#what other insane connections can i make. what other compilations can i waste time on.

[luxnebula]

Before I get to Fearless in Love, I listened to Voyage in Time (2022), which is a live album that compiles songs from along their career up until Colours in the Sun. I don't have much to say about it, other than it's a good, fun album. The speeches between the songs (or even in the middle of them!) are hilarious. It's so fun to hear the band banter. They don't take themselves too seriously. This especially shows in the album's version of White Shadow, which opens with a funny speech from Daniel and towards the end, Alex (or Danny? I can't tell) just gives up on signing lyrics and just growls wordlessly, to which Daniel (or Alex??) goes "What? Speak clearly!". Comedy gold.

The mid speeches do give some interesting insight to the band's influences, like these specific versions of Iron Dream and The Meaning of I show. I think it's also fun how they keep yelling out random places like "Let's go, Brazil! Let's go Reykjavik!".

Anyway, Fearless in Love from 2023.

The Best Intentions and Prince of Fire, the first two tracks, don't waste time. They open with trance-like synths, then quickly slap you with the guitars, as if to remind you that, yes, Voyager is indeed a heavy metal band. Despite having similar openings, the two songs have entirely different moods. The Best Intentions is a fast-paced "opening mood" song, while Prince of Fire is... almost melancholic. Prince of Fire, Ultraviolet and Listen are actually yet another example of how Modern Voyager(TM) handles melancholy. The songs have some melancholy to them, but they also have a fast tempo and lots of guitars. Ultraviolet also has guest vocals from Sean Harmanis from Make Them Suffer, which adds a rough edge to the melancholy. Modern Voyager's(TM) take on melancholy is not being boring about it.

After Ultraviolet is Dreamer, which was another song that Voyager tried to get into Eurovision with. At first, Dreamer actually kind of flew under the radar for me and I didn't think much about it, but it very quickly grew on me when I started paying attention to it. I really like the "getting shit done" tempo of it. As an Voyager song, it's very interesting: it doesn't have as much synths as Brightstar or Promise, they only show up as ear candy in emphasis points in the song. It's almost the complete opposite of Embrace the Limitless, which felt like Voyager tried to "sand off" some of their heavy metal elements for Eurovision. However, as an Eurovision song, it starts very slowly, which can be a weakness in the competition, in my opinion.

Submarine is one of my favourite tracks from this album. It's such a cheerful bop about depression naps and its music video is a fun, funny (which are two different concepts to me) and a charming banger too:

The costumes are silly, but it only adds to the charm. You can tell that Daniel was having so much fun hamming it up as King Neptuned. Seeing A.C. Bass struggle to find connection and finally find his place in the band is such a good time. It's fun (you have a great time watching) and funny (humorous). I physically can't not be cheered up when I hear Submarine or when I watch the music video. It's just impossible.

Then there's the crown jewel, the song that they did make it to Eurovision and placed ninth with. The song that introduced me to Voyager: Promise. It still blows me away how brilliantly produced the song is. It has almost everything I want from a Eurovision song: sentimental lyrics, a banger chorus to sing along to, it's fast-paced, but has that slow, sentimental bit towards the end, it takes you by surprise with a guitar solo AND a synth solo, all crescendoing to the finale: alright!! How did they manage to fit all of that in three minutes?! The only thing that it didn't have was a weird, off-the-wall insane stage show, but the band's sheer bouncing-all-over-the-stage energy more than made up for it. You can tell that they loved being there.

When I first heard that Voyager tried to get into Eurovision a bunch of times before, I was dismayed. I was like "You're telling me that I could have heard about this banger of a band years ago?! I could have been listening to them all this time??" But now that I've listened to all of the songs that they tried to get in Eurovision with and the song that did earn them the honour, I think... This is how it was meant to happen. I don't believe in any kind of higher power, but this is how Voyager was meant to get into Eurovision and this is how I was meant to learn about them. Promise is such a perfect intro to Voyager, it's like a portfolio in musical form. It has all of the elements that Voyager does: synths, Daniel's clear vocals, Alex's growled vocals, Simone's banger guitar solos. It grabs you by the throat and says "We are Voyager, and this is what we sound like" and it delivers. A lot of artists, when they go to Eurovision, make an overly polished and mainstream palatable version of themselves which sometimes sounds nothing like their regular sound, but Promise is one-to-one exactly like Voyager sounds like even out of Eurovision. It's beautiful.

I still sometimes hope I could have been there for the release of Colours in the Sun though lol

The last song of the album, Gren (Fearless in Love) is one of the best album-ending songs since Yahweh from U2's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. It starts slowly, but majestically, and it builds up and up, until it shifts moods and you feel like you're at the gate of Mordor with Aragorn while he's delivering the "it is not this day" speech. It's sweeping, it's majestic, it guides you gently, but firmly to a grand finale of the album. It's the perfect album-ender.

Fearless in Love is my second favourite Voyager album, but only narrowly. Colours in the Sun was the first Voyager album I heard, so it of course has a special place in my heart, but Fearless in Love was the album that eagerly waited for all of spring and summer 2023. I literally counted down days until its release and I was not disappointed when it came out. It blew me away and it still slaps Promise was my song of the year in 2023 and Submarine was my summer song. There were a few days in 2023 when I was having health problems and I was so down that I told myself: "fuck it, listen to Promise until you feel better" and I listened to it on repeat for two hours straight. And I still haven't gotten sick of it, I still let it play whenever it comes on. I love this band a lot, and I feel like all of my gushing is an understatement lol. I hope I have relayed at least a little of how much I love their music.

Wow, I can't believe I'm already done with these album reviews. I had so much fun doing these. Maybe I could do this with my other favourite bands and artists too, like Pendulum or Sara. Or Devin Townsend and Type O Negative, since they're Voyager's inspirations. The possibilities are endless!

[autodialog]

Depression

Hey there.

It’s been a couple of days. I thought you were going to check in more regularly.

I intended to, man, I really did. Life got a little muddled and I don’t have a clear head right now.

Are you sleeping?

We rotated our mattress and the past couple of nights after that I’ve been sleeping soundly and the mornings have been tough. My heel hurts and it makes walking a little difficult.

You should see your doctor about that.

I live in the US and pay an exorbitant amount for health insurance. You think that’s enough?

Fair point.

Plus every time I go I feel like I’m wasting their time.

That’s what killed Jim Henson you know.

Jim Henson was loved by an entire generation. I’m just me.

Boy, you sound depressed.

My wife keeps telling me that, but I don’t feel depressed, just unfocused and uninspired.

Have you checked the definition for depression lately?

No.

It might do you some good. You’re afraid of being depressed. You’re afraid of the label, because it means something is wrong with you, according to your way of looking at the world. You have a philosophy of action, so why aren’t you acting?

Because ... well, nothing seems important.

Yup. Depression. You’ve got it and you need to admit to it. It’s nothing to fear. It’s information, like any other emotion. It’s just a data point you need to consider and then act. You don’t want to do anything, so you have to force yourself to do something. Anything. You have a long to-do list.

And a longer project list. I know. Knowing how much I have to get done doesn’t help.

Your house is a mess and your brother is visiting in about six weeks.

Crap. I’m embarrassed about this place. Why am I embarrassed?

Because it’s disorganized. Clutter is good for you, we know that. You can’t work on a blank desk. Right now I can see the lamp, storytelling cards, journals, cds, books, and even an empty seltzer can.

I’m a slob.

You are slovenly, but that’s because you’ve let entropy take the reins. There’s nothing wrong with any of it. Even that crappy pocket watch you bought that doesn’t really work is fine. As long as it has a home.

When did you become Marie Kondo? Haven’t you heard she’s let that shit go.

No, she’s put it in its place. She has more important things. You can’t do some things because it takes too much energy to get them set up. You pause projects, you don’t kit them properly, so they are put away or in use or more likely sitting out under the tools of some other project.

When did you get to be so mean?

You think I’m being mean? We’ve worked with sales people. We know how to fake performative anger. Remember that time in church camp where you had to play the racist? You made that girl cry and didn’t feel a thing.

Because I was acting, I didn’t believe a word of it.

So you need to act like an organized, action-oriented person. You haven’t written anything on your latest story, and you haven’t compiled the critiques for the last story you sent across the table, and you haven’t even attempted anything for next week’s reading.

I know, I know.

You’re whining. Why?

Because I want to be productive. Not just at my job, which is rather insane right now, but in life. I want to do more than exist. I want to live.

And you don’t know how to do that. You don’t know how to have fun.

I have fun.

I mean fun with other people, outside. You have plenty of fun solving problems, but you aren’t even doing that?

Everything seems so damn hard right now.

But you know it isn’t. If it was really hard you wouldn’t have solved problems before. Look at the things on your plate. Nothing is impossible for you. It’s just putting pieces together.

I thought I was creative.

That’s all creativity is. It’s making connections and then methodically bridging the gaps. You’ve done it all your life and so you should have no problem sorting it out. You can’t expect to get it all done in a day.

I ... yeah, I’m impatient. I don’t want things to take time.

Then you’re being stupid. You’re stuck in a trap that says you can move between twelve different rabbit holes at the same time, because nobody else cares about what else you do with your time. Your time is theirs to waste.

No you’re being petulant. Did you forget the roles we play here? You’re supposed to be the wise one.

Maybe I am. Maybe I’m showing you how wrong you are thinking right now. So here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to read the prompts for Tuesday’s reading and you’re going to set a timer and you’re going to freewrite like it was NaNoWrimo again and you aren’t going to edit a single word, got that?

... yeah.

And then you’ll at least have something to edit, because you can’t edit a blank page. Good talk. Come back tomorrow.

[diesoonandsuffer]

companion, do you love the man?

a parallel between this scene in ‘metamorphosis’ and kirk in ‘the search for spock’

[thoughtfullyyoungduck]

I’ll never let you down

Summary: Can you do one where Richie has a daughter and she comes to derry after her dad leaves because she doesn’t want to stay with her mom and someone tells her where he went so she goes and when she gets there Richie is terrified about something happening to her so he makes her stay at the hotel but pennywise gets to her and takes her and Richie won’t stop till he gets her back

A/N: I’m so sorry this took so long! I hope it’s worth it! 

‘Mom, I’m back at the hotel now okay? Yes I know I shouldn’t have gone without letting you know, I’m sorry.’

Mia drops backwards on the bed, bouncing as her body makes contact with the matrass. Her mother’s voice droned on in the background, lecturing her on what she called running away. In actuality, all you did was follow your father to his home town, a miserable, petit town filled to the brim with people even more miserable than the place they lived in.  

It’s a bit crazy to think that your father, with all his charm and energy, was born in a place that sucked the life out of every good thing it had going on. In the day Mia explored, the only interesting thing she stumbled upon was a carnival, located on the outskirts of town. Any other buildings were overgrown with local vegetation and compilations of dust, including Mike’s library, even though he did his best to maintain it.  

‘No, he’s back with his friends and told me to stay put in the hotel, so I am. I’ll call you tomorrow okay?’ With one last goodbye, she ditched her phone off to the side, careful that it didn’t bounce off the bed. Her mom is not happy. She can’t stand Richie as it is, resents how well the relationship between father and daughter is compared to her relationship with Mia, but the running off ass more fuel to the fire.

This sucked. Her father dumped her by the hotel to reconnect with friend he hadn’t talked to in years, yet he practically locked her up and tied her to the chair to ensure she wouldn’t sneak off. An inclination about her possibly going to the fair set him off, his hand digging into her shoulder and shaking her, yelling in a way he’s never expressed himself towards her before. He apologized for it, but the behavior turnabouts floored Mia, shocked her dad has it in himself to turn into someone so scary.

She’s under strict regulations, is forbidden to set one foot of the threshold of the hotel, and even exiting her room is only allowed if she’s ordering food or a soda in the lobby. He didn’t even give her an explanation, waving of her concerns with an; ‘I’m fine as long as you stick to the rules.’

Mia thought rules weren’t apart of Richie’s vocabulary, since he trusted her with his life and in turn gave her the freedom to be herself and make mistakes, but evidently this town uncovered a sensitive vein in her dad, and caused him to divert from his usual path.

The problem is that Mia gets bored so easily, whether she’s home or somewhere else, if she doesn’t have a few things she can alternate between, she’ll get stultify. Here, in a hotel room with only an out of function television and a phone that was near dying, Mia felt compelled to break Richie’s rules and head out, disobeying his wishes. But she couldn’t, not after seeing firsthand how horror-stricken her father turned after spotting her for the first time.

To speed up the time, Mia hops in the shower, the scorching streams of water warming her skin and burning its way through the time. It’s surprising the warm water doesn’t cut off after a few minutes, something Mia had frankly expected in this town where time froze over in the 80s, so she drags the shower out for a longs as she can, stopping in the nick of time to avoid her skin blistering.  

She uses the body wash and shampoo she packed when leaving her mother’s house, unsure how long she was going to stay away for. As she’s dousing her hair in the sweet scented soap, she closes her eyes to prevent any suds to irritate her eyes, searching blindly for the shower tap. The water hasn’t changed temperature, so Mia leaves it as it is and proceeds to remove all the remnants soap.

A coppery smell fills her nostrils, so thick and omnipresent she can nearly taste it in the back of her throat. Confused, Mia opens her eyes to see what’s happening and bellows, tearing the shower curtain as she slips onto the tiled floor. Her whole body sops in blood, not the water Mia thought she was showering with, red liquid leaking from her hair and adding to the mess on the floor.

She begins to rub away the red spots, scrubbing so hard her skin rashes, yet the blood doesn’t budge and persists on sticking to her skin. With a garbled gulp she tries turning on the faucet of the lavabo, but that water too tints a dark red.

She’s not yet crying, though it won’t be long before she lets loose, a pending headache pounding in her skull, while she’s scanning the bathroom for a towel to smear the gore away. Mia finds one in the closet, dries her face first, all the while she’s hyperventilating, and scrapping every last inch. Bending down, she tracks the fabric down her legs, and finds that all the blood has gone missing.

Astounded, she stares at herself in the bathroom mirror, finding that there wasn’t any blood at all, just plain, regular water. The tub is spotless, and the water streaming down the showerhead is completely see through, like the blood she saw wasn’t real. The only evidence that something went down is the blotchy spots she developed from scouring.

The fear from before lingers around as she gets dressed, her fingers trembling violently. She suddenly can’t stand to be in the room anymore, aching to get out and go anywhere else but here, but the promise she made with her dad forbids her from that. If she explains the situation, maybe he would permit her to go out and tell her where he is so they can regroup. Then she’ll have a laugh about it with him, and it will just seem like a bad dream that got a little too real for her liking.  

She tracks her phone on top of the plaid where she left it, and unlocks it. She’s shaking so hard she misses the call icon multiple times. When she finally does manage to connect the call, Richie doesn’t answer, too caught up in what he came to do and deemed to inappropriate for Mia to know. Normally, Mia would let it go and try back at a later time, but she’s skittish after the bathroom incident and the room creeps her out. She waits for three rings, then ends the call and chimes back again. Again, no answer is giving, so Mia deems it necessary to leave a voicemail. Anything to get her to leave and be near someone.

‘Dad? When are you coming back? I know you warned me but I think you might be right. This place is really eerie and I don’t like being alone. You made me promise not to go anywhere but I really think I being in a place with more people will make me feel better, can I please explore the town or something? Do you have a dinner here? I-‘

A knock on the door captures her attention, knocking on the beat of a nursery rhyme her and her father always do before entering a room. ‘Oh, well I guess you’re here already’, she terminates the call without so much as a goodbye, allowing entrance to her supposed father. Except, the door entry is empty, and a glance towards the hallway informs Mia that he’s not hiding there to spook her either. Puzzled, and a little put off, she closes the door, and turns on her heels, to come face to face with the one thing her dad wanted to protect her from.

Mia’s screams carry over to the other rooms, but in true Derry fashion, no one bothers to go to go and take a look at the teenage girl begging for help.

A few minutes later, a pent up Richie Tozier checks his phone, and listens to his daughters voice mail.

  -----

Richie speeds along the corridor followed but a breath away by Bill, Mike and Eddie. He’s never run in his life, period, not even in high school during P.E, ditching every time they had to do track, but he’s barreling so fast Bill is heaving breaths.

He loses time trying to grab his keys from his pocket, agitation him to the point he simply kicks down the door instead of gently opening it. The words painted in blood are a blast from the past, ‘You’ll die if you try’, being written on Bev’s wall after Pennywise abducted her as a child. A red balloon taps to the ceiling, a signature as if it wasn’t obvious it’s Pennywise.

‘Richie’, Mike pants, sounding insanely guilty to Richie’s ears and turning his name into an apology,  but that’s not what he wants right now. He recites the sentence over and over again, his breathing sloppier with the second and his thought spiraling into an angry frenzy.

‘I am so sorry. Richie I’m so sorry’, Mike says, finding himself extremely culpable. A finger is jabbed in his chest, Richie thrusting his finger so grating Mike is forced to take a step back. Mike lets him, baring his head to side so Richie has easy access for a punch.  

‘This is your fault’, he spits, hands vibrating to strike, preferably a wall, but in the haze of rage Richie is experiencing, it might as well be Mike.

‘Rich, stop’, Eddie lulls, daring to inch closer and grapple at Richie’s fist. ‘Mind your business Eddie’, he barks, teeth grinding together, but he rest his fist in Eddie’s hands.

‘Is it your daughter that’s missing? No, it’s not, you don’t have a child at all and you wanna lecture me on how I should respond?’

He’s entirely too brash, he’s never been anything but potent towards Eddie, but he has a point. Eddie can’t comprehend how difficult this is and desolating Richie must be feeling, but what he knows is that if they continue to fight one another, they’re wasting time and energy they could be spending on saving Mia. He swallows down his vulgar response and moves in between Richie and Mike.

‘This isn’t helping anyone. Calm down so we can look for her.’

Richie and Eddie set off in a staring match, that Eddie wins, and Richie shrinks down, eyes watering.

‘I’m not leaving ‘till I find her. I’m not leaving. I can’t loose her Eds’, he whimpers pleadingly, dropping his head to Eddie’s shoulder.

‘You won’t. I promise. We’re not leaving either. Losers stick together,’ he whispers assumingly. Then, addressing the others in a louder, convicted tone; ‘None of us are leaving.’

Mutters from agreement rise from the group, and Mike face clears up, full attention on spreading his knowledge on how to defeat IT to the others.

Richie studies Eddie’s expression, trying to filter out any lies. It was only moments ago that Eddie was planning on separating from the group with Richie and evacuating town faster than lighting. But now Mia has gone missing, a child that someone he cares for holds dear, there’s not a sliver of doubt about staying.

Richie nods relieved, a shaky breath escaping. ‘Thank you.’

‘Guys, Pennywise is not going to let her go without a fight, there is a chance we might die,’ Mike warns, compelled to reveal part of the truth at least.

Richie merely waves off the warning. ‘As long as I get my daughter back, I don’t give a fuck.’

------------------

Mia is tired, terrified and hungry, but surprisingly still alive. She had though for sure that her time on earth was over when the clown wrapped one of it’s hands around her neck and squeezed the life out of her, only to woke marooned in an underground part of the sewers by herself.

The clown never returned, thankfully, and in the evening she began wondering around the drainpipe, discovering that she is in fact lost. Going in a left or a right tunnel makes no difference, they all mount to the same, original space she woke up in. She can tell because of her phone she left, useless this far underground with no reception.

Her calm demeaner is slowly ebbing away, the starvation a black empty pit in her stomach, swirling up anxieties. What if she starves to dead, will her corpse ever be found? Will her dad torture himself with the idea that she was in his care when she disappeared? Is he even out there searching for her now? Or is he convinced she left the room and upset with her for doing so?

It’s getting increasingly harder to stay levelheaded, and sometimes she almost wishes that the clown would reappear so she had a shot of pleading with him to let her go. She dismisses the notion as soon as it’s formed, the thing, she refrained from calling it a person, had shown no mercy while kidnapping her, so surely it wouldn’t now.

The rhythmic dropping of a single stream of sewer water drives Mia up the wall, so insanely that she almost cups her hand under the stream to stop it from contacting the floor, but she holds back. She’d rather not get dirty on top of everything else she needs to worry about.

‘Are you sure you know where we’re going Eds? He could have hidden her anywhere.’

‘I’m sure dickwad, I know what I’m doing.’

The head of one of Richie’s friends, Eddie she’s pretty sure his name was, poked out of one of the ways, spotting her and grinning a lopsided grin.

‘See’, he said preening, ‘I told you so.’

Richie rushed from behind him, stepping in the space so Mia could see him, tears filling up in his eyes at the imagine of his daughter sitting on a pile of rubbish, so timidly and apprehensive.

Mia regarded her dad, dark smudges under his eyes, ichor oozing a wound on his jawbone, and promptly ran to him sobbing.

‘Dad’, she cried out, colliding with him none too gently, clinging to her father like a man in the desert to water.

‘Mia’, Richie sobbed, rocking the two of them back and forth to pacify his hysteric daughter. His entire form embosomed Mia, a security blanket from all the evil done to her by his childhood monster.

‘The bl-blood’, Mia stuttered, trying to make her dad understand what she was referring too. ‘The water.. it was blood.’  

‘Shh,’ he shushed her, continuing to sway them back and forth. ‘I know, It’s okay. IT can’t hurt you anymore.’ Richie stared ahead, protectiveness rearing its head. ‘Nothing will ever hurt you again.’

The purple bruises on Mia’s neck told him all he needed to know, and if he hadn’t killed it already, he wouldn’t have a problem with it now.

‘You came for me?’ 

‘Of course I did, your my daughter and I love you more than anything in this world. I won’t be able to survive if you go missing again.’ 

‘Someone needs to keep their pops in order’, he joked, caressing Mia’s hair. 

‘Guys’, Eddie interrupted, ‘We need to go now. This place is collapsing.’

With a final clutch, Richie pulled away from his daughter, catching her tears before they could roll down her cheeks. ‘Let’s go home.’

[thewritingcaptain]

A Simple Plan: Chapter 14

To think he'd hoped that Tony would rescue him. It had been foolish, he knew. He should have seen the Avengers kindness for what it was, should have realized that whether he was Spider-Man or not, they really had no connection to him and no reason to care about him. Why would they waste their valuable resources coming to rescue him?

Part 2

In between the extended periods of darkness, there was only pain.

It was odd, honestly. He had a hard time understanding what was going on, between the pain and the dehydration and the fact that everything was just generally hazy. How long had he been here? He had no idea, now. He had no basis of where to even start counting hours, what with him having been knocked out immediately upon Tony leaving, and the extended amounts of time he was unconscious for all the time now.

And yet, what they were doing to him seemed… different. The first time was painful as hell, yes, but… it made sense. He'd been injected with things, subjected to crazy tests to figure out if their experiments had worked, but there was a purpose to all of it.

This time, the pain just seemed… senseless. It was near constant, and they didn't seem to have any goal in mind. There was no reprieve, nor any pattern, unlike the last time. The only real thing he could count on was the pain, and whether that was real or not was hard to say sometimes.

But all he could do was lay there and take it.

Tony hadn't slept.

Letting Peter go had to be the worst decision he'd ever made. Worse than abducting him, worse than deciding to do that first poor attempt at raiding Hydra, worse than anything he could think of.

The kid's face haunted him constantly. He could sense the moment he'd realized that his parents weren't there - and for whatever reason, they weren't. Tony had noticed a split second after he did, and by that point, it was too late. They were surrounded, and the realization only seemed to make Peter more determined.

Leaving him was the hardest thing he'd done in... years.

The moment he'd realized Peter's parents were nowhere to be seen, he realized the kid was right. He was going straight back to Hydra. Whatever their motives were, Tony had no idea, but Peter hadn't seemed very convinced that he would get out, and… well, he'd been right up to this point. He didn't doubt the kid's abilities, but if he was sure he wasn't getting out, then Tony wasn't going to sit around and wait for him to try before doing something.

And so he hadn't slept. He went to work immediately upon returning to the tower, trusting Steve and the others to deal with Wanda.

He hadn't been able to figure out before — where Hydra was hiding, what their motives were — but now he had all the information he'd had to work with before plus some, the knowledge of all the places they weren't, and a suddenly much more personal motive.

He cared about both of them, so he couldn't fathom why it being Peter made this so much more… personal. He couldn't fathom, even still, why he cared about Peter so much, nor when it had happened. But somewhere along the way… it just had. There was no explanation for it. And yet, he found that he didn't mind it. It just felt natural. And the feeling was further intensified by the fact he was sure he wasn't the only one. The whole team seemed to have been touched by him in a way that they couldn't explain, even if they'd only met him once.

It helped, having the whole team back. Nat and Clint were back in the game, whether they were really recovered enough to be or not, and Wanda, whenever she recovered enough to tell them what she knew, had a gold mine of information, at least when it came to rescuing Peter. They wouldn't be taking down Hydra as a whole with what she knew, but they had a fair idea of the conditions Peter was facing, and even a little of what it looked like inside.

It took days to compile the intelligence they already had with what Wanda knew, and to give Nat and Clint a chance to do their own work. Over a week, counting the time they were able to put everything together and come up with a decent plan. He left Peter in that hellhole for over a week. The knowledge killed him, but there was little he could do. They could be hasty and try to attack immediately, sure, but even if they had all the right information and the right location, if they went about it the wrong way, he would slip right through their fingers the same way Wanda had the first time. And then that week and some change could turn into weeks or a month or more and he just could not allow that, so he waited.

They waited and planned and worked better as a team than they probably ever had before on anything. They pulled out all the stops in preparation, and when it came time to make their move, they did. And this time they weren't going home without what they came for.

He saw them, once.

Well, not saw. Heard, was more like. But his dad was there, he was sure of it. Helping them, it seemed. His mom, less so — she'd come in to talk to him, for a brief time, and no one had been hurting him at the time, so… maybe she wasn't in on it? Maybe she was just there? Or maybe he'd just dreamed the whole thing and that was why. That was probably the more likely explanation, even if he didn't really want to accept it.

He still didn't know how long he'd been here. By now even his sleep schedule was so whack from the pain and constant darkness and the fact that he was in and out of consciousness all the time that any measure of it he had was long gone. It could have been a day or a month already and he wouldn't know.

To think he'd hoped that Tony would rescue him. It had been foolish, he knew. He should have seen the Avengers kindness for what it was, should have realized that whether he was Spider-Man or not, they really had no connection to him and no reason to care about him. Why would they waste their valuable resources coming to rescue him? He'd already been nothing but trouble, and they got what they came for, so why risk anyone else over him?

The simple answer was that they wouldn't. It made no sense. Still, he couldn't help hoping, in the beginning, and sometimes even through the haze of pain he was in, that someone — someone being multiple people, as time progressed, but if he was truthful, it was mainly Tony who dominated his hopes of rescue — would come for him eventually.

It didn't help that they Hydra agents seemed to think the same thing. He could hear them, sometimes, when they weren't experimenting with his senses for whatever form of torture was currently their favorite. Talking about what they would do and test to pass the time. What they thought would hurt him most, what they could accomplish before Tony came. What would hurt Tony the most when he found him again.

It was maddening. Every bit of it. Not knowing what was real and what was dreams through the haze of pain, the pain itself, the missing chunks of time… he really thought he was going insane.

The worst pain was his chest. Whatever it was they were doing to him, he was deprived of every sense they could, and then it just… seared. Blazing, blindingly hot, sizzling, foul smelling, and painful. And they did it every day, presumably hoping it would eventually scar. Even when he could feel it starting to, they still kept at it.

It was usually that pain that made him black out for the longest time. Everything else, while it still hurt, was nothing in comparison. He dreaded it every day - or at least what he assumed was every day. If it wasn't… well, then he really had no idea.

He just didn't understand. None of it made sense. What were they doing to him? Why did they want him in the first place if not to continue experimenting on him? And if these Hydra agents were so sure Tony was coming for him... then where was he?

A crash woke him.

Then a shot, another, something that sounded like a devastating impact.

Peter groaned as he started to surface from that blackness that seemed to be constantly surrounding him these days. Whatever the hell this new turmoil was, it was loud and obnoxious and interrupting the closest thing to peace he'd had since he'd gotten here. He just wanted it to go away.

But it didn't go away. It only intensified as time went on. It was torture on his already strained senses, but there was nothing he could do but lay there and take it, and try to block as much of it out as possible.

"Peter?"

The boy flinched. God, it had been so long since he'd heard his own name. Hydra didn't really talk to him, and when they talked about him, it was more of a passing comment, usually referring to him as "it" or some other inconclusive name. But who would be calling his name now? The voice was too loud, and his senses too painfully strained for him to be able to identify it.

"Hey, kid, come on. Can you hear me?" A pause, and then hands brushed his wrist, his throat, and he heard the sound of breath catching. "Stark, I found him, but it's not- it's not good. I'm going to get him back to the Quinjet. You guys finish up here as soon as possible."

If there was a reply, it was indistinguishable from the rest of the background noise to Peter's ears. Hands were on him again, tugging and pulling at whatever was holding him in place, and then he was being moved and oh god was it painful-

"Sorry, sorry, you're okay, kid, you're alright," the voice was murmuring, and then he was being jostled again and something shifted in just the right way and the world was suddenly black again.

He went in and out of the blackness a few times. Each time he woke up, the situation was more and more bizarre and his mind less and less able to grasp it.

The first time there was still moving and noise and chaos and he still couldn't see.

The second time, he'd been laid down on something, and the majority of the noise had faded into the background, though there were still voices shouting and the distant sound of battle in the background.

The third time, the background was quieter, though there was a distinct humming that never seemed to go away, but the voices were closer, and there were just so many of them, all different and all leaving an impression of familiarity but he was too out of it to have any idea why.

"He's in bad shape-"

"I should never have let him do this-"

"This isn't just your fault, Tony-"

"They've made it quite clear whose fault it is, they had from the beginning-"

"Fighting isn't going to help-"

"What are we going to do-"

"His parents-"

"This was a major win, we should be happy-"

"But the kid-"

"Look what they did to him, look at his chest-"

He was out again.

By the fourth time, things had settled down a lot. He was on a bed, he thought, and it was a lot comfier than anything else he'd touched in a long time, and it was completely quiet, no background noise or voices or anything to be heard but the soft thumping of his and one other person's breaths and heartbeats. He was coherent enough — or perhaps just paranoid enough — to realize the second set had to be from someone else, and that person had to be waiting on him to wake up, but he didn't know where he was or what that meant or if he should be terrified by the knowledge or not. It was clear that, at least temporarily, he was away from Hydra; but at what cost? Were his "rescuers" really rescuers at all? Or another evil for him to worry about when he really woke up?

Well, right now he didn't have the strength or mental capacity to worry about it. As soon as the fleeting notion to panic hit him, it seemed to exhaust him completely before it could even fully grip his body, and then he was sinking fully back into the blackness for the last time.

Taglist: @lyrical-harmony @lovinmarvel3000 @tell-that-to-my-feather @twixen93 @m0ther-of-dragons @dantedeletes 

[howaminotinthestrokesyet]

Where Have They Gone Now: Axl Rose

Born William Bailey originally in Lafayette, Indiana in 1962. His mother was still in high school when she had him, while his juvenile delinquent father was 20 years old. They would divorce when he was two years old, which led his father William Rose abducting him and reportedly molesting the young boy. His mother remarried to a man named Steven Bailey, who was not much better than his birth father. Axl and his siblings were beaten on a regular basis and once again reportedly molested as well. Led by his stepfather, the Rose household was very strict religiously growing up in the Pentecostal faith. He was required to attend church 7 to 8 times a week, and even taught Sunday school on occasion. This seems to be in stark contrast to the Axl Rose we will see later. Axl would comment on his upbringing. “We'd have televisions one week, then my stepdad would throw them out because they were Satanic. I wasn't allowed to listen to music. Women were evil. Everything was evil." Music became a source of solace from an early age as he began singing in the church choir at the age of five. Rose began as a natural baritone, but decided to change his pitch consistently during practice just to anger the teacher. The future Guns N’ Roses lead singer also began to study piano at Jefferson High School, as well as participating in high school musicals. At the age of 17, Axl was going through some insurance papers when he discovered the existence of his biological father. At that time, he unofficially adopted his real father‘s last name of Rose, but told everyone he would not share a first name with him only referring to himself as W. Rose. After this discovery, the young man began to completely act out leading to at least 20 misdemeanor arrests from public intoxication to assault. Lafayette police were trying to charge him as a habitual criminal when he moved to LA in 1982 at the age of 20.

Almost immediately upon arrival, Rose joined the band Rapidfire with guitarist Kevin Lawrence. He had met him just outside the Troubadour in West Hollywood. They recorded a five song demo, but due to legal actions was not released until 2014. The EP was entitled Ready To Rumble. His next band included childhood friend and guitarist Izzy Stradlin, which they named Hollywood Rose. They recorded a demo featuring songs like “Shadow of Your Love,” “Anything Goes,” and “Reckless Life.” These songs would appear on various releases throughout the years including 2004’s, The Roots of Guns N’ Roses. The band would break up just after the hiring of Slash and Steven Adler. The biggest reason for this was that Rose decided to join LA Guns led by guitarist Tracii Guns. As he struggled for musical success, the young Axl continued to work to make any sort of money including night manager of Tower Records and even smoking cigarettes for a scientific study at UCLA with Izzy Stradlin. By 1985, Rose had restarted Hollywood Rose, so this band and LA Guns could merge their members. Guns N’ Roses was finally born, but almost immediately Tracii Guns and two other members left the band. Essentially, Guns N’ Roses became an expanded version of Hollywood Rose rather than any connection to LA Guns. They simply liked the name, so they kept it. Yet, there is absolutely no Guns in the band.

One thing to understand about Rose and his prima donna behavior that eventually led to the disintegration of the band was that every band in Los Angeles wanted him to be their lead singer in the mid-1980s. Axl had a certain buzz about the energy and intensity he brought every night on stage that could not be replicated. He represented the shining star of the Sunset Strip at that time; he could pick any group that was not signed to a record contract. The band would sign with Geffen Records in 1986, but one thing to note was that right before he changed his name officially to W. Axl Rose. The name originated when he was playing in a band called the Axls, so one of his bandmates suggested that he change his name to Axl. Rose thought it was a cool idea and never changed it. As the band began their sudden rise to the top of the music world, people began to realize that Rose was much different than any other singer before him. He began to single people out in the crowd, who were causing problems after two people died at the Monsters of Rock Festival in 1988. Most times previously singers would tell roadies to take care of it without publicly calling out anyone in the crowd. If you listen to their live compilation album, there are a couple of tracks where you can hear him actually doing this. Axl would say this in a 1992 interview. “Most performers would go to a security person in their organization, and it would just be done very quietly. I'll confront the person, stop the song: 'Guess what: You wasted your money, you get to leave.'" Upon the release of their EP Lies, Rose ran into quite a bit of controversy for his use of racial and homophobic slurs in the song, “One in a Million.” His explanation and defense of the use of the terms at the time was he meant it to be a joke about people that are a pain in your ass in your life. If that had occurred in our present times, he would have been canceled immediately. In 1992, the singer tried to explain the use of the lyrics once again relating some personal experiences he had with blacks and gays that had formed this negative connotation in his mind. For all the controversy, the group was dropped from a 1992 AIDS benefit show. By 1989, most rock writers had begun to see him as one of the top frontmen in rock and roll at the time. Rolling Stone had such respect for him as a singer that they allowed him to use his personal photographer for their story on him, instead of someone on their staff. During the recording of Use Your Illusion, Rose began to impose his will upon the band in a variety of ways. He forced the band to accept his friend Dizzy Reed as a keyboardist. Axl then wanted to fire their longtime manager Alan Nevin, which the band had to go along with because the singer threatened to not perform on the album if he was allowed to stay.

The Use Your Illusion tour began in May 1991 highlighted by concerts that started hours late, rants of his on stage, and even a riot in St. Louis. He tried to jump into the crowd during that show to take away a fan’s video camera, so after he got back on stage Rose quit the concert. Upon seeing an empty stage, the 25,000 people there started a riot. The damage bill came out to be just around $200,000. The friendships between the band members and Rose were gradually imploding throughout the tour. At one point, Axl demanded and received legal ownership of the Guns N’ Roses brand name. He had supposedly issued an ultimatum either give me legal ownership or I will not perform. Axl would later deny these reports saying the contract would not have been legally binding if he had done such a thing. Who knows what the truth is when it comes to this band sometimes? The singer helped to start another riot in Montreal at a concert co-headlined by Metallica. The heavy metal band had their concert cut short because pyrotechnics severely burned lead singer James Hetfield. Once again, Rose was nowhere near the venue to go on early coming on stage very late. The group needed to do an extensive set to make up for the short one by Metallica, but Rose cut his set short claiming voice problems. Once again, the fans rioted leading to some extensive fines directed towards the singer by Canadian authorities.

In 1994, the band released the covers album The Spaghetti Incident, which included a hidden track originally written by Charles Manson. Axl had intended the song to be a message to his ex-girlfriend Stephanie Seymour. The controversy that followed this song meant that the band needed to donate money for the son of one of the victims of those murders. In 1994, Rose also decided to terminate guitarist Gilby Clarke as a member of the band without consulting any of the other members. This decision was made so that Axl could bring in the controversial guitar replacement, Paul Tobias, which eventually led to Slash leaving the band. By 1997, the only original member of Guns N’ Roses was one Axl Rose. He had started to fade from any public view becoming essentially a rock and roll hermit. The media had dubbed him either Rock and Roll’s Greatest Recluse or the Howard Hughes of Rock and Roll. By the late 1990’s, rumors began to spread that Rose was forming a new lineup of Guns N’ Roses for an album entitled Chinese Democracy.

The absolute insanity that was Chinese Democracy took place from 2001 to 2011. The album would be officially released in 2008, but not after several starts and stops over and over again. A tour of the new album had been scheduled from 2001 to 2002, but almost all of the shows were either cut short or canceled because Rose was either a no-show or would quit very quickly. Finally, in 2006 and 2007, he actually toured as Guns N’ Roses promising new music. The concert offered very little in Chinese Democracy, but only concentrated on their hit songs. Around this time, he had changed his hair into cornrows, which got a laugh from music fans everywhere. One should note that Izzy Stradlin actually made a few guest appearances during that tour. Fans had hoped that a reunion collaboration might occur, but there was no such luck. Upon the release of Chinese Democracy, the singer did everything he could to sabotage any possible success the album might have overall. He refused to promote the album, would not return phone calls, or give interviews for three months after the release of the album. By the time he actually did say something about the album, the reclusive Rose complained that Interscope Records did not help them very much in promoting the album. In 2009, Axl and GNR went on a 2 1/2 year long tour, which included a headlining appearance at Rock in Rio 4. Around that time, he was sued by former band manager Irving Azhoff for $1.87 million. Of course, Axl countersued him claiming that he was forced to do a reunion tour because Azhoff had completely mismanaged the release, promotion, and tour of Chinese Democracy. In 2010, he sued Activision for their game Guitar Hero. Axl claimed that he had an oral agreement with the company that if “Welcome to the Jungle” was allowed on the game, then Slash nor any Velvet Revolver would not be included in any release of it. Not only was Slash’s music included in the game, but he ended up on the cover. A judge threw out the lawsuit in 2013 saying that Rose could not prove the oral agreement and the statute of limitations had run out anyway. In 2012, the Guns N’ Roses singer was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but he declined to appear. In an open letter published on the Internet, Rose stated that due to the tensions between his former bandmates, he did not want to be where he was not wanted or respected. Yet, slowly but surely Guns N’ Roses began to tour with some of the original members culminating with the inclusion of Slash in 2016.

[watchtheblog]

petty cache

thank you for coming to read my diary which masquerades as a blog but is actually just a vessel for disseminating my birthday wishlists. it’s like an event you show up to where the host tries to sell you a timeshare 25 minutes after some requisite, mindless song and dance.

welcome! if you’d like purchase a timeshare, scroll to the bottom. for the song and dance, look no further:

the other day i zoned out on zoom therapy and when my therapist asked where i “went” i had to lie because i had gone to the part of my brain that holds all the things i need to think about forever for no reason (i call it the petty cache — this is an umbrella term for the space that also houses my attitude cabinet) and dusted off a memory of a comment i saw on a stranger’s facebook three weeks ago that said “message me. i lost my password and i have good news to share”.

i don’t know either person, and that’s what i was thinking about. i spend $[redacted] a month on therapy and instead of focusing on one of my numerous unsolved mysteries, i was thinking about the nuances of this comment - like why they wouldn’t just share the news or message the person directly? or what losing their password had to do with anything? or why they would comment on facebook instead of texting or calling the person. did they not have their number? imagine not knowing someone well enough to have their phone number, but still wanting to share your good news with them!

all i want (for my birthday) is to know what the news is that this stranger has to share, and i’ll never know so i have to put that comment in my minutiae repository with all the other things that will plague me until i die from texting and driving, smoke inhalation as a result of purposely leaving a candle lit in my home overnight almost every night, consuming half a dozen hot dogs a week, or a now unnamed disease that will posthumously be attributed to my chronic inability to mind my own business.

i’m constantly concerning myself with things that are none of my concern - no matter how insignificant - because my brain is a commune of sentient pepperoni running instagram polls among themselves to discern if something is worth spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about. and guess what? it turns out absolutely everything that has ever offended, confused, bothered, intrigued, slightly inconvenienced, or merely happened to me is worth spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about.

because i devote so much energy to nonsense, i can often be found persecuting strangers for insulting me on the internet (and for other miscellaneous bad behavior). the information superhighway is my home so i have to protect myself (and my friends) here, and if that means spending 45 minutes to 48 hours trying to find every misstep you’ve made in your life until i have enough ammunition to spray a dozen simulated retaliatory bullets at your virtual head because you called me a “stupid bitch” on instagram, well… so be it!

i am relentless in my pursuit of wasting time, so if that doesn’t work, i will find the cold stone creamery you frequent, seek employment there, be hired on the spot, learn the craft, be promoted to manager, poison you on your birthday, gain access to your funeral, and tarnish your reputation by reading your shitty DM in front of the few family and friends whom i haven’t already made aware of the abhorrent way you conducted yourself online!

there are so many different ways strangers will try to hurt your feelings — an interesting genre of which come from men who (like me) have definitely never had sex before, and mistakenly think i care about the ways in which my body does not make them horny.

“no tits” one will say. and i’m like, how do you want me to respond to that? my boobs are indeed small, yes. did you come here to shoot facts back and forth all day? ok: you’re going to start balding way sooner than you’re prepared for, i bet your childhood dog is dead, your time on the internet should be supervised, your closet is full of vests, and you wait on line at nightclubs… good day?!

while i will obviously engage with anyone if they want to fight, i prefer when the unsolicited criticism is personalized, and not just thoughtless, lazily devised tripe.

a year and a half ago, a man who looked like he exhales smog DMed me to let me know - among other things in a paragraph long rant - he’d “lost brain cells” watching my story. knowing he had likely never had an adequate amount to begin with, it seemed like an emergency, so i started a group DM with his wife. because his message had come just three days after a “fuckkk [heart eye emoji]” response to a photo of my ass, i included a screenshot as evidence of his devolving mental state.

being - presumably - gainfully employed, neither of them responded.

luckily, the consolation prize for insulting me is that you gain residency in my brain and stay in my thoughts and prayers for all eternity, so i checked in on them a few days ago. they’d unfollowed and wiped their feeds clean of each other!!

because i’ve never “moved on” in my entire life, i fired up our long dormant group chat, and sent my condolences: “aw. sorry your trip to positano - where you were going to attempt to repair your ramshackle marriage - got cancelled because of covid and so you just got divorced instead :(” i wrote before being blocked by both of them. 

then i headed right over to my therapist’s facebook and commented “message me. i lost my password and i have good news to share”

i spent an entire therapy session detailing this monomania before my therapist thoughtfully suggested i “pick [my] battles”.

to which i thoughtfully responded: yeah, babe. i pick every single one.

                                                        ***

timeshare time! it’s the same list as this post, with a few additions (at top) (and edits based on availability).

places to donate food education fund pretty brown girl the okra project

some furniture stuff a side table  a pointless, laughably tiny little thing this website is calling a “drink table” a lamp one of these benches i do not want this but it’s important to me that at least 2 other people know it exists

this plant that obviously does not need to cost $165 but idk how to shop economically

air pods

gifts from the previous post - all still v much in play!

a pair of shoes (size 8 or 38) one pair, another pair, yet another, these are on sale, these are not, and a final pair

a specific clutch with three color choices they allege this color is called sand but it looks white to me, pink, green for those who do not know what malachite means (it couldn’t be me. i learned it 3 hours ago when i began compiling this cursed list)

something everyone with money to waste needs this

dresses i’ll never be able to wear until there’s a vaccine because unlike someone tacky who knows me, i won’t be having a birthday party in the middle of a global pandemic (hi, you fool) white polka dot, not white polka dot, also not polka dot, a red dress, a skirt (aka half a dress), a black dress

this sweatsuit xs in this, small in this

is sephora cancelled? i want this hair dryer which i’m sure you can buy elsewhere if sephora is cancelled, which it v well may be

this item which you may think is cheap but actually it’s not soooo a hairpin

earrings one pair, another pair, and another

this dress which i’ll never wear anywhere even when there is a vaccine because… what?! but maybe. you never know. size 34. lol when i get this far into the list i’m always blown away by how insane it is that i do this every year to no audience. so i’m just laughing alone at that. :) i am v funny to myself. another dress i’ll never wear ;)

the nicest weighted blanket you know of i’m depressed!!!!! if you can’t tell!!!!!!!

every year i have asked for a weekend bag and every year i have not received one, so alas, we try again this is not a weekend bag actually but it will do. this is!

a peloton but just venmo me the cash (@merce212) because i have a hookup

an assortment of ridiculous things a $500 body scarf a $580 beach towel with an octopus on it for no reason besides “art” i cannot tell analog time but it’s never too late to start!! how mad would you be if someone bought you a roulette table for your wrist? be honest. (THIS WATCH IS FOUR YEARS RENT!!!!!!) they won’t say how much this costs :( i’m losing my mind and must be gifted a chanel watch or else i will perish. to put my salami on when i am eating salami in my bed “24k gold crocodile [?!!) teddy bear”. the website says there’s only one left, which begs the question “why did someone buy one of these rather than buying me a chanel watch?!!” *real ‘billionaires shouldn’t exist [unless they’re buying me a watch]’ energy* to put my new watch in this is ugly but it’s on sale :) idk wtf “secret box pendant” means but i wish this necklace was also a USB with every season and spinoff of 90 day fiancé on it hi yes i’m stupid but i draw the line at $1500 connect four…

[whitherliliesbloom]

❀ illya skawi profile playlist

Character Profile - Music Edition  ♪

For many of us music is a source of inspiration for our characters, so I want to know what songs inspire and/or relate to your muse! Chose between 10-15 songs, compile them into an album and tag some friends to share the beat!  I’m choosing songs that I think are exclusive to Illya’s personality and development, rather than her role as the Warrior of Light because I think those songs can pretty much apply to ANY WOL. Songs about certain special relationships are also excluded, since I’ll be making a separate playlist for those.

“wallflowers can never bloom” {quiet}

Stray Italian Greyhound by Vienna Teng

god, i just want to lay down. these colors make my eyes hurt. this feeling calls for everything that i am not.

Waving through a Window by Owl City

did i even make a sound. it’s like i never made a sound. will i ever make a sound?

Five by Sleeping At Last

a white flag waves in the dark between my head and my heart. my armor falls apart. as if i could let myself be seen. even deeply known like i was already brave enough to let go.

“wilting slowly, surely.” {helplessness}

Antidote by Faith Marie

i tried to find my reflection on the glass, but i all i ever saw were the things i lacked. all the smudges on the mirror make me go insane. all i ever thought i was was a mistake.

Lilac by Minami

happiness is a blurring defective eye shutter. painful things appear delicately by a high resolution lens. 

The Walk by Imogen Heap

no it’s not meant to be like this. not what i planned at all. i don’t want to feel like this. so this makes it all your fault.

Failure girl cover by Oktavia [tw: hints of self-harm?]

everybody tells me i’m a failure. there’s no reason to even show me love. no matter whatever i do, it falls short of enough.

Hard Times by Paramore

gonna make you wonder why you even try. gonna take you down and laugh when you cry. and i still don’t know how i even survive

idontwannabeyouanymore by Billie Eilish

tell the mirror what you know she’s heard before. i don’t wanna be you anymore.

“even if it’s to save just one more, then with my last breath..” {purpose}

Daughter of the moon by Adriana Figueroa

destiny was close behind her. phantom of borrowed life. and the sea was a reminder. mirror of given light.

Determination symphony by Roselia

let your prayer of courage ride on your sound. your fingers, connected to a promise, play it. someday by your side, even if its impossible now. i won’t stop.

“i love you more than you’ll ever know” {self-acceptance}

Shake it out by Florence & the Machine

and it’s hard to dance with a devil on your back. so shake him off.

They will fall like roses by of Verona

you don’t know who i’ve become. i’ve become somebody else. i have used it for myself. i have used it to be free. 

Cosmic love by Florence & the Machine

then i heard your heart beating. you were in the darkness too. so i stayed in the darkness with you.

Never lost Word cover by JubyPhonic

A flower bloomed inside of the mirror and she finally replied ‘good morning’ to me.

Tagged by: @ofthesilverlining​ <3 Tagging: @windup-dragoon​ , @yumeaino​, @astralyehga​, @theadventuresofshuri​, @righthererightzao​, @ishgard​, @scholarlostintime​, @viraixia​, @bloodsworn-marshal​ , @beetlebrownleaf​, @fair-fae​ and anyone who wants to this!! Feel free to tag me!! Also I’m sorry if I missed anybody or if you’ve been tagged but have already done this aaaa!!

Not sure if anybody wants a detailed explanation of each category and song and how they relate to Illya but if you are i love you stuff is under read more!

wallflowers can never bloom:

More about Illya’s shyness, introversion and social anxiety. Stray Italian Greyhound is pretty much Illya at the start of ARR, when she’s still incredibly uncertain about everything and unwilling to take risks. But after meeting more people, making more friends and learning to open up, she becomes more willing to turn her “no”s into “maybe”. Waving through a window is pretty self-explanatory about her social anxiety. Being afraid of connecting with others, and yet she also fears not having a voice and not being known by others. Five is just a song about her enneagram type about being afraid of showing her feelings because she believes it would push others away, and her curiosity about the world around her.

wilting slowly, surely:

Lots of songs about depression, self-hatred, helplessness. Illya’s trapped in a state of constant melancholy. Antidote can actually be taken rather literally about the first time she discovers her “dark self” at the start of the dark knight storyline. Lilac and Hard Times describes her emotional fragility. When the going gets tough, she doesn’t always handle it well, and crumbles. The Walk is where Illya has a habit of blaming herself for her emotions. For feeling angry, momentarily showing her emotions to others, feeling scared. Failure Girl describes her powerlessness. Being unable to help solve all of the worlds’ problems, being too late in saving certain people. Whatever she does is never enough. idontwannabeyouanymore is raw self-hatred.

even if it’s just to save one more, then with my last breath:

At the end of the day, she pushes through because her morality compels her. She can’t ever forgive herself if she allows her own feelings and insecurities stop her from doing her duty. Daughter of the moon is her realizing and remembering the gift she’s been given, and that she cannot afford to waste it. Even if it costs her her life to save others. Determination symphony is just a self-empowerment song of her finding the courage to keep pressing forward.

i love you more than you’ll ever know:

It’s a long process, but slowly, Illya is learning to accept and love herself. In Shake it out and Cosmic Love, she accepts the darker parts of her personality (or fray). She begins to let go of the hatred she bears for her own inner demons, and accepts that it will always be part of her. She finally accepts that it’s okay to not be perfect. They will fall like roses is her answer to the people who have hurt her, to those who made her into the woman she is today. Never Lost Word is her growth from a bud that could do nothing but doubt and hate herself, to someone who could finally look herself in the mirror. 

[cryptocoinguides]

Neo Coin Explained August 2021

Who has trouble when someone comes up next to me? What is neocoin explained? Neo cryptocurrency explained neocrypto review. So i’m doing this review on neo well, because it’s on rank 49. So it’s part of the top 50.

It has a total supply of 100 million and it’s pretty much having a market cap of two billion dollars. I really enjoyed reading the white paper for neo because it is rather short, it’s like 11 pages compared to those long ass white papers that spans like 30 to 50 pages. Those were insane but neil was rather short, and it was very succinct with the explanation of what problem they’re trying to solve. If you ever thought about how you could digitize your assets like your house, then neo would be probably the blockchain that you would be looking at. But if you’re thinking about investing into neo, because your friend told you about it, then please watch this video first, because i took two hours of my life to read the white paper to jot down these notes on neo and to explain to you what neo does From a software engineer perspective, because i’m a software engineer, so if you don’t want to waste two hours and just spend 10 minutes finding everything you need to know about neo, then this video is for you other than that.

If you haven’t already yet, please smash the like button, smash the subscribe button and now, let’s jump into neo, oh as with any of these coin project reviews. The first thing we got to talk about is the problem and the goal of the project. The goal of neo is to really use blockchain technology and digital identity to digitize assets. What that means is using smart contracts for digital assets to be self-managed, basically to achieve what they call a smart economy in a distributed network. So first we got to talk about what digital assets are.

Well, they are programmable assets that exist in the form of electronic data with blockchain technology. The digitization of assets can be decentralized, thrustful, traceable and highly transparent and free of intermediaries on the neo. Blockchain users can basically register trade and circulate multiple types of assets and on this blockchain it also proves the connection between the digital asset and the physical asset that it represents through something that they call the digital identity, which we’ll talk about in just a little bit. But assets that are registered through a validated digital identity are protected by law. So neo really has two types of digital assets: global assets which are recorded in system space and can be seen by all smart contracts and clients, and then they have contract assets, which is a little bit different, they’re recorded in what they call private storage and they’re.

Less visible and need specific sorts of clients in order to see them or recognize them when they talk about digital identity, it’s basically digital identity, which means it’s anything that can be used to identify individuals, organizations and other things that exist in electronic form. Now, neo’s method of issuing or using digital identities include the following features: facial features, fingerprints, voice, sms and other multi-factor authentication methods. I have no idea how excited i am for smart contracts to run in the machine and the machine to tell me to pee in a cup to unlock my car. That is something that neo has smart contracts. They have their own independent, smart contract system, which is called neocontract, and that is really the biggest feature of neo, because developers coming in they don’t have to learn a new programming language like developers who develop for ethereum, has to learn solidity.

They can use the ones that they’re familiar with like c sharp java, golang etc, which makes it super easy for smart contract development, debugging and compilation. The neocontract smart contract system basically allows developers to quickly carry out development of smart contracts and get things up and running. Much faster than other blockchains, including ethereum, any tokens that you’re looking at the tip here is that you always have to look at the tokenomics and neo has really two tokens the neo token, which is under the ticker neo and the neo gas token, which is under The ticker gas, so neo itself really has a hundred million tokens like we first saw at the start of this video and that gives the owner the right to manage the network. Things like voting rights parameter changes. Things like that.

The minimum unit of neo is one which means that it cannot be subdivided like how we can subdivide bitcoin into satoshis and ethereum into ways now. Neo gas is a fuel token, with the maximum total limit of 100 million, the neo network charges for operations and storage of tokens and smart contracts, and this creates incentives for bookkeepers and also the incentive to prevent the abuse of resources. Now the minimum unit of gas is by eight decimal places. That means that there is zero point, seven zeros and then one – and that is the smallest unit of neo gas. With the neo tokens.

The whole 100 million was generated at the genesis event, but the hundred million tokens of gas will be generated through time and will be expected to be fully generated in 22 years. Since the genesis event, if neo is transferred, then the gas generated will be credited to the new address and neo’s 100 million tokens were pretty much divided into two groups. First, 50 million was distributed proportionally to supporters of neo during crowdfunding. The other 50 million was kept by the neo council for long term development, growth operations and maintenance, so this was vested in the beginning, but by now i believe that the whole 50 million by the neo council has already been unlocked and they say that it won’t Enter exchanges and will only support neo projects which doesn’t really make sense, because if you have neo tokens which goes to neo projects which ultimately goes to people and they can profit from that, then i’m sure they’re going to be able to sell it and will sell It to the exchanges now how the gas is generated is that when new blocks are written, then gas is generated, kind of like bitcoin and with the algorithm they have, the 100 million gas will be fully generated in 22 years. Now each block is generated in 15 to 20 seconds, and each year they estimate that 2 million blocks will be generated.

Anyhow, how it is generated is not too important. What’S important is just to know that the block rewards do get smaller and smaller kind of like how bitcoin does it when it goes through halvings and that’s pretty much all you need to know about the tokenomics. So neo has something called neox, which is a really cool protocol that i haven’t seen in any other blockchains that i’ve looked at when it comes to blockchains. Each blockchain is pretty much independent to each other. They have problems with interoperability, which means talking to each other, and there are projects like polkadot that is trying to solve this problem, but neox does have cross-chain interoperability and it is also divided into two parts, the first part being the cross chain asset exchange protocol, which Basically allows participants to exchange assets across different chains, and the exchange that is made between these chains would either all work or at all fail.

So that’s what we call atomic either all succeeds or all fails. The second part is the cross chain distributed transaction protocol. What this means is that, when you’re executing a smart contract, then there’s multiple transactions and you can see those as multiple steps now, these multiple steps or transactions can be scattered across different blockchains, and that is okay. The consistency of the entire transaction is secured. Basically, a smart contract can perform a different action on multiple blockchains for the transaction and it will either all succeed or it will all fail.

So you can just imagine a car assembly factory now in this factory, there’s multiple lines: building multiple parts. If one of those lines screws up and doesn’t build the part right, then we don’t get a car at the end. But when all the lines are running perfectly, then we can assemble a final product. The car. At the end, everything works.

Fine everything either succeeds or everything either fails. I am a really big fan of digitized assets just because they are digitized, which means that you can take them anywhere with you. So if you need to escape the country for maybe some law that you broke, then you could take all your assets with. You know the government can’t freeze your assets like they could do to your bank account but having these digital assets, especially if they’re passive income and assets that makes you money while you’re holding them. That is what you want in cryptos.

You could do that with staking mining yield farming things like that, but in real world i use something like a walmart automation store to make me money. While i sleep and i’m going to take a bit of time, to tell you about that right now, all right guys just want to walk you through walmart automation. This is something that is another passive income stream. For me, i work with a trusted partner. In order to do this, they do all the work and i just sit back and collect payments while providing the funds to fund inventory.

You can see that the last payment that i got was 4 700 and the payments before that was 4100, so they’ve been scaling it up. But on top of this, i’ve been using amex to buy all the products from amazon and wayfair things like that and mark it up 25 30 and sell that to walmart and we’ve been seeing all these transactions. So every dollar on these transactions is 1.5 because of the card i’m using. You could also use cards to earn travel points, and things like that, so you could travel for free while earning a profit, but not only that.

I’M also doing these for write-offs, because i own a business now you can see that i started this in 2020. My federal refund is 18k. Compare that to 2019, which was 11k, the only difference there is because now i have a business i could do more write-offs. So you could earn more money by sleeping, earn, more points by sleeping and you get a bigger and better write-off on your taxes. So if you want to learn more about this, then please feel free to dm me at support.

Horsehack.Club i’ll be happy to explain more of this to you if you want to know more. Here’S, a quick summary of neil and my opinion about this whole coin. So neo is a distributed network that combines things like digital assets, digital identities and smart contracts and neo is completely new to me, because i only read the white paper but looks like they were doing something that is really really cool and really really niche, especially connecting Physical assets to digital identities and digitizing them. When i read that, i really thought about the buying and selling and trading of houses and with digital identity features, i mean who knows what kind of use cases that may bring in the future, something that i thought of was maybe it can pretty much scan our Faces or take our fingerprints to show that we own a certain car and without those, then we won’t be able to start the car which will prevent any sort of car theft in the world anymore, which will really solve the problem of car theft.

And maybe even a legal entry on our property, but with illegal entry that is kind of pretty much overdoing because i live in the united states and everybody has guns, so i think people would think twice before trespassing onto another person’s property, especially if you’re living in Texas, neo is definitely an interesting coin and project and i’m not surprised that they’re in the top 50, because they’re doing something really cool, i’m just curious as to where they might go in the future. Anyways guys, that’s it for this review on neo. If you’ve enjoyed this content, if you want to know more, please smash the like button smash. The subscribe button check out these other videos on cryptocurrencies and passive income and i’ll see you next time. Peace, [, Music, ] anyways.

If they make it so i have to pee in a cup in order to enter my car. I don’t think i can do that because i’m the type of guy who has trouble when someone comes up next to me and pee’s next to me, it’s kinda, i’m self-conscious about that.

Read More: Ripple XRP: We Are NOW At The Final Of This SHOW!

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via Neo Coin Explained August 2021

[cinemavariety]

Cinema Variety’s Favorite Horror Films of 2017

2017 marks the fifth consecutive year of me compiling year-end lists of the best horror films. It also marks the most difficult year in my rankings. In fact, I almost didn’t even make a list this year considering how lacking the horror genre was for me. There were some decent efforts, but I do believe that the horror genre is impressing me less and less as the years go by. That being said, most of the best quality horror films were ones produced and distributed by independent production companies. It comes as no surprise that Hollywood has really been missing the mark when it comes to creating a truly effective scare experience.

Alas, we have reached the end of another year. Another year of absolute madness when it comes to the real world. These next seven films proved to me that horror films, even the most unconventional of ones, still can have a big impact in the film industry. Check out my lists from previous years by clicking on the links Below. Favorite Horror Films of 2016 Favorite Horror Films of 2015 Favorite Horror Films of 2014 Favorite Horror Films of 2013

#7 - Life Directed by Daniel Espinosa

I believe the tagline of the original Alien film was: “In space, no one can hear you scream.” This exact tagline would be incredibly fitting for 2017’s best space-suspense film. Other than the impressive cast, I have to say that I was not looking forward to this film based on the trailers alone. To me, it looked exhaustingly formulaic and over-done. But after reading some really positive reviews for the film, I decided to give Life the benefit of a doubt. What ensued was a real exercise in panic and anxiety. As beautiful and mind-blowingly enormous as space is, I cannot help but imagine how terrifying it would be to be stuck up there in a claustrophobic ship. As the crew members in the film discover a lifeform of unknown origin, all hell eventually breaks loose as the organism grows and becomes more dangerous. This soon becomes a cat-and-mouse hunt for survival which kept me on the edge of my seat throughout the duration of the film. I was also pleasantly surprised by the deliciously bleak ending.

#6 - The Void Directed by Jeremy Gillespie & Steven Kostanki

I have nothing but the utmost of respect for films that utilize practical effects in this day and age of horror films which usually rely on CGI-gore and predictable jump scares. The Void takes full advantage of its low budget and creates a genuine nightmare world with some truly impressive sets and practical creature effects. The Void is a throwback to the era of 70s and 80s horror flicks. For all its absurdity and nonsensical plot, what The Void lacks in a strong narrative is made up for with nauseating details of a hell brought onto the physical plane of Earth. Parts reminded me of The Thing, while other parts reminded me of Hellraiser – all the while staying original and having its own voice. We need more creative outings in the horror genre such as this one.

#5 - IT Directed by Andrés Muschietti

To say that my expectations for IT were high would be an understatement. It was most definitely my most eagerly anticipated horror film of 2017. In fact, the trailers are some of the best ones I can remember for a modern horror film. I was letdown when I found out a couple years back that one of my favorite directors, Cary Fukunaga, dropped out of the project. Nonetheless, I stayed positive and hoped that whoever took the helms would still create a genuinely terrifying horror film. Well, as usual, my expectations got the best of me with this one. It didn’t have me shaking in my boots like the previews had promised. But it did provide an entertaining experience, especially with the chemistry of all the actors and their interactions with Pennywise. The production value was amazing. I gushed over all of the dutch camera angles that were executed with strong precision. Bill Skarsgard did a fine job of encapsulating the evil that is Pennywise and tormenting all the children with their worst fears. My main qualms with the film was that it was more fun than scary, and that jump scares were a little too overdone. I was hoping for a much darker tone, and I hope that is what is achieved with part two.

#4 - It Comes at Night Directed by Trey Edward Shults

Trey Edward Shults emerged onto the indie film scene with his harrowing family drama Krisha (a film which has held up even better upon a couple rewatches). So it comes as no surprise that I was excited when I discovered that his next project would venture into horror territory. It ended up being a psychological paranoia thriller with elements of horror sprinkled throughout. However there is no denying that the events that transpire in this film are about as horrific as they can get. Many of my favorite films are polarizing ones. In these cases, usually critics rave about it while the average movie-goer dismisses it as a waste of time. This was the response for It Comes at Night, and I take the side of the film critics with this one. The biggest complaint I read online was “nothing even comes at night”. I cannot help but think that people really cannot read between the lines with films, even when it comes to something as simple as the title. I can tell you what comes at night in this film: fear of the unknown, dread, disease, and mistrust of others. Shults plays with the audiences heads in this film as to what is real and what is not real. His use of lighting and camera movement immerse the audience into a story that is minimalist in nature, but also has so many subtle details throughout. The finale of the film left a pit of dread in my stomach which didn’t quickly go away.

#3 - The Untamed Directed by Amat Escalante

Leave it to a foreign director to concoct one of the most impressive films of the year. Mexican cinema is amazing – the country is no stranger to releasing scary movies that hit deep (i.e.: Cronos, Pans Labrynth, Here Comes the Devil, Santa Sangre). The way the story is told in The Untamed is genius. We are presented with mysterious situations and multiple characters at once which we as an audience must piece together and see how everyone and everything connects. The center of the story revolves around a tentacled creature which, in my eyes, is symbolic of pure lust. Each person who visits this creature, which resides in a secluded cabin, becomes addicted to the way it makes them feel. Characters who were once lost and unsatisfied feel like they have clarity of mind and a new purpose in their life based solely on their interactions with the creature. These newfound feelings quickly turn into something dangerous as the movie veers into unexpected territories. The Untamed did a great job at having me writhe in discomfort, all the while never becoming too graphic or exploitative. It doesn’t show too much to ruin the aura of mystery. Yet it also shows just enough to have me never looking at a tentacled-animal the same way ever again.

#2 - Gerald’s Game Directed by Mike Flanagan

Once again, a Mike Flanagan picture makes one of my year-end horror lists. The man is endlessly consistent on his filmmaking abilities. I wouldn’t say any of his works are horror masterpieces, but each one that I have seen has left an impact on me. Even his more mediocre work is better than the array of Hollywood-produced horror films. Gerald’s Game marks the second horror film on this list based off a Stephen King story. Many of the same themes that Flanagan has developed upon over the course of his career shine through in Gerald’s Game. Including but not limited to: unchecked childhood trauma, abusive parents, loss of innocence, inner demons, real demons, etc. etc. Once deemed un-filmable, Gerald’s Game is an extraordinarily creative film. All set in one room, the movie never becomes trite. It utilizes its stagnant location and turns into something that I could even see as a stage play. A wife’s worst nightmares come alive in Gerald’s Game after the main character’s husband dies after handcuffing her to a bed. To make matters worse, there is a bloodthirsty feral dog who eats her husband and a deformed man who visits her in the night. This results in one of the most hair-raising movie moments that I have ever witnessed. In one scene, the outline of this boogeyman is just barely visible in the corner of the room. Even I had to do a double-take to make sure what I was seeing was actually there. Was he real? Or was he just another figment of the main character’s unraveling mind? Flanagan lets this scene play out in complete silence. There is no jarring music or sound effects to be heard. This makes the scene all the more harrowing because Flanagan lets the fear build up naturally. He is not telling you when and how to be afraid. Oh and can we talk about that hand scene? That is not something I will forget.

#1 - Kuso Directed by Flying Lotus

I find it difficult to put my feelings into words when it comes to Kuso. I am surprised that this film even exists, but boy do I feel lucky that it does. Kuso is not a film that can be lumped into just one genre. But if I were going to categorize it into one, I think it is safe to say that it is a body-horror film to the highest degree. I respect the film so much just for the fact that this is art that not many people have ever, or will ever, see on a screen ever again. This work to me is daring, feverishly artistic, and completely out-of-this-world insane. In fact, I couldn’t believe my eyes at what I was seeing in certain scenes. It crosses the line countless times and revels in all its griminess. Make sure to watch the film on an empty stomach – you will thank me for this later. My friend and I agreed that the best way to describe this film to someone is as follows: “vignettes of absolute awfulness.” I say this with the utmost fondness. Kuso is the midnight movie I’ve been waiting for all of my life. To me, Flying Lotus is like Jodorowsky for the 21st century - polarizing, revolting, and exhaustingly stylized in the best of ways.

[c-art]

Porting High Hat from GDScript to C#

So Godot 3.0 just released and with it comes C# support. I've been working on High Hat for awhile now and it has been running on a development build of Godot 3.0 for about 8 months. But up until this point it has been 100% GDScript (Godot's custom scripting language). For a variety of reasons (which I will cover in a bit) I decided to port High Hat over. I'm pretty much done at this point, so I figured I'd share some of the things I learned along the way.

First: can you guess which side is GDScript and which one is C#?

Why C# ?

Normally I wouldn't waste time on a language port. Your language is rarely your bottleneck and unless the port opens up new platforms, you won't make anyone but your dev team happier. But my case is special I swear! High Hat is my first game built in Godot. It started as an experiment and slowly, organically grew into a full (insane) game. Additionally when I started I didn't know good Godot design patterns. There's tons of failed / malformed / abandoned / half implemented ideas in the old GDScript codebase that made it hard to move forward at the rate I wanted to. At this point I knew how the engine worked and what I wanted the game architecture to look like. High Hat needed a rewrite and thanks to the fantastic work on Godot 3.0 I had a few options:

GDScript

I could just take what I learned and do the rewrite in GDScript. GDscript is a simple and easy scripting language with fantastic integration with the engine. I don't want to discourage people from using it because it is absolutely the right choice for many people. Unfortunately for me its benefits don't outweigh its drawbacks. First, it is a dynamically typed language. I think they have their place, but I personally dislike them for large projects ... especially games. They make bad designs easier, refactors harder, and the build/run/verify loop longer. Statically typed languages (generally) have more compile time checks that surface errors that would otherwise be exposed at runtime in dynamic languages. This problem is exacerbated in games, which generally have longer startup times and take more time to set up the scenarios you want to test. Due to the language's simplicity (no abstract classes, interfaces, etc) it makes abstractions much harder.

A GDNative language binding (C++, D, Nim)

GDNative lets you call native code from Godot without recompiling the engine. One use case is adding new "scripting" languages utilizing native code. GDNative languages are FAST compared to the other language options. I did a benchmark that tests a few scenarios and GDNative languages were the clear winners (none of the tests were computationally intense and GDNative was still over 4x faster than GDScript). GDNative's mastermind, @Karroffel, did a great job here and I almost went this route, but it currently has some high friction areas that need improvement. First, the editor integration is less than ideal. Debugging is possible but difficult. When I tested the Nim bindings I had to run a new instance of Godot that booted into my game, then attach a GDB instance to that. Some variables displayed correctly in GDB but others were just garbage. I also needed to manually build the GDNative library after every change (rather than having it automatically build when pressing the "play" button). You need a separate build for each platform you want to deploy to (not much can be done about that). Additionally, it requires adding a new .gdns file for every native class you want to use as a script. This takes time and fills my repo with cruft.

GDNative is probably the future of Godot. Thanks to it, Godot is now ahead of Unity and on par with Unreal when it comes to language support. I suspect it will continue to gain ground as more people create bindings. The problems I mentioned above are not inherent to the implementation ... they're just small things that haven't been solved yet. GDNative is still young so I'll cut it some slack. I consider it to be the best thing to come out of the 3.0 release and I will definitely use it in the future.

C#

C# was also pretty fast in my benchmarks. There are a few bottlenecks that are already being addressed. I use C# every day for my job so it was already the "comfy" choice for me. It's static, it has a large gamedev community (thanks to Unity, MonoGame, and Unreal), it has a great package manager, lots of tooling, and a ton of syntactic niceties that the other languages don't have (pattern matching and LINQ come to mind). I've been following the binding's development since its inception and I've studied the code, so I understand the implementation and its tradeoffs.

C# was clearly the right choice for me, but that doesn't mean it is the right choice for you. Play with each of the options and see what sticks!

C# Patterns in Godot

Throughout the port I picked up a few opinions and tricks that I figured I'd share.

Avoid crossing the language barrier

Marshalling (converting types between C# and C++) can be expensive. The bindings currently have a few naive conversions that incur some pretty serious overhead. These are already fixed, but the pull request hasn't been merged yet on Github. The situation will be better soon, but there will always be nonzero overhead.

Pretty much all Godot API calls will incur this overhead. But don't worry too much about it ... every Godot language type except C++ modules will have this problem and its generally small enough that you don't need to think about it.

Don't use custom signals ever. Use C# events. They are better in every way. This is going to be controversial, but hear me out:

Signals are almost definitely slower. Upon connection they require string matching/hashing (the signal name and the function name) as well as reflection (to grab a C# function pointer using the function name string). Ditto for emitting them. Signals are cool but they're more complexity than we need.

Events are typesafe

Events don't require crossing the language barrier

Events can be easily refactored

Events can be autocompleted

Events can use lambda functions

I rest my case

Be wary of the garbage collector

GDScript uses explicit free calls (or queue_free) and reference counting to manage memory. C# uses a garbage collector. This means every so often execution will pause to find unused objects and free them. This can cause tangible stuttering so you want to avoid large GC pauses. I won't go in to detail here, but basically avoid allocations and deallocations (especially in large batches) as much as you can. Reuse objects when possible.

Object Pooling is a common way to avoid allocations (and thus GC pauses) by reusing old objects instead of creating new ones. Godot currently doesn't have a pooling system, but I have a feeling that it might get one in the future. You could also implement one yourself.

Use my input system!

It's free and open source: https://github.com/cart/godot-inputsharp

It circumvents the action system. Uses enums instead of strings

It circumvents the _Input handler. Uses C# events instead! (backed by a single _Input handler).

Stop caring about input types. Anything can be treated as an axis or a button based on the context.

Makes multiplayer easier. One Input object per device that exclusively tracks its device's input events.

Mockable. A great way to implement AIs: they have "virtual" joysticks.

Ensures unique device ids. Godot input ids are unique within a device type, but not across all devices.

It might be faster because it doesn't do string comparisons when checking events. I'm not sure and I probably won't verify this. It doesn't matter that much

Virtual axes: turn two buttons / triggers / axis directions (with a range from 0 to 1) into a new axis (with a range of -1 to 1) with one function call. I use this to create a horizontal axis input that maps to both keyboards (left and right keys) and joysticks (left and right on the analog stick)

It's still in its early stages. It's undocumented and relatively untested. It's also not a library right now because at this stage I don't want to deal with compiling multiple projects for my game. This might change as it matures and I stop iterating as quickly.

Take advantage of C#'s class extensions

Godot and the C# bindings are great, but every so often I identify functionality that the core types are missing that I'm constantly re-implementing. In GDScript, I just duplicated code or moved it to a static class, but C# has extensions!

Here is my current NodeExtensions.cs

Heres is my current MathExtensions.cs

Use LINQ

It significantly reduces the amount of code you write and makes it easier to understand. Well worth the cost of abstraction.

Conclusion

I've spent a couple of hours a day for about two weeks porting everything over and I consider it well worth the effort. My code base is smaller, it runs faster, and it's easier to understand. But what works for me might not work for you blah blah blah I'm done talking. Now back to your regularly scheduled gifs of blobby creatures stacking hats on their heads.

[ramsybaby]

  Truth be told, the existence and frequency of crimes being committed aren’t as mind boggling as I tend to express. The true riddle lies in what type of reward executors of the worst infractions could possibly be dedicating their lives, our lives, towards getting. With obvious and typical financial benefits aside (and threats of murder for noncompliance) there isn’t much room left to imagine other motivations.

What surprises me, I suppose, is that hundreds in power appear to not care what consequences will befall their own families, as a result of being connected to those who participated directly in the destruction and deceptions.

Especially when the hooves of their high and mighty stallions of “justice” are heard thundering across the broad quilt of our faces, each and every day.

In a world chock full of indignant “do-gooders” and exploited child spokespeople who are trained and rewarded to parrot those who hate us with every fiber of their being.

In the future (if there’s one left to be reached) the progeny of today’s criminals will more than likely suffer much of the same humiliations that current descendants of infamous figures have to endure.

I don’t see this habit changing much in the next few generations. As a matter of fact, with average IQs dropping as they are, we’re on a return trip towards average mindsets ruled by dark aged suspicions and fears; still throwing salt over our shoulders and ogling others for traces of  “bad joo joo” from the carriers of such deep-rooted corruption. What an unfair and heavy burden for any human being to carry. When they’ve struggled to build reputations amongst their clans and colleagues..only to be dashed on the grounds of historical evidence and assumptions of genetic tyrannical “cooties”.

Revenge. Disgust. Repulsion. Avoidance. These are the “gifts” those who knowingly destroy vital evidences leave their children. Lifetimes of opportunities dashed for the sake of single lifetime of kicks and privilege great grandpas Bush or Obama couldn’t shake and jollies which great-grand hyenas Clinton and Pelosi refused to drop from their sharp and dentured jaws.

From mortified sons and daughters, related to formerly esteemed editors of magazine dynasties to the innocent grandchild of a doctor forced to answer for tens of thousands of mothers bullied into the forced sterility and insanity. Be it by trial or the final and depressed contemplation of suicide. They will all suffer from this lack of foresight that all, who could have helped us, seem to be struck with.

The following is what I have determined are truths which will eventually drop into the light-with the aid of collectively restored mental functioning. I mention restoration because the ability to “think right” must be restored; or else we’ll never understand nor see the obvious things which we sadly struggle to see now. The things which are killing and sickening  us.

And will continue to kill and sicken us.

The following is a sampling of damages and the “odd and unexplained events” sure to be studied -along with other ongoing “trivial “ and serious offenses that I neither have the time nor the heart to address.

Lack of assistance re critical news for deaf citizens https://www.wcpo.com/news/national/fake-sign-language-interpreter-behavior

http://limpingchicken.com/2017/09/11/deaf-news-new-fake-interpreter-storm-over-hurricane-irma-emergency-newsflash/

An international corporation being forced to offer decent and necessary assisted services for the deaf. Although it’s an older article, there are still ongoing issues. https://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-sued-by-deaf-group-over-lack-of-subtitles/

Mercury, admitted by even the World Heath Organization https://www.who.int/ipcs/assessment/public_health/mercury/en/ as being extremely dangerous, being injected into millions of human beings and infants.

Their echoed assurance of Ethyl mercury being “quite different” from mercury; exposed as a lie thanks to scientific testimonials, including a 2017 report which specifically confirmed the two act in identical ways as far as damages are concerned, with differences being in the time of shelf life and residual tracing.

(Needless to say, this has been the worst and most publicized abuse)

  The increased crippling and damage caused to newborn babies by induced labor https://www.michigancerebralpalsyattorneys.com/causes-and-risk-factors-of-cerebral-palsy/labor-and-delivery-problems/cerebral-palsy-pitocin-cytotec-labor-inducing-drugs/

under the World Health Organization internationally pushed policies https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/44531/9789241501156_eng.pdf;sequence=1

The refusal of assistance for the stopping of genital mutilation https://www.cbsnews.com/news/detroit-federal-judge-dismisses-charges-female-genital-mutilation-case/

  although we are obligated to numerous “women’s rights” laws , with the United Nations making worn out decades of promises to end such violence…which even their own soldiers are immune from being prosecuted under.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/announcement/frontline-uncovers-new-cases-of-sex-abuse-by-united-nations-peacekeepers/

View at Medium.com

(you will have to input the following article’s link-from top of the search bar area- manually)

The following are a few laws and instructions that can, at wretched least, be easily tied to the aforementioned insults and abuses. (Something that may have been worth investigating if we would have had enough human beings in positions of influence, strong enough and fearless enough to have put millions of children’s lives in front of their own narrow interests.)

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Which leads us to one parallel factor that is commonly shared by the majority of this worlds’ leaders. And which should evaporate any arguments which begin with idiotic “Bi-partisan” huffing and puffing. ..Ronald Reagan, as both governor and president, frequently referred to the tradition, whether as a moral principle or a reason for specific policies on issues such as abortion. John Kasich, then the governor of Ohio, wanted to set up a new agency to promote Judeo-Christian values. Mitt Romney saw it as “central to America’s rise in global leadership.” President Barack Obama invoked it to eulogize Shimon Peres. Then-candidate Donald Trump vowed he would be “stopping cold the attacks on Judeo-Christian values.” And Stephen K. Bannon repeatedly invokes it in his plans to promote European and American nationalism….

(taken from complete Washington Post article which can be read here https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/17/once-judeo-christian-tradition-united-americans-now-it-divides-them/) One can plainly see the spirit of agreement and cooperation includes all parties and differing POVs.

Agreements which include actual legislation that our politicians have been free to make decisions upon , in blatant and unchecked monarchial fashion, for many years. The most shameless molestation of our Constitution-marrying religious matters into the very heart of state affairs.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/102nd-congress/house-joint-resolution/104/text

Finally, we have a last, but not least , “hint” of things not being as we’ve been forced to believe. A “clue” as to things not being as we depended on them being in order to operate within this “loving and respecting one another” snow globe. Choosing to look on the brighter side of matters, it’s a “hint” which can help us better maneuver what precious little is left of our lives, in order to avoid future and oncoming assaults. https://religiondispatches.org/holy-spit-why-do-ultra-orthodox-jews-spit-at-christians/

Never mind this bug eyed and open mouthed  “spit” into our face, regarding the witholding of “assistance” from “unworthy” human beings. 

When an entire fabricated piece of fiction of zombies in the land was vomited out from the guts of CDC instead of real and useful information (that used to be displayed so we could better save our lives) in the event of a true emergency.

https://www.cdc.gov/cpr/zombie/index.htm

It is these obvious damages and evils resulting from these types of connections which will plague the reputations and pain the consciences of the descendants- of the hundreds of leaders, academics, media monopolists, celebrities, clergy and all others…who have decided “to hell” with even the very children they promised to “love and provide” for.

Never mind us -the “dirty and revolting human beings that infect the earth” they rule over and claim embarrassing “superiority” over.

It’s simply a shame to see how many human beings, of supposed impeccable status and reputations, have ended up safeguarding the condition of their legacy with no better regard than pet waste scraped from the bottom of their well-heeled and “Louboutin”ed feet.

The “celebrated” multitude who bare their ugly teeth and have the naked nerve to dare accuse scores of us of “anti-Semitism” ; when in our own families we carry the DNA of mothers who had to watch their babies skulls get crushed in land stealing massacres, fathers who had limbs chopped off in attempts for freedom and those millions of families who carry the wounds of countless extermination programs…where their “betters” used them like any coward who has the audacity to use human shields.

If we were to be a bit more honest and a LOT less vain, we would see that the spiritual obligation to deceive us means we’ve NEVER been protected nor “loved” in the first place..by these all too mortal “men”.

Note;(As he predicted and as tyrants insist we remain terrorized by, as if we’re forever doomed to stay in the 200 B.C.s instead of 2020 A.D., he was murdered in the period before the Bolshevik uprising) The author is slandered (in a Wikipedia article) as being so ignorant as to have compiled a controversial translation of the Judaic documents, risking his very life, with the poorest understanding of the ancient language. As one can see, on occasion, he did include original text-meaning the door is closed on any such careless “fact” It is important work which resulted in one of the bravest moves a human citizen could have even imagined risking in the 15th century..especially while working under the severe eyes of the most dangerous merger of institutions that this world has ever been forced to suffer and exist under.)

photo By Sergey Nivens

  An Extreme and Wicked Lack of Concern Truth be told, the existence and frequency of crimes being committed aren't as mind boggling as I tend to express.

[vapormaison]

Budget Hi-Fi for Future Funk & Vaporwave: An Introduction

Introduction

I’ve had a couple of readers reach out to me in DMs after the holiday, and both wanted to start consuming vaporwave in reasonably high-fidelity — presumably with some fresh Christmas cash. First off, I want to apologize for converting them to this insane hobby. It will serve as an eternal joy to your ears, but an eternal terror to your finances. With that in mind, they both gave me budgets of around a thousand dollars, American, and I found myself recommending rather identical setups based on their parameters, living space, and general use patterns.

From the outline I gave over those previous DMs, I prepared a three part (potentially five part, if there’s sufficient interest) series of articles serving as a primer to roughly introducing basic principles of hi-fi enjoyment to a novice or neophyte crowd, My hope is that this can double as both a buyer’s guide for the reader, but also as a way to proselytize new fans into these two great hobbies: hi-fi and vaporwave. Here goes:

BASIC PRINCIPLE: Pure Sound, Compression & Loudness

“Pure Sound” is more of a term in vogue with Japanese audiophiles, but I think it’s functional here for what we’re trying to achieve. To understand pure sound, we’ve got to take a look at its antithesis: compressed digital. I want to make a point here of the word compressed because I’m not some boomer or vintage fetishist to the point where I can’t appreciate good sound from a digital source.

But, the way 90% of the world consumes music in the 21st century — in lossy mp3 formats with varyingly low bitrates on mediocre-to-poor head/ear phones is not ideal. Steve Jobs’ decisive victory over physical media with the iPod and iTunes expanded our libraries, but rendered most of that music into poor shadows of its state when originally recorded. The reason why your dad or grandpa are still devoted to their old stereo with a collection of CDs and vinyls is not just because they’re a luddite — primarily, it is because those CDs (up until ’95 or so) and vinyls (since and to forever, essentially) are usually compiled and pressed in the highest resolution possible. 

And before, anyone gets on my case about denigrating about Steve — I love the guy. His taste was excellent, too. Here’s a picture of the man’s Woodville mansion, where his only furnishings are a lamp, his hi-fi and some records. He’s got a handmade-in-Scotland Linn LP12, Acoustat Monitor 3 loudspeaker pair, and a Spectral Statis Amplifier. Absolutely legendary gear. Rest in sonic peace, King.

It was a $30,000 kit in its day, so he spared no expense. While he was selling you poorly compressed music, he was enjoying his audiophile vinyl music (a 1960s recording of Handel is in there, one of the “pure sound” classics in Japan) in the ideal recreative sonic comfort. Be more like Steve. I’ll try to get you there for 1/25th of that price.

What We Need:

To get a good sound system going for your library of vaporwave, there are four things you need at minimum. Today I’m going to just address formats. In the coming weeks I’ll go over the following: playback platforms (turntable, network streamers, etc), amplifiers, and your speakers (in-ear, headphones, or loudspeakers). But what all those are predicated by are a necessity of some kind of musical source — the reason, if you will, that you’re probably intrigued by hi-fi, right? Apart from the aesthetics of most systems, we’re trying to reach a higher echelon of music enjoyment.

Digital Fomats

The short answer here is just .flac files. They are lossless (uncompressed) 16-bit data-hungry kings which pump out much more detail than normal mp3s, which will be extremely important when you get a pair of nice speakers or headphones. I will go into that into more detail in a future article. If you play a crummy mp3 on a pair of nice earphones or loudspeakers, you waste their ability to soundstage — something we will discuss when we get to the speakers article. These lossless lassies also give us the ability to chase after that muse known as “dynamic range”, which is another way we can detect detail in musical compositions.

This kind of stuff matters deeply to both audiophiles and the artists themselves. If you remember the Quincy Jones vs. the Estate of Michael Jackson case, one of the accusations is that the detailed sound-spaces he created were crunched to oblivion in subsequent CD and digital releases of tracks like Thriller and Bad.

Above is a CNET comparison of the vinyl rips of Bad’s original release and a 2017 mp3 release. The top is “good” dynamic range -- you can hear the whole sound arrangement. The bottom is, well, shit.

People will occasionally argue for other digital formats. I don’t consider it a point even worth belaboring, really, as in my own benchmarks and those of many other audiophiles, there’s just no beating FLAC for general purpose listening. Some people will simp for another similar lossless format, ALAC. It’s Apple’s format, and while I’m a huge apple Stan (this is being typed on a 2018 MacBook pro connected to a Apple Thunderbolt display), Apple has effectively abandoned the project since Jobs’s death, primarily because it doesn’t sell, and secondarily because it needs a visionary of Jobs’s caliber to really take it global. Some people will also try to sell you on WAV. Just laugh at them. It’s also worth noting that the vast majority of vaporwave releases offer .flac as a format available for download, and you should be taking that option every single time.

Now, if you’re not a downloader, there are some streaming services that are offering hi-res. Spotify does so, but poorly at the moment. Tidal does a much better service to listeners and creators. I’m a Tidal guy, myself, but just because Tidal was an early adopter of hi-res formats for streamers. The differences in a few years, I think, however, will be negligible, as Spotify has finally started to take audiophiles serious now that its market share has started to stagnate. I’ll be going more into how to optimize your lossless streaming in my article about pre-amplifiers and network streamers, so stay tuned for that.

Analog Formats

I’m going start off by making a controversial statement here: cassettes are not high fidelity.

This is unfortunate, because the vast majority of physical releases for vaporwave are definitely motivated by a sort of 80s nostalgia and I’m sure many of the purchases are also motivated by the false presumption that the cassettes offer better sound quality. While they very well might seem like it in comparison to a youtube upload (although I think Real Love uploads in hi-res audio, not sure about Artzie), they will mostly be wasted on your system unless you’re just looking to pump some bass or annoy your neighbors. Real quality sound will be difficult to extract from these.

Why CDs? Why vinyl? It comes down to the numbers. I’ll explain this in the most lay terms possible, so much so that I’m sure audiophiles will wander onto my socials and demand retractions and corrections.

One of the ways we measure high quality sound is in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). I think this is best expressed as a sustained “pop, & warmth” that you hear when a needle hits a record. With tapes it sounds a little different — I’d liken it to the cracking of unboiled pasta, or the fluttering of plastic in the wind. The lowest quality consumer tapes, the stuff that your parents probably fucked to in the early 90s, are rated at roughly 45-50db of SNR. That’s like 2003-iTunes level of muddy, ugly, sound. CDs are almost double consumer-grade tapes, at around 95db. Vinyls sit at around 70-75db.  

Now, some vinyl-heads will come at me with some takes from the Loudness Wars. Yes, CDs went through a period from roughly 1994-2008 where they were poorly mastered that they bordered on unlistenable. But we’re talking about vaporwave, where the work is contemporary, and the mastering and production lines are boutique. No one at the Aloe Island, DMT FL, or Neoncity is demanding the mastering engineer to compress the sound to make the bass sound punchier for badly designed car audio systems based on bad anecdotal studies from disgraced EMI engineers -- at least that I know of. 

However, I will, just for you, include an obligatory “loudness wars” jpeg that only you will understand. Everyone else, for the purpose of this article, disregard.

Saint Vitus - "Let Them Fall" from "Lillie: F-65" (2012)

Additionally, I know most of you guys like a “little” analog sound in your systems. I do, too. Vinyl’s a warm medium, and I love it for that. It exists in that happy medium between the noisiness of cassette tape and the cold cleanliness of CD. If I ever have to do serious reference listening of classical music or something like that, I have CDs for that. Vinyls are what I listen to for fun.

Concluding Thoughts

My next article — in a few days — will be getting into the weeds with gear, specifically turntables, cassette decks (I know the people want it) and network streamers. I’m hoping that gives interested parties some time to get their records or FLACs on a hard-drive, because that is going to be essential to us even embarking on this journey towards high-fidelity Outer Heaven.

[tachibubu]

Tired [Part:4]

Pairing: Jerome Valeska/Joker x Reader x Peter Parker/Spiderman.

AU included: DC/MARVEL. Possible Suicide Squad.

Prompt: You had enough with Jerome as he keeps seducing other girls in front of you so you plan to leave him and go to New York. Where you will find yourself stuck in the web of another bug who will fall in love with you.

Ey~ The author is back from obsessing with a boy named Chase Goehring who almost looks like Cameron Monaghan now that he is all grown up lolol; anyways. IM BACK, I got author’s block so I just added the clown ;). Also I might add the Suicide Squad if you guys don’t mind, just for the fillers of the charaters~ Anyways I hope you guys like it! It’s kind of rushed but I just hope you guys still enjoy reading it. Also to declare my love for Chase, I added his original song here~ Check him out if you want!!! Ps. I’m still trying to practice my transitions XD

PART [1] [2] [3] [5] [6]

“So,” Steve Rogers coughed at the silence. “(Y/N), we would provide all your needs and clean your criminal record if you become a trainee of the Avengers just like Mr. Parker here.” He sipped the black coffee while staying eye contact at you, the whole Avengers including Nick Fury are here. Staring intently at you, waiting for your answer. Well except for Clint Barton who is cleaning his arrows and Tony Stark who is playing Mobile Legends on his device. Even though he has a Bluetooth earplug on, you could steal hear the sound waves slipping out.

“If not, we would have to put in you in death sentence for all the crimes you did.” Nick Fury fixed his eye at you while Bruce Banner nodded. “It’s for the safety miss.” Bruce said.

Peter stared at you; you were beside him throughout the session about what they would do to you. Tony Stark found you inside Peter’s bedroom and by force he cuffed your hands up while you gazed back at him with antipathy. He along with Peter brought to you to the Stark Building while Peter stared at you in worry and guilt. He couldn’t feel but blame himself of letting you get caught. If he gave you to the policemen it would be much better since they didn’t really know exactly who you’re than giving you to the Avengers and if you declined their option then you would be dead. He just hoped that you considered the accord

This might be the beginning of the change in your life, you thought. You wouldn’t let this decision to a waste, “Well, sure.” You beamed.

Steve almost spitted his coffee, “That sure?”

“How could we surely know if she won’t back stab us?” Natasha Romanoff banged both of her hands on the table and stood, she stared at the members and Fury for answers and death glared you while you just jerked your shoulders up in reply. Fury breath out heavily in annoyance, “Romanoff sit down. I’ll assign someone to look out for her.”

“And who is this someone?” Wanda Maximoff initiated while Vision bobbed his head at her question.

“Bucky Barnes, are you willing to?” Every person in the room stared at the Winter Soldier who was, as well, startled at what Fury said. He nictates then has grasped to the reality, “No.”

“Barnes,” Sam Wilson threatened.

“Barnes it is, you will train her tomorrow between six to ten and would be beside her at any cost.” Fury nodded while Barnes mumbled incoherent words as he whined to himself at the negligence. Peter shot his hand to the air and they considered to look at him, “Isn’t it better if I? You know, teach her? I know her more.” Fury didn’t spared an eye at him and continue on discussing. You gave him a knowing smile for at least trying; the boy was embarrassed but nodded at you. At least he gave a good impression to you.

“I chose him because I heard from your records you prefer using guns and your aim is quite good so he’s good for you.” Fury added, you just agreed along. It’s not like it could be hard right? You thought. Fury rose and nodded at the group.

“Alright, dismiss.”

-

You take it all back; being schooled by this gloomy man is hard as fuck than you would ever think of.  Now that you know his true colors, you would want to acknowledge at Peter educating you instead. If only there’s a working time machine.

“Alright doll! Training is over, now screw off.” Bucky gathered up the guns and started to clean them. You rolled your eyes and do what he said. You and Barnes never had a good connection to each other, he trains you and that’s it. He didn’t even bother to try and start up a conversation to you. As for the other Avengers, you were pretty good friends with Sam and Bruce. Sam was like a big brother to you and Bruce was like the father you never had, literally. Your father just died when you were a child and you didn’t spend a lot of time with him so you considered it. But with the other Avengers member, you were in an awkward acquaintance stage; you don’t really talk to them much, especially to Natasha. You could feel her preparing to clash onto you as soon as you entered a room with her on it. Now between your relationship with Peter, it started to blossom. You found yourself entertained being with him and you two being close as ever. Tony even teased about how you two are like a couple and you both just retorted with just laughing it all out but you didn’t notice the blush on Peter’s face as he stuttered, denying it.

You walked towards the kitchen and opened the fridge to get a cool water after all the combat training and learning how to use all of the guns, as you closed it you sensed someone near at the are. It was Peter in his enhanced suit made by Stark, he was upside down but then flipped and landed on the ground. “So, uh, I noticed you’ve been changing?”

“Hm?” you chugged down the water while looking at him in amusement.

“I mean you’re not like before. Insane and stuff, it’s great!” He scratched the nape on his neck and bashfully looks at you.

You chuckled at him trying to compliment you by starting a conversation, which was quite awkward. “Thanks mate,” you smiled at him. Yes, you indeed notice that there was a drastic change on living in New York and at the spare room of the tower for a month. Not only did you not think about your past relationship but you were healing with the help of Bruce and Tony with their medication, you didn’t even think that Tony can be a therapist but he just shrugged it off by saying he just learned how to by just reading some books few hours ago which you didn’t regard on but Bruce told you otherwise.

“So why early here? Don’t you have school?” you leaned towards the counter.

“School cancelled off and I just want to hang out with my best friends. Also you’re around my age why are you not enrolled in school instead?”

“Green guy teaches me, Fury couldn’t trust me going to school without making a ruckus.”

“Well that’s sad,” he said but you couldn’t help but notice his body language. He seems to drone out in his mind.

“Something matters?”

“Well, err, could you teach me how to play a guitar? I heard from Mr. Stark that you know how to play instruments and used to perform music at the circus. The class needs to play an original song on a stage individual for the Music subject. I don’t really listen in this subject to be honest,” he was playing on his hands as he looks sheepishly at the ground. You chortled a laugh, “Oh wow, the wise Peter needs my help?”

“I seriously need your help (Y/N).”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll help you; I’ll just take a shower. Meet me in front of my rom by eleven. Also, dress normal.” You stared up and down at his suit.

“Thank you so much!”

-

“Now that’s good notes right there,” complimenting him as he strung the guitar that he borrowed from you. He asked if he could use it for the presentation and you just comply nonetheless. You and Peter made a tune for the past few days and he was going to perform tomorrow. When he finished he grinned an adorable smile at you while you clap your hands.

“We made the tune but how about the lyrics?”

“Don’t worry about that, I already made few lines,” he murmured.

-

It was now Wednesday. You are with Bucky and have managed to sneak in at the school where Peter attended. You got miffed when Bucky lend a hand but respected it since Fury ordered him, it’s not like the man has a choice. When you arrived the basketball area where the stage is, a lot of people compiled in. You and Bucky stuck around the corner with your masks up, trying to blend in. One by one people played, some got the hang on it, some just doesn’t know how to sing or play, some didn’t follow the rules and sang a non-homemade song. Then it came to Peter, he was there looking around. Evident that he was nervous. His eyes landed at you, which was shocked, he didn’t tell you to come and you came by your own will. He returned his concentration to what he was supposed to do, now more anxious than before. He grabbed the hold of the mic and introduced himself “Uh, Hi? M-My name is Peter Parker and I m-made a song called ‘Hurt’. It is basically about a girl in a bad relationship and I’m kind of like, hey you’re not in a good position right now. I could really help you now if you just gave me a chance.”

He then averted his attention back to you, “Uh, okay I’ll just. Err, play now.”

He then proceeded to play the tune that you taught him, not missing a note.  To be honest, his voice didn’t sound that great but it was full of emotions that you wouldn’t care about it.

Hey, baby, you don't have to live this way You don't have a debt to pay So put your foot down and pick your heart up, off of the ground Cause that's not where you belong, I can prove that without this song But for now just play along

Your heart started to ache; you now know why he won’t let you assist him on writing the lyrics. This song was about you, you felt flattered but at the same time in full devastation. You started to recall your memories about Jerome.

The first greetings, “Hey my name’s Jerome. You?”

The way he comforts you when you got tomatoes stains on your outfit, “Don’t worry, someday I’ll get you out of this hell hole. For the time being, let me help you practice more so that it won’t happen again.”

The first I love you’s, “I love you my queen, will you be my girlfriend?”

The gift’s he gave to you, ”Darling I have something for you! It’s a pistol!”

The lie’s he said to you, “She’s just another toy, love. I still love you.”

The way he got angry when you pestered what his relationship with Harley is.

“I had enough with this bullshit Jerome!” the guards where out of the room where all of the mentally ill people is for three pm to five. You where harshly whispering at Jerome trying not makes a scene but then he beat you to it. “I’M SICK OF YOU FUCKING PESTERING ME THE SAME SUBJECT OVER AND OVER AGAIN, WELL UNLIKE YOU SWEETHEART SHE IS NOT BORING AND ALMOST SANE!” he grabbed a hold of your hair that was on ponytail and yanked you towards his face. The people around you silenced and watched the scene occur, probably enjoying it. Barbara stared at you, her face plastered concern and disorientation. Jerome grinned ferociously and noticed the reticence that started to hug the place, “Don’t worry about us! We are just having a couple fight~” That night when you were in your room you started to wail silently, pondering where is the Jerome you adored.

“I know you've been hurt by the way that he talks to you Hurt by the way that he fights with you Hurt by the way, that he loves you I know you've been hurt by the way that he talks to you Hurt by the way that he fights with you Hurt by the way, that he loves you”

When he was about to get into the second verse, you left with your eyes bulging out with tears. Bucky begun to chase you but you eventually run out of the building and onto the yard section. Some people where eating their lunch there and pestering happily. Bucky lost you and started to find you everywhere, his eyebrows furrowed. That’s when he heard the scream of girls nearby, the door beside him started to bang as it opened and girls and some males started to flee while crying franticly. He was confused so he entered and was soon meet with a group of people; he only knew two of them. He noticed you were there, kneeling. The group held weapons, some were wearing a mask some didn’t care less. He runs towards you, backing you up as he brought out his guns that were hidden in his jacket. Aiming towards the man.

You stared in front you couldn’t believe it. After all those days, he meant his word.

“(Y/N), darling! I missed you so much!”

There he was, the man who broke your heart into pieces.

“I found you! I won the game. Now I need the price, I need you.”

Who could’ve thought that you were bad at the game of Hide n’ Seek.

Tags: @pizxagordon @britt-janssens @zaporkent-hullo-rettenet @fireflyloki28 @hanji-zoe-surveycorps @peppermint-17 @behindthesesilvereyes @fandomlover2091 @theeeeens @varmeetkaur @bee-wrecker

If you want to be tagged for the next part just comment asking to be tagged! I won’t include for now a “PERMANENT TAG” since it’s quite a hassle for me. Thank you for reading!

PS. If you want to get tagged please check if your tumblr is allowed to be tagged by people, if not please turn it on. Thank you.

[theshoelessfaggot]

10 Latest Developments In Builders.

Before we start, we have to mention our first presumption: You are seeking to construct a new residence as well as would certainly intend to do it without as well much of a frustration. You are additionally searching for high top quality, practical cost, and also practical timeframe. An old claiming says that in between price, rate and top quality you can get any type of 2 however not the 3rd! This article is our effort to give you a couple of understandable devices that you could utilize to discover the building contractor that will certainly offer you an excellent experience while building your house. So, exactly how could you, as the one that spends for all of it, with minimal understanding of the dark world of “building”, make sure not to obtain taken. However before we go any additional you have to understand the structure is a relatively complicated work.

What makes every one of these logo designs powerful? It’s clear that these are building firms and also tips at the kind of construction that they do. These are elements you want to be trying to find in your logo design. On the flip side, I have actually seen several gorgeous construction logos that haven’t told the consumer anything. These two logo designs provide the audience no expertise of just what the firm does, not to mention that they’re a building firm. Make your area of specialty clear– otherwise in the logo, after that in the motto. A number of business that release approximating books will certainly send a “adjustment aspect” quarterly to correct their costs for your neighborhood area. Check out their book, count the variety of items in guide, and also increase that by the number of towns in the United States. Tell me, the amount of individuals making phone calls to suppliers and also subcontractors are should collect all those costs every quarter to keep every person’s price book up to date? In my viewpoint, you are getting the publisher’s finest guess on most of the costs. That’s not a wonderful way to cost your building and construction task. If you decide to use one of these books, below is a quick technique to keep your publication accurate for your area.

Along with this, obtaining an agreement from a client in connection with extra prices via the additional work is an excellent way of staying clear of any disagreements over settlements that have to be made. This ought to be obtained prior to the job is performed. If this is not feasible, discuss with the customer on a regular basis to concur and sign-off the prices of the additional job that has actually been done and do not wait till completion of the job before getting the customers contract. http://cctopbuilders.co.uk/about-us/ I am a legal writer covering recommendations on subjects of law, for more text and also similar works go to building as well as construction conflicts or contact a solicitor today. Log in or Create Account to publish a remark. Author: PeterJhonson As most of us recognize, nowadays there are several lawful disputes in the court. Compiling one before you write an agreement is a waste of time. Approximating must be done by unit expense just. It is much faster (as high as 2 times) compared to stick estimating, just as accurate, and also obtains you back in front of the consumer sooner. You cannot take three or four weeks with your quotation. You should be back in front of your consumers with a quote in 3-5 days, at many 7-10 days. Overall your numbers as well as have them examined by a second event that understands exactly what they are doing. Apply your markup, as well as you have a rate.

Will certainly the builder modify the layout to your requirements

Job Site

What type of training do crucial people in the business have

If the firm supplies common plans, just how much modification is enabled

Negotiate the Price and also Model Home Furnishings

The advertising and marketing strategy should be one-of-a-kind and also obtain consumers to take activity to acquire your item or service. Otherwise for the possibility, would certainly individuals still buy the product or service? Heres just what that suggests. In lots of Network Marketing business, the only method an individual could get a complimentary or affordable item is to end up being a rep. That would resemble your cell phone service provider stating “The only means you could ever before get a discount or get a complimentary phone is to open a franchise with our business. ” Thats simply insane! If the only individuals acquiring the product are the reps, most will continue to lose money for a long, long period of time, and they will certainly stop prior to they also resemble seeing a profit. The question you should address is: Do you sign up with a newer Network Marketing company, or a more experienced one?

Make sure that you become interactive if they accept your idea. You will certainly seek to locate more regarding their job and also the sort of jobs they have actually finished before. They additionally get to recognize you when you discuss a lot of points with each other. In case you get the chance to satisfy up with them, make certain that you ask as lots – Click on blog.lotnetwork.com – of concerns as you can. It is to your benefit to examine their capability to provide you the best feasible outcome. If they answer your questions well, after that you can take into consideration having among them employed in order to help you complete up the pending job. A gratifying residence getting experience relies on open interaction, a great working connection and also common trust. Consider what it would certainly be like to build your home with each firm and also compare. Does the company’s method to the acquiring as well as building process work well for you? Will you be able to work well with individuals in the company throughout all of it? Does the firm offer the kinds of details, support and also reassurance that you desire?

Because the damages they could cause, disagreements and also disputes can not be permitted to climb up. There are numerous methods to take care of dispute, to reach an agreement or a choice all parties are pleased. Publisher: Allan Barry Laboucan There are some similarities in between national politics and also economics as well as among the sad ones is certain teams take a setting and also unbendingly stay with it. The problem with drawing lines as well as saying this is exactly what side I’m on is that those on the various other side might have some great ideas as well as viewpoints. Author: mesriani legislation group Partnership is a type of service framework that has 2 or more owners as well as has actually not been registered as either a minimal liability business or a company. It could be taken into consideration as the most inexpensive as well as most basic service entity that could be established as well as operated by two or more co-owners.

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Artists & Artworks

Below are the artists and artworks I have viewed as key informants for my work this year. 

(Note: The NightMind link(s) is/are included with several of the works as he has created explanation videos for those works that are interactive, online and hold mystery within them. I have included these as they are often what introduced me to the works or have helped me understand the works in a different perspective. If the work interests you I suggest viewing it and then the NightMind video.)

It is upon compiling the artists and works I have looked at over this year that I have found the correlation of the uncanny and a representation of real, public life within all of the works and how this influenced my own work.

Please click ‘keep reading’ to view all of the information.

Alan Resnick (and Wham City Comedy) (This House Has People In It + Sculptor’s Clayground, Unedited Footage Of A Bear, AlanTutorial, Live Forever As You Are Now, Children Of The Mirror) Links: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 NightMind 1 2 3 4

Alan Resnick and Wham City Comedy create complete alternate universes within their works. Resnick started with AlanTutorial, a youtube and twitter based immersive art work that left viewers questioning whether Alan and his problems were real. This invasion of the suspended disbelief a viewer enters is present in all of the works listed above, and bar AlanTutorial, use this and the innate curiosity of a person to created a twisted narrative that comments upon society and its controlling aspects on the viewer.

It is the aspects of discovery that I have brought into my work, with the websites for UFOAB, THHPII and COTM all have between 20 minutes and 2 hours worth of extra footage and hidden text that does not leave the narrative it is creating or reverts to the “artist’s voice”.

UFOAB is film and website that follows a mother as she goes insane and pushes the fake medicine of Claridryl and can see to be commenting upon Big Pharma and our reliance on medications that cause more problems than what we are medicating for.

THHPII is a huge mass of information behind the initial video. Using security camera footage and logs we view the family, the newly connected family with the children being one of each parents and the baby being both of the parents’ child. After digging into all of the information with Sculptor’s Clayground it can be suggested that the work could be commenting on society and advertising pressures. The family are concerned about the contraction of a fake disease which is put into their brains by the media they consume and may be finally represented by Madison and the non-family members sinking into the ground.

The expanding sense of discomfort and confusion upon viewing just the videos is heightened when viewed in their original time slot (again bar AlanTutorial) at 3am on the American channel Adult Swim as part of their infomercial series (see below). However there is an understanding that all of these works do not have a definitive and absolute explanation and reasoning behind and within them and it is the viewer’s interpretation that creates the narrative also.

Also discussed in my dissertation.

Joe Pelling & Rebecca Sloan (Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared) Links 1 2 3 4 5 6 NightMind

Another video works that comments upon society, becomes chaotic and has many easter eggs within each video. DHMIS is the first work I viewed that informs my vein of work this year. First seen online July 2015 and also viewed at the cinema screening at Dismaland, we as a viewer are transported to a set like a children’s television show, and in each ‘episode’ we are given a barely graspable idea - Time, Creativity, Love, Internet, Health - that is introduced to children early in life and then something goes awry and we are greeted with a horror version of the show.

Nostalgia lulls the view into a false sense of security in the first video, the bright colours, puppets that are reminiscent of the Muppets or the Tweenies and the bright colours and simple set falls into the tpye cast of children’s TV show. The obnoxious lies that are then presented with these visuals jar against each other.

There are any interpretations of what DHMIS means, such as a comment on society and its use of control through advertising, the brainwashing of children through television and brand influence on presentation of individuals. It is the multiplicity of meaning that I have aimed to use in my work and the false sense of security and nostalgia of the child like appearance that is used in parts of all the installation-intervention works I have created.

Jeffrey Cranor & Joseph Fink (Welcome To Night Vale, Alice Isn’t Dead) Links 1 2 3 NightMind

WTNV is a podcast which developed into a touring show and several books that then lead to other podcasts such as AID. A fictional town described as “if Stephen King and Neil Gaiman created a town in The Sims and left it running”, Night Vale is a faux radio show hosted by Cecil Palmer giving out community information and news, which can be both ordinary and extraordinary for the viewer but treated as normal by Cecil and the townspeople.

WTNV’s use of just audio to create such a vivid mental image for the viewer is incredibly inspiring. Disparition and the voices selected for the characters create a perfect combination that created a universe that the viewer can easily fall into until the odd happenings question the ease in which you enter the town.

This has influenced some of the creepier comments and aspects in my work, loosely created the basis for the eye logo. Night Vale is one of the overarching background influences for my work as well as a piece I thoroughly enjoy itself. 

EverymanHYBRID Links 1 2 NightMind Playlist

EverymanHYBRID is a ARG work, part of the lore that has created Slenderman. Filmed and presented in a documentary/real life style drawing the viewer into the narrative it weaves. Multiple inputs and links from around the web as well as real life events that can be found on the web (the trials).

Aspicio Omniam Links 1 NightMind

An audio-visual piece that uses sound well to create an atmosphere, visit the apartments from hell, with ‘educational videos’ that explore the apartment in relation to the sound track with it.

Spectacular Organic Links 1 2 3 4 NightMind

A faux company that offers you a product that you never truly know what it is or recieve. This work holds the chipper and over exaggerated ‘happiness’ that I have emulated in the audio piece for Artist (i)nformation and in several of the posters in ETB.

The Modular Body Links 1 2 NightMind

A website and advert that shows the latest creation in biology. A creature that you can build.

The production value of the video is high and the technical aspects of creating a machine that can emulate the idea of a biological creature is interesting to be but the suspended disbelief is broken on the website however.

Abstractions Links 1 NightMind

I did not view this work much/for long, but the use of images and layering (the subtitles, the contrast and such) is intriguing and the act of having to search for meaning in an image or work is something I have used within my work just to a different degree.

Infochammel Links 1 NightMind

An over-exaggerated mockery of infomercials and advertising. A channel that can actually be streamed to television which on the surface seems like it can make sense but viewing the individual videos gives the sensation of your brain being fried but no knowledge being contained within them.

Adult Swim’s Informercials Links 1 2 3 4 5 6

Adult Swim has commissioned a variety of artists to create 11 minute long videos to be shown at 3am. Many of these videos parody a form of popular entertainment and showings typical of the 3am time slot - Too Many Cooks parodies the 80′s television themes and casting, Icelandic Blue and Miracle Man parody the style and content of infomercials, religious or consumer (Alan Resnick’s work was shown as part of this section as well) - and imply that these infomercials are not fake and are truly part of our universe and society.

The15Experience Links 1 2 NightMind

The15Experience plays with what is true and what is not and what is live and what is prerecorded and created. The viewer is given access to 15 cameras in an abandoned house, told by the creator/installer to be viewing a haunting. We are then privy to a group breaking in to the house and a demonic possession occurs.

The blending of true and fiction is important to me and my work and the horror aspect interests me.

Darren Cullen Links 1

Cullen’s key work for myself is Pocket Money Loans. It is a faux shop from that displays loans for children in return for their pocket money, mocking the loan shark culture of the work and the destruction of Romantic childhood ideals. His play in the space between real life and art is interesting to myself and the realisation of my work. The outcry he had in response to PML as people found the work either too realistic (therefore believing it) or too hard on the point it is putting across is something I wish to emulate in the future with my own work.

Also discussed/Discussed further in my dissertation.

Dismaland

Dismaland is a key exhibition/art work that has influenced my works this year. Showing several of the works on this list (Wasted Rita, Darren Cullen, DHMIS) Dismaland creates/reflects the overbearing ‘Big Brother’ state that I have emulated as the corporation of ‘(i)nformation H(eye)ghway’ . The merchandise and atmosphere is recreated and influential on the stickers and business cards in Elder Tour(i)sm Board. 

Yet another work that asks the viewer to suspend disbelief and enter the world it creates, Dismaland uses images we recognise and ones we don’t and manipulates them into a realistic but uncanny valley portrayal of theme parks, advertising and consumerism.

Also discussed/Discussed further in my dissertation.

Janice Kerbel

Kerbel uses language, wording, typography and staging to create art pieces. Nominated for the 2015 Turner Prize for DOUG, Kerbel subverts the tradition presentation of storytelling.

Her works comprise of audio, print and performance which as elements I have used within my own work.

Joëlle Tuerlinckx Links 1 2 3

While last year Tuerlinckx’s work was incredibly important to the creation of my own, this year her influence has lessened.

Her use of language and manipulation of language has influenced the duality I have created in my work, whether explicitly through the language - Expens(iv)es being a combination of expensive and expenses and how the reading and pronunciation of the word effects how the written piece is read - and the manipulation of thoughts and interpretations of the viewer themselves.

He combination of gallery and studio spaces in the exhibiting of her works has also helped with my realisation of the presentation of ETB. 

Also discussed/Discussed further in my dissertation.

Johan Deckmann Links 1 2 

Deckmann paints short statements onto book covers which hold somewhat private thoughts or information. The covers are then framed and photographed and aired to the world.

Katrina Palmer

It was Palmer’s work that cemented for me that writing and longer form writings can be art. Statement artists such as Wasted Rita, Lawrence Weiner, Johan Deckmann and Seamus Gallagher all told me that short but precisely focused statements can be presented as art outside of the literary sense of words, but Palmer’s works such as Geraldine The Goat  presented ‘story-telling’ as an art form outside of the traditional view of the narrative. 

Lars Laumann Berlinmuren Links 1

With Berlinmuren being a mockumentary of sorts following the true stories of two women in love with the Berlin wall.

The oddity of real events is something I want to replicate within my work while combining it with mundanity and ‘true’ extraordinary ideas.

Lauren Wolcott Some of The Lied I Have Told Links 1

The use of own thoughts and hidden feelings helped in creating the graffiti in all of my installation-intervention works.

Lawrence Weiner

Weiner has been a heavy influence upon myself, many through his discussion of what is art and how it is created or perceived or situated with Siegelaub and the others (see notes on the Siegelaub interview and the Lawrence Weiner book).

However I did not come to his work until late into this year, but his use of text as art to create a dynamic between thought and space is incredibly interesting to myself, and with a quick google search is apparently so with a mass of artists worldwide.

Mark Wallinger Link 1

Richard Littler Links 1 2 3 

Littler is the creator of Scarfolk, the blog, youtube channel and book that shows the town of Scarfolk that is stuck in the decade of the 1970s.

Scarfolk is a major influence for me: ‘for more information’, the use of posters to imply information without actually giving any, the over arching power of the town council and how they control the output of the town. 

With the book it is presented as a found document of writings by a father who is searching for his missing sons in Scarfolk. The legitimacy of Scarfolk is pushed by the printed document and its layout of the book makes it feel like a real guide to Scarfolk and his history as well as a documented search.

Littler makes the works look relevant to the time they are supposedly from while referencing current events as well (such as the election of Trump). The posters and audio-visual works on the youtube are convincing enough some people state that they remember them from their childhood in the 1970s, even though they were not created until 2009-now.

Also discussed/Discussed further in my dissertation.

Richard Prince Links 1 2 

Prince’s ideas on appropriate in art/as art have always been a point of contention for me. The copying exactly of a piece (in his sense redeveloping an image) does not create a new art piece, or an art piece you can apply your own name to, but using ‘found’ images to create different works in a major part of my work. Such as using the idea of bubblegum broccoli from McDonalds or the image of Apple’s Macbook.

Samuel Beckett Links 1

The performance an execution of Not I aided the production of the script and performance of (I)nformation H(eye)ghway. Beckett demanded perfect speech of the script but a continuous babble of words becoming unable to be understood, while the actress is strapped into a harness and suspended above the ground for the entire performance. Her endurance is part of the performance and the only object the viewer is given is the gaping mouth.

Seamus Gallagher Links 1 2

I discovered Gallagher’s work on instagram mid-November, and the worry became that the work I was producing at the time was too similar to his (the classifieds).

However both of us have developed down different avenues from a similar starting point over he same span of time.

His work has shown me how the ideas I have can work through a different aesthetic and process and has influenced some of the book covers made for A(I) and ETB.

Wasted Rita Links 1

Her fly-posters were the most interesting to me at Dismaland. The miminalistic images she creates through the use of private-made-public statements on faded papers are incredibly pleasing to me.

Also discussed/Discussed further in my dissertation.