#stringing him along as a plot device is so boring to me

[eywaseclipse]

If Quaritch doesn’t meet his demise in fire and ash then I’ll just be so unbelievably disappointed. Neytiri, aim for head 😌

[douchebagbrainwaves]

EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT SCHOOL

But I don't think this is true. Over and over, I've seen startups we've funded snatched by west coast investors are confident enough of their judgement to act boldly; east coast investors, not so much that it's fun to use, but that they're driven by more powerful motivations. I knew intellectually, but the boring stuff you do in school under the name mathematics is not at all like what mathematicians do. Here's a handy rule for startups: competitors are rarely as dangerous as they seem, because good people find good markets. I wasn't sure whether to include Jobs on this list because he makes me happy. Hardy said he didn't like math in high school the solution was the telephone. A user on Hacker News recently posted a comment that set me thinking: Something about hacker culture that never really set well with me was this—the nastiness. Of course, Internet startups are still only a fraction of the probability that they will succeed at all. Just that all other things being equal, the more stuff they seem to have been two ways of thinking about programming.1 It's hard for us to be up to our chins in failure all the time. Angel investors often syndicate deals, which means stock with extra rights like getting your money back first in a sale, or convertible debt, which means they join together to invest on the same terms. I'm not saying this is the route to well-deserved obscurity.2

As huge as their companies eventually became, they were all essentially mechanics and shopkeepers at first. You enjoy it more if you eat it occasionally than if you eat nothing but chocolate cake for every meal. For example, in my house in Cambridge, which was built in 1876, the bedrooms don't have closets. If you had to get over to start a new channel. The definition then spread to people who behaved like assholes in forums, whether intentionally or not. Everything that came to us through the mass media was a blandly uniform and b produced elsewhere. And so I let my need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. And you know why they're so happy? This is a list of the biggest regrets of the dying. And if I don't run for several days, I feel ill.3

It was surprising—slightly frightening even—how fast they learned. The eight men who left Shockley Semiconductor to found Fairchild Semiconductor, the original Silicon Valley startup, weren't even trying to start a new channel. I know how hard it is, because there is a lot of plot, but they want to start it. The reason this is news to anyone is that the Internet is the primary medium. That's not how you win at this game. The final contributing factor is the culture of the forum.4 Right now most of you feel your job in life is to be strategically indecisive: to string founders along while trying to gather more information about the startup's trajectory. Overall only about 10% of startups succeed, but that was enough to tell what I said that upset him: that startups would do better if they moved to Silicon Valley to succeed. It seems like a bad idea.

Notes

Giant tax loopholes are definitely not a VC who read a draft, Sam Altman points out that trying to figure this out. No one in a bug. It will require more than we can teach startups a lot like meaning. I got to the table.

An investor who says he's interested in x, and cook on lowish heat for at least should make a brief entry listing the gaps and anomalies. Oddly enough, a torture device so called because it depends on them, because they can't afford to.

I mean that if the value of understanding per se but from what the earnings turn out to be combined that never should have become direct marketers. But so many had been with us he would presumably have got more of the markets they serve, because what they're doing. Actually this sounds to me like a later investor trying to make peace with Spain, and I suspect. So far the only cause of accidents.

Stone, op. So instead of using special euphemisms for lies that seem promising can usually get enough money from good investors that they lived in a in the absence of objective tests. Median may be exaggerated by the government. 5 more I didn't realize it yet or not, bleeding out invites at a discount of 30% means when it converts you get nothing.

[bamfdaddio]

X-Men Abridged: 1968

The X-Men, those ever-so-slightly exhausting mutants that have sworn to protect a world that hates and fears them, are a cultural juggernaut with a long, tangled history. Want to unravel this tapestry? Then read the Abridged X-Men!

(X-Men 40 - 51) - written by Roy Thomas, Gary Friedrich and Arnold Drake. Drawn by Werner Roth, Don Heck, George Tuska and Jim Steranko

Did you know Frankenstein’s monster was an android, sent to earth by aliens as an ambassador?

My English Lit professor LIED TO ME! (X-Men 40)

Whereas last year served up a cohesive narrative by making it all about Factor Three, 1968 gives us a hodgepodge of clumsy and confusing storylines. This might be due to the different writers at the helm: last year was all about Roy Thomas, this year we’ve got three dudes pulling it in different directions.

What doesn’t change is the prose. So much purple prose.

Anyway, this year is all about THE DEATH OF PROFESSOR XAVIER and THE RETURN OF MAGNETO! (If you think this is terrific foreshadowing and not something that kills all narrative tension, boy howdy, you’ll love reading comics from this era.)

The best kind of foreshadowing drags you into an alley, punches you in the nose and steals your shoes. Fuck subtlety and proper twists. (X-Men 41)

Anyway, Xavier is acting all out of character: cranky, angry, impatient, barely using his powers for immoral purposes… He pushes the X-Men to the brink and continually sequesters himself with a troubled Jean.

Meanwhile, Bobby and Hank’s date with Zelda and Vera is interrupted… again. At this point, I just have to believe that Zelda and Vera are embroiled in some torrid lesbian relationship, while Hank and Bobby serve as their beards.ANYWAY, their date is interrupted by the Grotesk, the last remaining heir to an advanced subterranean species who have recently been slaughtered by an earthquake machine of human making. Look, how many underground societies does the Marvel Earth even have? Did these Grotesks live next to the Molemen? I…

In defense of Grotesk, spinning him around like a fucking bola is one of the top three things I´d like to do with Angel too. (X-Men 42)

The X-Men try to stop the Grotesk from sinking the Eastern seaboard into the Atlantic, and in the end, the Professor sacrifices himself to stop him, paying pays the ultimate price!

OR DOES HE

To make it even more tragic, apparently Xavier was dealing with some mysterious illness that neither human medicine nor mutant powers could cure. But before he died, he somehow transferred his powers to Jean. (Either pretend this happened or retcon it him awakening Jean’s latent telepathy.) Anyway, Chuck wanted to prepare them for the return of… Magneto. (Also Pietro and Wanda.)

Quicksilver crashes Xavier’s funeral, unsure whether he should ask the X-Men for help. He doesn’t. Meanwhile, Magneto somehow has duped some hapless time-displaced TikTokker into filming the grisly affair. (X-Men 43)

What follows is a sort of confusing crossover with the Avengers where the X-Men mostly get sidelined in favour of some drama involving the House of M. Wanda has some temporary mental damage that only Magneto can cure? Also, Pietro hates humans now, which, given the state of the world in general, I can only concur with.

Magneto captures the X-Men in customized cages, designed to be unescapable, but Angel escapes by simply pushing the right button. He flies off to get help, stumbles upon a weird and ultimately meaningless side quest and finally returns with the Avengers!

But! Magneto turns the X-Men against Earth’s Mightiest Heroes! Just kidding: the X-Men pretend to go along with Magneto’s mind games, but this was all a plot concocted by the heroes to make Magneto feel like he’s winning. Instead, the heroes attack and drive Magneto back. Toad, who finally is fed up with Magneto’s abuse, emancipates himself and defies Magneto, kicking him out of the helicopter he, Wanda and Pietro flee in. Magneto seemingly falls to his death in the water.

OR DOES HE.

First of all: why would Magneto just make a non-ferrous aircraft? Second of all: why would he then BRING IT ALONG? Big mad. (Avengers 53)

Following Xavier’s death, Foggy Nelson reads his will. The Professor bequeaths the school to the X-Men! Fred Duncan, Professor X’s FBI liaison is also there! And then! Juggernaut briefly returns from the dimension of Cyttorak, stirs up trouble and is then sucked back into the ruby of Cyttorak thanks to a Professor Ex Machina from the grave. This somehow convinces Fred Duncan that the X-Men should split up, fearing they may be too big a target for evil mutants and thinking they might be better at responding to threats spread out over the continent.

Yeah, Angel will be so much more effective when he isn’t part of a team of much more powerful individuals. (X-Men 46)

So, the X-Men split up! In NYC, Bobby and Hank battle Warlock, the most forgettable villain ever, when he interrupts their date. They also get into a fight with hippies because of… poetry?

Yeah! Put the slam in poetry slam, odd beatniks! *aggressive finger snaps* (X-Men 47)

Jean and Scott ‘go undercover’ in California, with Jean becoming a model and Scott ‘pretending’ to be her superjealous boyfriend. So, instead of actually forming a relationship, they just pretend to have one? Fuck, these two are exhausting. Jean also forgot she attends a university, apparently. Which is just as well, because it means boring Ted and his boring brother disappear from the narrative.

They are attacked by an increasingly silly string of villains and it’s obvious that nobody really knows what to do with this book. They even skip an issue: the preview for issue 49 is something completely different than what we’re getting.

The year ends of a sort of high note, however, introducing two familiar faces. Mesmero,a hitherto unknown follower of Magneto, is amassing an army of would-be mutants by… hypnotizing them? Through their… X-Gene? Among them is a curious gal named Lorna Dane, who is rocking the brown hair. Bobby saves her from her drone-like state and keeps an eye on her while the rest of the X-Men investigate Mesmero.

Lorna meanwhile takes a shower, washed out the cheap dye and is revealed to have green hair. (Fuck yeah! But also maybe buy better dye?) Bobby and Lorna are captured by Mesmero and his cronies, and Bobby warns the other X-Men telepathically. They let themselves be captured by Mesmero too, figuring it’s the easiest way to find his lair. There, Mesmero awakens Lorna’s latent magnetism powers, and bestows on her two sweet titles:

Somewhere in Kenya, Storm is upset and doesn’t know why. (X-Men 50)

And, in another shocking twist (gasp²), Magneto’s alive!

You say ‘aura of unspeakable evil’, I say ‘prime dom top daddy’. (X-Men 50)

He fights the X-Men while Polaris tries to determine who she holds allegiance to: the father she just met or these other randos she just met. You’d think she would maybe not want to hang out with the raving demagogue, but hey. Maybe it’s magnetic attraction. The X-Men flee, forced to regroup, and we end the year there, with the ‘innocent’ Lorna Dane under Magneto’s thrall.

Didn’t you take Art History? Oh! Issue 50 has the familiar logo for the first time, created by Jim Steranko!

So one cape tassel goes over the shoulder and one goes under it? Why is there a little skull with horns in the middle? Why the strappy sandals? Mesmero, sashay away. (X-Men 50)

Ugliest Costume: It’s a toss-up between Mesmero and Polaris, but since I assume Mesmero designed Polaris’ outfit, we’ll just give it to him.

Best new character: I didn’t think she’d earn it, because I’m not the biggest fan of Lorna Dane (most writers use her as a plot device, rather than a character), but otherwise this would go to Grotesk and that’s never going to happen.

Most audacious retcon: Jean is able to psychically penetrate Juggernaut’s helmet, which used to protect him from Charles’ influence.

It’s also kinda funny how after years of retcons where Polaris, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver sometimes are and sometimes aren’t Magneto’s kids, how it is right now is the same as when it started: Lorna is Magneto’s daughter, the twins aren’t.

What to read: Nothing. This is not a great year.

Death proof: ‘Chuck’ kicks the bucket for the first time.

[blodreina-noumou]

4, 12, 13! The 100 (duh), and for 13, you can choose the character

Thank you so much, my friend! 💛

4. Do you have a NoTP in your fandom? Are they a popular OTP?

This is known, of course, but Be//arke. Part of why I dislike them is because they’re such a popular OTP, and because I get a little bored with seeing that subsection of the fandom make everything that happens in this show about their ship.

That being said, I’ve been less salty about it lately. 

We will finally know, one way or the other, what the writers have intended all along, with the upcoming series finale. 

Either they will be an explicitly romantic couple, or they won’t.

Because it’s undeniable that they care for each other, deeply, or that we’re meant to get that impression, at least. They love each other, however ill-defined what exactly the nature of that love is has been on screen. They are each other’s buttons, the one person they’ll each go way too far for, even when other people would make more sense as hostages or bait. 

Bellamy spent all of s6 ignoring his canonical girlfriend so he could save Clarke. It was a snapshot of a few days within that universe, but it’s really hard for me to still be like “B/C shippers are delusional, smell my skeptic farts, mreh heh heh” when the past season emphasized their connection so much. He visibly mourned Clarke in a way that we did not see him mourn Monty and Harper, who he spent a lot more time with. He immediately supported Clarke at the beginning of the season, despite everyone else in his family being (imo, rightfully) very upset with her recent betrayals. He was shown to be in conflict with Echo more than with Clarke this past season - although he and Echo made up and are still solid, from where I’m standing. So that’s messy and kind of unsettling. What’s the plan with that?

Because if the writers aren’t headed towards an explicitly romantic relationship, they’re doing a hell of a job stringing B/C shippers along. 

And that leaves a bad taste in my mouth, regardless of how I’ve always felt about those characters as a ship. The writers and actors are far from oblivious about how that section of the fandom feels. The idea that they might be muddying the waters for no reason other than to fuck with people bothers me. It never used to, but it does now.

I’d actually prefer that they were headed towards a Be//arke Happily Ever After, than that they were stringing along their fanbase that way.

More likely, if history is any indication, things will still be muddy, one of them will die (my money is on Bellamy at this point, because of Bob’s subtweets apparently referencing Be//arke) and we’ll still find ways to argue about it for as long as the fandom persists after the show is over.

So at this point, they’re a NoTP for me, but I’m not super salty about it like I used to be. A year from now (hopefully) we’ll have the answers. Nobody can really say exactly what kind of love exists between Bellamy and Clarke until we see how it ends for them.

12. Is there an unpopular arc that you like that the fandom doesn’t? Why?

I used to say The Flame, but lately, I feel they really fumbled the potential that plot device had in s6. I just wasn’t as engaged with the Sheidheda concept as I could’ve been. Too many holes, too much missing backstory, too much blown potential in showing us other Hedas, outside of Lexa, Sheidheda, and Madi.

So these days, I’d have to say that I probably have an unpopular viewpoint for a Clexa shipper - Clexa wasn’t healthy, and was always doomed. The showrunners didn’t realize the sociopolitical impact that would have, because they attempted to take the same blase, non-issue attitude towards sexual orientation that the universe of The 100 has. I think the Clexa story played out exactly as it was always meant to, and if you strip it of its real world implications, it’s some of the best and most heartbreaking bit of character work that the show has ever done. 

It’s not about a timeless love story, but about the tragedy of a budding affection between two young women caught up in the politics of war and their opposing cultures - a tragedy which has nothing to do with them being wlws, and everything to do with them being oppositional leaders, and kindred spirits in a violent world. They were shaped into cold pragmatists, but around each other, they allowed a certain level of vulnerability and softness of the other person. That was what was beautiful, and the tragedy is in the truth that a connection like that never would’ve thrived in the world of The 100.

I’ll always love Clexa, but I don’t feel much like a Clexa, if that makes sense.

13.  Unpopular opinion about XXX character?

I’m going to go with Jasper. The general consensus that I see a lot about him seems to be that he was a better character before 2x16, that people miss Puppy Love Jasper. Some even go so far as to say that his arc didn’t make sense, that he was annoying or a whiny brat in s3 and s4. I couldn’t disagree with that interpretation more.

I feel a lot of people don’t fully understand the series from Jasper’s perspective. There is so much he’s unaware of, so much he witnesses, and so much he misses out on. There is so much implied loss in his life, much more than just Maya. I don’t believe her death is the sole thing that drove him over the edge - I think it was simply the final straw.

Before he’s locked away in Mount Weather, Jasper is shown to have a few close friends - Monty, of course, but also Finn, and Octavia. He spends the most time with all of them, and ends up losing all of them, on some level, by season 3. 

He struggles to forgive Monty for his part in the Mount Weather genocide. 

We never see him receive the news of how Finn died, and I think, given the way Jasper talks about him (“looks like Finn finally got his peace talks”; “you hear that Finn? he thinks he’s innocent, none of us is innocent!”) - I think we’re meant to assume that people sugarcoated it, and that Jasper doesn’t know the extent of Finn’s crimes. So in his eyes, he loses a good friend to a pointless war. 

Octavia falls in love with someone else, just a few days after kissing Jasper, and ends up so busy with her new culture that she more or less abandons him. Monty and Octavia (and later, Harper) all try to reach Jasper, but he’s too far gone at that point - he’s too alone. 

He also loses his parents (he mentions them in s1, and then we never hear about them again, so I think we can assume they died either in the Culling or on the way down to the ground, when the Ark crashes.) 

And he has his budding leadership crushed, his hope that he can somehow impact the future, and prevent the horror around him snatched away, by his former leaders genociding an entire civilization, including people who helped them, including the first girl he ever loved. She dies in his arms, though, in case the general horror of that wasn’t enough.

He loses so much more than just Maya.

He loses more than just about anybody, and it all happens to him while he’s fifteen years old.

Justice for Jasper Jordan. My heart always hurts when I think of him, and I hate to see people talk so poorly of him.

This is so long, and I could go on about Jasper forever, so I’ll stop now. Thank you so much again for the questions, and I hope you enjoy the essays you totally did not ask for, lmao!

[lol-jackles]

An episode from Mrs Singer that was watchable???? I agree it was probably heavily re-worked. I have a sneaking suspicion that the last speech and acting of Sam was Jared's bit for humanity- and maybe He 're-worked' the script to make it Sam and Dean friendly!

I’m curious who wrote Sam’s speech because it’s not typical BuckLemming style, I suspect Dabb may have written it as he seems to have a thing for the Sam angst (Dabb wrote Sam’s speech in “The Devil in the Detail”).

Jared’s acting was very good though I felt I was seeing more Jared than Sam right up until the attack-hug, then it was all Sam; the lonely little brother exhaustedly frustrated with his stubborn older brother.  Dean’s acquiescence took Sam by surprise because his state of mind was that of a child, coupled with Dean’s paternal pat on his cheek, and Sam as a child rarely got his way.

From Sam’s point of view (along with the audience’s), Dean’s seemingly endless self-inflicted apathy is part of the long list of crappy-things-to-do-to-Sam.  Like in “Advanced Thanatology”, Dean temporarily killing himself so he can go into the dead zone to find the bodies and free the souls, while a good idea (I guess???), was still a very crappy thing to do to Sam as there was no discussion, just “here’s a needle give me five minutes being dead okay see you later.”  It’s been ongoing since season 2 so I don’t blame Sam for thinking the magic box business is just the latest in a long string of events of Dean causing himself harm and then piss and moan about giving up.  Sam’s angry speech in “Damaged Goods” was not only about Dean cutting him out of his plan with no discussion but also for giving up by using blind faith in fate as an excuse (“since when do we believe in fate?”).  Sam’s speech in “Prophet and Loss” recounts their long history of defying fate and surviving literal and figurative hell because they had faith in themselves, but Dean seems to forget this lesson every damn season.  Oh yeah, I’ll be fed up too with this umpteenth nonsense and decked him, which if you ask me was pretty weak (Dean didn’t even drop his beer). 

Up until “Prophet and Loss” I wasn’t feeling the Dean situation, not just because we already have seen the self-sacrifice and coming back from the dead scenario, not just because Michael is boring and doesn’t feel threatening, not just because Dean acts like a background character in his own story, but because Dean’s apathy and bystander attitude doesn’t make sense anymore in face of the Winchester’s long history of overcoming the odds and saving lives and the world along the way.  This felt like Dean’s 10th I-give-up-at-first-opportunity shtick, he gives up too easily and here is where Sam’s raw frustration makes total sense and why part of me thinks Dean’s stagnation is a deliberate plot device and not necessarily poor writing because Sam’s breakdown was a perfect culmination of his decade-long frustrations with Dean’s obstinance.  Sammy’s “why don’t you believe in us?” is a child asking why adults do stupid things when the adults should know better. 

Side note: I can’t believe it took me this long until “Prophet and Loss” to realize why Dean isn’t the leader and why Sam had to step up to be one.  You can’t have a leader who decides to give up whenever life does a Lucy and yanks the football out of the way.  You need a leader who keeps fighting until the bitter end.  Dean gives grand speeches about fingering fate and alway keep fighting, but it is actually Sam who is the living example of Dean’s speech (“I learned everything from you, I copied from you”).  We often assume that because someone say something meaningful then they are an example of what they say.  Life shows you this is often not the case and why the talk is cheap cliche is true.

[taiblogcomics]

Flag-Rant System Error

Hey there, transients. It's down to the wire, friendos. This is the third to last issue of Suicide Squad we'll ever see on this blog. Aren't you excited? It's my Christmas gift to myself, honestly~

Here's the cover:

On the whole, this cover is pretty great. It's actually interesting compositionally, it's not some boring action shot or team pose. It's kind of fun and interesting, and who doesn't relate to Rick Flag wanting to throttle Amanda Waller here~? The one real complaint? Katana's ass being front and center like that. Like, this cover would sell on the rest of the premise alone, it doesn't need the bonus push from the pro-butts crowd. I think Harley is checking her out, though~

So we open in a dirty warehouse with Amanda Waller tied to a chair. Either she's drooling blood or eating Twizzlers, because there's a long string of red hanging from her mouth. Well, comic, you've got my attention. Please do something wonderful with it. The camera gets in closer and we can see Waller is actually pretty badly beaten up, and it stops being funny. Including the bad bruises, Waller also has a big scar on her neck. A Jigsaw voice comes on over the loudspeaker and informs Waller that she's now the shoe on the other foot of the table that's turned and tasted its own medicine. In short: Waller also has had a Suicide Squad style brain bomb implanted in her neck. Poetic~?

The voice asks Waller if she knows where she is, and Waller muses that due to the echoes and such, it's probably either a sub or space station. The voice agrees, complimenting her on her observational skills. The second thought is whether she can guess their identity, and that's much trickier. The list of people who hate Amanda Waller ranges from her own team all the way up to the reader. Although I assure you, the twist is not that I have kidnapped and beaten Amanda Waller. As the voice monologues, a door on the other side of the room slowly opens and a pair of hands hold up a sign saying "keep them talking". This pair of hands turns out to be, of all characters, freaking Cosmonut. This issue is saved~

Meanwhile--and we know it's meanwhile, because the comic specifically tells us--Rick Flag drops in on a lady and her baby in Washington DC. Who they are isn't really important. The important thing is that she's the wife of one of the men who was under Rick's command. Said man got killed, and Rick keeps dropping in because he feels guilty. She kindly tells him that she understands, but he doesn't need to keep doing this. As he leaves, he's suddenly accosted by Katana, who tells him under the threat of swordpoint that he has to come back to the Squad.

And another meanwhile, the Suicide Squad is jumping out of an airplane wearing some doofy-ass space suits. They may actually be diving suits, since they're dropping and Killer Croc isn't wearing one. As badass as Croc is, he cannot survive in the vacuum of space. This is how Batman always beats him. No sooner do the Squad hit the water (or the iceberg, in Croc's case) does the plane they rode in on explode. Well, that's surely not a bad omen or anything. So I guess the correct answer to where Waller's being held is "sub". Apparently they've all been specifically requested by the kidnapper to show up and save her, or they kill Waller and give all her secrets to the United States' enemies. So... Why did any of them come, then~?

So this prison is one of those ones by The People, that terrorist organisation that was raising superhumans like chattel. Everyone's pretty disgusted to be back here. This is where they first met Hack. They start exploring the halls, and Harley starts chasing a shiny light. Rick Flag tries to grab her and pull her back, which causes her to freak out. Neither of them are really over that one brief fling they had together the last time they were locked up. I'd link it, but you expect me to be able to keep track of what issue that shit happened in~? And then a sudden trap door opens up and Rick Flag falls down it, while Harley marvels at her new power to make men disappear.

The rest of the Squad continues down the hall, and it's not too long before Captain Boomerang bumbles across a tripwire that blows them all up, flooding the chamber with water and knocking them all out. A flaming ghostly soldier appears, reporting to another fellow named Grier (if you paid attention, this is also the name of the man whose wife Rick visited earlier in the issue, so guess where this is going) that their plan worked. When Croc turns out to not be as knocked out as they'd hoped, one of the G.I. Ghosts sets him on fire with his spectral flames, which Croc does not like.

Meanwhile, Rick Flag tumbles down the trap door and appears before a huge monitor. The monitor begins displaying images of Rick Flag during his time in prison, and then of Waller behind a desk, telling someone to keep Flag in prison for a few months so that he'll be eager to join her Squad when she comes calling. Yep, Waller set Rick Flag up all along. The Jigsaw voice comes back on the intercom and directs Flag to a device on the table. It's the remote detonator for a Suicide Squad issue brain bomb--the one implanted in Amanda Waller. A door opens to show him Waller, and asks him one simple question: how would he like Waller to die?

You can really see this issue attempting to patch together all the bits of previous continuity as a final goal. Rick Flag comes back, both Hack and Zod get namedropped, The People turn out to still exist, freaking Cosmonut shows up... Just line up any remaining plot points we can to tie together a sort of satisfying conclusion. Honestly, it’s not a bad way to go. And the mystery about the ghosts of Rick’s old squad--because that’s exactly who they are, I’m just gonna tell you--is a subtle one at first. Since Rick Flag doesn’t encounter them personally, it leaves the mystery for you to put together, and I appreciate that~

[lungs-n-langst]

A really cool dream I had about Voltron

Dreamworks paired up with WB animation or something to create a crossover event that would promote Voltron before it ended. The short was 45 minutes- 1hour long in a lose geometric 3d/2d Disney/ anime style (think Dragon Prince meets HNK) and aimed to introduce characters new and old. It was a dream so some parts were weird and nonsensical, but I can pin down its plot. Voltron from the reboot show is being normal, doing its thing by the beginning of the short when meanwhile an alternate Galra empire from "Into the 3rd Dimension" for some reason launches a Quantum Alterting device that could change Voltron's universe as we know it. Because of the device the Voltron Robot from the 1980s TV show and "Into the Third Dimension" end up crashing onto the planet that the current Voltron robot is hanging out on. The characters were a little different though because the version of Lance that was in the red lion of the other Voltron has a teenage daughter who dreams of being a pilot and a paladin one day, but her dad wouldn't let her. The introductions are amicable enough and the other Lance is a leaderly serious type that the Lance that we know thinks is boring and a wet rag. The rest of the team that we know, however loves this grownup version of Lance, this makes our Lance jealous and determined to prove himself.

Lance says a line that's like "He's like Batman-- and I hate batman." And Pidge tells him to knock it off.

The Voltron reboot team and the original team check out each other's lions and eventually check out Voltron, comparing the specs. The original team admits that the younger reboot team has a more powerful robot and the Voltron team thinks that the older team has a more stylish looking bot. Meanwhile, weird things are happening to the strings in their dimension and it takes a while for Voltron to notice. The teenage daughter begs her father to shadow one of the reboot paladins, arguing that they aren't much older than her. The teenage daughter is about 13-15 years old. Dad Lance agrees and she chooses to shadow young Lance in the Blue Lion (for some reason this takes place separate from the Lion swap). Lance isn't too thrilled, but she's over his shoulder anyway wearing a matching paladin suit.

Both Voltrons fly into space to patrol and the Reboot Voltron is attacked by some of the altering stuff of the dimension from the device. The old Voltron is like "Hey! You gotta watch out, that stuff seems to altering this dimension and if it touches you it could probably destroy Voltron and you!"

Eventually because of tension between young Lance and his alternate daughter, she chooses to shadow Shiro instead, saying that he's more like her dad than this Lance. Lance becomes more insecure and mad.

Now the daughter is wearing a smaller version of Shiro's Black Paladin suit.

A lot of stuff happens, the device makes the Quanta in their universe worse, Lance flies off on his own in a huff and finds the device. He brings it back with a hunch about it and Old Lance is like, "that thing is a time bomb we gotta destroy it safely." So young Lance makes a plan about throwing it in a black hole where time alters severely naturally and it'll dissapate when it reaches the singularity or be suspended in time indefinitely and keep their dimension safe. They all agree to the plan and Pidge says that the device is relatively small but the lions are too big to get near the event horizon safely without possibly being sucked in to the Black hole. So Lance Volunteers to fly near the event horizon and throw the device in. Shiro is like "nuh uh you ain't doing this alone." And tags along, and the Daughter is like "so am I." But the dad's like "no way." And she makes a fuss about how one day she'll want to be a paladin and that risks are what paladins take and "you can't protect me forever dad!" And the Dad is like, "..." "Aight, but forreal I can't afford to lose you."

And she makes a promise about coming back. So Lance, Shiro and the girl go out and push the device (which is about size of john deer tractor) towards the event horizon and the dimension is being more quirky and strange because of its unravelling and both teams are freaking out, saying that they need a large amount of energy to push it into the event horizon and reverse the adverse effects of the device.

Thsey find that energy, use it and as a team the three of them push the device past the event horizon.

And then I woke up, but I'm sure Lance learned a weird Lesson about leadership from Shiro and his alternate daughter.

[thassalia]

Agent and Reagent

@kernezelda asked for: Avengers/MCU / pipette, wrench, tea / cyclone  :D

Post- AOU, pre-CW. Natasha Romanoff and Steve Rogers. On hobbies and science and rain.  

The facility felt particularly frigid in the rain despite the preprogrammed temperature.  Natasha pulled the heavy sweater on over her head as wind lashed the trees against her windows and rain beat hard on the glass. It was worse than snow, which somehow transformed the gleaming modern monstrosity into something cozy and a little timeless. This kind of driving, torrential storm just upped the sense of isolation out here, although Natasha had never been bothered by solitude. A branch flew across the field, smacking into a telecom pole loud enough that she could hear the crack. So, more than a little rain. A shiver ran through her and she rubbed her arms, put her hand to the back of her cheek, but her skin was warm even a little dry. Maybe the cold was psychological. She grimaced, dismissing the thought.  More likely, she was just getting the damned death flu that Wanda had brought back with her from Indiana.  

She’d showered after morning maneuvers, held out in the elements because Steve was often an asshole who used the term “field conditions” to justify his sadistic streak. Eventually, the zero visibility and escalating gales had been too much for even Rogers and he’d called it, leaving them to their own devices.  Of course, it being Saturday, this only meant an hour shaved off an already shortened schedule, but it was a concession nonetheless. Now, despite an extra ten minutes under the hot water, cold crept into her bones. Natasha dug out thick socks and tall boots, hoping to stave off the chill. 

She’d passed on a group lunch in the canteen but she was due to meet with Steve in half an hour and wanted a sandwich. Beyond that, she didn’t have any plans for the day and she felt unexpectedly aimless. Downtime was in short supply with training drills, tactical planning, and the seminars she ran for the others on infiltration, disguise, intel gathering, skills she was better suited to impart than Steve. But there was nothing on the agenda today. Saturday afternoons were always free. It wasn’t like she had a rash of hobbies. String arts had been a bust, she didn’t enjoy playing an instrument although she was relatively accomplished at several, and while she’d taken dance classes in the city, out here it would just be herself and the music and decades of hazy memories, most of which she could live without.  The thought was unappealing.

She didn’t want for entertainment, exactly. Sometimes she went to the movies with Sam and Wanda on Saturdays, into the city for dinner with Pepper, hiking with Steve. Once a month the facility held a potluck and bingo night.  Natasha wasn’t bored, per se. It was simply that being trapped in this building reminded her of what she could have been doing out there in the world.  What she should be doing.  Running missions. Paying penance. That for most of her life, she hadn’t had hobbies because any free time she’d been granted had been filled with keeping her skillset fresh -- practicing languages, martial arts, programming and hacking, brushing up on deadly variations of chemistry and comportment.

There’d been exceptions to the rule of course -- weeks and weekends spent with the jostling, jovial Bartons, time spent cooking and cleaning and carousing with rambunctious kids, or drinking beer and bullshitting with Laura, silent shoulder-brushing companionship with Clint. Time in the tower, slowly building trust with Tony over anthropomorphized robots and delicate programming. Stolen moments with Bruce in coffee shops and boutiques, the art house theater in Greenwich and the galleries in Dumbo. Or in bed, his skilled, beautiful hands tracing along her spine, counting her ribs with his mouth following as she leaned her cheek against the pillow and rainwater trailed along the glass.

Things that she’d given up with her decision to live as an Avenger, to mentor a new team. (Given up, given away, been abandoned by...) Things she’d promised Steve that she’d refrain from pursuing unless absolutely necessary because this had to come first. Steve wanted to be the first line of defense, not the back up called in during desperate times.  Christ, he and Tony really were two peas in a pod, despite their inability to look at an apple and see the same color red. 

She really must be getting sick. This was maudlin and foolish, sentimental in a way she was loath to admit herself capable of.  Natasha shook her head and grabbed her phone, headed to the cafeteria.

***

Steve’s room was keyed to allow her access during certain hours, but she still called out to him as the door slid open.

“In here,” he answered and she made her way to the little studio he’d set up in the second bedroom of his quarters.  The light was excellent for drawing and drafting, but more often than not the pneumatic table was used as a hold all for the tacticals plans Steve still preferred to work out on paper.

Today, however, he was bent over a textured palette, brush in hand.  It warmed her, somehow, seeing him paint.  A sign that normalcy was possible, even if rarely exhibited. If Steve could occasionally remember how to paint, maybe she had it in herself to develop some outside interests.

Unfortunately, emotional warmth aside, it was fucking freezing. Steve kept his quarters on the ball-crawling side of uncomfortable since he ran hot. Natasha put down the roast beef sandwich she’d brought him and picked up a soft, camel-colored throw he kept for guests and wrapped it around her shoulders.  It helped a little.

He nodded at the sandwich, mouth tilting up and said, “I’m almost done, sorry.”

She shook her head, and went behind him to get a look at what he was working on.

Banded greens and yellows separated by slim open spaces occupied squares outlined in terra cotta.  They looked strangely familiar and at first it seemed like they were simple repetitions, gradation exercises, and then Natasha noticed subtle variations. 

The memory hit her all at once as she took a bite of her sandwich and her hand dropped slowly, placing the sandwich on the chair as her stomach clenched against more food.  Fuck that, she thought, more useless, rebellious sentiment.

Steve washed the brush through the rinse water, and glanced over his shoulder.

“Nat,” he said softly, and she shook her head.

The striations looked like little garden plots, strange ombred root vegetables growing in a row, but they weren’t.

It had been raining that day too. Less gale force hurricane than spring showers, but the water running down the side of tower had kept them inside all the same. She’d been curled on Bruce’s lab couch because she liked the light and the company, and because they all had a tendency to drift into his space like dinner guests into a kitchen.  The state of the art coffee maker and obscenely good sound system had helped, but some of it was also Bruce’s solid, stoic presence. 

Steve’s big hands had dwarfed the pipette as he dropped the mixture into the test tube, then inserted the little filter papers.  Bruce had been doing a basic chemistry course with Steve over the past weeks when he’d expressed an interest in filling up the gaps in his secondary education.  Today was chromatography, with a little history lesson on the development of the Pasteur pipette.  

“Now we wait,” Bruce had said.

While the pigments separated from the solution to travel up the little papers, Bruce had brewed espresso in tiny cups and Natasha’d roused herself to excavate a box of Danish butter cookies that she’d seen in one of the cupboards.

“I never thought much about science in school,” Steve had said, “but so much happened during the war, so many new things...”

“Yourself included,” Natasha had to add, but he’d ignored her with a raised eyebrow as Bruce covered a smirk.   

“This seems so benign. It’s beautiful.”

Bruce had brushed over the little papers and shrugged, shoulders hunching.  “It’s a tool, but yeah. It’s pretty. My mom loved this kind of stuff,” he’d added, hesitant and then growing more certain. “We lived in this little apartment with a wonky radiator. It was always too hot, and you’d have to bang on the valve with a wrench to get it to budge at all so we’d go outside, even in the winter. Collect leaves and sticks and stones, bring ‘em home for experiments. Classifications. She had a little garden out there that we’d weed, make potions to discourage the bugs.”  Bruce had looked a little embarrassed at the reminiscence, and she’d sidled just a little bit closer at the way his voice deepened with memory. 

Bruce never shared childhood anecdotes, and the anomaly had been too much for her to resist. The insight a precious thing she could add to her understanding of him.  She’d relished it. 

“It’s a kids game really,” he’d said, gesturing to the beakers. “Grinding up leaves, dissolving them in alcohol, watching the pigment travel up the coffee filter.”

“Sounds nice,” Steve had said, “Reminds me of my mom.  She was a nurse, always busy. Our radiator was always busted, too. Although we did fewer experiments and more rolling bandages. Or yarn.”

Everyone knew about Steve’s family, Steve’s home, Steve’s transformation but Bruce smiled at him like he’d shared a secret. Natasha had basked in that smile, bittersweet as ever, in Steve’s answering grimace as he made a winding motion with his hands.  “So much yarn.”

She’d leaned gently into Bruce’s space until her hip pressed against his, hidden behind the lab bench, keeping the physical closeness just between them. She’d felt the shift in Bruce’s body as he first stiffened, then relaxed, just a fraction, as his shoulders unhitched when he’d brushed his arm against hers, adjusting his glasses.  She ignored the way Steve glanced between them, eyes soft.  Anyone else and she’d have ruined the moment, stepped away from Bruce, derailed the conversation, but at the moment, she just wanted the heat of his body, Steve’s steady regard.

There’d been no need to say that she hadn’t performed experiments as a child, that she’d been the experiment. That the punishment for failing to perform her required chores had been corporal.  Not here amongst these other miracles of science and tragedy.  It was funny, she’d thought at the time, that while Clint had given her a place to go home to, she’d found an unexpected sort of solidarity here with these two men, with their warped reflections: monster, and killer, and savior, all variations on a theme.  Transformative beings, with the serum drawing up through each of them, breaking down into their own colored striations.

“It looks like water color,” Steve had said, drawing one of the little papers out of the solution, tracing over the separated pigment.  “Making art of out science.”

Now, Steve was making that statement literal.

“The rain,” he said, hunched into himself a little, and maybe she didn’t give him enough credit for continuing to absorb loss, pulling it into himself, thinning it out so that it barely touched those around him. He missed Bruce too. Tony...Steve kept losing people.  “It reminded me of that day with the leaves, and of turnips. I don’t know, maybe I was thinking about the war.”

“Turnips?” she asked.  

Steve nodded. “And radishes. Bucky’s mom used to talk about weeding them when she was a girl. And we ate them in France, with butter.”

She too had spread thick pale butter on slim radishes speckled with salt. Memories of a crisp, sweet bite followed by a bright wine bloomed on her tongue. 

“Banner talked about growing things, pruning and thinning and...well, It’s hard to believe it’s almost spring.” He trailed off, cheeks pink from the ramble. 

Natasha swallowed hard, and picked up her sandwich.  “A garden,” she said, and her voice sounded completely normal, nothing odd there, no sentimental rasp, no wash of memory.  “We’ve got the space.  When the rain stops, we can plant things. Watch them grow.”

She put her hand on Steve’s shoulder, and he covered her fingers with his for just a moment.  Comfort that she idly wondered if he could afford to offer. He dropped her hand and she came around to the other side of the desk.

“Carrots,” he agreed, “And arugula. For Sam to get his hipster on.”

“Potatoes for Wanda. Herbs for Rhodes. He’s apparently quite the chef.”

“Flowers for Vision.”

“We can compost.”

Steve barked out a laugh, and Natasha shrugged the throw from her shoulders, warmed through finally.

She touched the edge of the watercolor, cleared her throat.  “When you’re done,” she said, “Could I have it?”

[bluerorjhan]

Chapter One: I’ll Make Those Rebels Pay.

“Druxri? Please just talk to me. We can sort this out.”

But there was no sorting out this particular situation. Druxri had made up her mind and understood the orders she had been given. She was to kill her own husband, the man she’s loved for almost 7 years. To become a true Sith, you have to kill somebody you love whether it be family or a loved one. But Druxri had no family, so the outcome of the task fell on her husband. She sat crouched and hunched over on the floor facing away from his worried gaze thinking of how she would do it. Should it be painful? Quick? Savour the moment or get it over and done with? She didn’t know yet but what she did know, hurt her.

“Please answer me. Whatever I did, I’m sorry.”

Malakai wanted to reach out for her but feared of what could transpire if he did. He thought she didn’t know what he had done but being part of the beginning of the First Order, their intelligence helped her discover his new truth. He became a rebel. He disagreed with the First Order’s motives but was in love with a Sith. He had to choose. Her or the rebel alliance.

“Disgusting… You TURNED AGAINST ME.” Druxri screamed with pain in her voice, turning her head around sharply to face her new victim. The fresh cuts on her back were bleeding from the battle through the base’s security. More cuts littered her arms, which would later become deep scars. Her handmade outfit ripped and ruined, her hair messy and tangled.  She reached for her newly made lightsaber with her bony hand decorated with long and black pointed nails, a lightsaber which was sharp at the end to connect with another to form a double-bladed lightsaber.

“You joined the rebels Malakai…You left me. You made a vow and you BROKE IT.” She raised herself up and faced Malakai merely inches away from his face, hand gripping her lightsaber tightly with anger and venom in her eyes. Her mind was made up, quick it was but a part of her wanted to make him pay for his actions.

“The end is nigh, Malakai…and it’s time for you to meet yours.”

Druxri lunged foward waking up from her slumber. Missing the feel of murdering somebody.

“Pathetic.” She mumbled to herself as she got herself out of bed, ready to receive her new orders for the day. She didn’t have a Star Destroyer, not yet anyway. She wasn’t that high in the ranking but she did have her own ship. A fury-class Interceptor to be exact. Black with white and red lining on the outside, decorated with the First Order and Sith Empire banners on the inside.  Robots to do her work, look after the ship etc while she would plot her attacks in her office. She enjoyed living there. It makes her feel powerful, important and most of all… feared.

She went to the bathroom placed in the corner of her quarters to take a shower so she would feel refreshed for the day when there was a knock at her door.

“Ma'am. Supreme Leader Snoke’s Star Destroyer has just left lightspeed and is requesting you board for new orders.” The robotic voice echoed throughout the corridoors of the ship.

“Did I miss a Holo? Why is he requesting that I board?” Druxri didn’t open the door, merely listened from inside of her room, irritated that she couldn’t reminisce about her dream. Relishing in the moment of a fresh kill is the best way to meditate as a Sith in her eyes.

“I…I don’t know Ma'am. He requested your presence urgently.” The robot sounded nervous, fully knowing of Druxri’s power when she gets angry.

“I’ll be there in a moment. Tell the Supreme Leader.” Her voiced became irritated and the droid scuttled away praying she didn’t deactivate him or worse…

Druxri’s Interceptor boarded the Star Destroyer and she was greeted by Stormtroopers and Red Guards to escort her to the room where Snoke’s holo would be broadcasted. Druxri didn’t feel like she needed the escort as she could make her way through the ship perfectly by herself. But this was a time where she would first meet Snoke. The man behind the curtain, pulling all the strings. She entered the room with anger and pride in her step, walking down the long walkway towards the Holo of the Supreme Leader himself.

To her left was Kylo Ren, the long awaited Sith Lord in the high rankings of the First Order. His hair was to his shoulders, and ragged. A scar going from the right side of his face down underneath his clothing. His “uniform” consited of his normal plain black trousers and tunic. She had never met him before but from first impressions, she would enjoy working with him. The look on his face is pure anger, probably wondering why he had been called to a meeting just like her.

And to her right was Kohnû Chirikyat, another Sith Lord in the First Order. Although he had a more relaxed look on his face. But even still, relaxed may not have even been the right word. Confident? Bored? Nonchalant? That was the word. Nonchalant. You could tell he had better things to do with his time, perhaphs fighting or training or even just lazing around. He had brown hair slightly longer than Kylo’s. Hazel and dark tones. Thick, black eyebrows sat on his forehead. He also had bright red eyes lined with black eyeliner, a light coating. Barely noticable if you weren’t staring at him. He had slight stubble which further indicated his personality of lazing around. His uniform was plain black with a rich red cape draping from his broad shoulders. Fingerless red gloves covering his hands. The Sith knew how to dress intimidatingly it seems.

Druxri snapped out of her observation when she heard the deep booming voice of Snoke.

“You may be wondering why I brought all three of you here. Considering none of you have met before, I decided to give you all separate missions as to not cause any… disagreements towards how your missions should be handled. Kylo, you and Kohnû shall go to the planet of Jakkuu and search for any remaining rebel technology we can use to our advantage. Take storm troopers with you.’ The two Sith looked at each other, creating tension of already conflicting ideas.

“Jakkuu? What is the need for this? If there’s no definite rebel technology located then surely our presence could be useful… elsewhere.” Kohnû seemed completely annoyed drawing some amusement out of Druxri.

‘And Lord Ror'jhan, how nice of you to finally grace us with your presence.” Snoke continued completely ignoring Kohnû’s question. Druxri smirked with confidence towards the giant figure across the room from her.

“Supreme Leader Snoke, I was looking forward to finally meeting the illusive shadow that bosses about my every move.”

“SILENCE.” The said shadows voice boomed across the room. He was irritated and Druxri could feel the look that Kohnû and Kylo were giving her. She had the confidence to talk back to Snoke, she also knew that her sheer power and skill would not get her ejected from the First Order.

“You shall go to the planet Takodana. We’ve received some information claiming there to be some new blueprints for X-Wing fighters that should be easy for use to sabotage. Storm troopers shall accompany you. Use them as you wish.”

Druxri bowed at Snoke, turned and walked back along the walkway, Kohnû and Kylo still infront of Snoke. After she had left, Snoke continued.

“Now that, is what you call a true Sith. You should follow her example Ren. Then perhaphs your power would grow.” This angered Kylo and amused Kohnû. They both swiftly left the room.

As she boarded her Interceptor, Druxri went back to her quarters for the duration of the hyperspace travel. Sitting at her desk, she pulled out a holo-recording of her husband. She wasn’t angry or upset at seeing his face, but relieved. The only issue was that the only recording she had of him, was from the Rebel database.

“I pledge my alliegence to the Rebel Alliance, it’s cause and it’s people.” Hearing those words and seeing him in that outfit infuriated her. Her grip tightend on the holo-recording until the the device was crushed in her hand. Her husband betrayed her and everything she stood for, she was glad he was gone. But not soon enough. She was broken out of her train of thought by a knock at her quarters door.

“What?!” She shouted, still angry at what she had just seen.

“I’m sorry but we have reached the planet of Takodana. Your Troopers are ready to depart.” The same robot from earlier had an even more nervous tone in it’s voice, fearing for his life.

“Excellent,’ Her tone calmed. 'Send the troopers down and keep them in contact with me.”

She got up and headed to her quarters window to see the view of Takodana. Gazing at the planet, She smiled and said,

“I’ll make those Rebels pay.”

EDIT: I’m so sorry I didn’t even realise how long this was until I put it in here. I’m already writing chapter 2 so that’ll be up when it’s done but yeah! Lemme know what you think!

[frazzledsoul]

Disclaimer: I am less than proud of this post. I was going to keep it in my drafts, but I figured I’ll just put most of it under a cut instead. It’s pretty ugly and angry and irrational and I can’t back up most of the claims I make, but it is what it is. As I said the other day on here, no one thinks less of Amy Sherman Palladino than me. I don’t like her or trust her and while I might begrudgingly respect her for the show she created in the first place, I will not touch anything new she does in the future ever again. I think she’s earned that in spades: most of what I talk about here can be applied not just to love triangle shenanigans that happened a decade ago but to Rory’s plot in general in the revival, which was in its way a much bigger betrayal of everything the show stood for. It’s definitely a pattern and it’s not a positive one.

I will also say that one of the major reasons that the events at the end of season six hit me so hard is because I lived a much uglier, messier, more devastating version of these events in my family twice over the past 15 years. I’m obfuscating the details to protect the guilty, but in real life the damage is so much worse than what we saw played out on screen. There are some things that will never, ever be okay with me, that there are just no excuses for, no matter what. I don’t think I ever really processed that part of it, nor did I ever really process what it felt like to be dealt the final blow in what seemed to be a long, contentious battle between the creator of this show and the fans who kept hoping that Amy wouldn’t do the one thing we always feared she would resort to in order to achieve her own ends. So much of the time it felt like we (and Luke, but he’s fictional, so he’ll get over it) were just bugs waiting to be squashed.

So maybe this is because I am in a melancholy mood lately, but I just had some things to get off my chest about why I’m still so angry about the end of season 6 eleven long years after the fact. I still take it personally, and I still feel betrayed by that whole wretched plot development, and I still will never, ever forgive ASP for what she did. The revival may have worked out to my satisfaction, but I still don’t want the woman to write new episodes of the series because I don’t trust her. There’s no reason to believe she wouldn’t take everything positive she last left us with and obliterate it just because she could. She’s got a long track record of doing exactly that.

The bottom line is that we talk about this damn showrunner too much. It’s not a good reflection on her work. If what she was writing was good enough to speak for itself, we wouldn’t spend so much time trying to justify her choices and going WTFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF over and over again. Honestly, it shouldn’t be this hard. This is coming from someone who does still make a lot of excuses for her, from Luke and Lorelai not having kids to their decision to delay marriage to Rory’s surprise pregnancy and dour, unimaginative fate. The idea that everything she does is inviolable because she’s the one controlling the puppet strings and nothing else matters is a really unhealthy mentality.

Sometimes it’s okay to just flat-out say that a lot of the stuff she forced on us was simply wrong.

Of course, part of this is my fault because I come at it from the other side, too. It’s not in the best interest of an invested fan to pay too much attention to what the writing team says. They don’t see it like we do. It’s mostly pieces to move around on a chessboard to them and they’ll never understand why we care so much. I think the fan culture is much more balanced these days, or maybe I just say that because the only other shows I keep up with are genre shows where being a fan is an experience that’s so much bigger than what happens in those 42 minutes we see onscreen. It’s not to say that problems don’t exist or that there isn’t fan discontent, but it’s not like it was ten years ago. We’re all part of the whole for so much of the experience.

Showrunners like ASP (and I would count the notoriously sadistic Shonda Rhimes in here, too) don’t play that game, of course. I can definitively say that if I had never read any of her interviews, this would have been a way more pleasant viewing experience for me. What if I hadn’t known that ASP kept come up with excuses to keep Luke and Lorelai apart because she didn’t think she could get it right? What if I didn’t know that she only hooked them up because the show got into trouble ratings-wise and she knew David Sutcliffe was available for Christopher to “cause problems” if she got bored? What if I didn’t read that interview where she essentially said that anyone who cared about Luke would have to accept him being relegated to the sidelines because it was time for Christopher to show how good he was at a relationship?

What if this entire fandom experience didn’t feel like a huge battle to keep ASP from bringing it all crashing down in the most disastrous way possible so that she could pursue the relationship outcome that she really wanted? What if it didn’t feel like a constant fight not to have one of my favorite characters be replaced? What if I didn’t feel that it was only a matter of time before Lorelai would betray Luke in the worst way possible, and do the one thing that he and the fans always feared the most, just so that ASP could have her favorite swoop in on his white horse to rescue her from the love interest who would always only be humble and ordinary?

Maybe it’s never a good idea to know what’s going on behind the curtain. Knowing all of this definitely made what was already a deeply upsetting plot twist that much worse. It’s impossible to have faith that any of this is ever going to be fixed when it seems the person in control is always fighting against you. There was no reason to think that it was going to get better, because she didn’t seem to want the same things that we did. We were just standing in the way of the happy ending that she preferred.

I didn’t have many expectations for what I wanted from this show. All I wanted (during the OS and the revival) was for Lorelai not to run off with Christopher and break Luke’s heart after they had been together. When Amy wrote that ending that so many of us feared would eventually come, it felt like a spit in the face, a final triumph on her part for this adversarial process. It was anyone who care about Luke and Lorelai as a couple or even Luke by himself against her and her Christopher fantasy, and she won. The worst part was that I had quit watching months earlier because I knew it would always come back to this. I tuned into the last half of Partings hoping that she wouldn’t do what I always dreaded, that she wouldn’t take it that far. But I had been right all along. 

Of course, maybe Christopher was just a diversion in the first place. It doesn’t change the fact that Amy twisted Luke into something he wasn’t in order to build up his rival simply because she was bored. None of this had to happen, but she wanted more time with her favorite and the rest of us had to suffer the consequences. I really, really want to say that what she planned was temporary and that the happy ending we got was in the cards all along, but in my heart of hearts I’m never be able to talk myself into completely believing that. She still can’t bring herself to talk of the happy ending she eventually gave us as anything other than what the fans forced on her.

Why shouldn’t I believe that she would choose the worst possible outcome if left to her own devices? She already did it once before.

You’ll notice I haven’t talked a lot about the actual plot twist in question. There’s nothing I can say about it that hasn’t been said before. The truth is that we can argue about whose fault it was until the cows come home, but it was a plot machination whipped up so that ASP could write the Christopher/Lorelai romance that she always seemed to really want. The Lorelai I knew and loved for six seasons (because despite some immature passive-aggressive behavior earlier in the season, she still remains very sympathetic to me right up until the end here) would not go as far she did. No matter how upset she was, no matter how betrayed she felt by Luke telling her no, she would not hurt him the way she did. She wouldn’t blatantly use Christopher like that. She wouldn’t put Rory in the position of having to sift through the ramifications of her fucked-up latethirtysomething love triangle and put her on shaky terms with both of her father figures.

The Lorelai Gilmore I knew wouldn’t have hurt the people she most cared about that way. She wasn’t that type of person. I’m intimately familiar with that type of person, and Lorelai was better than that. But if that’s what needed to happen for ASP to get what she wanted, that’s what was going to happen.

I know it was fixed eventually. Fate intervened before ASP could write that Christopher plot she wanted so badly, and we got not one but two happy endings for Luke and Lorelai. Believe me, I’m grateful for all of that. But it doesn’t change what happened, and it doesn’t make it any less of a betrayal as far as I am concerned. I really wish I had been less Internet savvy back when I was watching the show, that I didn’t view everything in terms of this fight I felt ASP was having with the fans through the media. In the end, I don’t know if it would have made any of it make any more sense to me, though.

I’m glad we got the ending we did, but the fact that we had to suffer through so much to get it was completely unnecessary. I no longer let myself get emotionally attached to ships or characters: I still fangirl, but in a more general way. It’s not worth it to fight another war with someone who’s at such cross purposes with what makes her enterprise work, or who seems to delight in making her fans as miserable as possible. I haven’t encountered a situation like this with anything else I’ve gotten interested in, but there are always things out there that end up slamming the door in your face at the last moment. The finale of HIMYM is probably what comes closest.

If we have to focus this much attention on the writer’s motivations in order to justify what she put forth, something clearly isn’t working right. If it can’t stand on its own, maybe the creator needs to take a step back and focus a little less on forcing her own agenda on something that isn’t right.

Or to put it much more simply, the shippers aren’t always wrong.

[nerobombs]

Writing Romance

(Want more? Check out my Writing tag!)

There is the rather prevalent idea among writers that writing romance is hard. And for some people, maybe it is, but I would argue that it’s not difficult to write as much as it is easy to misinterpret.

In real life, relationships don’t have many straightforward rules besides a few obvious ones like “Trust is important” and “Don’t kill your spouse” and “99% of men are dense idiots who wouldn’t know how to read a signal if you tied them to a post and bashed them over the head with a rock, so just try asking him out on a date already”.

In the words of Tom Clancy, the difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense. What that essentially means is that writing fictional romance does have a few cut-and-dry rules, and that you can substitute “experience” with “logic” and get away with it, so you don’t need any prior relationship experience to understand how to write a decent romance. It can certainly help, but real life romance has a lot of factors that just wouldn’t fly in fiction.

1). “Love” does not equal “chemistry”

This is probably my biggest bugbear with any romance: “love” is not a magic adhesive that is capable of forcing two incompatible characters together. And if you think it is, you’re using it wrong.

You can’t have two characters fall in love when they refuse to empathise with one another, constantly have arguments based on annoyance rather than attraction, and consistently fail to compromise. You cannot portray these characters as completely incompatible, then suddenly up and declare that “they’re in WUV!”

Look, “opposites attract” does have some merit, but if you’re going to try to push the “tense romance” thing forward, your characters have to like each other. Full stop.

There needs to be chemistry. And if you’re wondering what chemistry is, it means that each character needs to have traits or aspects that the other character finds attractive or admirable. It means that they have to have a desire to be around one another, repressed or not.

Plenty of couples were started or ran more on lust and antagonistic attraction than on the traditional fluffy romance. Han Solo and Princess Leia, Ron and Hermione, Edward and Winry, and so on. You can have couples or potential-couples arguing every time they’re in a scene together and still make it believable for them to get together, if belligerent sexual tension is something you’re going for.

But that doesn’t mean you can have them say, constantly insulting each other’s beliefs and ideals. You can’t have their arguments be shallow, you can’t have them dislike being around each other.

Characters who are constantly at odds at each other need to find the other character attractive somehow. They need to engage in the occasional compromise and eventually realise their differences. These characters should possess certain traits or aspects that complement the traits of the other character.

Maybe two characters argue because one is carefree while the other is really uptight. They can have chemistry because the Carefree Character helps the Uptight Character learn how to have fun, while the Uptight Character’s sense of organization and discipline is admired by the Carefree Character. They’re complete opposites, yes, but they are attracted to each other because of what they lack, not despite it. 

2). Long-term romance requires ups and downs

Usually when a romance is solidified, the writer(s) wave it off as some kind of “and they lived happily ever after”. After a hundred scenes of arguing and hating each other, the characters have their love epiphany of “but they really loved each other all along!”, and then they encounter literally no conflict in the course of their relationship. All of the flaws are scrubbed away so that the author can gush about how “in love” they are with cutesy scenes and giggling.

If you remove all conflict or tension from a relationship, then any possibility of that relationship being more interesting gets taken away. Sweet patches or moments of soft intimacy are nice, yes, but I guarantee that if that’s all you read, you would eventually get sick of “how perfect” these characters are for each other.

Perfect romances can be nice for a while, yes, but there comes a point where the characters stop being people and instead become one-dimensional caricatures that only serve as vehicles for the author to fantasise about storybook romance.

Long-term romance that have believable spots of conflict are interesting because they give further dimension to the characters. They provide an avenue to discover a character’s discomfort or pain, and they are intriguing because they can show that characters are in love with each other because of their flaws, not despite them (sensing a theme here?).

 A romance that has survived numerous conflicts is far more admirable than a romance that has literally never hit a bump in its entire course.

3). Do not use the phrase “real me” or any variations of it. Ever.

Oh fuck me, I hate this one.

It’s utterly baffling to me whenever this comes up. The hero(ine) falls in love, and after a few incredibly out-of-character moments, promptly declares that their partner is the first one “to see the real me”.

Here’s the reason as to why it’s completely asinine: people are complex. Sometimes they act happy to avoid displaying that they’re sad, sometimes they deflect questions about their personal life with humour, whatever.

When you throw in the phrase “real me”, what you’re essentially doing is boiling down a character to something that’s completely binary and one-dimensional. People who feel compelled to defend themselves with personas or half-truths never create completely false personalities unless they have some kind of mental disorder or some idiotic plot device like amnesia or memory-rewriting is employed. 

And I hate this phrase because it’s completely self-absorbed. It reeks of a character “choosing” to fall in love just to show off their scars or so they can humblebrag about how tortured and deep they are for having an arbitrary impulse to inexplicably lie about how they actually want to act.

This is especially annoying when it’s something like a social or cultural barrier. You know, the uptight princess who has to act all courtly in front of the King but then falls in love with the peasant and goes on a night on the town on a drunken rampage, promptly declaring that the alcoholic is the “real me”.

Look, I get that social constraints can demand things like politeness or etiquette or a certain form of behaviour. What I don’t get is how a character’s resistance to such strict social constraints is to become either the world’s best actor or a complete pathological liar. People are not capable of masking their personalities to the point where the “real me” phrase can ever be used in any believable fashion.

The only people who use the phrase “real me”, or any variation of it, are people looking for a pity party. Don’t use it. Just don’t. 

4). Love does not stop characterisation. 

Or, putting it another way, love requires loose ends.

Somehow, “love” is seen as the apex of evolution and when two characters fall in love, they stop growing and developing as people because THEY’RE IN WUV.

No.

People change. People grow. People lose interest in some things and gain interest in other things. People encounter situations that force them to re-evaluate their morals.

When “love” is reached, characters do not spend the rest of eternity having flawless communication. They don’t inexplicably become interested in everything because “we’re doing it together”. A couple who has “nothing left to wish for BECAUSE I HAVE YOU” is utterly boring. You might as well just tick a box and never mention the characters ever again. If these characters aren’t interested in advancing in any way, why should I as a reader care about them?

5). All parts of a romance should have equal investment.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a simple monogamous relationship, or a love triangle, or a love pentagon or love dodecahedron. All characters in a romance should feel like people, not plot devices.

If you’re writing a romance such that the readers only care about a minority of the characters involved (for example: only caring about one character in a monogamous relationship, or only caring about two characters in a love triangle and not caring about the third), then it is highly likely that the other character(s) was written as nothing but a plot device.

Do not designate a character as a Love Interest and leave them dangling on a string for our protagonist to chase. Don’t try to induce a love triangle by having a third intruder step into the romance just to create angst and ham-filled melodrama.

Do not have the love interest’s life revolve entirely around the object of their affections. They’re supposed to be people. People with goals, motivations, and a life outside of the protagonist. They do not exist as indulgences.

If you have two characters in a romance, then both of them should have equal depth and effort to exploring them, otherwise who cares? The same applies if it’s three or nine or ten people in a romance.

My personal adage is this: if you can replace the love interest with a dog and nothing changes, don’t write the love interest. If all you want is to indulge your protagonist with a paper-thin Prince or Princess Charming who only exists as a contrived love-giving robot, then don’t bother.

[whitewolfofwinterfell]

I read what you said about how a lot of stories end with tragic character deaths and that it's expected to lose important people towards the end. And it made me think of the Sons of Anarchy finale, (which is one of the best series finales imo) bc they killed off a lot of main characters at the end, even Jax dies in the finale. Now TVD and SOA are nothing alike, but the point is that all the main deaths in SOA had a purpose, which is why they made sense and had a part in ending the show properly.

Oh my, don’t even get me started on the Sons of Anarchy finale. I mean, how epic was that!? 

You make a very good point, though. I wasn’t angry or resentful about any of the character deaths on SOA, because every. single. one. of them was done with purpose and for a reason. I would even go as far to say that all of the main character deaths on that show were beautiful in a twisted sense, because of how important they were. Even though we lost the character, each major character death contributed something to the show. 

Donna: her death changed Opie forever. It changed the way he perceived the world, how he navigated himself in the club, but mostly it contributed to one of the most important plots in seasons 1 and 2. It created tension in the club, provided conflict for Tig who was consumed with guilt for what he’d done and also a dilemma for Clay, who on the one hand knew he should be sorry, but at the same time was desperate to protect himself and the club. 

Opie: his death was necessary because it changed Jax so drastically. It hardened him, made him colder, more ruthless and it’s what needed to happen for him to be able to truly be King. And that pain and heartbreak of losing Opie is what drove him to make changes, to fight to push the club in a new direction and protect the rest of the people he loved, particularly his sons from dying a violent death because of the lifestyle that goes with the club. 

Tara: I mean when has a death on TV ever been this brutal, tragic, heartbreaking and yet at the same time weirdly satisfying? I don’t know if that’s the right word, but I don’t know how else to describe it. The fact that Tara got to die in such a huge way, was actually a tribute to her character I think. When has a character death ever been that memorable, that significant? I led to one of the best plots for the final season where we got to see the pay off of it. I mean, her death really shaped everything that happened in the final season. I’ve never experienced a character having such a huge presence without even physically being there. I didn’t miss Tara, because I felt like she was always there. We saw how it affected Gemma and it really did, despite how much of a cruel heartless bitch she appeared to be at times, we saw how her absence affected little Abel and him being the one to reveal to Jax that Gemma killed her…there are no words for how brilliant that was. As well as creating issues for Gemma and Abel, her death also caused Jax to change again. Losing Tara was really the final straw for Jax (and if it wasn’t finding out his mom was the one to kill her definitley was) and that was when his perspective really shifted. By that point I think he knew his time was up, but he mustered the final bit of strength he had to try and get the club to move in the right direction and ensure his sons would be safe and never know the life of chaos, just as John wished for him. 

Those are the main deaths I can think of that actually shifted the show and created an entirely new story. But then there are other deaths, that are just as satisfying because they were symbolic and fitted with the narrative and parallels that followed through the course of the show. 

Clay: I distinctly remember the first time I watched the show and when I got about 5 or so episodes in, I thought, “Jax will kill Clay.” I just knew it. It was always going to happen. The tension between them, the fight to be King, the hostility and battle to always be the alpha, the fundamental differences in their approach to things…it was always going to lead to Clay’s death at Jax’s hand or vice versa. Honestly, Clay lasted so much longer than I expected he would, and by the time he died he wasn’t really relevant anymore so his death didn’t change much, but it was in keeping with the story. It came full circle all the way from season 1 and it was in keeping with the values of the club. Clay had to die and that was it. 

Gemma: Similarly, her death didn’t affect much since it was right at the very end, but the second Gemma killed Tara we all knew it was coming. How could she do that and not die at Jax’s hand, just like Clay did? We all know how it works in that world. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life. It didn’t matter to Jax that it was his mother, because like Gemma said it’s who they were. Whether you loved her or hated her, Gemma’s death was so satisfying because from the very beginning she was always the puppet master. She was the one pulling the strings behind the scenes, manipulating everyone around her, maneuvering situations to suit her and lying to get exactly what she wanted. She justified her actions - including her murdering Tara - by saying she was protecting her family, but in reality it was always about power with Gemma. The battle for King was always between Clay and Jax, but in reality neither of them were ever truly King, Gemma was always the Queen. The day of her mighty fall had to happen and who better to end her than her own son? Such an epic death. 

Jax: I mean what is there to say about Jax’s death that isn’t already obvious? No one wants the main character of their show to die, because let’s face it, it sucks. But the way in which it was done, meant I couldn’t be anything but accepting of it. The way it all tied together…it was done perfectly. We saw it coming, just like Gemma and Clay’s deaths, Jax’s death was always foreshadowed and foretold. John Teller was so significant throughout, we were always told through Gemma, Clay, Piney and the others that knew John, that Jax was so much like him. Jax himself identified with his dad so strongly and believed in his vision. Wasn’t it obvious that the only possible ending for Jax was to die the same way his dad did? It was so symbolic and it was such beautiful storytelling. Even though I love Jax with all my heart and he’s one of my all time favourite characters, I can’t begrudge his death in any way shape or form, because it made sense and there was so much thought put into it. 

And you see, this right here is how you kill off your characters. There always needs to be a reason, deaths are plot devices much the same as any other major event and they show be used as such. A character death has to create new conflicts, new stories, make drastic changes to the characters and the world they’re living in. And if it’s too close to the end of the series (as it is with TVD now) to see those changes, then it at least needs to have meaning like Jax’s death did. 

The only problem is, the writers of TVD don’t know how to write character deaths and they certainly don’t know how to create a narrative. When I compare SOA to TVD, the writing standard is not even in the same vicinity. Sutter put thought and consideration into his story and he was always thinking ahead, always trying to connect dots, to make sure everything tied up and fit together to create a beautifully intricate story with unique plots and conflicts along the way that bled into each other to form the bigger picture. Plec and co., on the other hand, seem to have massive continuity issues and the story they tell seems to change drastically every couple of seasons. 

I was going to end this post here, but now that I’ve brought up the fact that TVD are so bad at handling character deaths, I feel like reflecting on this with some examples.

Vicki: the first (kinda) major character death. Honestly, who even cared about this, except for Matt? Vicki was pointless, boring and annoying and her death had no impact or purpose. 

Lexi: I loved Lexi so much, but let’s be honest what was the point of her death except for reminding us all how much of a dick Damon was? There was no reason she should die and to kill a character in the same episode we were introduced to her was just silly. 

Jenna: quite an important character for 2 seasons, yet her death was completely unnecessary. Someone explain to me again why Klaus just had to choose her to be the vampire for the sacrifice? It was idiotic. And after she was dead didn’t Elena and Jeremy and well everyone, forget about her existence immediately after her funeral? 

Enzo: I’m talking about his first death way back in season 5, where he killed himself but framed Stefan for it. What was that all about? I still don’t even understand…

Katherine: We all knew she had to die at some point, but it was dragged out way too much and the way it done was silly and not a justified end to her brilliant and interesting story. 

Bonnie: Which time, I hear you say. I know right. There’s only so many times you can kill a character before it stops having an impact, because honestly, who gives a shit? She’ll be walking and talking again before the week is over. 

Alaric: His death was sad the first time in season 3, but somewhere around the fourth or fifth time of him being resurrected I stopped caring and his life, as well as his death meant nothing to me. 

Jeremy: One of the more interesting deaths and in its defense it did lead to the no humanity Elena plot, but it was still mainly written in for shock factor. 

Damon and Stefan: I’ve actually lost track of how many times they’ve died now. Again, I’m going to make the point that matter how much we love these characters, there’s only so many times they can die before we stop giving a crap about what happens to them. 

Do you see the drastic difference in deaths on SOA in comparison to TVD? It’s actually laughable. No death on TVD has ever had any real purpose, contributed anything to a plot or story and they certainly haven’t had any symbolic meaning to them. 

This is why I am fearful as to what the writers are going to do in the finale regarding the character death. So far I haven’t known them to do justice to any death of a character (except maybe Rose in season 2) and that concerns me, because it’s the finale. It has to be epic. It has to have that same profound affect as SOA whereby it’s so emotional, sad and heartbreaking, yet we can see and understand the significance of it and therefore accept it. I hope they can pull it off, but I don’t have much faith that they can. 

I’m sorry this has ended up being so much longer than I intended it to be. Your ask just triggered a lot of thoughts and feelings haha. 

[brianwhitedarkdaily-blog]

July 2018 Listening List

I began working on a new project this month that I hope to turn into a book series called Quantum Mystics. As a result, I searched for a lot of music that embodied the chaotic, surreal themes of the scenes I was writing. Some were calming and dreamlike, others were action packed, and still others were weird and psychedelic. I started to create a playlist of songs pulled from the albums I listened to while writing the story. The bands and albums themselves don’t differ much from my normal listening, however, I did spend more time listening to instrumentalists that I have not listened to in a while, and found new gems in some staple favorites.

Orange Mathematics by Frontierer – I had listened to this album once before and simply dismissed it. It was still downloaded on my device and I was scrolling through looking for something different and decided to give it another listen. I think my previous dismissal was due to the fact that this is extremely heavy, jarring music. When this album starts, it feels like a gun going off next to your ear right as you are about to fall asleep. I also believe that the sounds of pick scrapes, screaming, and high pitched, distorted, high E guitar bends manipulates your brain waves and makes you instantly insane. Which, as it so happens, was exactly what I was looking for. As a result, I found a new appreciation for this album and band. Collapse was one of my favorite songs and was what I picked for the playlist.

The Yngwie Malmsteen Collection by Yngwie Malmsteen – If you’ve never heard of Yngwie then you’ve just never heard some of the best classical metal fusion ever created. Yngwie is a master, both musically and technically. His chops have stood up to the test of time and he is still at the top of the list of one of the fastest players of all time. Some may disagree, but I also believe he expresses a true passion for music and his songs are the type that stick in your brain. Black Star an original Malmsteen instrumental classic was the song I chose for the playlist and displays everything that makes Yngwie great.

Conquering Dystopia by Conquering Dystopia – Jeff Loomis has been one of my favorite guitarists since hearing him when he fronted Nevermore. I believe I’ve written about this album before but the dueling guitar of Merrow and Loomis is simply amazing. It manages to groove while being technical, quickly vacillating from screaming solos to toe tapping riffs. This is one of those albums that can immediately change my state of consciousness, which is why I returned to it. Ashes of a Lesser Man and Lachrymose made the playlist.

Plains of Oblivion by Jeff Loomis – Don’t need to say anything more about Loomis’ guitar playing. On this album he displays his harmonic range and brings in some guest singers and players such as Ihsahn but the female vocal lead on Tragedy and Harmony made this song my favorite and made the playlist.

Concrete Gardens by Tony MacAlpine - It had been a long time since I had listened to Tony. I remember the early Shrapnel Record days with Keel, Paul Gilbert, Richie Kotzen and of course Tony with his debut album, Insanity, which was exactly that, insanity on six strings. Well Tony has added two more strings to his insanity and his playing has never been better. Added to his technical wizardry and shredding capabilities are some great riffs which pull you into his every expanding garden of guitar insanity. The King’s Rhapsody was one of my favorites, along with Red Giant. Both were added to the playlist as well as some of the songs from Tony’s earlier albumns such as Autumn Lords (Maximum Security) and Dream Mechanism (Tony MacAlpine).

Lesser Key by Lesser Key – Lesser Key was formed by x-Tool bass player Paul D’Amour and has a similar sound. This is a great album that drags you into its embrace with hypnotic repetition and excellent, occult lyrics. Folding Stairs and Parallels were the two that I added to the Quantum Mystics playlist but all the songs are excellent.

Black Swans and Wormhole Wizards by Joe Satriani – I am a longtime Satriani fan. He is one of the few artists I have seen multiple times in concert and each time was memorable. Aside from being an accomplished shredder and guitar virtuoso, Satriani has some of the “tastiest” rhythms and riffs of any instrumental guitarist I know. He has guitar lines that feel as if they should be sung and I often find myself humming to his groove rhythms as if they were refrains. I’ve not kept up with all the albums he’s been releasing throughout the years, but as I was looking for something different and I was writing about quantum mystics, the album title immediately grabbed my eye. As it turns out Wormhole Wizards is one of the songs I added to the playlist. It has a great funk rhythm typical of Satriani. It draws you in and keeps you for the whole song, adding subtle changes and awesome displays of guitar wizardry in the process. God is Crying, is the other song I added. There are many categories Satriani’s playing could be placed in, but I always put them into either Blues/Funk Fusion that makes you want to move, or slow, dreamy, captivating, awe inspiring music that makes you reflective and emotive. Songs like Circles, I Believe, and God is Crying fall into this latter category. Great album from one of my favorite guitar legends.

Alien Love Secrets by Steve Vai – Vai is another one of my favorites. If you are looking for odd music that can make you cry, dance, cringe, sing or have you asking “what the f*** just happened,” look no further. Vai has it all. Vai is one of the few guitarists that can make you feel like you just listened to a song that had lyrics but that you know didn’t. His guitar sound can be lyrical and at times he’s even made it speak by answering lyrically posed questions. But my favorite thing about Vai is he manages to always be fun and at times comical. If you have ever had the pleasure of watching him play, it is immediately apparent how much he loves music, the guitar, and what he is doing. He gives everything he has, and it comes through in his music. He is the only guitarist I can listen to and find myself actually laughing. I can’t explain how he does it so I’ll put it in the musical mystery category. Ya-Yo Gakk from this album perfectly illustrates his ability to make his guitar sing and laugh.

The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall by Pink Floyd – Pink Floyd is something I find myself listening to when I want to get into a weird, psychedelic, philosophic mood. And I used these two albums to channel that emotion while I was writing because there are quite a few scenes in which the characters are exploring concepts that cannot be properly examined with normal consciousness. Hey You, from the Wall and Breathe, from Dark Side are the two songs that most brought me into this mode of thinking. In this case I didn’t pay any attention to the lyrics but went purely by the state of mind that was evoked while listening to these songs.

Savages and Savages (Instrumental) by The Dali Thundering Concept – Loved their previous album Eyes Wide Opium and this album extends their surreal technical wizardry to new heights. Their use of odd time signatures and the battle between thunderous bass, blazing squealing guitar, and growled vocals, keeps you on the edge of your seat wondering what will happen next as you are taken on a jarring journey from, The Myth of Happiness to being, Blessed with Boredom, which does everything but bore you. As much as I like Sylvain Conier’s voice and lyrics the instrumental version of this album is awesome allowing you to focus on how truly amazing the guitar playing from Leo Natale is. I was amazed while listening to the lyrical version and then awestruck when listening to the instrumental.

Podcasts:

Didn’t listen to much spoken word this month. Even while driving I wanted to keep Quantum Mystics on my mind and stay on a roll. Music always allows me to retrieve an emotion or an idea, so I spent a lot of my commuting time listening to the playlist and going over the plots, scenes and characters in Quantum Mystics while listening to the playlist. I did listen to one lecture given by Robert Anton Wilson where he discusses his book, Prometheus Rising, covering topics such as neural linguistic programming, the eight neural circuits, and imprinting, in his often comedic but always intriguing way.

That’s it for this month.

Enjoy!

brianwhite@darkrevmedia.com

www.darkrevmedia.com/thedarkdaily

tumblr:  http://brianwhitedarkdaily.tumblr.com/

[notesfromthepen]

Gardens, Gangstas, And Freedom

This prison is different than the other joints I've been to.

    Last year they started a garden club here. For ten dollars, you get a 10x10 foot plot of land, a bag full of seeds, and something productive to do in an otherwise meaningless existence. In order to be eligible for this club, you have to be a year ticket free (no disciplinary infractions), and that's about it. Well, other than a willingness to get dirty and do some work. Oh, and you have to donate ten pounds of your harvest to a local food pantry at the end of the season. Win-Win.

    When I got here last year, I was still heavily affiliated, (if you know what I mean) and though I had been looking for my way out for sometime, I still had one foot in and one foot in the lotus position. Basically I was too busy being affiliated for extracurricular activities. A year ago my concerns were slightly heavier than watering plants and pulling weeds.

    Well a lot has changed in the last year. None more important than finally cutting all ties of affiliation with any organization in here, well other than the notorious Garden Boyz!, that is. (No, but seriously; I have to watch what, I say. Everything is monitored) With my decision for complete independence secured, I was now free to do anything I wanted.

    So, I signed up for the garden club.

    I paid my ten dollars, and was assigned a 9x8 foot patch of dirt. My dirt. Sure I got shorted on the square footage, but this is prison: you rarely get what what's owed to you.

    Most of the women in my life have dabbled in gardening, whether it was growing corn and squash on an empty plot of land in the neighborhood, or a couple of potted tomatoes plants on an apartment balcony. I however, have never grown anything, with the exception of a massive weed plant behind my parents house, and a laundry list of bad habits. So, since marijuana seeds and cigarettes weren't included in the brown paper bag, I had to begin my gardening career knowing next to nothing about growing these plants.

    What they did give us in the paper bag was stuff like: head lettuce, white and red onion bulbs, pearl onions, carrots, cabbage, spinach, straight cucumbers, green peppers, banana peppers, beets, radishes, egg plant, zucchini, squash, beef steak and cherry tomatoes.

    It was up to us to choose what we wanted to plant in our limited space; a twinge of freedom. But as all you Green Thumbs know, there's plenty to do before the seeds actually go into the ground.

    Before we were allowed to enter the garden area, located in the center of the compound, we had to wait for the words: "Garden Club," to appear on our daily itinerary. I don't know what took them so long, but for weeks after signing up, and after being issued our plots, we were forced to sit, idly by, while the growable days of the season slipped past. The only people allowed in that fertile patch of land in the center of the prison were a handful of 'Yard Crew porters,' whose job it is to help manage all the gardening related duties. The Green Thumb Mafia.

    Some of grizzled Garden Vets, from the previous year, told us rookies that before we could plant anything we still had things to do. We had to 'turn over' our plots, go on a search and destroy mission for grubs, root out the insurgent weeds, carpet bomb our soil with 'milky spore' to kill the locals, and finally we had to section off our plots with tiny wooden steaks and yarn.

    With so much left to do before getting to the actual business of planting veggies, and with valuable time ticking away while we were held back by the rules of engagement, a few of us decided, in line with prison etiquette/corruption, to pay the bribe, proposed by one of the garden porters to start prepping our plots for us.

    The going rate for the deluxe treatment was three dollars, which included all the preparations mentioned by the Garden Vets, plus some extra compost, and access to plants not included in our starter bags. All in all it cost me a bag of instant rice and two Ramen soups. Which left me a dollar short, but I assured our corrupt/opportunistic garden porter that I'd get him the other dollar at some point in the not so distant future. I figured 'two bucks' in food to get a jump on planting season was well worth it.

    This was Pay to Play prison gardening.

    Finally, we all got our Garden Club itineraries. The next day, armed with my MP3 player and a brown paper bag of bulbs and seeds, I marched out to war. But first, you have to stand in line at a tiny, sweltering, shack to get your uniform. Some poor garden porter slowly roasts to death while handing out the fluorescent vests we're forced to wear in the garden area, and any garden tools we might need.

    Make it to the shack early enough and you'll get a decent vest. The best ones are made of a silky orange mesh, like a basketball or football jersey. They're light, loose, and comfortable. Show up too late and you'll be forced to wear one of the bright pink pull-over vests. These wiry torture devices are made of some sort of rubbery plastic, starched into a rigid square shape. It makes you look like some sort of cheaply dressed, flamboyantly gay, Halloween robot. Or you could just let your plants wither and die from dehydration. It's a hell of a choice, and I've often found myself lowering that abrasive pink contraption over my head for the sake of my garden.

    I got my vest, (one of the good ones) and with the crumpled brown paper bag in hand, I headed to my garden; plot 72. Inside the bag were fifty white onion bulbs and the assortment of seeds that I would use to bring my garden to life. And in case I'd forgot that I was in prison, all of the seeds were tucked inside pieces of paper, origamied in the exact same way that heroin dealers fold up their dope. I doubt the tomatoes seeds at Home Depot look like packs of heroin, but what do I know?

    With Bob Marley wailing his songs of redemption through my prison issued headphones, I got down in the dirt, and with a little help from my veteran friends, I started mapping out the plot, and planting the future.

    I got the soil wet and pressed my thumb into the earth, every four inches, in four of the ‘straight-ish' lines I could muster. It was still too early in the season for the tomato and pepper plants, so I filled each thumb hole with a little white onion bulb. I drew two shallow lines with my index finger and sprinkled in the spinach seeds. I used the same technique to make a little rectangle of pearl onions and two rows of carrots. I planted a stash of beets in one of the corners to donate. I transplanted twenty pea plants along the border of my garden and I dropped four newly sprouted garlic cloves, that I scored as part of the bribe, next to the spinach. Before I left, I built a little lattice of yarn for the peas to climb and I watered the freshly planted seeds.

    Crouched down, over my uneven patch of dirt, with music in my ears and mud under my nails, I breathed it all in before heading back to the shack to return my vest.

    Walking back to my unit, as the sun was falling towards the horizon, I felt like I was floating. I mean, I literally felt like I was drifting away. My feet were coasting over the asphalt, and my head was up in the clouds. It took me a minute to realize what had rendered me immune to the effects of gravity: It was the first time in five years that I felt Freedom. I mean real Freedom.

    In the middle of the prison, in my little patch of dirt, with no C.O.s hovering over my shoulder, or telling me what to do, without the sound of cell doors slamming shut and whipping open, without the cacophony of overcompensating voices, disgruntled and aggressive men, yelling at everything and nothing at all.

    In this calm amongst the chaos.

    I felt it.

    Surrounded by garden plots, without a fence, a steel bar, or a single spiral of razor wire in sight, for the briefest of moments.

    I felt it.

    Just listening to music and playing in the dirt, after five years of confinement, I managed to touch the tail of Freedom. It had been so long, that I hardly recognized the feeling. A feeling so foreign and elusive it felt like a distant dream. A type of deja-vu.

    But I felt it.

    So every time I head back out, to a garden that grows taller and more colorful with each passing day, I'm searching for that feeling. In my little patch of dirt, where I use alchemy to bring sunlight and water to life, I'm chasing down deja-vu, I'm looking to float away, and I'm grasping at the tail of Freedom. Just listening to music and playing in the dirt.

___________________________________________________________________

    OK, this isn't part of the piece, I just wanted to tell you what I've got growing in my plot now. It isn't enough for me to annoy my friends in here, with my gardening nerd-outs, I will now bore you all. Feel free to ignore this, unless you're interested in gardening, or bored out of you mind, or you get off on wasting your own time.

This is what I've got:

3x cherry tomatoes plants (about a foot tall)

2x beef steak tomatoes plants (1+ft tall) looking good and hearty! (What have I become?)

3x sugar plum tomatoes. They're babies, I just transplanted them a few days ago.

10x cucumbers. Four of them are getting close to flowering. The rest I just planted. I wanted to wait so I could plan on where to run the vines through.

8x banana pepper plants (small)

8x Bell pepper plants (small)

2x rows of spinach. I already grew and ate 2 rows, I pulled em out once they started flowering and replanted.

1x row of cilantro (had to pull strings to get these. I really wanted fresh cilantro)

1x row of mint.

50x white onions (I was over watering them for awhile)

40x red onions

3x red cabbage (large dinner plate size. gonna make stuffed cabbage!)

3x green cabbage (same)

15x Peas. They're only about a foot tall (everyone else's is 2-3 times the size.) I have 'Pea-size' envy?! but mine are already flowering and I've been eating pods)

2x rows of carrots (the stalks are about six inches)

4x Head lettuce (Can't wait to make lettuce wraps.)

3x garlic plants. (one didn't survive the transplant and the other three aren't really doing much. I think I was watering them too much originally. Most people's (those who have them) garlic are doing the same. I was hoping that they would do better, I was looking forward to fresh garlic.

5x eggplants

1x squash

A bunch of beets.

    This will be the first time in five years that I'll be able to eat fresh vegetables. The lack of healthy food in here is one of the worst aspects of prison life. Being restricted to fifty dollars a month makes it impossible to buy healthy food on the commissary. I can't wait to be able to eat fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts, and cheese when I get out....oh god I miss real cheese!

[stories-aha-blog]

Why Game of Thrones, ultimately, doesn’t make it among my top ranking series

There are obviously a whole number of things I like about Game of Thrones --- why else would I’ve been watching every single episode so far, and watched particular scenes over and over again on youtube? It’s always a good idea to start with the things you like about a story, rather than the things you dislike. And I promise I’ll try to deliver on this in the future, but right now, I feel like ranting a bit about why, ultimately, I very much doubt that either “Game of Thrones”, the tv series, nor “A Song of Ice and Fire”, the novel series, will ever make it into my top top ranking stories.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: There is the whole “White Walkers” / “The Others” thing, that consumes a lot of screen time, and becomes a major driver of the plot in the later, and that I find utterly boring or “without potential”.

Okay so it’s important to approach things with an open mind. The fact alone, that that it would never cross my mind to somehow make the whole subject of “manifest supernatural evil”, or “evil menace looming behind the horizon” part of one of my stories alone, proofs nothing. When I ask myself "what’s the most similar thing I can think of, that actually DID end up working for me”, at least one thing comes to mind. The Dominion in “Star Trek: Deep Space 9″. If you haven’t watched it: At some stage, very subtly at first, and very much on the margin of what happens, rumors and first signs start to pop up, that there is some other, alien power looming in some other Quadrant of the Galaxy, that has a record of enslaving other races. As the story progresses, more and more facts start to pop up, until there is actually contact, conflict, and ulitmately full out “world war”, or “galaxy war”, resulting from from this, putting the federation on the brink of defeat.

The reason that worked for me, is that ultimately it becomes revealed ---- I’m not gonna worries about spoiling this here, since the series is so old and dated and not really worth watching any more ---- the whole Dominion thing isn’t simply some featureless incorporation of evil, like, say, it is much more the case for the Borg, but that there is a kind of touching backstory behind it, of the creaturs that started the Dominion,were actually a very week and powerless beings, that, as a result, got “bullied” by other neighbouring races, until they decided to make sure this was never going to happen again, by kind of establishing proxy races, that would lead their wars for them, and enslave the neigbouring races, as sort of a somewhat out of proportion preemptive strike.

You know that you are on to something, when you create something that is uttlerly fantastic, but the proves to be quite valuable as a metaphor for describing certain real life constellations.

I wasn’t aware of it when I watched Deep Space 9 in the 90s, but recently it dawned on me, that the Dominion is actually quite a good metaphor for the policies of the present day Iran ... leadership or whatever you want to call them. (I am approaching this from a strictly storytelling point of view here, not from a political angle, or from an angle “which side would I side with?”.) They are technologically inferior, they had the experience of an ongoing draining war with their neighbour Irak under Saddam Hussein, they experienced the US sacking Iraq with their technologically far superior army ---- and, partly as a consequence of this, partly fuelled by religious zeal, they decide to “defend” themselves by establishing proxy armies, like the Hesbollah or, more recently, their ways of strengthening their ties with Hamas, to direct any kind of military threat away from their territory.

Even if this parallel should not resonate with you, you may still kind of agree with me, that something like the Dominion, has far more story telling potential, than the unstructered, language less, Others, whose character less nature makes them more similar to some menace arising from nature, like a volcano, or and earthquake, or what have you.

White Walkers are a waste of Screen Time.

That for me, would be the most obvious place to start.

Then ---  while we are at it --- there is the plot driving element of prophecies.

Prophecies are a perfect means to string people’s attention along. But, like the element of “unstructered, unpersonalized evil” --- they are a bit of a cheap trick, in that they simply can’t deliver. To my best knowledge ---- the real world simply doesn’t allow for anything that comes even close to “real prophecies”. So again, the books and series spends considerable amount of time on something that is of zero value, other than encouraging people to come up with solutions to the puzzles inherent in them. (Who is the Valoncar? Who are the three riders of the dragon? Who is the prince that was promised? etc. etc.)

But it’s not even the most important item for me.

The most important thing for me, off the top of my head, would probably have to be the fact that ... let me put this in a denouncing, devaluing way first, and then try to improve on it ... that George R. R. Martin’s characters are simply too boring, and his fantasies are too simplistic, to warrant spending extended amount of times on them.

Think of the Starks. Ned, Catlyn, Rob ---- all complete bores. Just like Bran, apart from the things that are happening to him. The two girls may have a tiny bit more potential, but as soon as we come to Jon Snow, we are back to complete bore.

To me those are characters, that come pretty close to “insignificant young clerk with no distinctive qualities gets thrown into a position where he has to save the universe”.

The characters that maybe come closest to being interesting in my sense, would probably have to be Tyrion and Oberyn. But even with those, similar things apply. Yes, Tyrion likes to hang out with whores and thieves. But, you know ... that by itself doesn’t make him all that intersting. And Oberyn is too much of a clichee, “throw in a little bit of everything, a little bit of martial arts, a little bit of studying at the Citadel, a little bit of traveling the remote and mysterious part of the world, a penchant for sexual experimentation, with just the right amount of bi curious --- and voila, you have your interesting character”. No. What is Oberyn driven by? By revenge for his sister. And also maybe a bit by providing for his daughters, in his own Obery way. That simply doesn’t make for an intersting character. They’ve both been known to act somewhat non harmlessly, or even ruthlessly, at certain times, so I’ll give them that. But that alone is not enough for me.

And those are the best candidates for interesting characters.

Yes, of course, you got Joffrey and Ramsey. But they are too one track minded vicious to count. How many people seriously empathize with either of them? Now very many, I would imagine.

It’s a bit like Quentin Tarrantino movies: Showing people casually committing atrocities --- to me is not a sign of being willing to explore the darker sides of one’s soul; but a sign of simple nerdiness. A slightly childish joy in shocking suprising the audience, and of indulging in urban legends.

Compare this to, say, some of the stories of Hagra here on tumblr, or ???, where you can see much more genuine drivenness and interest in these things at work.

Yes, “Game of Thrones” does have to count as a “day dream story”, that does make an effort to deliver things that are meant to stirr awe in one’s heart. But they are the fantasies of a person, that is ultimately too harmless for my taste. Yes, he kills off his characters in shocking and unexpected ways, that are not just played for their shock value, but actually do a good job of invicting making one --- or at least making me --- feel the tragedy. But that alone is not enough. Compare this to, say, “The Liaisons Dangereuses”, or the novels of Genet, or even people like Pedro Juan Gutierrez or Bukowski, where the very fact that the non harmless events they show tend to be somewhat less spectacular than in the case of people like Tarantino or Stephen Kind ---- and also, in my mind, Martin --- is a strong hint that they are engaging with deep rooted dispositions, as opposed to “visiting evil for the sake of thrills or entertainment, like a tourist”.

“This time, I will write books as big as my imagination”.

Yes a wall made of ice, that is more 700 feet tall, is a spectacular sight. As are dragons. But they are nerdy spectacular.

“Upping the ante, always has to go in the direction of the subtle, not of the spectacular.”

“A Song of Ice and Fire” is good at many things. It’s good at delayed pay-off. It’s good a posing riddles and puzzles, that inspire fans to come up with their own theories and suggestions for solutions. It’s good at creating drama and tragedy, and it’s good at creating “cozy situations” and settings, like, say, Sam and Jon having converations during their night watch on top of the wall. The writers of “Game of Thrones” the tv show are super good at writing strong dialogues, that have perfected the skill of achieving the maximum effect with “not one word too many”.

Game of Thrones excells at the use of story telling devices.

But no matter how good you are at HOW to tell your story, there will always be an upper limit induced by WHAT you tell. What your story is about. How captivating and deep and intriguing the subject matter of the story is.

George Martin writes Fantasy for a reason.

Yes, his capacity for taking his characters seriously and following whereever they make take him, is impressive. But that alone isn’t enough. Yes he paints a larger than life, alluring-with-respect-to-Marin world. But alluring-with-respect-to-Marin is simply too far removed from the things I find alluring, for the story to make it among my top top faves.