#/* Not sure when this thread takes place but assuming before 2010 */

[not-that-dillinger]

Ed curled his fingers lightly around Jet's, the sensation of warm hands in his grounding. He turned to Jet, focusing intently on his eyes.

"I--" even at a whisper, his heart raced and his breath caught in his throat, his voice too loud in his own ears.

He wasn't sure how to answer, even if he could.

He'd never really been one for movies, even before he started at Encom, and now that he spent most of his day staring at a computer screen, staring at another screen during his free time was more likely to cause a migraine than help him relax. Today Ed needed the distraction.

He glanced at the stack of DVD cases on the TV stand. Most of them were an eclectic collection of telenovellas, Bollywood, French, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic films that had once belonged to Hjordis, though Ed did enjoy them when she convinced him to watch them with her. Of the ones that were his were the complete series of Columbo, Deep Space Nine, and the original Scooby-Doo series, The Dead Poets Society, The Goonies, The Princess Bride, Twister, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Jumanji, three different productions of Les Miserables, and several Miss Marple and Sherlock Holmes adaptations.

...Ed wasn't sure he had a favorite.

He had to answer Jet's question. Saying he didn't have one was just... weird.

...There was a Bollywood film he'd seen recently on a whim that reminded him of one of the ones Hjordis had liked.

Three Idiots is good, he gently tapped in Morse Code on Jet's hand.

Ed... didn't quite hear Jet, too lost to his panicked thoughts to really process anything, though warmth of Jet's forehead on his seemed to pull him out of it slightly.

He glanced around for the puzzle book, though even that didn't seem to successfully divert his attention this time.

[eyrieofsynapses]

First Thoughts on YJ S4 Panel

WARNING: SPOILERS for the DC Fandome YJ S4 panel!

Okay, before I start chattering away, can I just saw how much I love this title poster? Because I love it. LOOK AT IT. LOOK AT HOW BADASS IT IS. 

Warning: this first bit is a teeny bit ranty, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t genuinely love the panel. It was really fun, but I have a few gripes with the amount of information we got. If you wanna cut straight to the cheery bits, check under the cut.

So... uh. I’m not gonna say I’m disappointed? Because I’m not, this was good, we got info, it was nice to see the voice actors. But I’m... underwhelmed. I definitely wasn’t expecting a lot but this was still, mm, not as much as I thought we’d get. No poster, no previews of character designs, not a peep as to when we’re getting the new season, nothing on where it’ll be streaming, nothing as to new characters, nothing as to who’s going to be the villain, and the Q&A session was maaaayyybe 3 minutes long. Oof, guys. Thought you said you’d leave us with something that’d leave us “more than just ‘whelmed.’” 

Essentially all we got was the title, and a few snippets of information regarding what the current status of the Team and its characters is. They didn’t really get the chance to talk to us at all about the actual season, either- I think Brandon spoke maaaybe three or four times? He got the title reveal, but, well, we knew that already, not that it’s their fault, but still. I love hearing the voice actors chat about their experiences and we got none of that, so that was disappointing. I’m wondering if there wasn’t some material cut, actually, because I distinctly recall seeing a clip on Twitter with Phil Lamarr talking about what it was like returning to the show, and it wasn’t in this. So what’s the deal, DC? Short-changing us on YJ again? When are we gonna get some actual news? 

There is the little problem that their big reveal of the title was spoiled, oh, maybe three or four months ago, and that isn’t their fault, but it does make that revelation more of an “okay, well, glad that’s confirmed” rather than an “OH MY GODS IT’S PHANTOMS WHAAAAAAAT” like I think they were hoping. Still, that’s definitely exciting to hear, and the new title poster looks cool. 

I got a “WHAT!!!” moment maaayybe three times, which is significantly less than I thought I would. There just wasn’t that much new info. But I think that’s less of a Grandon/production team problem and more of a world state and DC problem. I’m not annoyed at them, I’m annoyed at DC and at the pandemic, because I’m willing to bet their snippet was cut short by DC and what information they could’ve revealed just isn’t ready yet because of current events. Probably we would’ve gotten character designs if it weren’t for that.

As for the audio play, it was pretty good. They were definitely struggling what with having a distinct lack of people to pull from for a voice cast, but made some tongue-in-cheek references to it to take off the edge. I don’t think I realized just how many people voice for YJ until now... or how many characters each actor does. It’s a bit janky, and weird what with the arguing over who’s narrating the story (why, are they telling us the story, or are they telling it to someone else? Are you breaking the fourth wall, are you not? Make yourselves clear) but I’m blaming that on the fact that they’re more used to scripts than they are audio plays. These are different mediums, so there’s an inherent gap there; this probably would’ve gone better as an actual episode. 

So, FIRST watch-through, here’s my HAPPY cheery thoughts and reactions, in no particular order! I might do a second one later, we’ll see. (Under the cut, because it’s long.)

Return of Bowhunter Security! 

Clipboard makes a comeback!

The Supermartian marriage has taken place and they’re making reference to taking a long journey with Conner, M’gann, Bioship, Gar and J’onn. So... Mars? Do we finally get to see Mars?  

Forager gets to be sassy! And a hilarious narrator! Which, c’mon, it’s Jason Spisak, honestly, I don’t know what I expected.

Ahahah, Jason makes the most delightful faces when he’s voicing Forager. (And a few flubs, but he’s good at covering them.) We all miss Wally, but man, he does a good job with this character. Also, hey, that’s how he does the clicks!

Rocket! Even though she had a relatively minimal presence, sigh. I’m hoping they build her character more this time, she always get short-changed. 

ARTEMIS IS LEADING THE TEAM, repeat, ARTEMIS IS LEADING THE TEAM!!! YES!!! 

And she also makes a reference at some point to being in this fight for ten years, which, HMM, do I hear a reference point for our time jump? They started back in 2010, so this implies that the season’s caught up to 2020. So... season one was 2010, season two was 2016, season three was... 2018, I think? So does this make the next time jump two years too, or am I off? It also takes place on February 23rd. Eh, either way, it’s absolutely not as long as a lot of people were fearing- heck, I’m thinking this might be the shortest jump yet. Yay!

I’m not sure if the Snapper Carr dialogue is cringy or hilarious. I’m going with hilarious because I’m betting this would’ve been great if it were animated. It definitely loses something without the animation. 

Is... is Crispin Freeman playing four characters? Five? Will, Roy, Jim, Captain Boomerang... I think I’m missing someone, I’m gonna have to go back and rewatch this later, but wow. He switches between them so fluidly, too, that’s impressive.

Forget Freeman for a hot second, Nolan North, what are you doing, dude? Conner, Clayface, Mallah, at least one or two others, with a LOT of animal noises included... wow, okay. I definitely didn’t realize how many of these guys do two or three characters. 

Phil Lamarr doing Brick, Black Manta and Kaldur all at once is definitely impressive. I’m gonna take a guess and say he likes doing Brick best. He seems to get a little grin sometimes when he’s playing the character.

Ahhh, Danica McKellar definitely likes playing Terrence Terror. Don’t ask me why, I’m just getting that feeling watching her. Villains are fun to play.

...Wolf? Where’s Wolf? Uhh, guys? Where’s our fluffy doggo? Don’t tell anyone but I’m scared. 

Oooookay, that was unexpectedly gruesome. Dehydrating a man into sand? I mean, okay, it’s Clayface, but we didn’t know that till later. Eeeewww. Y’all, ik you’re going more dark, but that wasn’t an image anyone needed.

Jokes about Dadbod!Will are... hhh, cringy or funny, cringy or funny... I’m going sorta funny for now. Not enough to make me laugh, but enough to make me smile. 

Okay, Will’s definitely still hilarious. Literally that entire scenario with Captain Boomerang was amazing, and only made better by the fact that it was entirely Crispin Freeman. The “are you the Green Arrow fanclub president or something?” “...you have no idea” moment, the “boomerangs are better and Batman said so!” “...okay, FINE,” FLINGING CLIPBOARD, Boomerang teasing Will for his dadbod and Will answering with a wicked uppercut... ah, man. This is 100% Roy/Will Harper and I am here for it. 

I can see some people disliking this humor, but personally, I’m gonna just sit back and enjoy it. YJ has some quirky humor, but honestly, if you’re part of the fandom and you don’t like it, why are you even here?

Huh, Raquel’s a vegan and nobody’s making jokes about vegan burgers? Nice!

Oh, my gods, Forager deciding that Lian and Amistad playing with the food is an educational activity is AMAZING, 100% in character, and something I really, really want to see. 

(Fanartists? Fanartists, pleeeeaaasse?)

Will and Artemis ribbing each other will never get old.

...wait. Hang on. Is Will the comedic relief character now along with Forager? Is this a thing? I guess it is. If you’d asked me who out of the original Team would replace Wally as the comedic relief back when I had finished the second season, I would not have thought of him first, but I think I’m good with this. It’s definitely in character to his comic version. 

Ahh, Conner and M’gann’s relationship is still... interesting. Still not sure how to feel on this one. But hey, they’re married (?) now? Uh... nice? 

Nightwing’s off on some mysterious mission, hmm? I’m assuming that’s because of Jesse McCartney not being there, but I think I’m gonna headcanon that there are Other reasons for this. 

Yay, Clayface getting redemption! I love this in the Rebirth Batman: Detective Comics, so I’m 100% down for seeing it here. 

Tim did that for Clayface! Sweet! Not a plot thread I expected to go anywhere from that one season three episode, but one I am very happy to see used. 

...more secrets. Uhh, M’gann keeping secrets from Conner is... icky... again... but granted, keeping them because of confidentiality agreements is, well, a better excuse than she’s had in the past. Still, this is getting old.

Huh, so Waller will let out the Team’s secrets if they tell anyone about Belle Reve. I think this was already covered in the third season, but maybe not so explicitly. The reactions... hmm. Of course Conner’s okay with letting out all their secrets (and M’gann’s willing to... go along with that? ...okay...?), but the others, maybe not so much? Hmm. I wonder what Dick would have to say about that one. He definitely has something to lose. Not sure about Kaldur or Artemis, though. 

Jason did NOT get to make any Wally references. That makes me even sadder than if he did make one that made all of us cry. C’mon, guys. Let him have his references. 

I’m always a little meh on M’gann, but hey, M’gann gets to be a 100% certified badass! Saving Clayface AND taking down a ton of baddies with telekinesis, yay!

Oh, my gods. LOOPHOLES. WHAT IS WITH THIS TEAM AND LOOPHOLES. I love them so much.

The Team signing on as Bowhunter Security- oh my gods, all of the Team in fucking Bowhunter Security uniforms- oh my gods, so very in-character, so very true to YJ, so absolutely goddamn hilarious, I wanna hug whoever came up with that. That is the BEST mental image and it is a CRIME that they didn’t animate that. 

And, of course, Kaldur just immediately goes along with it. The Team’s corrupted him fully now. I mean, we knew that, but he’s done now. 

Black Manta attempting to roast Kaldur for his security uniform and Kaldur roasting him back 100 times worse is wonderful. “I wear my dignity on the inside, Father. Where do you wear yours?” KALLIE I LOVE YOU 

Ooooo, Artemis is inviting Roy to the Team? This should be interesting. He’s definitely not totally stable, but it seems to me that Artemis should be able to more or less keep him in check. Hopefully. She had to deal with Wally for five years, surely she can keep Roy in check?

...hmm. We’re all thinking there’s gonna be a Red Hood arc... Roy’s joining the team... Roy and Jason did have that run as the Outlaws in the comics with Kory... and this version of Roy has the sort of temper and attitude that I can just see Jason possibly getting along well with... hmmmmmmmm... 

Hah, villain shenanigans. Having Task Force X argue all the time is in character and admittedly sort of funny, especially as Black Manta’s sort of pulling a Kaldur and playing the absolutely exasperated denmother. I dislike BM thanks to him being a Baddie and all, but watching (listening to?) him struggle to contain them is enjoyable if only because I like watching him suffer. 

Ahh, watching the VAs is fun. It’s definitely nice to see that little view behind the camera. There’s the little smiles, the tiny grimaces at the icky bits, the responses to various bits, the way their demeanor changes with each character, everyone egging Nolan on when he’s yelling for Clayface being disintegrated... I’m sad we didn’t get to see them chat, but watching them interact while they work is fun. Pity Jason and Stephanie didn’t really have any interactions, though, I bet watching them work together would’ve been fun. Ah well. Still fun overall.

There’s a lot of variation in where they are/what setups they have. Some of them seem to have proper studios, some of them don’t but they have mics, Danica’s on the lower bunk of her son’s room with what I’m betting are several sheets hung behind her, and then... well, then there’s poor Stephanie with earbuds and what I’m betting is her phone at her friend’s house XD Also, Greg’s library is really awesome, can I steal it please?

Green title card... I know people have been positing this for a while, but Lazarus Pit? Also, the thing people haven’t talked about: Mars?! Is this a nod to the Martians, since M’gann, Conner, Gar and J’onn seem to be going there? 

Lots of speculation regarding Phantoms, but that’s been going around for a while, so *shrug* I’m not gonna spend any time on that for now.

Someone’s gonna have to write this out, methinks, for further examination. We’ll see if I get around to doing that or not before Fandome ends. I’m betting someone will record it and post it on YouTube, but a written-out version of the script would be useful. If I do, I’ll probably post it, so keep an eye out. 

So... season 3.9, episode 1? Hmm. Does this come directly prior to the fourth season? I kinda wanna say it does.

I have more thoughts, but I think I need to do a rewatch first, maybe in a little bit. Anyway... not what I was expecting, I sincerely miss Dick and Wally, but lots of funny jokes all the same, and lots of interesting information on the fourth season even if it’s nowhere near the amount we wanted. I might be underwhelmed but I’m certainly not disappointed. 

[fmdhyejuarchive]

this task helped me remember how long my girls all trained lmao but hi!! i love tasks so much so below the cut is a quick summary of my girls as trainees. feel free to hit me up if you'd like to thread something!

yujin

got accepted circa 2011 (around april) and then made her official debut in 2017 so she trained for a good ol’ six years!!

was usually the first one in the practice rooms and the last one out! because she had something to prove to her family, she made sure to spend every single second she had practicing

she was that trainee who was always smiling and believed that good things happened to those who were patient and hard working!! wow where did all that positivity go tbh

overall, she was easy to be friends with, but i can also see some people being annoyed at how happy she always was and there definitely would have been people who called her fake!!

looked like she had no worries, and she really didn’t until like her third year when she didn’t make the cut for fuse. that was sort of her first strike of ‘what if i don’t make it’ and then by her fifth year she probably wasn’t as bright as before because she started getting scared that she’ll never make it 

sort of an all rounder so probably helped out a lot of other trainees if they needed it

suji

got casted by gold star summer of 2010! trained for four years and one month before debuting as fuse

while she didn’t exactly isolate herself, she didn’t bother being buddy buddy with everybody either

like i said before, she’s sort of that person who’s friendly with everybody, and someone would consider a friend and then realize they know absolutely nothing about her

was always a poor dancer (still is) so you can either hate her for that or help her out idk

give me someone who hears about her family that’s living pretty well off in england and assume that suji doesn’t really deserve a spot as a trainee, and that she should go back to england or something asldkjf

or maybe someone who helps her get adjusted to life in korea?? if it’s someone older, take her under your wings or something and show her around. if you’re younger, just drag her around everywhere

i always imagined suji having like silent enemies where people simply disliked her because she was an overseas korean who got casted, but then she’s a horrible dancer and so you just don’t feel like she should ever debut

someone who debuted after fuse who thinks that she never deserved that spot in the first place??? 

hyeju

hi she’s the biggest mess out of all my muses lmao 

she definitely had people who disliked her because she didn’t want to be a trainee in the first place but she liked the free dorms that were given to trainees, and she just needed a place to stay 

doesn’t help that she’s pretty decent at everything??? i mean lead dancer, lead vocalist so she’s not too shabby

she also worked pretty hard because she didn’t want to get kicked out lmao my girl needed a roof over her head

was also not a big fan of the whole competitive nature, so she definitely avoided anybody who gave her those vibes. so if your muse was self-centered and competitive af she probably was like woah calm down or she just didn’t bother speaking to you

also i realized i never specified how long she trained or when, but she ran away when she was fourteen, so she probably became a trainee a few months later so let’s say january 2009~to debut so a good three years

had a tendency to sort of tell people to chill and whether your muse took that well or badly, that’s up to them 

[ncfan-1]

ncfan listens to The Magnus Archives: S1 EP011 (’Dreamer) & EP012 (‘First Aid’)

In which I have a lot of questions, and I feel like I’m not the only one.

No spoilers, please!

EP 011: ‘Dreamer’

- The imagery of this organism like a strangling vine choking the city is nice and visceral and creepy.

- So we’ve established that there’s a limit to what sort of cases the Institute will take on. It’s nice to establish this. I do wonder about stuff like that in series like this, because if the Institute treated seriously every fever dream they were told about, they’d never get any work done.

- “I know how that sounds.” Yeah, if someone said that to me, the first thing I’d assume is, uh, very different from what you’re telling us, Antonio Blake.

- Wait, Antonio’s ex is named Graham? I… I compared the statement dates of this one and ‘Across the Street’, and I think this is in the right timeframe to be right around the time Graham from that episode was replaced by not-Graham. Obviously, if this is referring to a different Graham (and yeah, I know I said not to rely on coincidences, but I think the same given name isn’t as much of a link as the same surname would be, unless the surname was, like Smith or Jones or Patel) I’m following the wrong thread, but if it is the same Graham, then wow, there’s some nasty subtext to that breakup.

Of course, I’m not sure this is the same Graham we’re talking about. Graham Folger had such a pervasive air of isolation around him that it stretches my suspension of disbelief a little to believe he had a boyfriend. But I suppose it would explain why he was often out of his flat, and it’s not like having a boyfriend would have helped him much when he was at home. Alone.

- I winced when Antonio detailed how he didn’t wake up from the dream when he fell from the roof of Canary Wharf, and didn’t wake up when he experienced the phantom pain of the landing. I’m terrified of heights, and the mere act of dream-falling would have been enough to wake me—and indeed, I think it would have been for most people, if they’re having normal dreams. But this isn’t a normal dream.

- I wonder if Antonio’s fear of taking the elevator up to the twenty-third floor is supposed to be indicative of a premonition involving an elevator malfunction.

- So the death of the head archivist at the Magnus Institute triggers some catastrophic change in supernatural activity in London? Or was there some drastic change, and the Institute—and Gertrude—was at the epicenter of it?

- “And the bridge was knotted high with the flashing vines.” I checked, and a cursory search with a few different search phrases didn’t show me any statistics that indicate that a statistically large amount of people jump from London Bridge in suicide attempts each year. If this was taking place in San Francisco and we were talking about the Golden Gate Bridge, I’d have no doubt that that’s what the vines are about there, but here, I’m not as certain. It might be a combination of suicides and car crashes, or, if the vines have been accumulating for centuries, it could just be the accumulated deaths of centuries upon the structure.

- The Magnus Institute, as described… is not entirely dissimilar from my own workplace in appearance. My workplace being a combination of administrative offices and archive for a local heritage center. Where I work as an assistant archivist. …You might see why this disturbs me a bit.

- And now Jonathan suddenly has so many questions. As he should. I can understand his gut response being to assume that it was a prank, and can equally understand his being freaked out upon discovering that no, this was probably not a prank.

- So Jonathan doesn’t know exactly what happened to Gertrude, and didn’t even know she was dead when he got the job? His comment about asking if she was available to give him some job training, I think, confirms something I was wondering about—whether or not he had a great deal of experience as an archivist before this. He sounds fairly young when he’s reading the statements (and when he gives his assessment of them it almost sounds like he’s trying to make himself sound older than he really is) and his seeming inability to understand that it would be better to get the hard copies of the files in chronological order before trying to digitize or record them were making me wonder. Jonathan, buddy? I hate to say this, but unless you pull some archiving info out of your head to wow me, your assistants may be better at this than you are. Yes, even Martin. Possibly especially Martin, given that he seems to have been working with the Archive in some capacity since 2010.

- Yeah, Elias sounds sketchy.

- So Tim’s the only one of the assistants you trust not to pull a prank on you? I guess I’ll have to file Tim away as the serious one.

- “But if anyone comes in ranting about dreaming my death, then I very much want to hear about it.” I’m just trying to imagine Jonathan’s possible conversation with Elias after this. Especially considering how high-strung he seems to be.

Jonathan: Hey, I just read a statement about some guy predicting Gertrude Robinson’s death in a dream. Elias: Don’t worry about it. Jonathan: But the statement is dated to just before she died. Elias: Dude, it’s not your business. Jonathan: It’s not my— You didn’t even tell me how she died! She could have overdosed on heroin at my desk for all I know! What else aren’t you telling me? Elias: Don’t worry about it. You know it’s all head-in-the-sand management around here—or did you not figure that out when I dumped you in a disorganized Archive filled with thousands of incomplete case files that hadn’t been organized according to any system, with only three assistants and no other help, and without giving you the slightest warning about the way Gertrude was running the place? I mean, if that didn’t tip you off that I’ve got no interest in giving you guidance of any kind, then I really don’t think there’s any hope for you. Jonathan: *not-so-internal screaming*

Friendly reminder that this is the kind of assignment that can make people start fantasizing about killing their boss.

EP 012: ‘First Aid’

- Yeah, so I have a new favorite episode. Already. I know; I’m fickle.

- I can speak to emergency rooms never really being empty, no matter the time of night. I had to go into the emergency room at three in the morning, once, and it was in a small hospital in a rural area, and me and my parents still weren’t the only ones in the emergency room. It wasn’t full by any stretch of the imagination—again, small hospital in a rural area—but there were other people there. There was also an asshole doctor who didn’t want to take seriously the idea that I was in any real pain or medical danger, despite the fact that my lower lip had swollen to about five size its normal size and was starting to split open and leak pus.

- So we see the weirdness start to infect the hospital early with the too-quiet waiting room.

- It occurred to me that for the two men to have been burned everywhere on their body (the older truly everywhere, and the younger everywhere below his neck where there wasn’t a tattoo), they also had second-degree burns on their genitals. I flinch in sympathy, no matter what these two were getting up to that led to the burns.

- Oh, look, Jared Key’s back! I’m sure that won’t be important at all.

- I do wonder what happened that the burns stopped at his neck.

- And Jared has been tied to eye imagery again. My Tolkien roots are showing, but I am reminded a bit of the Lidless Eye, always watching.

- The bit about everyone in the hospital apart from the patients too ill to be moved disappearing (and later shown to all get up at the same time and file outside to parts and for reasons unknown) is pretty creepy. I do wonder how the patients who could get up and go outside fared, considering it was December in Britain, where it tends to snow at that time of year.

- “It sounded like… the growl of an animal, a rolling, angry sound, and I realized that the floor was shaking ever so slightly.” What was going on with the vending machine could potentially account for this, but I also like the idea of the slowly creeping horror, invisibly stalking the halls of the hospital.

- “And then I saw it. […] But I now saw that the one on the left, a clear-fronted machine that stocked bottled soft drinks, was shaking violently. As I got nearer, I saw why. In every bottle, in every row of the machine, the drinks appeared to be violently boiling. Cokes and lemonades and fruit juices shook and bubble, before one by one, the bottles exploded, coating the inside of the clear plastic front with liquid that still kept steaming and hissing. It couldn’t have taken more than thirty seconds for all of them to pop.”

One: great description. Two: I wonder what the people who restock the vending machines made of this.

- Jared is just as ambiguous a figure in this episode as he was in ‘Page Turner.’ His actions in the events of the episode itself are beneficial to the narrator—it’s possible that he saved both of their lives—but he’s clearly caught up in the affairs of things moving just beyond our ability to see them. Things that are not benevolent. He doesn’t come off as being malicious in personality, but he’s still caught up in a lot of shady shit. And we’ve seen him kill at least once, possibly at least twice if he killed his mother and didn’t just skin her after she voluntarily committed suicide.

- “Something told me if there was a coherent explanation for everything that had happened since the ambulance arrived, then I would be no better off for knowing it.” What, no, listen, Lesere, this is absolutely the time to be asking questions.

- “Better beholding than the lightless flame.” Something to file away, I guess.

- I hope we get more information about Jared later.

- Jared was released into the care of his mother? Wasn’t Mary already dead by this point? Let me check ‘Page Turner.’ *checks ‘Page Turner’* Okay, the events of the episode take place in December 2011, and Mary turned up dead in 2008. So what, is she not really dead? Is the ghost Jared summoned with ‘Key of Solomon’ able to move around outside of their old bookstore/house? Was that someone pretending to be Jared’s mother? Well, at least now I know what Jared meant when he said he’d had worse burns than the ones you get picking up a super-heated metal trashcan.

- And now Lesere feels like she’s being watched. Lady, if I was you, I’d be more concerned by that.

- Yeah, where did they all go? Because the patients who could walk went outside, too, and I feel like standing in your bare feet in the snow for fifteen minutes would be injurious.

- “The feed cuts out for less than a second, and is replaced for a single frame, by a close-up of a human eye staring back through the video feed.” Yeah, that’s… that’s not good. You don’t want these sorts of things to take notice of you.

[leftoblique]

These are excellent questions!

This is basically my understanding of things:

A lot of “vacant” housing is in transition: units that have just been built, units that are between tenants or owners, units that are undergoing renovation, units in buildings that are habitable but slated to be torn down and people have vacated their leases, etc.

Of these, only the last one is really viable for housing people, and doesn’t provide a lot of stability.

(A good comparison is unemployment; there is no such thing as “zero unemployment” because someone is always between jobs. Actually, there’s a lot of political similarity between this situation and unemployment that I’d love to get into. Maybe I’ll add onto this thread later? I dunno.)

There may also be market-rate apartments being held back because landlords are unwilling to drop the price; this is another place we could claw back some units with creative legislation (especially if there’s some kind of app-based collusion going on, which there is some indication of). I’m not sure this is nearly enough to house everyone, but it would certainly help.

We’d also get a lot of housing back from banning short-term rentals like AirBnB.

(Both of these would be deeply unpopular amongst the kind of old rich white centrists who vote in off-year elections, which is when most local elections are. That also needs to change.)

But the key item in that story, I think, is that housing units per resident has declined slightly in the past 10 years. That suggests that supply has not quite kept up with demand, and those numbers do not take into account people who left or never moved to the city (many of whom have to live in exurbs and have those terrible commutes) because of high prices. Pre-Covid estimates were typically on the order of a 10-15K housing deficit per year in terms of population influx vs. net change in housing. And you’ll note that during the ten-year period from 2010 to 2020, housing prices rose more than 80% and rent was up almost 50%, which suggests a tightening of the market.

Anyway, high-end supply keeping up with demand is great, assuming we’re actually managing that (and we probably have been the past few years - or more likely at least been closer) but there needs to be political will to continue that while we also do the other, more important things. Like I said before, it’s a bandage, not a cure. (Also not concentrating all that growth in places that displace marginalized communities, but that’s yet another thread. Oh and also the number of people who are housing-insecure is way higher than the official homeless count.)

I just don't really understand the modern discourse on homelessness. I mean the conservative position is pretty well staked out at this point (send the police to harass, arrest, and occasionally kill them) but what's the liberal messaging here? Affordable housing, sure, but seriously, what's the plan for people who can't work or otherwise make money?

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

here we go

As of Friday evening, special prosecutor Robert Mueller has officially filed the first charges in the Trump-Russia investigation.

Quick civics refresher: a prosecutor can get an indictment if a grand jury thinks it’s more likely than not that a specific individual has broken the law. 

So here’s what you may be wondering about this one:

WHO: The indictment has been sealed, so we won’t know until Monday at the earliest. We don’t even know if it’s one person or several people. You can get into the parlor game of who’s been told to expect charges, who’s confessed to solicitation on Twitter, who got themselves kicked off Twitter after a yoogely entertaining meltdown, whatever. Pretty much the only person in Trump world we can rule out is Trump himself, since it’s unclear whether he can be charged while in office. We’ll know when we know.  

IDGAF WHICH ONE OF THEM IT IS! LOCK THEM UP! LOCK THEM UP!: I know, right?

WHAT: The indictment has been sealed, so we won’t know until Monday at the earliest. All we know for sure is the scope of Mueller’s investigation, which is crimes related to the Russian sabotage of the 2016 election or any crimes his office comes across during that investigation. It could be espionage or it could be tax evasion. The most likely prediction seems to be that it’ll be one of the more clear-cut cases against someone they think they can flip. We’ll know when we know.

WHY NOW?: It doesn’t feel this way because Trump time is like dog years, but in terms of large, complex criminal investigations, Mueller’s is moving at warp speed. For historical context, the only thing we can even remotely compare this to is the Watergate investigation, where the special prosecutor was on the job for ten months before bringing charges against anyone – and compared to this, Watergate really was just a third-rate burglary. Think of how long it would take you to work through what we know publicly about this case. The office is working as fast as they can without screwing it up and now’s the time they think they can prove at least one case beyond a reasonable doubt.

WHY IS IT SEALED?: This is one of those things that probably sounds more dramatic than it is. It’s not uncommon for defendants to get the chance to turn themselves in before the charges are announced publicly, or for law enforcement to want time to plan an arrest that won’t turn into a circus without tipping off, say, a wealthy defendant with connections abroad in time to flee the country. Most dramatically and least likely – though at this point we have to get used to thinking of this stuff as a possibility – they might need to make arrangements to put a potential informant into protective custody. 

DID WE GET HIM? IS IT OVER?!: Sorry, no. This is, at best, the end of Act I. The tipping point may be coming soon, but a lot can happen between now and “soon.” You need to prepare yourself, because things can get darker fast. Someone a whole lot more even-keeled than Trump would panic with the walls closing in like this. Keep an eye on activist groups like MoveOn and Indivisible in case we need to mobilize quickly against an even more authoritarian turn. Firing Mueller, pardoning everyone around him, a show trial of Hillary Clinton, war with freaking Belgium – assume we’re going to have to put up a fight against something serious any day now.

The regime did so much desperate covfefe-flinging last week that it looks as if they had some sense this was coming soon, but even before this news dropped, there were quite a few developments that they seem to have been trying to drown out over the past few days:

The CEO of Cambridge Analytica contacted Wikileaks to try and get them to make the stolen DNC emails easier to search, months after everyone knew that Russia was behind the hacks. To be clear: the head of a Trump campaign data contractor reached out to a known agent of the hostile foreign power which was trying to undermine American democracy and said “here’s how you can sabotage our election more effectively.”

Remember Junior’s “Russia – Clinton – private and confidential” meeting we found out about over the summer? It turns out the Russian attorney who went to that meeting had talking points which were approved by the Kremlin. That means she was acting as an agent of the Russian government when she spoke to Junior, Kushner, and Manafort in Trump Tower. 

The administration is nearly a month behind in implementing the sanctions we placed on Russia for interfering in the election, but Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is eliminating the committee that is supposed to be implementing those sanctions. 

Right before the indictment(s) came down, Assistant US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Dana Boente announced his resignation, after apparently being asked to leave. This is probably not coincidental and feels… kind of ominous. The EDVA hears a lot of national security cases, which means that Boente is up on (for example) the case against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. This year, Boente has also served as Acting Attorney General and Acting Deputy Attorney General, which means he’s seen a lot of the Trump catastrophe up close. 

Trump’s personal attorney apparently sold several NYC apartments for millions of dollars over market value. Cash. 

Nevertheless, Republicans in Congress have gone full Inquisition along with the White House, announcing several investigations into a grandma in Westchester County. Right-wing media is, naturally, participating with their usual rabid glee.

This is 100% garbage and none of it deserves the time it took me to write out, or the time you’re going to put into reading it, but you can’t look out for the disinformation if you don’t know what buttons they’re trying to push with it. So I want to emphasize: there is no coherent thread here because they don’t need or expect you to believe any of their deflections. They just need to scream and yell and point fingers until a critical mass of people give up and say everyone’s corrupt nothing matters. 

Republican and Democratic donors paid for the research behind the Steele dossier and the House intelligence committee is ON IT. The specific donors were identified earlier last week. Fusion GPS was initially hired by the conservative website Washington Free Beacon, which in turn is largely funded by Paul Singer, a wealthy Marco Rubio backer. Once Trump got the nomination, Republicans lost interest in trying to stop someone they damn well knew was a threat to the republic, so the law firm of the DNC and Clinton campaign picked up the tab. Trump is trying to make this into a thing, but this is not a thing. All campaigns pay for opposition research; the only way this was unusual was that there was so much outlandish dirt on Trump for opposition researchers to find. This did not stop the Free Beacon itself from screeching the Trump party line the day it was reported that the DNC had paid for the dossier. 

There’s an investigation into the investigation of HER EMAILS. There is no similar investigation into the Trump White House’s current use of private email systems. 

There’s another investigation into a conspiracy theory which was debunked years ago when it was first put out by Nazi wife-beater Steve Bannon’s propaganda machine. It is….*heavy sigh* that in return for a donation made by one Russian national to the world-class charity Clinton Foundation back in the year 2000, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally and unilaterally made nine different government agencies sign off on a 2010 sale of interests in a Canadian uranium company to Russia. It really is as stupid as it sounds. The point is just to shove enough crap in your face that you assume there’s something ominous you’re not seeing. The reasons they’ve brought back this specific garbage seem to be: 1) as a way to work “Clinton” and “Russia” into the same sentence (NO PUPPET! NO PUPPET! SHE’S THE PUPPET!) and 2) there appears to be some tenuous connection to Mueller, who was the FBI director at the time, and who they are now furiously attempting to discredit. 

The storylines themselves are ridiculous, but the fact that they’re being spun is anything but. This week, Trump personally pushed the Department of Justice to lift a gag order on an FBI informant to testify about a case which was connected with a trucking company which was connected with the uranium sale. The White House is absolutely not supposed to pressure the DOJ in specific cases.

THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH HOW YOU FEEEEEEEL ABOUT HILLARY CLINTON. Save that shit for your therapist. This is the full coordinated power of the executive and legislative branches of the federal government mobilizing against a private citizen, apparently for the sole reason that “LOCK HER UP” grievance politics are the one thing the Pepes still think Trump will deliver. THIS IS STRAIGHT AUTHORITARIANISM. WE CANNOT LET IT WORK.

Also? The Russia investigation is the existential threat to Trump and everyone who’s thrown in with him – which is why they’ve focused on it so frantically – but there’s a lot of bad news they’re drowning out. Puerto Rico is still experiencing a humanitarian disaster, and what little recovery effort is happening is being exploited by Trump cronies. Immigration agents are terrorizing kids who need to see a doctor. Republicans in Congress want to slash taxes on the wealthy and are still trying to sabotage Obamacare. And oh, a bad Republican story which (so far) doesn’t appear to be directly related to Trump: Georgia was sued over potential security failures during a special election earlier this year, and the government responded by wiping the data. As you watch this unfold, remember: Trump is the most pressing symptom of the civic rot perpetrated by Republican party and his ties to Russia are his his biggest liability, but neither they nor he is the underlying disease.

[conundrumdumdum]

Loved Too Well

(Warning: this story contains themes that may be unsettling to some)

The jingle of bells blended into the light chatter of the small bakery as I pushed the front door open. Within the first few steps, I was enveloped with warmth, the interlaced smell of coffee and baked goods. Windows spanned the front of the store and one of the sides, allowing plenty of light to illuminate the wafting steam from cups and the smiles of people enjoying their day. This bakery was in the heart of a college campus in the city, a crossroads between corporate folk and students. Despite the wintry urban landscape that painted the windows with monotone colors, the interior of the restaurant was a warm, welcoming brown. Along the windows, booths with high wooden backings created private enclosures; a commonplace where young couples shyly interlaced their fingers and sheepishly smiled at each other. I walked between several rows of couples and people typing on laptops before I reached the end of the booths.

Peering around the final wooden backing in the row, I found a man hunched over a newspaper. His black hair was peppered with gray strands, matted against his head and encrusted with a scattered layer of dandruff. From the side of his face, I could see that his beard also had the same speckled color as his hair. And although unshaven, his cheeks were hollowed.

“Oscar?”

His bowed head rose up, and I was welcomed with a weak smile and upturned eyebrows that framed a pair of swollen eyes. I took the seat across from him and he waved the waitress over. After pouring each of us a cup of fresh coffee, Oscar looked at me again with a moderately warmer smile than before. I was finally able to get a good look at him: his green eyes were rimmed with webbings of red veins, which fed into the blushed skin around his eyes. The rest of his face was translucent in contrast, with a texture similar to dried flower petals. I smiled back and hastily took out my notepad and pen from my bag. I didn’t want to make this meeting any harder on him.

“Well, before we get started, tell me more about why you picked this location.”

“Desiree always wanted to come here every Friday after her classes. We talked about anything that came to mind. It was amazing – there was never a moment of silence between us.”

Glancing down at the mug in his hand, Oscar swirled his coffee around. “That was ten years ago. Her favorite’s the cold brew. I always tried to tell her that the cold brew here was just ice cubes and the black coffee they made the day before – this isn’t a real coffee shop. We debated that one for at least an hour.”

Oscar smiled, lifted the mug to his lips, and tilted his head back, sipping his coffee. “She always wanted to win our little debates.”

I glanced up to survey the shop: From the front, I could see the waitress making her way around the tables collecting empty mugs and plates. Her voice was chipper as she joked around with a group of people dressed in suits. She knowingly whisked past the tables with the young couples who were too busy staring at each other to notice anything around them. When I shifted my gaze back to Oscar, I found him staring at the wall behind me with empty eyes, mouth pressed together in a firm line.

“Do you want to talk more about Desiree and your relationship with her?”

Oscar’s eyes immediately dropped from the wall to his half-full mug. After a few seconds, the edges of his lips curved up slightly. I flinched as he suddenly broke his statue-like stance and stuck his hand into his coat pocket to rummage around. His hand extended outward and produced a lint-covered midnight blue velvet pouch. I took it into my palm and pulled at the gold thread that closed it. Inside I saw a glimmer of silver.  I pinched the rim and lifted it out of the bag to examine it closer: it was a silver ring topped with a small diamond that sparkled in the sunlight softly falling through the coffee-shop window.

“After dating for two years, I realized I really loved her. Even though she moved to France for work, I knew she was the one. With everything that we went through and all of the memories we made, I knew I was going to propose to her…”

“What happened?” I asked.

“It just didn’t happen,” replied Oscar. He hastily grabbed the pouch from my hand and stuffed it back into his pocket.

“What didn’t happen? I mean, I don’t want to assume, but was that the time when she—“

“NO!” Oscar yelled. His sudden outburst made him withdraw into his seat and stare down at his cup again. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off.”

“It’s okay,” I replied. “It’ll help both of us if you just tell me about it. No rush.”

Sighing, Oscar looked out the window.  The snowflakes that collected on the glass slowly collapsed into water droplets. Watching the droplets collect together and trickle down, Oscar continued: “I was packing my bags and was going to board my flight to France that night. To make sure all of the pickup plans were confirmed, I tried calling her but it went straight to voicemail. Without thinking too much about it, I just assumed she was tired from work and wanted to sleep early so she could pick me up in the morning. So I rounded everything up and headed to O’Hare. As the plane was boarding, I checked my phone and I had 4 missed calls from Desiree. I put my phone on silent because of customs and border control – which took about an hour or so to get through.”

Playing around with his coffee cup, Oscar peered up at me and continued: “What went through my head was that she got sick in the middle of the night and wanted me to get a taxi to her place when I got there – which I would have been fine with, she has such a busy schedule. I wanted her to sleep early and not worry about me, so I called her immediately.

“There was no response. I got nervous then – I didn’t know what to think. I was so worried about her that after I landed I ran out of the airport without my check-in luggage. Thankfully she gave me her address earlier on when we were first planning the trip a few months beforehand. The taxi driver was able to get me to her place quickly.”

I scribbled a few notes on my notepad about his encounter. His fingers that were nervously rotating the coffee cup earlier had stopped their fidgeting. The skin around his nails was white and seemed rigid as his fingers flattened against the mug. When I looked up I saw the redness that emanated from his eyes had spread to his whole face. Little twitches from the side of his mouth made tremors in his unmoving face.

“Oscar? Are you alright?” I asked.

“I need a light.” Standing up, Oscar buttoned his coat and took out a lighter. “I’ll be back in a bit, feel free to order anything to eat. I’ve been keeping you for a while.”

His face was still stiff as he turned around and walked towards the entrance. The waitress that had been previously been juggling customers was handling the booth next to us. When Oscar passed her, she gave him a weak smile and made her way to our table. A jingle of bells signaled his exit.

As if on cue, she poured more coffee into our mugs. She smiled at me.  “Are you his friend? I haven’t seen him meet with anyone here before. He’s always sitting here reading his newspaper – no phone, no laptop, not even a Nook or tablet. Who even reads newspapers anymore? I haven’t touched a newspaper except when I had to paint a vase for my art class!”

“I guess you can say I’m a friend. I’m trying to…figure out his situation.” Glancing to the front of the restaurant, I could see Oscar through the windows that lined the front of the store. Puffs of white smoke alternated with the condensation of breath that floated from his mouth. The snow slowly dotted his black peacoat. After checking that he’d be away for a long enough time, I turned back to her and asked, “Since you see him so often, what do you know about him?”

The initial warmth that radiated through her smile was replaced by a scraggly scowl. “Ever since I started working here, he’s been a regular and always seems to be so…distracted.” She stared at the newspaper on the table. “I didn’t bother to notice before, but it seems like he brings in that exact copy of that newspaper every time. He always stares at it, and never seems to read anything else in the newspaper except one page. That’s all I got – hopefully you can figure him out and get him the help he needs.”

She walked away with her coffee pot to the kitchen. Left to my own devices, I picked up the newspaper on the table. It seemed to be in all French, titled Le Parisien. From what I could guess, it was an issue from 2010 in either June or July – whatever “juillet” meant. Scanning the front page, there were two pictures: one of the World Cup and in the lower right-hand corner was a picture of a blonde-haired woman with a pretty face. Her smile was bright and blue eyes seemed to shimmer even through the faded print of the newspaper. She seemed like she was in her mid-20’s.

A jingle of bells shook my focus and I quickly pushed the newspaper back to its original location. Taking my fresh cup of coffee to my lips, I watched Oscar as he made his way back to our table. He seemed to be more relaxed than before.

“Sorry about that, where were we?” he asked, stripping off his coat.

“We were talking about when you flew to France,” I replied.

“Oh, right.” A few moments went by before Oscar continued: “I reached her apartment and knocked on her door. There wasn’t any response so I knocked harder and louder. I didn’t know why she called me and my thoughts went through every possibility: she could have been robbed, she accidentally hurt herself, or she tried to go somewhere during the night…I thought of everything!

“I knocked so hard that her next door neighbor came out and shushed me. She couldn’t understand what I was saying, but I guess she knew that I was worried about Desiree. She helped me call her landline…yet we didn’t hear any ringing from inside the house. I was close to calling the police at that point and was asking the neighbor for the local police number. Just as she finally understood what I was saying and was about to give me the number, the door to Desiree’s apartment opened…”

Oscar’s face crumpled into his hands and his voice became muffled and wobbly. “There was a man who answered the door, with no shirt on. I was so fucking mad. I wanted to kill him but I knew deep down it was too late…”

His words morphed into a stream of sobbing as he laid his hands and head on the table. Taking napkins from a dispenser on the table, I pushed them into one of his hands and proceeded to rub his arm from across the table.

“Take your time.”

Using the napkins, Oscar blew his nose and dried his eyes, which were now bright, glowing red. I let him take his time to recollect himself. Without prompting him with further questions, he looked me in the eye and said “when I finally was able to see her face to face, I didn’t see Desiree – it wasn’t her! Her eyes were emotionless, completely dead. She’s usually always so joyous and shines her bright smile to everyone. Before shutting the door on my face, she only told me one thing: ‘I thought you weren’t going to come.’”

Oscar filled his lungs with a deep breath before continuing: “I didn’t know what that meant. We had been planning for me to come visit her months prior. I bought the tickets so far in advance too! It’s not like it was going to be a surprise to her. She even told me she was excited to show me around the river and the Eiffel Tower! I don’t understand what happened between us. Was it because of the distance that she decided to fuck another man? What did I do wrong? We had a future. We had everything set out before us. I gave up so much in my life to be with her – I wanted a life with her. I was going to fucking propose to her. I laid down in front of her door and started begging and crying for her to talk to me…”

Waiting for Oscar to end his rant, I jotted down a few notes from time to time. He went on for a few more minutes talking about his confusion about the whole situation. It was only after he noticed that he been running in circles with his thoughts that he stopped.

“I’m sorry, I just…I can’t come to terms with it.”

“That’s okay, I won’t keep you for much longer to dwell on this. I have just one more thing to ask you about and we can go our separate ways.”

Looking up at me, Oscar silenced himself, lips still quivering.

“Can you tell me what you know about what happened to Desiree in 2010?” I asked.

I saw a brief cringe flash across his face with my question. With that, I expected another outburst of emotion, so I readied my pen.

“About a year after that day, I was finally able to take another set of vacation days off of work. So I visited back in France to try and reconcile our love. But all I remember from that period of time is the image that I wanted to push out of my mind the most...”

“And what was that?” I inquired.

“I…saw a chair knocked over beneath her. There were large piles of mess around her living room—it was so chaotic! She had tied a rope around—I don’t wanna talk about this in detail actually, if that’s okay. I can’t sleep at night because of this. I ended up shutting the door on her because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing…I didn’t know she was going to end up like that. I just had no clue…I fully believe it’s my fucking fault. I deserved it.”

The denseness of the silence that filled the space between us put pressure on my chest. I cleared my throat to relieve myself. “Thank you for sharing, Oscar. I know it isn’t easy to open up about this.”

“Thank you for listening to my story. I’m sorry I’m a mess.”

“It’s alright Oscar. I’ll be reviewing what you said today. Expect a call back later on this week for further instruction.”

After placing a few dollar bills on the table to pay for my coffee, I slipped my pen and notepad back in my bag. Standing up and swinging it over my shoulder, I looked at Oscar, who was staring blankly at the wall behind where I was sitting. Figuring he didn’t want to say anything more, I put my hand on his shoulder.

“Take care, Oscar.”

I proceeded to make my way to the entrance, unwillingly letting the last seconds of warmth absorb into me before I would make my way out into the Midwestern tundra. With the setting sun, the light that filtered through the windows stretched to the other end of the store. The booths were mostly empty except for a college student staring at the screen of his laptop. Everything was quiet, as if the silence that filled the end of our conversation followed me to the door.

Pushing open the front door resulted in the jingling of bells, accompanied by a blast of cold air that encouraged me to tighten my jacket closer to my body. A flurry of snow spun around me as I made my way around the side of the store. I walked along the windows that fed light into the bakery. Upon reaching the edge of the building, I gave one last curious glance into the store to check on Oscar. He was gone.

[hekate1308]

Ad Astra Per Aspera

I swear I haven’t forgotten about Destiel, and like I said, my DCBB is definitely coming, I have just been going through Crowley/Drowley feelings - for obvious reasons - so here, have a Drowley ABO AU with politician!Crowley and artist!Dean. 

Enjoy!

The last place Sam Winchester expected to find his long-estranged brother was a John Oliver segment.

And yet that was precisely what happened that Sunday Night.

The theme of the week was omega rights, so naturally he and Sarah had decided to watch.

But Sam was not fated to take in much of the program, since only five minutes in, in a throwaway gag nevertheless, he saw Dean.

John Oliver was talking about “hope” states, where it was just possible that a more liberal Governor might be elected during the next term.

“And then there’s Kansas, where Fergus Crowley might – mind, I’m only saying this now just in case I can later say “I told you so” – actually take back the state from the Republicans in the upcoming elections.”

As an omega rights lawyer, Sam had of course heard about the Democrat after he’d decided to make them his signature issue. At the same time, he’d been a little suspicious, since not only had he never shown an interest before, but his contacts within the party had told him he had a certain ruthless reputation – and that he’d only become a Democrat to spite his mother.

“Of course he’s interested in omega rights, and not just because of politics – his whole mating story looks like the before and after pictures matchmaking services use to promote themselves. Do you happen to look like the weird uncle who’ll inevitably turn evil and betray everyone at the Democratic National Convention?”

A picture of Crowley dated 2007 appeared; Sam had to admit he looked out of place and decidedly moody amongst his own party members.

“Get mated and have a kid, it’ll fix it”.

Another picture, this one dated 2013, showed up. This time, Crowley was bouncing a baby up and down, looking decidedly happier and more accessible at the same time; as a matter of fact, he seemed to be conversing with Naomi Tapping, a well known pro-choice activist.

“Do you have problems with your kid?”

A picture of Crowley and what Sam assumed to be his then teenage son (he remembered vaguely that he’d been conceived during a one night stand and been brought up by his mother) arguing, this one taken in 2009. They couldn’t have looked less like family if they tried.

“Find a mate and you can bond over how cute their new siblings are”.

2017, Crowley and his son in a coffee shop. The son was holding an adorable toddler while Crowley was giving a bottle to the baby in his arms; there were smiles on both their face. It practically screamed “happy family”.

“Do you abhor these charity events you have to visit?”

Crowley sitting at a concert, 2010, an incredibly bored expression on his face.

“Let the arrow of love strike you. Congratulations. Every night is date night”.

2017: again, a concert, but Crowley was not sitting alone.

And that was how Sam learned what had become of his brother. Because that man, holding Crowley’s hand and being looked at adoringly by his mate, giving him a happy grin in return, was definitely the brother he’d walked away from when he had got into Stanford, and who’d been on his mind more and more often as the years passed.

“Sam?” Sarah asked, obviously concerned.

“It’s Dean” Sam forced out while John Oliver continued his segment, oblivious to what he had done.

“What?”

“Fergus Crowley’s mate... It’s Dean, Sarah.”

“Are you sure?” she asked him gently.

He could only nod.

In the following days, he did all the research he could.

Dean Crowley – he’d taken his mate’s last name, so that’s why the Google searches he’d started in recent years had led to nothing – was a sculptor already pretty well-known in Kansas who was slowly gaining fame outside of his home state.

The few articles Sam could find about how he’d come to be Dean Crowley all pointed to Crowley’s own interviews as sources, so he decided to simply watch them.

First, he found an old one from 2009. Since they’d met in early 2011, he was about to click away, but then he became curious about the man his brother was mated to.

He didn’t like what he saw one bit.

Crowley was by no means rude, but much too smooth; exactly the kind of career politician Sam had always feared he was. He thought of Dean as he had left him, passionate, deeply loyal to his loved ones, quick to laugh and anger. Could he ever...

But it had been so long...

He shook his head.

On to the next interview.

This one was from about six months after they’d met.

And immediately, he was struck by the difference.

Crowley actually smiled and joked a little with the omega reporter, made sure she was comfortable with an alpha in such an enclosed space, and when asked about his private life just replied, “It is all very satisfactory”.

It reminded Sam a little of when he had first met Sarah.

Then, around the one-year-mark something must have gone wrong, because in one piece, Crowley looked as if he hadn’t slept in several days, all but bit the reporter’s head off when he asked whether he had any plans to be mated, and was generally angrier and more impolite than he had been before they met.

That apparently hadn’t lasted long though. In fact, just a few weeks later, Crowley had once and for all embarked on that transformation that was slowly making him the darling of Kansas voters, being more relaxed, open, and happier than he’d ever appeared before; and it wasn’t long before Dean began to accompany him at events, causing a small uproar in the state when people realized that yes, against their expectations Crowley was in fact courting a male omega.

They mated soon enough, Crowley announcing the fact at an interview as if he’d just won the most important election of his life.

The children soon followed; the elder one, a girl, was about four now, the baby only six months.

When Dean had presented as an omega, the doctor had told Dad it was unlikely he’d ever be able to bear children. Sam knew he’d always wanted them. He must have been ecstatic.

John Oliver had definitely been right about the pictures, too. He didn’t found a single one of them in which Crowley didn’t look absolutely smitten and Dean radiantly happy.

He then followed their twitter accounts and spent the next two weeks stalking his brother’s life from the sideline.

From a publicity standpoint, they were pretty clever. Neither revealing too much nor too little, and always careful to keep their children as much out of the limelight as possible.

But there was still enough for the gossip-thirsty public to fawn over.

For example, one day, Crowley had tweeted “Surprising the mate. Just knew he’d love this”.

It was a first edition of Slaughterhouse-Five that must have cost some money.

Dean had almost immediately retweeted it, commenting “Not much of a surprise now, peaches. Looks awesome, but you really shouldn’t spend all that hard-earned money on me ;)”.

To which Crowley’s reply had been another retweet: “And here I thought you were too busy with your masterpieces for your show next week to be on your phone all the time”.

“What can I say? I miss my mate. Mary and Bobby say hi to their Papa, by the way”.

The whole thread had gone viral, with such comments as “Omg look at these cuties #goals”, “Did you notice that not only is Kurt Vonnegut often called an “alpha author” but he also didn’t ask him why he wasn’t looking after their children? #WhatRealEqualityLooksLike”, and “Seriously, I can’t. Where can I buy a Fergus Crowley? #ForeverAloneBecauseTheyRuinedMeForAnyoneElse”.

Of course there were the usual negative reactions, but they were far outnumbered.

Then there was an incident that had taken place only two months prior, when an “alpha rights” activist had attacked Crowley with a knife; the alpha had taken him down together with his body guards, but had afterwards loosened his tie slightly. Normally, he was impeccably dressed, so that this had been the first time the public had seen his neck properly.

“Confirmed: Fergus Crowley believes in equality, wears bite mark” the caption of the picture read.

Sam had Sarah’s too, but way too few Alphas bothered to, claiming that it was quite enough to claim the omegas themselves.

Of course this had gone viral too, and Sam was beginning to ask himself how he’d ever managed not to see these things.

“Ashahdgjhasgfjhgf would you believe it #TrueLove” one tweeted, another “Can someone please tell me how to get your mate to accept the bite #ComeOnItsBeenTwoYears” and someone else “Please tell me there are pictures of Dean coming to get him after that #IHaveAMightyNeed.”

Of course there were, and Dean had shown up with both of their children, clearly upset; even Sam admitted that the photo of Dean and Crowley lying in each other’s arms and scenting each other to calm down was touching.

“You know, you could always just call Dean. His studio has a phone number” Sarah talked him after several agitated weeks.

“I –“ he stopped.

She was right.

What was the worst that could happen?

As it turned out, all his fears of Dean being opposed to seeing him again after all these years were unfounded. On the contrary.

The very next weekend found Dean, his mate and their children knocking on Sam’s and Sarah’s door.

“Sammy” he said, drawing him in his arms, Crowley having the good sense of introducing himself to Sarah while keeping an eye on the kids.

“Dean”.

This of course was not the brother who, at twenty-two, had told him he was betraying his family by going to California without him or Dad; by the time their father had drunk himself to death five years later, Dean too had been gone from Lawrence, and no one had been able to tell Sam where he was.

“Didn’t expect you to call... but I’m gadl you did.”

“Me too”.

With that, Dean introduced his mate and his children.

“Sam Winchester. I have heard a lot about you”.

“Mostly good things, I hope” he said carefully. If Crowley looking at Dean in pictures had been telling, Crowley looking at Dean in real life was even more so. It seemed like he was about to burst into song at any given moment.

Sam came to know him better on Sunday; Saturday of course was entirely giving up to catching up with Dean as well as he could; and even though he found much to regret at having lost contact with him for almost two decades, the happiness Dean displayed at his life, mate and children, was more than enough to make up for it.

He got to know Crowley better the next day, when they took the kids to the beach.

They talked about their work and the bill Crowley hoped he would eventually be able to introduce, getting rid of the strict unnecessary rules that had been placed on abortion clinics.

“You weren’t always this outspoken about omega rights” Sam eventually began, careful not to anger him.

“No”.

Crowley looked over to where his mate and children were playing – or rather, his mate and his older child, while Sarah was holding the baby.

His face lit up.

“No, but things have somewhat changed since then”.

“Dean said you met at one of his shows”.

He also mentioned he noticed Crowley because the alpha followed him around the whole evening and he didn’t appreciate his posturing.

Crowley snorted.

“Yes. And by God was I an idiot about it then. Thank God Dean taught me better ways”.

He really was a clever politician, but he was also deeply in love with his brother.

And that was enough for Sam.

“You know” he admitted to Dean shortly before they left, “I never would have pictured you as a Governor’s mate”.

“Not saying anything about Governor yet, Sammy” he answered, his eyes sparkling. “But really, I don’t mind. We can make the world a better place together. Common goals are important in any relationship.”

“So when will I be the brother of the First Gentleman?”

“Let’s call that one a long term goal”.

“Long term” in this case meant that eight years later Sam, Sarah and their children stood proudly next to Dean and his family at Crowley’s inauguration.

[leatherjacket-lovesong]

leather jacket love song - part five (ongoing)

You sleep with your phone under your pillow and turned up full volume out of habit. Even though he never calls. Even though it's been months since he last rang you at three am.

(You're still 'there'. You're still 'his'. And you've a horrible gut feeling that no matter how many types of fiery hell he drags your friendship through, you always /will/ be.)

So when your mobile suddenly rockets Ian Brown into your dreams to rouse you from sleep, it's a damn good job you're a man of routine.

Rolling onto your back, screen flashing 'Elvis' pressed to your ear, your mouth wrestles with both a 'yes?' and 'what?' at the same time, as your half-awake brain tries to find the right greeting.

No 'hello'.

No 'mate'.

Even working at barely twenty percent brain capacity, you don't think he deserves it.

Only it's not Elvis who speaks. The voice mumbling down the line is way too soft, way too lilting, a little bit gormless round it's edge like the voice of someone who might forget their own name, and it takes you much longer than it really should to place it.

"Noel..." Your stomach sinks.

As far as your aware, the last time Elvis and Noel spoke to one another was the day Elvis moved back to his mum's. And the last time you saw Noel, the sketchy little bastard had been E'd out of his tree. You don't think it's unreasonable to have a bad feeling about this.

"Come pick your lad up..." Noel's voice is muffled into the mouthpiece as though he's trying to eat it, but his words are distant somehow. Faraway. Like he's speaking on autopilot and his brain isn't engaging.

Somehow, you're not surprised. Somehow, you'd expected this.

You snarl down the line, as you cram knuckles into your eyes. "Fucks sake, Elways. It's two in the morning. Just stick him in a taxi, or somethin'. Can you lot not wipe yer arse without me?"

Quiet on the other end. Just snuffled breathing and distorted trance waves on the wind.

"No can do, mate..."

"And why not?" You scoff, his incompetence sparking you enraged. Even ten storeys high on a mixture of what's likely MDMA cut with dog wormers, he should be able to shove Ellie in a taxi. "Knob stuck in a sheep?"

But when Noel doesn't bitch back and just /sighs/ instead, it suddenly clicks with you that maybe he's not the one being the cunt in this.

"Three reasons..." He finally says, in that rolling run-on voice of his, "Number one: he's on the floor... Number two: I can't wake him up... And number three: he won't stop bleeding..."

---

You remember little things.

Key moments.

Brief seconds in life that your memory locks away before they're burnt to dust by time and age.

They're rose-tinted, definitely. Perfect in every way the reality never could have been. And they're filtered with the sepia glow of nostalgia that awakens an ache in your chest.

They're unfaithful. (Like he is.)

Romanticised. (Like his is.)

But preserved. Protected.

Like Elvis in '95. Kicking his ball about in your front yard, skin sunburnt a colour to match his United footie kit.

And Elvis in 2000. Slouching outside the headmaster's office, blood smeared across a swollen but still snarling, burst upper lip.

Like Elvis in 2005. Sewing the first patch onto his leather jacket, stabbed raw fingertips dying the white cotton bright red.

And Elvis in 2010. Arguing with Noel over the redecoration of their living room, clothes flecked with wet oxblood paint.

Kneeling now, straddling Elvis's unconscious body with both your hands pressed hard into the groove of his boney hip, stemming the flow where a previously light t-shirt has turned magenta, though, you think...

(You hope. You pray.)

"Please, don't let me remember this."

---

You shout at Noel.

You don't meant to. You know, logically, that it's probably not his fault. You know, logically, that Elvis gets himself into fights he can't win all the fucking time. And you know, logically, that he's a dead man in these scraps without you.

But Noel's there. Conveniently. Looking ten shades of shit in the A&E waiting room.

And there's blood on your hands right now. Elvis in big red smears all flaking right down your forearms and every time you catch a unwarranted glimpse of it you have to swallow back the urge to throw up.

"Fuck's sake, Elways. He goes out with you for one night. ONE. FUCKEN. NIGHT. And this is what happens? THIS is what I have to wake up to?! You can't even take him out for a couple of hours without him gettin' knifed?? Without him nearly gettin' killed??"

It's early hours Saturday morning. A&E's swarming with obnoxious staggering drunks. You have to raise your voice over the noise to be heard.

Noel, decked out in a shredded Madonna t-shirt with a polka dot silk scarf knotted round his throat, and sitting a bit glazed eyed on a bench where you're pacing — waiting, worrying — barely makes a sound when he opens his mouth.

"I'm not his babysitter..."

"No, Noel. No, you're not." You agree, nodding, before suddenly leaning down to eye-level with a snarl, "But you're his fucken MATE."

Or supposed to be. You don't know what mad thought possessed Elvis to make him wanna go back to knocking about with Elways, but you assume the two of them put past grievances behind them, kissed and made up.

Exasperated, you go on, "Where the shitting hell /were/ you while all this was kickin' off? Standin' back, watchin', scratchin' yer balls?? Because you sure as fuck didn't help him out!"

Noel, slouched forwards with wrists clattering full of bracelets hanging between his knees, drops his head in a response you hope is meant to signify shame.

"Wasn't my fight..."

"IT DOESN'T FUCKEN HAVE TO BE!"

He yelps, surprised, when you grab his scarf.

Then yelps, in pain, when you use it to yank his head back up.

"YOU TWO-FACED, SPINELESS LITTLE CUNT. It's not my fight either! Elvis hasn't even talked me for the last three weeks. But I still came straight down, didn't I. I'm still fucken' here, aren't I. I still give a shit, don't I. 'Cos I'm his /mate/, and that's what mate's /do/. But you wouldn't have a slightest fucken clue about that sorta thing, would you?"

Noel doesn't answer.

Noel doesn't even appear to be registering.

Instead, his glassy dew-drop eyes drift sideways and it takes you a moment to clock that he's focused on something else.

"Mr Wood. Mr... Elways?" The nurse glances down at her clipboard, then chances a timid look around your bristling shoulder at Noel. "Would you both like to follow me? We've got some news."

---

You're not the first one to speak.

Sitting in the doctor's office, fingers steepled as though in prayer beneath your chin, you're ready for it. Mentally and emotionally prepped.

Armoured. Waiting.

You can hear it. You can take it.

You've already planned out how to break the news to his mum.

You're not soft. You won't break.

A phantom sting round your ear, from a hand that isn't there, makes you wince.

("Stop crying like a big girl, for fuck's sake. You want everyone to think yer a poofter? You want me to put you in a dress?! 'Cos I fucken will, if ya don't stop. I'll parade you round the whole bleedin' estate in it!")

But it's Noel who reacts to the news first.

Noel, perched on the edge of a cheap plastic chair next to you, who suddenly slumps against the backrest with his hands over his face.

Noel who breathes a loud, over-exaggerated sigh of relief.

"Well... at least he's not dead."

Not.

Dead.

It doesn't start to sink in for you, until you're the one filling out his medical forms with a hand that shakes.

Until you're writing your own name and contact details into the little space provided for 'Next of Kin'.

He's alright.

He's not dead.

Lucky. The doctor had said. Extremely fucking lucky, from the sound of it.

Half a centimetre away from a punctured liver.

Five minutes away from a blood transfusion and you heroically giving up however much he needs.

But he's sound (kind of). Okay.

He's alright, of course he is.

Because he's Elvis. Flirting with the devil. Dancing a razors edge. Iggy Pop for the new generation and you fucking lovehate him.

Out in the corridor, Noel isn't fast enough — or sober enough — to dodge when you grab him.

"Don't think this is over, Elways."

"Awh, gerroff my back will you, Wood. Only went out with him 'cos he called me up suggesting it, and I was tryin' to be his /friend/."

---

You don't realise how anxious you are (how anxious he's /made/ you) until you nip outside to get your cigs from the car, and all of a sudden begin throwing up.

Doubled over, one hand flat on the car's hood for support, you retch hopelessly into the grass verge until your throat's all acid and your stomach's all knots.

Then, when your chest muscles hurt and there's nothing left to puke, when you've slumped down onto the concrete because your legs no longer want to work, when you're leaning back against the front tire, dropping your lighter over and over again as you try desperately to spark up, everything you've been hiding from for weeks — for months — hits you full force all at once.

You don't expect to spend your Saturday morning sitting knees up in a hospital carpark, sobbing your heart out into your elbow, but you do.

And you don't expect Noel to come out later and sit down silently on the ground beside you, but he does.

And it's not comforting.

It's not helpful.

But it's human. And it's enough.

And when the sky's threaded purple and the streetlamps click off, when you've soaked and snotted all over the sleeve of your hoodie, Noel pipes up.

"I'm going back to Cardiff."

And when you halt in the middle of wiping your nose to give him a quizzical look, he takes it as his cue.

"You were right," he admits, a bit too easily, a bit like it's a speech that's been well rehearsed, "you and Ianson. You were right. I don't have any mates. I don't have anything to stick around up here for. I'm a cunt. So after I sit my final exam, that's it. I'm off. I'm going back home."

You don't know how to react to this. It's rare you ever get anything poignant from Noel. You've got a niggling little feeling he's waiting for either devastation or applause.

You don't give him either.

Just sit perplexed, brow pulled low, waiting for more.

And he gives you it, because he's Noel — the fucking master of drama and excess, and you knew he would.

"He loves you, you know."

"What?"

"He loves you." He repeats, as though it's the most flippant thing in the world, "God's sake, Wood, everybody knows."

And before you can react, he's already up.

And before you can scramble to your feet, with a bellowing, "KNOW'S WHAT, NOEL?!" the irritating little shithead is already halfway across the carpark, replying only in shrugs.

You've got no fucking idea who or what he's referring to.

But the abrupt tightness in your chest feels a bit like both panic /and/ hope.

---

You watch him, watching the sunrise.

Little shafts of infant orange light sliding through the gaps in the blinds, slicing across a face swollen tender and bruised.

Little specks of dust caught in the up-draft, sparkling in the early rays like swirls of glitter in front of his eyes.

Little consistent mechanical beeps, muffled into melody, reminding you both where you are.

He doesn't talk.

You reason it probably hurts too much to open his mouth.

Or he's embarrassed. Regretful and ashamed of himself.

(You hope so.)

He knows you're there, though.

Leaning in the doorway to his private room. Arms folded. A man ready to take on the world.

He knows you're there, because you can tell from the way his head's positioned at a complete ninety degree angle towards the window and away from the door, doing his best to avoid eye contact and avoid your inevitable onslaught.

You want to be mad at him.

You want to shout.

It's all there, building tension in your stiff, squared shoulders and clenched, set jaw.

You wanna tell him he's an ignorant, selfish, intolerable arsehole. You wanna scream and call him every derogatory insulting name you can think of.

You wanna give him a bruise to match the black eye on the right side. You wanna demand he man the fuck up.

And he's waiting for it.

You know he is.

Because /he/ knows /you/.

But for some reason the words are sticky.

For some reason, propped up in a hospital bed, narrow shoulders and bird-like collarbones, pale and sickly and wretched and worn, Elvis — Mr. Big Mouth and Bigger Ego, Mr. Big Dreams and Big Grand Tragic Fucking Gestures to Break Your Heart Apart — looks /small/.

And it occurs to you that you never really thought of him as something transient, something mortal, something with a finite amount of resources before.

Your best mate is — and always has been — invincible.

(You both are.)

"I thought I'd lost you." It's out before you realise. Soft-spoken. All feeling.

A sentence you immediately wish you could scoop back into your mouth and replace with the spitting confrontation that you really want.

It hangs heavy in the air between you. Sentimental words like an awkward gift neither one of you wanna take home.

Until Elvis closes his eyes.

And bows his neck.

And replies at a length, voice no more than a fractured half sob in the back of his throat, "I thought I'd lost you, too, man... I thought I'd lost you both..."

--

Your coat pockets rattle with Elvis's painkillers, when you take him home on day three.

He's not better, but he's managing (not complaining) and you make a pointed effort to drive extra slow over all of the speed bumps to minimise his stoic wincing.

You think he appreciates it.

You're not so sure he appreciates you driving straight by his house without stopping, though.

And you're not so sure he appreciates you pulling up in your mum's driveway, instead.

And he /definitely/ doesn't appreciate the patronising glare you gift him.

"You're stayin' wi' me for a bit."

He responds with a questioning pull of eyebrows and you elaborate, gruffly. "I want you where I can keep an eye on yer. You're fucked if you think I'm leavin' you on yer own with a shit ton of morphine."

He waits in the car while you climb out, then saunter round to his side.

Through the windscreen, hunkered and half scowling, he reminds you of that sulking kid, eleven winters ago, who smacked a busy in the face and got you both arrested.

You wish your world was that simple, that straight-forward and innocent, again.

"I'm not gonna off meself, if that's what ya think." He grumbles, when you open the door for him.

Leaning down, anchoring an arm around his back for stability, your reply's muffled in a lank mess of unwashed hair as Elvis lifts himself slowly, cringing. "Don't believe a word that comes outta your mouth lately, mate."

In the house, your mum fusses, naturally.

In the house, Elvis huffs and puffs and pretends he hates it.

You busy yourself upstairs, making up the spare bed in Chantelle's old room, smirking.

Your mum's always doted on Elvis like he's her own son.

And Elvis has always secretly loved the way she's a mum who'll actually /hug/ him.

Later, as you help him up to the bedroom, taking one stair every two minutes because he won't let you carry him (you tried. And you're counting.) he shakes his head in frustration, then elbows you in the ribs.

"I don't /want/ ya lookin' after me."

It's biting. Viscious. Like the last warning snarls of a wounded animal caught helpless in a snare. And it hurts you. Not because he's ungrateful or thankless, or because you've gone to all this trouble and he doesn't give a shit (you can deal with that, you've had a lifetime of it.) But because even after everything he's been through this month, after everything with Mattie and the fight and almost ending up dead, Elvis /still/ won't drop the bravado, /still/ won't be kind enough to allow himself to be /weak/.

You pull him tighter against your side. Lift the majority of his weight as he clutches at his stomach and braves the next step.

"Yeah well, I didn't wanna come save your arse from bein' buried six feet under at three in the mornin' 'cos Elways is incapable of thinkin' like a human bein', an' I don't /particularly/ fancy standin' about 'ere for three hours while you climb these bleedin' stairs, but sometimes — me lil fuckwit of a friend, you just 'ave to put up with shit."

---

You fetch it. All of Elvis's shit. Trudge up the street to what little remains of the Ianson family household, tooled with a clumsily scrawled list of everything he 'needs'.

Phone charger.

Laptop.

Crap to wear.

That one big tattered poster of Joan Jett that you're convinced is even older than him.

"I'm not bringin' yer entire wank bank." You'd told him, earlier that morning, when he'd swapped the list for a tray of your mum's breakfast in bed.

"Oh, come on," He'd whined, puppy-eyed even above a mouthful of scrambled eggs and pointing a fork to the Westlife collage completely covering one bedroom wall — a fading ode to Chantelle's obsessively romantic teenage years (years in which you'd had to accompany her to more than one of their shitty concerts, because your mum had /insisted/. Years in which you'd been needlessly excited when you discovered a picture of Alex Turner as her phone wallpaper, only to have your heart broken when she'd admitted she didn't like his band, and only had it there cos she /fancied/ him...), "I can't sit lookin' at those grinnin' paddy twats all day, I'll do meself in."

And so that's you, off to pick up clean clothes and electronics and fucking Joan Jett.

And that's you, anxiously pressing the Ianson's doorbell and hoping Elvis's mum actually lets you in.

As a kid, you'd never really liked her.

As a kid, you'd been convinced that dislike went both ways.

And as a kid, your Chantelle referred to her as 'the witch' on account of the sharp nose and cutting cheekbones Elvis later grew to inherit.

And growing up, Elvis's name for her had been solely 'the bitch'.

Nowadays though, you think you understand her.

Nowadays, you think you kinda get it.

After suffering four miscarriages and an unfortunate cot death, there's only so much of Elvis one mother's nerves can take.

When she opens the front door, however, you're surprised at her immediate inclination of head, gesturing for you to come in. And when you step into the living room, you're surprised to find a sofa scattered with Elvis's belongings. 

"I packed up a few bits I thought he might want. Clean clothes, toothbrush, computer... things..." Elvis's mum is so quiet you can barely hear her and she doesn't look you in the eye when she speaks. "Probably loads of stuff I missed, though. So you're welcome to go upstairs and pick up anything else you think he needs. You'll know better than I do. I don't know anything about him these days..."

Half an hour later, after you've fished Elvis's phone charger from the colony of wild socks underneath his bed and return downstairs with Joan Jett rolled up under an armpit, you find his mum in the kitchen, hunched tense over a cup of tea at the table, head in her hands and biting at a trembling bottom lip.

"He's gonna be alright, ya know." You tell her. Reasoning she needs to hear it. Reasoning some fucker has to be the one who remains positive.

She sniffs and nods. Twitches a thin smile. Doesn't look up at you, though. You reason she's likely just too broken for it.

"I know..." She eventually whispers on an exhale's fragile edge, "I know he's safe with you. You've always been a good influence on him. You looked after him so well when you were kids..."

(...when you were /kids/.)

"That's right." You step towards her. Crouch beside the table so you're at eye level. So she has no choice but to look at you. No choice but to see that you're /sincere/.

You've got this. You're Dominic.

"An' just 'cos he's a grown man now, doesn't mean I 'ave any intention of stoppin'..."

--

You're going to be the death of each other.

You've always known it.

Only it hits you a little bit harder when you find him sitting on the back step, kitchen door to the garden wide open, freezing his arse off in nothing but boxers and his leather jacket ‪at three o'clock‬ in the morning.

The urge for a piss had seen you glancing through his ajar bedroom door on your bleary eyed shuffle down the hallway, and it hadn't been until you'd finished in the bathroom that it twigged there hadn't actually /been/ anyone in his bed.

Now there's a thin strip of bruised knotted spine between leather and elastic that you wish you couldn't see, and you're standing six feet away, shivering in your t-shirt and Calvins.

"What's up?" You ask, when you've stood a bit too long, when you're certain he's waiting for you to say something, "Shit the bed?"

A plume of grey anorexic smoke. "Go back to sleep." And the hem of his jacket riding up to expose tattered ends of messy bandages haphazard with curling surgical tape.

He won't allow you to dress his wound. He'll barely let you touch him, these days. But he's sitting in your back doorway at an ungodly hour, wearing nothing but that stupid fucking jacket he left on the wing mirror of your car, so that must account for /something/.

Unable (and a little bit unwilling) to go back to sleep, you do what any discerning English gentleman would do in this situation.

You stick the kettle on.

Make tea.

Then join him out on the back step, trying to ignore the way it's so cold your nuts have practically crawled back up into your body.

"Red moon." He says, flatly, swinging the last third of his cig your way.

You take it. A straight trade for the cup of tea he wedges between grazed up knees.

Above you, hanging over the field at the end of your garden, where you and Elvis wore down the leather on footballs when you were kids, where you sprained countless ankles and wrists, because Elvis always played dirty — the United scum that he is — and where you laid the early foundations of a friendship later cemented in political fashions and music, a blood moon burns its warning.

The lunar eclipse. The end of days.

And, when you've crushed the cigarette filter into the concrete and your arse has gone numb from the cold on the step, when Elvis has drunk all of his tea and half of yours and you've both been quiet for ages, he hefts a sigh, leans back, angles up his chin and closes his eyes as though sunbathing. "What next?"

It's cryptic, like always, but you hear it — all the unspoken words overloading the single silent space in between.

The 'where do we go from here'.

The 'what does this mean'.

The 'sorry', maybe.

(Or perhaps you're just projecting.)

And you wish you had the answer.

You wish you had some security.

Wish his outburst hadn't caused you to lose your always certain, always steady footing.

Most of all though... most of all you wish you had something else to say other than, "I dunno, mate... You tell me."

--

You remember Glastonbury, '08.

Standing in a muddy field among hundreds of drunk festival goers while ‪The Verve‬ light up your Sunday. You're not dancing, you're not a bloke who does that sorta thing, but you've got your head thrown back and arms outstretched, soaking it all in. And Elvis — still wired from managing to blag a barrier position to see ‪Pete Doherty‬ on the Friday — is singing in your ear with an elbow hooked round your waist, and you're thinking (knowing, really) "I am a fucking 'Lucky Man', indeed."

You remember it being easier then.

(Happier, maybe.)

More manageable, definitely.

Even as you come across Noel later on, when you and Elvis stumble arm-in-arm back to your tent.

Noel who's come along to Glasto with you, but in true Elways style has quickly gone his own way. And who, after three days, is nothing but an indulgent mess of filthy bare feet, white jeans rolled up to the knees, rainbow body paint and strings upon strings of plaited daisy chains. Noel, who, on his way to fuck knows /who/ in fuck knows /where/, makes wanker gestures and shouts "who's on top, tonight, nancy boys??" when the sight of him running passed like some kind of Millennial-Woodstock reject has you and Elvis collapsing into one another, giggling.

You remember it being easier then.

(The word didn't sting.)

When it was just you and Elvis and sometimes, now and again, Noel Elways. Before that night down The Crown, when a five-foot-nothing blonde shoved in beside you at the bar, playing wing-woman for her scary best mate.

Before Noel and Specks. And Mattie and Elvis.

Before you could listen to ‪The Smiths‬ without thinking of a certain tacky knitwear obsessed artist.

And you wonder, if you were given the opportunity to go back in time, would you do it all differently?

And you wonder, if you could replay ‪Sunday night‬ at Glastonbury when you were nineteen — if you could rewind to that precise moment Elvis wrestled you down onto the tarpaulin, still cracking laughs on the back of Noel's comment, and jokingly suggested; "Ohhh, Dominic, KISS me." would you do it?

Probably... probably.

--

You're down town, flicking through the stacks in Sound on a Saturday, trying to find something decent to buy for Elvis as some sort of 'get well soon, ya twat' present, when he turns up.

You don't even need to see him, to know when he shows.

Because Liam Gaffney, Sound's sixteen-year-old weekend 'record assistant' and your own personal shopper, who's been trailing you about the aisles regurgitating every article he's read in this week's copy of NME word-for-word, standing way too close for comfort and constantly getting under your feet, suddenly exclaims, "JUDE!" so loud he almost bursts your ear drum, then rockets off in streaks of smiley faces and tie-dye.

You don't turn round. You don't even look up. Just slouch a bit further and sink your head a bit deeper, and strategically navigate your way towards the very back of the shop.

It doesn't really work. You're not sure why you bother. Sound's no bigger than a shoebox, so there's nowhere for you to hide at six foot two. You've also just gravitated into the Northern Soul corner, and if there's anyone who's gonna be browsing round that bit in a parka on a Saturday, it's you.

(Or Polly, you suppose.)

You hear snags of conversation between the gaps in the same Happy Mondays album Liam's /always/ got playing on repeat in the shop. (Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches. Released five years before he was born and playing over and over again every weekend for the last twelve months. You're surprised his manager hasn't broken it in two.)

"Saved summink special just for you, la..."

"How much you robbing me, this time..?"

"Jussa tenner now for you innit, like. But don't be tellin' 'em all, right. Mates rates an' that. Can't 'ave everyone wannin a bidda de Gaff..." And then, mixed with the ringing of a till and rustling of a carrier bag, "Cheers. Ta. Your Dom's over there, ya know."

And you /feel/ it.

The hesitation.

The weighing up of the odds.

The 'should we/should we not'.

But he's gotta keep up appearances in front of Gaffney.

(In front of the whole fucking world.)

You both do.

And so he's there, a few seconds later, leaning against the rack next to you, with a smile that's more like a grimace and an upward acknowledging nod, "Alright, mate."

"Alright."

"Anything good?"

"Not really. You?"

"Couple of bits. Just picking up some stuff Liam put behind the counter for me during the week." He doesn't offer to tell you what they are. Beyond Morrissey and The Beatles, yours and Julian's musical tastes don't overlap that much. He's long since gauged your disinterest. So instead, as you side step down the aisle to flip through the next stack, he offers up a sudden, "I heard about Elvis." in a tone somewhere between sympathetic and sore.

You pause in your browsing. Feel the muscle tense in your jaw. "Noel."

Of course. You should have known.

"Well, kinda." He shifts uncomfortably on the edge of your view, "He told Sara and Sara told me, so..."

"So, Mattie knows." Because of course Specks won't have thought to keep her big fat mouth shut. Because of course the news that Elvis nearly died just has to get back to the poor fucking girl.

Sometimes, you wonder if you're the only one in your group of mates who actually possesses forethought and common sense.

Sometimes, you wonder if you were beamed in from a completely different planet to them all.

Julian doesn't confirm or deny this information. And you know he's doing that irritating pacifist thing again, where he's dodging questions because he doesn't want anyone to get hurt.

There was a time, many naive months ago, when you mistakenly found this quality a bit endearing. And there was a time, many naive months ago, when it was quite nice to meet somebody who possessed a genuine moral code.

Funny how everything that was once attractive about him, bugs the absolute shit outta you now.

"How is she?" You ask. Because you've got manners. Because you do care. Because it's been way too long since you visited and there's guilt collecting in your gut like a reservoir. "Not good..." he says.

(Not long, you hear.)

"I'll visit." You say.

"You should." He nods. And then, when the small talk's over and you've both put on enough of a show, "I should get off, anyway. I'm meeting Polly round the gallery at two. Don't wanna be too late. /Scary/ that girl."

"Right, yeah, course. Don't piss 'er off, will you."

As he turns to leave, relief allows your teeth to un-clench.

And as he turns to leave you think 'thank fuck'.

Only for him to suddenly turn back again with a mumbling, "Uhm, actually... Dom..." frowning and rifling through his Sound carrier bag and catching you completely off guard.

You don't know what to say when he slides out a copy of Radiohead's album 'The Bends'. And you don't know what to say when he slides it into your hand, track-listing side up, a paint-stained fingernail bullet-pointing 'High and Dry' just a little bit too long.

"Really good on vinyl, that one." He offers, looking you in the eye for the first time since he entered the shop, "Just so you know..."

--

You spend the rest of the weekend conjuring a tension headache from the furrow in your brow, stomping about the house and grunting like a Neanderthal whenever Elvis or your Mum try to strike up conversation. Because you know what Julian's implying. You know exactly what he's trying to say. You've heard High and Dry so much on the radio at work you're pretty sure you've absorbed every inch of it's meaning.

And you know you're a dickhead. You know you're struggling with this. You feel like you're fucking drowning, most days.

You don't need a reminder of your shortcomings.

So when Elvis confronts you, late ‪Sunday evening‬, you're laying across your bed pressing the heels of your hands into your eyeballs, trying to push the aches out of your skull.

"What's up wi' you, mard arse? You on your period?"

"Fuck off. I'm not in the mood."

Creaks on the floorboards. The soft brush of sliding cardboard. Paper, crinkling. And you know.

You - "Put that back."

Him - "Get lost."

The whir of the arms rotation. A dull drop of the needle. Static that reminds you of air before a thunderstorm.

"At least turn it down."

To your surprise, when the music kicks in there's no frenetic drumbeat, no growling bass or snarling guitar Elvis always favours, though.

Just the gentle lullaby notes of Lennon's white grand piano backed with that warm, vintage vinyl hiss you've always loved. And when you move your hands, Elvis is smirking. And when your frown starts to let up, he flops down beside you on the bed, deeming close proximity safe once more.

He lays in silence next to you with his eyes closed. Not touching. But near enough.

Just a presence.

A reminder.

("I am here for you, you know.")

And it takes a while - three songs in fact - but by the closing notes of 'Jealous Guy' you don't feel like you want him to fuck off any more.

"D'ya ever worry you're turnin' into your old man?" You surprise yourself with your honesty. It suddenly feels as though you've been carrying the weight of your entire twenty-one-year existence on your back at all times and now you're unpacking it, one hoarded forgotten object at a time.

Elvis huffs a laugh, "What? No? Worried about turnin' into me Mam, more.” It takes a few moments for him to clock on, but when you stare at the ceiling in silence he figures it out, "You're nothing like your Dad, man."

"I don't know..." the hands are at your eyes again, the bridge of your nose feels sore, "...I wouldn't be so sure."

You try to explain the rage dwelling deep inside of you. The ruthless aggression stamped like a branding into your bones. The way that every day feels like being stranded in the middle of a war zone, fighting uselessly between what you want and what you /are/.

You were made in your father's image. And while you want to believe that you're not a bad person, you know -- inherently -- that you are.

"Why don't you go and see him?" Elvis suggests, when the words have run out and you're not sure how to put your tormented thoughts into comprehensible sentences any more.

"Are you havin' a laugh?" The thought tightens like a pair of hands around your throat.

"Seriously, mate," he continues, "If nothing else it'll remind you just how different you’ve become..."

--

You're eight.

You're eight, when you ram Sareem Akhtar's face into the school gates and leave him needing four stitches in his eyebrow.

You don't remember why you do it. You're not sure you really have a good excuse. Elvis recalls something about him pulling Chantelle's ponytail to get her attention and kicking it all off, but in all honesty you'd been searching for a reason to batter him for weeks. Maybe even months.

You'd just been waiting for him to put a toe out of line and get on your nerves. Because you don't like his face.

Don't like the colour of his skin.

And he regrets it, whatever he did.

Because when he's curled on the concrete in a puddle of his own blood, and you're standing over him spitting "dirty paki cunt!" with half the school crowded round behind you, he wails his little heart out, the poor sod.

And when Chantelle — the fucking loudmouth, blabs about it all when you get home, your Mum shouts til her face turns tomato then sends you straight to your bedroom.

But your Dad, sitting in his chair by the telly, hunched over shining his Docs, just listens silently and smirks.

That night, Chantelle, Mercedes and Chelsea all climb into your bed.

That night, Natalie and Rachel — the two eldest — stand at the top of the stairs earwigging as your Mum and Dad fight. "It's about you, bro." Natalie calls down the hall.

And Chelsea — the only sister in your bed not currently curled up in your arms and sobbing into your neck, huffs a scathing, "Fuck's sake, it's /always/ about you!" then throws the duvet over her head as she turns her back.

Your Mum spends the next morning crying in the kitchen.

Your Dad thumps about the bedroom, stuffing clothes into bags.

And when you pause in the doorway, frowning.

(Worrying)

He gestures you in, then tugs you into a gruff hug.

"Proud o' you." His chest rumbles against your face as he holds you tight, rubbing the top of your shaved head, "So fucken proud, son."

You don't hug him back. You don't know how, or even if you should. The most affection you've ever had from your Dad is a clout round the ear. And he's always beat it into you not to be soft.

He's never — not once — told you he's proud of you before.

So when he pulls away and holds out his hand, old National Front tattoo faded to a red and blue smudge on his palm, you stand there a bit clueless until he grabs yours.

"Take care o' yer Mam an' sisters." He says. And it's not a request, but a command. "An' take care o' these bad boys." He goes on, plucking up your other hand, balling your fingers into fists and kissing each set of knuckles in turn, "Your best mates for life, these two. "

And then, as the realisation dawns on you.

As you become suddenly startlingly conscious of the massive fucking shoes you're required to fill.

"Don't you dare cry, lad. Don't wanna see none of those tears, now. Not today an' not ever. Understand? You're a fighter. You're not a puff an' yer not soft. You're a proud Englishman, born and bred. Hard as nails. An' yer /my/ son."

--

You knew he'd bounce back.

Week three and Elvis is out in your back garden, playing footie with all your nieces and nephews. Getting tackled into the grass by seven boisterous five-to-ten year olds. Getting tickled half to death and mass sat upon. Much to the delight of the toddlers, Poppy and Rose, who are parked in a double pushchair by the back door and gleefully smearing chocolate biscuits all over each other from the excitement of it all.

You're gazing out the window above the sink, over a mountain of soapy bubbles, while Chantelle stands next to you, armed with a dishtowel, the pair of you reenacting the ‪Sunday afternoon‬ duties from when you were young.

"He'd make a great Dad, you know." She says, as Elvis suddenly leaps up roaring, sending the kids scattering in fits of screeched giggles across the yard.

"He's engaged." You remind her. Reacting on autopilot.

A deterrent.

(Or he was. At one point.)

"I wasn't implying anythin', ya div. I don't /fancy/ him. I'm not after his /babies/, Dom. Just pointin' out he's good wi' kids, that's all."

"Well, obviously..." You direct your attention back to the washing up, "'cos he never bleedin' grew up."

It's quiet for a bit. Just the sound of you scraping the remainders of a steak pie off the bottom of a baking pan, Elvis mimicking a T-Rex outside and the muffled audio of the telly from the next room.

Until, "You'd make a great Dad, too."

And you're not sure if she's saying it because she believes you — like Elvis — have a special way with children, or because you — unlike your own Dad — stuck around to actually look after your sisters and your Mum. But either way it's honest. And either way it's a thought that both surprises and scares you.

"We're two players down for Elvis's football team." She goes on, grinning to herself. "When're me and you gonna contribute?"

"Never." You grunt, "I'm not 'avin kids. At least not after how /we/ grew up..." And then, because the opportunity's right there. Because the conversation's wide open. Because you know you'll regret it if you don't seize the moment. "I'm gonna go see him, ya know."

And Chantelle looks up at you, pencil thin dark brows pulled low beneath a poker straight curtain of yellow-blonde. "Who?"

"Dad. On Wednesday. Called the Visitor Centre last week an' they rang me back with his confirmation this mornin', so..."

"Oh..."

She's silent then, for ages.

So are you.

She stares at the plates slotted into the draining rack and you stare down at the bubbles enclosed round your hands.

Outside, Elvis performs keepie-ups for his adoring crowd.

When your sister speaks again her voice is quiet, /thin/, "You sure that's a good idea?"

And you huff a sardonic laugh, "Hah. No. But I have to... It's somethin' I /need/ to do."

You know she doesn't understand your mysterious, undisclosed motive and in all honesty, you don't expect her to. As far as Chantelle's concerned — as far as all of your sisters are concerned for that matter — your old man is just a cunt who abandoned his family right when they needed him the most.

And you know Chelsea, who was always closest to your Dad and who's never quite gotten over it all, still pins a large fraction of the blame on you.

Chantelle, though...

Chantelle's always fought in your corner. Even if she does have a massive gob on her that's got you into shit more than once.

"Anythin' you want me to tell him?" You ask, when you realise she's not gonna pursue the conversation any further on her own, "Got anythin' you want me to say from you?"

And at first she shakes her head. At first she scrunches her little pig-like upturned nose in disgust.

Until suddenly her face changes, and her jaw squares and her brow crumples into a scowl just like yours, and she looks you straight in the eyes and goes, "Yeah... Yeah, actually, I do... Tell him I hope he never gets parole. Tell him I said he deserves to sit in that cell 'til he /rots/."

---

You won't let him wonder 'what if?'. It's not something you're going to allow.

Because you know that feeling. You live with that uncertain wondering — the sometimes wishful thinking — every day of your life. And you know it's no good.

No good for you.

No good for Elvis.

So when he starts uhm-ing and ahh-ing and bitching and moaning and making excuses that are a bit light on their facts, you pick him up. Physically, pick him up. Then carry him, bridal-style, out to your car.

There's nothing even remotely fucking romantic in it, not when you're struggling to restrain him cos he's kicking off and mouthing off while simultaneously trying to knee you in the jaw. And not when you're dumping him carelessly on the backseat with zero concern for his comfort, then kicking closed the auto-locking door.

"I'm not fuckin' goin'!" His boots ramrod your backrest as you twist the key in the ignition then reverse out of the yard.

"Get a beef on all you want, mate," you say, flashing a nonchalant look in the rear mirror, briefly eyeing your bristling barb-wired boy hunkered in the reflection, all tongue and teeth and too much gum, "it's not gonna change anything. You're goin' to see her and that's that."

Parked in front of Mattie's parents' house, Elvis sits sullen and sulking and refusing to get out of the car.

Parked in front of Mattie's parents' house, you grab him by the scruff of his jacket and haul him out.

"She doesn't wanna see me!" He protests as you frog-march him down the garden path.

"How the fuck d'you know?"

"I don't wanna see her!" He insists when you're the one knocking on the door. "You can't kid a kidder, man."

And then, when you're pushing him into the Linnington family's living room like a reluctant toddler, pressing your mouth to his ear and a ring into his palm, "I'll come back in a few hours when you've sorted it out."

"Wait, what?! Wood! No!" And when he spins to face you he's less agitated, more helpless. Just big childlike worried eyes and incapable pleading hands. "Don't leave me. Please. Don't go!"

Because you're better at fixing shit that's damaged than he is.

Because you're the one who's always puzzled back together all the shattered pieces of his life before.

Because he's fucking terrified of his own inevitably built up, inevitably broken, perpetually battered, rapscallion heart.

"I can't, mate. Sorry." You've got an appointment at Strangeways in an hour. Today, both you and you best mate are facing up to shit in your lives that hurt. "It's all you now, son. Just you..."

---

You remember Elvis' first month at university.

Not because he tells you about it — but rather, because he doesn't.

There are no text messages. No phone calls. No voice mails left in the stupid hours of the morning when he can't sleep because he's bitten his own wild mind bleeding and raw.

And you don't call him. You want to. You pull his name up in your mobile's address book and sit with your thumb hovering over the 'call' button more times than you care to recount, but you don't do it.

Because not too long ago, you laid side-by-side, the world growing slowly beneath your bones, as you stared up at the stars. And you'd told Elvis you'd visit. Told him you'd come down all the time to hang out. But since helping him move into the flat — since you hauled four bags of crap and guitar up the stairs while he arsed about getting to know his new friend 'Noel', he hasn't invited you to come over once.

And you're not the type to drop in on somebody /uninvited/.

And you reason he's likely found a whole crew of mates cooler than you, by now. He always was the popular one.

So when Elvis does finally call you, howling laughter down the line like a wolf, before informing you that he and Noel are planning to throw their very first 'party' and asks you to come along, you realise you're probably just trying to spite him when you tell him that you can't.

You're covering a late shift that particular Friday for a guy at work, you say. Then an early shift the following Saturday morning.

"Sorry, mate. No can do."

And Elvis lets out a sigh so full of disappointment, you can practically hear him deflate on the other end, like a balloon.

"Aw, Wood... Seriously? Really wanted you to be there... It's not the same without you, you know..."

And it's not so much that you're jealous of all Elvis' new mates getting to spend time with him — you swear you're not.

More that you're just envious of Elvis himself, with this exciting new life unfurling at his feet, full of incredible opportunities that you can never have.

And yet... despite your excuses, despite the fact you know you're not going to enjoy it, despite the way you know you're gonna hate everyone, you still find yourself picking out and ironing a decent shirt the night before...

At Elvis and Noel's, it's all bodies.

Bodies clustered round the entrance doors to the building, smoking. Bodies dotting the stairwell, half throwing up. Reams of philanthropically drunk teenagers spilling out of the flat and down the hall.

You have to step over a couple wrapped around each other on the floor, doing thorough investigations of one anothers back molars, before you can get in through the door.

"Thought you had to work?"

A nip on your right arse cheek, hard enough to hurt, incites both a yelp and a warning bare of teeth as you spin around.

It's Elvis. Obviously.

Elvis, all crinkled laughing eyes and lolling teasing tongue and ballsy rogue-like hands that tear the world in two.

"Brought you a present." You say, conveniently side-stepping away from your excuse.

His attention is immediately diverted as you lift up the carrier bag from the off license.

His  smile slides into the corner of his mouth. "How thoughtful of you, Wood."

And you know that he knows it was all a lie. And you know that he knows exactly why.

Because he knows you, just as intimately as you know him.

But he's not going to challenge it.

You know that, too.

Elvis doesn't take the bag holding the six pack. Just rustles about, peels a can from the ring-holder and cracks open the tab. Around you, the bustling crowd in the flat churns like whirlpool.

"Made a lotta new friends." You remark.

It's not a surprise. Everyone has always known and loved Elvis. He makes it too difficult /not/ to.

"Lotta new birds, you mean." He grins, leaning conspiratorially forward.

Elvis is all warm body and cold can, and you're not sure if the goosebumps erupting on your arms are from the chill of the Carlsberg suddenly pressed against your chest, or the close proximity of his mouth.

"Come on. Lemme introduce you."

And while you'd like to believe that when he hauls you round the flat by the arm, parading you proudly from one cluster of party-goers to the next, beaming "Remember when I was tellin' ya 'bout me best mate, Dom?" and "Have ya had the honour of meeting me best boy, here, Wood?" at anyone who'll lend an ear for a second — you know, deep down, he's doing it because he knows you're unbelievably jealous of all of this. And you know, deep down, he wants to make you feel included. Like you're important. Show you off. Make you a part of all this too.

Because while he's laughably blind to things sometimes, (most times), Elvis isn't stupid.

And while he sometimes (a lot of the time) suffers from tunnel-vision, Elvis isn't selfish.

And by parading you about like a trophy, excitedly introducing you to all of his new friends, sharing funny anecdotes from when the two of you were young and making you sound much cooler and put together than you really are — he's resetting the balance. Cleverly easing away your anxiety and re-establishing your existence as the centre of his universe.

And later, in the quiet moments when the night's not quite over but all the frayed seams of the party are starting to gently come undone, he lays next to you, horizontally, on the sofa, legs hooked over the armrest, head on your thigh.

Across the room, Noel's wedged into an armchair with a girl on his lap. She's giggling. He's grinning. And then he's saying something you can't hear into the exposed skin of her collarbone, as he slides both hands beneath her skirt.

"How does he do that?"

You assume Elvis is not commenting on Noel's fingering technique.

(You hope he isn't.)

And that Elvis really means how does Noel /pull/.

You shrug. "Low standards." You suppose, you don't exactly know him much, "Surprising how much you can put it about when you don't care where it ends up."

Elvis' hair brushes your knuckles as you pick up the can wedged between your knees, then bring it your mouth.

"That why Dom Junior's not allowed out to play? Standards too high for the common woman?" He snatches your drink before you're done. And you don't think you're imagining it when you drop your hand and he leans his head into you, tangling hair around your fingers as though seeking out your touch.

"/Impossibly/ high standards." You say, looking down.

At him.

Your firecracker. Your minefield. Your thunderstorm.

Effortless and ignorant here, with a slowly sideways slipping smile and head in your lap.

Your best mate stacking another /feeling/ onto that emotional pile of dry kindling still waiting for a spark.

The teasing — mildly flirtatious — half-panting tongue is back.

"I know, I know," he banters, "it's not every day you run into a bird as perfect as I am."

[ciathyzareposts]

Darklands: Summary and Rating

Note how little the box art exemplifies the game’s adherence to historical accuracy.

               Darklands

United States

MicroProse (developer and publisher)

Released in 1992 DOS

Date Started: 24 May 2019

Date Finished: 13 July 2019

Total Hours: 65 Difficulty: Moderate-hard (3.5/5) Final Rating: (to come later) Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

Summary:

      A highly-original and innovative game from a rare entrant in the CRPG market, Darklands offers a compelling setting in the medieval Holy Roman Empire. Four characters struggle to gain fame and riches through a series of repeatable, statistically-driven, scripted encounters based on common themes and beliefs of the era, including escorting pilgrims, fighting bandits, storming the castles of robber knights, routing towns of evil witches, driving dwarves back into the depths of their mines, and slaying dragons. A main quest involving the Knights Templar and the demon Baphomet caps the experience. Nothing is quite like other RPGs: combat draws upon the realistic limitations and strengths of various weapons and armor; divine magic involves praying to saints and going to mass; and arcane magic involves mixing reagents into potions. Skills like speaking Latin and reading and writing are rare and prized, and many of the game’s perils involve (seemingly) mundane situations like surviving a blizzard, gaining entry into a city, dealing with an arrogant priest who wants a “tithe,” and getting a local lord to receive your party. Unfortunately, the “repeatable” encounters end up being “repetitive,” and the lack of traditional RPG approaches to equipment, combat, and leveling creates some unbalanced gameplay.

*****

Well, what a ride. Darklands offers perhaps the most original approach to role-playing that we’ve seen since the inception of the genre, and in several dimensions. The experience wasn’t always a joy, but I never stopped admiring what the developers were trying to accomplish. In this case, the primary developer (“original concept” and “project leader” in the credits) is Arnold Hendrick. It was his only RPG. Hendrick wrote responses to 13 pages of questions on Steam between 2016 and 2018, participated in a three-part interview with Matt Barton in 2010, and submitted to a long interview on RPG Codex in 2012. Thus, I was able to pepper my summary below with many of his recollections.        (Hendrick, I should add, is a fairly unique game designer in that he came from a background of board and tabletop gaming and never learned programming. It reminds me of how Irving Berlin became immortal writing hundreds of hit songs while never actually learning how to read, write, or play music. I sometimes wonder if I could make a go as a game designer or a composer with a similar lack of foundational skills. Perhaps–but I don’t think I’d ever have the gall to put myself out there as such.)

           As often happens when I encounter an innovative game, at its conclusion I (perhaps unfairly) find myself lamenting missed opportunities. First, for a game that offers so many different types of encounters, Darklands doesn’t really support much “role-playing.” It is assumed that every party is trying to be good, to gain fame, to enhance local reputation, to build virtue. For most encounters, the worst option you have is a mildly neutral one, such as bidding pilgrims good fortune without helping them, or ignoring traveling merchants. You can’t become robber knights, steal from church collection boxes, or join evil cults. You can be overly-zealous, accusing innocent towns of witchcraft or bursting down the front doors of helpless women living alone–but in those cases, the game goes out of its way to make you feel bad about yourself.           

Don’t burst in on a witch unless you’re sure she’s a witch.

           Perhaps the one exception to the “no evil” rule is the ability to attack town guards, as a way to enter or exit the city without molestation, or as a way to avoid paying a fine for sneaking about at night. The consequences of such actions are relatively severe–you find it hard to enter that same city ever again–and thus hard to role-play. 

My second regret is that the game doesn’t use its setting to its fullest potential. Early 15th-century Europe was one of tremendous upheaval. There were dozens of competing factions. There were two or three rival Popes at most times until 1449 and no settled Holy Roman Emperor between 1378 and 1433. When I started the game, I thought it was going to be like Pirates! and I was going to be encouraged to pick sides, perhaps favoring Bohemian rulers and thus losing reputation in Burgundy, or hustling messages for supporters of Gregory XII. I thought real-life events would have ripples throughout the game setting. There was none of that. Most cities were interchangeable.           

Slight variances in the names of key locations is all that distinguish most cities.

          Third, I would have liked to see better balance between the deterministic and random encounter and quest systems. Darklands features an early incarnation of Bethesda calls “radiant” quests: repeatable missions to fetch items or kill enemies that send you to a random area each time. The concept isn’t exactly new–it goes all the way back to many of the PLATO games, plus Akalabeth–but this is the first game to feature these quests in such detail and variety. I certainly don’t mind them, but I like to see them balanced with more hand-crafted, fixed quests and locations. In Darklands, the only unique quest locations were the Templar fortress and the Castle of the Apocalypse.

A game has to be good in the first place for it to spark so many desires for it to reach the next level, so despite my few complaints, expect Darklands to GIMLET well.

1. Game World. It’s a great idea: set the game in the real Middle Ages, but act as if the superstitions and rumors of the time were all true. In this, Hendrick said that he was influenced by the Warhammer tabletop RPG, which took its inspiration from the Holy Roman Empire. As pointed out in a recent thread, the creators thankfully didn’t take the concept too far, or my characters would have spent the game slaughtering Muslims or constantly in debt to Jews. But even subtracting the more offensive caricatures, it takes some guts to build a divine magic system on the pantheon of Catholic saints. I learned some new things about history, geography, and language as I played, which is always a bonus. The world is well-described in the manual, which makes a clear distinction between history and legend, and does a good job explaining the game’s choices. I just wish that the world has been more responsive to my party’s actions, and that it had (as above) made more dynamic uses of its themes. Score: 6.              

If only the act of praying to saints cured plague victims in real life.

           2. Character Creation and Development. The Traveller– and RuneQuest-inspired creation process is a lot of fun as you envision various career paths for your characters, so it’s unfortunate that no reference is later made to those careers. I found that development, while rewarding, was also very uneven, with weapons skills developing almost too quickly and most other skills too costly or time-consuming, or not improvable at all. In particular, virtue–a vital skill–is oddly obstinate, only increasing a point or two occasionally no matter how many pilgrims you help or witches you slay. I would have liked more opportunities to improve attributes, too. On the positive side, your character “builds” have a significant impact on how you approach quests and encounters, and thus adds some replayability to the game. Score: 5.

3. NPC Interaction. The various political and economic leaders that the party encounters aren’t really so much “NPCs” as “encounters.” They’re interchangeable ciphers with identical encounter options and no dialogue options–which was all disappointing given the various historical possibilities. The only real NPCs are the Hanseatic League representatives and small-town mayors who will join the party for a quest or two. They were a nice boost to the party’s power, even if they had no individual personalities. Score: 2.            

“Hanse” is really the only NPC in the game. He comes with pretty solid skills, and higher attributes than I think are achievable for regular characters during character creation.

          4. Encounters and Foes. Unfortunately, setting the game in the “real” world creates a certain paucity of enemy types–but there are enough to require the player to make tactical adjustments. The monsters are thoroughly described in the game manual; you get not just a description and picture, but also a sense of their motivations and habits. I also like that they’re slightly different than the foes you find in other CRPGs.

The crux of the game is, of course, its non-combat “encounters,” presented in the form of menu options with associated skill checks, forcing you to find tactics for everything from entering a city (without paying the toll) to disrupting a coven of witches. Darklands is fundamentally an “encounter-driven” game in ways that we’ve never seen before. Unfortunately, very little role-playing takes place in those encounters; the player is usually trying to identify the option with the highest likelihood of success, not the one that best fits the party ethos. The encounters also become repetitive and boring over time. Nevertheless, it’s an approach to RPG gaming that we’ve never quite seen before and may never again. Score: 7.             

The long selection of options even extends to the party getting thrown in jail.

           5. Magic and Combat. The real-time-with-pause combat system is an important innovation, although it hasn’t quite reached its apex in Darklands. (In previous posts, I outlined some precursors to the Darklands system, but it appears from the interview material that the developers had never been exposed to them and came up with the system independently.) I outlined most of my problems with it in a recent entry, and these remained problems  until the end. Nevertheless, the system is more interesting and more tactical than most of the RPGs on the market at the time, and I like how the skills system allows you to create some specialties among your party members without any artificial considerations of “class.”

I had mixed feelings about the magic system. I thoroughly enjoyed the pantheon of saints and their various uses, even if it did take me a while to fully grasp how it worked. I found offensive potions significantly under-powered, however, and I thought the alchemy system was far too complex and simply encouraged the player to purchase potions rather than make them. This makes arcane magic more of an “equipment” consideration than a magic one. Score: 6.

6. Equipment. This is another relatively strong category. I like the variety of weapons and armor, how they associate with various skills, and key considerations like quality, penetration, and encumbrance. Potions are also, of course, a major consideration, often making the difference between a difficult battle and an impossible one. But I was disappointed how few unique and powerful items you could find, excepting a few “relics.” And it annoyed me how many useful-sounding but ultimately useless items I carried until the end, including spikes, grapples, and lanterns. Score: 5.

7. Economy. Darklands has perhaps the first truly good economy in RPG history. (Previous games that tie this score were rated too high, for the most part.) It hits all my points: you make money from successful encounters and quest-solving; there are multiple ways to make money (including working odd jobs); there are multiple ways to spend money; and you never reach a point in which you are “too rich.” In a very real-world way, money is power in Darklands, and you can use it to compensate for party weaknesses–by, for instance, purchasing potions instead of making them, increasing virtue through copious donations to churches, and fronting tuition to increase your skills at the university. You can even bribe your way out of some encounters. I never reached a point where I stopped collecting equipment to sell, and I never reached a point in which I had too much money. I did think some of the quest rewards were unbalanced, however, with robber knights netting you dozens of florins while a more lengthy, complicated artifact quest might only get you half a dozen.

The only way a game could really improve upon the economy here is to offer more expensive and useful equipment and to offer the ability to purchase property, something that would have been within the game’s theme and I’m surprised wasn’t offered. Score: 8.          

In a game were potions are so expensive and you can give copious amounts to churches for divine favor, money never stops being useful.

         8. Quests. Another strong category. There’s a main quest, of sorts, as well as innumerable side quests that serve to build the party’s fame and fortunes. I particularly like that the party can assume only the quests that it wants and has the skills to successfully complete, ignoring others with no particular penalty. There are multiple ways to solve most quests (although they’re not really role-playing choices), and there are even some alternate paths within the main quest, albeit with an obvious preferred set of choices.

As I mentioned above, I would have liked to see more scripted, deterministic quests to go along with all of the repeatable, randomized ones. (Such had been planned but were ultimately scrapped as the game ran over time and cost.) Plus, it would have been nice to have more quests that better used the history and characters of the time. But overall, Darklands earns a high score here in contrast to most games that offer a main quest and nothing else. Score: 6.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. Graphics are a mixed bag. The still scenes that accompany most of the menu encounters are well-drawn and evocative, but the overland navigation screen is a nightmare in which it’s hard to identify entire cities. I thought the character and enemy icons were also poor. I found the sound to be mostly forgettable.

The interface worked mostly okay. I appreciated the keyboard backups for all of the menu commands. I would have appreciated numbered options on the encounter screens, so I could choose them. There are a few too many commands that are indiscernible from the interface and must be looked up in the manual; for instance, pressing “A” to equip items in inventory, or “F7” to set an ambush. I didn’t enjoy the number of places in which my party refused to walk in the outdoor environment, despite showing no obstacles, nor the micromanaging I had to do indoors to move the party through narrow hallways. There were other miscellaneous problems like the saved games not sorting in any clear order. Score: 3.              

I found it difficult to see key features and to get my party to move where I wanted them to move on the overland map.

          10. Gameplay. We finish on a strong note. Owing to the nature of the quests, plus the fact that every party starts in a different location, the game is both non-linear and relatively replayable. You could set all kinds of fun challenges for yourself, such as hitting a certain fame level within a certain time frame, or making a certain amount of money.

While I found the adjustment period longer than usual, overall the game had the right challenge level, and it’s hard to complain about length in a game that has no fixed end and lets you retire whenever you feel like it. Score: 8.

That gives us a final score of 56. That doesn’t quite put it in the top 10 list, but it’s very close, and the game clearly will contend for “Game of the Year” for 1992. You could easily envision a near-perfect RPG that would, for instance, merge the Gold Box style of combat, Ultima NPC interaction, and the variety of equipment found in Might and Magic with Darklands‘ basic approach.             

“. . . and ends.”

           Like many games that appear near the top of my list, Darklands was controversial in its time. In the November 1992 Computer Gaming World, Scorpia loved the setting and character creation process, but she had many of the same combat complaints that I did, and she found the world a bit boring in its uniformity. She had issues with bugs, freezes, and a lack of features that were fixed by the time of my version.

But although I generally found myself nodding with her review, I have no idea where she’s coming from regarding the ending:              

The party’s basic goal in Darklands is to acquire fame and virtue, to be remembered in times to come as great and daring heroes. While this appears to be a novel twist, something a bit different from the more common “Kill Foozle” objective, in actuality the game isn’t quite so different . . . . Darklands operates in much the same fashion as any other CRPG, with the party working towards that big encounter with Foozle, although the final confrontation, in this case, is not exactly a battle in the usual sense of the word.

          Not for the first time, I have to ask: what does Scorpia want? If a game with as original a main quest as this one still isn’t original enough to escape being painted with the “Foozle” brush, what game could possibly avoid it? “Ho, hum,” she seems to be saying, “it’s just another RPG where the party gets more powerful and tries to complete some big objective. Yawn.” As if there were any other satisfying way to structure a CRPG.

But the climax of Scorpia’s review is reserved for invective against the sacrifices the party has to make in the final battle, including the lead character’s reduced attributes (she made the same choice that I did) and the loss of florins to Pestilence. These things didn’t bother me as much as perhaps they should have, since finishing this quest essentially brings the game to a close. (Having these developments spoiled for me by Scorpia, on the other hand, would have bothered me quite a bit.) But Scorpia was livid:           

Probably some Bright Mind at MicroProse though it would be a Good Idea to have the player “make a real sacrifice.” If so, that Bright Mind needs a new brain. It is inexcusable to treat the player in this manner, to not only provide no real reward for success, but to make the victory a Pyrrhic one. For this point alone, I would not recommend the game to anyone . . . . This is a shame, since Darklands might have been one of the great ones. Instead, it turns out to be a game more to be avoided than anything else.

                This is certainly in keeping with a trend. Scorpia knew her stuff, no question, and was probably the most experienced RPG player of the time. But when she was wrong, she was just staggeringly, bafflingly, unaccountably wrong.             

I thought there was something noble in making such a big sacrifice.

        (To avoid some fruitless debate along the lines of “how can someone be wrong about an opinion?,” the issue here isn’t that she’s wrong about not personally liking the game. It’s that she fails to recognize that her own perspective is dominated by a relatively minor issue, and that most players–as their own recollections prove–would appreciate the game regardless of that issue. It’s one thing to say that “I didn’t like it”; it’s another to say, “it’s to be avoided.”)

Of course, Computer Gaming World was well aware of this, and by 1992 they were pairing her reviews with more temperate ones written by less-experienced players. This time, the counterpoint is written by Johnny L. Wilson, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, who had already read Scorpia’s review and was “horrified” by it. (I have to wonder: did he consider simply not publishing it?) His own column isn’t so much a review as a counterpoint to Scorpia specifically, particularly taking issue with her inability to “recommend the game to anyone.” Along the way, he shows that he gets Darklands‘ originality better than the magazine’s more experienced reviewer:               

I truly enjoy the variety of choices on the menus, by the way. What other game would give the party the choice of extorting a defeated witch for useful information; allowing her to give one alchemical formula; forcing her to repent . . . or killing her? In what other CRPG does the party really have to think about whether to let a physicker try to heal them or not? In what other CRPG can one avoid a major battle by asking a saint for protection? How many potential ambushes can players sneak around and avoid in most CRPGs? I honestly believe that Darklands gives players more authentic role-playing choices than any CRPG since Dragon Wars.

          Scorpia was unrepentant. A year later, in a 1993 summary of modern CRPGs, she concludes her Darklands summary with: “Horrible ending, with the player being shafted rather than rewarded. For this and other reasons detailed in the article, it is not a recommended game.” She really knew how to hold a grudge.

Dragon also had a mixed review (4 stars!) that complained about combat AI, the repetitiveness of some encounters, and a tough beginning, but otherwise called it “a great adventure and . . . certainly one of the best multicharacter FRPGs [?] we’ve had the delight to play” and recommended that the player “stick with it for a winning experience.” A completely positive review is found in the May 1993 Compute!: “This newly revised game [some bugs had been fixed] should give you hours of pleasure. MicroProse should be congratulated for a truly heroic effort in creating a game for sword, sorcery, and history buffs.”

I was curious how European magazines rated a game set in their back yard, but all of the OCR’d text that I could find just gave general platitudes and didn’t address the setting specifically. The worst (62) was in the September 1992 German Power Play (“a diffuse brew of game elements that are neither thematically nor technically compatible”), the best (90) in the September 1992 French Tilt (“MicroProse has managed a tour de force to renew the genre”). Most were in the 70s or 80s.       Overall, Darklands seems to have required a bit of aging to fully appreciate. In modern times, it’s hard to find a review that doesn’t stretch towards hyperbole. “One of the best RPGs ever made,” declares a 2014 review on “Rock Paper Shotgun.” In 2004, it was included on GameSpot’s list of “The Greatest Games of All Time.” It has a 9/10 rating (from 117 reviews) on Steam. It has a dedicated fan page. It has a wiki. The only thing it doesn’t have–bafflingly–is someone trying to remake it. There have been several attempts over the years, but they all seem to have fizzled out.

Alas, lukewarm reviews in its own day affected sales, canceling planned expansions of the game to other areas of the world and other times in world history. In his Steam interview, Arnold Hendrick said that the game had gone over time and over budget, “nearly bankrupting” MicroProse in the process, and that while subsequent sales were good, the company also received a lot of returns because of bugs, and then had to work on fixing the bugs. Hendrick blames poor approaches to project management in the era: “Nobody was teaching project management as a discipline, so the development process was poorly organized by AAA development standards today,” he reported in the RPG Codex interview. Such comments are echoed in Jimmy Maher’s coverage of Darklands from a few months ago. He portrays MicroProse owner “Wild” Bill Stealey as an eccentric, laissez-faire manager, personally uninterested in any game that wasn’t a flight simulator. The failure of Darklands left MicroProse in such poor financial straits that Stealey sold it to Spectrum Holobyte the following year.            In the Steam thread, Hendrick is quite pessimistic about the possibility of either a sequel or a modern remake of Darklands, believing it would cost so many millions of dollars that it would be unlikely to get enough venture capital for even a demo. In fact, reading his cost estimates, I wonder how any modern game actually gets made.               

The “real-time-with-pause-and-orders” combat system used by Baldur’s Gate (1998) seems like a natural evolution from the system pioneered in Darklands.

             The legacy of Darklands is difficult to pin down. It seems impossible that its wide-open world and procedurally-generated content did not affect the early Elder Scrolls games, and the Infinity Engine’s combat system (used in Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment among others) seems to be a natural evolution from the one presented in Darklands. But I haven’t been able to find any explicit acknowledgement from the developers of these later games that they had experienced Darklands. For what it’s worth, Hendrick himself considers Baldur’s Gate and its sequel the “finest and most polished” party-based RPGs ever made.

Darklands was one of only a small number of CRPGs released by MicroProse. I think it’s fair to say that the company didn’t really understand RPGs, the quality of Darklands notwithstanding. As we’ve seen, it suffers in some of its departures from standard RPG conventions. The only other two RPGs released by the company–The Legacy: Realm of Terror (1992) and BloodNet (1994)–are adventure hybrids that may ultimately fail to meet my definition. It really is too bad that the company never overcame its “RPG problem” because it produced extraordinarily memorable games in other genres, and it probably would be remembered as a major RPG publisher if it had built on Darklands instead of abandoning it.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/darklands-summary-and-rating/

[smoothshift]

A Tall Person's Guide to Convertibles via /r/cars

A Tall Person's Guide to Convertibles

Reference: I'm 6'4" - 145 lbs - Los Angeles - Single

Priorities (in order of importance):

HARD TOP

Essential for quiet, comfort, temp, safety, and security while both driving and parked. Requires compromising weight, performance, mpg, storage, and steep repair costs if it malfunctions.

4 SEATS

As a primary car, even if the rear seats are basically unusable, having them as back up is better than having no option. Plus, with the top retracted in the trunk, there'd be no storage for the 2-seater rendering it unusable for trips, especially with a companion.

COMFORTABLY ACCOMMODATE HEIGHT / LEGS

After road-tripping my whole life, I assumed the soreness and discomfort was an unavoidable aspect. Many economy cars don't have the thigh support people with long legs need, forcing knees to bend and the weight carried on your feet. They also have a more upright position that forces your weight to be carried in your butt - making it sore. A reclined sitting position distributes weight over the body and reduces sore spots. In order for a tall person to feel comfortable reclined, it requires the ergonomic adjustments frequently only found in luxury brands. Additionally, many convertibles have small/angled windshields where a tall person's head would stick out and get buffeted by wind.

SMOOTH SUSPENSION & FUN TO DRIVE

L.A. has terrible roads that are uncomfortable with a firm suspension. While a priority is a smoother ride, I still want it to be fun and responsive.

SMALL CAR

Easier to navigate and park.

LIGHT INTERIOR

This is both form and function in that light interiors are refreshingly airy and less claustrophobic/cave-like. Plus, you also don't want dark seats heating up when the top's down. However, light light interior does scuff and show dirt/stains - requiring more frequent upkeep.

________________________________________________

​

Taking all those variables into account, that leaves only a handful of cars to consider. I tried to test drive them all to compare side-by-side and make as informed of a decision as possible. Here's my personal reactions to each test drive:

CHRYSLER

200 / SEBRING

Ultimately didn't test drive due to there being none local enough in reasonable condition. Reviews say "strong engine" but "cheap/uncomfortable interior." That, combined with negative reviews, brand, and reliability caused me to give up on this one.

BMW

325i

This thread reports very little difference between 325i + 328i. Both fine with 328i feeling comparatively lighter/spriter.

328i

7/20 - Test drove 2011. Great in both style and size. Cabin is spacious with considerable leg room, but seat lacks thigh/leg support to an extent I struggled to find a comfortable position. Despite the leather, seats are more firm than plush. 2nd best windshield and viewing angle after VW Eos. Sitting closer to the window prevents the frame from obstructing as much view. I’m extraordinary picky about that and didn’t have complaints - especially since it did a great job keeping the wind off my head with top down. Steering wheel was so firm it didn’t feel powered and resulted in a hair trigger response that may be appealing for performance, but gets fatiguing after too long. Similarly, suspension was so firm/transparent, it’s too evident just how bad LA’s roads are. What killed it before even test driving was the abundant reviews from owners regularly paying 4-digit repair costs. It doesn’t sound like it will take long for the repairs to surpass the purchase price - defeating the whole point of a budget and going used.

335i

This article says 328i is superior to 335i due to handling power better.

INFINITI

G37

7/20 - Test drove 2011 Base. Great looking inside and out - the most elegant/classy. Leather seats were only a bit more plush than firm and lacked thigh support. Windshield offered fine/good visibility and the side window height was a surprising perk. Speakers in headrest sounded crappy, but A/C in seats was a godsend. Top down, I think I felt wind hitting my head over the windscreen. Curiously, it didn't feel as special with the top down. The drive was firm, responsive, with a smooth suspension that wasn’t numb. You can feel the car’s weight, but it handled well enough. Came closest to replicating VW's fun acceleration, but only after a bit of an annoying pause. 2nd place after VW Eos.

Q60

None under $20k, so didn't test drive because out of budget.

LEXUS

IS 250

7/19 - Test drove 2014 IS250C Base. Sexy body with aggressive looks. Leather seats were more firm/supportive than plush/soothing. Lacks the most in thigh support, but seat is otherwise sufficient. Windscreen was smaller/narrower than VW Eos and similar to Volvo C70 -but a bit better. Great side window makes up for it with refreshingly unobstructed views (Infiniti G37’s is even better). Top down, the wind only occasionally glanced top of head - seemed relatively minimal/normal. The drive was firm with the best suspension yet, but there's a numbness you have to fight through. Couldn’t replicate the fun acceleration of the VW Eos. However, something about it did “feel good” to drive. It still managed to evoke pleasure despite lacking clarity. 3rd place.

IS 350

This article says the bigger engine is worth it, but none under $20k

SC 430

7/18 - Test drove 2003. Good small size, yet comfortable leg room, thigh support, and headroom is just sufficient. Luxurious cabin has wood paneling, leather, and feels like sitting in a plush recliner. Windshield is too low/narrow and feels excessively closed-in with top closed. Top open has better visibility (than VW Eos) due to small windshield, but results in unacceptable wind buffeting top of head. Super soft suspension, but not fun to drive. Feels heavy and boat-like with imperceptible acceleration. As though all the attention was put to making the driving experience as smooth and invisible as possible at the cost of all responsiveness. Last place.

PONTIAC

G6

Couldn't find any local in reasonable condition to test drive. MPG 15 city / 22 hwy, but lots of people commend its reliability if taken care of.

VOLVO

C70

7/19 - Test drove 2010. Compared to VW Eos, everything about it seemed just...fine. Not better, not bad, just...fine. Not nearly as big of an improvement from my Honda Fit as the VW Eos. The two biggest downsides are reduced visibility from the smaller/narrower windshield and underwhelming acceleration/drive. Whereas the VW’s peppiness put a smile on my face. This cabin was fine with leather, if a bit firm and less plush than others. Comfortable and supportive seat with good thigh support and leg room. Wind felt a few inches above my head, but view/angle of road didn’t feel that great. Handling is nicely light and responsive - just lacked fun acceleration. 4th place.

VW

EOS

7/18 - Test drove 2007. Perfectly small like my Honda Fit with similarly spacious cabin and few inches of headroom. Good thigh support, leg room, and comfortable seats. Good visibility and skylight (which no others have). Surprisingly light/zippy drive with incredible acceleration that gave smile-inducing gforces. Smooth suspension. Tasteful design, not cheap plastic. Shocked by not having any complaints. 1st place.

7/25 - Test drove 2012. This second test drive was to make sure because I found it hard to believe how superior this car was too all the others in drive, comfort, and design. I was shocked that none of the "luxury" brands came close to satisfying all my requirements as well as the VW. But after test driving it again, it only solidified that this was unequivocally "the one."

_________________________________________________________

​

TL;DR

In the end, I purchased a 2013 VW Eos with 7,200 miles for $18,900 and have been driving it for a month. I did an inaugural 3-day road trip and was blown away by how comfortable and not sore I was by the end. Every time I get in, it feels like more luxury than I deserve...like traveling 1st class. I was complimented by 4 different strangers within the first week of owning it. That's never happened a single time before in my life. I love this car like Han loves the Millennium Falcon. It's shocking to realize how much I was missing before finding one that actually accommodates my body size.

As with anything, there are compromises. VWs don't have great reliability and repairs are costly, so I'm expecting pricey upkeep. It takes premium gasoline and costs $50 every fill up. If there's any problem with the roof, they generally aren't repaired and must be replaced for $10k (wondering if a rider on my car insurance is possible/worth it?). VW stopped producing the Eos in 2015, so unsure what costs/consequences that'll entail.

After personally comparing all the cars, I just couldn't get this one out of my head. I knew nothing else would make me as happy despite its trade offs. It may be wiser to go with a more reliable brand, but I'm hoping the low miles will help with that.

[latestnews2018-blog]

Christina Aguilera finds her ‘Liberation’

New Post has been published on https://latestnews2018.com/christina-aguilera-finds-her-liberation/

Christina Aguilera finds her ‘Liberation’

After a six-year hiatus, the pop star returns transformed, and says she feels like a brand new artist

In the 20 years since Christina Aguilera’s arrival helped usher in a new era of pop, the performer has shown she’s unafraid of transformation.

Aguilera famously torched the bubblegum teen-pop image crafted for her with a pair of leather chaps and edgier genre-blending music that announced a young woman in full control of her agency. It shocked America and the then 21-year-old singer was slut-shamed by critics, peers and even Tina Fey.

At one point she took her cues from the styles of the 1920s-1940s, committing wholly to a vintage pin-up aesthetic to match the modern take on vintage jazz, soul and blues she was exploring.

She’s assumed the role of a cyborg, channelled Marilyn Monroe and Marilyn Manson — for the same project — and re-emerged as a blissed-out earth mother.

Shape-shifting has always been a part of Aguilera’s charm, but her real appeal lies in that voice.

With a fiery range that recalled early Whitney Houston, Aguilera was able to separate herself from the pack of pop ingenues reaching superstar status during the early aughts.

For a generation who hit puberty during the great Y2K pop explosion, Aguilera was an essential voice with music that tackled self-empowerment, feminism, sex and domestic violence — subject matter her contemporaries were shying away from.

Just look at the lasting impact of 2002’s “Stripped,” her most ambitious work to date and an album that has since become a blueprint for the likes of Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato — young singers who have all come of age in front of the public and sought to shed their manufactured image the way Aguilera once did.

Aguilera has sold over 50 million records worldwide, notched dozens of Billboard Hot 100 hits, won six Grammys, dipped into film and helped make NBC’s The Voice a TV phenomenon.

Yet the past decade has been shaky for Aguilera on the music front.

Her most recent work — 2010s underrated Bionic and it’s mostly forgotten follow-up Lotus — wasn’t met with the same fanfare she was used to and a lengthy stint on The Voice left Aguilera’s fans wondering if she would ever return to music.

Now 37, Aguilera is undertaking her latest reinvention, one that was fuelled by the singer-songwriter feeling “disconnected” from her purpose.

“I had to get back to my own artist body and self,” she says.

Finding her way back to herself and her passion is the core of Liberation, her first album in six years.

Debuting at No. 6 on the Billboard 200 upon its release last month, Liberation showcases a creatively renewed Aguilera, but don’t call it a comeback: “I feel like a brand new artist,” she says.

Leaning mostly toward R & B and hip-hop, genres that have always informed her style, Aguilera’s new album isn’t about being progressive or chasing a trend — she’s not interested in any of that, she says — but instead it’s about showcasing an artist reborn after losing her footing.

The collection is some of her more forward-thinking work in years. When she’s not doing a mix of The Sound of Music with Michael Jackson, she’s crafting downtempo R & B with D.C. rapper GoldLink, smashing the patriarchy and navigating collaborations with Ty Dolla Sign, Kanye West, Anderson. Paak and MNEK.

And yes, she’s embraced a new look — this time, however, she’s found inspiration in her own skin which is why these days her aesthetic is more stripped back (her album cover is just her bare face).

While tending to her 3-year-old daughter, Summer Rain, Aguilera discussed the four-year journey to Liberation, her first tour in a decade and why she gave up The Voice.

For a while there it felt like an album was never going to materialise.

I do take my time with records, but Jesus, yeah, this one was a while in waiting — for many different factors and reasons. I love collaborating so much and taking the time to get to know the people that you’re working with and truly do something meaningful and not just commercialised and cliche. I’m not the artist that’s going to just get a bunch of songs from my label, record it and put it in a little bow and send it off.

What kept you away from music for so long?

I felt disconnected for a while and I wasn’t in the right head space either being in an environment that was just not good for me.

That environment you’re referring to is The Voice. You said you felt suffocated as a judge. When did it stop being fun for you?

Nobody expected [The Voice] to be as big as Idol or take off the way it did. It just became a whole different kind of a machine. You’d have two teams at once because they were overlapping seasons. It just wasn’t exactly what I wanted to be doing with my life. I’m not a spokesperson. I’m an artist.

The blind audition thing was very intriguing to me because it provided an opportunity for anybody to get on stage and be discovered, regardless of their look. Being in this business for so long and knowing how labels work and how packaging is so very important, that idea of not being able to see them was genius to me. But year by year, I kept seeing things that were not lining up with that original vision. The show progressed in a direction I wasn’t into and that I didn’t think was a lot of times fair.

Do you think there’s still any value to singing competition shows?

Look, everybody has their own experience, and I don’t want to devalue anyone’s own experience with any of those shows. As an artist, I believe in artists being able to express themselves how they feel they should. Just know there’s a lot of other people involved in those shows. Certain factors and things are dictated according to what ratings will be. It’s definitely a business. I also saw blatant things that I didn’t think were OK and that I’m sure no one would want to put up with in a work environment. It was important for me to step away.

Your last projects weren’t critical or commercial successes. Did that add any pressure while working on Liberation?

Because I am a real vocalist, I have always heard, “Why don’t you just stand and do a bunch of ballads?” That’s just one element of what I do, but it’s not everything. I would be so bored if I sat on the stage and just sang ballad after ballad. I’m an artist. The label was great in giving me the freedom to take my time and do what I wanted. I’m no stranger to knowing how to play the game.

It is an amazing thing whenever things are commercially received and successful. I’ve had those successes with Genie in a Bottle and What a Girl Wants, and I was still miserable because I wasn’t connected to the music and wasn’t being able to change it. I’ve done my share of that and I see a lot of artists get into that trap of chasing the charts. After I’m dead and gone, I really want the music paid attention to and not because of where I charted or how commercially successful it was but because the quality has stood the test of time.

Although the album is heavily R ‘n’ B and hip-hop, it was still surprising to hear that Kanye West and Anderson. Paak were key to informing its direction. How did that happen?

I sat with Kanye a few years ago, while I was still on The Voice actually. We met at Rick Rubin’s studio where he was recording at the time — he was finishing The Life of Pablo record _ and we just connected. I loved the tracks he was playing me. That’s where I heard Maria and [the album’s lead single] Accelerate for the first time. They had so much heart and depth. His music makes you feel something impactful, one way or another. He’s a controversial artist, and I’ve been that way myself. Working with him felt really good. I had done some recording before the Kanye meeting but doing Maria with him gave me the base for the album. The whole story unfolded before me when I listened to the song.

And then Anderson really helped the album take shape. I met him last year, and things rapidly unfolded. He is just such a great musician. He’s such a great lyricist with such a strong cadence. I explored different ways to use my voice on this record, and it wasn’t all about hitting high notes and being acrobatic and full of ad-libs. I wanted to scale back again and just really vibe.

There’s always been a thread of empowerment in your music. How much of what was going on in the world influenced the music you were working on?

A: The climate right now is interesting because there are so many people that are feeling oppressed or suppressed. I’ve always been about putting out messages that I feel strongly about and about my truth. It’s why I did songs like Beautiful and Fighter so long ago and why I have songs like Fall in Line and Sick of Sittin’ on this album, records that are perfect for anyone that maybe need to find their own truth. We’re in a place where people need to feel liberated and I wanted to reflect that.

You’re going on your first tour in a decade. What can fans expect?

Ever since I had my son [Max Liron, 10], the idea of the tour has actually scared me. I was like, “How does this work? How do people do this? Do I uproot my kids from their home life and everything?” With this more intimate tour, it’s kind of lessening the pressure. I’m dipping my toe back in the water and also giving my fans a real chance to see me after they haven’t in so long. I’m probably going to take my daughter with me because she’s so little. I don’t want to be separated. It’ll be interesting.

[magicofword]

The Inside Story Of SoundCloud's Collapse

Lixia Guo / BuzzFeed News If you want an example of when SoundCloud’s mission to be a free-for-all music sharing venue collided with its desire to go mainstream, the time it accidentally banned Justin Bieber is a pretty good place to start. In late April 2014, a user named "Sir Bizzle" posted a song titled “We Were Born for This” on SoundCloud. The sparse acoustic track sounded so much like Justin Bieber that listeners assumed that it was the Canadian pop star. It quickly racked up a few thousand plays, and chatter on social media, before SoundCloud flagged the profile, assuming Sir Bizzle was an imposter with an ill-gotten Biebs jam, and took the song down. Using SoundCloud’s online complaint form, Sir Bizzle asked that the track be reinstated. The company declined his appeal, noting that the account’s associated address, “123 everywhere street,” was clearly bogus. Sir Bizzle responded with a selfie — of Justin Bieber holding a notepad with a greeting to SoundCloud’s employees. “OMG OMG OMG I JUST SAVED BIEBER!” wrote one employee on an internal email thread after verifying that it was the artist and restoring the song. The company’s community and artist relations teams jumped into overdrive to placate the world’s biggest popstar. Three days later, Bieber’s label, Island Def Jam Music Group, rehashed the issue, issuing a takedown notice for the tune before retracting the statement after learning that the artist himself had posted the tune. Former SoundCloud employees familiar with the Sir Bizzle incident point to it as an encapsulation of the company’s promise, missed opportunities, and inability to coherently work with an entrenched music industry. Three years after Bieber’s selfie, SoundCloud has squandered its position as a maverick, but beloved audio platform and failed to build a meaningful business. In a music era dominated by Spotify, SoundCloud has been, at the best of times, a startup in stagnation, and, at the worst of times, an organization in disarray. Once harboring aspirations to be the YouTube of sound, the Berlin-based company has struggled to remain viable, hamstrung by management missteps, an ineffective business strategy, and a stubborn music industry that would rather it had never existed. In early July, SoundCloud laid off 173 people — some 40% of its workforce — shuttering satellite offices in San Francisco and London in an effort to stave off bankruptcy. According to more than a dozen current and former employees who spoke to BuzzFeed News, SoundCloud’s July layoffs were inevitable, the result of some 24 months of turmoil. Those workers spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing nondisclosure agreements and the fear of damaging personal relationships. In their view, SoundCloud is now a company in search of an identity — and money. One source close to the company, which has struggled to find an acquirer, told BuzzFeed News it is close to securing a new round of funding at more than $100 million. If it does, that person said, Soundcloud’s board may seek to remove company cofounder Alexander Ljung as CEO and make him chair. SoundCloud declined to make Ljung available for this story. A company spokesperson also declined to comment. With a valuation that at one point was expected to surpass $1 billion, SoundCloud was a web property unlike any other. Part audio streaming service, part social network, it offered a hub for creators to upload, share, and discuss nearly any kind of sound. It hosted bootleg remixes, spontaneously recorded Drake tracks, and bird songs. It provided a rich library of content for users hungry for audio offerings outside of the mainly standardized catalogues of Spotify, iTunes, and Pandora. In February, the company boasted that it had 150 million tracks, about five times the amount on Spotify or Apple Music. “We really see ourselves as creating something new — something that doesn’t exist,” Ljung told Forbes in a 2013 interview, alluding to similar online services including YouTube for video and Flickr for photos. “Our main competition, if you will, is that it doesn’t exist in the world yet, and we’re trying to create that space.” SoundCloud’s downfall, according to many former employees, was largely the result of a strategic misstep — a move to compete head-on with the giants of the music-streaming world. With the March 2016 launch of SoundCloud Go, a $9.99 per month subscription service, SoundCloud was a late entrant to a ferociously competitive streaming music space and with an array of services that offered no differentiation from incumbents like Spotify and Apple Music. It was a blunder, and its mismanaged rollout exacerbated the management and cultural issues that weighed heavily on the company. “No one comes to SoundCloud to listen to The Beatles’ catalogue,” said one investor. “SoundCloud did exactly what its users didn’t want it to do.” A series of emails shows how SoundCloud employees reacted to Justin Bieber uploading a new song under the name "Sir Bizzle" in April 2014. Images provided to BuzzFeed from sources SoundCloud began as pet project for Ljung, a sound engineer, and his Stockholm Royal Institute of Technology classmate Eric Wahlforss. As amateur musicians, they built the tool to share audio snippets with each other at school. Upon realizing there was nothing like it, they bought SoundCloud.com for $400 and moved to Berlin in 2007, sharing the service with other artists and producers they met in the city’s electronic music and techno scene. When SoundCloud moved out of beta and launched publicly in October 2008, it had 20,000 users and two inexperienced but enthusiastic founders who did everything to keep the site from crashing. It scooped up $3 million in funding the next year led by Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures, and passed the 1 million registered-user mark in May 2010. Artists flocked to SoundCloud for its ease of use and its cool factor. Listeners followed the artists, spreading the company’s gospel every time they commented on a track or shared one of its wave-form media players on a social network. SoundCloud never had a problem attracting people — by July 2013 it had 40 million registered users. Its issue was building a business around that traffic. While the company’s original revenue stream centered on selling accounts with more upload space to professional users, driving the majority of its $14.1 million of revenue in 2013, its founders set their sights on monetizing with ads. But SoundCloud, which lost $29.2 million that year, was handcuffed from the start, said multiple employees. In the early days, the company’s hands-off approach to regulating uploaded content allowed it to gain momentum, but that changed when rights holders and music labels began to take notice. More than half of the material posted to SoundCloud at the time was not authorized and cleared by the proper rights holders, according to two former employees. The company took no responsibility for the material uploaded and designated it as user-generated content — though employees were well aware that “gray area” material was frequently posted. Further complicating the matter were posts of remixes, songs with label-owned samples, and DJ sets — all staples of the SoundCloud ecosystem — that could have been subject to rights claims or legal issues. There was such a lack of clarity around material, said multiple employees, that the company’s general counsel advised them to avoid acknowledging that some of the site’s content might be under copyright. SoundClouders were asked not to favorite tracks, a common way of saving music, from their personal profiles, or to put links to audio tracks in company emails. Some workers made fake profiles to freely peruse the site. But by 2013, relationship-building with the entrenched music industry was well underway. The company hired talent from Amazon Music and other companies to negotiate with the three major music labels: Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and Warner Music Group. The idea was to develop long-term licenses for their content and, until they were in place, stave off any potential legal escalations. “Deals with the labels would have allowed us to have monetization,” said one former executive, who explained that no ads could be run across label-owned content without a revenue-sharing agreement.“We needed to make sure that we could grow unencumbered without a lawsuit.” But SoundCloud underestimated the time frame for those deals — severely. Two years would pass before the company had agreements with all three major labels in place, and it was able to ink them only after expending enormous effort making its service palatable to the music executives on the other side of the negotiating table. In the midst of those talks with the labels, Twitter inquired about an acquisition in spring 2014. Having missed on an opportunity to scoop up Instagram, the social network coveted SoundCloud’s user base and saw it as a tool to help a core group of power users — musicians — connect to fans. Former executives remember Twitter Chief Financial Officer Ali Rowghani meeting several times with the company, with some employees hoping for a scenario like Google’s 2006 acquisition YouTube, in which a larger company scooped up a startup and bankrolled it in spite of the legal risk. On the morning of May 19, Ljung called a handful of SoundCloud executives to say that papers of intent would be signed that day. But the deal collapsed. With SoundCloud holding out for just under $2 billion, Twitter balked, sources said, put off by the heady price tag, music industry headaches, and the discrepancy between Soundcloud's monthly visitors and its registered users. (Many people listened to SoundCloud’s content, but never registered with the site.) “Alex and Eric were devastated,” said one person familiar with the negotiations. SoundCloud CEO Alexander Ljung Anna Webber / Getty Images By the time acquisition talks with Twitter collapsed, Ljung and Wahlforss had been leading SoundCloud for seven years. The company employed more than 220 people, many of whom the founders had personally interviewed to cultivate a built-for-artists-by-artists culture. Among them was Jeff Toig, a former VP at mobile provider Cricket Wireless and founder of on-demand digital music service Muve. Ljung tapped Toig as SoundCloud's chief business officer, hoping his music industry experience would come in handy hammering out licensing deals with the major labels. He gave the Harvard Business School grad reign over advertising sales, marketing, and business development. By all accounts, it was a terrible move. Toig very quickly became a controversial figure at SoundCloud, known for publicly berating some of his reports and playing favorites with others. “He would carry a football around the office under his arm like a prop and he threw it to you to indicate that you were in the gang,” said one former SoundCloud employee. “He never threw it to women.” Several SoundCloud employees who spoke with BuzzFeed News characterized Toig as “a bully” who “created fear” at an organization once known for its flat reporting structure and the approachability of its executives. Three workers noted that he sometimes addressed women in the office by pet names like “sweetie.” Others recalled Toig shouting at an employee during a video presentation for not using his preferred PowerPoint style: size 10 Arial font with a black background. “To be a good CEO, you have to hire people that are better than you at certain things, and Alex was trying to do that,” one former SoundCloud employee told BuzzFeed News. “But Jeff wasn’t that guy… many felt like he was poisoning the well.” Indeed, some reported Toig's behavior to SoundCloud's upper management or filed complaints to its human resources department. One reported incident occurred during an Aug. 2014 photoshoot with a major news outlet, during which Toig was asked to suck in his stomach and puff out his chest. “You mean stick my tits out like the women on Madison Avenue?” he replied, according to multiple people in the room. Toig declined comment for this story. SoundCloud declined comment on his tenure at the company. Based in Berlin, Ljung and Wahlforss had an ocean between them and the goings on in their stateside offices, whose operation they’d entrusted to Toig. The chief business officer was also tasked with closing three major label deals ahead of the scheduled August 2014 launch of SoundCloud’s advertiser program. Ex-employees recall Ljung sometimes skipping important business meetings because he thought Toig could handle them. By that time, the SoundCloud cofounder had scooped up several entrepreneurial awards and adopted a more extravagant lifestyle. He attended the Grammys; he went deep-sea diving with sharks in the Bahamas; he partied with DJ Steve Aoki in Ibiza. And he Instagrammed all of it, irking employees worried that he’d disengaged from the company. One former employee who left in the summer of 2016 remembered a photo of Ljung taking a private jet. “People were like, that should be going to my salary,” they said. Investors were similarly put off. “He let it get to his head and he lost his focus,” said one. By August 2014, it was abundantly clear that the SoundCloud’s advertising program, which would allow artists and labels to collect royalties, would not launch as planned. Despite Toig’s promises, not a single major label had agreed to a deal. The project launched with a eleventh-hour pivot to focus on independent creators, with Toig later apologizing at an all-hands meeting for failing to sign the majors. (By March 2015, Toig was out of the gig; he was later tapped as CEO of Tidal Music, where he lasted for nine months.) Ljung assured everyone in attendance that the label arrangements would eventually get done. A few days later, he flew to California and went off the grid. It was time for Burning Man. “You mean stick my tits out like the women on Madison Avenue?” https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/inside-the-storm-at-soundcloud?utm_term=4ldqpia&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr