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zombiescantfly · 4 years

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Halo and the Burden of the Extended Universe

Halo, as in the initial trilogy of games one through three, has been about one man, known only by his rank, traveling to exotic alien superstructures hanging in deep space, traversing their surfaces on foot and in a variety of human and alien military vehicles, and mowing down literally hundreds of enemies per level. Throughout that trilogy, we’re supposed to believe that these aliens, the Covenant, pose a great risk to all of humanity. We’re told, by way of the instruction manuals and some NPC chatter, that these aliens have pushed our own species, at the time a massive space-faring empire, back to the singular planet of our birth.

In all three games, we just barely make our way to the latest superstructure, clawing our way there against what's said to be insurmountable odds. We're constantly told that we're low on resources, low on time, we barely have a foot in the door while the Covenant have already made their bed. And yet, every single game, we win. Effortlessly. Constantly.

And not only do we win, but we prevent the total annihilation of all life in the universe no less than once per game, sometimes more! Untold hordes of enemies fall at our controller-wielding fingertips, but somehow we're meant to accept that this one is our last chance, for real, we swear. Still, problems come and go at the whim of an inattentive scriptwriter, built up to be the most important thing we've ever seen, left perfectly resolved at the end of a 20-minute level.

In every game, the goalposts are constantly shifting, pushed further and further back by writers who realize, sweat on their brows, that they've started with the destruction of all life in the universe and have to somehow amp it up from there. For three games.

To put it mildly, they are not successful.

What do we have to be afraid of? Not the Covenant, because even the worst weapons we have available to us can tear them apart. All life on Earth, the last bastion of our species, is put at risk a full three times over the course of two games, and every single time we, as the protagonist, turn our back on the problem and are promised it will be solved when we aren't looking. If the Halo rings are fired, all life in the universe dies! Except when it was fired in Halo 2 and only sent a standby signal before being deactivated. Except when it was fired in Halo 3 using a never-before-heard-of "tactical pulse" that is at perfect odds with everything it was stated to do in all three games.

There's no threat that sticks, no threat that matters. Everything the games have told us to be afraid of are continuously revealed to be utterly inconsequential. Even the moment-to-moment threats become routine, the moment-to-moment losses, unnoticeable. How many times have you gathered a squad of friendly Marines only to lose them all in the next gunfight? Well, don't worry, here comes a Pelican with four new ones, no questions asked. Yes, we're running low on fuel and men and supplies, but here you go Chief, you're special.

But why are we special? Who is The Master Chief? We know some things, but not a lot. We're a supersoldier, a Spartan. We have a ship's AI in our head who tells us what LZs to clear and does all the talking for us. Across three games, approximately thirty hours of gameplay, our main character has a mere sixty-eight lines of dialogue, and most of it doesn't pass the five word mark. Cortana, in comparison, has nearly six hundred spoken lines. Our hero is characterized only by lines like "boo," "green, sir," "I need a weapon," "understood," and "we'll make it."

Truly, a fascinating and deep character to go down in the annals of gaming history. A man brimming with all the personality of a cardboard box, all the empathy of a brick, and all the motives of a potted plant.

And yet, every Halo fan out there will tell you how cool he is, how haunted by his past he is, how deeply he feels the loss of his comrades, and how much he cares for his tiny blue Garmin.

Why? We played the same games, right? With all the same plot holes and haphazardly shifting priorities, the miniscule cast of named characters that never do anything to extend past their paint-by-numbers archetype? What are they getting out this that I haven’t?

Well, they read the books.

To them, Halo has an excuse. There aren't any plot holes, none at all, because you can just read this piece of licensed fiction to plug it. Are you still uncertain, well over a decade after the fact, just how much time passed between Halo 2 and 3? There's a graphic novel to answer that for you. What about the Arbiter, why didn't he stick around to try to form a proper treaty with humanity after the end of Halo 3? Read the book to find out. Okay then, the Flood invasion of Earth, how'd that get cleaned up so fast? Don't worry, watch the animated short.

This isn't how storytelling works.

You don't get to present a player of your game, a buyer of your product, with one third of a story and then tell them the rest exists as multiple books. You don't get to ignore key plot points that would bring your story together just so they can be sold off years later in a different medium.

External media, should your property have it, should be to expand on things the primary property has no room for. Hinted-at background events. Formative character experiences. Something tangentially related that still ties in to the main story. If it's really that important, tell your writers to make room for it in the main product.

Halo has the room for it. Each game will probably take a first-time player around ten hours for a first playthrough, and far less time on subsequent runs. These games are short, but they attempt to tell a story many times larger than they make room for. So make more room. End the focus on getting players in and out in a single weekend sitting. Let your characters talk to each other beyond exchanging stiff one-liners in cutscenes. Stop making every level a bombastic, breakneck setpiece and give the story room to breathe, to actually be told. If it’s the end of the universe we’re dealing with, surely you can spare us more than nine measly levels? Let us actually see the larger situation rather than being told about it. Do you really think Halo fans would complain about a campaign taking fifteen to twenty hours to beat? They love Halo, they want to spend time with it. Capitalize on that, and take the opportunity to finally, actually tell a story with all the parts in it instead of just a third.

Which brings us, finally, to Halo: Reach.

Certain Halo fans, largely the same group of them that defend the poor storytelling because “it’s in the books,” have a reaction to Halo: Reach that can best be described as ‘vitriolic.’ They don’t like it. Why?

Because it’s not like the book.

You see, while Halo: Reach came out in 2010, a book by the name of Halo: The Fall of Reach came out some months before the first Halo game in 2001. They are both about the same event, but with quite major differences. This caused quite a lot of contention at the time of Reach’s release, mainly from the part of the fanbase that believed they were going to get a one-to-one retelling of this book in videogame form.

They didn’t get that. Halo: Reach is an original story that tells the tale of a world’s final hours and one team of elite supersoldiers as they attempt to do anything they can to help delay the inevitable end. It’s not the most compelling story ever written, or even the most compelling version of that story ever told, but it’s effective. Even though we’re dealing with the imminent destruction of an entire planet, the story manages to stay small. Reach’s ultimate destruction is a common piece of wall graffiti or NPC combat barks, so the ending is known, leaving room for smaller objectives to take the spotlight. Rescue civilians trapped behind enemy lines. Delay an invasion force to buy evacuation efforts another hour. Clear the skies so supplies and medivac can go out.

Halo: Reach has almost no connection to the series at large, and it’s quite the breath of fresh air. As a prequel, its ending is a forgone conclusion, but it does what it can with the time it has. The messy, convoluted politics of Halo 2 and 3 are far in the series’ chronological future, letting you fight two enemy factions at once for the first time in the series, away from the plot point that sees them at war with each other. The end of the universe isn’t constantly being dangled over our heads for the third time in as many games, so the characters have a chance to sit down and swap banter, tell us who they are. They aren’t anyone too terribly compelling - Bungie still hadn’t quite figured out character writing - but they’re tested archetypes played well enough for the story’s demands. The threat is known and static, the stakes grow higher by way of the ticking clock drawing us ever closer to the planet’s inevitable end. There’s no faffing around with “trading one villain for another” because killing the first one would have ended the story too quickly, so a new one has to show up with no lead-in.

Even at the very end of that original trilogy, Halo’s story was too big for the time Bungie gave it. Its own plot points were shoving at each other, jockeying for position, knocking parts off themselves in an effort to fit into nine half-hour levels until all that was left were fractions of what you’d need to find in the books afterward.

Reach suffers from its own short length, but not in the same way. It suffers in that you can point to the characters and they say needed more setup, more time with each other, maybe another level or two here or there to really draw the relationship out. It suffers by pushing a little too hard at the “imminent end” angle, hurrying you through and skipping over hours of in-world time that probably could have been their own level.

But surely even the superfans saw that this was preferable? That a standalone story was the best way to go about things? Surely they understood that attempting to simply recreate the book would have ended with them not seeing any of what Bungie came up with for this new game? There’s a lot to like about Halo: Reach, and a lot to do in it that you can’t do in any of the other games. Surely even the most fervent defenders of the extended canon ended up coming around and being able to separate the two for what they both were on their own.

Of course, that’s not what happened. See again, ‘vitriolic.’ And so here we are at the question this whole thing has been building up to. When a company leans as hard into external supplemental media as Bungie did for Halo, is it then obligated to play by the rules and plot points outlined in those external entities? It’s a tricky question, mostly because up until that point, Bungie had gone ahead as if every book and animated short and comic and webisode was one hundred percent canonical. The reason superfans tolerated those gaping plot holes in the games is, again, because they weren’t holes at all when paired with their companion media. So now, in the far-past year of 2010, Bungie has suddenly decided that one of those sacred tomes of external knowledge is incorrect.

I think the easiest answer would have simply been to...tell the proper amount of story in the first place, but I guess it’s a little too late for that, especially now.

So what, then, is the obligation put forward by such a slavish devotion to external storytelling? Were they wrong to do something different? Were they right to forge ahead with something new for the benefit of freeing players who had never read that book and any other related to it from the web of multi-author canon?

I’d say they made the right move. Let’s talk about Star Wars.

Star Wars and Halo share many a talking point, the most obvious of which is just the sheer amount of additional stories they have stapled to them. Great news for fans who are into it, but terrible news for the actual IP holders. All they do is get in the way when the primary vehicle wants to expand. Disney felt it more than Bungie ever did, but Bungie felt it first: cut away the myriad stories clogging up the canon or you’ll never make anyone happy. Try to appease the superfans and get burned by not touching on every single node of criss-crossing plot webs that is the result of decades of overlapping stories by as many authors, while alienating newcomers by being forced to pay lip service to concepts and characters they’ve never heard of and have no attachment to.

Disney made the right call, and so did Bungie with Reach. What came next in Disney’s case isn’t relevant, and Bungie washed their hands of Halo entirely afterwards.

If your story cannot survive without the propping-up of half a dozen pieces of external media, you have failed to tell a good story. If your answer to questions about this story is to tell the asker to read a book, you have failed to tell a good story. I understand the appeal of that expansion, of being able to have a celebrated setting grow and reach new places, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of the setup. The world has to exist before it can be expanded upon. The story needs to be in place for its offshoots to grow. And that’s what Halo fails at, so totally and repeatedly. Bungie was too excited by the prospect of having an extended universe that they forgot to make a universe to expand upon. As a result, the actual core universe exists smeared across half a dozen mediums and dozens of individual pieces, with no true convergence point someone can present a newcomer with and say, “Start here.”

The Halo games are a patchwork mess of uninspired characters, unexplored concepts, unknown stakes, and uninteresting locales. Because they rely so heavily on their companion media to fill in those blanks, there’s nothing there to entice a first-time player to do it themselves. If a character’s inspiration comes from one book, the exploration of a concept comes from another, the weight of the stakes is told through an animatic, and the otherworldly locales are shown in all their glory only in the pages of a comic book, what is the game even for? If everything you need to know about the Master Chief, the Covenant, the war, and the Halos isn’t in the games, what’s the point of them? What do Halo 1, 2, and 3 actually stand to add to a universe seemingly defined elsewhere?

They become wastes of time. Wastes of potential. Other people - artists and authors working under contract for Bungie, not Bungie themselves - did all the heavy lifting to create these worlds and these characters. Does Bungie even know who their own characters are? Could the original writer for Halo 1 tell me everything the Master Chief has become through the works of a dozen other authors over the course of twenty years?

The books might be good. I wouldn’t know; the games didn’t inspire me to read them.

#words about games #halo #master chief #Arbiter #cortana #Bungie #343

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cfavigncn · 5 years

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hi hi! my name’s hannah ( she / her, 23, est ) and this little marshmallow is juliette dewhitt, though most here would know her as avignon! she’s a front desk receptionist at the hotel. i’ve got info on her below the cut! like this or message me if you want to plot because it’s my fave thing ever! i’m also in the discord so we can talk there too. can’t wait to get started!!!

tw: cheating, verbal abuse, alcoholism

INFO.

❛ ｡ ❄️ ﾟ danielle campbell. female. she/her / did i hear you say flowers pressed between the pages of a well-loved book, sunlight peeking through clouds, a half-empty bottle of lavendar perfume, & a smile no less genuine just because it’s exhausted ? then you must be talking about avignon, i’d recognize them anywhere. i’ve heard that the twenty-three year old front desk receptionist is a cancer and honestly, i see it. they’re known for being stubborn & overbearing, but their kindhearted & selfless tendencies make up for it. they’ve been working at du lac for two years and i think that their real name is juliette ‘jules’ dewhitt, but don’t spill. ( hannah. 23. she/her. est )

HISTORY.

so juliette was born in paris to arthur dewhitt and and celeste boucher. they were a bit of a cliche, him being an up-and-coming author and her being the darling of french theater.

when they first got together, arthur told anyone that would listen that he fell in love with celeste while watching her on stage, before ever having said a word to her.

the issue with their grand love affair, though, was that it was exactly that- an affair. celeste was already married to another man. he was a prominent director and had oh so coincidentally been the one to cast her in her first breakthrough role. and though celeste wasn’t in love with him anymore, he was still utterly devoted to her.

with the baby on the way, arthur started putting pressure on celeste to leave her husband and be with him openly. but as much as celeste did love arthur, she loved her career more and she feared what the revelation of the affair would do to her chances to perform.

she pushed him away, telling him that she loved her husband (she didn’t) and that she wanted to give her baby the best chance at happiness with a nuclear family (that hadn’t even come into her head until she said it out loud).

arthur was heartbroken, but he respected her wishes.

years later, he ended up writing a novel that drew heavily from his own experiences with celeste. it was critically acclaimed- beloved by the critics, made into a movie, generally agreed that it would be one of the novels that defined the decade.

unfortunately for celeste, there were enough details that mirrored their own lives that her husband finally caught wise. he confronted her and though she lied and denied as fervently as she could, he ended up leaving her and the daughter that he now knew wasn’t his.

without the income of her husband, and now getting too old to land the roles that once sustained her career, celeste ended up moving herself and juliette to a small town in france.

she hated it there, having always been so used to the hustle and bustle of paris.

juliette would have been only 13 or 14 when this happened and to say that it was devastating would have been an understatement- within the span of a few weeks, she found out that her mother had cheated, that the man she had always considered her father wasn’t and that he no longer wanted anything to do with her, and then got moved away from everything that she knew.

she ended up getting a job as a bagger at the local grocery, riding her bike to and from work.

her mother talked about getting one herself but never seemed all that pressed to actually start looking. instead, she focused on reliving her golden days and began drinking heavily.

slowly, she devolved into a hateful and cold shell of her former self.she resented her daughter, thinking that it was because of her that the perfect life had unraveled around celeste.

jules learned to grow up very quickly after that. she cooked dinners, made sure that the bills were actually mailed out, always put a blanket on her mother when she passed out on the couch, and turned a cheek at the words spoken while still awake.

despite everything, jules is actually an incredibly positive and kind person. she realized very young that no amount of bitterness at her own plight would change things and that she wanted instead to focus on putting joy and kindness back into the world.

she focused on creating healthy friendships and relationships, on her schoolwork, on anything that wasn’t her home life.

she probably wouldn’t have told anyone about what she was dealing with at home, as she didn’t want people to worry about her.

when it came time for university, jules decided to study hospitality. she was an incredibly detail-oriented person, and had learned over the years how to manage her own household. plus, it was a career that she thought her good nature would be suited to.

it was hard to leave home, not knowing what state her mother would be in without her, but jules reasoned that she couldn’t hold back from having her own life forever.

at school, jules really started to thrive. left to only care for herself, she started exploring every hobby that she could think of and learning everything about herself that she could.

she even reached out to her birth father, who was thrilled to finally get to acknowledge his daughter. they’ve begun a tenuous relationship that they’re both very nervous but hopeful of.

it was actually a suggestion of his that, as he hadn’t had the chance to support her while growing up, that he could get her a connection at the hotel du lac, where he regularly stayed when he wanted to write.

she’s even started going by his last name! it’s really exciting for her. at first it was just because it would help with the job interview but it’s started to be something she does in her own head too.

she works at the front desk, and actually really likes it. basically her whole job is solving problems for people and staying friendly, both of which are right up her alley. also, she always loved visiting avignon while growing up and to have it as her codename is actually very charming to her

HEADCANONS.

she’s super afraid of heights. one time went to the top of the eiffel tower and nearly puked. hasn’t been up since

she loves oversized sweaters, soft blankets, fuzzy knee-high socks, basically anything cozy. would probably sit in front of a fireplace for a year if she had the time

laughs at her own jokes. sometimes literally can’t get through telling her own jokes because she’s laughing too hard

she has a really impressive book collection. growing up, she’s always loved the escapism of reading and ever since she got in touch with her father, he’s been sending her his own favorites. her favorite ones are the ones that he’s written his thoughts in the margins, a habit which she’s since picked up

she’s a total pushover. would do anything for anybody. honestly, to the point where it’s a character fault. it’s led to her being taken advantage of more than once in her life

hasn’t ever had a pet before but she would totally love to get a cat one day

doesn’t handle interpersonal conflict super well. like, she could get yelled at by a guest all day long without breaking a sweat but if someone that she cares about gets visibly upset with her she kind of freaks out and overextends herself trying to make things right again

loves knitting and baking when she’s stressed out. it’s nice for her to have something to do with her hands while her mind is racing and then at the end of it all, you’ve got a nice little treat for yourself!

has recently started keeping a little journal that she writes in. it’s partially to try and collect her own thoughts and get to know herself better and partially because she wants to have something shared between herself and her dad

WANTED PLOTS.

friends!!!!!!! avignon has never really had the chance to have close friends growing up because she never had the money/time, and she was afraid to get too close to people and have them realize the situation with her mom

her dad. this one will actually be a wanted connection, but i would love to have arthur (obviously that name isn’t set in stone lol) around and start to navigate their relationship actually being together for the first time

a love interest- avignon is very guarded about romance because she’s got deep abandonment stuff and also is afraid that she’s not good enough for it but like i can totally imagine her having these huge feelings for someone, either requited or unrequited that she doesn’t know how to handle and getting very blushy about it

a bad influence- she’s never really had the chance to let loose and have fun before, so i’d def like to see that happening. plus, she would probs start trying to like take care of them in return and make sure they drink water and the whole nine it would be very charming

irritant- tbh, she isn’t most peoples’ cup of tea. she’s very almost aggressive about her kindness and i can imagine that there are people that would absolutely hate that and they would just butt heads over it

#lac:intro #&&. avignon ; about #this is...... so long....#sorry y'all i was working out the plot as i wrote

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mllemaenad · 6 years

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'Imagine your children growing up in such a world. If a mage asked it of you, you would have to give him your daughter, not knowing what his plans for her might be. You could not resist him, and neither could she.' - Sorry, this line particularly came to my attention because take away magic and this? Is exactly what happens in the Tabris origin. And to that one Orlesian merchant in Denerim in DA:O. And probably to any number of peasant/elven girls at the hands of nobles every day across Thedas.

No need to be sorry. :)

You’re right. Absolutely.

The thing is – take this in context. This is an answer written by a grand cleric to a nobleman who seems (we don’t have his side of the conversation, obviously, so we can only infer from the substance of the reply) to have been challenging the Chantry’s treatment of mages. If you look at it like that, then what the grand cleric is describing is what happens to almost every mage child in southern Thedas.

Armed men come to your door and take your child away. You have no right to say no. And you have no idea what they’re going to do with them. They may take your child to a Circle across the sea. They may murder them. They may make them Tranquil. They may rape them, beat them, torture them. Maybe you’ll be lucky: maybe your kid is Vivienne or one of the Warden mages. Maybe they’ll do okay.

But you don’t know. And you can’t tell the Templars to go away; that they can’t have your child. They live in a world where this happens to parents every day.

It’s almost too much to imagine. The Circle, the Templars, they’ve shaped my life. I was no more than twelve when they came for me. My mother wept when they fixed the chains to my wrists, but my father was glad to see me gone. He had been afraid, ever since the fire in the barn. Not just afraid of what I could do, but afraid of me, afraid my magic was punishment for whatever petty sins he imagined the Maker sat in judgement upon.

– Anders (short story)

Anders’s mum couldn’t say no. Maybe she wanted to. At bare minimum, it sounds as though she didn’t want to lose her son forever. But that’s what happened. Little Ella is desperate to get back to her parents, because the Templars didn’t even tell them where they were taking her – and when we encounter her, a Templar is threatening her with Tranquillity and strongly implied sexual assault.

Wynne gave birth to a healthy baby boy, whom she was allowed one day with before he was taken into Chantry custody. The child, who was names Rhys, was taken to Lydes and from there transferred to the White Spire in Orlais when it was discovered that he, too, was a mage.

– World of Thedas I

They kidnapped a newborn baby and took him to a different damn country. It took decades, and fighting an archdemon, for Wynne to even get the chance to find him again.

Dulci de Launcet was lucky: she’s a noble, so she at least had letters and some general idea of where her kid was, but she hadn’t laid eyes on her son since he was six.

Yeah. Good fucking job, Chantry. You really solved the problem of powerful people coming to your door to abduct your children.

But while, yes, given the context of the letter I think the irony is best understood in relation to mages, I definitely think it can be expanded upon:

The demon had impersonated the human man who had bought her from the slavers that took her in after her father died. She’d had no idea back then who those kind men really were, only that they offered her food and a warm bed to sleep in. Then an even kinder man came to take her from them, and she found herself in his luxurious home and thought herself the luckiest girl in the entire alienage.

How very naive she had been. Count Dorian, as she learned her new master’s name to be, had been in search of an elven whore he could keep as a pet, something he could put in a pretty dress and bring with him on one of his many trips to the capital, like baggage.

– Dragon Age: The Calling

Ah, look. The exact scenario Grand Cleric Francesca was fear-mongering about. A little girl abducted, enslaved and sold to a nobleman who abused and tortured her. Yes, a mage-child as it happens, but that wasn’t apparent at the time. Fiona was vulnerable because she was an elf – an orphaned elf considered expendable by society.

“What they wish is irrelevant.” Celene turned and stalked away from the window. “I am already fighting a war on two fronts. I cannot be seen to fight a war on three.”

“Then don’t.” Briala rose, putting herself in Celene’s path. “Give them justice.”

“A lord for the death of an elf? I … damn this thing.”

With a quick jerk, Celene tore her mask from her face. Her face was flushed beneath, her eyes red from another night of little sleep. “Shall I declare the elves equal citizens before the Maker and the throne as well, while I’m at it?”

“Why not?” Briala took her own mask off, stealing a quick moment to steady herself. “Unless you don’t believe that, and I’m just a jumped-up kitchen slut you haven’t tired of yet.

– Dragon Age: The Masked Empire

Or here: a revolt that ends in genocide, and that begins because it is unthinkable that they arrest a nobleman for murdering an elf. The victim’s name was Lemet. He was killed shielding an eight-year-old boy who threw a rock at a carriage. And the boy said he did it because his mother had been murdered by Orlesian nobility:

“They killed my mother,” the boy said, pulling against Lemet’s grip.

“Be quiet.” Lemet looked back at the coach and heard its joints creak as the guards jumped down to the street. The driver would want to have that oiled, some part of Lemet’s mind noted.

“They can’t come down this street after what they did to her,” the boy insisted. “They can’t!”

– Dragon Age: The Masked Empire

Or this, where soldiers rob, rape and murder their own citizens in the midst of a civil war:

“Two days ago, Lady Seryl’s men rode in and cur down every man and woman working the fields. Killed our guards, killed everyone in the village square. When they finished killing the other soldiers, they fired arrows out onto the water, killed most of our boys in the boats. They took all the food they could find. They spent the night.” A collective flinch splashed across the crowd. “Said we had been assisting enemies of the throne, that this was a lesson to anyone who’d help Gaspard’s men.” At the last, his voice broke. “My lord, I don’t even know who Gaspard is.”

– Dragon Age: The Masked Empire

Or the serial killer who is repeatedly allowed to walk free because he’s a magistrate’s son, and he targets elven children. Or the elven boys who fled to the Qun because a guard raped their sister – no one would arrest him, so they took matters into their own hands.

And yes, of course, you see the exact same thing in Ferelden in the alienage.

I’m sure everyone feels so much safer now they’ve locked up all the mages.

Orlais’s crimes don’t excuse Tevinter’s. That’s where they went wrong with Dorian’s … painful dialogue on slavery. You can’t point to the horrors of Orlesian society and therefore suggest that the Tevinter slave trade is not that awful. It doesn’t work like that. What you can do, though, is say that Tevinter’s crimes don’t excuse Orlais’s – particularly when they tend to do exactly the same shit:

Slavery still thrives in Thedas, even if the trade has been outlawed. Who hasn’t heard the tales of poverty-stricken elves lured into ships by the prospect of well-paying jobs in Antiva, only to find themselves clapped in leg-irons once at sea? And humans fall prey to this, too.

If they’re lucky, they end up in Orlais, which has only “servants.” Most nobles treat them decently because they are afraid of admitting the truth. Orlesians go to great lengths to maintain the fiction that slavery is illegal.

Of course, the greatest consumer of slave labor is the Tevinter Imperium, which would surely crumble if not for the endless supply of slaves from all over the continent. There, they are meat, chattel. They are beaten, used as fodder in the endless war against the Qunari, and even serve as components in dark magic rituals.

—From Black City, Black Divine: A Study of the Tevinter Imperium, by Sister Petrine, Chantry scholar

– Slavery in the Tevinter Imperium

Fiona is not an anomaly: Orlais kidnaps and sells people into slavery, too.

And this makes sense. Fantasy always draws on the real world, even if they mix and match the cultures and historical periods a bit. So, just like in the real world, you generally have to take anything the wealthy and powerful say with a grain of salt.

The Chantry has a very specific, empire building, agenda. It makes much of problems that aren’t really problems (demons and abominations are not widespread threats, and both are poorly understood); it pins the blame for actual crises on oppressed groups (the Blight is in no way the fault of this random peasant mage from Antiva); it uses racism and religious intolerance to create in- and out-groups (elves [and dwarves, but we haven’t conquered them yet] are degenerate heathens who are preventing the Maker from returning).

As much as I love Dragon Age, what Bioware does sometimes that is … uncomfortable … to use a mild word, is that it lets the powerful rule the narrative. Inquisition is worst at this, because it presents strong voices for people like Cassandra and Cullen, who stick fairly close to the party line. And then it takes characters like Varric and Sera, and distances them from their own cultures … which is fine for individuals but awkward when we’re not letting Briala or Fiona say much either – and where the fuck is Sigrun? No one’s spoken for Orzammar’s casteless since Awakening. But it’s there, to some extent, in all the games.

So the point, always, is that mages and Circles are misdirection. Mages are scapegoats in the Chantry faith who are held responsible for all the bad things, and represent a pretend evil nobility that the Orlesian Chantry is keeping under control.

But the actual problems of this fantasy world are more or less the same as the problems of the real world: powerful nations dominate the continent and force others to bow to their whims and adopt their culture, because empires are just shit; the rich and powerful hoard all the rights to themselves, and can do damn near anything to the poor – particularly where the poor are part of a marginalised group.

What Orlais doesn’t want people to realise is that they are Tevinter. It was never the mages that were the problem, it was the absolute power the Tevinter magisters held over their slaves – a power now held mostly by the Orlesian nobility, who use it in pretty much the same way. Not exclusively, no: of course the nobility of other nations can be, and bloody are, evil fucks. But even there, the Chantry view helps to obscure the truth: you should be scared of empires and those who rule them. Much more scared than you are of a possessed mage.

#dragon age #Anonymous #cw: violence #cw: abuse #cw: rape #chantry critical

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aliceic · 6 years

Text

Put your music on shuffle and answer the questions about each artist.

tagged by @kingink2 thank you!

Name of Artist: Patti Smith Group

What genre are they ? rock with bits of spoken poetry

How long have they been active ? since 1974

Have you ever heard them on the radio ? I think I heard “because the night” on the radio once and made everyone in the car stop talking and appreciate it.

Have they released any new music within the last year or two ? nope

Do they have a male or female vocalist ? female

Name of Artist: The Smiths

Would you recommend them ? depends on the persons mental health state and how music influences them, I wouldn’t want to make someone more depressed.

What is your favourite lyric of theirs ? “Oh mother I can feel the soil falling over my head, do you think you can help me?”

What are their album artworks like ? old pictures whose message is still relevant.

If they stopped making music, would you be sad ? They stopped making music decades ago, but I feel like there’s a pretty good back catalog.

If you didn’t know what they look like, based off their music, what you guess they looked like ? one of those pretentious guys who think their lame poetry is “deep” when it really isn’t that hard to get (sorry Morrissey)

Name of Artist: The Rolling Stones

How popular are they ? VERY

Have you ever seen them perform live ? nope.

How did you find out about them ? I was raised on the more popular stuff by my dad.

What is their sexuality, if known ? straight as an arrow except for maybe Mick in the early 70′s but then again who can resist David Bowie?

Is their music easy to dance to ? yep.

Name of Artist: The Kills

What instrument is the most prominent in their music ? Electric Guitar

Does your family listen to them ? My mom likes them but isn’t as crazy about them as I am.

Are they still making music today ? yep!

Would you want to meet them ? I would love to! I think Alison Mosshart is one of the coolest people ever.

How represented is this artist in your saved music / collection ? Very! I have all of their albums and older singles for their awesome B-sides.

Name of Artist: Lou Reed

When did you discover them ? When I was about 17

How many albums do they have ? 22 studio albums and 12 live albums.

Which member of the band is closest to your ‘type’ / do you find the most attractive ? nope, I would love to have a conversation or be friends but I am not attracted to men.

Have they gone through any line-up changes ? Nope, he’s always played with studio musicians or friends.

Is their music more fun or serious ? definitely serious!

Name of Artist: The Dead Weather

Is the type of music / genre they play something you would typically enjoy or is their sound different for you ? Yeah I love gothic or more heavy rock music.

Based off of their sound, what would a human version of their music look like ? A 60 foot tall woman with long black hair, dressed all in black who rides a motorcycle.

Could you see yourself getting along with the members personally ? yeah! If I was cool enough 😥

Did somebody recommend this band to you ? no, I learned about them while going down a Jack White rabbit hole.

Of all their songs, which would you play at a party ? No Hassle Night, probably because it’s my favorite.

Name of Artist: Led Zeppelin

How many people are in this band/group ? 4

When did they start making music ? 1969

Do they have any well known songs, if so, which one(s) ? Stairway to Heaven and probably every other song they've ever made.

Do you listen to this artist regularly ? yep

How would you describe their music ? A 60′s take of the blues mixed with rock and sex.

Name of Artist: Elvis Costello

If they use a stage name, what is their real name(s) ?

Do they regularly make pop charts ? not sure? Probably in the U.K

Have you ever met them ? no

If they toured in your city, would you go see them ? If it was back in the 70′s when they played the music I liked of course! but they have changed genres over the years and don’t sound the same.

Name of Artist: Television

Are they known for anything else besides music ? They were the first band formed in the 70′s underground CBGB scene.

What is their nationality ? american

Are they a guilty pleasure ? no, I listen to them quite frequently.

Which age group is this artist most popular with ? much older guys who were part of the original punk scene.

Has this artist ever toured in your country/state/city ? I think so, back in the 70′s.

Name of Artist: The White Stripes

Do you think it’s necessary or important to know about their personal life to ‘understand’ their music ? no, I think that each song has it’s own theme and story which stand well on their own.

Have they ever gone on hiatus and did they return ? The band broke up in 2006-ish

What instruments do they use ? guitar and drums

What city are they from ? Detroit MI

What are your experiences with fans of this artist ? I actually don’t know any fans IRL

I tag: @sad-eyedlady @britneyshakespeare @lovestreett and @sadsongz

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englishchinesetranslations · 5 years

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This is a piece about me visiting Riyadh, several times, for Formula E.

Formula E is an electric racing series that says OK, boomer to 20th century petrolhead culture.

I am a high-performing, self-absorbed diva who writes about cars for a living.

Riyadh is the capital of Saudi Arabia.

Riyadh. It’s not a place, in the western imagination — which despite my scattershot efforts to broaden my horizons I definitely have — it’s a synonym for the Saudi Arabian state. Which, again, in the western imagination is one millennial and a network of shadowy contract killers.

The name Riyadh inspires fear, like a monster under the bed, something unknowable and threatening that doesn’t say anything about a city nine million people live in. Like most people, I hate admitting I’m afraid of anything real so in my mind it’s never been more than an imaginary metaphor to shield my own delicate ego.

I don’t think about the place much outside headlines. Or well, didn’t used to.

If you asked me if I’d ever imagined going to Riyadh a few years ago, I would’ve had to first work out if I could imagine Riyadh. In my mind — and I have an international relations degree so this is extra embarrassing — it was a mediaeval fortress. Perhaps some heads on spears on the walls. I’d seen some pictures on the Daily Mail or something and for some reason never considered whether this was a bit racist.

This starts in Berlin, 2018. Formula E, a street-racing electric motorsport series, announce the championship is going to Riyadh. Which is a ridiculous concept because Riyadh isn’t even a place with streets, in my mind, because I have not yet managed to stop being racist about this and actually learn anything.

More ridiculous is that I can’t go — I’m one of half a handful of full season journalists in this series that I decided to upend my life for completely a few years ago and I can’t go to the season opening race for the next ten years.

Because of strict Sharia law in the Kingdom, I can’t work in Saudi Arabia without my dad or husband giving me permission. Which at then-31 years old, divorced and resigned to my parents disapproving of everything I do for some time now is extremely laughable. I can’t work in motorsport there at all, classed as a dangerous profession. And how the hell am I going to get in in the first place?

There is some quite emphatic shouting on a street near Tempelhof when a fellow journalist asks me what I think of it and accidentally triggers the nuclear codes on my brain. I can’t do this, are they joking? How can I even continue in the series, I used to work in the humanitarian sector, for crying out loud.

I spend a night stewing in my hostel bed and wondering how all this can be thrown back into my face so hard. And then, trembling with rage and the less hot emotion I don’t like to think I’m capable of, demand answers from then-Formula E CEO Alejandro Agag in a press conference where he’s meant to be passively introducing Nico Rosberg.

The press conference is important because he tells me that there will be women there, that there will be arrangements made, that I can go. Which is the moment Riyadh has to stop being a fictional, mythical fortress to me because if I can, then I can’t not. No matter what else I think right now, I can’t let my male peers go and exclude myself so now even worse than being banned from Riyadh I have to actually go there.

Then my handbag gets stolen on the U-Bahn and I have bigger problems in the immediate, because the British embassy’s closed for a royal wedding.

Why is going somewhere so bad? Especially if you’ve already sucked down the moral serving of working in motorsport, gone the distance and done the deeds to get there.

I don’t want to shy away from the facts, here. Firstly, that motorsport is an intensely conservative world — all sport is. Formula E is by miles and miles the most liberal, even confrontational element of at least the cars bit of it but there are no openly gay drivers at a top level, there are very few women.

It’s bizarre to me, as someone who lives in London’s very leftwing queer scene, to work somewhere where shaving half my head was a bit edgy not just ‘had a breakdown on Tuesday, lads.’ I am more left wing than most normal people and motorsport as a whole is considerably more right.

I love my job. I whine about doing it, constantly but I love motorsport. I am obsessed with it, it’s what makes me feel the most and I am fascinated by the tech and I adore my friends in it, this is a job I have worked insanely hard to get — not something I am being forced to do, disinterestedly. But there is a disconnect between the realities of it and myself as a person.

Even motorsport people, however, were shocked by us announcing we were going to Riyadh. Until this event, the FIA (motorsport’s global governing body) had never sanctioned an event in Saudi Arabia, not because there was no interest from the Kingdom (Saudia, the national airline, have been an F1 sponsor for decades) but because until recently, women were completely banned from driving.

That changes, in the months between the announcement and the race — because it had to, as a condition of the event happening. You can view that as the Eprix clearly directing positive change or not if you want but the fact that it had to is important as part of the situation, as part of understanding why people were shocked we were going there.

Saudi Arabia operates a guardianship law for women, who require their husband or male relative’s permission to do things like open a bank account, get a job or a passport. Women are required to wear an abaya (the usually-dark coverup garment that covers you from foot to neck) as well as modest clothing and muslim women must wear a hijab. All Saudi Arabians must be muslim and a religious police force exists to enforce strict adherence to sharia law.

Kissing in public is absolutely banned, as is alcohol and western music. There are no cinemas and media is restricted. LGBT acts can get you imprisoned, publicly whipped or even executed. Human Rights Watch lists the “dissidents” who are detained on long charges in Saudi Arabian jails — they are women’s rights activists, people who have criticised the government, protestors who in most countries would be considered very mild. Torture is documented by HRW as being widely used as an interrogation tool against detainees.

It’s not fully whataboutism to say “well, other countries have terrible records on human rights, too and sport still happens there.” But Saudi Arabia has been off the table for a long time, not least because events like this — people congregating and especially in mixed gender settings — have been banned for a long time by the government themselves.

So is Formula E so financially or morally bankrupt to take the Saudi Arabian money and go there? It’s not like the country has a longstanding connection to electric technology and green solutions — absolutely the opposite, Saudi Aramco is the world’s largest producer of crude oil.

It’s complicated. WWE were the first big sports brand to announce an event in Saudi — but WWE isn’t really a sport and isn’t governed by a sporting body, wrestling a strictly choreographed entertainment product, despite the athleticism. As a consequence, the event in Riyadh could be bent to meet existing Saudi restrictions — no female wrestlers, no women in attendance, etc.

The FIA couldn’t do that and neither could Formula E. The event was somehow going to have to cater to, well, people like me. And they could have done that by spending the Saudia money on ferrying us around so we never saw anything but for whatever reason, they didn’t. They’ve never told me what to tweet or what to write about it. I don’t work for them, they didn’t sign this off and if anything happens to me as a consequence of writing it it’s not their problem.

They’ve got me access to princes to ask questions and put me in front of an exhaustive list of local TV and newspapers to prove that, yes, there is a woman — I’m aware I’m a bit of the PR to all this. And that that’s why people question whether what I think about it is true and why I’ve spent over a year writing this and why it’s so long.

I am incredibly sick of the persistent accusation Formula E journalists do not ask about this. That the media has not had to think about it, that nothing’s been written. So here you go, I’ve written it all.

There’s a view that these big, international events happening in Saudi Arabia is ‘sportswashing’ — that the intention is for Saudi Arabia’s international reputation to be rehabilitated by being thought of as a sports venue. That brief, highly-controlled environments are giving an unrealistic view of life there.

The events are short, for sure. I have made three brief trips to Riyadh and I am not about to pretend that I know about ‘normal’ life there in any meaningful way. This isn’t intended to be documentary about Saudi Arabia writ large, it’s about what it’s like to go there as a journalist to cover the events and what I’ve seen and the people I’ve spoken to. A lot of it’s just about what goes on in my head during the weekends — it’s part travelogue.

I don’t think about Riyadh very much for the next few months because I don’t know what I’m going to do about it, until Formula E call me a few weeks before testing and ask if I’d like to go on a trip. Would I. My entire method of managing my fragile psychology is dependent on going off somewhere every few weeks and the pent up home time is sending me scratchy, I say yes before I’ve even heard where it is.

It’s Riyadh, obviously. They post me some abaya and I read some not very reassuring travel advice, most of which doesn’t make much sense, while trying to work out a way of covering up my confrontationally queer hairstyle.

At Jaguar’s season launch I scope out who else is going — it’s all men but then again, there are not many things like me in motorsport. I contemplate my own death in a mediaeval fortress a lot, because this, for some reason, seems likely to be something Formula E would be sending me to.

The flight over is blandly sober. My hobbies and interests are pretty much covered off by “getting extraordinarily lit on flights” so the self restraint to ask for coffee instead of wine, before we enter Saudi airspace and they stop serving it, is an immense struggle. I also keep falling over my abaya and still can’t do anything with the headscarf to save my life.

My male peers are not having these problems. One of them has a gin and tonic, for a start.

In my head, Riyadh airport is a jail. The entrance to fortress Riyadh, machinery of a despot. In my mind, this is where it goes wrong — where my hastily-issued travel authorisation is judged invalid, where the men are let in but I’m not, where somehow this turns into The Gang All Go To Saudi Prison. Sitting nervously on plastic chairs, we wait for our visas to be done and I try to be sanguine about my upcoming, certain death and consider if I could actually fancy one of the dudes or if I’m just surprisingly horny about my own mortality.

Spoilers: I am not dead.

When we get through customs, the Saudi fixer shakes my hand. My very limited googling has informed me this is absolutely illegal unless we are married and my heart leaps out of my chest because oh here we go, here’s where I die. It’s so stupid it’s unreal, my tabloid-mythological Saudi overlayed like VR on what’s in front of my face.

I’d say it’s the fact it’s 40 degrees centigrade at 1am but realistically it’s just me being ignorant as all get-out and believing whatever I read, especially the most ghoulishly outrageous bits, instead of being willing to find stuff out. Which is a particularly stupid situation for a journalist.

Riyadh is, through the window of the taxi, very clearly not a mediaeval fortress. It has Starbucks. It has Nando’s. Its late but there are people walking around and when we get to our hotel, it’s easy enough for me to buy a coffee, go for a quick wander around the block and then stare out of my thirteenth-story window at a sprawling city glittering with lights. Not as built up with forbidding glass as Dubai, not quite as antiquarian-ramshackle as my beloved Marrakech and there’s something somewhere to it, a little chaos and disorganisation, a little… rule-breaking tendency that twangs on strings tied to Tbilisi.

Riyadh suddenly isn’t a story to scare naughty children with, it’s a place — where nine million people live. And I realise I have been quite stupid about this. Embarrassingly, shamefully so. I don’t get anything like enough sleep, thinking about it because I hate being wrong and I’m not quite sure how I so bullheadedly was so off the truth.

At the showcase I interview some Saudi princes. In the back of my mind lurks a vociferous argument I had with my ex-husband once, where I called him morally bereft for even considering working with the Saudi state. It is funny when you schadenfreude yourself.

My image of a Saudi Prince at the time is very limited. And by limited I mean I can name one.

I have not thought about HRH Abdulaziz bin Turki AlFaisal Al Saud. At this point, he’s the person personally tasked with making Formula E happen and he is vibrating with anxious tension about making it work. In my steady realisation that Saudis are people, too, I clock that they’re as nervous about screwing this up for us as we are of doing something wrong. Maybe a lot more so.

Abdulaziz is funny. I worry halfway through the interview I’m going to get in trouble for flirting with him because when I listen back to it, we laugh a lot. It’s the slightly anxious giggling of people doing something weird they’re not sure will work, at the start and then just genuine jokes. We “do a bit” about everyone telling Saudi they need to make changes for decades and then telling them they’re going too fast when they do.

I find out most Saudis, in fact almost all Saudis, are aged between 15–30 and think about what that means for the life expectancy in this bakingly hot, dry country. 90% of the population works in agriculture, which must be backbreaking in the extremities of the peninsula’s climate and that quality of life is poor, especially compared to the state’s wealth. It is very obvious he is a devout reformer and wants to urgently improve things for Saudi Arabians, starting with what he knows (he used to race in Blancpain GT in Europe) by bringing motorsport and technology to push the country away from the oil enriching — and endangering — it.

He’s not a cold despot, or a charismatic liar — there are plenty of both in motorsport let alone other fields I’ve covered — he’s a little bit thousand-miles-an-hour, talks more like Formula E’s bouncy kiwi Mitch Evans than a politician and with slightly more honesty, not offended when I push things and offering more to ask about than he tries to hide.

If the whole trip has wrongfooted me a little by just bringing Riyadh out of the mythical then this does something else. I do some gormless, rapid recalculations, brain as vacant as that meme because despite my almost unshakable sense of western entitlement it has finally got through that there’s a chance the race in Saudi is not actually about me.

In all my righteous, ask-a-manager fury about having to do this myself, I haven’t thought about the Saudi equivalent of me. Who wants to watch motorsport, work in it, has been denied it right up until now unless she was privileged enough to get to other states — and 90% of the population isn’t. Doing the maths in my head, that 70% 15–30 year olds includes about 13.6 million women my age or younger who’ve just got the right to drive as part of the FIA negotiations for the race. And the right to work at it. And here I am pitching a fit because I have to comply with what might as well be a uniform, to a tourist, for a weekend.

Ok, somehow I have got some perspective. But that doesn’t make this all automatically fine, does it.

Aseel Al-Hamad, a Saudi woman who’s just driven an F1 car at the French grand prix, is there. There’s a flamboyantly camp young Saudi YouTuber or something who is flirting with everyone. I still can’t drink coffee without dripping it on my headscarf.

Everyone keeps saying “it’s just a normal place.” Which is true — it has coffee shops and supermarkets and I eat an extremely salty salad with two other journalists after we get back to the hotel and none of us get arrested for not being married to each other. But also that dumbs it down, to just our own flighty concerns about how to exist here.

I can’t stop thinking about those stats. Saudi, which I’d thought of as ruled by old zealots, is so modally young that I am above the average age here.

There are young, excited Saudis at the showcase. Obviously, because that’s what 70% of the population are. 39 million people live here, who I’ve either thought of as generically oppressed or generically oppressive, drawn on some very primitive gender grounds. When I worked in humanitarianism, no one ever mentioned being humanitarian to Saudis and to my genuine horror, against all my ethics, I’ve casually dehumanised an entire population.

Don’t tell me, sitting from the west and spitting blood on social media at the idea of racing series going to Riyadh, you haven’t done something the same. Because I’m pretty good at this and yet somehow I can get my head around going to New York while toddlers sit in ICE detention, can get on with living in the UK despite knowing full well the horrors my own government is committing but I didn’t know any Saudis, you see. So somehow it hadn’t occurred to me they might want things like entertainment and sports and other things I take for granted and don’t assume I should be denied just because the prime minister’s done a racism again.

Formula E wasn’t taking a compromised event — not like WWE’s male-only show for a select few. It was going to be an Eprix like any other, bar the podium champagne. Not only that, there’d be women on track.

Saudi Arabia was about to go 0–60 by never having had women driving to hosting an event where, during a test, the largest number of women, anywhere, ever would be driving current, top flight machinery alongside men. A statement, yes but not intended to me about Saudi but to Saudi women about motorsport. I mention it to the prince, who thinks it’s quite funny as a statistic — he’s raced in Europe, after all, he knows what the numbers are like in our glorious egalitarian societies.

(If you don’t: they’re atrocious. I can name every woman who’s ever got as far as single seater racing, while I can’t remember which men were in F1 5 years ago, there’ve been so many.)

I tell someone on Twitter that if other countries wanted to do it they’ve had the preceding 70 years and well, where is the lie?

The flight to Dubai, en route back, is weird. I rip my hijab off in the airport terminal, no longer able to cope with my own inept wrapping and try to stop the side-shaved bit of my hair standing up. A male journalist asks me why I bothered with it in the first place and I try not to give him too much of a death glare because actually it’s becoming apparent things aren’t what I assumed.

I absentmindedly delude myself into thinking I’ve been invited to hang out with the guys, not just tagged along by proximity, for the rest of the journey and it hurts for about half the subsequent season that I’m incapable of learning not to make assumptions, despite the big ol’ wisening experience I just got lavished with. But those are other places.

Jamal Khashoggi is brutally murdered in an embassy in Turkey shortly after our showcase trip and the number of names of Saudis most people can think of increases to two. One deceased.

I nervously ask Formula E, at testing, if we’re still going. We are. It’s fuel for some very gory nightmares for a few weeks and can I really go there? I feel pretty strongly about dismembering journalists.

As the days tick down to going, mythical Riyadh re-descends on my mind. I forget the place I saw in broad daylight and brood on the fact I’ll be arriving at 1am, totally alone. It’s stupid fear, not the healthy respect I have for the fact travelling so much on my own, anywhere, is generally dangerous.

My usual attitude to being presented with a dangerous opportunity is to immediately take it. My sense of self-preservation isn’t impaired but my survival skills are over-developed, it’s left me with some excellent stories I can never put my name to and which I often only tell softened versions of, to avoid upsetting anyone. I can think or… Well, let’s say manoeuvre or lie or cheat or manipulate myself out of almost anything and the things I can’t, I can chalk up to a big bucket of Things That Are Making Me Weirder And Weirder But I Just Can’t Stop Doing Them.

I don’t think that will work in Saudi Arabia. And I’m so incapable of behaving myself. I’ve already forgotten the manifest demonstrations I saw that Saudis handle strict rules the same way everywhere else with them does, ie by each pretending they must apply to other people and look like you’re doing it when it matters, my own MO for everything.

Meanwhile my own unelected leader in the UK nearly tanks us out of the European Union for the first of what will be several, increasingly grim times and I have this vague feeling of unassailable doom.

All the thinking about going to Saudi has stopped me doing any thinking about actually going to Saudi, which because I booked my flights late and am permanently broke, is via two Ryanair flights, a gruelling overnight layover in Milan Malpensa (0/10, do not do) and 11 discombobulated hours in Jordan that I thought I was going to enjoy but it turns out the fear is kicking in.

The silly thing is, the thing that scares me is a taxi driver in Ammam who I throw some Jordanian dollars at while bruising my thumb forcing the lock down at some traffic lights to escape after he tries to essentially extort me. But if I can’t handle Ammam how am I going to handle Riyadh? A lot of me wants to turn around and go home.

I get to the airport for my final flight much too early and when they tell me I can’t check in yet, it all suddenly hits and I unexpectedly sit down on the terminal floor and cry hysterically for ten minutes.

By the time I get on the plane, I’m delirious with panic. The insane idea I am going to get arrested at the airport dominates my entire thoughts — after all, last time I was with Formula E but I’m not normally in the group, the showcase a one-off excursion.

Also, most pathetically given I’m 32 not five, I have not told my mother I’m going to Saudi Arabia. My mother disapproves of most things I do but I feel like there’s a relatively legitimate case for that here and also that I am a gutless coward for not being able to take that on. Gutless cowards afraid of being told off probably shouldn’t be trying to do this.

I cry so pathetically with fear the Flynas staff, who are spectacularly kind, give me a free coffee and one sits with me, thinking it’s the thermal-buffeted take off that has me hysterical, not the country they live in.

It is, obviously, not Formula E’s responsibility to check I get anywhere. Or where I’m staying or in particular I’d really rather they didn’t attempt to regulate what I’m doing because I reserve my right to get up to all kinds of things without them trying to stop me. But sometimes there are moments when I think anyone would quite like to think there’s someone who’ll know if they don’t make it to their hotel and I’m having one, feeling much too vulnerable to be able to do this. The monster under the bed is scaring me, mooom.

Needless to say, it’s fine. Uber is very well-regulated in Saudi Arabia and the process of transferring to my apartment hotel is extremely straightforward and despite my sudden inability to do maths convincing me it costs three times more than it does, really cheap from a London perspective.

The guy at the check-in desk thanks me for respectfully wearing Saudi-compliant clothes; my hair at this stage is still difficult to not look aggressively asymmetrical and I’ve finally learned how to do a hijab but it sort of unnerves me. Am I either appropriating or colluding with something, here? After all, I’m not muslim. I’d be a terrible muslim, I already miss wine.

I really need to sleep but don’t, which turns out to be basically what I spend most of my time in Riyadh doing because my brain won’t stop turning over and there’s not enough hours before I have to get up and go to the track anyway.

Here is where things get interesting, of course. Because I’m not staying in a hotel full of Formula E people, I’m not staying with anyone else at all, I’m just any old regular person in Riyadh, staying in the kind of place an average-income Saudi might if they were visiting from Jeddah.

Formula E don’t have my address, I didn’t have to put it on my visa application (handled by the championship so I have no idea how difficult it would be to get one as a journalist otherwise) and unless someone very carefully trailed me from the airport then I’m just out here alone. I’m staying in Al-Aqiq, which is a neighbourhood sort of near Diriyah and as decentralised as the whole of Riyadh seems to be.

Riyadh is a weird city, from my perspective — it seems to have no centre and there’s motorways everywhere. In any 500m walk, you can find at least two demolished buildings with the rubble in situ and another one under construction, a petrol station and a kebab shop. Every road feels like a dual carriageway and I don’t understand the shops.

Not for the reason I assumed I wouldn’t understand the shops, which was more specifically cultural issues. I don’t understand the shops because they sell things that make absolutely no sense to me whatsoever — I’m staying in an apartment hotel and there’s a petrol station nearby, a coffee shop on the forecourt.

That’s reasonably sensible to me. I can also get my head round the oddly Roman-themed kebab shop and the phone shop the other side — fine, that’s how modern life works right?

What I do not understand is the stationery warehouse that also sells party gear and interior design trimmings that seems, by all accounts, to be the big shop in the area. It’s sized for a DIY shop and stocked by the crazy crap aisle in Lidl and although it sells me an exceptionally good pencil sharpener that I’ve jealously guarded ever since, I cannot work out what the heck its deal is. It opens at like 7am and has supermarket trolleys available but every time I go in everyone’s buying like one box of paper plates?

There will be no answers. Some elements of Riyadh, I have to accept, I will not fully understand.

But I find myself going in a lot. I buy some weird new stationery that doesn’t really set me up for the season, because Al-Aqiq doesn’t have much else going on. I get really invested in trying every type of latte flavour the petrol station coffee shop does because it sort of gives me a sense of direction in my attempts at exploration that are otherwise coming up short because I can’t find anywhere to poke around, sleepy residential and mosques the main features of the area.

I assumed it was because I was sort of on the outskirts but this continues to puzzle me a year later. I’m used to cities with centres, high streets — I don’t know if it’s the heat or just a different, dispersed way of doing things or because (and I definitely have noticed this) Saudis don’t really have a culture of congregating places, turning up in crowded scenarios or what. But the structure of the town kind of makes no sense to me, and maybe never will.

There’s, seriously, no public transport on the enormous roads and coming from London that confuses the heck out of me. Contrary to the imagined SUVs of gulf state, most of the cars on the road are old and Japanese — Toyota Camrys and Hyundais, clearly proudly cared for but long in the tooth on mileage. There are almost no European or American cars and the ones that exist look weirdly out of place, a Renault Megane looking like an undersized curiosity in a line of Honda estates.

From that, you can probably gather I walked around a bit. I actually walked around a lot more than I initially intended to, especially on the first day I was trying to get to the track.

This is where it gets a bit technical about the business of motorsport, which is that for the first and only time this year, I need to get to the accreditation centre and pick up the pass that will let me into the circuit — and the rest of the season. This is a very minorly stressful process — and only so because I haven’t been to the circuit before so there’ll be a degree of wandering around trying to find the right place.

What happens is that I initially book a taxi to the wrong place, as it turns out there are several bits of Riyadh called Diriyah. Then I rebook a taxi and it goes to a different version of the wrong place, including having to get through several military checkpoints that my taxi driver is increasingly confused why I think I should be going through — and to be fair, so am I. There wasn’t any of this last time.

I bail out when I see some Formula E hoardings on the basis I must be nearby. This is a stupid idea. I’m the wrong side of the track and have to walk through it to get to the thing that will let me get the lanyard that says I am allowed to go through it but there doesn’t seem to be any other sensible way of making it there.

This feels like the sort of thing you could get into a lot of trouble for. It feels more like that when I get to some catch fencing that hems me in so totally I realise the only thing I can do is walk a long way back, to possibly not be able to find a way through or to climb it. Reader, despite the clothing situation and the fact I am carrying a rucksack full of precious scarred Macbook, I climbed it.

Jumping down the other side, I realised one of the reasons was because it was next to what looks really like a military compound and there’s a bored-looking dude with a gun staring at me. To quote Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye: ok, this looks bad.

There’s a sort of weird thing that happens when you are in a genuinely bad situation. Like, this is obviously not what I am supposed to be doing and it’s hard to guess whether the FIA or the Saudi government will get angry at me wandering into places I am clearly not meant to be first — or most severely. Technically I haven’t signed my behaviour waiver with the FIA for the year yet and also they probably have fewer guns.

As you can probably guess by the fact I’m writing this a year later, the next 45 minutes are quite stressful but ultimately end up in the accreditation office with extremely smudged eyeliner but no permanent damage. And for the record, the Saudi soldier I end up speaking to through Google Translate is nothing but helpful.

Which should probably be the end of me getting lost in various places in Riyadh except it’s kind of only the beginning. I very rarely get lost, I’m great at yeeting myself round the world and reading cities from their layout alone — I don’t know if it’s just that Riyadh is so decentralisedly alien to me or if it’s just the same thing that happens where I cannot stop myself trying to read Arabic the wrong way round and it’s just that I’m too stupid to understand it.

Whatever it is, I get lost a lot. Nearly continuously. I have to develop an uncharacteristic level of chill acceptance for not knowing where I am or when I will next be able to work that out. For sometimes wandering at length down motorways, in the rain, trying to hope that there’s a point on the horizon where GPS will work and maybe I won’t run out of road before then. It’s never that horrible, as an experience — Riyadh actually has fairly decent pavements — it’s just slightly bizarre and adds to my sense of being constantly wrong-footed and out of my depth, which is the kind of on-the-edge-of-fear feeling that makes me crotchety and unobservant and the whole problem ten times worse.

Anyway, that’s for later.

Occasionally, people call me inspirational. How inspirational of me, pursuing a career in a male dominated field. How inspirational of me, tootling round the world on my own and with no budget. How inspirational of me to not have ended up dead given all that.

It’s a weird feeling. I am outrageously flattered by it but I don’t feel very inspirational; I’m broke, I have a professional respect level probably best described as ‘tolerated’ (and barely that) and I’m hardly out here getting awards. When I finish a season I mostly feel a crushing sense of disappointment at myself for not having done that better.

Which is the kind of thing, when the drivers say it, you feel moved to say something encouraging. But it’s true — I’m frustrated by the number of times the titanic effort to get to a race limits the ambition of what’s possible there. And I’m kind of breaking myself a bit and in denial about it.

Anyway, should I really be an inspirational figure for dragging myself to Saudi Arabia on budget flights and white-knuckle bracing to hang on for another season? Probably not. After all, the whole reason I can do this sort of thing is because I’m an overpaid London media professional with a devastating sense of entitlement about travel.

It gnaws at me a bit, because all weekend when I’m in the Riyadh paddock young women keep coming up to me. They grab at my media pass, newly-minted and full-season heavy in the folds of my abaya and we stagger through conversations in Arabic via google translate or if they know enough English to talk.

It’s very exciting and inspirational, seeing a woman journalist succeed. I know because a few months previous to this event, I got amazingly drunk and embarrassed myself telling Suzi Perry how much she inspired me. I look up to the broadcasters and the journalists I find digging through old magazines and suddenly realise that’s a woman’s byline, often from a point when I assumed there weren’t any.

To be honest, I think most people just assume there aren’t any of us either way. Women in motorsport are grid girls or PRs — at least, in that same spooky, popular imagination where Riyadh’s barely a map location but you definitely have an opinion about it even so.

As far as the young women grabbing at my pass are concerned, I’m as ludicrously mythical as I can’t seem to stop myself thinking about their city if I let my mind wander for even forty seconds. A female motorsport journalist, travelling around on her own and from their perspective the most extraordinary thing, which is that I’ve apparently come to Saudi Arabia of my own volition. In fact, I’ve had to work really hard to do so, when I could have just… not.

This is kind of incomprehensible, to the Saudi teenagers. They’re excited by the idea I’d do it but when I live in London and can go anywhere, why would I? And on my own? I must obviously be the kind of incredibly celebrated and important person who thinks they can get away with that sort of behaviour and I don’t have the heart to tell them I’m actually panicking a bit about whether I can get anywhere to even take my coverage this season.

Riyadh’s one of the problems, actually. Editors don’t want to be seen to be endorsing it and the ones I can get to take it say they have to include critique of the situation, which is maddening when they won’t let me write about anything I’m actually seeing.

Ok, yes. Here is the situation: the Saudi government has paid for the race. Someone, somewhere, always pays for a race — championships sustain themselves on hosting fees and Formula E doesn’t go for the scalp like F1 but ultimately ‘who is willing to pay’ is a major persuasive factor to an events’ viability. Not to peel back the final veil but this is how big sporting events work, everywhere.

It’s proved controversial in the past. Montreal paid extra to host a season-ending double-header over several seasons, then it turned out the (I’m compelled by journalism standards to write the word ‘allegedly’ here) corrupt mayor had made promises the city wasn’t willing to keep.

It put Formula E in a position where, contractually, they had to sue the city for a settlement — not the most popular thing to do but FE itself can hardly just wave away a contract or they’d look like mugs everywhere else. Also probably, you know, needed the money for something because no one knows more about how much doing all this costs than my Ryanair-seat-shaped arse.

And why? Why wheel and deal to make a global car racing championship happen. Well, I don’t know — there’s no actual point, is there? There’s not a moral at the heart of this, a heartwarming lesson for humanity that’s perfectly illuminated by the chance to watch one millionaire athlete smash another millionaire athlete into a concrete barrier in a shower of carbon fibre.

You’ve got to tell yourself something to sleep at night though, right? There’s got to be some reason you’re doing it. We make it up for any job, the reason you’re logically doing these things. Here’s mine.

The planet is dying. That’s not hyperbole — the seas are emptying of whales drowned by plastic as fast as they fill with Antarctic meltwater. We can’t put either of those things back, there isn’t a fix except prevention.

The sky is choking, we’re shutting off the stars with satellites and smog and after a few hundred years of building a world dependent on massive — and mass — mobility, we’ve realised we can’t use the types we’ve been reliant on. We talk about the screaming, hurtling destruction of the only place we can live in bland, corporate terms, these words like ‘mobility’ and ‘transitive economics’ neatly editorialising the end of the world as the closing remarks of a conference on disaster mitigation.

It’s terrifying. It’s so incomprehensibly, mind-crushingly fearful that even if you can somehow get yourself together enough to think about it, it’s really hard. Scientists say the risk numbers are into the bit where human minds actually don’t understand them because we just can’t really be that scared.

Which is a problem, because the last thing we need right now is numbness. A few years back, I’d slipped a long way into it — not really specifically the planet but more that some very immediate things were going very wrong in my life and the only way I could continue to get up and go to work instead of lying down and screaming was to just not feel anything. Which isn’t very sustainable, you need a cathartic ability to make sense of things even if they’re terrible.

There’s lots of crutches people use — alcohol (a generally reliable and disastrous one for me) and other mind-altering distractions, getting overinvested in box sets, obsessively hyperfixating about your OTP, pinning your emotional wellbeing on the success of a sports team.

I went for pinning my entire psychological and professional future on Formula E being the thing to dive into right that moment. In the moments where I couldn’t think of a reason to carry on, there’d be another race on the horizon. In the long nights where I didn’t want to live anymore I could motivate myself with the sheer, stubborn desperation of throwing myself into getting in.

Frivolous, yes. But Formula E does also have a point: on this dying earth, amidst the keynotes on the end of transport, we need to do something. Just stopping flying or transporting or using the massive systems we’ve rigged to plug the earth in won’t work. Same as we can’t put the whales back in the barren sea, we can’t just pull the brakes on a tangled juggernaut we’ve spent decades chaotically assembling because as much as we urgently need to, to save lives, if we do then people will literally die.

It’s complicated. It’s those things too big to think about and we needed solutions before I was born, are living through the dying moments of panic while we scrabble for a fix that makes things least-bad. The trolley dilemma between apocalypse and slightly mitigated endtime.

We’ve got to be brave. We’ve got to do things like say ‘we actually cannot use oil anymore’ — for fuel, for plastic, for millions of things that keep us alive in abstract or direct ways. The 20th century was built on such a proliferation of oil products it’s hard to imagine extracting them from your home, you can’t even extract them from your supermarket trolley without making a very contorted list.

And there’s so little time. There’s so much to do. We’ve got to fix cars and planes and medicine and supply lines and food and it’s really hard to think about it all because there’s nothing you can do, you need some sort of thing to rally around.

Yes, it’s cruder than a barrel to say that Formula E can be that thing. It’s a racing series, it’s a day out, it’s entertaining sport — but it’s also a test of shame for automakers caught out in dieselgate, it’s an on-track annoyance that says actually it is possible to make electric cars populist, you can do this.

If all the absurd, awful things we have to deal with now were built in the panicked competition of the twentieth century, then welcome to the 21st edition of that scrap. There’s no time to tear into the companies and people that have orchestrated it — half of them are dead and none of them care but if you can make a system where to succeed, they have to do what you want then that’s something else.

There’s never been and I hope there never is again a moment where motorsport, as inch-grabbing competitive hot lab for transport, has had such a crucial moment. All the years of F1’s development need to be drowned out in the next half-decade by the wind-up banshee howl of electric technologies making up for decades in absence.

And you can’t politely do that on the streets of Monaco as a nice little spectacle. You have to go where you’re not wanted and explain that, actually, you are what is needed. You can’t disrupt anything without causing a little chaos and you’re gonna have to do some stuff that scares you and other people might not approve of.

So for all that, I’d better be fucking inspirational. If I’m the in, I’d better live up to it. If I’m, somehow, the lens that someone can see something worth getting excited about through then I’d better wipe off the grime and get on with it. If I’m how someone can see themself being part of this, across whatever incomprehensibly vast gulf, then I’d better not be churlish about it.

Yes, I am a colossally privileged westerner. Yes, I am ignorant and disastrously naiive — no one looks at me in a paddock and takes me seriously. Formula One journalists consider my curious electrical proclivities like discovering the intern is into something kinky and I’m never going to get a Pulitzer.

But in a paddock in Riyadh I’m a thing people haven’t seen before because all that colossal western privilege means I get to do things they’re not allowed to. And things people have never seen before are inspiring, whether they’re race series screaming round a UNESCO world heritage site or grandstands where women sit with men or Jason Derulo’s shiny jeans.

And the government paid for it, yeah. It’s a little incomprehensible. Why would the Saudi government pay for an event that’s hardly aligned with an oil state’s economy?

One answer is the propaganda. A greenwash over ARAMCO’s continued production of the majority of the world’s crude oil. But New York has an Eprix and no one looks across the Atlantic and says ‘well, the US is green now’ any more than anyone thinks of Oman as the home of football.

So if you talk about greenwashing, you either think the Saudi government is hopelessly naiive or that the entire world is, stricken by lack of knowledge about the place. Formula E is part of a plan, though — the Vision 2030 programme of reform and transformation, which includes a focus on opening Saudi to visitors.

Saudi Arabia has a lot of visitors per year, to Mecca. But visas for non-Muslims were very hard to come by until recently, with tourist visas not at all and a lot of the country restricted.

The first year, lots of journalists were flown out by the Saudi tourism board and taken on an ultra-luxury, whistlestop tour of the Kingdom. I obviously wasn’t one of them. This doesn’t come from a place of delusion where I think those lovely people from Saudia took me on such a nice trip, I learned so much during the cultural briefings between private jet flights…

The thing about being the unexpected element, that weird thing no one expected to see in a paddock anywhere let alone Saudi Arabia, is that no one notices what I am doing most of the time because they assume I’m just recording a Vine or gazing wistfully at a drivers’ hairline or something. I don’t really get fussed around by teams or pushed out of garages or moved away from conversations because despite it being pretty obvious by this point that I do know what I’m looking at, I am also still the comedic relief.

It has turned into a bit of an act. If I actually am I tremendous dumbass then I can’t get mad when everyone treats me like one.

And no one cares what I do or where I go. As soon as I leave the circuit I’m a black shape as swaddled as any of the others. Which is why I think I can trust what I saw and what I think about Riyadh, why I don’t think anyone there was trying to impress me.

The teenage girls, after all, were there for the Black Eyed Peas concert. It was purely incidental that they discovered nice western ladies women could be motorsport journalists in the process, that my big, heavy permanent pass drew so many eyes because I couldn’t get the lanyard to bend to sitting right yet.

One of the women I speak to wistfully says she’d like to be a journalist herself but she’s been arrested before and couldn’t face it happening again. Which is where the teenage excitement melts away.

The reality is that I’m seeing Saudi Arabians get to do stuff they haven’t been able to previously which I take wholly for granted. I’m not inspirational, I’m just an exotic glimpse of someone who, for all my bleating and crying about going to Riyadh, is in absolutely no danger whatsoever.

And when I blend away into the night the only thing that stood out was I have no cocking idea how to keep an abaya out of the puddles from the unseasonal downpour. But going to Saudi is not about me.

I don’t think you can fake teenage girls. You can fake loads of things but you can’t pretend it’s plausible a restrictive state faked teenage girls’ enthusiasm. (the next year I’d get in a mosh pit with them but that’s later)

I meet a really lovely, wonderfully dedicated Saudi journalist out there. She’s a credit both to her youth and frankly to motorsport and I don’t think she even half realises how great she is at making both internet content and quality traditional journalism.

(I’m not putting her name here because this is a reasonably low-risk piece for me, I think — but I wouldn’t force anyone else’s name to be put to my words, any more than I was willing to let my own be edited)

So there are Saudi women doing this. And you should listen to them about the race far more than me and what they say is obviously the same thing I say about the London Eprix; of course you want the sport you love in your city.

Boris Johnson’s an odious prick and I’m allowed to say that. I don’t have to express gratitude to him for facilitating the event, when it happens next year. He didn’t have anything to do with it and I can be British without having a single miligram of respect for the people running the place.

I can’t tell you what Saudis think about their own leaders because I don’t know — but the attitude is definitely quite different. The situation is different, the structure is different. I don’t want to say that people are lying when they say they’re grateful to the leaders for bringing sporting events there because I don’t know that they are.

The politics of anywhere is complicated. There’s not a requirement to engage, except when there is. When you have to go somewhere the issues loom in massive print or your prime minister keeps straight-up lying about things that will get people killed.

People think we don’t ask about this. But what is there to say? I can tell you what was said in a press conference, I can tell you what I inferred from the total disregard for a lot of the stricter rules that’s obviously running through Riyadh.

Saudi Arabians like being Saudi Arabian. Much more than I think most British people like being British but that’s kind of cultural. It will come as no surprise that a young population finds strict religious law grating and wants reforms, that the handful of cinemas that have opened in the past few years are popular, that people like being able to go on dates and go out for dinner without being strictly separated into male and female and they love to party. Some of them probably wouldn’t say no to a beer.

If I tell you that Saudi Arabians (largely) approve of the race, will you approve of the race now? If I tell you that there’s young Saudis, especially women, getting the chance to do stuff they really want to do because we bring the circus to Riyadh, are you onboard? Not if you weren’t before.

I would say: why do you think you deserve the opportunity to go to things and they don’t? What are you gonna tell my friend, ‘hey, an accident of your birth location means my politics ban sport from your country?’ I don’t know if that sits right with me, personally.

Here’s some tea: the Riyadh paddock, in that first year, is the nicest motorsport paddock I’ve ever worked. As a woman. I mean, I always work in paddocks as a woman but like in terms of me being there, womanly, it was the nicest.

Within the Formula E paddock, people behave pretty much like they do in a lot of the rest of Riyadh, from what I can tell. Western women uncover their hair and some fully do away with the abaya, by year two that ratio increases to pretty much everyone but me shedding it as soon as they’re through the gates.

Women have never been banned from motorsport, in liberal western Europe. We make up 1.5% of race license holders — over the course of 125 years of motorsport events — and it’s conventional for men in racing to be able to say wildly misogynist things without it affecting their careers but we’re not banned and never have been.

Women always have been in motorsport, working and as pure fans. Most people in it start as one, end up as a combination. It’s a passion field, you can’t commit to the schedule otherwise.

But we’re a minority. And people quite often either forget we’re there or forget that any group who are so completely marginalised actually kind of needs some extra catering-for. You get used to it after awhile and kind of forget but you will never be one of the boys.

Riyadh isn’t like that because this is a totally new event. They have to make sure that it caters to a population not used to attending these kind of events at all and also that it specifically advertises to and makes itself welcoming to women, because otherwise they’re at risk of getting in trouble with the FIA. The organisers here 100% have to prove how liberal and reformed they are.

Which means everything includes me. People add “and ladies” every time they say “guys,” everyone asks for my opinion about things, I get brought to the roundtables and possibly actually given more time with people than the men.

It’s so strange and flattering, it gives me not a weird impression of Saudi Arabia, who I completely understand the motivations of about this and yes I know it’s PR and an act. But it’s an act that’s working, I do feel welcomed not specifically to Riyadh but to motorsport in a way I simply never have back home. It makes me a bit genuinely hysterical about having to go back to normal paddocks.

I don’t think Riyadh deserves a medal for it or anything — but it makes me think a lot about the ‘regular’ motorsport events.

Back to that first year; it’s fine. I distract myself by looking after one of my friends, who is finding it all much harder and who I designate myself the food and drink carer for the majority of the season.

By the time we’re leaving the circuit I promise to come back for a week next time, to see more of the city. I’ve already made myself a playlist for the way home and although I’ve been cheerfully, relentlessly convincing myself I am coping fine and the kilometre and a half down a dark motorway I’ve walked every night doesn’t bother me and I feel perfectly safe, there’s a cathartic reason it opens with the Pet Shop Boys’ Home & Dry.

But it’s done. We’ve been to Riyadh and nothing bad happened and I ate some really great falafel. Also had one of the best experiences of my life when I walked up to media pen on the test day and there was a near-equal number of female to male drivers due to a test stunt where teams were allowed to run a second car if a woman drove it.

Yeah, it’s a stunt. But it’s the one that means Saudi Arabia has now had the most women driving in a mixed-gender, top flight motorsport series, simultaneously, of any country ever. If anyone’s mad about that then motorsport has been happening for 125 years and somewhere else could have done it first. I mean, this is just sport. Somewhere could have done that. Somewhere could do it now with a larger number. In the interim, well played HRH Abdulaziz.

I decide maybe I don’t want to drink any wine in Cairo airport on my way back, for roughly the amount of time it takes me to get off my plane, walk to a place that sells wine and immediately order some. It tastes so good, I have a little cry.

Thus ends year one of what’s going to be ten years of me taking myself to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as a lone woman and trying to get around.

Something weird happens the day after that season’s final race in New York, which is that I go to a lunch with a load of other journalists. They’re all F1 and important and cool, I probably shouldn’t have even been invited. Especially given I’ve just got off a heavily delayed overnight flight from JFK and I am not feeling it.

Anyway, I inevitably mention I’m from Formula E and this guy goes off at me about Riyadh. Then when he discovers I actually go, he goes even more in on me and my moral decay. I’m genuinely shocked by the ferocity of it, especially from a group of people who go to Bahrain.

I’ve got used to having to explain myself but this guy just won’t let it lie, says I’m dancing on Khashoggi’s grave and and mocking the idea of journalism, supporting crimes against women. I kind of think, privately, that that’s a bit much coming from the lofty podium of working in, uh, famous humanitarian agency Formula One but then at the time I also do that so perhaps that’s not a great stone to start throwing in a room full of people who do too.

I don’t manage to get my brain together enough to sell it to him. I mean, I don’t know if I want to sell it? Do I actually think it’s good that we go, not just survivable?

You know what, I do. I think it’s difficult and it stresses me out and every year it makes the season opener tough and you know, people shout at me over lunch and things. But look, if you just close the door on Saudi Arabia then how’s there gonna be reform? How is freedom of the press and rights going to improve if you don’t know anything about anything that happens there? Or anything about the country? The people that live there?

It’s 2019; the same way that Saudi Arabia can’t stop the flow of information as a young, internet-savvy population gets extremely online, you can’t stand in the way of things

My most succinct summary of why I think we should go, though, is simpler: Formula E getting paid to race in the home of oil and sit there going ‘that’s bad’ without getting censored is the biggest middle finger move.

Ah, Riyadh alone: round two. Now, surely, I would be armed with enough knowledge to not screw up constantly by disappearing into my own bizarre alternate reality.

Guess what? I absolutely do not. If anything else I’m even worse. I get really, really anxious in the runup — partly because this year my mother knows I am going and oh boy am I getting told off. Which is pathetic, what the hell, what kind of tiny, baby child am I?

I booked my flights really early this time, before testing. They were way better flights and I was excited to be going home via Beirut because apparently I am a lot better at inventing fictional versions of countries that sit in my brain like mirages than I am at reading the news.

Anyway, great life choices aside (it’s not like this is even my worst one) I, in theory, should be really chill about this. Except I miss the FIA email to apply for a visa and end up doing it late and it doesn’t turn up for ages and I get really stressed and then also ill and I start a new job and everything is really full on and I want to throw up.

I don’t do my packing until the last minute, then prepare by drinking too much wine and sleeping through my alarm so I have to book a last minute Uber to Stansted. Which isn’t ideal because I’m not sure if I’ve been paid but better than missing the whole thing.

Anyway, my point-blank refusal to ever check my bank balance is very much a me thing rather than anything directly connected to Saudi Arabia. So, off to Stansted and I have to re-buy everything I need and obviously forgot in the airport but again, this is pretty standard behaviour for anyone who’s as much of a total mess as me.

This doesn’t seem like the way to do it. I can get most places half-cut and sloppy but this is not most places. Nevermind — also it turns out Pegasus serve surprisingly pleasant in-flight wine and by the time I get to Istanbul I’m feeling quite relaxed; I have hours of stopover for it to wear off in, don’t worry.

I don’t want to go. It’s got into my head. I’ve been getting all these weird emails with hate-filled fantasies about me getting killed and I keep thinking about the guy at that lunch and also about the texts from my mum and the way I don’t feel cavalier enough to be doing this.

Why am I going? Because it’s my job to go. Because I have stuff to do. Because I have this endless compulsion to do it and it’s a massive privilege. I don’t know. It’s all weighing on my brain, am I an instrument of state PR now? I wouldn’t put up with that from anywhere and besides, I don’t think I am. I’d probably be on a fancier flight if I was.

But getting onto my late-night flight in Istanbul, I know it’s descended again. The fictional, fearful Riyadh is in my head and every radical thing I’ve tweeted from the past year is haunting me. What the hell am I doing going to Saudi Arabia?

And the thing is, I can’t (at this point) recognise it’s the VR. Yet again, I’m expecting to get arrested at the airport, to get trailed, a million paranoid things that won’t happen. But now they’re incredibly real in the sort of simulated reality everyone’s told me definitely exists and is more important than my own memories.

I’m not normally like this. I haven’t been sleeping enough (I’ve had ten hours sleep over five nights) and it’s really starting to show.

Still, on the plane now so better live with it — obviously I get to Riyadh without incident and am through the airport with a warm bag of falafel and a coffee, into an Uber where I manage to stagger through a mostly-Arabic conversation and send a selection of my wilder and more enthusiastic tweets about politically safe but morally questionable topic: Lando Norris is really hot lately.

I know I said I’m never going to win a Pulitzer but with that kind of bold reporting, I really should.

Finding my hotel takes a bit (it’s another, different dubious apartment hotel) and by the time I’m in and arrived, it’s like 3:30am so I just pass out in the massive bed. By which I mean, look at memes on my phone and rewatch the camping episodes of It’s Alive and wonder at which point I stopped just writing about semi-teenage idiot sportspeople and actually became one.

Nevermind, anyway, soon enough it’s time to revisit ‘finding the accreditation centre.’ This year I am determined not to have to climb any catch fencing so pick my Uber dropoff point VERY carefully. It is to absolutely no avail and I end up lost in the enormous Diriyah Season compound down near where Ruiz and Joshua will be going at it in a few weeks but certainly there are no electric cars currently.

Because I’m still freaking out and only managing to psychologically sustain myself by internally commentating on the situation it gets steadily worse as I wobble across the paddock on a combination of caffeine, adrenaline and inadvisable 4am hotel tap water. Once I actually find the place, collect the thing and get in the media centre things feel less out of control, except that I need to write two season previews before anyone wakes up in the UK still.

At least there’s fruit and coffee.

Thursday is a bit of a mess, for me. I don’t eat enough (I’m vegan and it’s a genuine problem in paddocks) and I’m so sleep deprived I’m really not coping very well and keep having to watch Calming YouTube Content to get a grip on myself and churn out another thousand words. To be fair, all of this is just the business of being me, doing journalism so can’t really be attributed to Riyadh or anyone there.

A team are doing an event later where I’m meant to be interviewing someone who I inevitably don’t get to interview because scheduling is a nightmare and also it’s really obvious that I am about one second from falling asleep on the floor and considerably over my stress limit. Another woman in Formula E asks me why I’m letting the side down by wearing an abaya (most team personnel are taking them off the second they enter the paddock) and I just snap.

It’s because I’m on my own. Because I arrived at 1:30am. Because everyone’s spent the last month telling me how stupid I am by going here and how certain I am to get killed and it turns out even I have a limit to self-determined risk enthusiasm. Because if anything happens to me, no one knows where I am and Formula E don’t look after me -

This comes as a surprise. They don’t? Surely no one lets me run round Saudi Arabia totally on my own?

Oh, they do. And being alone is psychologically testing and I feel so pathetic at how pitiable it all sounds. One of the drivers sympathetically tells me that sounds “really fucked up, to be honest.” It, err, doesn’t help.

By the time I get back to my hotel the absolute most I can manage to do is go to a shop and buy the ingredients for a big night in in Riyadh. Which is to say, some crisps, some mystery thing in a jar that turns out to be definitely not vegan kind of fake cheese with the consistency of mayonnaise that tastes amazing on crisps (food waste is bad) and one of everything from the drinks section.

I love foreign supermarkets. Full of weird stuff. This one is crucially full of men who are understandably surprised to see a western lady wandering around shaking like she’s on a billion drugs and trying to find the hummus (I can’t) or work out which colour of water is fizzy in these parts.

Obviously there’s no beer in Saudi Arabia but there is a wide selection of like beer-adjacent malt drinks that have weird fruity flavours and also cider-adjacent things with frightening coloured labels. I go for a beer-adjacent thing in flavour ‘original’ and a threatening can of Mirinda which poses the question about itself: watermelon or cantaloupe?

(my investigative powers don’t stretch that far, it mostly tastes of heavy-handed corn syrup)

I’m freaking out, though, because when I was in the supermarket the guy packing my bags gave me a present. It was just a chocolate wafer thing and I was concentrating on understanding what number I needed to pay so didn’t really pay any attention until I left and suddenly thought: what if they’re setting me up to be done for stealing it?

There was no evidence for this at all. Every Saudi I’ve met has been genuinely helpful or openly friendly, the worst reaction being a kind of morbid curiosity about why anyone would do what I am doing. But instead of using all 10ft-across of my weirdly gigantic hotel bed to get the sleep I really, really desperately need I obviously just send myself insane googling ‘setup to be arrested Saudi shops’ and variants thereon. It’s so stupid and I am only getting stupider as I waste precious resting hours on doing the opposite of that.

Now fully convinced I will be in jail before the end of the day, it’s time for the Friday race. Either you’re into motorsport and therefore know how race day works or you’re not and so don’t care but basically a lot of things happen all at once and I have to stop writing worryingly thirsty things about drivers in other series and do some work for once.

I’m really in the toilet, brain-wise, by this point and have to cry in the loos three times during the day. Which is difficult when the loos keep being closed because of some kind of water supply issue (Formula E uses temporarily-built paddocks so these things happen) and requires quite a lot of timing effort.

Also people keep interviewing me, which actually now seems to happen more than I interview other people and the whole thing feels completely ridiculous. Why are you interviewing me? I’m an idiot and I can’t remember my own name or feel most of the left side of my body because I last had ‘adequate sleep’ about three weeks ago and for some reason I forgot to bring any socks with me so I have these really aggressive blisters and I’m probably going to go to Saudi jail over a chocolate bar.

A lot of stuff is happening to me and very little of it is conducive to doing anything useful. Which then gets in my head more and this is how every weekend goes, except with an added, imaginary carceral threat.

I relay my woes to one of my friends who advises that maybe it really would be a good idea to eat something that isn’t crisps and get more than three hours’ sleep and like ok, I can believe that.

My Saudi friend notices I am having a meltdown and says she’s worried I hate her city. It finally kicks me into functional gear — I can’t be coming over here, making people feel bad about the fact I have a wholly imaginary version of their country down over my head like a visor.

So that night I first go to the concert after Formula E and purchase ‘potato,’ the most vegan thing I can find to eat. This helps somewhat and gets me into the mindset where when my taxi drops me off, I head off to the malls near where I’m staying (which are not the grander, designer sort you find in some of Riyadh) to complete the incredibly trivial task of buying socks and ordering stir fry.

Socks it turns out are easy, as there’s a shoe shop nearby and I could’ve saved myself a world of pain really easily. Which is pretty much the moral of this entire episode: stop making your life really hard and driving yourself insane and instead of just doing things like a normal, woman.

Dinner is also easy in that I get an absolutely monumental quantity of stir fry vegetables from a mall food court place and eat them in a sort of blissful semi-coma while listening to the sounds of Dr Dre’s seminal album 2001, over the mall tannoy. I seem to be staying in a very Asian district this year and most of the restaurants seem to be authentic Indonesian places.

This helps the sleeping problem enormously. It turns out just ‘not being scared’ is really key to getting six straight hours in bed and so being able to operate normally. And that’s the thing, what am I even scared of? Myself?

(to be fair, I am definitely the biggest danger to me)

It feels better. But I’m still relieved when I leave — it’s all the things: my own stupid ideas, the judgement from other people, the pressure of trying to make sure I’m doing it right.

Before I do though, I go to the last concert with a group of Saudi young people who I’ve tagged along with. Everyone is covered in glitter and dancing suggestively and jumping on each other and starting mosh pits. It feels like being at a gig I am about 15 years too old for in any other country, except that unlike if it was in London no one sloshes a pint of Tuborg down my back at any point.

It definitely does not feel like government collusion when at the end of his set, a Lebanese rapper does a dubstep version of Bryan Adams’ Everything I Do (I Do It For You) and I, an old person, absolutely lose it in front of this surreally gigantic stage, surrounded by excited young people.

For me, I could go to a gig like that every night of the week in London. But this is one of a handful. The first western music concerts were played at the Eprix the year before and there’s something there that feels big. You can claim the sport is a distraction for the rest of the world but you don’t televise concerts, these are for the Saudis.

(The concerts actually caused a really problematic ticketing situation this year where people were buying them, looking like the Formula E numbers were good because it was a combined ticket and then not turning up — when the organisers were asked they admitted they screwed up and would be trying to fix it next year)

This is what it comes down to, about the race. It’s a good track, it’s one of the best ones we have in fact — it’s produced two exciting races this season and despite torrential rain making the first year difficult, it worked then too. And yes, we have done all the bits about turning up to torrential rain in Riyadh; it snowed on the Sahara when we were in Marrakech once, too.

Climate change doesn’t really deal in imaginary metaphors.

So it’s a good track, the drivers like to drive on it, it produces a genuinely good sporting event. It takes electric racing and green principles, confrontationally, to one of the homes of oil. It has forced some small changes — which should not overshadow the achievements and struggles of Saudi Arabians themselves in getting those.

If you think it is just sportswashing then that’s too simple, it isn’t. It depends if you think the Saudi 2030 Vision plan is for you, probably sitting in the west and still thinking of this as some distant horror theme park, or for people there.

There’s an open PR angle, but those stats — the ones from way back at the show case, about how low life expectancy is in Saudi Arabia and how generally Saudis have a poor quality of life — well, a lot of this is not about how you see it. It’s about things like the massive investment into grass roots sport (especially motorsport, a nice upside to the now-head of the Sports Authority being an ex-racer) might improve things for regular Saudis.

You want to know what going to Riyadh is like? It’s a bit boring. People want stuff to do, same as you. And to meet people — each other and weird, jetlagged British women who can barely hold a coffee without tipping it down themselves.

So long as we acknowledge the other stuff (and we should do it everywhere) then I think you’re taking the wrong side, if you believe your opinion trumps their right to access that.

Ok here’s some more tea: Riyadh is covered in rubbish. If you want proof I’m not lying, here it is: the whole place is absolutely bedecked in trash.

This happens a lot in places with poor infrastructure, which Riyadh absolutely has. Because making life easy for people to get around and to meet up and to get places hasn’t been a social or specifically political priority, Saudi quality of life suffers in more ways than one. Who cares if the streets are filled with garbage if you never go out?

But people do now. Young Saudis go out in big groups and nearly all Saudis are young. Stepping around overspilling rubbish becomes the first thing I get the hang of keeping my abaya out of because man, it does not smell ok.

Rubbish in a city is a pollutant and I really hope, for the people living there, that Riyadh sorts this out. It’s all the ‘being a metaphor’ thing, isn’t it? Metaphors for governments don’t have extensive municipal recycling programmes.

I can’t tell you to unconditionally support Formula E racing in Riyadh. I don’t think you should unconditionally support anything, really, apart from maybe Lando Norris but we’re all just having a big one about that at the minute.

But anyway, this wasn’t to tell you what to think. It was slightly just to write about going there because not many people do and slightly because everyone keeps insisting no one in the Formula E media is thinking about this stuff when I have tortured myself for weeks with it. Also some of the anecdotes are funny. I could write a lot more, from my run-ins with ‘rose Lattes’ to the time I bought a lime juice and recklessly refused extra sugar in it only to discover I’d got an actual pint of just undiluted lime.

But this is long enough and it’s already much too much about me, for something that really shouldn’t be. We all have to live in our own heads.

0 notes

seigyokus · 7 years

Text

1.5 - Trouble

Idolish Seven - Part 3, Chapter 1.5 For more Part 3 translations, click here!

Translation below the cut!

Tsunashi Ryuunosuke: You're pretty used to these sorts of parties, Sougo-kun. Nothing less from FSC's hei-- Osaka Sougo: Ah....... Tsunashi Ryuunosuke: He-- hey, I kinda wanna eat meat! ......Sorry, that was supposed to be a secret, wasn't it. Osaka Sougo: Oh no, I'm the one who should be apologizing, if anything. Tsunashi Ryuunosuke: You know, I've given it some thought since then. Why don't you try talking it out with your family again? Tsunashi Ryuunosuke: Nobody's happy when they're at odds with their family. Right now, I've got connections to FSC through TRIGGER's TV show. (1) Tsunashi Ryuunosuke: If you want, I could try to mediate the situation, to the best of my ability. How about it? Osaka Sougo: ....... Tsunashi Ryuunosuke: It'll be okay. There's no way a parent could ever hate their child, Sougo-kun. Osaka Sougo: ......You must've been raised in a warm and loving family, Tsunashi-san. Tsunashi Ryuunosuke: Sougo-kun...? Osaka Sougo: Thank you for offering, but I'm afraid I must refuse. Please don't mind me. Tsunashi Ryuunosuke: But-- Osaka Sougo: There is no need to worry. Thank you for your concern. Tsunashi Ryuunosuke: ....... Tsunashi Ryuunosuke: ......Got it. I'm sorry I butted in like that when I don't know anything about your situation. Osaka Sougo: Not at all....... I apologize.

Yaotome Gaku: Tsumugi. Where are the other guys? Takanashi Tsumugi: Gaku-san. I'm just on standby here, since they've all got good conversations going with other people. Yaotome Gaku: I see. So, how have you been? You've been preparing for their first anniversary tour on top of your usual work, right? It must be a handful. Takanashi Tsumugi: Indeed, it is. But it's their anniversary tour! Everybody at the agency is just bursting with energy! Yaotome Gaku: Ahaha. So that's how it is. I'll make some time and drop by, one of these days. Takanashi Tsumugi: Thank you very much! We'll welcome you with open arms. I'm sure everyone will be delighted! Yaotome Gaku: Yeah. Woman: Good evening, Yaotome-kun. You two sure are getting along swimmingly. Are you perhaps Yaotome-kun's cute little date for tonight? Yaotome Gaku: Oh.... No, it's not like that. Takanashi Tsumugi: Nice to meet you, I'm Takanashi Tsumugi from Takanashi Productions. I work as IDOLiSH7's manager. Woman: Oh my, IDOLiSH7's manager. It's nice to meet you too. You know, everybody was just so surprised that Yaotome-kun was grinning so much-- he's usually quite surly. Yaotome Gaku: Haha, I get that a lot. I don't look that displeased, do I? Woman: You do, you definitely do. You're just like an open book, Yaotome-kun. It shows on your face. Yaotome Gaku: Man, that's harsh.... Well, I'll see you later, Takanashi-san. Takanashi Tsumugi: Yes! Thank you very much. Keep up the good work! Yaotome Gaku: Yeah. Yaotome Gaku: .......

Izumi Iori: What's the matter, Nanase-san. You're blankly staring at the venue. Nanase Riku: I just thought it was amazing.... There's so many people who work in our world. Nanase Riku: These people are just like us and have dreamed about living in the world of music. They've been here for decades, if not more, and there'll only be more and more people as time goes on. Nanase Riku: Each and every one of them is like a star, brilliantly shining. They come and go, flowing like the Milky Way, and eventually become part of history. Nanase Riku: Zero, and us too. We're all in the midst of that great passage. ......As are Kujou and Sakura Haruki....... Izumi Iori: Indeed....... Izumi Iori: Speaking of which, we are only one year in. We need to focus and get ourselves together, lest we vanish like sea foam. (2) Nanase Riku: You're right! We still haven't settled the score with TRIGGER. We'll also be facing challengers at Black or White this year. Nanase Riku: I hope we'll be a group that the challengers won't be ashamed to face-- just like how TRIGGER was to us last year. Izumi Iori: If we are aiming to fight TRIGGER and Re:vale, then the MOP is the perfect time to do so. Nanase Riku: MOP? Ah, it's the thing that decides which idol got the most support this year, right? (3) Izumi Iori: It will be a race to collect awards like the JIMA and Diamond Disk. Izumi Iori: Last year, it was a showdown between Re:vale and TRIGGER, and Re:vale ended up winning. TRIGGER intends on winning this year, without a doubt. Nanase Riku: And we'll be butting into that fight! Sounds interesting! Izumi Iori: Haha, how reliable. Ah....... Nii-san, Rokuya-san, where are you going? Izumi Mitsuki: We were gonna go to the bathroom, but I figured we could also look for Yamato while we're at it. That dude might be holding on to him still. Rokuya Nagi: Please go, Mitsuki. I would love to rendezvous with all of the ladies dressed up tonight-- Izumi Mitsuki: I'm doing it to get you away from the venue too! You're getting way too into this! Right after you've come back from Northmare, too! Rokuya Nagi: OH......! Izumi Mitsuki: Later guys! If they bring out dessert, grab some for me okay? Nanase Riku: Gotcha!

Izumi Mitsuki: Stop flirting around! We're idols, in case you didn't remember. Rokuya Nagi: No, no! Bestowing words of praise to women is but a part of a gentleman’s manners. Izumi Mitsuki: You could say that again. Ah, there he is! Yamato-san-- Man in a Suit: Ahaha.... I've heard a lot about your work. It truly does runs in the family. Nikaidou Yamato: ......Thank you very much. Izumi Mitsuki: 'Runs in the family?' Maybe he knows somebody in Yamato-san's family? Yamato-san doesn't like talking about them, so maybe we should stay outta their way....... Rokuya Nagi: Hm...... I want to know. I'll give that man my business card and get closer to him. Izumi Mitsuki: H-hey! Hold up, Nagi......! Man in a Suit: What was it, IDOLiSH7? It looks like things are going quite well with them. That's very fortunate, especially in times like these. Man in a Suit: Say, Yamato-kun. You're finally making it big. It'd be awful to cause trouble now, especially when things are going smoothly and without any problems. Don't you think so too? Nikaidou Yamato: Haha.... Don't worry. I don't have any intentions of exposing that right now. Nikaidou Yamato: Not Chiba Salon. Izumi Mitsuki: ...'Chiba Salon'......? Rokuya Nagi: ....... Man in a Suit: ......That's a relief. I remember you telling me, when I first invited you to the entertainment industry.... Man in a Suit: That if you did enter showbiz, you'd only be doing it to get famous and grab everyone's attention-- so you could expose the secrets of Chiba Salon. Man in a Suit: You know, I was shocked to hear that you debuted as an idol, but I'm glad you weren't serious about going through with that. This is the best course of action for you, and for your friends. Nikaidou Yamato: ....... Man in a Suit: I'll be going now. Please give your father my regards. Nikaidou Yamato: Hmph. I haven't even seen his face. If you'll excuse me.... Nikaidou Yamato: ......! Izumi Mitsuki・Rokuya Nagi: ....... Nikaidou Yamato: ...You guys.......

Kujou Ten: ....... ???: Kujou Ten. Kujou Ten: ......Who are you? ???: My, my. This is my first time seeing the real deal. Kujou Ten: ......Just who are you? And why are you standing in front of my house? I'm going to call the police. ???: Hehe....... ???: Kujou's made someone like you into his son, and calls you 'perfect?' Kujou Ten: ....... ???: Let me tell you something. Something that's even better than my name. ???: Your life is pointless. Try as you may to dance, to win trophies-- but both the fans and the world are frivolous. ???: One day, you will be forgotten. All of the things you've ever given, all of the things you've ever shown, everything, everyone-- all of it will disappear, far beyond memory’s reach. ???: You will no longer be the person they wish to see, and your song will no longer be the music they want to hear. ???: After all, that's what happened to your younger brother. Right, Nanase Ten? Kujou Ten: .......

To be continued....

TL Notes/comments:

If you don’t already do this, I highly recommend tapping thru the game (or a video playthrough) of the chapter as you read to get the nuances behind each spoken line!!

(1) The more literal would be: "It's really unfortunate that your family doesn't get along. " but I didn't really like how that sounded (kind of sarcastic? a little condescending? though that is kind of what's going on here, given the context of what happens in the later part of this conversation)

(2) "vanish like smoke" (also, "disappear like bubbles" LMAO) were my original tl's, but I wanted to keep that whole star/river/water metaphor going!!! It's fucking Beautiful. Riku waxes absolute poetry here, I Love It.

(3) phrasing was kinda confusing in orig? lmk if i mucked up this one! Slight note on the title, it means wind+waves and also strife. 'Strife' was the working title I used for a while then i actually translated the title drop line, and in context (波風を立てる) it means to cause trouble. yep!

haruka is fun to translate THOUGH there are like one or two sentences i am just not 100% satisfied w/ how i tl’d or any way i try to approach it so :| btwn every draft revision it has changed a little so yeah

BIG THANK U TO KURI AS USUAL 4 CATCHING MY WEIRDASS SENTENCES AND PROOFING!!!

As usual, if you see any mistakes/mistranslations/etc, please message me!

Thank you for reading!!

#idolish7 #アイドリッシュセブン #story3:tl #story3:text #translation

103 notes · View notes

play-read-write · 8 years

Text

Shipping Wars

Fandom: RWBY Word Count: 1692 Characters: Team RWBY Description: Of all of team RWBY the only two to never fight were Blake and Ruby. Weiss and Yang walk in to find there’s a first time for everything.

They were close to the room before they heard it, almost to the door. Yang looked over at Weiss, who met her confused look. “You hear that too?”

“Yes.” Weiss says, “I do.” They moved closer, standing just outside the door to their dorm now, the muffled sound of raised voices coming from inside.

“But… it can’t be.” Yang says, “Those two never fight.”

“I certainly don’t recall them ever being in an argument with each other.” Weiss says.

“What do you think happened?”

“How should I know? Open the door and find out.”

“Alright, here we go.” Yang says, opening the door and stepping in.

“HOW can you possibly think that?” Blake asks, waving her hands, “It’s absurd!”

“How can you NOT?” Ruby asks back, “Its plain as day, you just don’t want to see it!”

“What I want is for you to start making sense; nothing you’ve said has had anything to go on!”

“It’s had everything to go on, you’re just pretending it’s not there even when I point it out!”

“Um, you two okay?” Yang asks, “What’s going on?”

“What’s going on,” Blake says, “Is that your sister is being ridiculous.”

“No I’m not, you’re just being stubborn.” Ruby says.

“Your idea is based on circumstantial evidence and a bunch of hearsay. You’re just deluding yourself.”

“Don’t think breaking out big words means you’re right.” Ruby says, “Just cause I can’t word it as fancy doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

“No, the facts mean you’re wrong, how is it even a question?”

“Did we even read the same book?” Ruby asks, “If you honestly believe that after reading it then you need to read it again.”

“I have, six times, and I still don’t know what could prompt someone to think such a thing?”

“Wait, this is about a book?” Weiss asks.

“Not just a book.” Ruby says, “The Hidden Huntress, only the best book to come out in like, decades!”

“At least we agree on something about it.” Blake says, “It’s a great book, and the first in a series, but SOME people” She glares at Ruby, who glares back. “Seem to have some insane ideas about it.”

“Yeah, and one of those people is named Blake Belladonna.” Ruby says.

“Oh real mature.” Blake says.

“So you two are arguing over a book you both like?” Weiss asks.

“Not surprising.” Yang says, “Ruby can get really really into those fictional worlds. As much as Blake reads, I’m guessing it’s the same.”

“But what on Remnant could they be arguing about in something they both enjoy?”

“It’s easy.” Blake says, “I read the book and, with my literal thousands of books of experience, saw that they were clearly developing a relationship to be explored in the later series. A very good one too. Ruby read it wrong for some reason.”

“I did not!” Ruby protests, “I may not have read as many books but I’ve played games and seen movies too. I know what was happening. She wasn’t falling for her at all, she said she hated her!”

“It’s called character development. And you’re one to talk. You really think she’d be going for the other girl, they’ve barely spoken!”

“It’s called character development.” Ruby repeats, “Besides, they’re relationship is clearly better. Even at the end of the book when they were friends she was still all rude sometimes. The Hidden Huntress would never go for her!”

“Right, because she’d go for the used to be villain.” Blake says sarcastically, “She’d have nothing in common with someone with that past. Besides, they are clearly interested in someone else.”

“Oh don’t even get me started on that one!” Ruby says, “They had ONE important scene together, the only other thing they’ve done is stand next to each other.”

Weiss and Yang look between the two arguing girls, confused and somewhat nervous. “Wait,” Yang says, “You guys are fighting… over a shipping war?”

“No!” They both say at the same time.

“It’s not a shipping war.” Blake says, “I’m just trying to talk some sense of reason into your sister here.”

“She’s right that it’s not, but she’s the one who needs to see reason.” Ruby says, “They’re amazing characters and I won’t have her thinking of them like that, they deserve better.”

“Oh because yours is so much better. Two of them you like are polar opposites, they’d never get together!”

“I could say the same about yours, twice!” Ruby says, “But at least mine aren’t actual opposites, they’re the same at heart.”

“One is a criminal and one of them beat a guy to nothing for just stealing.”

“Yeah well one of yours is all mean and one is all happy.”

“So the happy one makes the mean one nicer it’s called balance.”

Yang walks over to the bookshelf as they keep arguing, pulling the book off, and then getting the other copy off of Ruby’s bed. “HEY!” She shouts, getting their attention. As soon as they look she activates Ember Celica. “You two stop right now, or the books get it.”

Both of them immediately change their tone. “Be reasonable Yang.” Blake says, holding up her hands passively, “You don’t want to do that.”

“And I don’t want my best friend and my little sister fighting, which one is more important do you think?”

“Yang.” Ruby says sternly, “As team leader I demand you return those books unharmed.”

“Sure.” Yang says, “As long as you two promise to stop fighting.”

“She started it!” Ruby says.

“Oh I so did not.” Blake says.

“I was just asking about the book, I was being friendly, and you had to go and say my ideas where stupid!”

“I did not say that, I just pointed out how you were wrong.” Blake says, “But yes, that idea is stupid. I’d have thought a Beacon student would be smart enough to realize it.”

“You’re the one with the stupid ideas. There’s no way that could happen.”

“It’s going to be canon!” Blake says.

“Only if you write it down and put it in the barrel of a gun!” Ruby says.

“They love each other!”

“Of course they do! It’s just not romantic!”

“It is! Why else would they put it in there?”

“Because they want to show how close they are as friends! Friends do that kind of stuff together all the time!”

“Not in stories they don’t. They can’t waste a minute so they only put it in if it’s relevant.”

Yang tosses one of the books into the air and fires a shot, causing it to rain down singed pieces of paper. Blake and Ruby both jump at that.

“NO!” Ruby cries out.

“Yang how could you?” Blake asks.

“I told you to stop. Still one more here you could share, no idea whose it is. I’m sure such a popular book would be sold out so you better stop.” Yang says.

“Yang.” Ruby says calmly, taking a step towards her. “Just give us the book.”

“Nope.” Yang says, “Not until you promise.”

“Fine.” Ruby says, “I’m sure we can come to-“ mid-sentence she bursts forward in rose petals to snatch the book from Yang’s hands.

Yang saw this coming and quickly raised it up over her head. “Ha, I’ve been your sister long enough to-huh?” She looks up just in time to see Blake jump over her, snatching the book while she was distracted and landing on Ruby’s bed. Jumping she tries to grab it, only to go through one of Blake’s clones as she jumped over her, tossing the book to Ruby.

“Run for it!” Ruby says, flying out the door and leaving rose petals behind, Blake following behind in a black and purple blur just a second later, both of them running past Weiss.

“Well, that should take care of that.” Yang says, dusting her hands off.

“What just happened?” Weiss asks.

“They were fighting, so I gave them something more important to focus on. Hopefully they shouldn’t go back fighting again.”

“I see.” Weiss says. “Well they’ve always gotten along before, I’m sure this will pass. Though they’ll likely be mad at you for destroying one of their books.”

“Eh, I can take it.” Yang says with a shrug, moving to her own bed. “Better than having them fight.”

“I still can’t believe those two fought, and over something so silly.” Weiss says as she sits on her bed as well.

“It happens.” Yang says, “As long as they don’t let it come between them.”

“I guess some people get caught up in the most ridiculous things.”

“Yeah, they’re smart though; they’ll calm down and apologize. Probably already are.”

“I hope so.” Weiss says.

…

Ruby and Blake ran down the hall until they realized they weren’t being followed, not that Yang could catch them anyway. Finally coming to a stop they stood there, Ruby holding on to the book. “I think we’re safe.” She says.

“Looks like it.” Blake says, “I can’t believe she destroyed one.”

“Yeah.” Ruby says, looking at the one she had. “Here.” She holds it out to Blake.

“What?” Blake asks.

“It’s yours.” Ruby says, “It’s got your name inside it.”

“Oh, thank you.” Blake says, taking it. “I suppose Yang was right, we can share until you get a new one. It’s my fault it happened anyway.”

“No it’s not.” Ruby says, “It’s Yang’s. Kind of mine too. I shouldn’t have gotten so worked up over that, sorry.” She twists one foot on her toe as she looks up at her through her bangs.

“No, it was mine too. I shouldn’t have either; I usually try to be more composed than that. I just slipped up a bit.”

“It’s alright, we both messed up. You liking… that other one doesn’t change the actual book when I read it so it’s not a big deal.”

“And the same for you.” Blake says, “You want to go see if we can find you another copy?”

“Sure.” Ruby says, “Then we can come back and mess with Yang for threatening the books.”

“Sounds like fun.” Blake says with a chuckle as they head out.

#RWBY #Blake Belladonna #Ruby Rose #Yang Xiao Long #Weiss Schnee #My Fanfic #February Challenge #i thought ''ruby and blake fight'' sounds interesting #took me a while to figure out what the heck those two would fight about #also a bit of a joke in there with who their shipping if you can pick up on it

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nerdcorp · 8 years

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Pro Wrestling News: Talents Pulled From Bookings for Royal Rumble, Top Stars Done With AAA

Top Talents from the UK Tournament Pulled - The WWE has apparently called into work Tyler Bate, Trent Seven and Pete Dunne. The three were working or were set to work in the German promotion Westside Xtreme Wrestling and were all pulled from their bookings only a week in advance. The promotion was left scrambling to fill the slots. This again shows the lack of respect the WWE has for indy promotions, as they said that they wouldn’t restrict where talents who competed in the UK Tournament worked. If you actually believed that the WWE wanted to do right by the wrestling business, I have some time shares i want to sell you.

Top Name in the Rumble? - The WWE seems to be making a play for a big star studded Royal Rumble cast, which isn’t that surprising considering the lack of names in the match itself. Kurt Angle apparently pulled out of his commentary duties in Scotland for this upcoming weekend, and with the news that he’s going to be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, this isn’t too much of a stretch to assume he’d show up at the Royal Rumble. While it seems unlikely he returns to even a part-time schedule in the WWE, the Royal Rumble is the one match that offers up the prospects of him returning to compete, as everyone from a crippled (and real-life-murderer) Jimmy Snuka to Hacksaw Jim Duggan have popped up in said match, well beyond their expiration date as regular competitors.

AAA in Trouble? - Trivia Question: Which North American promotion is considered to be the poorest ran pro wrestling company over the last five years? Answer: If You said TNA, you clearly don’t know about AAA.

Ever since Lucha Underground opened up, both L-U and AAA have been struggling. While TNA was late on pay, AAA has flat out NOT paid many of their talents. At one point AAA featured Mistico/Sin Cara I, who was the biggest draw in Mexico in decades, Alberto El Patron and Rey Mysterio. All three were signed in 2013-2014, just months apart. By late 2016, all three were gone and refusing to work for the promotion. Mysterio is still technically under contract with them, or was at a point, but due to not being paid, has essentially left the company.

The last few months especially have been hard on the legendary Mexican promotion, as Sexy Star, Konnan, Jack Evans and Fenix, have left the promotion. Considering the popularity of Sexy Star by herself, this was a huge blow. But now you can add Daga, Hector Garza Jr and L-U mega star Pentagon Jr to the list as well.

To put it in a way most of you American fans can grasp, Garza Jr to AAA is like Charlotte Flair to WWE, if it was still WCW and this was 2001. A loss like that just wouldn’t be acceptable to a promotion with legacy. Daga is basically Mexico’s Hideo Itami or Finn Balor (but maybe not as good), and Pentagon Jr is their John Cena, and New Day, and AJ Styles rolled into one, for company merchandise sales. He’s stupid popular.

They lost all three. Kevin Sullivan from 2000 thinks this is a big loss to a company. The three went to The Crash, which is an up and coming promotion in Mexico that’s been around for about five years. Konnan is apparently running this promotion now, after running AAA for a while prior. The three are now part of the Los Perros Del Mal (Evil Dogs) stable, which was started by the late Perro Aguayo Jr (El Hijo del Perro Aguayo). The group has seen names like Lucha Underground’s Taya, Ivellise, Blue Demon and Texano, as well as legendary Luchadores, Hector Garza Sr, L.A. Park, and Shocker all take up the banner.

To further compound the issue, Lucha Underground is stretching their contracts with talents out even longer than necessary by postponing any more episodes from being aired until the summer. Many L-U talents want out of their contracts, as they’ve become big properties with online wrestling fans, and could translate that momentum elsewhere. Pentagon has another three seasons on his deal, which means he could be there for almost five more years depending on how L-U structures their shows. We’ll be into next winter before we see things that were taped last year finally air on television.

Rey Mysterio also has one more season left on his deal. I’ve heard most talents have it written in that they’re not technically free from their obligations until all of their content has aired as well. Which means if Mysteiro films the next season in June, he may be at Lucha Underground’s whims until all of his material airs. While the content has been good, at least in the ring, L-U and AAA’s baby seems to be more hazardous than necessary. Many people I’ve spoken with even said the issue isn’t the taping schedule, but the fact they never know when tapings will occur and the lack of house shows to help generate income. If L-U did start doing house shows, this may help matters but apparently the company has lost more money since the show debuted, than TNA has in its 15 years in business.

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tinymixtapes · 6 years

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Interview: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV)

As one of the key originators of industrial music, organizer of the occult art collective Temple ov Psychick Youth, and participant in the ambitious body-altering pandrogyne project, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge has embodied the artistic process for over four decades. Observing and critiquing culture from the vantage point of a disruptor, P-Orridge draws from the teachings of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, whom s/he counted as friends. Throughout the years, P-Orridge has dabbled in occult practices, pouring h/er thoughts out in a 500-page tome, Thee Psychick Bible. But h/er band Psychic TV also mastered the mainstream with the pop hit “Godstar,” which remained a number one song in Britain for months. Oh, and Psychic TV was also in the Guinness World Records for releasing the most albums in a year. That doesn’t mean P-Orridge rests on h/er prior achievements. Recently, s/he performed with Psychic TV at a rare show at this year’s Moogfest and was the subject of the documentary Bight of the Twin, which chronicled h/er experiences with Voodoo practitioners in Benin. A second documentary, A Message from the Temple, is forthcoming. --- Is there any kind of ritual or practice you undergo before going onstage with Psychic TV? No, no. There used to be a drinking ritual where we would get plastic bottles of water and put in vodka and cranberry or vodka and orange to take onstage, and that became this really ridiculous little ritual that we used to all do. And then everyone would all go and have a pee [laughs]. The band now is without any question my favorite lineup we’ve ever had. It’s basically stayed pretty stable since 2003. We’re on our third keyboard player. Our keyboard player seems to be a bit like the Spinal Tap drummer [laughs]. But we’re so bonded at this point that it’s a true organism. Everyone’s hyper aware of what’s happening in each other’s lives, what emotional journey they might be on at that given moment. So if we feel somebody needs encouragement, it just happens. Psychic TV is such an amazingly integrated organism that everything goes unsaid a lot of the time, but there’s an amazing amount of love. It really is a family in the truest sense. In Benin, when someone passes away, they say that “a twin goes to the forest to look for wood,” which is explored in Bight of the Twin. You’ve been involved with the idea of twins since at least the pandrogyne project, but there’s also a history of this in the Vodun religion. Yeah, as you carry on through life, you discover that there are twins in all sorts of hidden doctrines and groups with different belief systems. I mean, the Garden of Eden begins with twins. So we draw those into many experiences of rituals and psychedelic trips and what have you, and myself and Jaye concluded that either symbolically or literally, we were here to reunify as a species, that things like either/or, male/female, black/white, Christian/Muslim are all tools used to control us. The only way out of control is unity, where there is no difference. Therefore, no strategies are irrelevant. That’s why we felt pandrogyny was so important as an idea, and the twins idea in Africa was just confirmation on a really exciting, deep level. As the oldest continuous religion, Vodun would have the earliest concept of creation. We were asking them about their creation story. And they said, “In the beginning there was one god, Mahu, made up of both male and female parts named Segbo Lissa. Segbo is a female chameleon, and Lissa is a male python.” But they were one, or in other words, a pandrogyne. You can argue Adam and Eve is one being. In the earliest paintings of the Garden of Eden, the paintings were of God, Adam, and Eve, and they all have male and female genitals and breasts. The Vatican suppressed it, of course. So we’re not card-carrying dogma followers of anything, but we keep an extremely open mind. Psychic TV is such an amazingly integrated organism that everything goes unsaid a lot of the time, but there’s an amazing amount of love. It really is a family in the truest sense. Can you tell us about the idea of “occulture” you wrote about in Thee Psychick Bible? That was one of those words that just seemed inevitable. There’s a TOPY [Temple Ov Psychick Youth] member now in Asheville named Chandra Shukla who got involved with what we were doing on many levels when he was a teenager while living in a very traditional Asian family. He couldn’t bring himself to surrender into repetition of what his parents had lived, so he started looking for different stories. He’s working on a Psychick dictionary of all the phrases and slogans and new word definitions we’ve developed the last 50 years. Occulture was one of those words we just felt should always have existed. Even as a teenager, we’d read about Freemasons, the Process Church of the Final Judgment, different secret cabals, the Knights Templar, all these different organizations, some mythological, some actual, that were about, if you like, the real history of the world. Like what was the real reason that the first World War happened? It was a fight between two members of the same family, Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm, and they had a family argument and neither of them would back down, and then we have a war where millions die. So what were the real reasons that we went to war? Why was America so rich and powerful in the 50s? Profit came from the war where the Morgan bank financed both sides. If you start looking into the nitty gritty of where control really resides, there’s probably 100 families that tell us the primary story of what’s really gone on so far. Occulture is a great framework to think about these latent practices and organizations that have always been there throughout history outside of the mainstream. When I was a teenager, I started to daydream. “Wouldn’t it be fabulous if someone or myself identified the real history of the world?” It’s a long, big topic, but the bottom line is we’re constantly fed stimulation, but we’re not constantly fed education, and to me, that’s very suspicious. And it’s a vested interest. We want to keep the true story quiet. The real reasons that they decided to go to war in Iraq, was that for the oil or was that ego? We don’t know, but it wasn’t the reason they gave. A cult is hidden from the eye and culture is a control system. Occulture is also about people’s hidden motives. You know, Burroughs was brilliant at revealing these kinds of dynamics in society, and his work with Brion Gysin, with cutups, still to me is one of the greatest tools for breaking control, because it reveals things that cannot be revealed any other way except through what appears to be random chance. People now are surrendering on a level that we’ve never seen before. My years of mental formation were heavily influenced by the liberationist concepts of the 60s and some of the most positive changes that happened in society. Squatting, prison’s rights, organic food, gay rights, women’s rights, alternative medicine, yoga, there’s an endless list of changes that occurred. There’s a huge array of simple but identifiable improvements in the lot of humanity that came from that era, because we said, “Let’s take our daydreams really seriously. How would we like to be treated? How would we like to live? Why can’t we? There must be a way.” One of the ways we believe that has to come in the next real step of rebellion is communities. Not communes, but communities and collectives where people share their resources. So if there’s 10 of you, you don’t need 10 cars. Maybe three for emergencies. Sell the other seven and you’ve still all got access to cars. The money from those seven can buy a new computer that everyone uses or pay for the roof to be fixed. It’s always shocking to me how many people are terrified of sharing. They’ve been trained to think in terms of career as a success. You know, in the art world, which we’ve been dabbling in lately, it’s all about divine inspiration. It’s not a continuum, but in fact, everything that we make is a continuum. My life, I’m thrilled to say, is the result of all the different things that have happened and influenced me. All the people we’ve met, all the people that have spoken to me, all the places we’ve been, all the books we’ve read, all the music we’ve heard. All of that is what we then percolate and refine in order to make a response or create an object or a piece of music that we feel contains what we know so far in some way, in the hope it will inspire others to be less afraid of sharing. You were listed by Guinness World Records for the most albums released in one year. What was your work ethic like then? Well, I don’t know if it’s true anymore. I’m sure someone’s beaten us. A lot of them were live concerts released on vinyl. We were on CBS Records when we did Dreams Less Sweet, and then I wrote “Godstar,” a great little pop song, and I went in to Muff Winwood, the head of A&R, and I said, “Muff, listen to this tape.” And he went, “Hmm, it’s not weird like the other stuff.” I said, “No, but it’s a great pop song and this is what I want to do now. We’ve done the weird, now we want to do psychedelic pop.” And he said, “Oh, no, no, no. We don’t want the music to change like this. Your scene is weird music, so you’ve got to keep doing weird music.” And we said, “Muff, we just left your label. And I’m going to prove that even a monkey could make this into a hit record.” [laughs] I released it myself with a new label, Temple Records, and it was number one in the indie chart in Britain for 16 weeks, and it got into the top 30 in the national chart, too. It was our big hit. One of the ways we believe that has to come in the next real step of rebellion is communities. Not communes, but communities and collectives where people share their resources. To get the money to do a proper mix, I went to my bank manager and said, “Could you possibly loan me some money to remix this song?” And he went, “I don’t know, what’s the collateral element?” “Well, I don’t have any. I’m on the dole, living in a squat.” And I don’t know how, but the conversation changed and I was talking about bootlegs, and we came up with this idea to do a series of live albums that people collected, and each one had a token in it, and when you had all the tokens, you got a free record that was only available in that way. And on that agreement of me saying we’ll do that, he loaned me the money to do proper mixes and recordings of all the psychedelic stuff. That’s how we got in the Guinness World Records, because I was releasing a live album every month and then there were other records too, and it just built up to about 14 in a year or something, which at that time was a lot. We were next to Michael Jackson in the Guinness World Records. That’s really incredible. What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned from studying Austin Osman Spare? The potency of the orgasm. The idea that you can open up any inhibitions or gateways that might normally be closed between layers of consciousness and actually reprogram your neurology, your brain, your mind. That in fact the orgasm is a moment of absolute unity. And of course, two beings having a simultaneous orgasm is a superb image of androgyny where the two become one. Spare said that’s when you can reprogram a self. You decide how you really want to change or what you need to achieve. The choices you make afterwards, without you really being aware of it, will always be geared towards what your mind thinks is going to get you closer to the desired place. You’ll continue with certain activities, drop others, maybe end or begin a relationship, travel or stay home, whatever it is. Those decisions will be made to maximize your potential of reaching the most divine version of yourself. That’s what he taught me. Can you relate a memorable encounter you had with William S. Burroughs? Oh, god. [laughs] Memorable… I don’t know if it’s memorable. I’m trying to think… no, I can’t. I mean, there’s lots of little things, but it was the entirety that really made him so special. You know, at one point we came over to New York when we were still in England. I think it was in 1980 and we were in the bunker. William wanted to try the Raudive experiments of using a crystal radio set plugged into a tape recorder to get the voices of the dead to appear in the static. Have you ever heard about that? I haven’t, no. Konstantin Raudive — I think he’s Latvian — did a book called Breakthrough, and it’s just full of all these conversations with the dead recorded on blank tape using this little crystal set. It’s incredible, and there was a record with the book so that you could actually listen and hear some of them, but unfortunately, that’s been lost. But we recommend you have a look at that at least. Yeah, I’m definitely going to. That seems super interesting. It is. But we did it together, me and William. We still have the reel-to-reel tapes. You have to release those. Well, actually, it’s funny you should mention that, because when we did it, me and William listened to them back afterwards and, “Ah, there’s nothing.” [laughs] But now that technology’s improved we were just talking to Ryan Martin [of Dais Records], and he wants to play those tapes through really high-quality speakers and see whether we can hear things. The thing that made me a little bit unsure about Raudive is that most of the voices he heard were speaking in Latvian. And you think, “Really? Do they actually know that this is a Latvian speaking? Or is he just imagining Latvian because that’s his language?” Right, like out of all the languages, why would it be Latvian, or even something humans created? Yeah. So there’s a question mark, but it’s an interesting area. Certainly there are voices. That seems pretty definite. My hope would be that they’re voices from alternative dimensions. You know, when people take psychedelics, no one asks, “Why were you traveling? What did you want to learn that was so important and who did you want to benefit beyond yourself?” We think about all these people who now do DMT and ayahuasca as psychedelic tourists. It’s like Mount Everest, which is drowning under human feces and trash. People are leaving behind their consciousness trash. They’re popping into these other worlds where all the DMT creatures are and looking around. “Oh, wow, man. Look. Ooh.” Like they’re having a picnic at the zoo. Isn’t that really impolite? You know, in that kind of situation, we believe you should cleanse yourself, bathe, talk to the spirits, ask for permission, and really be hyper aware that you’re visiting somebody else’s world. The other thing I often wonder about is, are we ripping holes in the veil between these two alternate realities where things can come through into this apparent dimension that we didn’t invite? Now, what exactly is happening? It needs to be thought about much more seriously, in my opinion, before you do that. Now, are you letting things come back this way without even realizing it, and if you are, what are those things and what’s their agenda, and are you leaving a big mess like Mount Everest? Right, like it’s shortsighted for us to think that we can have these experiences without affecting either ourselves or another realm. Exactly, and it’s a typical short-sighted human response. It’s an aspect of the capitalist society that should be very carefully kept away from the sort of shamanic spiritual experience. If we make a mess on Everest, how dare we go somewhere even more precious until we know what we’re doing and we’re respectful? This is an example of thinking about things from different directions when you’re working, and that’s an occulture moment too, you know? What’s hidden in this process? What might be going on? And you can look at it and think of certain things that seem ridiculous. But maybe somebody’s having dinner in the DMT world and then we pop in going, “Hey, this is interesting. Oh, sorry I’ve stolen your food. Blah, blah, blah, blah.” It’s a great way to consider it. I never thought about it that way. Oh, good. Well, see, that’s what we’re here for. http://j.mp/2oLE5zt

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