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red-riding-wood · 9 months

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Devil, Devil - Part I

Pairing: Tommy Shelby x F! Reader

Fandom: Peaky Blinders

Summary: The seal of your fate, to a man falsely crowned. And to your devil, your soul was bound.

[Inspired by this request for a jazz/vaudevillian performer and the song Devil, Devil - MICK]

Warnings: Dark!Tommy, dubcon/noncon themes, noncon touching, little bit smutty but full smut in future chapters, stalking/unhealthy obsession, manipulation, blackmail, mentions of domestic abuse, blood, mild choking, mention of prostitution

WC: 5277

It was all because of that damned Peaky devil.

You cursed him for the gaudy pearls strung around your neck, for the corset that pinched your stomach so tight it would be a wonder if you’d be able to hit your lower notes. You cursed him for the waver in your stride every night you stepped onstage, for the heat beneath your skin when that frozen gaze seemed to douse you in fire, for the quiver in your tone when you sang – for you sang from your soul, and your soul trembled in the sights of the blue-eyed Devil.

He’d started arriving for your performances every night, attracting the attention of the dancers and the waitresses, the owner and the local hoodlums, but he paid no mind to any of them but you. He always sat in the second row, shadowed by the establishment’s collection of antiques. He’d light a cigarette and blow a halo for a crown, lurking in the darkness but staring at you from eyes like twin beacons, his pinewood throne framed by the black coat he never relinquished and his sharp features hallowed by the candlelit fires of Hell.

“He’s trouble, that one,” the locals had said. “Managed to turn a backwoods razor gang into an enterprise, but make no mistake; he’s got cursed blood in him. Shelby Company Limited, they call themselves now, but the Peaky Blinders they’ll always be. Thomas fuckin’ Shelby comes up from Birmingham, thinks he owns everything he sees. The Devil, some say; if you’ve crossed paths with him twice, them say it’s too late for you, when the Devil’s set his sights on your soul.”

If he’d truly set his sights on your soul, you wondered why he tormented you like this, why he never said a word but only devoured you with those frigid blue eyes, as if you were all his and you possessed not even a fraction of him. Last you’d checked, legend had it the Devil traded for souls, so what could he possibly think to grant you? The man had brought you nothing but misfortune. It was because of him that tonight you were expected to join the dancers, because your act had been slipping beneath that coldfire gaze and smoke-ring crown. Your manager claimed it was by popular customer request, but you knew better. You were a songbird, not a peacock; while the other girls of your troupe flared their feathered skirts and tasseled corsets, you were an instrument in their symphony. You got up on that stage not because you wanted to show off, but because when you sang, your soul came alive, and amidst the velvety sounds of the trombones and saxes and the lurid displays of flashing colours and lights, you were at peace.

Until he came along and ruined everything.

“I do not run a charity,” your manager had said. “I run a business. And this business, it has an image to maintain. Before our contract ends with this club, we need to show these Londoner pricks that we are not just another travelling circus with cheap whores and fake magic tricks. Nobody is questioning your ability to sing, Y/N. We just think you could be bringing a little… more.”

As you stepped onto the stage that night, and immediately felt yourself impaled by the icy hooks of that piercing gaze, you wondered if the Peaky devil also wanted a little “more”. As if you could give him anything more than what he’d already taken: your soul, your peace.

Your breath came shaky against the microphone as the lights illuminated the stage, blacking out all of the club’s customers except for one. One, whose mouth you could swear quirked into the slightest of smiles around his cigarette, whose gaze roved across your new ensemble like you were a piece of meat. Your corset already hitched your breath in your chest, and anger flared within you, frustration eating at the hollowness of your ribs as your voice came airy and light.

But this rage that had flickered to life inside you, warm and whelming like the oil lamps that cast darting shadows across the white tablecloths, it spurred a growl in your tone that surprised yet thrilled you, and as your nails curled around the microphone, your shoulders carried to the bright of the music, the dark of your tone made you feel like you were something dangerous. That perhaps a devil dwelled beneath your breast as it did the man with the eyes of death.

Feathered wings and headdresses whirled around you as the girls began their choreography, and your heart seemed to escape the heavy constriction of the corset to pound in your throat, your skull, joining the chorus of sounds that resonated deep in your bones. You sidled your hips from side to side, slowly, sensually, the way your dancer friend, Sally, had taught you, your heels beginning to click to the beat of the song.

But your flesh was burning up beneath that icy stare, and sweat prickled at your neck, and though you sang with fury, your voice still felt limited, unable to utilise the full breath of your stomach. Irritation clawed at your buzzing flesh, and your lip curled over your teeth as you attempted to belt your notes.

Damn you, Peaky bastard, you nearly breathed, hating the way his eyes seemed to gleam as you moved your body. He had no damn right to look so smug.

You tried to focus on channeling this frustration into the movements of your body and the snarl of your tone, the pearls along your chest clacking together as you twirled, your head growing dizzy as you battled for breath. It wasn’t the hoots and hollers nor the cat calls that spurred you on, but the icy hooks of the Devil’s gaze. No, he did not look at you like a piece of meat. He looked at you like you were a goddess.

Breaths coming shorter, you yanked at the laces of your corset, your irritation reaching new heights and the incense and music and cheer drowning out the voice in your head that usually kept you from doing anything stupid.

As your corset tumbled to the stage, cold air sweeping across your sweat-dappled flesh, your voice sprang free of its cage, notes pulled deep from your belly and your fury masking the tremble in your tone. The pearls pooled between your breasts, the feathers of the pasties still scratching your flesh but no longer grinding so painfully against the fabric of the corset.

The Blinder’s smirk seemed to fall, jaw clenched, bright eyes darkening and drinking you in between minacious glances at the men in the crowd who cheered, kicked at the tables, shouted obscene comments that were only half-drowned out by the smooth shrill of the trombones. Your lips pulled into a wicked grin round your teeth, and you became lost in the music as you danced and sang, not caring anymore that your breaths were short or that you didn’t hit every note just right. The look on his face made it all worth it.

And as the final notes died in your aching chest and the stage was swept by dark, and the saxes unleashed their final, wailing cry, Sally swept a sheer robe round your shoulders and ushered you from the stage and to the dressing room. Her excitement was contagious as blonde curls bounced over her bedazzled headband and she whispered praises to you, but her words seemed to muddle together as you heard, distinctly, the chanting of your name behind you like a sordid prayer.

---

The muffled notes of piano still hummed past the walls of the dressing room as you applied another coat of cherry red lipstick, a coil of smoke rising from the ash tray beside you and clouding your head as you attempted to filter out the excited chatter of the girls. Sheer gown now fitted properly around your arms, your skin had the chance to breathe without existing under the ogling eyes of the rambunctious men who had been chanting your name.

“I still can’t believe what just happened out there!” Sally’s voice cut through the throng of the rest, mostly because she had leaned over to squeal into your ear. “Did you see that gentleman at the front? His jaw practically dropped along with your corset.” She giggled, and you popped your painted lips, chasing away the smile that threatened their corner. You hadn’t noticed any man in that crowd but the blue-eyed Devil. Those twin blues were practically burned into your skull, so much so that –

You stilled, blood turning to ice in your veins and your heart freezing over in your chest. The lipstick clattered to the desk, causing Sally to jump back with a yelp that if not from her, could’ve only come from a Chihuahua.

Blue eyes stared back at you in the smudged mirror.

A sharp breath filled your lungs as the ice around your heart shattered and it began to beat again, hard, against your ribs, and your head spun from the sudden flood of cigarettes and incense. You could’ve feinted as you stood, whirling on your heel, nails splintering the wooden grain of the desk with how hard they dug in to ground yourself. Your gaze narrowed, and your heart fluttered as you found it was met with the same intensity.

The dressing room fell silent with a hush, and as Thomas Shelby sauntered in, snubbing out his cigarette in the nearest ash tray, a fearful reverence seemed to coagulate in the air, until it became so thick you could scarcely breathe.

A few of the girls darted out behind him as he drew closer to you, smirk playing at his lip and that darkness colliding with the bright of his eyes in a twisted, glittering dance. But he held out a hand before the rest could vanish, even the high-spirited Marla, who seemed dismayed but didn’t challenge him. Though not of a very tall stature, Thomas Shelby was an intimidating man, and it was evident that the name he carried made him untouchable. Your brow furrowed, teeth grinding together as you tried to work out exactly why he didn’t want the girls to leave when it seemed obvious he had come here for you and you alone. And when that icy gaze settled on you again, the bright of it glittering with mischief, and his smirk tugged higher with unmistakable pride and that insufferable smugness, you figured you were beginning to work it out. He wanted to make a statement, and whatever it was he planned, he wanted them to see.

The statement, perhaps, that your soul belonged to him. And only him.

Shoving his hands in the pockets of his trousers, he closed the gap between the two of you with an agonisingly slow stride, as if time revolved around him. The gold chain of his pocket watch glinted in the harsh lights, and you might’ve used the word “dashing” to describe his prim, collared, snow-white shirt, had you not wanted to smear the contents of the ash tray across it out of spite, or perhaps douse his black suit in some of the gold glitter the girls brushed their skin with.

Perhaps, some part of you wanted to print your lipstick along the rose-white flesh of his neck, to match his striking red tie.

Forcing such conflicted, intrusive thoughts from your reeling mind, you cocked your head, glaring at him expectantly.

“Quite the performance.” His voice was not shrill and grating as you had anticipated, but low, rumbling like thunder over a black horizon yet pooling like soft honey between your thighs. “Tell me, songbird, do you usually win the crowd over with such provocative displays?”

Already amazed by his sheer fucking nerve, you stifled a scoff. As if you hadn’t caught him staring, lurking in the shadows of every performance.

“You tell me, Mr. Shelby,” you purred out your words, but cocked a brow in challenge. “To what do I owe such keen interest?”

The bright of his eyes glinted, and his smirk hooked his lip. “You’ve heard of me.”

“Everyone in this city knows your name. It seems to spread like some sort of plague. I’d prefer it never have crawled from the sickening bowels of the Birmingham streets, but... here it is, on my lips.” You rolled your shoulders upward, leaning against the desk, head tilted to one side.

“And yet, you wear it well.” Thomas’ gaze darted to your parted lips, snaked his tongue between his teeth as if to taste the cherry. “Don’t fret, little bird…” He spoke in a hushed baritone that still managed to reverberate through the diminishing space between you, as if the faint hiss of his whisper would mask his words from everyone but you, like clouds gathering over distant thunder. “… you’ll be saying it more often.”

A burning, whiskey-tinged breath fanned your cheeks, stirring the wisps of hair from your face. Tension mounted in the room, the girls turning into porcelain dolls as they held their breaths, but they didn’t exist outside of the threads that pulled taut between you and the Blinder.

He smelled of gunmetal, of old books. Of charcoal and wood smoke. Like blood and hellfire.

“Will I, now? Think you own these lips, is that it? Think you own my body?” You didn’t even need to take a step to bring your figure to his, your breasts brushing his chest through the sheer fabric of your robe, the chain of his pocket watch tickling your stomach.

He smelled of earth, of sacred rituals. Of frankincense and myrrh. Like dug graves and lost religion.

And like a candle, the bright of his eyes was snuffed out by the dark, and the smirk fell from sharp outlines. “You haven’t heard?” he said. “Some say I own everything the light touches…” His fingers brushed your side, the heat of his blood beneath his skin sending cold shivers along your flesh, and you cursed yourself for wishing in that moment, in which his fingers dragged reverently down the curve of your hip, that his touch would burn away the fabric between you. “Some say I own everything the light is too fearful to touch.” The pressure of his touch increased, thumb tracing your navel, and suddenly, his grasp was anything but gentle – possessive, demanding, as his fingers curled between the parting of your thighs and his nails burned against your skin. A breath hissed from your teeth and you swatted his hand away. You were surprised when he returned his thumb to his pocket, his devious smirk reappearing. Could he hear how fast your heart was beating for him, could he smell the lust that brewed beneath your flesh, could he feel the heat that had pooled like poison between your legs?

Did he know that he haunted your dreams? That you could not drift off to sleep anymore without thinking of those soft lips trailing down your sternum, of his teeth leaving bruises across your flesh?

He made you want to be worshipped, and ruined.

“Some say you’re nothing but a Gypsy bastard.” Your voice rose, breathy and high, like a falsetto note. “A false king, with no crown.”

“But a king nonetheless.”

“A devil, the witches say. Have you come to bargain for my soul, Mr. Shelby?” Your voice dipped back into your sensual alto as you regained some vestige of control, forcing your words to rise deep from your fluttering stomach.

“Oh, I’m here for more than your soul,” he breathed, closing the sliver of a gap between the two of you again, backing your spine against the wooden desk until you could’ve sworn blood welled beneath the sheer robe. “I’m here to offer a proposal, little bird. You’re going to sing for me, at the Eden Club. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. It’s far more prestigious than this seedy place. Your pay will be tripled, and you will never know a fabric rougher than silk or taste a wine younger than a lifetime.”

Though his offer would be tempting to most anyone, you did not sing for money. Pride, it came easy to you, and you did not appreciate the condescending way in which he spoke to you, looked at you, breathed in your direction.

“I’m under contract.”

“What, this?” He chuckled, pulling the slip of paper you’d signed a year ago from the deep pocket of his trousers. The material crinkled beneath his fingers, so close you could’ve reached out and grabbed it. But you didn’t. You watched, seething, as he lowered the contract to the candle beside your lipstick, an orange tongue lapping at the corner of the ivory paper, the ink of your signature bleeding into the open flame. Out the corner of your eye, you caught a glimpse of Sally, her shoulders furling inward just as the edge of the paper did before it was swallowed by the flame, the blackened remnants of the contract smudged into the floorboards with the toe of the gang leader’s boot.

“Everyone can be bought with the right price,” he said. “Your boss’s wife, she likes diamonds.”

You shouldn’t have expected any less of your manager. Like most in the entertainment business, he was shrewd, frugal, ruled by greed. The idea of his wife wearing diamonds was laughable; Thomas must have been a bloody saint in her eyes, because the most you had ever seen that man gift her was a silver locket that had been put in lost and found at one of your past gigs. He must’ve sold you out before Thomas could even pull his mafia card. And then milked you for one last performance.

You hated them. You hated them all.

“Well, I will find new work. The crowd seems to love me,” you pointed out, recalling the jealousy you’d seen darken the Devil’s eyes as he’d watched over your performance. Butting shoulders, you moved to stalk past, but a vice grip latched round your forearm and you froze, a puff of startled air escaping your lips as your gaze swung to meet his.

“I haven’t told you my terms,” Thomas said, and if it was out of fear or that devilish itch between your legs that made your body acquiesce, you couldn’t be certain, but damn it all the same. He shoved you back against the desk, fire igniting in his icy eyes as his shoulders pressed to yours, his figure solid against your own, denoting no escape. “So long as you work for me, you will not dance for another man…” He had the courtesy, at least, of releasing those icy hooks from your soul, the sharp line of his jaw brushing a flushed cheek to let his breath pool against your neck as if whispering sweet nothings to a lover. His fingers, ghosting the pulse of your throat. A breath hissed between your teeth and your eyes flared as they dragged down the vulnerable flesh, demonstrating his strength in a squeeze at the base of your throat.

“They so much as look at you, I will personally take their eyes.” A kiss, placed to the crook of your collarbone, like a promise. His lips were as soft as you had imagined, and you half-expected his tongue to be forked like the legends, but it was supple and rounded as it wet your flesh. Your bottom lip caught in your teeth as you stifled a moan, your body betraying you in a slight rut of your hips. A chuckle rumbled against your ear; he knew what he was doing to you, and apparently the feeling was mutual, for the scarcely-clothed heat between your shivering legs brushed against a firmness in his slacks as your hips rolled forward.

“You see…” He paused to inhale your scent, to drink you down like the whiskey on his breath. “I’ve done some research… you like to move around so much because you have a husband, in Sheffield, who very much misses your company.”

The racing tides of heat that rolled beneath your flesh gave way to a cold sweat, and you shuddered, your blood turning once more to ice in your veins. Your heart, stolen from your chest, leaving your lips parted in a gasp. His fingers traced the hollow shell of your ribs, nails digging in where your heart should have been. His, you thought, wretchedly.

When he pulled back to assess your reaction, to witness the fear bloom in your eyes, the smugness was gone from his face, replaced by an intensity, a darkness that seemed to wrap its shadowy tendrils around your soul. His nose brushed yours, and you noticed, for the first time, that his face was freckled. Kisses from God, you’d heard them referred to as once, and if the breath had not been stolen from your lungs, you would’ve chuffed a laugh at the demented irony.

Dark lashes crowned the blue eyes that raked down your chest, his thumb continuing its snaking little path from your heart to the lip of your breast, slipping beneath the fabric of your robe. “A year ago, you spoke with a solicitor about his tendency to… well, overexpress his love.” A jolt rocked your body, accidentally sending your hips back against his, drawing a groan from his chest that managed to be irresistible despite the discomfort of the scar he perfectly traced with his forefinger. Pain exploded beneath the surface of your flesh, as if his fingers was made of glass, like the smashed bottle that had struck your side all those years ago. You shuddered beneath his touch, the alcohol on his breath suddenly foul, and for just a moment, the way the light reflected off his eyes betrayed a sliver of green in seemingly pure blue.

“The solicitor told me that you showed him this – this, that was not his to see. Not his to touch.” Your lashes batted beneath his furious breaths, but you dared not close them, dared not let this man turn into a ghost of your past. To your relief, his fingers retreated from your scar, only to cup your cheek in his palm. “You offered him one night in exchange for freedom, and by morning, he did not honour his word. Do you know what I did to the solicitor?”

Thighs damp with arousal, palms clammy with fear, you trembled, breaking, cracking at your seams. The splinters of the wooden desk pierced your flesh as you sought its support, feeling like your knees might buckle beneath you and somehow knowing that he would catch you, but that that would be worse than falling to the cold ground. Because he wanted you to break, wanted to be the freckled angel who caught you when you fell.

But somewhere, from the shattered remnants of your chest, festered a darkness, a thirst, a satisfaction as you imagined the bloodied face of the man who had tricked you, as you imagined his eyes turned pale, pale as death.

Your pain didn’t break you; it kept you standing, fractured but whole.

“To you, I may be the Devil, but the Devil keeps his bargains.” His thumb swept across the ghost of the kiss he’d left on your skin. “And when you work for me, I will ensure that your darling husband never bothers you again.”

You could not banish the tremble from your limbs, nor the ireful rise and fall of your chest. And when you spoke, your hate, it seemed, was not even for him but for ghosts, “You’re every bit as vile as the rumours say.”

“Oh, I’m worse.” He smiled, almost sweetly. “Much worse.” A clear-blue eye winked, before studying you so intently you wondered if he really could read your thoughts, your sordid desires. Your sins. “But I don’t see disgust in your eyes, little bird. I see intrigue.”

Breathe, you told yourself. Breathe.

You were most at ease when you sang, and in your moment of need, an old melody you’d heard once travelling west came to you, and with it, the curl of your lip into a wicked smirk.

“Cannot buy me, Devil, Devil,” you half-sang, half purred, the notes that found your voice carrying undertones so dark, it almost did not sound like your own.

And in this moment, you found power, in the way his thumb seemed to still against your jaw, in the way his eyes locked to yours, mesmerised, his tongue catching between his teeth. In this moment, at last, he was yours. In this moment, he was just a boy, lured in by a siren song. As the notes died in your throat, his eyes darted to your lips, something softer than lust forming in oceans of melted ice. Your fingers fumbled for the first drawer of the desk, stabilising yourself now on the ivory handle.

And the emotion vanished before you could make sense of it, frozen over by a wall of ice.

“In life or in death, I will take your soul.” His teeth grazed the lobe of your ear, and his hand drifted to your scalp, sinking into the wild locks of your hair. “I will take everything.” Another hand closed around your waist, squeezing your ribs, bunching the fabric of your gown. “It is your choice, little bird. Because, you see, I made certain your husband knows of your infidelity. It’s a great dishonour, to a man of his station. And what sort of things does a man of his station do when he finds himself with a problem like you, eh?” Your chin was pointed sharply up, suspended by two fingers, your lips a hairsbreadth from his own as he stared you down.

“Now, I don’t think your friends will like to see what I’m going to do to you, little bird.” A growl grated the thunder of his tone, and he bit his lip. “I’m going to be a gentleman, and let you decide if you’d like them to give us privacy.”

And gone was the whiskey of his breath, the fire of his touch, the sharpness of his teeth. Thomas Shelby took a step back, smoothing out his waistcoat as if nothing had happened between the two of you. One of the porcelain dolls came alive, skittering back on her shaky heel to make way, but he paid no mind to her. He only awaited your command, as if trying to give you some false sense of control.

The silence that stretched between you was impossibly thick, like gasoline ready to ignite from one heated breath. You remembered to breathe, in, and out. And you began to sing.

“Clever Devil, Devil…”

His eyes narrowed, fixating so intensely on you that you were convinced nothing else existed in this moment beyond your dark melody, your cherry lips, your siren song.

Trembling, behind your back your fingers pulled gently at the drawer handle.

“How quickly do they sell their souls…”

He blinked, slow, enraptured. Yours.

Your fingers clasped the familiar stock of the 1911, flesh kissed by cold metal.

“… for the feast and the promise of gold.”

Time itself fractured; Thomas barely stirred as he watched your lips, your wrathful eyes, your brow sewn by ruthless will. He did not watch the gun you pulled on him, nor did he seem to hear the rack of the slide that split the quiet of the dressing room.

“But Devil… that won’t be me.” Your velvety singing turned to words of steel in your throat, and you glared at him down the sights of your weapon. Only now, did he seem to take notice of it, with a fleeting, unconcerned glance at its gaping black maw. He could have turned it on you, but he didn’t. He just smiled, bright blue eyes shining down a silver-moon barrel to meet yours.

Stepping back, leisurely, fists buried in his pockets, he promised, “I’ll be back, to claim what’s mine.”

Your finger loosened from the trigger yet trembled as the sight of Thomas Shelby disappeared past the doorframe, nothing left of him but the soft thud of his dress shoes down the hall and the ghost of his burning touch on your skin, the dampness on your neck from the promise he’d made you. The shameful cling of the sheer robe to your slicked thighs, the cold sweat that sent shivers of winter, death, and all things barren along your flesh.

For one, gut-twisting moment, all eyes were on you. The suffocating festering of fear, the sickening crawl of disgust, the heart-wrenching trace of reproach all culminated in the air around you, cast to the incense and smoke by bright eyes and slacked jaws, crossed arms and furled shoulders.

And the girls began to scurry from the dressing room, skirts and dresses and tassels streaming behind them like streaks of lightning that followed the rumble of the storm, like rivulets of rain chased by the hurricane.

Marla was among the last to leave, her eyes wary and wild and a sneer curling her lip as her eyes traced up and down your trembling form. Only when she left did you lower your gun, sliding the hammer back in place.

That left two. Sally, and the woman who claimed herself a witch.

“I’m sorry…” you breathed, not knowing what to say. “I’m sorry you had to witness that, I – I had no idea that was going to happen.” Shifting your attention fully to your friend, you reached a tentative hand for Sally, as if to ease her anxiety. Poor thing was shaking like a furled leaf and quiet tears streaked the freckles of her heart-shaped face.

She flinched away, and your heart clenched, hand withdrawing. You set aside your gun, hoping that might settle her nerves. “At least, let me give you this back…” you untied the bedazzled choker from your neck. “It looks like this was our last performance together. Thank you, for lending me it.”

But she sprang back like a jackrabbit when the fabric brushed her knuckles, and she shook her head frantically, tears shaking free of her spidery lashes like dew falling from painted webs. “You can keep it,” she spoke, her tiny voice cracking in her chest. “Just stay away from me.”

Something bitter worked its way into the fracture of your chest, the cruel fist of rejection squeezing the remnants of your shattered heart tight. Your fist curled, hard, around the choker, so hard that when you opened it, the jewels had left red impressions on your palm, and your thanks turned to bitter ash on your tongue as the laces of the choker slipped between your fingers.

The witch, Clementine, watched you from dark eyes always shrouded in an enigma, but today, held the slight trace of unease. A foreboding weight sunk her shoulders, and when she spoke, the raspy tones of her voice were those of lost souls, crying from strangled throats to warn you of something truly grave on the horizon,

“You’re marked. You’re marked by the Devil, you are, girl.”

Your brow furrowed, and the chime of her jangling bracelets seemed to mock you like laughter as she pointed a hooked claw to your loins.

Pawing aside the fabric of your robe, your fingers swiped across the nail marks Thomas had left along your inner thigh, wrathful and red and weeping. Your fingers came away with a veneer of blood, pooling in the rings of your skin like a wax seal.

The seal of your fate, to a man falsely crowned.

And to your devil, your soul was bound.

Part II coming soon!

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brf-rumortrackinganon · 2 months

Note

The worst opening ceremony ever

That’s because you’re looking at it all wrong. The opening ceremonies are incomparable, for a whole list of reasons:

The economic and financial situations, both in the country that’s hosting and for the entire world.

The country hosts

The creative and production teams involved in putting on the shows.

Geopolitical tensions and issues of the times

The athletes involved

You’re expecting 2008 production value in a 2024 world that’s dealing with different economic crises, two very significant wars with WW3 breakout potential, and a rising far-right/return to dictatorship. It’s incomparable.

You have to look at the opening ceremonies as their own standalone unit. And when you consider last night’s spectacle that way, it was actually a tremendous success:

Arson shut down most of the French trains and there were enormous fears of what it meant for the ceremony, but it went off without a hitch.

It rained the whole time, but all the performers still made good performances, no one was injured, and everyone made it.

Celine Dion made her first major public singing appearance while dealing with a huge medical condition. If you don’t know the significance of Celine Dion to the French or the song that she performed, then just be awed by her commitment to turn up, IN THE FREAKING RAIN, on TOP of the Eiffel Tower to perform. Who cares if she lip-synced? It was raining! She showed up anyway, with every right to demand the performance be relocated to the flat ground under cover.

The athletes all had a good time and were excited.

The cityscapes during the torch relay showed off Paris’s incredible architecture and skyline. Name any other city that can do that and have it be so meaningful.

The bells of Notre Dame rang for the first time in 5 years, they gave credit to all the workers and trades/crafts that have been restoring and repairing the cathedral, and gave an homage to the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

There was a lady in a croissant costume. A CROISSANT costume!

They had a choir of headless Marie Antoinettes accompanying a heavy metal band that was performing AT the very same prison she was held captive at.

They lit a piano on FIRE and floated it down the Seine while performing “Imagine.”

They acknowledged France’s bloody, violent history without it being preachy or sentimental. (Watch the LA 2028 ceremony ignore the US’s bloody history - I guarantee you it’ll highlight our melting pot culture but it won’t even touch on the oppression, slavery, Civil Rights era, or how indigenous peoples were treated, much like the London 2012 ceremony didn’t acknowledge Britain’s bloody history.)

They highlighted all the ways that French culture contributed to the global community; music, literature, love, fashion and Coco Chanel pink, Louis Vuitton, the Eiffel Tower, croissants, the minions, and French people’s contributions to modern sport (as well as foreign success in French sport).

The homage to Assassin’s Creed, the Phantom of the Opera, and other famous masked French figures in the torch relay and flag-bearers.

They had an opera singer dressed as the French flag singing the national anthem from a sloped rooftop over the stadium in the rain. I had literal chills, y’all. It can’t get more patriotic than that.

Organizers made statues of important French women to display during the ceremony and they’re DONATING all of them to Paris after the Olympics! I don’t know if you caught it, but the male-to-female representation in Paris’s statues is 4.5:1 (over 200 male statues, just 40ish female statues). It’s an incredible start towards gender equality in Parisian and French history that a lot of countries could take a note from.

Les Mis! Who doesn’t love a good musical interlude?! Especially one introducing a segment paying tribute to the French Revolution. (And I must admit, I’m now kinda expecting LA 2028 to have a Hamilton nod.)

The image of Assassin’s Creed with the dove wings behind her as she walked up.

All the athletes running together for the final torch relay - more chills! (Usually that doesn’t happen.)

Raising the Olympic cauldron by hot air balloon so everyone could see.

That amazing light show from the Eiffel Tower.

and so much more.

Yeah, the can-can line was sloppy and the audio quality was poor, the parade of nations took forever (they always take forever though) and no one understood the order they were coming in (because it wasn’t explained until *after* the ceremony that the upcoming hosts are also at the end) and there’s a ton people offended by the threesome and the drag queens on the grounds of religious morality (you can see my reaction to that criticism in the earlier post below), but overall, all things considered? Considering the entire 4-5 hour show, in the spectacle that is Paris, with a terrible weather forecast, in the unprecedented geopolitical times we’re in?

It was a kick-ass opening ceremony.

#olympics

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sixteenseveredhands · 1 year

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Stone Turtle of Karakorum, Mongolia, c. 1235-1260 CE: this statue is one of the only surviving features of Karakorum, which was once the capital city of the Mongol Empire

The statue is decorated with a ceremonial scarf known as a khadag (or khata), which is part of a Buddhist custom that is also found in Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan. The scarves are often left atop shrines and sacred artifacts as a way to express respect and/or reverence. In Mongolia, this tradition also contains elements of Tengrism/shamanism.

The city of Karakorum was originally established by Genghis Khan in 1220 CE, when it was used as a base for the Mongol invasion of China. It then became the capital of the Mongol Empire in 1235 CE, and quickly developed into a thriving center for trade/cultural exchange between the Eastern and Western worlds.

The city attracted merchants of many different nationalities and faiths, and Medieval sources note that the city displayed an unusual degree of diversity and religious tolerance. It contained 12 different temples devoted to pagan and/or shamanistic traditions, two mosques, one church, and at least one Buddhist temple.

As this article explains:

The city might have been compact, but it was cosmopolitan, with residents including Mongols, Steppe tribes, Han Chinese, Persians, Armenians, and captives from Europe who included a master goldsmith from Paris named William Buchier, a woman from Metz, one Paquette, and an Englishman known only as Basil. There were, too, scribes and translators from diverse Asian nations to work in the bureaucracy, and official representatives from various foreign courts such as the Sultanates of Rum and India.

This diversity was reflected in the various religions practised there and, in time, the construction of many fine stone buildings by followers of Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity.

The prosperous days of Karakorum were very short-lived, however. The Mongol capital was moved to Xanadu in 1263, and then to Khanbaliq (modern-day Beijing) in 1267, under the leadership of Kublai Khan; Karakorum lost most of its power, authority, and leadership in the process. Without the resources and support that it had previously received from the leaders of the Mongol Empire, the city was left in a very vulnerable position. The residents of Karakorum began leaving the site in large numbers, until the city had eventually become almost entirely abandoned.

There were a few scattered attempts to revive the city in the years that followed, but any hope of restoring Karakorum to its former glory was then finally shattered in 1380, when the entire city was razed to the ground by Ming Dynasty troops.

The Erdene Zuu Monastery was later built near the site where Karakorum once stood, and pieces of the ruins were taken to be used as building materials during the construction of the monastery. The Erdene Zuu Monastery is also believed to be the oldest surviving Buddhist monastery in Mongolia.

There is very little left of the ruined city today, and this statue is one of the few remaining features that can still be seen at the site. It originally formed the base of an inscribed stele, but the pillar section was somehow lost/destroyed, leaving nothing but the base (which may be a depiction of the mythological dragon-turtle, Bixi, from Chinese mythology).

This statue and the site in general always kinda remind me of the Ozymandias poem (the version by Horace Smith, not the one by Percy Bysshe Shelley):

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,

stands a gigantic leg

which far off throws the only shadow

that the desert knows.

"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,

"the King of Kings; this mighty city shows

the wonders of my hand."

The city's gone —

naught but the leg remaining

to disclose the site

of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder —

and some Hunter may express wonder like ours,

when thro' the wilderness where London stood,

holding the wolf in chace,

he meets some fragment huge

and stops to guess

what powerful but unrecorded race

once dwelt in that annihilated place

Sources & More Info:

University of Washington: Karakorum, Capital of the Mongol Empire

Encyclopedia Britannica: Entry for Karakorum

World History: Karakorum

#archaeology #history #anthropology #artifact #ancient history #mongol empire #mongolia #karakorum #middle ages #ancient ruins #art #turtle #bixi #ozymandias #poetry #mythology #genghis khan

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troythecatfish · 4 months

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Human zoos in the West were a feature of colonialism. They fed a fascination for exotic lands and a grotesque pseudo-science that focussed on the physiology of so-called 'savages.

Africans were exhibited in primitive settings for the enjoyment of spectators at trade fairs and travelling shows, helping legitimise the domination of 'lesser' beings by supposedly 'superior' Western civilisations.

One famous 'exhibit' was Saartjie Baartman, who was also known as Sarah Bartmann. She was a South African woman who attracted crowds due to a genetic condition (steatopygia), resulting in a highly protruded posterior. She was shipped to London in 1810 and spent most of her life on display. In 2002, her remains were repatriated and buried in South Africa. Another infamous exhibition was unveiled at the 1958 World Expo in Brussels, Belgium. It featured Congolese people in their mocked-up 'village' at the venue.

Awareness of the foul, dehumanising practice is slowly being raised. A Paris exhibition in 2011 called

"Inventing the Savage" showed how human zoos laid the foundations for racism against Africans. It was the brainchild of the former French footballer, Liliane Thuram, whose Caribbean family suffered under slavery. Though human zoos do not exist anymore, the effects of colonisation and exploitation of coloured people persist to this day. That's why we'll keep posting about them.

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frommybookbook · 2 months

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The Grass is Greener (1960)

I watched The Grass is Greener (1960) over the weekend and I can't stop thinking about it.

For starters, I watched it purely for the cast. I didn't even bother to read the description, I saw Robert Mitchum and Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr and Jean Simmons and I was in. In hindsight, I'm actually really glad I didn't read the plot ahead of time, going it without an agenda was perfect for this one. And for that reason, I'm going to put the rest of this under the cut because I'm going to completely spoil the plot.

The general plot of the movie is: Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr are a married, titled British couple who have begun allowing tours of their family estate to keep the lights on; Robert Mitchum is an American oil millionaire who gets nosy on the regular tour and decides to barge into the family's private quarters, where he meets Kerr. Over the course of about 10 minutes, they get to chatting, he's very flirty, and they share a pretty passionate kiss. Grant then arrives and the afternoon is over...until Kerr decides to go to London to "get her hair done" and ends up staying for a week having an affair with Mitchum. Simmons plays Kerr's best friend, whom she stays with in London and who decamps to the family home to see how Grant is holding up.

That last part is important: everyone in this movie knows exactly what's happening with Mitchum and Kerr from the very beginning. Grant can see the moment he walks into the room that this stranger is into his wife and that his wife is intrigued. Simmons knows that Kerr isn't spending any time at her apartment, she's spending it with Mitchum.

Everything comes to a head when Grant, in a display of passive aggression that would make generations of Midwestern church ladies proud, calls Mitchum and invites him to come back out to the house for the weekend. Oh, and while he's at it, would he mind giving his wife a ride home, she's been in London all week too, you see.

From there we have the world's most awkward dinner party, a legitimate duel at midnight in the estate's long hallway, and a genuinely keeps-you-on-the-edge-of-your-seat questioning of who Deborah Kerr is going to choose.

And it's this denouement that makes this such a wonderful movie and has it rattling around in my brain days later. Weirdly, and wonderfully, no one in this movie is treated as a villain! This is a story about love and adultery and passion and complacency and everyone just gets to be human.

It would be so easy for Deborah Kerr's character to be treated as a harlot and a whore and a loose woman for seeking out an affair with another man. It would be so easy for Robert Mitchum's character to be simply made a homewrecker and an aggressive American jackass and a playboy for showing clear interest and affection for a married woman. Cary Grant's character could have so easily been made out to be the cold, distant, unloving husband who drove his wife away. And yet none of that happens.

All of these characters are treated sympathetically and respectfully. I spent the whole time rooting for all of them and feeling conflicted every way about who I wanted Kerr to choose. It felt real and honest and like something that wouldn't be told in 2024.

Plus it was absolutely hilarious. Because as poignant as this was, it was also so damn funny. Cary Grant still had so many opportunities to break out the slapstick and prat falls and quippy one liners. Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum got to trade dry repartee, and don't get me started on Jean Simmons. Jean Simmons absolutely stole the show as the somewhat flighty, airheaded, divorced best friend and I couldn't stop laughing every time she was on the screen. I'd never seen her do comedy before and it was just incredible.

So, yeah, go watch The Grass is Greener.

#the grass is greener film #cary grant #deborah kerr #robert mitchum #jean simmons #i guess technically this is a farce?#kinda?#whatever you want to call it #it's fucking brilliant

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women-throughout-history · 8 months

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Sarah Baartman

Sarah Baartman's tragic story is a heartbreaking narrative of exploitation, racism, and the dehumanisation of an African woman in the early 19th century. Born in South Africa's Eastern Cape in 1789, Baartman faced a life marked by hardship and loss. Orphaned at a young age, she entered domestic service in Cape Town after her partner was murdered, and their child died.

In 1810, under questionable circumstances, Baartman signed a contract with British ship surgeon William Dunlop and entrepreneur Hendrik Cesars, agreeing to travel to England to participate in shows. Her distinctive physical features, characterised by extremely protuberant buttocks due to steatopygia, made her a spectacle in London's Piccadilly Circus, where she was exhibited in skin-tight, flesh-coloured clothing adorned with beads and feathers. The fascination with her large buttocks reflected the prevailing fashion of the time, but Baartman's public display in so-called "freak shows" also highlighted the darker undercurrents of racism and colonial exploitation.

Baartman faced a tumultuous life in Europe, performing on stage, enduring private demonstrations, and facing questions about whether she willingly participated or was coerced. The British Empire had abolished the slave trade in 1807, but Baartman's treatment raised ethical concerns, leading to a court case against her employers, although they were not convicted.

Moving to Paris in 1814, Baartman continued her exhibitions under the nickname "Hottentot Venus." She faced further exploitation, possibly engaging in prostitution, and ultimately succumbed to illness, dying at the age of 26 in 1815. The postmortem exploitation continued as Georges Cuvier, a naturalist, dissected her body, preserving her skeleton, brain, and genitals. These remains were exhibited in Paris's Museum of Man until 1974, a grotesque testament to the objectification of Baartman.

The journey of Sarah Baartman's remains back to her homeland was a protracted one. Finally, in 2002, after years of advocacy and efforts, her skeleton, brain, and genitals were repatriated and laid to rest in the Gamtoos River Valley, where she was born. Baartman's story remains a symbol of the intersection of racism, sexism, slavery, and colonialism, prompting debates and discussions about the historical exploitation and the ongoing fight against injustice.

#sarah baartman #saartje #saartjie #colonialism #women in history #khoikhoi #south africa #khoekhoe

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lashton-is-my-drug · 1 year

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i was at the fonda (night 1) when luke referred to sierra as his wife. however, no wedding band. i'm sure someone else has mentioned that, but i haven't seen anyone else talking about it. this weekend's fashion display by luke in milan..sierra nowhere to be found. he does have a ring on his left hand, but it doesn't seem like a wedding band to me. and if it were, why didn't he have it on at the fonda? rhetorical question. anyhow, this is a very lengthy way to ask your take on it all, and do you think they are married or was it a planned "announcement"..which he didn't seem to make mention of night two?

OK, ready?

Luke saying “my wife Sierra” at his solo show at the Fonda in LA

Pardon the delay in my response, I wanted to wait a beat to see what happened after.

First, Luke was wearing his matching ring with Ash. Ash was wearing his the prior couple of days of events and with fans. Luke hasn’t ever worn a matching ring with her, which therefore there’s nothing to construe as a wedding ring for them. Ever. Luke and Ash have been wearing theirs ever since the band Twitch stream. Check out my various black onyx ring tags. Also, since Youngblood era (stars rings), Luke and Ash have worn various matching rings. They’re sneaky about it. Sometimes they both will wear it, sometimes only Luke, sometimes only Ash. Ash doesn’t wear any rings when drumming.

Released his album with Sony (known for using stunts and people’s personal lives as promotion. Example: all of the Spidermen and Mary Jane’s have “dated”). He’s also managed by Matt Emsell/Ben Evans, who have managed the boys all throughout Modest days.

No article or anything afterwards, which would typically happen with these things…. instead there’s a mystal pregnancy announcement to overshadow it. (Which don’t even get me started on THAT whole thing….)

Luke hasn’t mentioned it anywhere else or made a formal announcement. There was a big deal made about the engagement (along with the standard PR article in People, Ben earning his money) so if the marriage was real, wouldn’t there be one? Luke said some lovely words in his ig post but nothing about any marriage? HELLO?

I truly 100% don’t think they’ll ever get married. Luke and Ash remain devoted to one another. The time is ticking on the Lierra breakup. (Side note: Notice how Ash nor any of the other boys nor anyone on their team nor family members have acknowledged it either??)

Another side note that I find entertaining: I find it very reassuring that the fans actually don’t favor the duet (Older), which was supposed to be this beautiful love PR move between the stunt. Caramel is intensely much better of a song. The gays tend to do a much better job at it. (Hello Elton John and so many others.) Ash would never think of trying to overshadow Luke, like S tried to at London ONO.

Luke’s been flying solo to events ever since the guys were in Aussie. She wasn’t at Fashion Week either. (I’m including video clip proof he was solo.) [Theory: A couple fellow Lashies believe it was some sort of trade off that he had to say the marriage thing at his show so he could be sans Sierra at Fashion Week. Fashion is his. He wants to be himself whenever he can. One day Ash will be next to him though, cheering him on proudly.] Luke has been at events with bandmates, family members (his brother), or is solo ever since they were in Aussie at the end of Take Me Home Tour? Which we need to acknowledge how much Luke absolutely SLAYYYYYED at Fashion Week!! Multiple of different outfits! Get it!!

[Camera flashing warning]

Ash needed to be next to him. 🥺❤️

There’s just so many reasons it was a flat out lie.

Hey Siri, play “Lie to Me”. Actually, seriously, stream Lie To Me, it’s a banger. Writing credits of Luke and Ash, so, of course it is.

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dragoneyes618 · 8 months

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The dank, claustrophobic basement of a derelict building in east London was the setting for an unusual exhibition last week. Organized by the 7/10 Human Chain Project, a grassroots group formed in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 blitzkrieg on Israel, the installation, titled “Voice from the Tunnels,” sought to bring to life the experience of Israeli hostages held underground in Gaza for more than 100 days.

The exhibition was open for five days to members of Parliament, celebrities, leaders of faiths and communities, senior CEOs of large corporations, journalists, social media influencers, and anyone else with a platform to highlight the plight of the remaining captives. The disturbing displays recreate the settings of the Hamas tunnels under Gaza, estimated to be at least 350 miles long — far exceeding the length of the London Underground railway system at 250 miles.

“It’s based on IDF evidence, it’s based on footage that was found, it’s based on interviewing the Hostages and Missing Families Forum,” says exhibit co-creator Orit Eyal-Fibeesh. “It’s really an attempt to portray, as accurately as we possibly can, some of those stories.”

The 7/10 Human Chain Project came from a nucleus of people who began putting up posters of hostages to publicize the October 7 kidnappings. The small group watched pro-Hamas activists tear down their posters and became more determined.

The group began holding demonstrations outside Parliament Square, Downing Street, and the London offices of the Red Cross and United Nations Women. It took the name 7/10 Human Chain Project after gathering enough people to form a human chain at one protest.

The group would remind passersby that hostage Emily Hand had turned nine years old in Hamas captivity. Little Emily has since been released, but her father, Thomas, has said in interviews that his daughter still cries uncontrollably, does not wish to be comforted by anyone, and only speaks in a low whisper. Emily, like the other children and women already released, left the tunnels traumatized, hungry, and alone.

Utter Overwhelm

On January 14, marking the hostages’ 100 days in captivity, the 7/10 Human Chain Project organized a rally in support of Israel that drew more than 25,000 people to London’s Trafalgar Square. The next day, the group opened the “Voice from the Tunnels” exhibition, an effort for which planning had been underway for many weeks.

The project came about after one of the organizers, who identifies himself only as David, decided to create a display of Hamas atrocities. David has a business that supplies mannequins to stores and theatres, and saw an opportunity to put his trade to use to help the hostages.

The display he developed, using mannequins that are human-like but essentially faceless, created a haunting impression that David wanted to capture. By that time, some of the hostages had been released, and horrific stories began to emerge.

The organizers spoke to doctors who had treated released hostages, as well as their family members, and also made use of video footage discovered in the tunnels that was released by the IDF. Everything in the group’s reconstruction of the Gaza tunnels was then verified and cross-checked with the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.

The exhibit, made accessible last week to members of the media, took the form of a tour that begins in a makeshift hospital environment. Beds are lined up in a large ward at ground-floor level, and at first glance resemble the setting in any other hospital. But as the tour makes clear, many of Hamas’s tunnels have been discovered underneath hospitals, schools, kindergartens, mosques, and even United Nations buildings. It is a reminder of the security cam footage discovered by the IDF that showed Hamas terrorists bringing hostages to a Gaza hospital on October 7.

As the tour heads below ground, project co-creator Orit Eyal-Fibeesh, serving in the role of tour guide (she is also a former IDF officer), informs guests that the actual Gaza tunnels are some 50 to 60 meters (170 to 200 feet) underground, running to five or six levels. The complex could only have been constructed with a mind-boggling quantity of concrete — not to mention engineering expertise.

The gut-wrenching part of the tour starts in earnest when it reaches a display of prone mannequins covered in a bloody white sheet, meant to recreate what the IDF discovered upon entering one of the tunnels in their quest for hostages. Apart from one female soldier, the rest of the hostages discovered on that day had been murdered.

The tour moves on to an introductory room, where TV screens display various media loops covering the unfolding events of October 7, followed by news coverage in subsequent days and weeks.

Little Kfir Bibas, kidnapped when he was just under nine months old (his birthday was on January 18), is mentioned in the coverage, along with his four-year-old brother Ariel. The oldest person still in captivity is 85.

At this point, two women appear next to Orit. They seem to have joined the tour, but Orit explains that they have just watched a 43-minute compilation of footage from Hamas body cameras retrieved by the IDF, along with video from kibbutz and police security cameras and that taken by soldiers.

The two women are both in total shock, so overwhelmed that they cannot speak, and they begin to cry. Orit starts sobbing herself, as she is familiar with the film. The two women cannot continue and need to leave.

Careful Preparations

Throughout the tour in the cold, damp, filthy tunnels, screams of “Allahu Akbar” repeat on a recorded loop taken from October 7. There are also recordings of the sound of bombing in the distance, believed to be from IDF bombs and shells.

Freed Israeli hostages have told doctors and family members that the shouts of “Allahu Akbar,” which echoed in the tunnels when terrorists came in pumped up with adrenalin, will not leave their heads. Hostages being held underground did not know if it was night or day. Their captors constantly told them, “No one is looking for you and no one knows you are here.”

On the tour, the screams of “Allahu Akbar” and the booms of nearby IDF bombing only last about 45 minutes — leaving it to tour participants to imagine what it would be like to be trapped there for more than 115 days with little or no food, no medication, no room to move, no showers, limited access to toilets, and terrorists brandishing automatic weapons.

Orit leads the tour into another tunnel, the floors of which are strewn with children’s pajamas, shoes, and clothes, baby bottles, diapers, and pacifiers. The IDF discovered such tunnels, proving that Hamas was preparing for this “operation” for a long time.

The IDF also determined that Hamas assembled detailed records of who was living in each house, their ages, nationalities, and more. The next room recreates a scene in which Hamas commanders, with their detailed paperwork, are giving instructions to the terrorists already in the kibbutzim as to who lives where.

The next room recreates Hamas’s crude operating theatre, where the hostages Maya and her brother Itai are highlighted. Maya was shot in the foot while she was taken hostage and has described how she was forced to walk on the wound more than two miles in the tunnels. Her brother Itai was also shot.

None of the Arab doctors wanted to operate on Jews, so a veterinarian was brought in to perform the complicated operation on Maya. In what has been well documented, Maya’s foot was sown up the wrong way, while Itai was operated on without any anesthetic.

Next is the Hamas command center, where operatives prepare to fire more rockets into Israel. There is a Koran and a prayer mat. In another room, a young boy is depicted sitting on the ground in front of a TV screen. This is Eitan Yahalomi, aged 12, who was kidnapped with his mother and sister on two separate motorbikes.

The mother and sister managed to escape when one of the bikes hit a tank. Eitan was on his own, and once he was in Gaza, he was made to watch some of the footage of Hamas’s barbaric atrocities. If Eitan started to cry, they threatened him with pain and death. He spoke fluent Arabic when he was released from Gaza after 50 days.

The stories of the elderly hostages are just as horrific. Emma was released more than two months ago, but remains in the hospital. She was taking medication to manage a health problem before being taken hostage. Since being released, Emma’s organs have failed because of the conditions in which she was held.

Many of the tunnels did not have high ceilings and the elderly had to walk crouched over for miles in the damp, dark, and wet tunnels. The older people were forced to sleep on the floor. They had to wait 12 hours before using the toilet.

Forced into Hiding

Noam Sagi, a son of a 74-year-old hostage from Kibbutz Nir Oz who was released, visited the London tunnels last week and attested that it was an accurate depiction. His mother turned 75 in captivity. She was one of the lucky ones; she was sold by Hamas to Islamic Jihad and then taken above ground and held in a family home.

Ada, another hostage, was also sold to Islamic Jihad and held above ground. Before October 7, she lived on the border and spoke fluent Arabic, as she was an Arabic teacher, and she believed in peace with her neighbors. She refuses to speak to the media today, but a family member says she will eventually write about her captivity.

Orit Eyal-Fibeesh says many of the hostages suffered from chemical burns because they were not allowed to shower even once, the entire time. Doctors discovered they were drugged, probably with Ketamine, which is used to induce a state of sedation and immobility.

The exhibition is a collection of images that cannot be unseen. The fact that the event was essentially forced into hiding — open only to politicians and journalists at a secret location in London — testifies loud and clear about the violent anti-Semitism that has taken hold in the UK.

As Hamas’s supporters dominate the streets of central London in weekly marches, any reminder of Jewish humanitarian suffering in Hamas’s torture tunnels has essentially been driven underground.

#october 7 #antisemitism #london #hamas hostages #bring them home now #pro israel #israel under attack #israel under fire #jumblr #frumblr

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memoriae-lectoris · 3 days

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Victorians had a fascination with natural history. This manifested itself in various ways, not the least of which was in fashionable clothing and décor. A Victorian parlour, for example, might feature a scientific display of pinned butterflies, while insects, such as butterflies, dragonflies, beetles, and grasshoppers, were often depicted in Victorian jewellery. Some insect brooches and hairpins were even set en tremblant (on a spring) so that the jewelled insect would tremble and shake as if it were actually alive. Of these various insects, butterflies were undoubtedly the most well represented in Victorian fashion.

During the 1870s, embroidered butterflies decorated women’s ball gowns and stockings, enamelled butterfly pins adorned ladies’ hats, and diamond butterfly hair ornaments accented fashionable coiffures. Ladies’ magazines of the day also describe black satin shoes with butterfly bows made of jet and brilliantly coloured figured silks designed with butterflies, birds, and flowers. Birds were also well represented in 1870s fashion. Though feathers of every variety had been fashionable throughout the Victorian era, it was not until the 1870s that ladies began to adorn their hats with actual stuffed birds, including doves, cockatoos, bluebirds, robins, and pigeons. The heads, tails, and wings of birds were also used for trimming hats and were often arranged amidst flowers and foliage to appear more natural.

So many birds were used in fashionable dress that, during the nineteenth century, the plumage industry rose up to meet the demand. According to author Stephen Mosley in his book The Environment in World History, London soon became the centre of the international plumage trade, ‘importing and re-exporting bird skins and feathers from the British Empire and elsewhere around the world’. The craze for bird skins and feathers wrought havoc on bird populations and, by the end of the century, bird protection societies had formed in both England and the United States. Unfortunately, the fashion for hats ornamented with stuffed birds and exotic feathers showed no signs of dissipating. It would continue on, reaching its absolute height in the Edwardian Era, before at last fading away in the 1920s.

#victorian era #book : victorian lady guide #feathers #19th century #taxidermy #1870s #fashion #animal #bird #stephen mosley #environmental concern

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canmom · 1 year

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Das Abenteuer der Canmom in Köln (zur Gamescom)

It's time for canmom to have another adventure! What will that wacky lil porygon do next?

[you may be wondering, whatever happened to the plan to transfer l'aventure de canmom à Annecy to the main site for easier reading? that's still planned to happen, hopefully pretty soon! I've just been very busy.]

So: I work for a small VR games company called Holonautic. I've been working for them for around four months now (time flies)! This week some of us were in Cologne, Germany, attending Gamescom. Until this trip I hadn't met any of them in person, and indeed only had a vague idea what they looked like, because the modern world is wacky that way.

What's Gamescom? It's a major industry expo where game devs show off their games to the public and journalists, and otherwise have various industrial sorts of chats. The event fills a massive convention centre (the Kölnmesse), similar to the Excel Centre in London. Thousands and thousands of gamers enter in massive queues, and once inside, they queue up some more to get a chance to play some work in progress games at massive display booths.

Or maybe they go to the indie room, where there are hundreds of tiny desks just wide enough for a dev to set up a computer with a demo... or the retro games area, where various old consoles were set up for people to play... or one of the zones set up for laser tag or something like that. There was a lot going on!

Even Cthulhu came down to check out the games.

My own experience of Gamescom involved very little of that. With my Trade Visitor badge I could skip the queues, but most of my time was spent in a corner of the Business Area demoing our game to influencers, other devs and members of Meta and Unity, and then heading out to restaurants to have dinner with other VR devs in the evening. I had a good time though! It was great to meet the rest of Holonautic in person, and get to see the sights of Köln a tiny bit. And it was a very rewarding feeling to see other people enjoy the game I'd been working so hard on.

So in this post I'm going to talk about my trip, do a bit of amateur sociology, think about the place of videogames in the world and all that - and also talk a little about how the game sausage gets made - at least as far as I can without breaking NDA. Sadly, the game I spent most of the weekend demonstrating remains under wraps, so I'll have to tell you about that another day. I didn't get to see a ton of games but I'll also talk about the handful of indies I did see!

This time I travelled by train (non-transport nerds, feel free to skip this paragraph), taking the Eurostar from St. Pancras to Brussels, and then the ICE 19 to Cologne. Although it was slower and a bit more expensive than flying, once you factor in the time it takes to travel out to the airport, and the security generally being much more straightforward, I think I much prefer the trains. I spent my journeys drawing other passengers (coming soon to @canmom-art) and reading Osamu Tezuka's manga Ayako (which will be its own post). It was all told very straightforward and comfortable.

[minutiae: I thought I was clever by getting an Interrail pass instead of just buying tickets the usual way, but I didn't realise that you also have to pay for seat reservations, so in the end the Interrail probably cost about as much for a 'there and back again' type of trip.]

By far the most expensive part of the trip was the hotel room. We stayed in a hotel pretty close to the centre of Cologne, but it turned out that its proximity to be about 15 minutes walk from public transport, so we didn't end up saving that much travel time. Since I ultimately spent almost no time in my hotel room, I think if I go next year, the call will be to stay at a hostel. But anyway, let's talk games.

How a game gets released on the Quest

So, Holonautic specialises in VR games. I wrote about our previous games in this very nerdy post, but in brief, there are broadly two major types of VR game: PC VR and standalone VR. For PC VR, the game runs on a computer, and the headset just contains a screen and something that can be tracked. For standalone VR, the headset is essentially a powerful Android smartphone with a custom OS; it uses the headset's cameras for tracking and does all the computing on the headset.

With the success of the Oculus/Meta Quest series, standalone VR became really, really popular - much more so than PCVR ever was. It makes sense: for native games you don't need a powerful gaming PC and there are no cables to trip over or expensive base stations, but you can still play PCVR games if you want to. Almost all of Holonautic's games are Quest-native.

For PCVR games, you can use one of various APIs, such as OpenXR, to wire up your game to VR tracking and input. Moreover, Valve built pretty good VR support into Steam, and since Steam is pretty much anything-goes, it's pretty easy to release a PCVR game in a way people can get it - but marketing is all on you, as with any Steam game.

The Quest is a different story. Compared to other consoles, Meta (which absorbed Oculus a few years ago) occupies a bit of a strange position in this industry, simultaneously the hardware manufacturer, the only publisher, and also a developer of first-party titles.

I don't have any good pictures for this part so here's me in a massive cathedral. Metaphors? No no. It's just a holiday photo...

There are two ways that games can get released on the Quest. There's the store, which is heavily curated: here, Meta acts as a publisher, releasing only games they think will sell, but they also put games through months of QA and handle all the marketing for you (i.e. putting it in front of people when they boot up the Quest). To get on the store, you basically need to have an in at Meta - there's a whole process, I'll talk about that in a moment. There's also 'App Lab', which is much less heavily vetted - but also it's a lot harder to get an audience on App Lab. If a game is particularly successful on App Lab, Meta may end up promoting it to the store. But a lot of games just languish there.

Of course, just because you have a liaison at Meta does not mean you have a free pass onto the store. There's a whole series of stages you have to go through: first you write up a detailed pitch, then if approved (based on what else may be in the works, Meta won't approve two overly similar games), you have a few months to make a 'Minimum Viable Product' prototype of your game and show it to Meta. I joined the company about a month before the MVP was due on our game.

Assuming your contact at Meta likes the MVP, you get a few more months to make a 'Vertical Slice', which is essentially a small portion of your game that's more or less complete. (For example, a single level.) Then, you show this to Meta again. If you make a good impression, they'll give you the go-ahead to finish the game and release it on the store.

Here's another random picture of Köln from the famous Hohenzollern Bridge. Are you saying this wall covered in padlocks is symbolic of something? Overactive imagination, I tell you.

So if yo uwere wondering, the last few weeks of intense work were all about making that vertical slice be as good as possible (and it got pretty clutch at the end). Since we were all going to be at Gamescom, we agreed with our guy at Meta that we'd demo the game in person.

The upshot of all this is that selling a VR game is heavily heavily shaped by Meta, and specifically the individual at Meta who makes the call. Holonautic has a longstanding contact with a laid-back American guy I'll call W.; he has in the past championed some of our games like Hand Physics Lab that left other Meta staff unconvinced. (As it turns out, W. was right and Hand Physics Lab was successful.) But he's not shy about saying that a game doesn't make the cut and should go to AppLab instead. Our game would live or die based on W.'s opinion.

But not just W.; Meta itself as an organisation is also looking for certain things, shaped by its internal politics. They have new features they want to tout - so if you can come up with a game that uses mixed reality, hand tracking and shared anchors that's probably going to count in your favour. And they have certain directions they are keen to push: sporty exercise games are in favour at the moment.

What does this mean for the evolution of the medium? Well, of course people will make the games they want to make, and just because Meta likes an idea doesn't mean it will sell. But Meta does have a lot of power to dictate the general direction of VR games - and if the Apple Vision Pro takes off in a few years, Apple will no doubt end up with a similar role.

It's been interesting to see the forces that shape a game up close: our ideological desire to make things that are new and different and meet our personal tastes, balanced against the need to have successful games to keep the company afloat (good old M-C-M'), and the need to satisfy Meta; all of this leaves its fingerprints on the game.

To not keep you in suspense, I think the demo to W. went pretty well; I can't really say more than that. It was also a good chance to tell the Meta guys about the parts of their APIs that are jank and hard to use - and to their credit they were apparently rather desperate to get feedback and I feel hopeful that they'll make it better.

It's hard to talk about Meta, because it's just such a massive organisation. We can talk about massive erosion of privacy, enabling genocide in Myanmar, and so on - but we're dealing with a small sub-corner of this huge beast, which is less a social media company and more of a games publisher and console manufacturer. But I definitely understand why someone wouldn't want to let a Facebook device loaded with cameras into their house! I could go more into privacy and the Quest 2 but it would be way too long a tangent. Ultimately this is probably a 'no ethical consumption'/'we live in a society' type of deal - one day Meta's domination will erode and we'll have to deal with a different superpower.

Whatever happens, we can continue to explore what's possible in this medium! I think of all the ethical bargains that must be made with the tech industry, I have done OK.

What Cologne is like

On Tuesday, I arrived in Cologne Central Station (Köln Hauptbahnhof) and walked over to my hotel, where I met my colleagues. Most of them looked fairly similar to how they'd set up their VR avatars... but none of them had realised I'm super tall. surprise, bitches ;p

We went out to an Indian restaurant where we all ended up ordering biryani. This being Germany, the portions were massive, so I asked for mine to be in a box to finish later, forgetting that my hotel room had no fridge or microwave and I'd have zero time to eat it (rip). Overall I think I hit it off pretty well, and we chatted for a while about games we liked, the mess that happened at Za/um, movies and the like - it was good to get a chance to interact more casually in person instead of only ever talking about work stuff. Everyone was exhausted from travel so we turned in pretty early, though probably not as early as the restaurant would have liked...

The thing that surprised me most about Cologne is how much it didn't feel strange or unfamiliar. If not for all the signs in German and cars driving on the right, you could drop me in an area of Cologne and tell me it's an unfamiliar part of London and I'd easily believe you. The parts of the city that are filled with business parks and glass-fronted chain stores could exist almost anywhere on Earth.

That said, there are some ways the Germans do things differently! One is restaurants. I visited three different restaurants and two of them worked on a 'self-service' model. Essentially, you order your food at the bar, and they give you a little buzzer device. When it buzzes, you go back up to the bar and collect your food. Nobody would wait tables, there would just be one person behind the bar taking orders and such (though someone would still have to clean your table).

Restaurants also close very early in Cologne. I think a couple of times we put staff in an awkward position of wanting to go home but having to sit around until our party was done. That said, at one point I walked through a riverside area with a few dozen steakhouses, and that seemed to stay open a lot later.

Köln has a decent amount of graffiti, a surprisingly large portion of it in English. Under most bridges there's usually a good number of tags. I didn't manage to get any good photos but shout out to the person who wrote something like 'this world is too damn loud', which is a big mood for autistic girl walking away from a convention centre lmao.

Wednesday: in which our heroine finds out what an influencer is

The next morning we all went down to a German bakery (pictured above). According to my colleagues, the thing to get is a Bienenstich, or 'Bee Sting', a kind of cake with crispy honeyed almond flakes on top and cream in the middle. Here's a really bad photo:

It was pretty tasty!

We scooted over to the convention centre on the metro, and made our way in. I started getting used to navigating the Messe. Our company didn't get our own booth this year, but XR game devs are pretty tight-knit, and Niantic, creators of Ingress and Pokémon Go, there to promote their new phone-based AR Monster Hunter game - lent us some space in their booth to do a demo to the popular VR influencers Cas and Chary.

We headed over to Hall 8 and none of us could find the Niantic booth. Eventually we figured out why: the Niantic booth was outdoors. On a very bright summer day.

The Quest 2 has a bit of a finicky relationship to light. If it's too dark, the cameras can't pick up anything and tracking can fail - hand tracking is especially susceptible. But bright sunlight is also a problem. Essentially, the controllers on the Quest 2 contain small infrared LEDs, which are tracked by the headset's cameras. This works very well, in general - but in the sun, the background infrared radiation can completely overwhelm these LEDs and the controllers become essentially unusable. You also have to be very careful never to let the sun shine through the lenses inside the headset when you take it off, or the focused sunlight can destroy the screen.

So, an outdoor demo was a problem. Luckily, Niantic had an air-conditioned tent in their little zone. We all filed into the tent and started testing the headsets. Even inside a tent, it was too bright for the Quest 2 hand tracking... but we managed to figure out the Quest Pro still worked (since it uses cameras in the controllers for tracking), and rushed to test everything would work. Before long, Cas and Chary arrived, and we demoed the game. Look mum, I'm in a tweet:

Before this convention I had very little knowledge of the whole world of VR influencers, and honestly I still don't, but it seems to be a big thing - a good word from an influencer is a massive boost to a game's chances. I'm still not entirely sure what the difference is between an influencer and a journalist; both are in the business of reviewing new tech and games and rely on a reputation of unbiased analysis for credibility, and both are courted by devs hoping to promote their games. I guess an influencer is like a fully independent journalist? In any case, Cas and Chary were really sweet in our extremely brief meeting, and it was amazing to see the first people from outside the company having fun with our game.

We got word that bHaptics, a Korean company which makes haptic suits and gloves for use with VR devices, had some space in their booth and were willing to let us do some demos there. So we set off back down the entire length of the convention centre to go into the secret Business Area.

Wednesday at Gamescom is restricted to trade visitors, meaning it's much less crowded than the later days. On those later days, that restriction only applies to the three halls designated as the Business Area. Like regular Gamescom, these halls are divided into flashy booths trying to sell you stuff, but in this case it's mostly companies trying to sell services and tools to developers: backend services, special 3D pens, anti-cheat... also a bunch of stands selling merch and figurines for some reason (maybe because they want to manufacture tie-in merch for your game), as well a bunch of national organisations promoting the game development scene in xyz country.

The Belgian stand functioned as a meeting spot, and they were also handing out vouchers for free beer. A strategy that seemed to be quite effective, judging by how crowded their booth became that evening.

We tested our headsets in the bHaptics zone, and discovered DOTS Netcode's prediction/rollback is good enough to make the game feel smooth even on public convention centre wifi, which was rather satisfying - so you know, good job Unity! Unfortunately the Shared Anchors continued to be a pain. We briefly ran into the head of DOTS at Unity and arranged a demo, scooted off to meet W. from Meta who bought us drinks, scooted over to Niantic again to meet some members of XR Bootcamp (a training course in XR game dev, whose cofounders Ferhan and Rahel seem to be the glue that holds the whole XR dev scene together), and at last wandered back to the Belgian zone...

...and then I went back to bHaptics to have a go at their gear. I didn't take a photo (rip) so here's a photo by CNet showing the full bHaptics getup, which in combination looks... kind of like you're the member of the SWAT team on washing up detail...

(source: Scott Stein/CNet)

I had never gotten to try any sort of haptic suit before this, so it was quite novel. Essentially the vest contains 40 (or 16) vibration motors; the gloves contain further motors on the tips of each finger, and there's another motorised ring between you and the headset. There are also motorised wrist bands, motorised ankle bands...

The first demo was designed to showcase the features of the suit and wristbands, so you could try out various actions like shooting guns or putting stuff in a backpack with and without haptics. A second demo focused on manipulating objects: no wristbands, just the glove and hand tracking.

Of the various devices, the most convincing was probably shooting with the haptic suit. Vibration motors are well-suited for brief, intense pulses, and firing guns definitely felt more impactful with the suit on - not a perfect simulation of impact, but a strong effect. The backpack demo was especially impressive: it really felt like dropping heavy objects into a backpack. You also got to shoot at your own mirror image and feel the bullet/laser impacts, which felt like a rather roundabout way to give myself a back massage, but I could see it being effective in the right game.

The hand demo convinced me less. The problem is that vibration is a poor simulacrum of pressing against a solid surface, so it just felt distracting to have a vibration pulse when i grabbed an object - and you still had the usual physics jank associated with manipulating objects in VR using hand tracking. The final section of the hand tracking demo was social interaction: you were faced with rotated clone avatar, and you could shake your hand, punch or slap yourself, or give yourself a hug. As someone who lives half a world away from most people I love, I think giving someone a hug in VR would be a fantastic use of the technology, but sadly this hug was... not entirely convincing. It is very hard to simulate a steady touch with vibration motors.

Ultimately I think the best use for this haptic gear may not be simulation fidelity, but more abstract: similar to the haptic suit used in certain public demos of Rez Infinite, pulsing in time to music. Such uses are mentioned on the bHaptics site, and I'd love to have been able to try that kind of demo. (And yeah, I'm sure you could hook it up to the other kind of remote-controlled vibrating devices if you so desired, though you'd probably have to do a bit of work to wire everything up.)

It was really cool to finally get to experience haptics, and I was very grateful to the bHaptics members for taking the time to show me their gear.

After I'd satisfied myself, I caught up with the gang; we went out to dinner with other XR devs at a Turkish restaurant called Bona'me near the river. (The food was tasty and had a decent amount of vege options, once again in huge portions but this time we split them between the table. ...and once again we were the last table to leave by a long way, and I feel bad for the staff who had to sit around waiting for us.)

There, I met a solo dev called Ben Outram, who's spent the last three years working on a game called Squingle, a fascinating psychedelic game about manipulating bubbles in a world of DMT-core abstract visuals. (Honestly, check this game out, it's nuts. Meta are sleeping on it, it should absolutely have a full store release.)

Thursday: chaos reigns

On Thursday it somehow ended up that in the space of an hour, we would be demoing our game to the head of DOTS development at Unity (whose name I somehow never managed to catch), demoing our other game Cybrix to Cas and Chary, and then doing the big important demo for meta. Then it turned out that our metro line was blocked by an accident up ahead. We hurried out to get an Uber, and our driver gave us a rather... exciting ride; he rolled down the window to argue with another driver and dropped us off in the middle of the road while we waited in traffic. Rather harried, we arrived back at the bHaptics corner and set up for the demos in an unused area of floor nearby.

I'm not sure if I can say too much about how our demos went, but unfortunately we ran into some versioning issues and were not able to show Cybrix to Cas and Chary before they had to rush off (we weren't the only one to face transport issues that morning). Lesson learned: test everything, not just the part you're worried about. It's not the end of the world, though, and we all headed over to W.'s hotel, into a swanky suite with a nicely laid table for the most important demo of the week. We had the room for maybe 20 minutes, then we were out the door again to the lobby of another hotel to talk it over.

After that... suddenly the afternoon was free, ish. We went back into Gamescom and ate some very expensive ramen. Then, word came that some more influencers wanted to try out our games, so it was back to bHaptics and well, the story gets a little repetitive at this point :p I can't say much more than that without talking about our game, so I will just have to say that the demos went well.

This was my view for most of Gamescom.

At the end of the day, I had a couple of free hours to scoot over to the indie games area and try out some games before everyone went home. At this point my social batteries had run very dry indeed so I was glad to get some time to just play games.

The indie zone was divided into lots and lots of small booths, typically just wide enough for one computer. And even late in the evening, it was very, very busy...

This is just one small corner of the indie area.

Not really knowing almost any of these games, my 1337 MLG Pro Gamescom strat was to wander around until I spotted an empty chair and then play whatever game was going and chat with the dev if they were around. This worked out pretty well! I'll write up the games I played in a moment, but first I'm overdue to wax philosophical.

What was really striking about walking around the indie area is just how many games there are. Wandering around you can pretty quickly spot patterns and influences just by glimpsing at screens (here's a combat tutorial, there's a crafting/survival game, and yonder a narrative game that's borrowed the entire interface of Disco Elysium).

I've seen, up close and personal now, just how much fiddly effort and dedication it takes to make a game. There's something kind of strange and alienating to me about encountering all this creative output in a massive aggregate, where you can only give it maybe half an hour in a noisy room, surrounded by a dozen more or less similar games, in a way that kind of demands you rapidly assign it into a broad, combinatoric category: x art style, y core mechanic, z emotional register. Presenting this game this way really seems to file them all down to Content, which can be boxed and tagged and matched to a consumer with the appropriate set of subculture flags.

One thing that is distinctive about games as a medium to me is the very strong separation between 'mechanics' and 'presentation'. To produce a game you don't just need a system to manipulate, but also associate it with a narrative to make it comprehensible and lend it some sort of affective impact.

So you could theoretically make a game with the exact same mechanics as, say, Half-Life 2 - the same movement, the same enemy hitboxes, the same collision geometry and shooting mechanics and progression - but a completely different presentation style and telling a completely different story. Indeed, a typical early stage of game development has placeholder 'programmer art' and 'greybox' levels.

Equally, you could lift the iconography of a game and drape it over a completely different mechanical substrate - and indeed, it isn't at all uncommon for major franchises to launch spinoffs in different genres.

So games as a medium consist of all these different pieces which you can attach in various ways to define a game which you can name. And once this is done, that game becomes in a sense 'concrete': we act as if Half-Life 2 is an object with a distinct existence. It's a powerful social construct. Then, a successful game is then one which manages to unify all these disparate elements into some sort of whole that feels coherent. Game development sees all the possible elements of a game gradually collapse into whatever gets released. It's highly stochastic: an arbitrary decision by a tired dev, or even a glitch, might later become fixed as one of the core icons of the great 'Franchise'.

When there were less games around, and it was a lot harder for people to get their hands on dev tools, it made sense to think of games as solid, discrete things. Whatever you got on the cartridge or disc was pretty much immutable. Now, though, most major games operate as a 'service' that is constantly modified, and it is not uncommon either for players to mod a game, on a continuum from small changes like injecting shaders or changing music, to total conversion mods that are a 'whole new game'.

And indie games, then... you've got a subculture which heavily emphasise sharing techniques, and it's just as beholden to genre as AAA games. The existence of all these games side by side, even though each one has its own name and identity, seems to further break up "games" into combinations of pieces. When I encounter a new third-person action game, it's as a variation on a kind of broader, abstracted super-game. My first task is to discover the particular quirks of this manifestation of the third person action game. The days when we had a shared culture of 'games everyone has played' are basically already gone, but we still have a certain degree of shared context, because each game is a probe into that constantly evolving game-space, which someone has gone to the trouble to fish out and decorate...

I suppose this is all coming back around to the otaku database thing, isn't it? Or just semiotics in general...

Anyway, here's what I found on Thursday:

I played an FPS called Serum, in which the core conceit is that you inject big syringes into your arm to give yourself powerups. Otherwise, it seems to be a game about gathering and crafting. Sadly the demo computer didn't have headphones, so I was missing sound, and seemed to be a bit underpowered for the game. Nevertheless, I walked around a bit, manufactured a healing serum, and shot some wolf and rabbit monsters with a bow and arrow.

I feel like I was rather ruder than I intended to be, because in talking to the dev afterwards, the first thing I mentioned was the performance issues and he had to apologise like, yeah, we're running it on a laptop (it sounded like he said with a 3070? but I must have misheard him, unless he has very high standards for underpowered), it does run better on a proper computer. The environment design in this game was definitely really strong. Not quite sure how the serum mechanic would work in practice - it sounds quite like Bioshock's plasmids, but the demo didn't really give the opportunity to try out the different options.

I played Dead Pets Unleashed, an adventure game about a demon girl in a struggling punk band. One of the devs was hanging out with this one and generally had a great vibe, joking about how almost nobody picked a certain option and suggesting the route that would get the most out of the demo.

The game uses a sidescrolling perspective with hand-drawn sprites. The art style is very consciously flat, its population of monster people allowing an impressive variety of colours. It broadly alternates between conversations with choices that adjust stats (e.g. +punk, -social) and a variety of minigames - there was a music minigame of course (the conceit being chasing away intrusive thoughts), but I also washed a dildo, constructed a hot dog, and waited tables. Generally it oozed style, absolutely nailing the punk vibe, and had a bunch of cute features like changing your character's outfit. You can play the same demo on Steam. I think this is one I might well get when the full release comes.

And then I played... a game I can't even find now! I really should have made a note or taken a picture or something. It was a kind of Amanita-like point and click game in which you play a tin can person, manipulating objects as you try to rescue your can dog, descending into a city made of cardboard boxes. The puzzles were occasionally a bit obtuse, but the cute style really carried it. The devs weren't on hand for this one, but they did have a wall where you could leave postit notes with your comments on the game, including one with a fairly essential hint for the first puzzle. It was called something like 'can world' or 'box world', but at this point, I can't find it anywhere. It's a shame because I thought it was neat.

That was all I had time for on Thursday: I zoomed off to another restaurant by the river to eat some more falafels. Someone let off some fireworks for some reason.

We started to make our way back, across the famous Hohenzollern Bridge, which is one of those bridges with a tradition that lovers will attach a padlock to the fence to symbolise how long their relationship will last.

At this point the padlocks have started to resemble kudzu, hanging down in strands of linked padlocks, or even growing up onto the superstructure of the bridge on chains. Questionable symbolism or not, it all makes for a fantastic textural effect, especially since it maintains the sheer density of padlocks for the entire length of the bridge.

While we were crossing, a boat passed under the bridge carrying some kind of a party. From a distance, all you could really see was a mass of glowsticks, and all you could hear was the ghost of the beat. It was a cool sight.

At this point I was pretty much completely exhausted so while there was some kind of industry party I definitely could not handle the crowds and walked home past the cathedral for an early night, eager to head in early to Gamescom tomorrow with a good night's sleep...

Friday: just like in my Bloodbornes, amirite gamers?

Predictably I overslept. Since I'd only get a few hours at Gamescom, I decided to visit the famous cathedral. I took that photo that I posted earlier, where somehow my little phone camera absolutely nailed the lighting, even if the cathedral is severely out of focus...

I headed inside the building too.

Cologne Cathedral (Kölner Dom) is a bit of an oddball, historically. While it wasn't uncommon for cathedral-building projects to last a century, after working on this thing from 1248–1560 they downed tools, leaving the city with a half-finished cathedral for about 300 years.

They had the front and back of a cathedral, with a big crane on the front part.

In the 1800s, the middle ages were in and the state decided it would be a good idea to have a big cathedral - both to make their new Catholic subjects happy and a symbol of THE NATION. After raising a stonking amount of money with one of the world's first NGOs, they built the rest of this thing, which briefly became the tallest building in the world. Hooray, said Emperor Wilhelm I. I love being a big strong nation with a big cathedral dick.

The cathedral survived the first world war, but got hit by a lot of bombs in the second - though the towers remained standing. After the war, they put it back up again. Now, it's a tourist attraction. Transsexual atheists can walk in and turn their phone to funny angles to try and capture the ceiling...

You can call this a Deutsch angle, because... ok whatever guys they can't all be winners.

They've got some old school Christian-style guro in here.

The interior is pretty cool: huge vaulted ceiling, massive stained glass. The stained glass unfortunately photographs really poorly on a phone, the colours washed out pretty much no matter what. They did have this funky ladder contraption, which I assume is probably used for maintaining/washing the windows...

After a little while in there I decided this was pretty neat but I'd go to Gamescom, to say goodbye to everyone and maybe get a glance at some of the mainstream game zones. As it turned out we had another demo lined up, so we went back to The Corner Near BHaptics and did the routine. This time the audience was mostly other VR devs so I got to have some nice technical discussion.

At last, I had about an hour before my train. I thought about exploring the indie game zone some more, but decided I should really at least take a glance through the other halls. What I discovered was... queues! Many many queues. And various elaborate dioramas.

Sometimes they had actors to go with them. I decided to include the people taking the photo because... I don't even know what I was going for with this one to be honest, it seems kind of banal.

Here's a queue of people waiting to play Rogue Trader, which boldly tells you it's the first(!) CRPG in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, hopefully not also the last. 'Warhammer CRPG' is a concept that 16-year-old Bryn would have gone completely insane about. 31-year-old Bryn was still a bit curious, but not enough to wait for a sitting down queue with less than an hour left at the con.

I didn't take a lot of photos of the Extremely Gamer Shit, but for a taster, this lady was DJing a set on something called the 'Leet Desk', which appears to be a desk with built in RGB lighting, billed as 'the desk for gamers', because we can no longer contain the rainbow puke. When I walked past, she was playing an EDM remix of a tune that I vaguely recognised from a movie or a game but couldn't place specifically, which felt about right. Maybe it was Skyrim?

A lot of people walked around with the Hoyoverse bag, Hoyoverse being the collective term for the games of Chinese developer miHoYo such as Genshin Impact and Honkai Impact. Their slogan was 'tech otakus save the world', which thanks to their cunning move of handing out large bags, was soon paraded all over the convention. I feel like the jury is still out on the impact (ha ha) of tech otakus on the world...

In the end, the last hour was spent briefly walking around to see the halls and then I left to say my goodbyes and hop back on the train. The journey back was totally straightforward. I finished reading my manga and drew some more train passengers, who were generally pretty happy to be drawn.

Cosplay

It's a con, there's gotta be cosplayers right? Sure enough, the crowd was peppered with stormtroopers, kitsune, army men, luffies and various spooky skull guys... I didn't get many photos but here's a couple.

Obligatory stormtroopers. Luckily, the inside of the con was airconditioned, those suits look toasty.

These three kindly stopped to pose for me. I don't know what game they're doing, Dead by Daylight maybe? DbD girls, tell me ^^'

This robot-girl cosplayer's costume is neat: when you look close you see it's made of old PC parts. Or at least the casings of them. I spotted a graphics card and an old VR headset. She also has built-in stilts so she towered over everyone, big respect. She was hanging out in the hall on Wednesday, so she might have been there in an official capacity, but I didn't get a chance to talk to her.

Observations of demographics and stuff

It's been a good long while since I've been to any sort of nerd convention. Mostly I've been to scifi/media fandom cons like Nine Worlds and Worldcon, or general nerd-shit cons like MCM Expo, and in the old old days, Warhammer cons like Game Day. But this event being specifically a gaming expo was pretty new to me.

Predictably the demographics skewed male (but not overwhelmingly) and white/East Asian (almost without exception). The various national organisations present were primarily European (which tracks for an event in Germany) but there were large stands e.g. promoting Korean game dev or the Guangzhao region of China. In the indie zone, there were a good handful of Japanese devs, and I spotted one game that was fully in JP. Here and there, you'd spot banners promoted other gaming expos - a lot in Europe, but also there is apparently a Gamescom Asia in Singapore, and a Tokyo Indie Games Summit which sounds pretty fun. By contrast, while I don't have any real stats to substantiate, I would say I saw very few organisations were promoting game devs from South America, Africa or Oceania.

Beyond that... this is very definitely a place for nerds, but there's a lot of different varieties of nerd you can be now. So sure, T-shirts with slogans and cargo shorts for many, but equally you could dress super goth, you could show off all your tattoos, you could go in your colourful coordinated kitsune cosplay or just wear some bright hair die. I'm confident I saw a few other girls from the isle of 🏳️‍⚧️, but 'hello I clocked you let's be friends' is not the best introduction even from another trans girl lmao - in general I didn't really talk to people besides the group I had arrived with. I think if I'd gone alone, it would not be the sort of con where you make a lot of friends, but who knows?

All in all, a solid adventure. I'll probably go again next year, if I can find somewhere cheaper to stay. I never did get to see the chocolate museum.

ok, story over - thanks for reading, nerd ;p

#gamescom #computer games #adventures of canmom

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