#temporal tourist

[arbiterlexultionis]

Instant Eternity

Time travel involving the infinite realms is truly a bizarre thing. Sometimes it follow one set of rules, and sometimes that set of rules may as well not exist. Usually, however, it works in one of two ways, the first is when the time travel is achieved through artificial means such as clockworks portals and allows for the altering of the timeline as one would expect time travel would allow. The other type of time travel is through natural means, portals usually, and it’s just that, Natural. That portal to the past opened up in the past the same moment it did in the present. If you step into the portal in the year 2000 then you already stepped out of the portal hundreds of years ago. It’s A Thing That Already Happened. Danny himself experienced this, as while chasing Vlad through time they fought in the middle of a Roman coliseum and, whoopsy daisy, set a really big fire. A fire which Danny had learned about years before he even had his accident.

So, the infimap can take the user anywhere, anywhen. And the infimap is just that, a map. It doesn’t make new roads, it just drags you across already existing paths. So it is a natural form of time travel, if you use it to go in time to kill your grandfather in order to insure your never born your interference will result in your grandparents falling in love and your birth.

Danny realizes that anytime he needs to heal from a battle or has gone 156 hours without sleeping or eating he can use the infimap to pop back to the past for a few days and then have the map bring back to the “Present”, exactly one second after he left. A three week vacation that lasted one second. At first he’s really wary about using this, worried about accelerated aging or getting lost in the time stream and a hundred other issues. At first.

It’s been months sense the accident. Sam and Tucker have both shot up several inches. Danny, on the other hand, hasn’t grown sense the accident. At all. They fought a ghost who could rapidly age opponents, a single slap turned Tucker into a decrepit old man. The ghost wrapped his hands around Danny’s throat and spent 5 minutes trying to strangle him while Danny bought time for Sam and Tucker to pull off the plan. The sucked him into the thermos, his influence on time ceased so Tucker returned to his proper state. “Jeez it sure is lucky he didn’t try and age me, right guys? Ha ha ha”. Danny gets blasted through a natural portal while making a trip through the zone and spends years trying to get home, not aging a day.

He can’t deny it after that, can’t ignore it. He’s immortal. He’s going to live forever. He’s going to watch his friends and family whither away and die out. He’s going to have to spend the rest of his life wandering from place to place trying not to get outed as the same 14 year old who save someone’s great great grandma 100 years ago.

After having his first middeath crisis, suddenly the only reasons he had to not spend years on end wandering the world and the past is gone, even if he loses the infimap, worst case scenario he’ll just take the long way home. Suddenly, he’s dreading the next 80 years of the “Present”. He decides that if he’s going to watch his friends and family grow old and frail he’s going to make sure it’s takes as long as it possibly could, from his perspective. By the time they’re 20 Danny’s gonna have 200 years under his belt.

He becomes a temporal tourist, hopping into the past every time the late night fights and schoolwork become to much. Spends years in every civilization imaginable, mastering every skill he can, leaving legends in his wake.

I feel like Danny and his adventures do have a lot of potential for story’s, as it’s a pretty good setup for having Danny in any type of time period or historical event for extended periods of time, fighting in the trenches of World War I, exploring the Americas during the era of colonialism, sailing the seas a swashbuckling vigilante pirate. I, however, have most of my related ideas being based around crossovers. So most of that will be in part two, so that people who like to filter out all that can still see this post.

[red-dragon-archfiend]

Learning about supposedly haunted locations is fascinating because there's so many reports of different, strange things happening but they're also wildly inconsistent

[queering-ecology]

Chap 12. Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands (part 2)

Mourning and Melancholia

(1915 essay by the same name by Sigmund Freud); mourning and melancholia are reactions to the loss of a beloved object: “both are grave departures from the normal attitude of life” (1984, 252)  but with mourning “we rely on its being overcome after a certain lapse of time” (225) in melancholia the ego will not let go, the melancholic internalizes the lost object as a way of preserving it.  (334) A loss has occurred, “but one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either” (254)(335)

Mourning is thus a process of recognition of beauty as well as an acknowledgement of its extinguishment (things are beautiful because they die) (336)

Melancholy Nature

Ecotourism, wilderness tourist practices are a form of ecosocial ritual by which consumers of ‘vanishing’ nature confirm their own transcendence of nature in the moment of mourning its loss: by understanding nature as something ‘lost’ at the hands of modernity, and by witnessing its demise in the fetishized chunks that are offered up to spectacular consumption by modernity, the victory of the modernity responsible for the loss is confirmed (337)

The temporal logic of this (bourgeois) progressivist narrative is very akin to Freud’s: the position of the present as ‘better’ than the past is achieved through an understanding of loss that assumes the libido will simply ‘move on’, and that also, in this case, assumes that modernity will simply move on from nature even as it memorializes its legacy in parks and monuments (337)

Fetishization and commodification of a lost, romanticized nature—“unspoiled” wilderness—is very important; it is the very quality of nature’s impending extinguishment (buy now or you’ll miss it) that fuels much ecotourism (337)

“Nature” becomes mythic, idyllic, a commodity, a fantasy, a fetish  that can be bought to extend the reach of capital rather than critique the relationships that produced the loss in the first place. The idea of a pristine nature on the perpetual verge of destruction is not only a violent rationale for the dispossession of peoples and livelihoods but a seductive fantasy that keeps consumers poised to watch that destruction. (337)

Nature as a fantastic, watchable visitable commodity is a part of modernity (338); the consumption of nature as wilderness is an imposition of one hegemonic relationship—capitalist exchange—into a landscape of many other relationships and intimacies, relationships that are often destroyed in a process of consumption itself. crucially, the fantasy of wilderness is not only infinitely consumable, but infinitely replaceable.

There is lots of evidence of environmental loss but few places in which to experience it as loss, to even begin to consider that the diminishment of life that surrounds us on a daily basis is something to be really sad about, and on  a personal level. Non-human beings and particular life filled places are,  here, ungrievable in the same moment that their loss (or impending loss) propels their value on the market (338-339)

How does one grieve in a context in which the significance, the density, and even the existence of loss is unrecognized?

Melancholia, pressed into the service of memory—environmental loss becomes something recognizable and meaningful—and grievable

Queer Melancholia

Mourning is a process of accepting that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly forever (Butler 2004, 21) (340)

Melancholia is a productive response to the twentieth century’s “catastrophic losses of bodies, spaces, and ideals, [and that] psychic and material practices of loss and its remains are productive for history and for politics” (5) (340)

Melancholia suggests a non-normalizing relationship to the past and the world, in which the recognition of the identificatory persistence of loss in the present—loss as self, the fact that we are constituted by prohibition, power, and violence—is central to our ethical and political relationships with others.

Butler writes; grief furnishes a sense of political community…by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility (2004, 22) (341)

The author makes direct connections to queer activism especially surrounding the AIDS crisis and the catastrophic losses experienced.

“The numbers of deaths are unthinkable’ but ‘the rest of society offers little or no acknowledgment” ; is it not surprising that gay men feel “frustration, anger, rage, outrage, anxiety, fear, and terror, shame and guilt, sadness and despair” but rather that “we often don’t”  (Douglas Crimp) Crimp believed that the failure of activism to acknowledge the fact that AIDS is bound up with internal violence as well as external is itself a form of disavowal; “by making all violence external, pushing it to the outside and objectifying it in ‘enemy’ institutions, and individuals, we deny its psychic articulation, deny that we are effected, as well as affected, by it”; Mourning is a vital companion to organizing and melancholia a part of the politics of AIDS. (341)

Cvetkovich; the collective preservation of loss is an ‘archive of trauma’—[…]suggests the acknowledgement of melancholia as a public activity; public melancholy as a form of survival (342)

What might it mean to consider the preservation of a public record of environmental loss, an “archive of ecological trauma”—made up of the kinds of art, literature, film, ritual, performance and other memorials and interrogations that have characterized so many cultural responses to AIDS—as part of an environmental ethics of politics?  

What would it mean to consider seriously the environmental present, in explicit contrast  to dominant discourses of ecological modernization, as a pile of environmental wreckage, constituted and haunted by multiple, personal, and deeply traumatic losses rather than as a position from which to celebrate their demise by consuming them (and moving on to something else)?

What might it look like to  take seriously the fact that nature is currently ungrievable, and that the melancholy natures with which we are surrounded are a desperate attempt to hold onto something that we don’t even know how to talk about grieving? (342)

[fatehbaz]

November 1985 marks a before and an after in Colombia. [...]

[A] squadron of [...] guerillas stormed the Palace of Justice in Bogota. [...] A belligerent military response [...] resulted in at least one hundred deaths. [...] For two decades, Colombia’s civil war had been raging on mountains and in jungles. Now, it had arrived in the country’s capital. A week later, on November 13, a sleeping giant stirred some two hundred kilometers west of Bogotá. After lying dormant for over 140 years, the Nevado del Ruiz exploded in two eruptions. From the Andean volcano’s crater surged boiling lahars, which descended the mountain at speeds of one hundred kilometers an hour. [...] This monstrous debris flow decimated almost everything in its path, engulfing the regional cotton-producing town of Armero and killing the majority of its twenty-five thousand inhabitants. [...] The government’s ensuing response to the Armero disaster was characterized by inefficiency, miscommunication, and corruption. [...] [M]onetary aid went missing. Unidentified child survivors were taken by authorities and put up for adoption. No effort was made to locate their relatives. [...]

---

In his 2016 book Endangered City, [...] Austin Zeiderman analyzes coverage of November 1985 in the Colombian print press. [...] [R]eporters used the language of forewarning to denounce the government for its failure to avert the convergent crises. Several columnists played with the title of Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a pseudo-detective novel [...]. One 1985 headline [...] called the Armero landslide “a forecast apocalypse.” “We have become the land of tragedies forewarned,” so the article read [...]. Even as the siege and the eruption were treated as spontaneous catastrophes, so, too, were they framed as self-fulfilling prophecies. History was being written in the subjunctive. As the temporal breadth of the convergent crises expanded, they acquired the characteristics of “slow-onset disasters.” Rob Nixon, among others, has written of the difficulties in visualizing catastrophes that gradually unfold [...] over lengthy periods. [...]

In the context of the Anthropocene, artists are increasingly tasked with what Latin American studies scholar Joanna Page describes as “taking up the challenge of representing geological and cosmic time [...].” One such artist is Santiago Reyes Villaveces, who presently lives in the shadow of the Nevado del Ruiz, and whose work uses multimedia methods to explore the volcano. His video installation Orbit, currently on view at New York’s Instituto de Visión, tells a version of the November story.

The fall of 1985 is framed in an imperialist chronology, where disasters are continuities, not ruptures [...].

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The protagonist of Orbit is a two-hundred-ton boulder that once sat at the heights of the Nevado del Ruiz. On the night of the eruption, it traveled over forty-five kilometers, and was deposited in the center of Armero shortly before midnight. Today, it is a landmark in a ghostly town that, like Herculaneum, stands in ruins. However, unlike its Italian counterpart, Amero receives no conservationist funding or legislative protection.

In the absence of state investment, the rock has become an unofficial monument to the dead. Every year, it attracts hundreds of tourists and mourners. [...]

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The disaster industry is one branch of the export economies that dominate life in this mineral-rich region known as the macizo.

Correspondingly, there looms the specter of another disaster: the European invasion of the Americas.

In its inaugural exhibition, Orbit appeared in 2019 alongside seven other sculptural installations named Anus, Puddle, Navel, Brick, Fever, and Room Temperature. These works are made with gold, silver, copper, limestone, and rubber -- the same raw materials that drove the expansion of the Spanish empire. Centuries later, they still fuel the competition for resources [...].

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Displayed in a museum setting alongside tools of measurement and unearthing, they create an “extractive viewpoint,” a phrase from scholar Macarena Gómez-Barris. [...] Gómez-Barris compares this vantage to the colonial gaze. Per her definition, it “facilitates the reorganization of territories, populations, and plant and animal life into extractible data and natural resources for material and immaterial accumulation.”

The macizo region is thus placed in a matrix of colonial relations that operates on an accumulative timescale.

Rather than regard the Conquest as a finite event, work like Reyes Villaveces’s urges us to think, instead, of a “colonial presence” that has endured throughout the postcolonial period. In conjuring this notion of history as perpetuity, anyone who sees such art is challenged, with Ann Laura Stoler, “to refuse the quick resort to ‘before’ and ‘after’ -- and even to work against the wooden, if all too common, conceptual containers of ‘past’ and ‘present.’” [...]

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[E]thnographer Beatriz Nates Cruz [...] argues that inhabitants of the macizo reside in multiple worlds that converge around symbolic landmarks and that operate according to their own discrete laws of space-time. [...]

Survivors of the Armero tragedy also return to the disaster site to stand awhile next to the departed. On each anniversary, the bereaved attend commemorations among the ruins and visit the rudimentary graves of their loved ones [...]. Darío Nova aims to foster reflection, spirituality, and healing. [...] More recently, he has led an initiative called Time and Memory that has seen participants use colorful string to frame features in derelict homes and place figurines on sills and mantles. These interventions make of Armero a museum curated by a grassroots collective that addresses a lack of governmental interest [...].

---

Confronted with this institutional indifference, we might return to the concept of negative gravity. We have seen how this phenomenon shapes a history of extraction, occupation, and conflict that propels state-making in Colombia. [...]

One of the remarkable things about disasters -- perhaps even their defining feature -- is that they cause the convergence of temporalities that usually coexist, but that do not necessarily intersect, or at least not in ways that are easily discernible. The 1985 eruption of the Ruiz volcano created a collision between this dimension of geological time, which spans billions of years and the expanses of space; centuries of imperialist expansion, capitalist accumulation, and national development; and the infinitesimal scale of a single human life span. All of this took place in a matter of seconds [...].

Survivors attest that time stops as disaster strikes. As these crises climaxed, the clock stopped ticking. But these disasters also accelerated the juggernaut of history that predated that November. They spliced experiences of time into a before and an after, causing it to move in new directions.

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Images, captions, and all text above by: Rebecca Jarman. “Before and After? Temporalities of Disaster.” e-flux Journal Issue #135. April 2023. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[101flavoursofweird]

Can I perhaps request a short fic about the Ravens and the Golden Garden/Targent for PL4 Day (I love those crazy kids)? I had this somewhat odd idea that Swift just adopts any kid with a bird name because he's quite literally a mama bird in my eyes...(Crow, pack your bags, lmao).

((Thank you for the request! I’m sorry this is a day late and it’s kind of open-ended but it was already longer than intended and I needed to finish it.))

Title: The Raven and the Swift

Description: The Black Ravens aren’t giving up the Golden Garden without a fight. Swift is sent to infiltrate Misthallery.

Set: After PL4, but before Miracle Mask and Azran Legacy

Spoilers: For PL4

Warnings: Referenced character/animal death, Swift carries a knife

Swift— dressed in white trainers, khaki cargo shorts, and a red floral shirt— made his way up to the Golden Garden.

While his ‘tourist’ disguise was intended to portray a casual demeanour, he admittedly (and ironically) would have felt more at ease in his Targent uniform. His face felt particularly exposed without his scarf and his sunglasses, but his dark brown contact lenses would have to do for now.

His targets were all too familiar with Targent’s appearance in Misthallery.

Swift was here under strict, classified orders from Commander Bronev. The mission he had been given required the upmost stealth and sagacity.

If Swift was recognised, he would be denied access to the Golden Garden, and the Azran site would remain out of Targent’s control.

Thus far, Targent’s best efforts to secure the garden had been impeded by a gang of ruffians wearing white bird masks and ragged black robes.

Despite Swift’s suggestions to deploy the assassins, Bronev had insisted that it was to be a bloodless, clandestine infiltration.

They didn’t want to alarm the local residents or the authorities… unlike Jean Descole, with his ridiculous attempt to demolish Misthallery over a year ago.

Had this ‘Black Raven gang’ been hired by Descole? The Ravens’ costumes certainly resembled Descole’s, with their white masks and billowing dark attire…

Not to mention, the Ravens had Descole’s ‘Spectre Robot’— with which, they had managed to drive Targent out of Misthallery so far…

Bronev was right; Targent couldn’t just invade the garden, guns blazing. Then their agency would look no better than Descole or his underlings.

Someone needed to take the garden right from under the Ravens’ noses. Someone like Swift.

Swift frowned as he joined the queue of visitors waiting to enter the Golden Garden. They were all being corralled like cattle along a canal, which had been emptied of water along with the reservoir.

Apparently, the giant lake-dweller that had once inhabited Misthallery had destroyed the flood gates and uncovered the entrance to the Golden Garden. 

The creature had given her life, and (as rumour had it) allowed a sickly young girl to recover with the garden’s pure air.

Why should the residents of Misthallery alone be able to capitalise off the Golden Garden? The gifts of the Azran should be shared with the world!

The majority of these people, like Jean Descole, would have no respect for the Azran’s legacy; just lookat how they had treated the aquatic creature— the last of an ancient species. (They were known as “Lagushi”, in the ancient Azran language.)

If Targent had arrived in town before Descole, they would have temporality captured the creature, ensured her safety while they studied her, before releasing her back into the Golden Garden. 

Swift would have made sure of it— 

“Get your very own Loosha, right here!”

Swift raised an eyebrow at the salesperson hollering from a wooden stall on the bank of the canal. The person, along with their two colleagues, were all sporting Black Raven costumes.

The Ravens were gesturing to the blue ‘Loosha’ toys and other mechanise out on display. It seemed they were profiting off Loosha’s sacrifice. (How tactless…)

One red-haired woman purchased a T-shirt from the stall. She ran past Swift, whooping.

Reluctantly, Swift left the queue to approach the Ravens’ stall.

“Greetings, curious traveller!” called the Raven who had been hollering earlier. (They actually sounded quite young, now that Swift considered it.) “May I interest you in a Loosha friend?”

Swift hummed, perusing the wares with a sceptical eye. “Is that really what ‘Loosha’ looked like?”

The speaker replied, “‘Course it is—“

“We saw her up close,” a slightly taller Raven bragged.

“Did you now?” Swift drawled.

“Yes! We helped her open the flood gate—“

“That’s enough,” a third Raven hissed. They shuffled to the front of the stall to stare at Swift. “If you’re not gonna buy anything, then buzz off!”

“I will buy… this,” Swift said, pointing to a glittering grey-blue stone supposedly from the Golden Garden. He removed a £50 note from his wallet. “And I’m after some information, please.”

He placed the money on the stall counter. The Ravens snatched it up, resembling the scavenger birds they were named after.

“How can we help you, Sir?” the third  Raven chimed, all traces of rudeness vanishing from their voice. Their associates observed Swift curiously. 

Swift put the stone in his pocket, carefully pondering his next words. He gestured to the Ravens’ robes.

“What was the inspiration behind your… Black Raven apparel?”

The Ravens hadn’t expected that. The trio glanced at each other— engrossed in some silent discussion Swift had no part in. After a moment, the third Raven (the apparent leader) nodded.

The leader asked Swift, in a conspiratorial tone, “Have you heard about the Bird of Illusion?”

“Perhaps…” Swift hummed. He had read about that particular Azran legend, but how much could he reveal without raising the Ravens’ suspicions? “Is it linked to the Golden Garden, by any chance?”

“Indeed! The bird was said to lead people into the garden— but only those rare few who proved themselves worthy!”

“Worthy?” Swift snorted. Anyone could enter the Golden Garden these days…

Looking back at the visitors’ queue, Swift was annoyed— albeit, unsurprised— to see his space had been taken. At this rate, the garden would be closed before Swift could get inside!

He huffed. Behind him, Swift heard muttering from the Ravens.

Then, the lead Raven said, “Lost your place in the line?”

“Obviously…” Swift rolled his eyes back to them.

The leader whispered, “What if we could offer you a private tour of the garden?”

“Really?” Swift’s eyes narrowed. Was this a scam? Or an attempt to catch Swift off guard?”

“Really, really!” the leader breathed. “For £100–“

“I already gave you fifty,” Swift grumbled.

“Seventy, then! That’s my final offer,” the leader bargained. They offered Swift their long flowing sleeve.

Swift shook it.

“Meet here at midnight,” the leader muttered.

-

Swift knew he could very well be waltzing into a trap. 

The Black Raven may have been inspired by the Bird of Illusion… but Jean Descole was familiar with Azran myths too. It would be in keeping with Descole to make an imitation of such a myth— like he had done with the spectre.

Consequently, Swift wasn’t going in unarmed.

The mist might not have been as bad as it was during the ‘spectre’ attacks, but it was still thick enough to cut with the small knife Swift carried in his shorts’ pocket. Really, he hoped he wouldn’t have to use it…

Still, his hand hovered over his pocket as he crept up the hill to the former-reservoir.

He had left early— intending to arrive before his ‘guide’— but there, waiting next to the canal, was the Black Raven.

The Raven was wielding a lantern, which they lifted upon Swift’s approach. Swift felt like he was about to be led into the afterlife by a ghostly guide…

No. Whatever happened tonight, Swift was going to walk away from it in tact.

“Finally,” the Raven snorted. It was the leader from earlier. Once again, Swift was struck by how youngthey sounded— no older than sixteen, surely.

Swift shrugged. He gestured to the entrance in the dam wall. “After you…”

The Raven gestured back at him.

“No, please— after you…”

Slowly, Swift turned towards the entrance. Swift sensed the incoming attack. He ducked as the lantern swung over his head. Spinning on the ground, Swift kicked the Raven off their feet.

The Raven cursed and landed on their back.

When Swift glared down at them, he saw their hood and the bird mask had come off. A boy with dark blonde hair was blinking up at him, with one dark eye not concealed by his fringe.

The boy wheezed. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

“Do you work him?” Swift demanded. He had removed his knife and was now pointing it towards the youth. “Jean Descole?”

“What?” the boy gasped. It was almost a pained laugh. “‘Course not! That nut-head tried to destroy our town—“

“Then explain why you still have his machine,” Swift hissed.

“Uh…” The boy struggled to sit up. “D’you mean the Spectre Bot?  We nicked it from him—“

“And you’ve been using it to fight my associates ever since!”

“Well— yeah…” Frowning at Swift, the boy clambered to his feet. “Did you really think we’d let some other nut-heads take the garden? After Loosha died for it—?”

“My… organisation has no quarrel with you or your little gang,” Swift reasoned. He lowered his knife. “All we want is to ensure—“

“You just attacked me!”

“In self-defence after you attacked me!”

The boy huffed and crossed his arms. “So… what��now? Are you gonna kill me?” Under his bravado, Swift could see he was shaking slightly. 

“…No,” said Swift. He pocketed his knife. “What would be the point in that?” 

Relief flashed through the boy’s one visible eye.

Swift turned his head towards the dam wall and the garden beyond. “Instead, I have a mission for you and the rest of the Black Ravens.”

“A mission?” The boy’s tone was still guarded, but Swift detected a hint of curiosity. 

“For now, my agency will leave the garden alone— trusting that you and your friends will guard the site from Jean Descole.” Swift smiled and held out his hand. “Do we have a deal?”

“Do I have a choice?” the boy muttered.

“The only other choice is that I will send in reinforcements to secure the garden,” Swift warned.

The Black Ravens’ leader sighed. He quickly shook hands with Swift. 

“I’ll throw in three hundred pounds for your troubles,” Swift added. 

Bronev wouldn’t be pleased about the price— but wasn’t it worth it to know the garden would be under watch, and Targent wouldn’t have to get their hands dirty? 

And what if their agency could gain some new recruits along the way?

The boy hummed, before he agreed, “Deal… Erm, what’s your name? Just in case we need to get hold of you—“

“It’s Swift,” Swift answered. “Yourself?”

He smirked. “Crow.”

[horangkwon]

⭐ Veinticuatro: Baby cupcake.

wc: 900

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You had never thought that working could be so much fun.

Or at least, not until Soonyoung had kindly given you an overview on what the rest of your month would be like. A few moments before your shift started, he had asked you to pass by the staff common room to let you know the details.

—So, you are saying that we are going to scam our clients into spending more money than they should?— you whisper-yelled, as if the room was not completely empty, not a single soul in sight.

—Don’t word it like that!— he imitated your tone, making exaggerated hand movements as if they were enough to replace the lack of noise —Rich people literally throw their money everywhere, I’m convinced some of them use paper money to clean their ass! Our goal is to make them use that money to buy our services… They were already expecting to waste it, so there are no wrong-doings here— his tone was so convincing that it made you wonder whether he had scammed you in the past without you even noticing.

—Okay… and how exactly are we going to do that?— you opted to cease the yelling and cut to the chase, there would be some other time later to meditate over how much you were willing to risk your moral values for the sake of a temporal job.

—Glad you asked!— Soonyoung looked as if he had waited his whole life for you to say those words. His smile grew wider, proportionally to how concern took over your features as you watched him turn on a projector connected to a laptop you had not seen until now. After the first five attempts at trying to project the screen on the wall failed miserably, the concierge sighed and opted to show you his work directly from the laptop instead —Take a look at this—.

A few technical issues later, the concierge started his presentation with the help of a water bottle to mimic a microphone and some PowerPoint slides that could make Vernon tear up if only he was in the room. You felt like crying too, but for completely opposite reasons, like second-hand embarrassment. —So, just as you have experienced before, our goal is to make people think our itineraries are out of this world and that they would not be able to find this level of entertainment anywhere else!— he pressed a key and a new slide with pictures of some destinations of touristic value showed on the screen with a fancy star transition; you recognized some places, like the yellow backroom.

—To do that— he continued, ignoring the shiver that ran through your spine while wild flashbacks invaded your mind —We must show them a variety of cool places like these— he gestured at the screen —Taking in account their personal preferences and what do they expect or want from a trip!— the presentation ended with the sound effect of a roar; you were pretty sure it was a lion, but you did not have the heart to tell him.

—Any questions?— he looked around the room as if the entire staff was there, gesturing with the water bottle. You looked around too, and timidly rised your hand after none of the imaginary students did. —No one? Great, because we have no time for questions, we are actually running late!—.

(...)

—Yeah, we are just taking a rest after a long day at work— Soonyoung stretched his arms and faked a yawn —Making itineraries is not easy, you know? But we can’t complain, our services are gaining popularity these days and our clients get to experience fun trips and stuff…—his gaze lifted from the glass of whiskey to the rich-looking couple of customers.

The atmosphere at the bar was lively, and after a few drinks, the man wearing an incredibly ugly hawaiian shirt was falling under the spell of the concierge’s deceptions. His partner just looked happy to be there, amazed by everything; you sensed a desire for adventure from her, you took a mental note on this information, as it could help you later.

Almost every single word that came out of Soonyoung’s mouth was a complete lie, but it was working, the tipsy man was completely focused on him. —You must be very busy… but if it’s not too much of a hassle, could I request a special trip for me and my baby cupcake?— you almost chocked on your drink (Seungkwan had insisted on serving you some orange juice to avoid a disaster) at the pet name, but luckily no one noticed as all the attention was on your coworker.

—Of course! We actually have one free spot for tomorrow, if that’s okay with you?— Soonyoung said, mixing the ice in his glass that had almost melted completely from all the time it took for him to take the conversation in the direction he wanted.

The couple shared a glance and nodded at each other; oh, to connect so deeply with a person to the point were words are not needed to communicate —We would like that a lot— the man offered you a business card and shook hands with both of you —I’ll leave it to you, then, please plan the perfect date for us!—.

And just like that, your first job as a rookie concierge started.

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❝⭐Five Dollars and a Dream.❞

Soonyoung's plan was perfect: get a degree in contemporary dance, upload covers on YouTube, perform on the streets, ???, become rich, and live in a gigantic mansion with a family of tigers. Well, there might be flaws in his logic, but his passion (and a lucky encounter) will push him to make his dreams a reality.

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[theinsatiables]

Present Imperfect

Aftersun opens with a home movie, a daughter filming her father. Sophie (Frankie Corio) has just turned eleven. Calum (Paul Mescal), who will turn thirty-one by the end of the film, is dancing. “These are my moves,” he smiles, and you can almost hear her eyes roll. “When you were eleven,” she asks, zooming in on his face, “what did you think you’d be doing now?” He looks down and the frame freezes. So this is to be an elegy.

It is the story of a parent who will die—who has died. This is a spoiler only insofar as knowing that the mother will die could ruin the experience of watching Tokyo Story, which is to say only insofar as the death of a parent is a surprise. It is, of course. But you knew it was coming. And then it did, and now you know. This temporality, from future to present perfect, eliding the unspeakable present imperfect and future perfect—“is dying,” “will have died”—gives force to Aftersun’s otherwise delicate narrative. It is a reminiscence haunted by dread, which might be a good definition of grief.

Calum and Sophie are on vacation in Turkey. We can guess, given the presence of a consumer camera that shoots on digital video and, later, the most natural-looking performance of the Macarena you’ve seen since Janet Reno was attorney general, that it’s about 1997 or 1998. It is eventually made clear that adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall), a millennial with a baby of her own, is watching these old tapes—fleeting documents of what she and her dad were like, Calum’s sly humor, Sophie’s antic energy—and remembering or imagining what happened outside the frame. Aftersun could be understood as the art project that she makes as she sits with her memories and recordings and tries to piece together a portrait of her father. Calum, meanwhile, turns out to have been reminiscing while still on vacation, watching the tapes each night like dailies, holding fast to the experience while it’s fresh in his mind.

Clips from the home movies punctuate the film, the pale, watery light of digital video testifying to their cinematic factuality. In between, on celluloid, the languorous days of vacation: father and daughter laze by the pool, play billiards, go to a mud bath and a sauna, visit a rug merchant, tease each other, swim, apply sunscreen during the day and toner at night. Looking back on her younger self, a child on the cusp of adolescence with an adored father whose fallibility she is beginning to grasp, adult Sophie sees a perceptive, sensitive girl approaching a loss she is still struggling to understand.

Adult Sophie, or perhaps the director, Charlotte Wells. Wells also happens to be a Scottish thirtysomething whose father died when she was young. In interviews she has said that Aftersun is not strictly factual but “emotionally autobiographical.” This idea should be familiar to anyone who has ever recounted a story whose details they’ve forgotten.

For a film with only the barest exposition, which dedicates its oblique framing and patient editing to the careful construction of feeling, Aftersun is dense with meaning and unspoken narrative. Calum and Sophie arrive in Turkey, take a tour bus to a tacky resort peopled by other British tourists, explore the local environs, and grow closer and further apart. He and Sophie’s mom, who has primary custody back in Scotland, are on friendly terms, but Calum, who moved to London, is a restless young man, given to a third beer with dinner, standing on the hotel balcony late at night smoking a cigarette, looking at the sky, and dancing.

The vacation is clearly a special occasion, not least because it must have cost dearly for Calum, whose current job is “this new thing going on with Keith.” On the first night in their room, they discover that there is only one small bed. Calum dutifully calls down for a cot, ceding the mattress to his daughter. The next morning they are awakened by the ringing sounds of construction: the hotel is being renovated in the off-season. Yet this flat disappointment—the deflating indignities of poverty, even while on vacation—intensifies the sense of freedom, the delight of time alone with a parent, the need to enjoy a rare luxury.

But outlining the film’s plot feels like a graver betrayal than spoiling the end. Works of grief are typically described as “raw,” as if the creator had simply ripped off a limb. Aftersun is fragile, as befits a film with the title of a poetry collection. Each scene delicately brushes its meaning like layers of paint: by the pool on the morning after their arrival, Calum rubs sunscreen into Sophie’s back, apologizing for the resort’s limitations while trying to pick up on the last conversation they had together, a conversation she glancingly remembers. Underneath their dialogue, the shrill ping of hammers. This is the awkward rhythm of reuniting with the noncustodial parent, who is nonetheless determined to care for you, scored by the impingement of money, obligation, and the adult world.

Orbiting the story of a parent’s mortality is that of a child’s maturity. Sophie, who will start at a secondary school in the fall, takes alternately tentative and bold steps toward adulthood, and therefore away from her father. “Why don’t you go over and introduce yourself?” Calum asks her, indicating two children who must be around eight and six years old. “Dad, no, they’re like kids,” Sophie scoffs. Instead, she invites two teenage boys to join them in a game of pool, confidently breaking the rack herself. Where Calum largely confines his attention to Sophie, she is drawn to these long-limbed adolescents, who swan about in yellow bracelets that mark them as the privileged few with access to the all-inclusive experience—“You can get as much as you want of anything,” says a girl with a pierced ear, inadvertently advertising the adolescent fantasy of adulthood. (Sophie is also, mysteriously, briefly captivated by a bright pink swizzle stick in the shape of a woman’s naked body.) And always in the film’s background, swarms of paragliders—a risky adult pastime she is not allowed to try—flit about like dragonflies.

Wells sees everything with equanimity: Sophie getting affectionately teased by the big kids, recalling the episode of The Simpsons where Lisa befriends a group of oceanside teens and feels cool for once; or swimming with ease in the ocean with her dad but finding herself in over her head when the older kids start making out with each other in the pool. The role calls for the sensitivity of the budding artist, the impishness of childhood, the yearning of adolescence, security and sudden insecurity, the unspoken intimacy of parent and child. Corio is marvelous.

Mescal no less so. His handsome, charming Calum can’t be mawkish, awash in self-pity, because he is struggling mightily to keep Sophie from seeing his demons. She evinces some anxiety on his behalf, noting with a tremble in one of her video diaries that he has gone on “some scuba diving thing” despite not having a diving license. “He’ll be fine. Yeah. He’ll be fine, I’m sure,” she reassures herself. We get a child’s glimpses of his recklessness: crossing the street in front of a bus or balancing precariously on the balcony railing. For the first half of the movie, he sports an arm cast—from an accident he doesn’t remember—in which he fumbles to light his cigarettes.

But he is a doting father, protective and thoughtful, negotiating Sophie’s desire for independence with his responsibility to keep her safe. He indulges her in an intimate, grown-up rapport; they start their trip sharing a private joke at an English tour guide’s expense, Sophie laughing richly at her father’s impersonation. Calum practices tai chi, occasionally to Sophie’s embarrassment, but he is good at it, just as he is good at dancing. In one scene his movements rhyme with those of a fan in the corner of the room, which twists and blows cool air in time with him.

“If you let it rest on an object for a wee while it gets the lighting right,” Calum observes early on as he tries out the camcorder, and Aftersun seems to abide by this premise. The eccentric compositions—people and props placed about the frame in seemingly random order—are held until a balance reveals itself. Gregory Oke’s cinematography is complemented by Blair McClendon’s elliptical editing so that individual scenes have the aura of memory, an experience broken down to its elements: Sophie, Calum, ocean. Hand, face, cotton ball. Boat, mountain, shore. Through a toilet stall keyhole, a glimpse of the arm of an older girl as she mimes jerking someone off while telling her friend about a recent escapade with a boy. Experimental techniques are used less in a spirit of inquiry for its own sake than for their effect. Wells plays with a mostly shallow depth of field to highlight presences on the rim of Sophie’s awareness, pulling focus from Sophie to the arm of Michael, the boy playing arcade games with her, as he brushes her own, Calum in the deep background ordering at the bar.

At the furthest edge of Sophie’s awareness is a nagging anxiety, formed right at the seam of her maturity and Calum’s mortality. On one of their last nights in Turkey, she volunteers the two of them to sing REM’s “Losing My Religion,” a shared enthusiasm, at a resort karaoke show. Calum, drunker, perhaps, than he intended, and dwelling on his private miseries, refuses to go onstage. Sophie, in a mortifying and triumphant display, presses on alone in several long takes that showcase Corio’s tremendous performance as her anxiety gives way to disbelief and finally disappointment and sadness, mixed in with a brave insistence on finishing the song. Afterward, Sophie decides to spend her evening with the teens, and has her first kiss with clumsy Michael.

Calum, chastened and ashamed, gets drunker, stumbles down to the shore, and walks into the sea. The camera looks out at the dark water for several agonizing moments. He does not return. It is Aftersun’s first explicit acknowledgment of what has otherwise only been suggested, but it is also not Calum’s death. The film has been told to this point from Sophie’s perspective, and she wouldn’t have seen Calum’s lonely descent. It is, rather, the manifestation of her terror, a nightmare illustrated with the almost pure archetype of a parent vanishing into darkness.

After her kiss, Sophie returns to their hotel room to find herself locked out. Hours later, when the concierge wakes up to let her back into the room, we are as shocked and relieved as she is to find Calum passed out on her bed. With the quick elasticity of a child’s mind, she incorporates this news and the story returns to its gentler course. The next morning, Calum apologizes at the mud bath, and they wash each other’s backs. The camera pans over the water as eddies of mud and silt curl away under the sun. She was being silly after all, no need to worry.

The final scenes, following the introduction of a haunted adult Sophie in Brooklyn, signify much harder, abruptly jostling what has otherwise been cradled. Father and daughter’s joyful last day on vacation, dancing together at a supper club, Calum at his most handsome and charming, are intercut with a metaphorical vision of his death, sweaty, drunk, and high, dancing in a strobing nightclub, as adult Sophie screams soundlessly, desperate to get his attention.

At my mom’s wake, I asked an old family friend who had also lost his mom unexpectedly, many years before, if it ever got less painful. “Eh,” he said. This was comforting. My mother’s books and sunhats, her collection of sea glass and stacks of notepads are arrayed about my home, and I have taken to using her preferred sunscreen, Olay Complete. Letting any of it go is unthinkable. Wells knows the solace of holding onto grief. 

A cliché about maturity is that you learn to appreciate your parents more fully, as nonidealized people, as human beings who struggled also, who don’t know the answers, who have been plodding along all this time, just like you. This is half true. You also come to see them as fragile, weakened by struggles you don’t yet, or might never, know. Then one day you see their lives entire, a complete form that will fall away behind you—that has fallen away behind you. 

-Daniel Drake

[samanthasvietnameselitblog]

Five Interesting Nonfiction Books

"The Tale of Kieu: A Bilingual Edition of Nguyen Du's Truyen Kieu" by Nguyen Du

Since its publication in the early nineteenth century, this long narrative poem has stood unchallenged as the supreme masterpiece of Vietnamese literature. Thông’s new and absorbingly readable translation (on pages facing the Vietnamese text) is illuminated by notes that give comparative passages from the Chinese novel on which the poem was based, details on Chinese allusions, and literal translations with background information explaining Vietnamese proverbs and folk sayings.(Amazon)

2. "Where the Ashes Are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family" by Nguyen Qui Duc"

Nguyen, less one of his siblings, an older sister who suffers from mental illness, leaves Viet Nam as a refugee in 1975, while his parents stay behind for different reasons. His father, in particular, as a high ranking South Vietnamese governmental official, subsists in prison for many years. Nguyen’s re-writing of his father’s experiences are interesting in that it obviously would have taken an immense amount of interviewing and temporal reconstruction. Nguyen also relies upon poems that his father had written during his time in prison to help nuance the incredible challenges of his life as a prisoner; his constant movement, the endless monotonous days, and the persistent interrogation remind me much of Xiaoda Xiao’s work on life in prisons during and after China’s Cultural Revolution. His mother tries to remake her life in the post-war regime and maintains a steadfast hope that she will be reunited with her husband.(DVAN)

3. "The Mountains Sing" by Nguyen Phan Que Mai

It’s a sweeping multigenerational story of Tran Dieu Lan and her family’s life from the 1920s to the present. Tran’s family was originally from the North. During the communist land reforms, her family was forced to migrate to Hanoi.(The Bamboo Traveler)

4. "Eating Viet Nam: Dispatches from a Blue Plastic Table" by Graham Holliday

A journalist and blogger takes us on a colorful and spicy gastronomic tour through Viet Nam in this entertaining, offbeat travel memoir, with a foreword by Anthony Bourdain.

Growing up in a small town in northern England, Graham Holliday wasn’t keen on travel. But in his early twenties, a picture of Hanoi sparked a curiosity that propelled him halfway across the globe. Graham didn’t want to be a tourist in an alien land, though; he was determined to live it. An ordinary guy who liked trying interesting food, he moved to the capital city and embarked on a quest to find real Vietnamese food. In Eating Viet Nam, he chronicles his odyssey in this strange, enticing land infused with sublime smells and tastes.(Amazon)

5. "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien

Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, of the Alpha Company, carries various reminders of his love for Martha, a girl from his college in New Jersey who has given no indication of returning his love. Cross carries her letters in his backpack and her good-luck pebble in his mouth. After a long day’s march, he unwraps her letters and imagines the prospect of her returning his love someday. Martha is an English major who writes letters that quote lines of poetry and never mention the war. Though the letters are signed “Love, Martha” Cross understands that this gesture should not give him false hope. He wonders, uncontrollably, about whether or not Martha is a virgin. He carries her photographs, including one of her playing volleyball, but closer to his heart still are his memories. They went on a single date, to see the movie Bonnie and Clyde. When Cross touched Martha’s knee during the final scene, Martha looked at him and made him pull his hand back. Now, in Vietnam, Cross wishes that he had carried her up the stairs, tied her to the bed, and touched her knee all night long. He is haunted by the cutting knowledge that his affection will most likely never be returned.(Sparknotes)

[arbiterlexultionis]

Instant Eternity Pt. 2

So, Danny has the infi-map and uses it to go on vacations and the like to enjoy his now eternal life. The infinite realms are Infinite, really and truly. But locations within the realms correlate to spaces in the “real” world, so what happens when you travel beyond what should be the ends of the “real” universe in the realms? You find other universes. All universes, realities, multi and Omni verses connect with the Infinite Realms, hence the name kind of implying the existence of infinite realms. With the infimap Danny’s able to visit and explore these other planes of existence to his hearts content, and over the course of his travels makes a number of close friends.

He can’t just say goodbye forever, can’t leave them with no way to call for aid or call for small talk so, he comes up with a bit of a crazy plan to make sure all his new friends can meet each other and stay in contact. A combination of the infi-map, Fenton portal technology, time medallions/assistance from clockwork, help from the yeti’s and maybe even some help from Dr. Strange or Dr. Fate all come together to make a private club that connects to who knows how many dimensions. In a Ghost King AU his royal palace has all the normal palace stuff but surrounding Phantom’s Keep is a whole town for inter-dimensional travelers. The portals themselves are all in a massive tower, either leaning tower of Pisa style or a massive clock tower because of how much Clockwork helped out, arranged kind of like how all the statues of the avatars are arranged in the air temple in ATLA.

Danny’s sitting at his desk in his office while 7 Gokus, 13 Vegitas, 4 Beeruses(Beerusi? A pod of Beerus? Flock?) 10 Piccolos and 1 Gohan crowd the rest of his office. “Two Hundred and Forty. 2-4-fucking-0. That is the number of of Territories that have lodged official complaints about the ruckus your fights have been causing! Queen Patet sent a fifty seven page long letter asking me to give every single one of your dimensions eternal travel bans to all of your dimensions and every dimension where even one of you exist. Because the shockwaves from your fights were still strong enough to shatter glass when they reached her Territory. The territory of Vitrum, which makes Fucking Everything from glass! Including the Goddamn Buildings! They build their cities in massive glass orbs! More than thirteen hundred buildings torn down in one day. Including every single hospital they had. You fought for nine days straight. Get out. Get the crap baskets out of my office. Now. Go home. Let the Bulmas know that they’re paying the reparations.” They all file out of the office, Vegitas and the flock of Beerus mumbling about how they shouldn’t have made their buildings out of glass if they didn’t want them to get broken. The one(1) brain cell the group had, otherwise known as Gohan, was apparently the only one with manners, profusely apologizing and offering to help with the clean up even as he got shooed out of the office.

More then a dozen Quirckless!Izuku vigilantes come together to form a great big club to share intel that match’s across their various worlds, analyze quirks, train and give each other therapy. It’s all going well. Then the Batmen stop developing contingency plans for literally all the beings they meet here juuust long enough for their adoption senses to start tingling. The Dad Mights, Dadzawas and Dad for Ones put aside their differences to combat this new threat. The Spider-men are sitting in a corner grateful that their spider senses and Peter tingles helped them avoid all that nonsense. Until the Iron Dads show up. Then they’re all to busy running and cursing their Parker luck to be grateful.

Passing through a gateway to another universe that isn’t yours require approval from no less then half the visitors from that verse and/or Danny himself. Same thing goes for leaving the compound to explore the Realms.

All the adoption addicts from across the multiverse take one look at Danny, listen to all the rumors about his parents and go “Mine!”. Luckily for Danny he doesn’t really have to to worry to much, doesn’t even notice really, because 2.3 seconds after they did that they all turned to each other and went “No! Not yours, Mine!” The infighting has kept them busy ever sense. However, according to an ancient, sacred prophecy(something that Clockwork mentioned in passing 2 months ago) they will eventually all decide that Danny having a proper support network is more important then who his favorite supporter is. So he’s going to get parented so hard by all three hundred and eighty of them. More moms, dads, ma’s, pa’s aunts and uncles then he’ll know what to do with.

[quincyhorst]

OC Files: Céleste Astarloza

Since Spain ended up winning the Women's WC, I'll be briefly talking about my RM girls; or at least those whose outline I'm the most satisfied with currently. Here's the first one!

First off, her apperance. Here's a Picrew image I use as a main reference for her design (The original is here and its made by instagram.com/2muchglitters.).

Céles isn’t actually spanish; as she is from Biarritz, France; belonging to the french part of the Basque Country (Also known as Iparralde). However, her having some family members at the other side of the Pyrenees makes her often visit the neighbour country. For the most part she and her family had been watching Rose Griffon play at the Euro League, but when the FFI started, they decided to move temporally to Madrid as to watch Red Matador play (But still support her home country via TV). And finally once all eliminatories were done, she also went to Liocott too. Though truth be said, she never thought they would be put againist each other in the same group again.

For the most part, Céles is bubbly. She does come from a middle-high class so her struggles aren't many, but also leaving her a quite innocent view of the world. A double edged sword overall. While she first wasn't sure how to feel about Red Matador as a team, she grew so fond of its players that she ended up preferring them over the french ones. So in the time they all spent in Liocott, she pretty much started to hang around them often. Though, neither nor mom or dad are seem fond of it.

...At some point during the EE, her appearance accidentally caught the interest of the RM captain Querardo, which led to him showing off just to impress her (Like he'd do with any girl he found pretty). Céles took it a bit too seriously, even getting interested on approaching Que romantically, but upon finding out that 1- He actually wasn't much into her, and 2- He had changed his focus on someone else, she felt rather confused and dissappointed. At least while hanging around RM's defender trio (2-3-4)... It would be Antonio the one to win over her heart.

She also befriends other passerbies related to RM, including the poor reserve GK Donato (Still trying to get over his expelling back at Madrid) and Carmina, a mysterious tourist.

Funfact, but because most of her travels have been only inside of France and Northern Spain, being on Liocott has been an entirely new experience for her. Add to this her clueless nature, and she's 100% prone to fall on all sorts of tourist traps. At least she still keeps a smile no matter what...

BONUS:

Here's also her drawn by me. It might have some flaws, but at least it still serves as a reference of her hair texture + color (Since I find it straight up impossible to recreate this style on ANY Picrew at all, nor in any other character maker).

In this drawing she reminds me of a bird, somehow. I'll take it as a positive though since I do associate her with canary birds...

[septembriseur]

i don't think you can really say that the romanticised vision of venice is temporally separated from antisemitism. it's literally the city that they named ghettos after.

I think you think that I was saying that Venice's history is temporally separated from antisemitism. But what I was saying is that modern Venice sells a fantasy of history that is presented as temporally distant in a way that allows it to go without scrutiny. So, for instance, historic Venice was antisemitic because "that's how things were back then," and we're not challenged to see it as connected to the present. But also, the fantasy of history that Venice is selling is very light on historical details of antisemitism. If you go to the Jewish Museum and its tours in the Ghetto, the crowd is overwhelmingly Jewish. (It's kind of cool, actually— the current Jewish population of Venice is really tiny, but Jewish tourism means that the area can support a kosher hotel, several kosher restaurants, and at least three stores where you can buy Jewish-themed tourist tat like menorahs made of Murano glass.) Outside of that, "The Merchant of Venice" is a high-end perfume brand with an ornate shopfront in San Marco.

That kind of makes sense, at the same time as it reveals the frightening amorality of capitalism. Tourists don't want an uncomfortable experience. They don't want to be reminded that the Renaissance churches and baroque palaces they're admiring were built while Jews were being locked in the ghetto at night, or that those same churches and palaces were funded through war against "the infidel" and economies of colonialism. So those elements are obscured in order to produce more easily consumable experiences.

[lizbethborden]

Re: women's weird- weird used to be synonymous with spooky or having to do with the supernatural and/or ghosts. So maybe that's why the early stories are more gothic?

There is most definitely a relationship there! For me, i see the genre of “weird” as very temporally bound, so my take is that the cultural context for Weird fiction hadn’t really developed yet and that’s why these early stories are so much more Gothic. For example, “The Giant Wistaria” from 1891 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is just a straight up ghost story. It’s available here to read if you want to check it out:

[greysfic]

Trollhaven

At the end of the world, on the southern shore of the ice wastes, lies the great city of Trollhaven. It is the home and only city of the Trollkin, who have never in their long history been inclined to venture far for long nor seize more lands.

At the heart of the metropolis is the High Fane, carved from ice and snow. A vast complex specially designed for acoustics where the great woolly Trolls dwell. Tall as two humans, with thick coats and large tusks, the Trolls live in contemplation of The Resounding Cry; the last syllable of the song their deity, Mother, sang to bring the world into being. Visitors to Trollhaven can hear the echoing trollsong from the Fane at all hours, said to be strangely comforting. The Trolls lead the Trollkin - spiritual guides, temporal adminstrators, a council of elders to discern the future of their people.

The rest of the city is a hive of activity, where the Orc children of the Trolls live their lives in upkeep of the city. Sturdy and lightly furred, Orcs are infamous to outsiders as lacking imagination, blunt and open - but such outsiders have never seen them in their element. Orcs mostly adore engineering and the city is a testament to their cooperation, pragmatism, and regimented thought. Everything is functional almost to a fault, straight and angular, efficiently built with a particular aesthetic bent provided by their commitment to amplifying the Song through the stucture of the city itself. While Trolls give the big-picture orders and deal with external powers, the Orcs accept delegation for running infrastructure, construction, maintenance. They are also the frontline soldiers of Trollhaven when they are forced to violence, an unbreakable line of riflemen and pikes. Were it not for their lower numbers they would be the most formidable military force this side of Great House Lezek. As it is, the Orcs ensure Trollhaven is a valuable and prickly trade partner, mining worldseeds and ores from the land beyond the city, devising new mechanisms and chemicals.

The Goblins are the last of the Trollkin but by no means least. As small as Ratfolk, each Goblin is a single mind in six bodies. This makes them excellent sailors and airship crew, and while they support Orcs as part of the labour force at home and adding an extra creative spark to their works, for centuries Goblins were the only Trollkin to rove beyond their home. It is said no explorers have seen as much of the world as Goblins.

Trollhaven does not use money. The people work always for the good of the whole, under the guidance of the Trolls. Orc quartermasters staunchly manage the food and materials of their districts to ensure there is enough for everyone. This does make Trollkin culture quite rigid - noncomformity is punished harshly by exile, and many Trollkin can barely survive cut off from their community. Those who do are eccentrics found around the Known World in odd professions. Their most strict tenets are twofold; neither Orcs nor Goblins may sing, for that is a sacred act only for Trolls, and to manifest the power of a Magus is to demonstrate disconnection from Mother. Both are punished by exile.

A single ward of Trollhaven called Quarantine is given over to visitors to the city. Foreigners are not permitted to enter the rest of the city and barely tolerated where they are, but the Trolls decided this was necessary for diplomacy. Thus Quarantine is filled with embassies, mercantile company offices, and a small tourist industry run by those who felt out of place everywhere else.

Trollhaven sells metalwork, firearms, gunpowder, worldseeds, and fossils to the outside world. They import primary materials, especially wood, and meat. Trolls are obligate carnivores and not so ascetic they are averse to sampling morsels from distant lands. The city doesn't require trade too desperately but following a series of resource wars instigated by outsiders (and one holy war instigated by the Trolls), it was decided commerce was the best way to keep the peace.

Trollkin loyalists who leave home are often scholars and archeaologists, such as Trolls looking for traces of Mother or Orcs seeking to learn from foreign architecture. Trollkin exiles are often eccentrics or Magi; Trolls who cannot hear the Cry over the magic roiling in their soul, Orcs who shamed themselves serving as mercenaries, one-Goblin acappella bands on the run.

[mijureunion]

Aujourd'hui (hier, j'écris toujours avec un jour de décalage, vous avez suivi ?), on a fait une des sorties DE BASE, incontournable... On est allés dire bonjour au volcan ! 🌋

Bon du coup au départ du Tampon assez tôt le matin, pour maximiser les chances d'arriver sur place avant les nuages. Bon on n'est pas non plus des randonneurs aguerris hein, eux se lèvent à 4h du matin pour être dans l'enclos à 5h. Pas nous !

Pour commencer, la route serpente encore salement. Ça devient une blague à force, quand Camille me dit "c'est TOUT DROIT, enfin autant que possible quoi"... On prend la route qui monde du Tampon vers la plaine des cafres, ça tourne déjà bien. La route du volcan, qui monte, fait le tour de la ravine, pour aller du bon côté, ça tourne encore pas mal. Mais ce n'est pas encore le pire de la route. Ça viendra, ne vous inquiétez pas...

Premier arrêt : le cratère Commerson ! Reconnaissable parce qu'il est cassé, vous allez voir :

On est à 2300m d'altitude !

On reprend la voiture vers un autre paysage impressionnant : la plaine des sables ! Photo avant blabla :

Des lacets donc, encore. Mais ça, ça va. C'est la piste qui traverse la plaine vers le volcan, le pire ! Creusée de trous dans tous les coin, ça bouge plus que dans les manèges à sensation, sauf que ça dure 10/15 min ! De toutes manières on s'y est arrêtés parce que le paysage lunaire est magnifique, et qu'en plus on voulait y ramasser des olivines (https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivine#). On se baisse, on fouille un peu les graviers et on trouve plein de cristaux !

La plaine des sables, une autre planète.

Donc on suit la route qui traverse la plaine, et on arrive au pas de Bellecombe. Bon, on a eu du mal à se garer hein, c'est le point à touristes d'où partent toutes les randos. Là, on est en hauteur, au bord de ce qui s'appelle l'enclos. C'est l'ancien site du Piton de la Fournaise, mais il s'est écroulé sur lui-même il y a 65000 ans, et les falaises qui l'entourent depuis forment un enclos naturel. Une grande majorité des éruptions qui ont lieu sont dans l'enclos, par le cratère du piton ou pas, et coulent, parfois jusqu'au grand brûlé, c'est à dire la zone qui va de l'enclos, à flanc de montagne, jusqu'à la mer.

On voit bien les falaises qui entourent l'enclos du piton de la Fournaise !

Un escalier descend en serpentant le long de cette falaise, pour aller dans l'enclos même. Donc on l'a pris !

La grosse dune au premier plan est le Formica Leo, un ancien cratère.

Et le voilà quand on y est passé !

Bon moi j'ai filmé un peu, mais je trierai les vidéos plus tard !

Vous voyez les falaises derrière ? C'est de là qu'on vient !

Dans l'enclos, entre le pied des falaises et le Formica Leo !

Lave cordée, marcher dans l'enclos c'est laborieux parce que rien n'est plat ! Plus les coulées sont récentes, plus elles sont noires et friables (et donc casse-gueule !). On monte et on descend sans cesse, après avoir descendu le Grand escalier de la falaise, c'est pas reposant !

Une fois qu'on est remontés (bien laborieusement encore !), on a pris un petit repas au snack qui est au pas de Bellecombe. Beaucoup de monde, un tout petit snack sans électricité, qui fonctionne donc au solaire, et un monsieur tout seul face aux hordes de randonneurs affamés. Bon comme d'hab j'ai pris... Un pain-bouchons ! C'est donc l'heure de mettre à jour notre classement :

Étang salé

Front de mer de saint-pierre

Conservatoire botanique des Mascarins

Saint-Gilles devant l'aquarium

Pas de Bellecombe

C'était bon quand même hein ! Mais bon, le prix est du simple au double par rapport à d'autres qu'on a mangé, et il n'était pas fou fou. Je ne jette pas la pierre au monsieur qui faisait tout tout seul, y compris les sandwichs au fur et à mesure des commandes, mais la comparaison avec les autres est rude !

Après ça, pause plus longue dans la plaine des sables au retour, pour profiter du paysage et chercher encore des olivines, et puis retour au Tampon bien fatigués ! De là, on a repris les valises temporairement déposées de nouveau chez Nicole est Bruno, pour aller chez Annick et Éric, des amis très proches de la famille qui nous hébergent jusqu'à notre départ ! Plus de déménagement jusqu'à l'avion donc !

Dans l'article de demain, encore plus de lave ! Mais pas que...

[sol-flo]

had a positively and literally surreal experience today. i was at the surrealist room at this museum looking at the rad paintings and stuff and. i suddenly heard watermelon sugar playing nearby. and there were some loud tourists and i thought no fucking way they're just listening to music now but. i walked around a little more and it was an artwork with a radio in it!! and of course i immediately forgot the name of the artist orz but honestly slay this piece in constant flow both geographically and temporally.... constantly updated forever..... a direct connection through time yknow??.... i almost forgave it for making me listen to harry styles