go back to the artists that make things easy

This doesn’t mean be a pushover

"Show me the Money!” Think about how much you’re being paid and how many hours you’re putting in… are you even getting paid minimum wage?

If you’re being paid less than you’re worth/less than minimum wage, it’s not worth it… and you’re hurting the whole industry! 

You’re better off investing in yourself - work at Starbucks and build a strong portfolio at night/on the weekends

As your skills go up, the money goes up (you need to go from good to great if you’re going to make it) 

Do you know why you do what you do?

If it’s for the money… maybe you should just go into banking, because this isn’t really a path to make money 

Jeremy does it because he simply enjoys it, which takes the pressure off

"You’re okay, I’m okay”

Growing up, Jeremy had a lot of depression because he was seeking external approval 

If you get your approval from within, you aren’t giving the power to others to put you down 

You’re the final authority on how you fell about yourself, how you treat others, and what you love and want to do

There’s beauty in diversity - just be good to each other and celebrate your differences

Question time!

Where should I go to school?

Depends on what you want and how your learn best - really successful people have not gone anywhere and really unsuccessful people have gone to great schools 

Maybe consider non-traditional schooling like GumRoad and New Masters Academy 

At the end of the day, you need the skills, and however you get them doesn’t really matter

How do you manage your time to develop range and show that range in a portfolio?

When you email an AD/recruiter, consider attaching 3 images that highlight what that contact is looking for in the email… and then lead them to the rest of your work if they’re interested

That’s all you need for “portfolio geared to a company” - you don’t need a full portfolio geared to a portfolio if you have 3-5 images you can attach to an email

Keep your portfolio updated! Don’t leave up bad work from a long time ago! 

Even when you’re not asked to, following up on feedback from ADs/recruiters with new work is a great way to stay in contact and establish your worth 

If you gear your portfolio towards one company and you can’t get into that company, you might have trouble getting into other companies 

However, if you have a very rangey portfolio, sometimes all you need is an art test to prove you can execute the style 

Know your stylistic limitations, too - if you know you can’t do something, don’t waste your time and the AD/recruiter’s 

Having trouble focusing? Set an explicit goal for yourself/make an assignment for yourself… and set a deadline for it (or else you’ll never finish it)!

How do you connect with an AD without being annoying but also not getting ignored?

ADs are busy people, at the end of the day 

Consider joining a forum/contest… sometimes your peers are better critics for you than an AD 

Develop a circle of trust (people you trust to give you good feedback) 

When you do meet an AD, remember “everyone is people…” don’t be weird about it! 

Don’t be embarrassed/ashamed of negative feedback… own it and be fearless! 

Remember: it’s normal to ask ADs/recruiters to look at your work… just ask for permission, give them an opportunity to say “no,” and if they do say “no,” offer to follow-up or leave your email/card 

Also remember to maintain relationships with professionals, because they might be keeping an eye on you and hire you in the future… address their feedback, explain how you improved, etc.

How do you form a good narrative in a painting?

“Create a picture that has a gap for the viewer to fill in”/“Don’t answer/render everything” (Jomaro adds - “like a trailer!”) - Frazetta is a great example of this 

Engage the viewers curiosity and get them to want to know what’s happening 

Maybe look at storyboard artists/sequential artists 

Also maybe identify a feeling/single word/etc. that embodies your piece… and strive to communicate it fully! 

You can execute a complex idea in a very simple way

Do ADs judge you on your backlog/old work?

Always be producing work, or else you’re stagnant! 

Always update your work with your newest stuff 

ADs love seeing jumps in quality! 

ADs aren’t gonna judge you for old work they find in a deep-dive, but be sure to put your best foot forward and have that easiest to find

What can you do to stay in touch while you’re waiting for a response on an art test?

Once you submit the test, it’s out of your hands 

If it’s been a week, try following up with HR asking if there’s anything else you can do 

If you get radio silence, it’s not the end of the world - be positive about your experience and open to future opportunities

Do you need to master digital/PhotoShop/ZBrush/etc. just like you master anatomy/colour/etc.?

If you’re skills and design are good, they’ll show through in any medium, but at the same time, not knowing PhotoShop at all can get you dinged when working in-house

What was your favourite project to work on and what did you learn from it?

“Ravnica,” because he struggled with self-doubt and had to put his job on the line for something he believes in 

HearthStone has also been a blast

Is there anything outside of art that helps you as an artist?

Everything he’s told you not to do, he did himself, which is why he’s trying to help you avoid it 

Letting go of the idea that his self-worth was determined by how other people saw him… compete only against yourself 

It helped to stop taking himself so seriously and just have fun… eliminated the pressure and lets the creativity flow

Stop trying to get everyone to like you and your work! 

Don’t just be a theory expert… put things into practice! 

The biggest thing people are lacking is the mileage

Don’t get deflated by feedback… actually integrate it! 

Don’t get discouraged by people who are better than you that have been doing it for longer… that’s normal!

[adistantstarblog]

Wild Earth: A Whale’s Tale

Rated: Mature | Words:  2327 | Chapter Title: A Whale’s Tale | Chapter: 8/ | Other Notes: Fanfic, Alternate Universe, Clexa

(Start at the Beginning)

(Back to Chapter 7)

Chapter Excerpt: “From what I understand an animal specialist has been called out who is going to help answer those questions,” Clarke was glad to have at least one solid answer. But then she looked up and saw the crowds were parting for a pair of police officers escorting a person through them toward her. The officers waved at her to let her know her specialist had arrived, “and here they are now,” she said. She was glad to have the weight of the harder questions taken off her shoulders and watched as the person walked up to the police line, looked up at her, and froze on the spot.

Clarke did too. In fact, she felt her mouth drop open in front of the microphone. All she could do was watch as Lexa regained her control first, ducked under the police line, and walked up to her. Lexa’s hair was pulled back in its customary braid and even though the truth was in Lexa’s eyes that she recognized Clarke she still walked right up to her and offered out her hand like they had never met, “Lexa Woods,” she introduced herself.

Whales Beach Overnight.  

Lexa’s laptop was on from the night before and already her table when she read the headline on the local news page at the top of the screen.  She was barely awake.  She was reaching for her coffee cup when she read it.  Her eyes widened.  Her hand slowed down mid-reach and fell into her lap.  She clicked the article, “an entire pod of whales,” she began to read out-loud.

Her phone chose to start ringing that exact second.  Still staring at the screen in front of her Lexa scrambled a hand forward across the surface of her small table, grabbed her phone and answered, “what is it, Anya?” there was frustration in her voice.

“Is this Miss Lexa Woods?” the voice on the other end asked, male, not Anya.

“Who is asking?”

“My name is Wells Jaha, with Arkadia News,” the voice continued, “we were looking for Miss Lexa Woods to see if she would like to come down to the Beach today to offer ideas about the Whales.”

“I am Woods,” Lexa answered.  She stared at the screen harder hardly hearing the voice. She rubbed her forehead with her free hand, “when?”

On the other end of the phone, Wells Jaha answered, “we go live in 20 minutes.”

Lexa’s eyes roamed the pictures on the news article, “I will be there,” she said quickly.  In the pictures, there were so many people walking up and touching these poor whales, “contact the law enforcement.  They need to get those people away from these poor animals.  And close that beach for now.”

“Will do..” Wells answered, “Miss Woods, can you answer--”

Lexa hung up the phone.  But she had barely time to start finding keys to her motorcycle when her phone started ringing again.  She ignored it.  She was already on the way and having to tell them so again would just hold her up.  She checked the counter by the coffee pot. She checked the table by her bed.  But her phone would not stop ringing.  Angry she answered it, “yes, what? I have said I am on my way!” Lexa spun as she did and at the same time caught sight of her keys hanging up on their hook where they were supposed to be near the stairs that went up to the deck. She rolled her eyes at herself and strode toward them.

“Is that a way to greet your sister?” Anya’s voice asked.

“Anya?” Lexa demanded.  She grabbed her keys off the hook and as she did she realized she was still in her shorts and shirt that served as pajamas.  With a sigh, she hung up the keys. She would have to shower really fast. Lexa turned to find clothes, “what do you want?”

“I am not sure if you have seen the news,” Anya answered dryly.

“The whales, yes,” Lexa opened a drawer under her bed and started pulling out cargo jeans and a white tank top.  She started tugging off what she had on, “I am actually on my way out there now.”

“No,” Anya answered, “wait, whales? What whales?”

“Whales on the Beach, Anya,” Lexa answered irritably, “an entire Pod of them.”

“Forget whales,” Anya sounded perturbed and amused at the same time which was a talent only she could really master, “I mean the other news.”

Lexa stopped and stood in just her underwear, “other news?” she asked.  She didn’t like the tone of Anya’s voice really. Especially considering the smirk in it as Anya added, “oh …you must not have seen what your Clarke is doing, yet.”

“She’s not mine,” Lexa countered.  Her tone stiffened even more though when she asked, “what is she doing?” because she really wasn’t sure she wanted to know.  As an afterthought, she added sarcastically, “taking swimming lessons I hope?”

“Swimming lessons, what?” Anya asked in confusion, “Lexa ..you are not making sense this morning--”

“Never,” Lexa sat on the edge of her bed and rubbed her forehead in frustration because mentioning Clarke and swimming reminded her of that day, “never-mind. But what did you need now? I really have to go Anya, what is she doing?”

“She’s got a fundraiser going on,” Anya supplied with amusement saturating her voice, “something about,” Anya paused and Lexa could hear her chewing on something she was eating. Chewing noises was always one of Lexa’s pet-peeves. Anya spoke again, “something about a crocalisk.”

“Crockalisk?” Lexa got up, “what?” She tried to place the word.  It did sound familiar.  Then it hit her, “crocodile, Anya. Crocolisks are World of Warcraft.”

“They are, that’s right,” Anya muttered under her breath. Then she started gulping something down as though to hide it.

“Wait,” Lexa realized something, “how did you even know the word Crockalisk?  Anya,” Lexa asked in a tone that almost sounded accusatory, “have you been playing online games?”

“It might currently be part of my job,” Anya answered vaguely, “for now. But listen, Lexa. We’re off track. I was calling because Clarke has set up a fundraiser for animal conservation awareness.”

“That’s good.” Lexa heard herself saying, “that’s good.” any conservation awareness would help. But this was Clarke so she was still waiting for that other shoe to drop, “and?” she asked.

“Lexa, look,” Anya spoke, changing the topic, her tone went quieter than usual but not completely gentle.  It was the tone she used when something was bothering her, “you know I am only suggesting you consider including the girl for numbers right? You can pay rent, I know, and feed yourself and it's very clear people love your show; you’ve built it all on your own. You don’t need her to keep it - your show or your talent.  But you are short a video, which will hurt your income.  You need these sponsors Lex, in case something happens.”

Lexa felt herself get quieter. Because she hated admitting, “I know. I know that.”

“I support you whatever you chose, you know that too, yes?” Anya asked.

“Yes.”

“Anyway, this fundraiser,” Anya went back to the topic at hand, “all proceeds are going to you.” 

Lexa was stunned speechless a second. She felt her mouth drop, “she can’t!” the protest was the first two words off her lips. She repeated them, “she can’t.” she hardly knew the girl. On top of that the meetings, they had never ended well.

“Well, Lexa, she is.” Anya verified.

Lexa squeezed her eyes shut and dashed for her chair, “let me have her social media Anya, I know you have it already.”

“I thought you had beached whales.” Anya’s voice was clearer now back against her ear.

Lexa insisted, “and I will still make it if you will just hurry and tell me!”

-=-

“Here we are on the beach coming to you live,” the wind off the ocean tore at Clarke’s hair as she spoke into the microphone and stood alongside the pounding of the inbound waves. The skies were gray and cloudy today and behind her like broken behemoths, the whales lay dying on the sand with rescue workers frantically spraying water onto them, “where dozens of whales have beached overnight.  I am Clarke Griffin with Arkadia News and as this story unfolds we are taking questions.”

That caused an explosion of noise from the crowds behind the police lines. One voice was louder than the rest, “are they dying?” it asked. A man a few rows back in the crowd waved his hand in the sea air to get her attention, “have any of them died?”

“Unfortunately yes,” Clarke answered, “rescue teams here have lost three of the animals since last night and in spite of best efforts it is suspected more if not all of them will follow if we don’t get the whales back into the water.”

“Do you know why they beached themselves?” Another voice behind the lines shouted out. It was quickly followed up with a woman calling out, “how are they going to get them back in the water?”

“From what I understand an animal specialist has been called out who is going to help answer those questions,” Clarke was glad to have at least one solid answer. But then she looked up and saw the crowds were parting for a pair of police officers escorting a person through them toward her. The officers waved at her to let her know her specialist had arrived, “and here they are now,” she said. She was glad to have the weight of the harder questions taken off her shoulders and watched as the person walked up to the police line, looked across at her, and froze on the spot.

Clarke did too. In fact, she felt her mouth drop open in front of the microphone. All she could do was watch as Lexa regained her control first, ducked under the police line, and walked up to her. Lexa’s hair was pulled back in its customary braid and even though the truth was in Lexa’s eyes that she recognized Clarke she still walked right up to her and offered out her hand like they had never met, “Lexa Woods,” she introduced herself. Clarke was still staring, speechless and live on the air she was staring numbly at Lexa Woods.  She pulled it together quickly though, as though the hand offered hers was a lifeline back to being able to talk she gripped it and said her name back, “Clarke Griffin.” Clarke released Lexa’s warm fingers.

Lexa put her hands on her hips, “now,” she said, looking over the beach she frowned sadly and looked at Clarke again, “I am seeing an awful lot of beached whales.”

“Yes,” Clarke pulled herself together, “a-lot of beached whales.” she had to get through this. This was different. This time it was Lexa suddenly showing up in the middle of her work instead of the other way around.  The irony wasn’t lost on her nor was the irony that the last time they had met and the first time for that matter was in a jungle on the other side of the world when apparently they both lived in the same city.  Clarke’s heart started thumping a loudly in her chest as she remembered that last meet up with Lexa and suddenly she was back there and Lexa was jumping into the river to save her. She was thinking of Lexa, beautiful Lexa, with her hair floating about like a silken cloud under the water, looking into her eyes.

“Did you have questions about the whales, Miss Griffin?” Lexa’s voice asked. Clarke snapped back into the present and she was there on the beach again realizing that Lexa had asked a very direct question with little room to slide except for the topic they were both here for. Clarke tightened her grip on her microphone, “we do.” she spoke at last, her voice forming words strongly probably only by practice somehow, “notably you are an animal expert-”

“Enthusiast,” Lexa added in.

“Enthusiast,” Clarke added in because she wasn’t willing to be derailed and she was finally getting the ground back under her as the shock wore off, “and instances like this bring a-lot of questions. One of those questions frequently asked is why do whales do this?” Clarke motioned out toward the beach with a sweep of her arm and offered the microphone to Lexa.

Lexa was on her game instantly. It was like hitting an on switch on a topic she knew, “well there are any number of reasons honestly,” her tone was thoughtful, “among them are the two most common stipulations that sometimes -just like Humans and other animals do- whales can get lost. They actually have ears that are different than ours. They actually have ears that float inside their heads allowing them to tell what direction sounds are coming from under the water and sometimes something might go wrong with this,” she seemed to be searching for words other than scientific ones to use, “navigation system, so to speak, and before they know it they swim too close to shore and end up on a beach.”

“So they get lost?” Clarke asked in hopes of a simpler recap.

“They can get lost, yes.” Lexa confirmed, “or they can also get sick. Let's say one gets sick and swims into shallow water for shelter and it ends up washed onto the beach.”

“So they get sick and can beach?”

“They can,” Lexa confirmed as well.  She made a thoughtful face before continuing, “but usually just instances of single animals. For instances where an entire Pod the likes of this one--” Lexa looked out at the whales and then at Clarke again and explained as though starting over, “whales have a strong sense of family, a strong sense of loyalty. If one gets sick or lost the entire pod is likely to swim after it or into shallow water with it and they will all end up on the beach.”

“Just like this?” Clarke asked.

Lexa nodded and agreed, “just like this.”

“So what do we do?”

“We have to be ready to respond quickly to save them,” Lexa answered. She glanced over at the whales. She looked at the cameras rolling. She looked at Clarke again and added, “as fast as we can.”

(Continue to Chapter 9)

[fmpgabby]

Coming up with my Final Idea

My project went through a lot of variations in the first few weeks before I settles on a final idea.

Inital Ideas & Thoughts- 

Before I really knew what this project was about, I knew that I wanted to make something due my love of cosplay and fantasy armour. I also knew that I really wanted to make a set of wings, as it’s something i’d never done before and would give me a chance to push myself. 

I knew that I would have to design the costume I made - thus I decided to also venture into character design & concept art, as this was also something I was really interested in earlier in the year. 

Most cosplay armour i’d previously seen was from World Of Warcraft, so this was my primary inspiration from this stage - as well as the design of typical medieval armour. I started designing some armour ideas for fun.

First Ideas - using the Titles

This idea began to evolve as we officially started the project and had to consider the titles we were given as a starting point.

I picked the following titles and made some notes relating to them, trying to think of a possible narrative that could work:

Rose Tinted Spectacles

To have a certain view on something – i.e. you can only see the good things or the bad things. Having something that could allow you to access another view of a world - for example Spiderwick. 

Anything involving separation between two worlds – i.e. like the real world and a fantasy one -  or hell and the real world. So like something from another world – could be something underwater.

Virus – something infected by something else – so like maybe the character has been infected by something from another world so the armour is like covered in moss or plants/decay. 

Things being hidden from plain sight - is the main character hiding a secret?

Having a character travel to a place and become infected by it. 

Behind Closed Doors

Secrecy – something people aren’t meant to know about – maybe the main character has come from another world and is being kept hidden. Maybe the wings are like the result of an illegal experiment.

Crimes, undercover police, illegal actions etc. 

Having an assassin style character - someone who has two jobs 

Crossover

Literally crossing over to another world – so the character’s come from another universe etc. Heaven and hell – dreams/nightmares – day/night – different time periods.

I guess mixing two themes together - in her armour design?

Having a character that unites two worlds - similar to Aquaman – has both worlds in their design.

Host

Having a possessed character or something like venom – transforming character

E=MC2

Having a sci-fi/ inspired futuristic character

Aliens and characters from another world

Science experiments, linked to Behind Closed Doors - such as Maximum Ride

After considering each of these ideas, I really liked the concept of an assassin character, so I chose Behind Closed Doors as my initial starting point. 

Having now decided that this character I wanted to create the costume for would be an assassin, I could work on a few other designs that would actually incorporate this theme. 

Idea 1

My first proper idea was to have this concept set in a fantasy world. My character would be part of a royal guard who works to defend the king. However, at the same time she works as an assassin. No one one knows that she is the same person. She has a reputation for being able to take out 100% of people she’s asked to kill. One day she received a request to kill the king himself - while at the same time being one of the people trusted to protect him. 

I really liked this idea at the time (and would perhaps like to expand it in the future) but it eventually fell short as I realised that I wanted to go more for a science fiction theme - similar to the designs in Marvel and Overwatch. 

This inital idea is why several of my design sheets turned out to be fantasy based (rather than science fantasy as I am now doing) as shown below:

Idea 2

When making the pinterest boards (as well as seeing other people’s work and ideas) I was inspired by all of the science fiction designs. Because of this, I thought it would be fun to try and design a more futuristic costume for the character to see if would look good. 

I designed this (right), inspired by the designs from this pinterest board which I had created. 

The left design was my original fantasy armour concept. The middle design was an outcome which I created by combining the two. I took my favourite aspects from both and kept the colour palette (which was my favourite out of all the initial designs). 

This was the result below. Ever since I combined both science fiction and fantasy I knew that I wanted to continue with this theme for the rest of my project. 

Idea 3 

I came up with this next idea after struggling to really think of a narrative for the science fantasy character. This concept was created based on my GCSE Media studies project - a show about Ancient Egypt. Along with Egyptian mythology, I was also really interested in conspiracy theories, aliens and government secrets - these all combined really well with the E=MC2 starting point.

Still liking the science fantasy concept, I began to think of an alternate reality of earth in which Ancient Egypt and its events happened in the future when everything was futuristic and technologically advanced - but also still had the egyptian gods present. These gods I thought could possibly actually be aliens (which would explain their armour design) in this world - much like Stargate. The idea would be that Egypt would be like Wakanda - completely hidden from outsiders and actually extremely advanced despite everyone’s belief. My character I planned to have based on a cat - as they were highly worshipped (and the bird/jackal appearances were already claimed by the two gods) and known for being very silent and sneaky, perfect for an assassin.

My character would be an assassin who would venture outside of Egypt and reclaim lost artefacts that have been taken. 

This lead to this armour design (right) which was a redesign of the previous (left) with a more prominent aesthetic - I wanted an eye, cat and wing motif as these were all common symbols in Egyptian Mythology.

This idea was invented in a mere few days and was really more of an impulse concept - I should have developed my other ideas further before rushing into this one as it was also quickly off the table for several reasons.

For one, people that i’d asked didn’t really think that the black & gold armour was very ‘Egyptian’ looking. I also couldn’t really find a plausible reason for the character to have wings. But the major turning point was when I discovered all the research I’d have to do to back up this idea - into Egyptian films and actual factual information about the country - which honestly didn’t really interest me at all - I just liked the concept of the animal themed gods and alien conspiracies. 

Idea 4

I remember shortly after coming up with the Egypt concept that I was sitting in a room surrounded by people all working on their science-fiction stories. I felt like i’d made a serious mistake in choosing it for such a huge project when it wasn’t something I was insanely passionate about. I had to sit down and consider if, three/four weeks into the project, if it would actually be worth changing my idea again. It was actually looking at my favourite artist’s work that fully convinced me to revert back to the science fiction/fantasy theme I wanted to do previously. Simon Stalenhag’s dystopian universe and environment paintings full of giant machines made me realise that this was really the sort of thing I was interested in. 

I still had my main idea in mind: to create a costume with wings. But now I had to try and incorporate a typically fantasy character into a futuristic science fiction universe.

I still wanted my character to be somewhat secretive, with not everything known about her - for example an assassin built by the government as an experiment with actual wings.

Another reason for this decision change was because I didn’t want to have to ground my work into reality - with Egypt I would have to stick to realistic conventions and history whereas with sic-fi, anything was possible and would give me a lot more freedom to imagine where technology could possibly take us in the future. 

I was originally going to have this story set in Egypt as a homage to my previous idea. I also wanted to have a large company who pretty much ruled the entire world - something my character could fight against and overthrow. I wanted the company to be ruled by an AI, and I really liked the concept of a future where everything you do is watched, recorded, etc. As it was set in Egypt, I wanted this AI to be called Anubis after the god. The company was known as Anubis Robotics for a while.

The company would offer people a way to live forever inside a machine - having a second chance at life even after death. But having everyone living as a machine would also make them controllable by the corporation- making them able to achieve whatever they want, including world domination. 

Sakura (the protagonist) would be an assassin who wants to overthrow this company. But the point was made that she would have no reason to care as it was not involving her in any way. For this reason I decided to scrap the idea of her being a random assassin and instead, she became the scientist who invented the technology that the company uses - a benevolent girl who just wants to help people who have lost their bodies live again. Having the company turn on her and use it as a world domination and money making scheme was a lot more plausible of a reason for her to take them down. 

As this idea grew, the world i’d created started to drift away from Egypt little by little - and since I wanted the company to be world dominating (not just an Egyptian company) I thought it would be better to name it after something else. I wouldn’t really be able to explain the name ‘Anubis’ anymore, but I was still really attached to it so I picked something similar sounding - Atlas.

It is interesting to note that Atlas’ design and the company’s logo was still created with Anubis in mind - hence the pointed ‘jackal ears’ he has on his head and the dog-headed logo itself. 

The only thing missing was an explanation as to why the main character had wings. 

This was when my story ended up becoming an alternate version of earth - a new world in itself. Since I wanted to focus on both science fiction and fantasy, I incorporated a magical energy into the world which is shared between all living creatures - thus connecting them to each other. As the magical energy transfers between each creature and returns to the earth, it is possible for it to transfer DNA between organisms - creating mutations from other species resulting in fantasy races. This allowed me to instantly have mermaids, dragons, angels etc while still maintaining the science fiction aesthetic. This magical energy was then named as Mana - one of my inspirations behind the logic of the energy was based on Annihilation’s lore with DNA refraction (which sounded ridiculous to me and everyone else watching but was still believable enough for the suspension of disbelief.). 

While I started out wanting to create just a winged character with a backstory and a suit of armour, it eventually turned into wanting to create an entire narrative and alternate future which I named Windfall. 

The name ‘Windfall’ is the name of the planet that is alternate Earth. 

[noisysoup]

A tale of deceit and mistrust

Hey there. I don’t really post on here at all, mainly because I honestly don’t understand how this works, but I’ve recently endured many months of extreme mental trauma with a very recent climax and don’t have many people that I feel comfortable directly sharing it with, so I figured screaming into the endless void here could be some sort of solution. To preface this, people say there’s always 2 sides to a story. That’s very true, but there’s also a collective story. I’m not here to tell my side of this story today to the best of my ability because bias must be left alone on this for you to try understand. Even I don’t fully understand what happened or what’s continuing to happen. To anyone going through something similar, or even if you’re just going through your own bullshit that this life throws at you, know that you’re not alone. There’s help out there. I’m actively seeking therapy and have been for a while now (remember this, because it becomes very important later down the line). I’ll be editing real life names and changing/blurring names through messages that I show here. Everything here is 100% real and the messages themselves are real and unedited other than name changes. I may be upset, but I’m not vengeful. Also, please be warned before you read any of this: This is going to be difficult for some people to read. Let this serve as a trigger warning for anyone who can’t handle intense situations involving depression, anxiety, self-harm, or suicide.

I understand that this post is very long and that some people won’t care to read the whole thing, so I’ll put a little tl;dr at the very bottom because I really want people who are in the know about this to know what really happened, not just know what they chose to hear.

This story has no definite beginning, so let’s start with introducing the people at play here:

Me, of course, and the one person who I can speak on most accurately as I change and develop throughout this story.

My girlfriend of almost 5 years, who I’ll be referring to as Brenda and who supported me through all of this.

A friend turned anomaly who I grew up with and who I’ll be referring to as Anna and who initially serves as a deuteragonist.

A second friend, Anna’s significant other, who lies in the middle as a neutral character and who I’ll be referring to as Naomi.

There are more characters, of course, but those characters are much less significant in relation to the events that unfold here so do not need proper introductions quite yet.

Let’s start with high school. High school was... Rough for me, to say the least. This is where most of the problems begin to unfold. I lost my grandmother to cancer on January 28th, 2013, during my Freshman year. She was very close to me, my best friend and someone who unconditionally loved me and taught me how to unconditionally love. I was there when she passed. She was placed in hospice care for around a month in our house until her body couldn’t hold on any longer. Everyone in my family was absolutely devastated and couldn’t accept what had happened. Later, we’d come to find out that the event had actually developed into PTSD in my mother. This is also the moment that something inside of me changed. You see, at the same time as this, I was invested in one of the worst things I could have been at the time: A girl that I’d had a crush on for a very long time. She’ll be left unnamed, but she had brewed up a darkness within me. This girl led me to believe she loved me and I, being the stupid and immature child that I was, fell for it and became enveloped in her and would do anything for her validation. She introduced me into cutting (I mainly did it for attention at first if I’m entirely honest), but once my grandmother passed, I noticed that it took away from the pain I felt inside. I began to regularly cut myself to cope with the fear I held inside, and this took hold of me anytime a situation became even slightly overwhelming. I started developing intense suicidal thoughts and would actively think about different ways that my life could end, though I only had 1 or 2 moments where I planned out a death for myself. I fell behind in schoolwork and would be obviously distressed in class until I was recommended to seek counseling in school. This ended up helping me a lot, and it slowly came out during these counseling session that I regularly self harmed until I was made to call my parents and admit this to them. My parents took this better than I thought they would and they ended up being very supportive and understanding of my mental health. They took my switchblade that I’d use and hid it, telling me to never do something so foul to myself again. Having someone actively intervene in the bad things I did to myself and the negative emotions I felt really helped me feel cared about and like I didn’t need them. Of course, these moments came in spurts because depression isn’t a constant in your life. Sometimes it comes and sometimes it goes, which is something that I came to learn the hard way. During this time, I also severely struggled with my sexuality. I was constantly bullied by people calling me gay because of the way I would act around my friends and really started to question whether or not I was because I’d always liked girls but there were guys that I felt some sort of attraction to every now and then. I would go into the football field house to workout and have people come up to me asking if I was gay, people would call me a faggot when I just wanted to be alone and try to better myself physically. It really got to my head and is something I’d talk a lot about with my future girlfriend.

High school wasn’t all bad, though. After my terrible communicative relationship with the last girl ended, I found one of the best things in my life: Brenda. She was actually very good friends with the previous girl and that’s how I met her. I’ve been with Brenda since October 25th, 2013, and I hope to stay with her for the rest of my life. She’s been so supportive of me and helped me see things in my life so much differently. She’s taken my negative viewpoints and helped me reshape them to more positive viewpoints. She’s helped change me from someone who I absolutely despise looking back on to someone that I can say that I’m proud to be. She’s been there when I was at my worst and she’s been there when I was at my best. I know that I’m drilling in about how great she is, but I promise, it’s very integral to this story. Brenda and I were in band together and going through high school band events with her made the rest of my high school experience so much better and so much faster, so there’s not a whole lot more relevant information from high school specifically to be spoken on other than another of the relevant characters: Anna. I’ve known Anna since we were pretty little, and my girlfriend was pretty good friends with her for a very long time. She’s had a pretty rough life, moving back and forth all over the state and country, so her and I never really had much of a chance to communicate until the end of high school when she moved back to my hometown and settled back down. She’d always been super shy and super reserved, but a really good friend of mine became a really good friend of her’s, so we began talking slightly more. We never were great friends in high school, but I would talk to her in classes where I noticed she was sitting all alone just staring down at her phone. I was... Kind of weird back in high school, so I’m sure her perception of me at the time was fairly negative, and our relationship as friends remained more as knowing that we had a few common interests in things like games and concepts for artistic ideas.

After high school, I kind of accepted that everyone I knew and had grown close to would go their separate ways as we go off to college. A lot of my friends had high ambitions for the furthering of their knowledge, going off to big colleges like A&M or UT Austin. I couldn’t afford colleges like that, and to be honest, I never really wanted to attend them. Brenda had always been super interested in UNT ever since she went with her brother (who’s about 4 or 5 years older than us) when he went to visit it. Her interest piqued my interest, and I saw that they had a seemingly great computer engineering program and even had a separate campus for the engineers. This was really cool to me, but the best draw in was the amount of opportunity I had with financial aid and the low cost/ease of entry to get in, so of course I was drawn into it. I get to go to a cool college with my girlfriend? How could I resist that? I had automatic acceptance and got in and my entire family was super excited for me, with me being the first person to attend a real college in my family, let alone a university. Even if none of my other friends came, I figured the real ones would still keep in touch with me (which they thankfully have, and I’m very grateful for). For a while, me and Brenda figured we were the only people going to UNT until we noticed another UNT acceptance board outside of our school: Anna had been accepted and was going to be there with us. Since Brenda was pretty good friends with her and I was starting to become friends with her, we were excited to know that a friendly face was going to be there to accompany us on our voyage to a bigger, brighter future.

We started college in the fall of 2016. My first semester was a mixed bag, mostly stemming from me having absolutely no idea what the hell I was doing. However, it was still a time that I hold dearly in my heart. I raided competitively in World of Warcraft, clearing all of Mythic Emerald Nightmare while it was still current content, attended 16 hours of classes and kept a 3.6 GPA, and met a whole lot of really cool and interesting people, a majority of which I still talk to. Before this time, I also couldn’t really afford a smartphone, but with the help of financial aid, I was finally able to purchase my own phone that was capable of downloading Pokemon: Go. Being on a college campus meant there were Pokestops and gyms all over the place, and we’d constantly walk around during our free time playing the game. How is this relevant? Anna really enjoyed Pokemon: Go, so it was an excuse for me and Brenda to walk the mile and a halfish to visit her at her dorm or for her to come to campus and screw around with us. During this time, all of us became friends and had a great time together just being carefree kids. It helped bring Anna out of her shell and introduced more of her character to us, and I knew that we’d be good friends when I started seeing more of who she was underneath her timid shell. We’d spend hours at her dorm some nights watching vine compilations and laughing our asses off, and we started becoming more comfortable with venting frustrations about little things as a group. We slowly learned of Anna’s gf, Naomi, who she’d known for a while and played a bit of Overwatch with. I got very into Overwatch the summer before coming to college, so I snagged her battletag and added her. Over the coming months, we’d play together a bit and started talking a bit more than we had before. Eventually, Anna became comfortable enough to introduce me to Naomi and we all started playing together and I started to get to know her a little bit, too, but nothing super interesting or noteworthy happened during this time.

That summer, I took my first real job working in a warehouse as part of a picking program for a large shipping industry. The job itself wasn’t too bad and payed pretty well, but the hours I worked were killer. I’d typically work 10-12 hour days and be working 6 days a week. Of course, I’d tell my friends about this because it sucked not having a whole lot of free time and you tell your friends your frustrations. I learned that this venting process really helped me calm down after work, helped to serve as a stress relief to just get my feelings out there so I wouldn’t boil over and I started to vent pretty regularly without it becoming a huge topic of focus in conversations. Just something where you’d tell your friends that one part of your day sucked and move on. Pretty normal, yeah? I thought so, too. Anyway, I’m getting a little ahead of myself. After having this job for about 2 months, I quit due to shitty management and being treated like a subhuman by the people I worked with and the people I worked for. Having more free time meant that I could hang out with my friends in person a lot more and meant that I could hang out with people in games a lot more, which is something that I had missed for a while. Having this break from responsibility before the next semester of college was really nice, because that’s when things start to crumble a bit.

College only gets harder the longer you stay, and that’s also something I learned the hard way. The fall semester of 2017 is when I had my second computer science course. I absolutely bombed the first major project that we were assigned in that class because I didn’t understand anything that we were doing and became super frustrated. After I saw my grade, I got pretty upset (I have pretty high standards for myself). I really wanted to just drop out of college because the rest of my classes weren’t going super great either, but bombing something in my major field of study felt absolutely awful. That day, I went to our student union to have lunch. I was in line to get some Chick-fil-A when I heard a familiar voice: Anna’s. Me and her grabbed food and had lunch together and started talking about our lives and stuff as we hadn’t really talked much since the semester started and we were both busy. I told her about me bombing my project and she told me about how difficult her art classes were. We had a pretty lengthy conversation following this, traveling from topic to topic pretty seamlessly, until I had to get to my next class. Since she was done for the day, she offered to chat with me until we got to my class. This began a regular routine of us having lunch together then walking to my next class where we’d part ways, and this really started to build up our friendship. We’d talk a lot about our interests, discussing how we’d both eventually like to work on games, showing each other memes we thought were funny, and everything in between. We became really good friends through this, and this experience really changed me as a person. I slowly started realizing, however, that certain things and phrases I would say would cause her to have an unpleasant look as if they offended her but she was too afraid to say anything. One day, I asked her if me saying something upset her, and she eventually told me that yes, it did. I didn’t take offense to this, as I didn’t really even realize that it was offending her (which is really stupid of me to be honest, and something that I really don’t like about the way that I used to act and things that I used to say). This discussion really led me to look at how I talk and stop using certain words and phrases because they’re really uncalled for and immature. I’d later come to find out that this moment in time terrified her because she thought I’d hate her for telling me that something I said was bad, but I couldn’t be happier that she told me. Despite everything that’s happened since this moment, I’m glad that I asked because it’s helped me mature as a person. But, again, I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

Having gone through these changes as a person, I really changed the way that I looked at everything and flipped my college life around. I ended the semester with a 3.9 GPA because I took the power of initiative that I had with her and applied it to other areas of my life. I brought my grades up enormously, made damn near perfect grades, and only got a 3.9 because a file upload system for a lab report broke and I didn’t catch it in time to realize my own mistake. I was ecstatic, and my relationships with others began to blossom a bit more. My relationship with Brenda became much more understanding, I began to spend more time with her and her friends, and I spent more time with myself. I was in a pretty good place in my life. But something that I haven’t brought up in a while is that darkness inside of me. I don’t want you to think that it wasn’t there, because it was. It was slowly getting worse, but the overwhelming positivity in my life kept it at bay... For a while. I’m not entirely sure what happened, but a catalyst suddenly set it off. In December, I became extremely depressed despite how happy I was. I would have regular panic attacks over absolutely nothing and have nightmares about the most brutal and horrifying events. I started feeling very lonely, and then I remembered that I noticed Anna had been playing a lot of one particular game for a while- ARK: Survival Evolved. Me and her had talked about it a bit and she really loved dinosaurs, so she got very invested in that game. It sounded really cool and interesting from what she’d told me about it, so I messaged her one day and asked if she’d wanna play with me. When she said yes, I bought the game and we hopped in to an official server and she taught me how to play. I was hooked pretty much instantly, even though I had no idea what was going on at first. We played this game together quite a lot, so we spoke quite a lot about stuff. 

One night, I had a bad panic attack while in a discord call with her, which is one of the worst thing that can happen when you’re just trying to have fun. It’s hard to act like nothing’s happening, so I didn’t. I told her what was happening, muted my mic, and let it happen. Afterwards, we stopped playing and just started talking to each other. I just... Vented to her about everything. Told her about my grandma, about the girl who ruined me in highschool... I told her a lot. I didn’t expect anything back, but she continued the conversation on her own end and we stayed up until 3 A.M. sharing stories that hurt us and just let someone else know our story. And it was nice. From then on, we started playing almost every day together. It wasn’t just ARK, though. We would play Overwatch with Naomi pretty consistently, even played a bit of Minecraft with Naomi. Me and Naomi became really good friends after all of this, too. Over this period of time, I get really try to stay stable mentally by being around others and not letting myself get too much into my head.

The next semester starts, and I’m starting to feel a bit better emotionally. I’m super hopeful for the future and I’m getting really excited to advance in my major and get to the complex stuff. What a fool I was. This was my worst semester yet. My physics class was filled with a ridiculous amount of work that was underexplained in class to the point where I literally had to teach myself physics to even understand what was going on. Plenty of people had to buy a Chegg subscription to finish the homework. My chemistry professor acted as if chemistry should have been our only class that we were taking the entire semester and set the difficulty level ridiculously high just because he could. My computer science class had exams that were presented in such a way that, no matter how much you studied or knew, you would need a cheatsheet to complete every question. I was eventually talked into going into counseling by Anna and Brenda and stuck with that for a while. Everything was wrong with this semester except for a few things: Talking to Brenda, spending time with Anna, helping Naomi with math, and watching anime with Anna and Naomi. Those were the only saving graces for this semester, but none took more of my time than being with Anna. We spent an unhealthy amount of time together, literally about 5 hours every single day playing ARK and talking about everything that was wrong with our lives and having extremely deep conversations weekly. This happened through the course of the entire semester. Me and Anna quickly became best friends. We still had lunch together whenever we could, talked about a lot of stuff together, and I started to notice something. I felt like I was developing some sort of romantic feelings for her. Now, let me be EXTREMELY clear about one thing: Firstly I did not ever feel like I loved her in any way other than platonically. If anything, it was just above a crush. Secondly, even if I did “love” her in that way, I’m not a cheater. I have enough willpower to just deal with it. The problem came from the fact that I continuously felt that feeling grow because I’m the type of person who can only have a romantic relationship with someone that I’m already close to and feel a personal connection with. For the longest time, I never said anything to her about it, until a certain event happened.

All of the semester built up and culminated into a large and sudden burst right after I stopped going to counseling sessions regularly where I got the very intense urge to kill myself on May 4th, 2018. I was being torn up inside, and this was pretty late at night and I was all alone. Brenda was out of the state at the time, but Anna had been messaging me previously. She asked if I wanted to play something, but I felt so wrong on the inside and couldn’t convince myself that she really wanted to be around me. I finally told her that I wanted to be alone (which was a lie) and then I planned everything out, but got too scared because I thought about how the people who cared about me would react and I just didn’t have the heart to fully go through with it. I ended up crying myself to sleep and woke up the next morning and admitted what had happened to Anna. She told me to schedule a an emergency counseling session so I did. When I got there, I told them what happened, and they recommended I go to a professional help clinic. I thought I had insurance at the time, so I agreed. What ended up happening is I was sent to a loony bin and had invalid insurance. I sat in that building for hours upon hours in a single room, knowing I wouldn’t be able to pay for it. I eventually asked Anna to come bail me out at close to midnight, and by some stroke of good luck we were able to convince them to let me go. Oh, did I mention I had a final the next day? Because I did. Luckily, Anna let me spend the night at her apartment and we got up the next day pretty early because she had to go to work and I had to study for my final. After I was done, I waited for her to get off work and her mom picked us up. You see, her mom and I both suffered mentally in eerily similar ways, and it scared the death out of her mom because of how awful it was the way that the thoughts appear in your mind and how intense and sort of exciting they become. I spent the day and night with her mom so that I wouldn’t be alone and then went back to my apartment the next day. After that point, everyone started to treat my mental illness a little more seriously. People who knew were actively messaging me to check on me, seeing if I wanted to do anything and spend time with them because I absolutely hate being alone. The situation was one of the worst I’ve been through, but seeing the support that I had afterwards was so nice that I’m tearing up now just thinking about it. However, things started to taper off, as they do, and people seemed to forget anything had ever happened.

In the coming weeks, Anna got super invested into competitive Overwatch and started talking to me a lot less. At this point, I had become very attached to her because of how much we had interacted and how much she had helped me and it was extremely unhealthy and I will 100% admit to that. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that I felt like we were slipping apart as friends because of that. Does it make it true? No, not at all, but my worries shouldn’t just be passed over because someone else feels differently about them. She made me feel stupid for thinking we were slowly losing our friendship and that she was replacing me with a game. Instead of showing me that we were still friends, she simply told me that we were and continued doing things that, to me, suggested the opposite. I loved Overwatch, but any time she mentioned it from this point onward, it stung. I slowly started to hate the game, this game that I loved, because I felt like it was replacing a friendship. I felt that I had been so much of a stress on her that she started talking to me less and playing that game more as a coping mechanism and that made me feel so shitty, and you know what? I was right. And it’s my fault that it even happened in the first place, I should have done something else, I should have caught on that our relationship was turning unhealthy earlier, but I didn’t and my best friend replaced me with other people that she didn’t even know in a game that had helped connect us in the first place. And I’m such an idiot for that. This part of the story is on me. This part is my fault. Everything that happened before this and directly after this is on my shoulders and will be directly on my shoulders for the rest of my life and I’m just going to have to live with it.

In some stupid effort to revive our friendship and make her feel compelled to talk to me again, I finally told her that I felt as if I had feelings for her. Again, I never told her that I loved her, I simply told her that I felt like I had feelings for her. This was another mistake, and the beginning of the end. I absolutely freaked out after this, I knew immediately that I shouldn’t have done it and I... I freaked out. I went and told Brenda everything that night, and we had a lengthy conversation about it. I mentioned earlier that I would be providing images to keep bias out of this story, because everything up to this point has been directly from my point of view. Putting these images in here is going to be hard for me. Reading them makes me wince because of how utterly weak I was for doing this. I hate these messages, but they complete the story.

As you can see, we agreed to take a week break from talking to each other. I hate admitting this, but this was very hard for me. I felt like shit for this week, and I’m so weak for that. The day after this, I got the impulse to kill myself again and messaged Naomi about it. I felt like Brenda was slipping away from me at this point as well, so Naomi felt like all I really had at the moment. I shouldn’t have done that, either. I scared the hell out of her because of the way that I brought it up. I’m a bad person for doing that. But afterwards, I calmed down and me and Naomi ended up playing quite a bit of Final Fantasy together over the course of that week, which did help me get through it a little bit, but I’m still such an idiot for regressing this much at this point. Everything I had worked towards improving was shot down because I made a string of bad decisions trying to make myself happy. I digress, however, so let’s get back on track here.

After this little break, we both agree that we had been spending too much time together and decide that a change in our friendship is in need. We put a cap of one continuous hour of voice calls a day and would adjust that number from there as we both saw fit. We would still continue to message each other, but we both agreed to not just talk to each other (mainly for me because of how much of a comfort blanket she was to me at this point). A few days later, she had a counseling session where her therapist recommended a new system to try for her: She would stop talking about serious stuff past 10, get off of the computer by 11, and be in bed by 11:30ish, with the only exception to those rules being Naomi. I was completely fine with this and actually thought it was a good idea myself... Until she immediately broke those rules. I called her out on it, but she didn’t take me seriously. Kind of treated me as if it were a joke when I was being serious, and that upset me. The following messages are what happened when we tried to discuss this issue. You know, like friends do.

As you can see, there was a huge amount of misunderstanding here on her part. Whether or not it was intentional for her to misconstrue what I was saying is something that I still question to this day, but she really seemed to not be listening to what I was saying and focused on what she wanted to hear. She wanted to hear this as a personal attack, so she did, and she became extremely and overly defensive, justifying her actions because she didn’t think they felt wrong (which, might I point out, us spending an exorbitant amount of time together didn’t feel wrong at the time, either). And then she got scared and stopped messaging me. For a while.

 I attempted to reach out to her multiple times after this, but the only real response that I got from her was that she needs time to get better and that I should respect that. So... I tried. But it became increasingly obvious to me that she didn’t really care about me anymore, or at least she was trying not to at the time. A few weeks later, which felt like more than enough time to me, I sent the following message hoping to get some sort of reaction. This is the thing that I regret doing the most, because I think this is the nail in the coffin and the main reason that things have lead to the point where they are now. However, the things I said here aren’t untrue. Everything I said, I stand by. But I shouldn’t have said it in the first place.

And I did just that. I left every discord server, ever group chat, removed her from all social media, off of every game... I removed her from my life as much as I could. Naomi then stops talking to me as well, although our friendship is ended on a much more positive note. I felt so betrayed and, even though I admit to being a large part of the problem, I didn’t feel like I should be treated this way. I was in a very bad place and needed friends to support me. No one can handle everything in life on their own, and she had been the person to help show me that. But then she turned that all around on me and made me feel guilty for doing it in the first place. I was confused and felt so alone. I didn’t know what to do with myself.

Another few weeks go by and instead of letting myself grow weaker, Brenda helps me become better. We work on my thought processes, I started focusing on self improvement more than the previous weeks, and I learn a lot about myself. I start doing a lot of research on the things that I feel and how other people have dealt with them. Over the course of Anna not talking to me, I try to forget about her and change myself into a better person. And I do just that. I become better, I force myself to do things that I don’t want, and it helps me become better. I realize a lot about myself. I realize that my struggles in high school over my sexuality were because part of me did like guys, but I still liked girls, too. But I realized it was beyond that and part of the reason that I developed feelings for Anna in the first place. I like people who I find interesting, regardless of sexuality or gender. I realized that I’m pansexual and that if  Brenda were transgender or if she were a guy that I wouldn’t care. I’d still love her just as much as I do now, and this sets me on a path of openness. Instead of trying to directly make myself happy, I work directly on stopping myself from being unhappy, and I achieve so much in a 4 week span and I’m so proud of doing that and so grateful of Brenda for being there by my side and pushing me on, but one thing still remains in the very back of my mind, causing me to be unhappy. Anna. I felt like I was ready at this point, I had a lot to say and apologize for, but I had no way back. Until Brenda offered me a big favor. She told me that she’d reach out to her on my behalf if I really wanted her to, and I thought about it for a bit. I really pondered if this is something that I wanted. Would this truly be the last thing that would tie up loose ends and stop all of the unhappiness? At the time, I decided it was and took her up on the offer a few days later. Anna responded to her saying that she was willing to talk to me, but only on a superficial level about super small things. I was completely fine with this. We could slowly build our relationship back up from here, and this time I was willing to be truly patient.

We start talking again. Surprisingly, we talk about quite a lot on the first day, though none of it is super deep. It reminded me of the days when we would have lunch together the very first semester that we started doing it. However, I couldn’t just ignore the fact that I had fucked up pretty hard. I told her that I wanted to talk about what happened, but only when she was truly ready. So I actually waited, and we eventually talked about it a few weeks later. The talk was a bit rough and difficult, but it was overall really good and really productive. During that talk, we decided to take things extremely slow this time, build our friendship up slowly and not ramp up the way it had before, but still being comfortable with eventually becoming close again. I was fine with this. I accepted the fact that we may never be best friends again and that we definitely wouldn’t have the relationship we had before, and I was fine with that because I honestly didn’t want that myself. My relationship with Naomi also starts up again, which I was and still am very grateful for.

I get a job as a maintenance worker at my apartment complex during this time period. At first, I absolutely love it. It’s a lot of fun for me to be able to help people and see physical and tangible progress on something that I’m working on, so this job seems great to me. My boss is a little bit of an ass, but he reminds me a lot of my dad so I figure it won’t be too much to deal with. I work with a cool guy that I quickly become friends with, and he eventually convinces me to buy Final Fantasy XIV and I begin to play it pretty frequently on my days off. Naomi also plays, so I start to spend a bit of time in game with her and she helps me through it. I message Anna every now and then, and she messages me back fairly frequently. We send each other memes, talk about random stuff, and it feels like we’re friends again. It’s nice, I felt nice. But things take a weird turn from here.

I start noticing small things at work that bother me. The way things are operated is really shitty, the jobs that the other maintenance people do are really shitty, my friend starts getting increasingly frustrated while we’re working together and acts out constantly. Another guy I work with treats me as if I’m incompetent even though we started working at around the same time and he knows things I don’t because he works on stuff that I don’t. My days off are nice, though, because Final Fantasy quickly becomes a coping game in a way where I can just come home, hop on, and drop the baggage of the day and not care about anything and just have fun. However, sometimes I just want to vent in the group chat about my day, you know, life friends do with each other. So I do. Anna responds in the group chat, we kind of talk about it, and then she starts direct messaging me because Naomi is at work and probably not reading everything going on. Keep in mind that, at this point, I just wanted to vent. Didn’t necessarily want to have an in depth conversation about it, but if there is an offer by ways of continuing the conversation directly, I was cool with that. So we discuss it a lot more in depth, and in my head I’m thinking, “Cool, our friendship actually is developing. We’re talking about issues here a little more deeply to try and actively help each other resolve them, that’s what friends do.” But now that I look back on it, this should have been a red flag.

The talk goes pretty well, or so I thought at the time. We resolve the situation to a point where I honestly feel a whole lot better about it and have some revitalized energy into going in to work and dealing with the bullshit. A few weeks later, turn comes around at work. This is basically a time where everyone who’s lease ends moves out and we prep all the empty apartments for the people moving in. This sucks. This is absolutely awful, I have to work 7 days a week, 70 hours a week, and it really starts to take it’s toll on me. My mood shifts and I become kind of irritable, but this is something I’d been training to catch through mindfulness so that when I notice myself doing it, I try to catch it. If I’m passive aggressive to people, I try to catch it and then apologize for it, whether they realize it or not. I noticed that I did this with Anna, so I apologized:

As you can see, this was... A pretty constructive and positive conversation, yeah? This is something that I still agree with, This conversation was indeed really constructive and really positive. However, I would like to make one thing clear. Once again, I only wanted her to know what I did in the first place. Didn’t really want to have a huge conversation about it, but since one was started, I participated in it. I’m not going to just dip out of a discussion if one is started, but I’m never trying to start one directly. I’m simply trying to explain myself and hold myself accountable. Remember this.

So, turn goes on. Turn continues to get worse, and I don’t have a lot of energy. My capacity to catch myself with mindfulness wanes and I start slipping back into the mode where I get upset when people don’t respond, and Brenda notices this as well. I notice that Anna is really busy lately, and is one of the people who responds to me the least at the time, and it has really been upsetting me seeing as how well our friendship had been progressing at this point. I go to therapy specifically for the work stuff, and me and my therapist devise a plan: I refocus my energy away from the friendship for a moment and let it lie where it is because I’m putting too much energy in and not getting enough out to satisfy my own expectations at the time, so I let Anna know this because, as seen through previous messages, she wants me to tell her about these things so that we’re always on the same page.

So, there’s a lot of messages here and a lot is talked about. Once again, notice how I state at the very beginning that I DIDN’T want this to turn into a big discussion, I just wanted her to know what I was doing so she would understand the change in interaction. Did I word it poorly at the beginning? Yes, I did, and I admit to that multiple times. But she started a discussion from it. Again, I didn’t WANT a discussion, but discussion are how you directly work through an issue (you know, like friends do), so I didn’t oppose. I’m not afraid of confrontation, so I’m fine with having a discussion. If you’ve read up to this point, though, you may have noticed something... Peculiar about the way that she’s been responding. She’s still being super defensive when I bring something up, but super aggressive whenever she brings something up. She’s starting to act as if she can do no wrong and that her viewpoint is the only valid one, brushing things that I say off because she’s continually misunderstanding things that I say. You may have noticed this trend a while ago, and it’s slowly been developing since we started speaking again. She’s changing pretty rapidly, and it feels... Forced. At this point in time, a small part in the back of my mind starts speaking to me, starts questioning what this is. A seed of an idea is planted in my mind, and over the next few weeks, this idea grows: This isn’t Anna. This isn’t the Anna I knew, and I get that people change; Hell, I changed a lot myself, but this change... This is such a deep personality change that this isn’t even the same person anymore. This feels like a stranger in the body of someone that I used to know. And I can’t brush this idea away.

The weeks go on, turn goes on and eventually ends, we continue to talk occasionally and I spend a lot of my free time with Brenda or playing with Naomi, but me and Anna never do anything together outside of talking. I begin to notice these more rapid changes that Anna’s developing, and she becomes increasingly aggressive with things and unwilling to change her view. I notice how close minded she is, notice that she’s so close minded that she doesn’t even realize she’s close minded. But I can’t say anything because I know that this new Anna will just get upset about me bringing it up and it will just make things worse. I don’t know what to do at this point. I so sorely want the old Anna back, just want to talk to my old friend about nothing, but she doesn’t exist anymore. I start talking to Brenda about whether or not I really want to even be friends with her or not anymore. She tells me to go with my heart, but my heart knows that the real Anna is there, buried underneath this coping mechanism she’s developed to help with some bigger issue that I’ll never know of going on within herself. I don’t even feel like we’re friends anymore, which is an issue that I’d continually brought up and an issue that she’d continued to brush off. I feel weird inside.

College starts back up. Slightly before it does, we show each other our schedules and they conflict pretty sharply with me being at the engineering part of campus all day which is a few miles away from the main campus. I ask if she wants to do lunch still because it’s something we’d done for the past year. We find that Wednesdays will work right after she gets out of her last class, so we plan to have lunch then. The week goes on, we get to Wednesday, and we have lunch. It’s actually pretty nice, and she seems different in person than she does online. She’s actually talking to me about stuff and I’m talking to her about stuff. One of Brenda’s roommates spots us and starts talking to us. Brenda’s roommate asks me why I’m not on the engineering campus, and I tell her I’m there early just to have lunch with Anna, and she says, “Wow, you’re a pretty good friend for doing that. I definitely wouldn’t do that,” to which Anna responds, “Yeah, he is isn’t he.” This kind of comes as a shocker and puts me in a slightly better mood. This is... Weird. But welcome. It comes time for me to get to class, we part ways, and the week goes on. For the first 2 weeks, my first Friday class is cancelled so we schedule to have lunch for those days as well, and considering how well the first lunch went, this is a nice sentiment. We don’t talk a whole lot outside of school, which is cool with me because we’re both pretty busy, but... Something just doesn’t seem right to me. Something just doesn’t feel right. And I don’t say anything about it.

I continue working at my maintenance job while going to school, and it gets really overwhelming. I don’t have a whole lot of time to get the work done that I need to get done during the week and weekends are really the only times I have to do anything. Sleeping becomes a chore and I start to get super exhausted constantly. I get really anxious when I have free time and don’t do anything that my brain identifies as productive, but I know that I need some rest. Spending time with friends like Brenda, Naomi, and Anna really help relieve the stress of going to work and school at the same time, despite that being time that I could be doing homework with, and I look forward to those moments in time. The second week of school, Anna has to cancel our lunch to complete her application with Petsmart. This was completely fine, she had to do something important that would help her with her financial situation. Nothing wrong with this. Then, on Thursday, I try to remind her that we have lunch on Friday as well. She tells me that she’s meeting with someone during that time. This one kind of hurt a bit because she made plans with someone else over our plans, and I wasn’t super happy or okay with this, but I waited to say anything because she probably just forgot. It turns out that she did, but... She forgot that we made plans literally a week after we made plans. That stung quite a bit. The next day we also had plans to do a raid day in Pokemon Go with me, Anna, and Brenda. We go, and I just feel weird inside. I feel like I’m in a car with strangers again, and I don’t really talk much. I notice this attitude, and I try to change it, but I’m still upset on the inside. 

I make sure that we’re still on for lunch the following week, and we have lunch. This lunch goes fine, nothing too special. Mainly sharing memes with each other but not really having too much conversation about much of anything. My work week after this is really rough, though, and so is the week after. I’m so tired at this point and my coursework is starting to get a bit rough. The next time we have lunch is really awkward. All Anna talks about is how great her day was and I try to smile and be happy for her, but then she asks how mine has been. I don’t lie, and I tell her that it sucks. I don’t have the energy to fake a smile, don’t have the energy to put any emotion behind my voice, it’s just a really uncomfortable experience. This is the last time we have lunch because she cancels again for the next week. This one really got to me, and this is at the peak of me questioning whether or not I want to be friends with her still because she’s completely different than how she used to be at this point. The following Wednesday, I decide to start using the hour we had lunch with each other previously to put in more time at work until I get my financial aid and I can finally quit my job because I can’t take the stress of my job on top of being a full-time college student anymore, so I send her a message to kind of cancel the rest of our lunches until further notice and let her know about it. The following is what occurs afterwards:

Those images speak for themselves. She did exactly the same thing again, but this time she caught herself. And what does she do? She bails on me. Which, you know, that’s fine. I’ve been debating whether or not to be her friend anymore anyway, so it’s no real skin off of my back. Am I upset? Yeah, a little. This was my best friend and I still hold onto those memories fondly, but she seems to misremember a lot. We decided pretty early on back into talking that this wasn’t going to remain a superficial friendship, but she seems to focus on the fact that that was all it was supposed to be this whole time when that’s blatantly untrue. Was she at least respectful and seemingly tried to end things on a somewhat positive note? Yeah, she called me the most talented individual from our hometown and wished me the best. But you know what? That little idea that I’d had in my mind was right the whole time. Because this last message that she sent me is all a facade. It’s all fake. She is fake, and I’ve felt it for a while. But now I have proof, and now people will know and now I know for a definite fact.

I did something I shouldn’t have done a few days later, something that Brenda forbade me to do but I did it anyway because that last message concerned me about what’s going on in her life to put up this gigantic wall around herself, trying to convince herself that her life is alright, being super defensive about everything that I had an issue with that I tried to resolve with her as a friend and out of concern as a human being. I went on her tumblr. And I found the following.

This is what she really thinks of me. That last message she sent me was utter bullshit. Wishing me the best? No she’s not. I’m the most talented individual and I’ll make it out there? She doesn’t believe that. Nothing that she’d said to me over the past 3 months was the truth. This wasn’t Anna. The old Anna is dead, and this is what’s replaced her. A careless, lying husk. Let’s go through this message and deconstruct it a bit now that you know the story. “Toxic men using me as a catalyst for all their feelings and emotional baggage” Apparently I’m toxic for talking to my friends about my feelings (YOU KNOW, LIKE FRIENDS DO) and that I put all my emotional baggage on just one single person because I’m a gigantic piece of shit. We’ll go with that. “It may have taken 5 times” Really? 5 times? Maybe you’re just misremembering with that poor memory that you admit to having, or maybe you’re just delusional now Anna, but this is time number 3. It is an undeniable fact that this is the 3rd time that we have stopped talking, but maybe you’re just playing this up for attention at this point, eh? Not even going to touch that middle garbage, just more defending her position and playing a holier-than-thou part where she can never do any wrong and that she has no faults because she didn’t want to be the bad guy. Whatever. “Using me as a therapist” You mean talking my feelings through with friends? How am I using you as a therapist when I continually told you that I didn’t want these long drawn out conversations about things? How am I using you as a therapist when you are the one who always draws it out of me because you yourself have reverted mentally back into being a savior archetype DESPITE me continually telling you that I didn’t want you to be my therapist? How am I using you as a therapist when I am literally actively seeking therapy with a licensed professional? That’s ridiculous. “Becoming codependent on me to express their feelings” Was I codependent on you? Yeah, I was several months ago and I absolutely hate the fact that I was, but don’t you dare for one second act as if you weren’t also codependent on me. And don’t you dare act like it was a way to express my feelings as if I didn’t have actual severe issues that were life threatening. That’s disgusting behavior. And oh boy, this last part... “Always fell in love with me - despite whatever including being GAY and being friends WITH MY GF” Oh, so I “always fell in love with you”, eh? Despite me never ONCE telling you that I loved you in that way, it was a constant thing every time, yeah? Oh boy, I developed feelings for someone who’s gay when I’m also in a relationship. You know for a fact that I would have never acted upon those feelings at all because I’m not a piece of human garbage and have the willpower to get over it. I told you that one singular time and told you afterwards that they weren’t real. You know for a fact that I discussed it with my own girlfriend as well. You continue to act so fucking righteous despite being so blatantly ignorant. Who are you anymore? You aren’t Anna. What happened to you? 

That last paragraph was way more aggressive than I wanted it to be, but it’s my raw feelings about seeing that post. I can’t believe the person who I was closest with would be capable of saying that about me, would be able to say that on a platform where people who don’t know the full story would read it and go, “Oh yes girl, fuck him and fuck men!”. Do I expect anyone to be on my side after all of this? No, I don’t. I made plenty of mistakes along this path, and I’ve shown those mistakes. But I don’t think I deserve this. I don’t deserve to be treated this way by someone that I cared so deeply about. I don’t deserve to be so utterly disrespected as a human being under such false, misconstrued claims. It’s such a cowardly thing to do that... I’m just so confused. How could the person who would once regularly say things like this: 

Come around and be so fake in her final message to me then post something like that for all of her followers to see. I just don’t understand. And I’m so broken on the inside. I still talk to Naomi but... I’m not sure how much longer she’s going to want to continue talking to me. After last time, I’m partially expecting her to up and leave at any given moment, too. I don’t really have anyone right now other than Brenda, and her work schedule plus her school schedule conflict so heavily with mine that we hardly get to talk. I figured I could just use this to vent, to show some people the truth even if they don’t give a shit about me as a person. This has taken me around 10 hours to put together, so I’m hoping at least one person reads it through. And Anna (the real Anna, not this disgusting human being that’s taken her form) if you’re reading this... I’m sorry. I didn’t want any of this.

tl;dr: Became best friends with a girl I knew from a very young age. Spent too much time with her on a daily basis for a few months and talked about too much in too little of a span of time. She helped me immensely and I slowly started to feel as though I developed feelings for her, told her, then freaked out, which caused a rift in our friendship that led to a break in talking. That break mentally damaged me (mostly my fault) and things were never the same afterwards. I tried to be her friend again, but she never really was my friend in the first place it seems. Look at the images attached to the post, most of the context to understand those is within the paragraph you just read. I’m the color red, girlfriend is the color purple, ex-best friend is the color green, and her girlfriend is the color yellow, Cheetah Cucks is the name of the group chat we had with me, the friend, and her girlfriend. Even though I fucked up a lot, I don’t feel like I deserve all of this. I don’t know if there’s something more going on in her life right now or what. I feel devalued as a human being and I feel completely broken. I’m not pushing all of the blame on her at all, but... Fuck.

[scouringsaucepans-blog]

Would You Just... Clean the Grill?

I am about to do something unconventional, radical, perhaps even heroic. I am about to clean the grill.

I know.

I hate cleaning the grill. I have always hated cleaning the grill. I remember childhood as one long uninterrupted stretch of wonder and joy, pretty much because I spent it never having to clean any grills.

At 15 I could be found in the kitchen of my family home, staring at the grill with tilted head, silently, like that dinosaur trying to comprehend existence in Tree of Life. Cleaning that grill must be a nightmare, I began to think. I’m glad that has nothing whatsoever to do with me.

At university I was appropriately adequate in many ways. I finished my assignments on time and washed my pots and only occasionally maxed-out my overdraft. But the grill was just not my domain. I found if I left it long enough someone else would get angry and clean it for me – and that person’s anger was always infinitely preferable to actually doing the grill myself.

But then university was over and I was living back at home, pretending I didn’t need a job because I was going to be the next Jack Kerouac, and suddenly my mother had decided the rules had changed.

She would return from work and I would hastily tab out of World of Warcraft, back to the Word document in which had been scrawled the same lousy four paragraphs for weeks, and my mother would come upstairs and ask how the writing was going, and I would squint at my lousy four paragraphs and say, Yes, good thanks, yes. And my mother would put her arm on my chair, and I wouldn’t say anything. And she would peer out of the window, and I wouldn’t say anything. And she would walk back towards the door, and my fingers would be hovering over the alt and tab keys, and she would be at the door, through it, gone – and then she would turn around, like fucking Colombo, and offhandedly ask if I would mind quickly cleaning the grill.

And I would stomp downstairs, muttering how the grill wasn’t even dirty, I hadn’t even used it, that Jack Kerouac never would have finished On the Road if he had been perpetually forced to clean grills like this, and I would get to the grill, and in fairness it would look like the back seat of the car in that scene in Pulp Fiction when John Travolta accidentally shoots Marvin in the face.

But I had meandering poetic romans-à-clef to be writing – or at least night elf druids to be levelling up – so I would do with that grill what Harvey Keitel had the mobsters do with that car in Pulp Fiction: I would gather up all the sodden old tin foil and throw it away, and then basically ensconce the grill pan and all the crumbs and congealed fat and bits of crisped bacon in new foil, so that if someone peered close the subterfuge would not hold, but from a distance any mum-cops in the area might be fooled. And then I would make cheese on toast and go back to World of Warcraft.

***

Of course now, a decade later, I’m a proper adult, which means I don’t even change the foil in the grill. I just leave it all and hope that, like hair, it will eventually start regulating itself.

Except the roguishly deprecating tone I’ve engendered here belies the truth of the situation, which is that I am miserable. My girlfriend will come in from her exhausting job as a pub manager – which job provides the flat in which we both reside – and I’ll hastily tab away from, I don’t know, a Wikipedia page detailing Captain America’s role in the 1982 Marvel comic book cross-over event Contest of Champions, say, back to the Blogger draft in which has been scrawled the same lousy four paragraphs for an eternity, and she, my girlfriend, will ask how the writing is going, and I will squint at my lousy four paragraphs and mutter, Yes, good thanks, yes.

And it’s all fucked. I don’t know what to write. If I’m not up for work or something that will let anyone but myself down then I’ll just stay in bed all day, and the flat is a tip, and I’ve got no clean socks, and I keep reading the first page of books and then throwing them aside, and there’s this weight pressing down on my chest that has been pressing down in some form or another for as long as I can remember, and it’s like everything is too heavy, I can’t lift any of it off, it’s all fucked…

And then here I am in the kitchen one day looking at all the dishes feeling the weight pressing down, and sort of slowly yet all at once it strikes me that although I can’t lift off the heavier weights, the ones about my career and my future and the apparent inexorability of my failure, there are smaller, more manageable weights that I could lift off, if I actually so desired, and one of these, perhaps the smallest, so small that it would almost be more ridiculous to not do it, is cleaning the grill.

So I am going to clean the grill.

***

And immediately I find I can breathe easier. Although, yes, only a minuscule weight, it is the first time anything has been lifted off rather than added in aeons, and it fills me with hope. Life is not so bad. You do little bits and they add up to big bits, and eventually you are free. The trick is to go slowly, and go easy on yourself. The grill today, then later I will watch Netflix, maybe have a beer, and I’ll be prepared to tackle more tomorrow.

But what will I watch on Netflix? Do they have Aliens on Netflix? I love Aliens so much. It’s not got the majesty of the original Alien, of course – what does? – but it is basically schlocky 80s B-movie as apotheosis. I tell you what, when you’re having a beer, a few beers, and watching Aliens – when those marines are running around in their bandanas, and Bill Paxton is shouting “Game over man, whoah man, we’re toast man,” and Michael Biehn is being Michael Biehn – when the alien queen detaches from her flaming egg sack – when that reveal comes of Ripley in her mech suit…

… Or is it Bill Pullman? Bill Paxton and Bill Pullman are similar, no? Is this a thing? Do people know about this?

I continue with such thoughts for about half an hour, until I realise I’ve spent all the reward from cleaning the grill but have as of yet not actually cleaned the grill, and that there is nothing left to do but go and clean the grill, and I instantly start feeling miserable again.

I motivate myself all over again, and head into the kitchen. To the cupboard where we keep the tin foil. There is no tin foil.

What the Paxton?

I swear, every time I try to drag myself out of this pit, God comes and puts some insurmountable obstacle in my way, like he doesn’t want me to succeed, like he wants me to stay suffering here forever. How are you supposed to fight against God?

No, Rob. Stop inventing deities to blame for your inability to complete basic household chores. Just go to the shop for more tin foil.

I go to the shop. Outside it is balmy, warm, wonderful, and everything feels great. I’m moving, life is happening, we can do this.

My cheeriness lasts for two and a half minutes, until I arrive at the shop and the lady points me to the wrong aisle for tin foil, and I decide the best course of action is to stand there pretending to choose from what is actually a selection of tinned goods until she disappears and I can go looking myself – except then the lady realises her mistake and comes jogging back, and I have to yell at her that It’s fine, it’s absolutely fine, I wanted butter beans anyway. Which I definitely didn’t.

Then at the counter I put my basket down before the woman in front has finished paying, and I don’t know what to do, whether to draw attention to the awkwardness by picking the basket up again, so I just hover there too close while the woman buys lottery tickets and chats to the cashier. I’m invading this chat, I think. My arms hang at my side like repugnant flippers. I can’t for the life of me remember how people are supposed to stand.

Finally, eight years later, it is my turn. I act too northern with the cashier to mask my embarrassment, but it comes off weird and I know she can tell I’m from the posh end of Sheffield, that I don’t belong here. All walk home I am distressed, gloomy. I think of others my age, struggling with promotions and babies and marriages, and here I am struggling to buy tin foil from a shop. I am wretched.

But the only thing more wretched, I decide as I return, would be to use my self-pity as an excuse to not clean the grill. I really am going to have to clean this grill.

So I get started – by planning out what I’ll do. First the dishes in the sink will need washing to make room. Which means actually first I’ll have to put the dry dishes away. I hate that this is a thing. Why don’t we just build kitchens with huge draining boards instead of cupboards, and then we could store dishes where they dry, thus removing a pointless and mundane job from existence? The same with clothes. Replace wardrobes with massive clothes horses, then we’d never again have to stress over folding t-shirts and the sides not being even and having to shake them out and try again, and finding pairs for all the socks, and staring at the wall as the light fades and the evening draws in, wondering whether it’s even worth being alive in such a bourgeois existence that apparently consists of nothing but putting possessions in drawers and then taking them out again, over and over, until death comes for us hunched and–

–Oh, that’s the dishes put away. Wasn’t so bad.

I wash the dishes in the sink. I wash the big roasting pan that we inexplicably store on top of the grill where it gets covered in dust and grease. I bet that was my girlfriend’s idea, I think. I find a better home for the roasting pan, on top of the highest cupboard where neither of us can reach.

Finally it is the grill’s turn. The old tin foil wilts in my hands. Underneath is a fatty pool of despair. I scrape out the pool with a spatula. I attack the grill pan with wire wool, green scourer, sponge. I attack the grill rack with same. I put it to dry.

I rinse out the empty wine bottles, the empty milk carton. I clean the hobs, the front of the oven, the kitchen tiles. I look around, panting. I do inside the sink, the back of the sink, wash out the cutlery tub with all the pond water in the bottom. I take out the recycling. I empty the cat’s litter tray, take the bins out, sweep the floor. I get it all done, do it all.

***

It is later. We’re watching Netflix. I tell my girlfriend I’m making a brew. I go to the kitchen, stand in the middle of the room, look around. The grill is gleaming. Everything is gleaming.

This will be easy, I think. All I have to do is apply today’s technique to every issue in my life that I’ve allowed to get on top of me over the past decade, and continue applying it every day for the rest of my life. Yes, I think. Easy.

[kyleesie]

A Year in Review: Movies I Watched in 2016

Those of you who know me well know that I watch A LOT of movies. As a kid, going to the theatre was a family past-time, and my parents were my number one movie-watching buddies. To this day, it remains one of my favorite ways to escape reality and share time, experiences, and thoughts with those I care about most.

I started collecting ticket stubs when I was young, but it was an inconsistent endeavor and I’m pretty sure I’ve thrown all of them out by now. Only in the past couple of years have I become more strict about collecting. Now that I buy most of my tickets online, I still make sure to get them printed at the theatre when I arrive. For me, each ticket, each movie, was a memory of what I saw, who I was with, what I felt, what I thought, and what I did all throughout that day. It became a diary of sorts - that centered my life around the stories and worlds that I wanted to live in or tell myself.

It only recently occurred to me to keep an actual list of all the movies I’ve seen in one full year. I started doing so back in 2015, but like my ticket collecting, it was a half-hearted hobby, and I logged only the titles of the films I saw. So, in 2016, I set out to create a more detailed account and began tracking the theatres I attended, the date, the time, and who I saw it with. I later tacked on my own critic and enjoyment ratings, because, ya know, everyone has an opinion and I wanted to remember mine.

Anyway, pardon the self-indulgent writing, but without further ado, here’s the list, in chronological order, of all the new films I’ve watched in theatres from January to December in 2016:

The Hateful Eight: 70 mm Roadshow The Revenant The Danish Girl Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Deadpool Zootopia 10 Cloverfield Lane The Witch Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice The Jungle Book Captain America: Civil War X-Men: Apocalypse WarCraft Finding Dory The Purge: Election Year Ghostbusters Start Trek Beyond Suicide Squad The Secret Life of Pets Jason Bourne Kubo and The Two Strings Don't Breathe Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children Boo! A Madea Halloween Pokémon: The First Movie - Mewtwo Strikes Back Doctor Strange Arrival Moana Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them Rogue One: A Star Wars Story La La Land Collateral Beauty Assassin's Creed

And here’s a breakdown of all the films, prioritized in order from best to worst in their respective categories:

BEST 5 MOVIES (must watch, they were awe-inspiring and revelational) La La Land Moana Arrival Don’t Breathe Kubo and The Two Strings

WORST 5 MOVIES (don’t bother, my brain was either shut off or died at some point) Suicide Squad Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice Ghostbusters Assassin’s Creed X-Men: Apocalypse

HONORABLE MENTIONS (perfect or not, I kinda just really like them, so...) The Revenant Captain America: Civil War  Zootopia Collateral Beauty Rogue One: A Star Wars Story The Hateful Eight: 70 mm Roadshow 10 Cloverfield Lane Deadpool

BEST MOVIE OF 2016: La La Land WORST MOVIE OF 2016: X-Men: Apocalypse MISSED MOVIES (I really wanted to watch them, but didn’t get to) Nocturnal Animals Moonlight The Handmaiden Fences The Huntsman: Winter’s War Looking back on the year, I’ve come to realize that although I’ve become decidedly disillusioned by superhero movies and most animated films (namely Pixar’s films - sorrynotsorry), they will, most of the time, be well-produced and well-told stories, with enjoyable characters, and overall satisfying experiences. Regardless, that alone does not make them outstanding pieces of cinema. Superhero movies have become the blockbuster, tent-pole films of our generation, and while I’m glad Marvel has figured out a way to make them popular and profitable (with the exception of Fox’s X-Men franchise and DC, who both REALLY still need to get their shit together - still holding out hope fro Wonder Woman tho...), they’ve also now raised the bar for themselves. Nothing short of a genre-breaking/redefining superhero movie will stand out in the massive and masterfully crafted cinematic universe that they’ve created. Video game movies though, apparently, still have a lot to learn (PLEASE don’t fuck up the Tomb Raider reboot!) As far as animation goes, Pixar, for me at least, seems to be suffering the same stigma - all their movies are amazing and super well-made, but not really memorable. With that in mind, it’s ironic to me that the villain in my favorite film of theirs, The Incredibles, foreshadowed their current fate when he said: “When everyone’s super... NO ONE will be...” In contrast, although Disney’s movies aren’t exactly perfectly produced, it at least appears that they’re taking risks in the messages and themes of the stories they’re telling. They’re pushing and poking boundaries with cultural representation and social subject matter. Granted, their handling of such topics is still somewhat clunky and controversial, but I appreciate that their voice is evolving and adjusting to the modern world and diversity of people around it. Now that I think about it, it is that clarity, freshness, and uniqueness of voice that is probably the greatest common factor shared among my top 5 moves of the year. Whether it’s through style, themes, message, character, or literal language and vocals (or lack there of), each film expresses its story with a voice so clear that it rings out, distinct above the din of drama, and echoes still, strong as ever, inside my heart and mind.

Also, as I mentioend before, movies are one of my favorite ways to spend time with those I love while enjoying something I'm passionate about. So here's a short list of my friends and loved ones who've accompanied me the most on these cinematic adventures: TOP 5 MOVIE BUDDIES Sean (33 times) Raad (11 times) David (7 times) Stacey (7 times) Daniel (6 times) I don't know if I could ever thank Sean enough for basically watching every single movie with me this past year! The one film we didn't see together he still showed up to the theatre afterwards to wish me a happy birthday. THANK YOU, my Sean and stars! XOXO

[jenniferasberryus]

25 Years of Warcraft and 15 Years of WoW: An IGN Retrospective

When I think of the games and franchises that define Blizzard Entertainment as a development studio, the name that stands tallest amongst a formidable line-up of giants is Warcraft - Blizzard’s high-fantasy universe full of memorable characters and moments, epic battles, and lore that spans thousands of years.

In many ways the story of Warcraft is also the story of Blizzard, and the evolution of the accessible, fun, and cinematic approach it brings to many of its creations. It’s a story that takes us from a small studio looking to create something new and original to a larger and more experienced team delving into a broader online world. In the 25 years since Warcraft first hit retail shelves as a new strategy game, and in the 15 years since World of Warcraft created a community of millions, this franchise has evolved and grown, as has its popularity.

To celebrate the anniversary of Warcraft, the games and its history, I sat down with several key Blizzard devs to discuss Warcraft's journey.

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994)

“I was actually at 3DO at the time, a company I helped found, and I had gone to Electronics Boutique to look at some new games that I could play,” John Hight, Executive Producer on World of Warcraft recalls. “And I see this game called Warcraft: Orcs & Humans. I picked it up and was completely enthralled, I played through the campaign and tried to convince anybody that would listen to me to go out and buy it. Partly so we could play together. It caused me to shift my career direction. After 3DO I went to work for Westwood Studios where eventually I worked on Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2. Warcraft was my first introduction to real-time strategy, and I loved it.”

By 1994 Blizzard Entertainment had already developed a few titles: licensed products like The Death and Return of Superman for the 16-bit Super Nintendo in addition to original efforts like The Lost Vikings. Under the guise of Silicon & Synapse, the studio was made up of a small team of passionate developers that, when not working on a project, could be found discussing what games they were playing at length.

The Lost Vikings, a strategy platformer of sorts where players were put in charge of a colourful group of Nordic warriors who had to work together to reach a goal, began as a riff on the popular hit Lemmings. Warcraft, which would go on to define almost a decade of real-time strategy excellence for Blizzard, began in a similarly unexpected way.

[caption id="attachment_2276499" align="aligncenter" width="1280"] Lost and clearly loving it.[/caption]

“At the time it wasn't actually going to be Warcraft: Orcs & Humans the strategy game,” Technical Director at Blizzard Bob Fitch tells me. “We were playing games like Monkey Island, and point-and-clicks were really fun, so the next thing was going to be a graphic adventure game.” And that adventure game was set to star the Lost Vikings.

As a Blizzard veteran, Bob has been working on the underlying tech that has driven many of the company’s most iconic releases for decades. This flirtation with the graphic adventure genre wouldn’t last though, thanks mostly to the release of Westwood Studios’ Dune II – a game that many cite as the original real-time strategy or RTS game. Slowly but surely the team became fixated on this new way to experience interactive strategy, so the decision was made to rework the engine and to create something in this space.

“We were thinking that the obvious answer was to take the Vikings, shrink them down to be really small, and then have the player direct them where they wanted them to go," Bob recalls, noting that the initial tests were simple scenarios that were very different to the puzzles found in The Lost Vikings. Looking to Dune II, the addition of opponents, the ability to attack, and PvP entered the picture. But when it came down to creating abilities or different types of Vikings, the team hit a wall.

“We realised that just telling our Vikings where to go and attack wasn't as much fun as playing Dune II,” Bob continues, confirming that coming up with Viking powers was a struggle. “The next thing you know, artists were drawing pictures of orcs and goblins and elves and saying that if we weren’t coming up with interesting ideas for what Vikings could do, this might be the answer.”[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=%22D%26D%20and%20Tolkien%20were%20all%20very%20traditional%20medieval-styled%20characters%20and%20places.%20We%20pushed%20our%20fantasy%20world%20into%20the%20realm%20of%20superhero%20comics%2C%20blockbuster%20movies%2C%20and%20heavy%20metal%20music.%22%20-%20Samwise%20Didier"]

“We all grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons, and reading Tolkien, so we all knew what an elf looked like, or what a paladin was,” Senior Art Director for Blizzard Entertainment, Samwise Didier, recalls. “Artistically, we really wanted to make our creations stand out. D&D and Tolkien were all very traditional medieval-styled characters and places. We pushed our fantasy world into the realm of superhero comics, blockbuster movies, and heavy metal music. Everything we created was ramped up. Anything ‘Level 1’ needed to look like it was ‘Level 5’. We didn’t go to ‘11’, we went to ‘111’!”

It was a defining moment for the studio. Although it had already created an original property with The Lost Vikings, the Warcraft universe would soon become something much more. Once the decision was made to tackle fantasy elements the project quickly evolved, with new mechanics and features added over time. Even the chess-like nature of the RTS genre would take literal form. “We had actual chess pieces, that was the black pieces and the white pieces,” Bob explains. “It was the Orcs & Humans. On one side you got the footman, on the other side you had the grunts, and they were kind of equal, and each side had its pieces in a particular slot.”

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Warcraft: Orcs & Humans released in 1994 to both critical and commercial success. Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness followed shortly after in 1995 and saw the series, franchise, and real-time strategy really deliver on its potential.

Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995)

“I was working on MechWarrior 2 at Activision and a colleague started playing Warcraft II,” Tim Morten, former Production Director on StarCraft II recalls. “I looked over his shoulder and it seemed like fun. There was a feature back then where with one disc you could have your friends play multiplayer with you. So, I got to join him in a multiplayer match and he immediately marched into my base and built towers. Of course, at this point I'm figuring out the tech tree. I hadn’t played an RTS so I had no idea how to counter that strategy and he couldn't stop laughing at how my base was getting taken apart by these towers. That was my inspiration to learn how to get better at playing RTS games.”

“I think in a lot of ways we didn't really feel like we were finished,” Bob Fitch tells me. The still relatively small team at Blizzard was ready to keep going the moment development wrapped on the original Warcraft. “We were finished in that it was the game we had set out to make, but there were things that got cut. Things like Naval battles. That and we just wanted to keep working on it. We had learned a lot about how to make an RTS, how they play, how to balance them, how to make artificial intelligence for them – and we knew we could do an even better job the second time around.”[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=%22We%20had%20learned%20a%20lot%20about%20how%20to%20make%20an%20RTS%2C%20how%20they%20play%2C%20how%20to%20balance%20them%2C%20how%20to%20make%20artificial%20intelligence%20for%20them%20%E2%80%93%20and%20we%20knew%20we%20could%20do%20an%20even%20better%20job%20the%20second%20time%20around.%E2%80%9D%20-%20Bob%20Fitch"]

“Orcs & Humans was our first step into Azeroth,” Samwise adds. “And we basically just stuck to orcs and humans, with a little flavour added through water elementals and demons. With Warcraft II, we added elves and dwarves, as well as trolls, ogres and dragons. We were building our fantasy world with the standard tropes but were making our own versions of them – the Blizzard versions that we all know and love.”

“We realised that it would be more interesting if the sides were more diverse,” Bob continues. “And so, you can see that in Warcraft II, which had so much more variety in the way that each side played and what all the units were. And that evolution was then reflected in StarCraft where there's three unique races.”

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In creating Warcraft II, the team at Blizzard also worked to evolve the tools that it had, with the goal being to create something so powerful that players would have the option to create anything they wanted. In Orcs & Humans, many of the maps and campaign missions were laid out using text files. This evolved into a proper editor for the completion of Warcraft II and later, its expansion, The Dark Portal.

“The campaigns went through evolutions where originally they were simplistic,” Bob explains. “Over time they grew to have more story and sub-quests, as we got better. And then that segues into another evolution, which was the editor. We began building the editors to have more and more functionality until our goal with Warcraft II and eventually StarCraft II was to create engines and editors so powerful that end users could create whatever they wanted.”

Jumping forward to the release of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos in 2004, this goal was met when user-created versions of genres we now know of as Tower Defence and MOBAs began to appear for the first time – all within the Warcraft universe. For the team at Blizzard it was a gradual evolution of the tools it had been honing internally finally making their way out into the world. And in a way getting to see the end results felt like mission complete.

In expanding the scope of Warcraft II, however, the characters and lore of the universe began to form alongside the art and strategy gameplay. Compelling characters began to emerge, and events took on more cinematic qualities. This storytelling would eventually take the series and franchise in new and exciting directions.

[caption id="attachment_2276501" align="aligncenter" width="1920"] Warcraft II saw the series really finding its feet.[/caption]

Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (2003)

“When I started at Blizzard, it was 1996,” Chris Sigaty, former Executive Producer and Senior Vice President at Blizzard recalls. “I was in college at USC at the time, and I knew a friend who knew somebody at Blizzard, and they invited me to come in and help test Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal. I absolutely loved Tides of Darkness and strategy gaming. And immediately there was this feeling of having found my people. I was a total Dungeons & Dragons nerd, science fiction and fantasy reader growing up and I never imagined there was a career in it. But once I arrived, I knew this was exactly what I wanted to do.”

Before Blizzard would return to Warcraft though there was - as the team lovingly puts it – many distractions along the way. From the dark action-RPG Diablo series to the science fiction space opera StarCraft. The latter took the RTS genre to its strategic limit by introducing three varied, asymmetrical, and involved races that engaged in grand battles involving large armies. It was StarCraft’s popularity and success in this space, bolstered by the earliest examples of competitive esports, that would inform the development of Warcraft III. That and the renewed focus on character and story.

“Warcraft III was where everything came together,” Samwise tells me. “The story, art, movies, hell - even the art in the manual, really pushed our game to 111. We came up with the franchise’s biggest characters in Warcraft III: Jaina, Illidan, Thrall and Arthas, and dozens more. Almost every character in World of Warcraft was based and modelled after something we created in Warcraft III and when World of Warcraft came out, it only got better.”

[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=%22We%20came%20up%20with%20the%20franchise%E2%80%99s%20biggest%20characters%20in%20Warcraft%20III%3A%20Jaina%2C%20Illidan%2C%20Thrall%20and%20Arthas%2C%20and%20dozens%20more.%22%20-%20Samwise%20Didier"]

“It was originally a hero-controlled game,” Chris says, talking about the earliest moments developing Warcraft III. “You could only control your hero, and the units you had around it were selected only if you had vision of them. It was a very different game. It wasn't working out, but it gave this differentiator for Warcraft III that we wanted, which was something that played very differently than the units-swarming you got from StarCraft. Hero-centric, level up, have items, consume them, go into different buildings and then focus on a few smaller armies. We called it RPS (Role Playing Strategy).”

This new direction saw an explosion of lore and gameplay come together, from the introduction of 16 or so playable races, to the simplification of base building to incorporate more story and role-playing character progression. Warcraft III would ultimately see this vision move back towards more traditional RTS mechanics, with the playable races cut down to eight and then four, but its focus on hero abilities and a central character remained.

“It was a complete revamp at that point,” Chris confirms. “We basically went back to the drawing board, but the element of having this hero character was something the team was very fond of. That hero-centric play felt like the big innovation for us.”

“We were still working on StarCraft at that time,” Rob McNaughton, Lead Artist on StarCraft II recalls. “We really sat down and thought about how we are going to evolve the RTS. We wanted to take it to the next level. First, we made the decision to go with 3D graphics, which meant that Warcraft III became one of our most technically challenging games to make during those years. But we also quickly realised that it was going to be more than just a continuation of the RTSs we’ve made. With the heroes and levelling, the game could become more accessible to a lot more people. So, from our point of view internally, the Warcraft franchise went a little softer where StarCraft went hard esports.”

“By Warcraft III, we added dozens more races and places to Azeroth,” Samwise adds, “including some of our most recognisable races in the game; the night elves, tauren, and murlocs. Working with 3D models and environments at this time allowed us to really push the look of the game and add to the immersion with in-game cutscenes. All the while, our pre-rendered cinematics were improving with each game and by World of Warcraft, both gameplay art and cinematic art hit a whole new level.”

[ignvideo url="https://au.ign.com/videos/2018/11/02/warcraft-3-reforged-cinematic-trailer-blizzcon-2018"]

Warcraft 3 returns!

World of Warcraft (2004)

“I was working at BioWare in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada on a game called Jade Empire,” Kevin Martins, Lead Designer on World of Warcraft recalls. “With World of Warcraft we had heard the buzz about it. We played a demo at E3, but as we only played about 20 minutes of it, we didn't think much of the game. I’m an orc and I kill scorpions. I hope there's more to it. Oh boy, was there more to it! When it was released it quickly took over the team at BioWare, where it single-handedly delayed Jade Empire because we were all playing it. I had my troll and female mage, my first characters and they're still around to this day.”

Taken at face value, World of Warcraft presented a new direction not only for the franchise but Blizzard as a whole. But much like the origins of Warcraft, which was born from playing and loving a new type of game with the release of Dune II, World of Warcraft’s inception followed a similar trajectory.[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=%22When%20it%20was%20released%20it%20quickly%20took%20over%20the%20team%20at%20BioWare%2C%20where%20it%20single-handedly%20delayed%20Jade%20Empire%20because%20we%20were%20all%20playing%20it.%22%20-%20Kevin%20Martins"]

“The team was playing EverQuest and Ultima Online and loving them,” Chris recalls. “So, immediately we began asking - what if. What if we brought our slant to it? There was another game in development at the time and it was not an MMO in any way. And we didn't want to do that anymore. The big moment came when Allen Adham walked in and said, ‘I know we've been doing this thing, but we all really want to go and do this thing.’ And everybody was like, ‘Let's do it.’ And that new thing became World of Warcraft.”

Having thousands of people log into a single server, with the goal being to create a seamless world without the zone-loading seen in EverQuest, was there from the beginning. This alone proved to be a huge technical challenge and undertaking for the team. “It's hard to wrap your head around it,” Chris continues. “We started building this engine that needs to do all these things, and it was new territory. Blizzard had been through this many times where we’ll ask, ‘What do we know about that?’, and then realise we don't know anything about it.”

The sheer scope of World of Warcraft’s, well, world was larger than anything Blizzard had developed to date, and it required both new technology and a different approach to design. But it wasn’t long before the first prototype build was put together and the team could see the Warcraft universe face-to-face for the first time.

“I remember being completely impressed by seeing the world at scale,” Chris tells me. “With the Warcraft RTS games, even though they showed some size differences between units, it's not truly a scale. It does whatever it needs to do for the gameplay, so an ogre might be bigger than a footman as far as the number of pixels on the screen is concerned, but it wasn’t an accurate scale.”[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=%22When%20you%20look%20at%20how%20big%20that%20initial%20world%20was%20and%20how%20ambitious%20it%20was%2C%20comparing%20it%20to%20all%20the%20MMORPGs%20that%20were%20released%20before%20that%20-%20I%20don't%20think%20any%20of%20them%20came%20out%20with%20a%20world%20that%20huge.%22%20-%20John%20Hight"]

“When you see a treant in Warcraft III walking around, it's big compared to your footman,” Chris continues. “But it's not like when you walk around in World of Warcraft, look up, and see a treant. That was one of those moments where it was like holy crap that’s a treant! That's how we knew we were on the right track, because it's such an epic feeling. We knew Warcraft players were going to like this too.”

“Instead of viewing multiple characters from above, we had our first experience of looking up to see a sky and seeing just how terrifying some of our creatures and characters could be,” Samwise adds.

Although early builds would provide this new perspective, there were still many challenges facing the team. One was taking the art style seen in Warcraft III and translating that to a more traditional over the shoulder look. “Keeping the Warcraft style; we struggled with that for a while,” Samwise admits. “For some reason, with this new point of view, the art team had a tendency to go more realistic with the characters and environments. Our weapons and armour were more proportionate to normal-style weapons, and our colours were becoming dull and muted. Maybe it was the view we were working in.”

[caption id="attachment_2283094" align="aligncenter" width="1280"] Battle Chests... now that takes me back.[/caption]

“At that time, most first-person style games were trying to be more realistic,” Samwise continues. “That is definitely not want we wanted. We wanted the immersion to feel realistic, but not kill the Warcraft art style that we all loved. We needed to get that superhero vibe back. We just applied our normal philosophy for creating art and tweaked it a bit to fit this new camera view. By pushing the proportions back to normal Warcraft levels, our characters became more dynamic and more heroic. We pushed the weapons and armour to be even bigger and bulkier, and juiced up our palette to keep our colours rich and vibrant. After that, we had the feel of Warcraft back in our art.”

“The game for me and I think for a lot of players, is that the world is the star first,” John Hight says. “There's always something new and an interesting place to explore. When you look at how big that initial world was and how ambitious it was, comparing it to all the MMORPGs that were released before that - I don't think any of them came out with a world that huge. And then each expansion added to the world with interesting storytelling and characters like Jaina or Sylvanas or Thrall. Characters that we’ve followed through many different stories over the years.”

“The moment to me that really stands out came on launch night,” Kaeo Milker, Production Director on Heroes of the Storm tells me. “We do launch events and we did one for WoW at Fry's Electronics, which is this big warehouse electronics store. We'd done them before and usually a couple of hundred people show up, they're all excited and they buy the game and we sign autographs and we all celebrate together. But that night when we arrived there was a line of people wrapped around and around this huge building multiple times. And then it went out into the parking lot and around the block. There were thousands of people there and it was the first moment where we realised that this was different. It felt like the beginning of everything, beyond all of our wildest expectations.”

[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2018/08/09/25-changes-to-world-of-warcraft-since-it-launched-in-2004"]

A look back...

Warcraft: Legacy (2019)

It’s hard to overstate how the success of World of Warcraft not only impacted the industry but Blizzard as a studio. From a small team that created Warcraft: Orcs & Humans the studio would grow to measure in the hundreds, especially as work commenced on expansions for World of Warcraft. But behind this exponential rise in popularity and awareness, Warcraft has always remained the result of developers given the freedom to create. “We know what we like,” Bob summarises. “Sometimes that's all it really takes, knowing what you like and a commitment to do it.”

“Warcraft came from passionate players creating the games they wanted to play,” Chris Sigaty confirms. “And it turns out that the people out there playing the games are basically brethren, people that feel the same way, and there's this awesome camaraderie that comes out of that. You can feel that togetherness.”

“Friendships that people could make before ever meeting in real life, that's always been a part of what the internet is,” Kevin Martins adds. “The power of relationship building was particularly strong in World of Warcraft and it’s a legacy that resonates to this day.”[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=%E2%80%9CThe%20power%20of%20relationship%20building%20was%20particularly%20strong%20in%20World%20of%20Warcraft%20and%20it%E2%80%99s%20a%20legacy%20that%20resonates%20to%20this%20day.%E2%80%9D%20-%20Kevin%20Martin"]

“We love seeing people create costumes and artwork based on Warcraft,” Samwise says. “I remember explaining to the artists when they joined the team what the ‘Warcraft’ art style was. At the time, it was really different, and sometimes polarising for people. Now, everyone walks into Blizzard knowing what the style is. I have hired people as artists specifically from seeing their fan art.”

“You know, we do want World of Warcraft to live for another 15 years or 50 years or even a hundred years,” John Hight tells me. “And in order to do that, it has to remain relevant to the community out there. We're also developing for the next two, four, six, eight years. We plan many expansions ahead. What’s exciting is that people coming to work on the game or play Warcraft for the first time probably have no idea about the games that had influenced the designers of the originals.”

With the release of World of Warcraft: Classic, which recreated the launch period of the game to great success, and the upcoming release of the remastered Warcraft III: Reforged, this is a sentiment that rings especially true for Blizzard. Both projects have artists, designers, and engineers who grew up playing Warcraft – either in its original real-time strategy form or the phenomenon that is the massively-multiplayer World of Warcraft.

“When I think about how those things influenced each other, it wasn't this path that we set out on, knowing we're going to get to this place,” Chris concludes. “But World of Warcraft became the giant exclamation point for Warcraft in that it created communities of people. It broke down barriers with people simply having a great time adventuring together. That for me, I want to share that with more people, and I look forward to 25 more years where we can broaden that feeling and bring that sense of togetherness to an even larger group.”

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Kosta Andreadis is an Australian freelancer who also wrote IGN's Diablo retrospective and StarCraft retrospective, as well as a look at the early days of Blizzard with its co-founder Allen Adham. Follow him on Twitter.

from IGN Video Games https://www.ign.com/articles/25-years-of-warcraft-and-15-years-of-world-of-warcraft-an-ign-retrospective via IFTTT from The Fax Fox https://thefaxfox.blogspot.com/2020/01/25-years-of-warcraft-and-15-years-of.html

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