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doshmanziari · 4 years ago

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Musical Offerings for the New Year || What is “Radical Music” in 2021?

Near the end of 2020, a bunch of musicians populating a chatroom, including myself, each submitted ten minutes’ worth of our work to another musician, Chimeratio, who generously compiled it all into a set totaling nearly ten hours.¹ The work didn’t need to be new; just what we thought might best represent our abilities/style(s) and/or perhaps what we were especially pleased with. The set premiered in late January. Since I have some tentative plans for reorienting Brick By Brick this year, while not overriding its emphases, I wanted to share that music with anyone who’s interested.

I compiled the four videos into a playlist, although you can also access them individually: here (1), here (2), here (3), and here (4). If you care to, and are on a computer, you can also view the accompanying chatlog and read people’s responses from when they were listening to the live broadcast.

The compulsion for this project was sparked by excited discussions over and usage of the term “digital fusion”, most helpfully propagated by Aivi Tran, designating a computer-based body of work that for years lacked the rooftop of a commonly agreed upon genre-name. While describing my music has never been a big concern, even if it’s usually felt impossible (what, for example, is this? or this? I dunno!), I’ve appreciated how the spread and application of this term has brought together people who may have felt isolated.²

As “digital fusion” gained designative traction, I witnessed the activity in the aforementioned chatroom explode over the course of a few days. Before, a day’s discussion might’ve been a few dozen messages; now, there were dozens of messages every half-minute. This had positive and negative ramifications, the negative being that conversations often proceeded at a pace of rapidity which precluded concentrated thought. Eventually, I bowed out because the rapidity exceeded my threshold for meaningful interaction; but I was glad that significant invigoration was going on.

I wanted to share this music also because it intersects with thoughts and talks I’ve been having stemming from the question, “What is ‘radical music’ in 2021?” This was stimulated by a 2014 talk given by the writer Mark Fisher, wherein he contends that, were we to play prominent “cutting edge” music from now to people twenty years ago, very nearly none of it would be aesthetically shocking, bizarre, or revelatory (think of playing house music to an audience in the early 1960s!). Fisher also observes a trend of returning to music which once was seen as the future -- as if, deprived of a shared prograde vision, imaginations turn hazily retrograde; ergo, genres such as synthwave or albums like Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories.

It isn’t my goal here to argue about the “end of history.�� Fisher’s time-travel hypothetical, however, rings loud and true to me. Visible musical radicalism has, for at least a decade, been strictly extra-musical, in the sense of songs like “This is America” or “WAP”, where one’s response is primarily to the spectacle of the music video, the performer’s identistic markers, and/or the manner in which the lyrics intersect with (mostly US-centric) ideological hotspots. Musically, there is really nothing radical here. Any vociferous condemnations or defenses of a song like “WAP” deal in moralizing reactions to semantics or imagery: how progressive or regressive is the political aspect? how propelled or repelled are we by the word “pussy”?

It would be a mistake, and simply wrong, to assert that the only music one can enjoy escapes the parameters outlined above; and my inability to coherently categorize some of my own music hardly raises that portion to the status of radicality. But the question here pertains to what is being made, and I think that if we’re going to seriously consider the nature of truly radical music today, we do need to question if such a quality can prominently exist when our hyper-fast consumerist cycle seems to forbid not just sustained, lifelong relationships to artwork but also the local, unhurried nourishment of creative gestation. Now, in my opinion, there are good, even great, examples of radical music still being made in deep Internet-burrows, and for evidence of that I would offer some of the material contained in the linked playlists. Moreover, I’d say that this quality can exist in part because these little artistic communities are so buried.

Let me share a quote that another person shared with me recently:

For culture to shift, you need pockets of isolated humanity. Since all pockets of humanity (outside of the perpetually isolated indigenous people in remote wilderness) are connected in instantaneous fashion, independent ideas aren’t allowed to ferment on their own. When you cook a meal, you have to bring ingredients together that have had time to grow, ferment, or decompose separately. A cucumber starts out as a seed, then you mix it with the soil, water and sunlight. You can’t bring the seed, soil, water and sunlight to the kitchen from the get-go. When you throw those things in to the mixture without letting them mature, the flavor cannot stand out on its own. Same thing with art and fashion. A kid in Russia can come up with a new way to dance, gets filmed on a phone, it goes viral quickly but gets lost in the morass of all of the other multitudinous forms of dance. Sure it spread far and wide, but it gets forgotten in a week. In the past, his new art form would have been confined locally, nurtured, honed, then spread geographically, creating a distinct new cultural idiosyncrasy with a strong support base. By the time it was big enough to be presented globally, it was already a cultural phenomenon locally. This isn’t possible anymore. We’re consuming too many unripened fruits.

The main impression I have here is that radical music today will, and must be, folk music. Our common idea of folkiness might be the scrappy singer strumming a guitar, but my interpretive reference rather has to do with the idea of a music being written, first of all, for one’s self, and then shared with a small-scale community, which in turn helps the artist grow at their own pace. This transcends a dependence upon image, the primacy of acoustic instrumentation, or the signaling of sincerity versus insincerity. It is a return to the valuation of outsider art, so rare nowadays. As someone who I was recently in dialogue with wrote, “Where can you find new genuine folk music? Pretty much just with your friends, imo. Even then, the global world is so influential and seeps into any crack it can find. I think vaporwave was radical and folk for a while. Grant Forbes made that music way before the world knew about it.”

Sometimes, a lot of fuss is made over what’s seen as “gatekeeping” within certain communities. It can be, depending on the context, justifiable to question and critique this behavior. At other times, the effort of maintaining a level of exclusivity, of retaining an idiosyncratic shapeliness to the communal organism, can be a legitimate attempt to protect the personal, interpersonal, and cultural aspects from the flattening effect of monoculture. Hypothetically, I welcome the Castlevania TV series and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate having introduced new and younger demographics to Castlevania. In actuality, stuff like “wholesome sad gay himbo Alucard”, image macros, and neurotic “stan” fanfiction being what’s now first associated with the series makes me want to put as much distance as possible between my interests and those latecoming impositions.

The group-terminology David Chapman uses in his essay “Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution” is kinda cringey, but some of the cultural/behavioral patterns he lays out are relevant to the topic. Give it a look. If we cross his belief that “[subcultures] are no longer the primary drivers of cultural development” with our contemporary consume-and-dispose customs, we’re left with the predicament of it’s even worth attempting to bring radical/outsider art beyond its rhizomatic habitat. This is troubling, because it would mean that artistic radicality no longer might not only refuse to but cannot encompass cultural upheaval. It would be like if dance music were invented and -- instead of progressively permeating nightlife, stimulating countercultural trends, and ultimately being adapted as the basis for pop music globally -- only were listened to via headphones by a few thousand people on their own, stimulated a group meeting once a year or two, and never affected music beyond a niche-within-a-niche. That’s a very sad picture to me.

⁂

¹ Chimeratio has also maintained an excellent blog on here dedicated to looking at videogame music written in irregular time signatures, far preceding higher-profile examinations like 8-bit Music Theory’s video on the same topic.

² For myself, creative isolation has had its uses, because it has led me down routes that are highly personalized. The isolation can be dispiriting too. Although a lot of my music is videogame-music-adjacent, almost none of it uses “authentic” technology, such as PSG synthesizers or FM synthesis; and the identification of those sounds is fairly important for recognition.

#music analysis #radicalism #digital fusion

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iffeelscouldkill · 4 years ago

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Adjusting [Part 4: Arkady]

A/N: Hey! In honour of us getting a confirmed release date for TSCOSI Season 2, here’s a fic update! (No I was not planning to post this anyway tonight, what are you talking about)

This one’s another long chapter, so strap in, folks! As always, a big THANK YOU to @dragonsthough101 for beta reading and for all the encouragement and enthusiasm! <3

CW: This fic contains a fairly brief description of a panic attack, from the POV of the character experiencing the panic attack. If you want to skip it, stop reading at the line “Everything is very still.” and skip to “They gravitate over to the kitchen table...”

---

The sound of gunfire echoes around purple-tinged sand and silver rocks, the alien landscape of a desert planet that sinks, spongy under RJ’s feet as they run for their life, head down to present less of a target. There’s a fiery pain in their right leg, running from the thigh right down to the shin, and though RJ clenches their jaw and forces themself onwards, it buckles, sending them crashing to one knee in the sand.

“RJ!” Sana shouts. She’s about thirty paces ahead, supporting a blood-soaked and half-conscious Arkady.

“I’m fine – go, get to the ship,” RJ calls, but Sana doesn’t budge. Cursing under their breath – and feeling a sudden kinship with Arkady every time she’d complained about Sana prioritising the crew’s safety above her own – RJ forces their leg to lock and pushes off from the soft sand, wobbling into a standing position. There’s another hail of bullets, closer this time, and RJ almost trips forward in their haste to move- and then stops.

Wait a minute.

“RJ!” Sana calls again, this time with a note of panic in her voice. She looks like she’s debating sprinting back across the distance between them to find out what’s wrong, but doesn’t want to abandon Arkady.

RJ waves a hand at her, motioning her down. Arkady has roused enough to give Sana a confused look, but both of them sink down towards the sand.

In the echoey canyon that they just emerged from, it had sounded like the gunshots were coming from all sides. RJ had been baffled as to how so many shooters were still pursuing them, as they thought they’d managed to take out virtually all of them, but there hadn’t been time to figure it out. Now, out in the open, RJ can tell: there’s only one shooter.

“Kid,” Arkady hisses, her voice carrying just far enough to reach RJ in the quiet. “Get out of the goddamn open.”

RJ ignores her, scanning their surroundings. They’ve narrowed down a rough area that the shots are coming from: an outcrop of metallic rocks on a ledge about twenty metres up. The spot is almost completely shielded, but it’s also difficult to shoot from. The shooter can’t get a clear shot at them, which is why they were laying down so much fire: trying to confuse them, make them panic, and run into the path of a stray bullet.

It also means that RJ can’t get a clear shot either, unless…

RJ flails as if losing their footing on the sand, turns and crumples dramatically backwards. They hear Arkady swear, and Sana say, “Wait here- I’m going back-”

From this vantage point they can see through a gap low in the rocks, and sure enough, there’s a dark shape beyond, sunlight glinting off the dull metal of an old-fashioned automatic rifle.

“Got you,” RJ mutters, and fires.

A muffled cry of pain can be heard across the distance, and RJ jumps to their feet in a shower of sand, adrenaline and triumph numbing the searing pain in their leg. They catch up to Arkady and Sana, who are frozen in the middle of getting to their feet.

“We can go now,” they say. A delighted smile spreads across Sana’s face, while Arkady looks torn between annoyance and grudging respect.

“Glad you made up your mind,” she snarks.

They make it back to the Iris without incident, where Violet is there to work the airlock as usual. She pales at the sight of them.

“Arkady- Sana- RJ! What happened? We couldn’t get you on your comms-”

“Yeah, sand’s a bitch,” pants Arkady, who seems to have rallied some more at the sight of her girlfriend. She pulls the useless, sand-encrusted comm link from her ear and tosses it with a flick of her hand at Violet, who just catches it. “That weird purple storm you saw? It jammed all of our devices.”

“You’re covered in blood-”

“I’m fine,” Arkady insists, though the fact that she can barely stand upright is undermining her argument quite a bit. “I’ve been worse.”

“Sana Tripathi to all crew,” Sana is saying over them. “Krejjh, we’re gonna need a quick getaway. RJ took out the last of our pursuers, but we think some of them might have gone for backup. We can’t afford to hang around.”

“Aye aye, Captain Tripathi.”

“Brian, Park, keep an eye out for anything on our tail.”

“Roger that.”

“Will do.”

Sana turns to RJ, Arkady and Violet, who are still clustered around the airlock. “Arkady, you’re going to accompany Violet to the medbay for urgent attention, and no arguments.”

“For once, I wasn’t gonna,” says Arkady with a wince, her voice strained. Violet moves forward to take Arkady’s weight, and Arkady leans on her gratefully. The height difference makes it a little awkward, but Violet is also clearly stronger than she looks.

“Captain, I’m going to take a look at that shoulder as soon as Arkady’s been patched up,” Violet says in that gentle-but-firm way that no-one ever tries to argue with (except Arkady, but even she doesn’t try particularly hard).

Sana nods, hand going to the dried patch of blood on her shoulder. The bullet had only grazed her, but it hadn’t been pretty at all, and they’d had to improvise a bandage in a panic out of a scarf that Arkady had been using to keep the sand out of her face.

Violet turns a sharp gaze on RJ, who straightens reflexively, letting go of the safety rail they’d been leaning on. This proves to be a mistake as they put too much weight on their injured leg, and they can’t conceal the resulting flinch.

“What happened to your leg, RJ?” Violet asks. It’s mild, but there’s no-nonsense steel lurking under her tone.

“I’m uh, not really sure?” RJ admits. Their pant leg is caked in violet sand, ragged and torn; there’s no visible blood, but it could easily be concealed under the sand. “It’s uh, it’s kind of painful, but I don’t think I got shot. There were bullets ricocheting off the rocks, though, and some shrapnel might have hit-” They’re rolling up the leg of their pants as they speak, and then stop as the wound comes into view. ‘Some’ shrapnel is an understatement: RJ’s leg is peppered with tiny pieces of glittering metal, including one fairly large and pointy-looking piece sticking out of their lower thigh. Dried blood is streaked along the length of their leg. Sana sucks in a breath.

RJ laughs a little, nervously. “Um. Ow?”

Violet passes a hand over her face. “Okay. I’m gonna get those out of you as soon as possible, RJ. In the meantime, try to keep your weight off your leg – actually, that goes for after I’ve dressed the wounds, too. Luckily, none of it seems to have gone in too deep.”

“Arkady, you might have some too,” Sana says. “She and RJ managed to draw most of their fire-”

“Arkady more than me,” RJ puts in, as if it wasn’t already obvious from Arkady’s multiple injuries. “I guess I didn’t seem like that significant of a target.”

“-but it was kind of hard to tell what was a bullet and what was debris, with sand whipping up all around us.”

“Yeah, if I never see another sandstorm, it’ll be too soon,” Arkady mutters.

“Wonderful,” Violet says dryly. “Is it too much to hope that the sand might not contain any toxic or harmful substances?”

There’s a pause, as Sana, RJ and Arkady look at each other. None of them had thought of that possibility.

Violet sighs. “I’ll prep some equipment and try and get a sample to analyse from Arkady’s comm link.” She holds up the inert device. “I haven’t tried it out yet, but the medbay in this ship has some equipment that should be able to do the job.”

“You could probably get a good sample from our clothes, too,” says Sana. Violet nods.

“Sana, RJ, I want you to – carefully – change into some clean, loose-fitting clothes and then come to the medbay. Try not to touch your wounds directly.”

Both Sana and RJ give their assent to her instructions. It’s a little weird for RJ to see Sana, as the Captain, taking an order from someone else, but Sana acts like there’s nothing unusual about it at all. They’ve known some commanding officers – okay, a lot of commanding officers – in the Regime who acted like they would lose all their authority if they were seen deferring to a subordinate for anything, which led to a lot of bad and stupid judgement calls. They know now that the mark of a good leader is someone who’s willing to listen to the people under their command.

Violet turns back to Arkady, her face softening.

“C’mon, soldier,” she says quietly. RJ isn’t sure if this is a pet name or just a reference to ‘brave soldier’, but either way, it makes Arkady go pink. Sana looks impossibly fond of the two of them.

Arkady looks back at RJ, and RJ braces for some kind of threat about breathing a word about that to anyone else, but instead Arkady says, “Good shot earlier.”

For the first time ever, she doesn’t call RJ ‘kid’.

“Uh… thanks,” RJ barely manages in their surprise, but Arkady doesn’t even seem to hear it, already letting Violet help her down the corridor to the medbay.

---

The whole crew is a little on edge for the rest of the day (or what passes for ‘day’ when you’re hurtling through the black void of space). The excursion on Enlil was meant to be a simple pick-up and drop-off job, which was why Sana had thought it might be a good first outing for RJ to accompany them on while also providing some extra backup. But someone had tipped off the planet’s local security force – a sort of combined police force and militia – to their presence, and minutes after completing the trade, they’d found themselves fleeing from a dozen armed pursuers.

They got the payment, and more importantly got away safely (ish), but it’s a stark reminder just how little they can afford to let their guard down.

Dinner is a lively and extra-loud affair, all of the accumulated tension of the day (of the past two months, really) welling up and spilling over. For once, RJ doesn’t mind. They boost themselves up, gingerly, onto one of the bolted-down metal chairs decorated with Sana’s colourful homemade cushions, being careful not to jolt their leg, which has been expertly cleaned and bandaged by Violet. (The sand, to the best of Violet’s assessment, did not contain any toxic elements, but was still not great to have in an open wound for obvious reasons).

RJ watches Jeeter haphazardly throwing ingredients into a huge stock pot while Park looks on with a slightly pained expression. As Brian gets distracted by a compliment from Krejjh, he quickly claims the spoon, adding some spices from a small tin and a few other flavourings from little bottles in precise, measured amounts, before replacing the spoon just as Brian turns back around.

The noise and the activity is… familiar. Reassuring. It helps to drown out the images of purple and silver in RJ’s head, of sand whipping against rocks and gunshots echoing through a vast canyon, so vast it seemed like they’d never emerge from it. Of thinking about those few crucial seconds, out in the open, and what might have happened if they hadn’t made the shot.

(RJ always makes the shot. Every single time, in the Academy and afterwards, they had always made the shot. RJ believed then that they couldn’t afford to miss – for the sake of their reputation and their career, for the respect of the senior officers that they’d worked so relentlessly to earn.

But since becoming part of a crew and having more than just their own wellbeing riding on their steady hands and the aim of their gun – RJ has learned the real meaning of can’t afford to miss).

Sana passes out bowls of the stew that Brian has concocted, unknowingly aided by Park. It’s pretty good – the vegetables and meat are bland (RJ can’t even identify them, which is probably for the better) but the spices give it flavour and the tiniest kick. Park slides into the seat across from RJ; the crew officially don’t have designated seats in the kitchen/dining area, but unofficially, they totally do, and Park’s chair is padded with two cushions: one on the seat, and one on the back.

RJ can’t say how it happened, but Park had always sat a little awkwardly on the unforgiving chairs, and there was a tentativeness to his movements whenever he shifted, like he was in pain and trying to hide it. Evidently they weren’t the only one who noticed, because a second cushion had mysteriously appeared on ‘Park’s’ chair one day, and that had been that.

“Dinner’s pretty good,” RJ tells Park, under the combined volume of Krejjh, Brian and Sana’s jokes and laughter. Arkady is there too, also propped up on multiple cushions, after she’d loudly and persistently refused to have dinner brought to her in the medbay. “I’m already sick of being stuck in there. I’m not helpless, Sana,” she’d snapped. Sana and Violet had exchanged a look over her head that spoke volumes.

She looks paler than usual, but she keeps up a determined level of snark and banter like she’s daring anyone to question her health.

“Tell that to the cook,” Park responds mildly to RJ’s compliment, picking up his spoon.

“I am,” RJ replies with a smirk. Park’s only response is the slightest raise of his eyebrow.

“I heard you got to do some sharpshooting, earlier,” he says instead, changing the subject. RJ brightens, realising that with everything that was going on after they got back to the ship, they’d never got a chance to tell Park what had happened on Enlil. Sana must have said something about it to him.

“Yeah, finally,” RJ says, and Park grins fleetingly. He knows RJ has been itching to help out with some of the (infrequent, always extremely cautious) drop-offs and supply runs, but Sana had been reluctant to take the risk.

“I know how capable you are, RJ,” she’d said gently the last time she turned them down, while RJ had done their best to hide their disappointment. “It’s not that I don’t trust your skills. But I don’t want to send anyone else out into the field unless it’s strictly necessary, and I’m sure that Arkady and I can handle this one. As soon as we get a drop-off where I think we’ll need more backup, I promise that I’ll bring you in.”

She’d sounded sincere, but RJ had been privately sure that the promise was just meant to pacify them. They’d been genuinely taken aback when less than a week later, Sana informed them that she wanted them to accompany her and Arkady on the next drop.

“We’ve never been to this planet before, and neither Arkady nor I are familiar with the terrain,” she’d explained at the crew meeting, handing RJ a topographical map of their destination while RJ quietly exploded with excitement. “By the looks of things, there’s a lot of open ground, but also some spots where we could be vulnerable to ambush. I think three pairs of eyes will be better than two.”

She’d been completely correct about that, although the planet’s intermittent sandstorms had not been in their intel. Either way, RJ doesn’t think that Sana and Arkady would have made it through in one piece without their help.

They should be pleased at that thought, to know that they were critical to the mission, but instead it makes them feel slightly sick.

Everyone lingers in the kitchen after the meal finishes, and soon enough Sana breaks out a bottle of engine room-brewed moonshine and cups are passed around. RJ prepares to decline, as usual, but to their surprise Violet passes them a cup of something else – it’s bright orange, slightly sparkly, and smells sweet.

“What’s this?” they ask.

Violet shows them the bottle, which is silver with an orange bolt of lightning down the side and shimmering writing in Chinese characters. “It’s an energy drink!” she says cheerfully. “I lived off it when I was in grad school. If you down it in one go it’ll give you a kick like you wouldn’t believe. We used to knock it back instead of shots sometimes – the buzz wears off quicker than alcohol, but you also get less of a hangover. I stashed some away in case we ever needed to pull an all-nighter or something.”

RJ looks doubtfully down at the drink and then glances at Park, who responds with a shrug and half a smile. His expression somehow conveys both, ‘It’s okay if you don’t want to,’ and ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’

“I promise it’s completely safe,” Violet says, reassuringly. “Here, I’ll join you.” She pours herself out a small amount of the vibrant drink. “Cheers!”

She clinks her cup gently against RJ’s and then downs it in one go. After a moment’s hesitation, RJ follows suit. There’s a burst of intense, teeth-rattling sweetness and then a fizzing sensation like something went up RJ’s nose. They shake their head rapidly. “I… wow,” they say. Everything seems very bright all of a sudden. Violet is laughing as she puts down her cup.

“Oh my god!” she exclaims. “I feel like I’m 22 again.”

“How do you feel?” Park asks RJ, nursing his own cup of moonshine.

“I feel…” says RJ, and then gets distracted by how the ‘l’ sound rolls off their tongue. “Feellll… I feelllll… great! Really really good.” They beam at Park, who looks a little uncertain, but smiles anyway.

“That’s… good. Well, cheers.”

---

Twenty minutes later, RJ is laughing hysterically at a joke that Krejjh just made – in Dwarnian.

“It’s the- it’s just- it’s the way they said lequezzek…” they wheeze, trying to explain the joke to Park, who is staring at them in some consternation. They wipe one eye. “Ah, you kinda had to be there.”

“I… was there,” Park tells RJ.

“Hey, your pronunciation is really coming along,” Brian says approvingly to RJ, who brightens and sits up straight.

“You really think so?”

“Heck, yeah!” Krejjh chimes in. “Hey, say ‘Dwajjhah Ferin’.”

“Dwajjhah Ferin,” RJ repeats, trying hard to get the ‘jjh’ sound right. Brian and Krejjh look at each other, and Krejjh grins.

“Excellent Dwarnian ‘jjh’ sound. For a human.”

RJ throws their arms up in the air, almost clocking Park on the ear. “I’ll take it!”

Not long after that, Sana notices Arkady struggling to keep her eyes open and, over her half-hearted protests, firmly instructs Violet to accompany her back to her room. “I’m going to turn in too,” she says. “Not that I wouldn’t love to stay up with you guys, but it’s been a pretty long day and I think the adrenaline crash is finally starting to hit me.”

Her eyes linger on RJ, who stares back, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. “Don’t stay up too late, okay, guys? Get some rest,” she says.

“You got it, Captain,” says Brian as Krejjh salutes. “Hey, RJ – wanna come back to our room to watch the pre-season 17 finale of Sh’th Hremreh?”

“Yessss!” RJ cheers, jumping up.

“You’re welcome to join us, too,” Brian says to Park.

“I… thanks, but I think I’d be a bit lost,” Park declines politely. “McCabe-”

RJ, who is bouncing on the balls of their feet with impatience, looks over. “Hm?”

“Just be sure to drink plenty of water. I know Violet says that stuff gives you less of a hangover, but I think it’ll help.”

RJ rolls their eyes exaggeratedly. “Okay, Dad,” they groan, but they grab a bottle of water from the fridge before following Krejjh and Brian out. “Night, Park.”

“G’night.”

---

By the time the credits roll on Sh’th Hremreh, RJ has to admit that the effects of the energy drink Violet gave them have thoroughly worn off, and they’re feeling pretty beat. Krejjh has actually dozed off, and is snoring quietly against Brian’s shoulder.

“D’you wanna keep watching?” Brian asks quietly. “We should probably save the actual finale for when Krejjh is awake, but we can watch an episode of something else.”

RJ considers it, but reluctantly shakes their head. “Thanks, but… I think I do need to sleep,” they admit, stretching their arms up over their head.

“That’s fair. How’s your leg?”

“Uh…” RJ hasn’t really thought about their leg since dinner. The energy drink made every part of them feel fuzzy and light, so it hadn’t seemed like a concern. They hope they haven’t accidentally overdone things, although it’s not as if they’ve been running around the corridors. Well. They might have raced Krejjh to Brian and Krejjh’s room. It seemed like a fun idea at the time.

They stand up experimentally, testing how it holds their weight. It definitely throbs, but it’s a dull throbbing, and it doesn’t feel like it’s about to give way beneath them. “I probably should have stayed off it more like Violet said,” RJ admits. “But I think it’ll be better after some rest.”

Brian grins, an expression that RJ can just make out in the glow of the holo-screen. “Not really following medical advice is kind of a time-honoured tradition on this ship. It’s a miracle Violet hasn’t given up on all of us and left us to our own devices.”

RJ knows he’s joking, but the idea of Violet not being around to help in the aftermath of situations like the one they were in today is more than a little horrifying. “You guys didn’t even have a medic before she joined the crew, right? How did you manage?”

Brian shrugs in that easy way of his. “Arkady has a fair amount of field experience dealing with injuries, which I expect she picked up, uh… during the war,” he says. “Krejjh too, though obviously their knowledge is mostly applicable to Dwarnians. Sana and I know basic first aid, and Campbell – you met him when we made a stopover in Neuzo – has some skills and some contacts who don’t ask too many questions. We would sometimes go to him for help if we were in a bind, medically speaking.”

RJ nods slowly. It makes sense, although it also raises a number of other worrying questions. Namely, what if they’d been stuck out in the middle of the Deep or in hostile territory and weren’t able to get in contact with anyone? What if something really serious happened?

Brian correctly interprets their expression. “Mostly, it’s best not to think about it,” he says cheerfully. “Overall, we were pretty good at not needing any help, but it did happen occasionally.”

“Maybe I should learn some first aid too,” RJ says, thinking about possible worst-case scenarios on unknown planets and the fact that there’s only one of Violet. “Just in case.”

Brian smiles. “No reason not to. Violet could probably teach you stuff that the rest of us don’t know.”

After saying goodnight to Brian (and a still-sleeping Krejjh), RJ starts off in the direction of their room, but then reconsiders and heads towards the kitchen. Maybe it’s the lingering advice from Park to stay hydrated; maybe RJ just wants to sit and nurse a cup of tea and stare into space for a while.

They aren’t expecting, upon entering the kitchen, to find Arkady already there, reaching for the box of tea at the top of the cupboard and wincing as she pulls at her stitches.

“Uh…”

Arkady whips around so fast RJ is positive she must have pulled something else. She relaxes slightly when she sees RJ, obviously afraid it might be Violet or Sana. “Hey, McCabe. What are you doing up?”

RJ shrugs slightly as they step further into the kitchen, letting the door whoosh shut behind them. “Same as you, I think. I came to get some tea. Should you be… doing that?” Arkady has turned back to the cupboard and is slowly stretching up again to try and grab the tea. She huffs in exasperation.

“Don’t you start.”

“I’m just saying, we do have a stool,” RJ points out reasonably, going to fetch the foldaway stepping-stool.

“I don’t need a stool,” Arkady retorts. RJ thinks it’s meant to sound deadpan, but it comes out a little petulant.

“Well, I do,” says RJ, carrying it over and setting it down next to Arkady. “Move over.”

Arkady rolls her eyes, but moves aside to let RJ climb onto the stool and grab the box of tea, newly replenished thanks to a recent supply run.

“Why do you guys keep it on the top shelf, anyway?” asks RJ, setting the box on the kitchen table. “Is it because of…?” They nod at the scrawled NOT FOR YOU, JEETER on the lid of the box.

“Oh, that?” Arkady seems surprised, like she’d completely forgotten it was there. “It’s a joke, kinda – Jeeter doesn’t drink tea normally, but he has a habit of raiding our stash sometimes when he’s really sleep-deprived. And he always forgets that he’s allergic to rooibos, so. I wrote that as a reminder.” She flips open the top of the box and considers the contents.

“I… see,” RJ says, brow crinkling. They don’t really, but that tends to be the case with a lot of things involving their crewmates, so they decide not to spend too much time worrying about it.

Instead, they pick out a bag of peppermint tea and wait for Arkady to choose her flavour – lemongrass and ginger – before quickly plucking it out of her hand. “I’ll make these!”

“Kid–” Arkady grabs at RJ, who dances out of reach. “Listen, I can make my own goddamn tea–”

“Sure, but if I don’t make you sit down then both of us are going to get in trouble with Violet, and also I think you’ve already popped a stitch,” RJ shoots back. Arkady looks down and swears as she sees the tiny spot of blood that’s leaked through the bandages around her side onto her shirt, and grudgingly sits down at the kitchen table.

Smug, RJ rummages around for two clean mugs and drops the teabags into them. They pick up the kettle and carry it over to the small, pump-operated sink to fill it with water.

Intent on their task, RJ almost doesn’t notice it until the last second – out of the corner of their eye, a glint of light off silver rocks, off the barrel of a gun—

The kettle goes flying with a loud clatter as RJ whirls around. “ARKADY, GET D-”

Then they stop, heaving breaths in the middle of the kitchen, their leg throbbing. There’s nothing there.

Everything is very still.

But RJ saw it, they saw–

A glint of light, reflecting off the fridge, in the corner of their eye. Not an attacker. Not silver rocks and purple sand.

“-kid, can you hear me? RJ. RJ, can you hear me?” Arkady is suddenly right there, her face serious and intent, bending down to RJ’s level. “Kid, I need you to breathe with me. You’re having a panic attack. Breathe in–”

RJ is confused. They are breathing in. Aren’t they? Then they register the sharp, panicked breaths that they’re taking, their side beginning to ache from the strain. Oh. A panic attack. Right.

It feels like their lungs are already full to bursting, but RJ manages to drag in a breath.

“And out…” Arkady demonstrates, and RJ copies her. It’s helping to even their breathing out, but RJ’s muscles still feel like they’re locked in fight-or-flight mode, a non-existent threat pinging at the back of their brain.

“And again,” Arkady instructs, and she starts counting as RJ breathes in, and then out again. Her tone is matter-of-fact, with no attempt to sound soothing or sympathetic, and weirdly, it helps ground RJ. Plus, Arkady seems like she’s done this before. Maybe a few times before.

They gravitate over to the kitchen table, RJ breathing more normally but still keyed-up and tense. Their head is light from sucking in air, and their hands feel strangely tingly. They blink as Arkady pushes a hot mug towards them. At some point, she must have cleaned up the kettle and boiled some water for tea.

“Thanks,” they say, voice hoarse. They realise they should probably give some kind of an explanation about what the hell just happened. “Uh, that was…”

“Do you want me to get Violet?” Arkady asks, over them. RJ blinks.

“No, I- it’s not a medical condition, I swear. I mean, I don’t think it is. I just…” They think back to the glint of light, and then immediately try not to think about it. “I thought I saw something, and I panicked.”

“It was the refrigerator, right?” says Arkady. “Reflecting something.”

RJ looks at them, surprised. “Yeah, I- how did you know?”

Arkady shrugs. “I figured it might be something that reminded you of earlier. And since there’s no purple sand in here…” RJ laughs at that, very weakly. “I didn’t suggest Violet because she’s the ship’s medic,” Arkady goes on. “She knows a lot about this kind of stuff. She could…” Arkady gestures vaguely. “Talk to you about it.”

RJ really doesn’t have much desire to talk about what happened, although they know they probably should. “You seem like you know some stuff,” they point out. Belatedly, they remember the tea, and take a sip.

“Having a guh- uhhh, having a close… that is, knowing someone with anxiety will do that to you.” Arkady coughs as if trying to cover up her almost-slip of the tongue. RJ hides their smirk of amusement behind their mug.

“I don’t have anxiety. I don’t think, anyway,” they say slowly. “I’ve never had problems coping with combat situations before. They ran us through all sorts of simulations in the Academy. I learned to shoot in any conditions, under immense amounts of pressure.”

“Yeah, but how much actual field experience do you have?” Arkady asks sceptically. “Those were just simulations. It’s not the same as… actual war.”

She sips her own tea, a dark look on her face, and RJ is forcibly reminded that Arkady fought in the war – was probably a teenager when she did. There’s an awkward silence as they try to think of something to say. “No,” they say eventually. “I guess I don’t have any… experience with that.”

Arkady straightens up suddenly, squaring her shoulders. RJ remembers her popped stitch and hopes she isn’t putting any additional strain on it. “If this is the part where I’m supposed to delve into my dark past and tell you a story that inspires you, you’re shit outta luck,” she says flatly. “You want touchy-feely, you can go wake up Sana.” RJ laughs for real this time.

“I’m good. I promise,” they say. “Uh, but. Thanks for…” They falter, trying to be sincere but not wanting Arkady to make fun of them. “…Not freaking out,” they finish.

Arkady looks a little taken aback, like she wasn’t expecting to be thanked. “It’s no big deal. Really.”

At the mention of Sana, something occurs to RJ that makes their heart drop to the bottom of their stomach. They don’t want to voice it aloud to Arkady, though. Unfortunately for them, she reads it on their face anyway.

“You've got this scrunched-up look on your face,” she remarks. “Whatever it is that’s suddenly bothering you, spit it out.”

Her tone is impatient, but fortunately RJ has spent enough time with Arkady by now to know that she sounds like that most of the time, so they know not to take it personally. Well, too personally.

RJ worries at their lip, and then bursts out, “Please don’t tell Sana what just happened.”

Arkady’s face does something complicated; she looks halfway between baffled and annoyed. “You think I’m – what – going to rat you out to the Captain?” A slight laugh creeps into her voice.

RJ is too worked up to be reassured, though. “It took so long for her to agree to send me out on a drop-off, and I know that I had a bad reaction just now, but I can guarantee it won’t reoccur and I won't let it affect my performance on-”

“Oh my god,” Arkady interrupts, running a hand over her face. “Kid, listen to me. First of all, never try to keep things from Tripathi. It’s pointless, and she’ll only pry it out of you anyway and then be disappointed that you tried to hide it from her. Save yourself the bother.”

Arkady shakes her head slightly. “Second of all, the Captain isn’t going to bench you because you had a bad reaction to something that reminded you of a combat situation. If she did, I’d never-”

She catches herself, but RJ is able to mentally complete the sentence. I’d never be allowed to go on a drop-off or supply run.

“Look,” Arkady says. “You can’t “guarantee” that something like that isn’t gonna happen to you again, maybe in the middle of a job. When it happens, you deal with it, and you get on with the job. If you can’t do that, then maybe you should stay behind on the ship. But if you can deal with it just like you would anything else unexpected that happens, then I don’t see the problem.”

She gives RJ a flat look, as if daring them to find a hole in her logic. RJ has to admit it makes sense. It’s going to take a lot longer than they realised to shake the mentality that was drilled into them at the Academy, and under the Regime: optimal performance, optimal efficiency. The idea that anything less – any mistake – is unacceptable. That being human is unacceptable.

They realise they haven’t said anything yet. Arkady doesn’t seem to be waiting for a response, and has gone back to drinking her tea. Maybe she can tell that RJ’s taking in what she said, but they still want to give some kind of acknowledgement.

“Yes,” they say, into the silence. Arkady raises an eyebrow at them. “I can do that.”

“Good,” Arkady replies.

“Uh, thank you,” RJ adds, because they feel like they should say it, even though Arkady definitely won’t want them to. They drink some more of their now lukewarm tea.

“Ugh, don’t thank me,” Arkady says, predictably. “And speaking of not telling the Captain things: we’re not telling her that I just gave you a goddamn pep talk.”

RJ smirks. They can’t resist pointing out: “Didn't you just say it was pointless to keep things from the Captain?”

“I did. I also forgot to tell you about the exception to that rule,” says Arkady breezily.

“Which is?” RJ asks, already knowing the answer.

“Me.”

RJ snorts a little. It’s a relief to be back on the familiar ground of trading snark back and forth and not thinking about panic attacks or worrying about what will happen the next time they need to pick up a gun. They wonder if they’d be able to sleep now if they went back to their room. Maybe, after a couple of audiobooks. They’re still only midway through the collection that Park gave them, and Park has been talking about persuading Arkady to connect to the local network on their next stop-off so that he can download even more.

RJ realises that they never got the chance to ask how Arkady came to be awake and making tea in the kitchen so late at night. It’s probable that she’d say it was none of their business – and isn’t, really, except for the fact that they’re crew, and they were on a drop-off together earlier where RJ watched Arkady get shot, more than once, in part because she was trying to draw fire – and attention – away from RJ and Sana.

Arkady’s finished her tea, but she hasn’t made a move to get up and either refill the mug with more water or make her excuses and go back to bed. Instead she’s staring into it, brow furrowed, like she’s thinking about something unsettling. There’s shadows under her eyes.

“Are you-” RJ begins, and then second-guesses themself. Except that now Arkady is blinking at them, confused, which means that RJ needs to come up with something to say instead, damn it. “Uh, I mean. Could you… not sleep?”

Arkady looks momentarily annoyed by the question, and RJ prepares to walk it back, but then her face clears and she just looks tired. “The pain makes it… difficult,” she admits, grudgingly. “And before you say anything about painkillers, the kind that Liu gave me have some weird side-effects if you keep taking them for too long, so I don’t wanna risk it.”

“And she can’t give you something else?” RJ asks, because well, it’s the obvious question.

“We’re running low,” Arkady says, shortly. “Meds have always been the hardest to get our hands on, even when we’re just moving them, never mind for our own usage. There’s even more of a shortage now. Black market prices have gone up – we think the Regime is requisitioning more, either because they’re expecting to need them, or just to keep them out of the hands of ‘insurgents’. And back-alley doctors, abortion clinics and anyone else they’ve decided doesn’t deserve to have them.”

RJ feels the now-familiar wave of anger at being confronted, yet again, with evidence of the Regime’s callousness and pointless cruelty towards the people it’s meant to be protecting. Normally when this happens they keep quiet, uncomfortable with voicing outrage towards something that, until recently, they were completely complicit in. But this time, they can’t keep it from slipping out. “Fuck that.”

Arkady just nods, though RJ thinks there’s something approving in it. “Point being, I’d rather go without for a few hours and be sure that we still have enough in reserve for an actual emergency.”

RJ looks at the spot of blood on Arkady’s side, dried now but still there, and wonders what would class as an ‘actual emergency’ in her book if not this. No doubt if it were Sana who had been hurt (well, hurt worse than she was), Arkady would be making a very different argument. But RJ isn’t Sana, which means there is no way they would get away with pointing that out.

“Are you planning to stay up all night drinking tea in the kitchen?” they ask instead.

Arkady’s mouth lifts a tiny bit at the corner. “I was planning to kill a bit of time doing that, then head down to the engine room and do some stretches. Gentle ones.”

“The… engine room?” RJ is completely nonplussed. They know Arkady and Violet go there fairly often, but they figured it was for a specific reason, not like… recreational engine room time. “Don’t you brew moonshine in there?”

“Not all the time,” Arkady says. “A batch lasts us a while, so we only brew some every few weeks. You want to steer clear of the engine room while that’s going on, but otherwise it’s fume-free, and pretty roomy. Have you even been down there yet?”

RJ has not.

Which is how they somehow find themself in the middle of the engine room with Arkady at something like three in the morning, moving slowly through a series of Tai Chi stretches.

RJ can safely say they never predicted that their night would end up like this. But as they finally fall into bed half an hour later, gradually dozing off with an audiobook playing in the background, they feel pretty okay with how it turned out.

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jeminy3 · 5 years ago

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Blind Roy - Office Woes

This was meant to be part of a series of more Blind Roy drabbles, titled and focused on things like being back in the office, conversations with each individual team member, talking grimly of the future with Grumman, etc. But all my writing juice went into other stories (like the Elicia story, The Things We Carry), so they never really came together. This is just leftovers.

Features: Blind Character PoV, insecurities, workarounds for disabilities, Team Mustang being supportive like a good team should.

Read on Google Docs

Read on AO3

Twitter Post

Disclaimers:

- Realistically, Roy would be forced to retire from the military because of his blindness, but I didn't double-check that until I'd written out most of this because I'm PRETTY sure that in Brotherhood, he says something about continuing to pursue his goals despite his blindness. But whatever, it's an AU.

- I know Braille wouldn't exist in the FMA verse, or would go under a different name, but whatever.

Also, here’s another Roy doodle.

Roy's first day back in the office was difficult - much more difficult than he imagined.

He spent the majority of the day shuffling slowly around rooms with arms outstretched, running into walls, knocking things over, feeling his way around doorways and chairs and tables, much like - well, a blind man. He would've laughed at himself, if not for the quiet shame and anger that gripped him.

And a strange sort of denial did, too. Years from now, he'd look back on these days and realize that his biggest mistake was thinking he could somehow function exactly like he used to and therefore not become a burden to those around him. Because the worst parts of it all were his constant, stubborn refusals to accept help, even from his own squadron.

It takes him almost two weeks before he finally relents to using a cane at everyone's suggestion, after growing incredibly tired of crushing his nose, bumping his head, stubbing his fingers and toes, and wounding his pride in front of other officials while navigating their offices.

The sounds of people snickering softly behind his back hurt more than all his bumps and bruises combined. He expects them to multiply upon starting use of his cane, but to his surprise, they don't, and eventually stop altogether.

He gets a reason why when he offhandedly comments on it one day, as he's getting ready to head home for the evening.

"Another day done, I suppose. Almost surprised I'm still in one piece."

He hears a questioning sound from Riza. "How do you mean, sir?"

"Well, besides surviving the day without hurting myself for once-" He gestures with his cane. " -I haven't heard any, shall we say, disrespectful sounds from anyone in my vicinity. Maybe they're finally wise enough to hold their snickering for when I leave the room."

Riza makes an odd sound, as if holding back a laugh herself. "Well I wouldn't say that, sir..."

"...Hm?"

There's a shifting of fabric from Riza's uniform, as if she were lifting an arm to adjust her collar.

"Just between us, sir, if it eases you... myself and the others may be responsible for that. I've done my best to shut down any potential disrespect towards you during our meetings, and Fuery's encouraged us to take problem folk aside and give them, as he says, 'a good talking-to' about your condition."

There's a lightening in her voice, as if she's smiling. "And it looks like our efforts have paid off."

Roy was silent for a good few seconds, gaping a bit. He was... shocked, a little, that his squadron would go so out of their way for his comfort, even his pride.

Eventually, he'd learn to stop being so surprised.

Progress on paperwork nearly came to a complete halt during his first few days.

Unable to read, Roy had asked Riza to read the forms aloud to him before he signed them, but that method quickly proved to be inefficient. Not only was listening to Riza's droning voice a battle to stay conscious by the end of the day, but the strain on her soon proved to be too much.

"-and so, as per the order of Colonel Roy Musta- Agh. Ack." Riza chokes, then breaks down into a coughing fit.

"...Lieutenant? Are you alright?" Roy asks, snapping out of his boredom.

It takes a few seconds before she's recovered enough to respond, and when she does, her voice is still noticeably rough. "I'm- Urgh- I'm sorry sir, but I don't think this will work. I'm losing my voice," she says hoarsely.

Roy does his best to stave off a surge of panic. These forms need to get done. "Er- Well... Then uh, bring Falman in to take over until you recover, Lieutenant."

He hears her sigh softly. "Apologies again, but I have to disagree, sir. Falman has his own duties and can't spend all his time reading to you. Same for the others."

"...Besides, he's not even here today," she adds. "He's out on reconnaissance, remember?"

Roy sighs deeply, sinking into his desk and rubbing his temples. "...I'd forgotten. Sorry, Lieutenant. It's just- the meetings, the forms- it all blends together sometimes. You know."

Riza makes a "hm" noise in agreement, but nothing else. An awkward silence falls, and Roy can imagine her staring him down accusingly, since she'd already suggested a better alternative earlier today, but Roy had refused it, as usual.

At this point he was just delaying the inevitable. He lets out a long, loud groan of defeat. "Fine, fine. I'll stop putting it off. I'll try to learn that 'brell' language you told me about."

"It's called Braille, sir."

He waves a hand dismissively. "Yes, yes... And we'll have to reprint everything with that special paper... Ugh, the print department's going to moan at me, I just know it."

"I should hope not. Not when their Colonel has a disability that needs accommodation."

Disability. Roy flinches a little at the word, associating it with years of well-meaning but nonetheless other-ing societal norms. Nursing homes, therapy wards, parking spaces and public seating set aside and marked with garishly-colored signs.

"Er- Can you... not call it that, Lieutenant? It's not disabling, just ah- challenging, that's all," he says.

He hears her sigh again, and the sound of her uniform shifting, then feels her hand on his shoulder. Her voice is soft, perhaps softer than intended from her hoarseness, but there's something undeniably sincere in it.

"Roy, please... it's alright."

Her voice is closer to him now, and Roy can imagine her leaning down with a small, gentle smile near his face, offering tender support against his bull-headed stubbornness that masked a deep, all-consuming shame inside him. It eases him, a little.

Roy breathes out slowly, relieving a tension in his shoulders he hadn't noticed was there.

"I... I'll try, Riza. Thank you."

Luckily for everyone, the Braille system works out better than expected.

Frustrated with the amount of time it took to reprint everything traditionally, Roy, in his usual manner, came up with the brilliant idea of using Alchemy to convert them instead.

It takes some time and convincing to the higher-ups, but eventually, with the help of Major Armstrong and a few other alchemists, Roy creates a new and fairly simple system. All one has to do is place a stack of documents, along with a small amount of extra wood chips, in an array that instantly thickens the paper and raises the correct pattern of bumps, both for letters and lines to write into.

Then it's arranged for a specialized alchemist to be tasked with learning braille, translating documents, then recreating them using this process.

It turns out to be quite a bit faster and more efficient than traditional printing methods, since mistakes happened rarely compared to the sometimes-unwieldy machines, and in turn, this significantly cuts down on costs from maintenance and wasted paper.

East Headquarters’ Treasurer and Senior Accountants commend him for the idea and its execution, and begin sharing the idea with the officials at every other military office. Soon there’s talk about installing a similar system in every printing facility throughout Central City, even the country beyond, potentially opening up a significant breakthrough in readership for the similarly-disabled.

Roy was just happy he could finally fill out his paperwork by himself with little issue, but he’s certainly not above claiming it as another of his many impressive achievements.

As for writing out new documents himself, the solution was more simple. He has Riza bring in a typewriter to type his words as he says them aloud to her, and uses a ruler to keep his signatures straight on the plain, non-textured paper. Then the proofs are brought to the printers to reproduce as proper forms.

It took time - a long time - but eventually, Roy forms a mental map of not only his office, but of his personal apartment, the surrounding hallways and rooms of the apartment building, the whole interior of East Headquarters, and everywhere else he frequented on his daily routine, largely helped by his memory of what they looked like before he lost his sight - and by his squadron, of course.

Eventually, he also learns to stave off the irrational fear that things could be switched around without him knowing, that doorways and furniture would change position for no reason, and he didn't have to feel and re-feel everything every other day just to make sure. Slowly, he learns to trust himself and his connection to this dark world that was familiar, but at the same time strange and terrifying.

And of course, his squadron would never be so discourteous as to move something in his office without telling him.

#roy mustang #fma #blind!roy #riza hawkeye #team mustang #jeminy3 art #jeminy writes

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bbq-hawks-wings · 5 years ago

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After the DabiHawks shippers took on the “he’d hate Endeavor if he found out his past then ttly became a villain!” I’ve had this rage about the subject lol. Endeavor is not Enji. That’s been stated by even Natsuo and a lot by Shouto. Hawks is a fan of Endeavor the hero and he’s shown to be great at compartmentalizing so I don’t think it’d matter much to him. (Like how Deku was.) Especially since Endeavor became self aware and is changing. Really what we need is more background. HORI! 😡

"That last ask reminded me how much I dislike fanfics' portrayal of Hawks' reaction to Endeavor's past, lol. I guess that's more to do w/ people hating Endeavor but they forget that these two have a good relationship that goes beyond hero worship by now. Endeavor cares for Hawks and Hawks got to see his change, to support and trust him. That's why the reveal will be extra painful and Hawks' reaction cannot be predicted, it's very complicated." -Another Anon (We'll call you A2)

All this interaction and just from something I plunked down in my blog without major tags? I really do have a significant amount of people who read my stuff, thanks everyone!

Tw: Abuse of various kinds

Before responding I'd like to take a step back and frame this is real-world terms for a second: abuse is rampant in our local communities even if you may not realize it. Both my parents came from backgrounds with abusive parents/step-parents - some of which was on par with what the Todoroki's went through. That scratches the tip of the iceberg of people I personally know who have suffered some sort of domestic abuse, including myself, let alone the people I know of who have experienced it.

We really need to be sensitive to the fact that some respond to Enji the way they do because they don't see a fictional character with a story and message to tell in the larger scheme of the series - they see their own abuser, that person who on whatever level ground them down and made them feel like something less than human for however long and may even still be doing so. Have compassion for these folks. Not every Enji-anti is a cancel culture party planning purist ambassador.

Hawks is a comfort character for a lot of people, and many have used his ambiguous/mysterious personality as a blank canvas to project their woes onto and triumph over them vicariously through him. I've even done so. When his canon past came to light, a lot of them doubled-down on it, believing their victory was near. For those with open wounds, vehemently rejecting that abuser is a common cathartic release dream - especially if they've only recently come to terms with the fact that they aren't the ones at fault for what they went/are going through. Anger is a normal reaction.

For many of these people, the idea that someone who had it in them to do THAT to a human being could EVER, ACTUALLY want to change and CAN change is, frankly, actual insanity.

On the other side of the coin are people who believe that while those individuals need to have consequences of some kind for what they've done, they are allowed to make strides to improve who they are moving forward. They can never erase the evil they've inflicted on others, and it's up to their victims to decide if they forgive them individually; but never letting a genuinely remorseful person try to be better one day at a time leaves the world at least as ugly as we left it.

You had a good word for it, A2 - it's complicated.

Part of forfeiting your right to forgiveness as a former abuser includes not only giving up your right to be forgiven by your victims but by anyone you lied to as you commited and hid the abuse.

To A1's point, Enji and Endeavor until recently have not been the same person. He's Enji Todoroki first, and he lied to everyone to maintain his image as Endeavor the hero. In fact, he sacrificed the integrity of Enji to exist as Endeavor, so Endeavor the hero is not free of the crimes of Enji Todoroki.

For someone like Hawks who may have looked up to Endeavor, after coming to the conclusion that Papa Takami was a garbage human being, and thought "That's what a good man looks like! He would be a good dad to me if I was his kid," he would be justified in not forgiving Endeavor/Enji for implicitly lying to him for years, enforcing a false version of reality that lead to him selling his freedom as a child and not fighting back harder when he was older because to Hawks they are the same person - if you're this good to the public, you're this good in private. If Endeavor did all this, lied to Keigo and the public, with the HPSC's blessing, Hawks has the right to spit pure venom because in his mind you can't separate the hero from the person. Recognize that there isn't anything of Keigo Takami that isn't Hawks, and Hawks exists at the cost of Keigo Takami. If Hawks goes down, so does Keigo.

"If it means getting my hands dirty to put the minds of others at ease, I'll gladly take on this task."

The series is trying to tell us that, too. Have you noticed that none of the "big three" have real hero names atm? They're Shouto, Bakugo, and Deku. Even Izuku's choice to be called Deku is symbolic in this sense. Deku isn't a hero-proper, he's just Deku doing what Deku does because that's who Deku is. Call him by any other name, that's who he is at his core, it's who he was before he ever got a quirk, and it would be that way if he was recognized as a proper hero or not.

The HPSC has tried to strip Hawks of Keigo Takami unsuccessfully because they can't - if anything, by choking out Keigo Takami's ability to exist outside of Hawks they've reinforced a sense of personal identity and responsibility over his own actions that they can't undo. All Might only exists because Yagi Toshinori wanted to create a paragon, and in feeding All Might's existence Yagi Toshinori withered away. And on the same note, when Jin Bubaigawara reached the end of his rope and had nowhere to go and no one left to turn to, he became Twice and found a place that wanted him.

Now, Jin felt like his own most ideal version of himself as Twice, and even despite his laundry list of crimes up to and including murder Hawks still felt he was worthy of redemption - even just the chance for it. Will Endeavor, whose list of crimes also stack up in similar fashion also be worthy? Does it matter what you call yourself or what you've done that matters, or does it come down to what you want to do and who you want to be that counts?

It's hard to tell. It's complicated. We'll just have to wait and see.

#spoiler!hawks

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lightshielded · 5 years ago

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OKAY SO there is a lot actually in this fiddle cinematic that you might not know if you haven’t read particular demacian stories and lores, so i’m going to rave about it here and talk about social implications, timeline implications and generally be happy as a fiddle main cause he is one of my main jgs !

okay, so the first thing we obviously need to note is the events mentioned and those NOT mentioned. so the guards are talking about how they wanted to go get a drink but instead got extra watch because the “ whole country side is on edge after fassbarrow. ” this quote gives us a time period of being AFTER the for demacia story, but no mention of the mage rebellion - which is, y’know, kinda a big deal in demacia - makes me think it is prior to the events of the comics. WHICH for us demacia writers is nice as it does give a time frame for that short story, as with the new lore with the comic actually didn’t fit in properly with the timeline. so it’s good to see that even with the first issues that have seemingly picked where they want that story to sit, and we can just ignore that she has a wand in it.

now another significant thing beyond it being implied to be relatively soon after the noc.turne attack, is that the soldier says “yeah, filthy mages...” in response to fassbarrow being brought up. now, the readers of for demacia will know it was NOT a mage but a demon, but most people in the story thought it was a dark sorcerer trying to kill an entire town of people. this tells us that lu.x never revealed the truth to anyone about noct.urnes escape and that the magic wasn’t from a human but his ultimate: paranoia. so, we know demacia is blaming this HORRIFIC event on magic (which is right) and then on mages (which is wrong).

BUT, what is so significant about this is now we have a confirmed time of the short story again, that being a week after jarv and shyv return together. and do you know what’s so special about that? well it coincides with a newly added information to jarv’s lore which was put there post comic.

“ With the dragon’s skull in tow, Jar.van journeyed to his father’s court in triumph, Shyv.ana at his side . . . Even so, Jarv.an resumed his position within the military . . . the prince felt assured that Demacia could answer any emergent threat. But the kingdom itself was changing. The Mageseeker order had gained support among the noble families, leading to widespread imprisonment of anyone in Demacia possessing magical talents. ”

in other words, this could imply truly recent events, after or coinciding with his return, caused the public to deeply fear magic again allowed the mageseekers to gain control again by gaining influence in the court. like it is implied that widespread imprisonment wasn’t a big thing before, likely there was still a lot given demacia and its history but it does suggest it was at least lesser by an amount. and, based on what we know of his personality, i imagine the king would relent to allowing greater restrictions on mages if we are talking entire towns at risk of magical destruction -- for as, as far as demacia knows, that mage escaped -- which could be the “good points” jarv.an iii mentions in aftermath.

this is would mean that the laws of stone were probably slightly looser prior to these events but since they don’t confirm the actual stuff for that i can’t say much more. but basically, this creates a really interesting explanation for the next 7 years until the events of the comic. basically we have greater mageseeker activity resulting in more mages being arrested and either imprisoned or exiled, this leads to greater unrest, which leads to the “countless exiles” jarv mentions aiding as a result of his own promise to shyv of making an equal and good demacia.

basically, noct.urne sparked the more recent mass fear of magic, which caused the recent rampant imprisonment of mages. BUT NOW don’t forget about the star of this rant, fiddle.sticks. now we know he is ALSO killing soldiers in the forests post noc.turne’s attack. demacia thinks that that dark mage is still out there and now soldiers protecting those country cities and towns are going missing? the amount of fear which is probably built up in the communities would have been palpable. and even though we know this is DEMONS all this hate and fear is being pushed onto the innocent mages within these communities. which basically amplifies all i mentioned before.

also... did i mention eve also is a demon and -- if i’m remembering shuana’s age right -- also attacked demacia in the last 7 years... look i’m not saying these demons have an agenda... but they might. also it is explicitly stated that the people can’t comprehend that a demon would be in demacia so that again shows the pushing of the crimes onto other magical folk. because that is the history of demacia, they were refugees of human magical warfare and so instinctively - almost they blame everything on it.

so basically, all this has really effected our more recent demacia lore. for we know that the mageseekers having and abusing their power is one of the big driving forces of the rebellion. it is the mistreatment of innocent people who’s only crime is being born with a trait and then being blamed for atrocities of a creature not even human. its what is creating this really frustrating to watch story of us as readers watching a people who have done nothing wrong as a people get targeted with this hate born of fear which isn’t warranted. personally, i enjoy this little development, brings a bit of humanity and enlightenment to the recent changes in demacia and you can when forcing yourself into the shoe of a demacian see why they might think a way they do, even though you just really want to slap the thought process out of them.

essentially, tl:dr we now seem to have a plausible reason for the increased mageseeker behaviour given that we know it was a recent change within the last 7 years of the nation’s history (as from what we know jarv is about 25 in current lore and was 18 during the events of his return which coincides with for demacia). we can see that these demon assaults have likely been blamed on innocent mages creating mass fear and paranoia in the populace at large against them. this has allowed the mageseekers to vy for more policing power which the king granted on the basis of “good reasons” which we can assume to be the lives and safety of his people -- soldiers and towns folk alike. and this has all lent a hand to effecting the more recent events in our demacian lore.

of course, this is all assuming i am right in my understanding and assumptions haha

#insert that men in black meme but its me and DEMONS #— out of character `#long post /

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blackjack-15 · 5 years ago

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All Dogs Go To Pennsylvania — Thoughts on: Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake (DOG)

Previous Metas: SCK/SCK2, STFD, MHM, TRT, FIN, SSH

Hello and welcome to a Nancy Drew meta series! 30 metas, 30 Nancy Drew Games that I’m comfortable with doing meta about. Hot takes, cold takes, and just Takes will abound, but one thing’s for sure: they’ll all be longer than I mean them to be.

Each meta will have different distinct sections: an Introduction, an exploration of the Title, an explanation of the Mystery, a run-through of the Suspects. Then, I’ll tackle some of my favorite and least favorite things about the game, and finish it off with ideas on how to improve it.

If any game requires an extra section or two, they’ll be listed in the paragraph above, along with links to previous metas.

These metas are not spoiler free, though I’ll list any games/media that they might spoil here: mention of MHM, DOG, brief mention of VEN, brief discussion of two characters from ASH, brief mention of LIE, spoilers for 20th Century American History in case you’re not caught up yet.

The Intro:

Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake is, first and foremost, a game that is simultaneously over- and under-appreciated. It’s a rare phenomenon in gaming, and one that only occurs once in the Nancy Drew game series.

It has an intensely atmospheric location, but is coupled with the least fitting cast to ever grace a Nancy Drew game.

The maze (and its bird spotting/worm finding puzzles) is tedious at best, but the speakeasy is riddled with fun puzzles and pitch-perfect décor. It has the most boring, milquetoast, robotic suspects of all time, but some of the best phone characters.

And, to top it all off, it has one of the most straightforward mysteries paired with an insanely weird ending.

The thing that DOG really nails is the location. The visuals, the accents (Emily’s is a standout), the feeling of timelessness — all of that is central to this specific area of Pennsylvania and somehow Seattle-based HER really just gets it all right. Not only is this significant in this burgeoning era of Nancy Drew games, but it also goes a long way to making the game fun to play.

By this point, HER has cottoned onto the fact that their audience really likes historical background to the games, and includes it as a matter of course. For DOG, we’re learning about Prohibition-era Pennsylvania — and more specifically, bootlegger history.

To understand the game completely, a little history lesson might be in order. If you’re familiar with Prohibition and its cultural impact, you can skip the next few paragraphs.

For those not from the US, Prohibition was when a bunch of uptight, meddling people in the early 1900s decided that they needed a good Moral Panic and that the best way to get rid of the problems that can come with drinking was to give the government the power to make it illegal by adding it to the United States Constitution.

This lasted a total of 13 years (1920-33) where everyone immediately and promptly ignored the law, until the government sheepishly passed the repeal in the form of another amendment to the Constitution, having accomplished nothing other than moralistic finger-wagging and the solidification and exponential growth of organized crime and the black market in the US.

Thus, in United States culture, bootleggers and others who defied Prohibition are usually viewed as folk heroes fighting against stupid governmental overreach, rather than as criminals.

One of the most famous anecdotes from the Prohibition era is about an FBI agent who went undercover to see how long it would take to get alcohol in the major cities of the time. The longest took him a bit over 15 minutes, while the shortest was in New Orleans, Louisiana, where it took him 32 seconds due to his cab driver answering the question of where he could get alcohol by producing a bottle and saying “right here”.

This backstory is crucial not only to understanding characters like Jeff Akers, Eustacia Andropov, Vivian Whitmore, and, yes, Mickey Malone, but it’s also crucial to understanding why the game feels the way it does.

Unlike the other Nancy Drew games that touch on organized crime — Phantom of Venice, Labyrinth of Lies — this game holds a sort of fascinated reverence and “good ol’ American boy”-type feelings for Malone and his fellow gangsters.

Usually in Nancy Drew games — and almost always in the early to middle games – HER tries to send a very strong message against any type of illegal or immoral behavior (as evidenced by the games’ Fundamentalist fanbase), but DOG stands out in its sheer American pride in these law-breakers from a different age.

It’s to the benefit of the game that the character archetypes of certain suspects and/or phone characters feed into these 20s/30s Prohibition-era tropes, as it gives them some grounding in a game that really doesn’t have much to say (in contrast to how much it feels).

Other than the historical background and its modern-day underpinnings, DOG is a paint-by-numbers Nancy Drew game with one or two annoying puzzles, a strong atmosphere, fun phone friends, and a decent plot. In a first for the series, it’s also a primarily outdoor game, which would inspire future games such as Danger on Deception Island and Creature of Kapu Cave, among many others.

While I would never rate DOG in my top games (and probably not even in the top half of games, due to the overall quality of the series), there’s a lot it does right. Ultimately, the problem with the game — and the reason that it doesn’t rank too highly on a lot of lists — is not that DOG does anything wrong, per se. It’s just that, for all its good things, DOG doesn’t do enough right.

The Title:

Lots of Nancy Drew games (always excepting the first two, which were more trial-style games and thus are different on a whole host of levels) are titled with “The [adjective] [noun]”, “[noun] in a/the [adjective] [location]’ or “The [noun] of [Proper Noun/Location]”, and Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake thus stands out a bit, making the title seem more important than it would normally.

The title tells us pretty explicitly what the main conflict — and the main “haunting”, as this is a Haunted game in its trappings, if not in its actual plot — will be: the ghostly dogs that haunt the Moon Lake property. It also lets us know, in a roundabout way, the location of the game (though there are Moon Lakes in multiple places throughout the US).

However, that’s all the title does. Unlike most other titles in the series, DOG’s title doesn’t really let you play around with possible meanings or read into it at all. As good a title as it is for pointing you right to the heart of the premise of the game, it’s also a bad title because it refuses to tell you anything else about the game.

In other words, the title, much like the rest of the game, is a mixed bag that, for me at least, hangs a little more on the negative side than the positive.

Now, onto the only thing that the title points us to:

The Mystery:

Nancy’s been called to investigate by a friend of her family’s, Sally MacDonald — a photographer and land owner — due to the fact that Sally’s cabin has been experiencing nightly hauntings by ghostly dogs of the cabin’s previous owner, a Prohibition-era gangster named Mickey Malone.

Technically, Nancy is supposed to be there to visit, but Sally can’t take another night of hauntings, and books it out of there before Nancy can arrive. Upon her arrival, Nancy experiences one of these hauntings, and promptly sets out to solve the case behind the Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake.

As a mystery, DOG isn’t too standout — it’s in the vein of MHM, though not as good — and follows the basic structure of a Haunting Game: a few instances of the haunting, some logical explanations, some illogical explanations, and a few shifty people who could have caused the disturbances.

The reason behind the hauntings is established fairly quickly, as Nancy learns that Malone’s property is valuable for a number of reasons, and Sally’s purchase of it upset the plans of the other three residents of Moon Lake. What’s not clear is which of our three extremely guilty-seeming suspects (four if you consider Sally a suspect) is actually responsible.

While the culprit in this game isn’t immediately recognizable, as HER has tried to lay some red herrings and distribute blame a little more than they have in the past, it’s still easy to figure out once you’ve hit the halfway mark (and can be figured out well before that if you’re paying close attention), but that’s more due to the suspects being one of the most lackluster suspect groups in the entire series.

The Suspects:

Sally MacDonald is the owner of the so-called haunted cabin on Moon Lake, and is the “client” of the game. She bought the Moon Lake property for its picturesque views, but soon learned that the cabin came with a price beyond the monetary. Upset by the hauntings, Sally high-tails it out of Moon Lake, leaving Nancy an incredibly garbled message about the dogs and not much else. She also hasn’t apparently tested her water even though she’s been there for a month, which is a Bit Much, City Girl.

Sally’s not really a suspect, but there’s nowhere else to put her, and if the game didn’t begin with Nancy witnessing the dogs for herself, Sally would start out as a halfway-decent suspect herself, rather than a mostly-pointless phone friend.

Sally herself is one of the weakest points of the game (more on that below), which is a little sad when you consider how important her presence is to the game versus how much impact she actually has (less than anyone else)

Red Knott is the rather unfortunately named birdwatcher that perches on what I’m pretty sure is Sally’s property to begin with and yells about The Youth with the vigor that only an oldster in civvie-camo can do. He’s upset about Sally’s purchase because he wants to watch birds 24/7 and having more people — especially someone younger, as he hates those under 50 — in Moon Lake means more people disturbing the birds.

Red is rude, cantankerous, and firmly believes in having people do things for him, provided it’s an 18 year old in unisex camo gear. You’d think his and Sally’s shared hobby of photography would link them together and make Red your first-cleared buddy-buddy suspect, but Nancy’s pretty much on her own the entire game.

As a suspect, Red is pretty lackluster as well. Sure, he likes his birds, but no one believes for a moment that this dude is actually behind anything other than being a pain the butt. Red is entirely un-useful in everything, but not so unhelpful as to stymie Nancy. In a cast of nothings and no-ones, Red is especially forgettable apart from asking Nancy if she smokes.

Jeff Akers is the local park ranger and resident owner of the most firmly lodged stick in the universe. He’s also the strongest tie to the Prohibition-era backstory as the Lawmen opposing people like Mickey Malone and Valerie.

It’s a shame he doesn’t do his job better; Jeff should be the embodiment of Consequences when Nancy goes too far, but instead, he barely shows up to have his dog be a red herring and then disappears into Moon Lake like some Nessie-style monster of Little Consequence.

As a suspect? Well, Jeff isn’t going to tick many boxes. Sure, he’s got a dog — albeit not the right type of dog at all — and he’s not fond of Nancy, but pretty much no one in this game is a fan of Nancy, so that doesn’t do much for his suspect-ness at all.

In a game where dogs are bad news, Jeff is all bark and no bite. He’s a comic relief character that shouldn’t be a comic relief character, and a present-day presence when he should be a relic of a past time.

Emily Griffin is the owner of a local bait shop/general store/Prohibition-era antique corner who definitely only sells Legally Obtained items, thank you very much. She’s got that cheeriness that HER liked to conflate with friendliness, ignoring that they’re two very different things and produce two very different reactions in the player (think in ASH Toni’s cheeriness versus Alexei’s friendliness).

She’s the one most tied to the past through her side hustle of selling Prohibition antiques, and it’s obvious that she must be the culprit through that reveal alone. Unfortunately, that’s her only tie to the Prohibition era, as nothing else about her is a shadow of Malone, Vivian, or any other bit of the past we learn about in the game.

As a suspect, Emily is the best, but still isn’t fabulous. There’s little depth to her beyond simple greed, and her interactions with Nancy might as well be with a slightly cagey computer rather than a person. She’s not sinister enough to be scary (apart from one subtle moment covered below), but not silly enough to be funny. She perhaps best represents DOG as a game: she’s a mixed bag with a few shining bits, but is ultimately forgettable.

The Favorite:

There are a few things that DOG does righter than rain, so let’s take a run-down.

The first and most important thing that DOG nails is the atmosphere. I’ve mentioned it above, so I won’t dwell too much, but HER really just gets rural Pennsylvania right, and it’s an absolute treat to play in that atmosphere.

The next is also covered above, but I really adore the good ol’ American appreciation for our bootlegger heroes. It would have been so easy to demonize these people who did, admittedly, break the law, but instead HER for once doesn’t play the wet blanket and acknowledges that sometimes (most of the time, really), American folk heroes are a bit good and a bit bad.

My favorite puzzle is incredibly lame, but it’s the Roman Numeral puzzle. I have a slightly secret, mostly nerdy love for puzzles that use things that are useful in the real world, and having taken Latin in college, this puzzle really actually helped me be able to 1) pass accelerated Lain and 2) feel more confident when looking at dates. It’s also just kinda fun and relaxing. I like puzzles that make me sort stuff.

My favorite moment in the game is probably when you first step into the speakeasy and Malone’s presence is almost palpable. Every time I walk in, I’m always looking around for someone to speak to, even though I know the saloon is empty. It’s a great moment and an appropriate reveal given the heft of the historical background.

Once again, the Hardy Boys are a bright spot in this game, as are Vivian and Eustacia. Really, the phone conversations are the best part of DOG — not just because the actual game is a bit lackluster, but more because they’re really just that good.

I’ve also gotta give credit for the insanely terrifying tidbit of Emily trying to give Nancy calming tea that would poison her after setting the shed on fire. It’s a great moment of fridge horror, and shows that Emily does have some subtlety (attempted murder with a femur bone notwithstanding) when she wants to.

The Un-Favorite:

There are probably as many bad things as good, however, and it’s here that DOG starts to show its weaknesses.

As mentioned above, Sally really drags down the parts of the game she’s in, as she could have been a good character and ultimately winds up not even being a character at all.

If you restructure the beginning and have a little more subtle haunting of the dogs happening to a cabin and then cut to Sally leaving Nancy a voicemail/talking to her on the phone — but Nancy sees no evidence of dogs, just general mild destruction — then you start out a haunting game on the right foot.

Proving Sally right about the dogs and right to leave Moon Lake from the beginning weakens the game, and is one of my least favorite bits of it.

As far as least favorite puzzles go, there are two contenders. The maze in the woods is a high point for some, but as someone with a little trouble with distinguishing visual stimuli in the first place, it can be (and usually is) absolute hell. None of the puzzles are hard except for the bird-spotting puzzle, which isn’t hard as much as it is frustrating.

My least favorite moment is the beginning haunting simply because it builds the game up to a point that it never reaches again, not even with the hilarious screwball ending. When the best moment of the game is the first two minutes, you’re not looking at a satisfying game.

The cast is often what makes or breaks a game and, unfortunately, this is a game where the cast breaks it. There’s simply nothing in the suspects to propel the game forward, which gives the game a feel of more of a graphic novel-type game than a whodunnit. And, spoiler alert, it doesn’t make for a good graphic novel game either.

The lack of length in this section isn’t a testament to the value of the game itself; rather, it shows DOG for what it is: just unremarkable. Not good enough to be solid, not bad enough to be an outlier.

The Fix:

So how would I fix DOG?

There’s not much you can do with the current cast of characters, despite their tenuous ties to Prohibition tropes, so I’d pretty much start over.

Make Sally a mid-game presence (actual tangible suspect, thank you very much) and shift Emily from the ‘bumpkin’ archetype to someone a bit more world-wise (though keep the accent, it’s fantastic) and hide her involvement in dredging the bottom of the lake a little longer (or implicate someone else in it first, whichever works).

Give Red something to do to make him a bit more suspicious and use him as Nancy’s buddy once Sally comes in (to keep the number of suspects the same) and have his photography actually come in handy. As for Jeff…an obstructionist presence is fine, but root him a bit more in history as a figure of the law rather than a sissified bureaucrat whose only character trait is that he loves to give tickets.

The puzzles could also solve to be more memorable and not auto-solved (save for the bird-spotting puzzle, which is a Disgrace) by the game, but part of that is the age of the game.

DOG is structured as a haunting game, so beginning it with Nancy experiencing a haunting full-stop is a horrible beginning. It takes out any suspense and any sense that this might just be an old legend and minor sabotage getting the better of Sally (or better, Sally damaging her own property in order to hype up its status as Malone’s house and then flip it for a profit/get her photos of the “hauntings” featured in a nationwide story) and instead gives us the most cut and dry (emphasis on dry) haunting game in the series.

Beginning DOG in the way that HER does, while a great cinematic (especially for 2002), drains the suspense and Mystery out of the game like sap from a pine tree. We’re still left with a structure of sorts, but it’s just not what it could have been.

Ultimately, even with DOG fixed, I don’t think it would be a standout game for anything (except possibly atmosphere). At its best, DOG is simply a three-star entry in a series; no one’s least favorite, very few people’s favorite, and memorable only for its initial haunting rather than for its plot, characters, or mystery.

#nancy drew #nancy drew games #clue crew #ghost dogs of moon lake #nancy drew meta #DOG #my meta #video games

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blog-increasetwitterfollowers · 5 years ago

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How Your Company Can Build Up More Twitter Followers

It's uncommon to consult with a company owner who utilizes Twitter but that does not desire more followers. Some might say that the numbers are not significant and they're just worried about"quality followers." But, it is generally the individuals who just have a few followers that make this debate.

As a company owner why do you want to have more Twitter followers? Here are 3 great reasons:

1. More followers deliver societal authority. The same as any other standing method, the greater your audience count, the longer individuals (your clients ) presume you're an expert-or at someone popular and interesting. It might not be legitimate, but it is how it functions in a universe where there's a rated list for all.

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Before I talk about you a few tips about the best way best to raise the amount of your Twitter followers, then I think it's essential that I need to let you know how to not take action.

Do not attempt to cheat the machine and attempt to get immediately draw in tens of thousands of followers instantly. If something seems too good to be true, then it likely is. Unless you happen to be a celebrity that has built a huge audience in a few other media station, bringing followers will take some time and effort however, the investment is well worth it.

What about purchasing followers? In the end, there are plenty of individuals promoting this type of service.

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Rather than employing these allegedly fast-track methods for building your own follower count, I wish to talk to you a few of my favorite proven means by which that you may receive more faithful twitter followers.

Engage and Inform

Twitter is about participation. It's a hectic and fast moving stage, and that means you have to make content that educates, advises, entertains or arouses your followers. This is sometimes carried out by sharing a fantastic mixture of articles, either your own and other individuals. Before long you'll construct a massive following of folks that wish to hang out together and accompany because they enjoy what you are saying or discussing.

Proudly show your Twitter button Hyperlink

If you'd like traffic to your site to accompany you around Twitter then be certain they can view your Twitter button connection. You need to help it become clear for them. Do not irritate the Twitter button in the base of your site or site page. Allow it to be notable and ask your customers to accompany along with you. If they're in your site they're definitely interested in knowing more about you and everything you need to say.

Place"Follow Me on Twitter" on your email signature.

On your email signature, then add a URL to a Twitter accounts. (An email signature is little bit of information which gets attached to the conclusion of the email address. Folks typically place their name and contact information from the email signaturenonetheless, you're free to place whatever you enjoy.) Make after you on Twitter simple. Again, do not make them search for you.

Add your Twitter ID on your business cards and letterheads.

Though this will not build you a massive following really quickly it's a great habit to get into and can be equally as crucial as incorporating your own physical address, phone number and email address.

Avoid excessive advertising.

It's true, you can market your blog articles, goods, etc. . Twitter but be cautious. There is an invisible line that you shouldn't cross. If you do, you resemble a spammer-or just clueless. Not only can you NOT get extra followers, you'll wear out your present followers and several will just dazzle you.

Actively follow different folks on Twitter.

Start your media efforts by becoming a follower of those people that you respect in your business. Read on their tweets to acquire a feeling of who they are and what their aims are about Twitter. It's a great idea to follow along because many folks in your business or business as you can. As soon as you've discovered people and began to follow themit is going to provide them the chance to find both your great content along with your internet presence. They are more inclined to reciprocate and accompany you again, as are most of the followers who may even prove to be prospective clients.

Place your Twitter title in bulk media campaigns

If you put ads in magazines, or on radio or television, you have to be certain your twitter title is not there for everybody to watch and listen. Just include the Number (hashtag emblem ) followed with your business's title or advertising and individuals will accompany you.

Keep your articles short sufficient to retweet.

Retweets are the sole method to get seen by men and women who do not follow you, but you have to create your articles easy for other people to retweet. Keep your tweets brief enough for folks to have the ability to bring the RT emblem and your own username ("RT @yourcompanyname"). So for instance, let us say your title is 14 characters you will also have to incorporate the distance. That implies, so as to become more retweetable, your own tweet may be no more than 126 characters (140-14=126).

Have your Twitter connection on Facebook

Virtually everybody uses Facebook, therefore ensure it is simple for them to jump over to a Twitter accounts whenever they see the Facebook profile. The perfect place is at the"About" section.

Tweet frequently

Picture Twitter as a continuous, fast flowing stream. Tweets flow beyond and are usually never found again. Consequently, you have to keep your own Tweets flowing so you aren't forgotten. Be clear. Stand out from the crowd and you'll find far more followers.

Link to Twitter out of LinkedIn.

Possessing a Twitter connection in your LinkedIn accounts is ideal. You are allowed three hyperlinks onto LinkedIn profile, so be certain one of these is the Twitter accounts. It'll be excellent for media, particularly with the movers and shakers in your business.

Reply to other people openly.

I was able to respond to individuals through Direct Message, believing what I needed to say was immaterial to all my followers. Since I was not responding in people, this left me seem unsociable. So today, I answer almost exclusively in people, and actually, the only men and women who see these messages are individuals who follow me and the man I am responding to that's just a tiny subset of my own followers. By doing this, my tweets are social but not bothersome.

Be generous when connecting to, and others.

Twitter encourages a culture of sharing. The longer you connect to other people, the more folks will encounter, and that is exactly what should occur for you to raise your follower depend. You want other people to present you to their own followers. But don't request a retweet too frequently. Once in a while is fine but in the event that you merely post content value retweeting, folks will happily do it to you without needing to ask!

These hints will truly help boost your own follower amounts and we expect they give you a bit of inspiration. Having said this, you will need to consider: If you're at the commencement of your Twitter trip, no one is actually going to be paying much attention for your own.

Initially your articles will probably be lost in a sea of different messages which are competing for attention, but on the other hand there aren't likely to be too many men and women that will see your own messages before you develop a sizable following, therefore this is the best time to create a few errors.

Recall: Twitter takes a whole lot of work, has a small steep learning curve and could be a fairly scary place to be on one. You will find a lot of these confusing symbols and characters, odd shortened connections, stress to accompany men and women that you do not understand and numerous chilling acronyms and buzz phrases, and of course that the hashtag.

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mamsellechosette24601 · 6 years ago

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Detailed description of Brazil's Great Comet of 1812

This is the stage with the denominations I gave to make it easier to follow

VERY LONG POST ahead, about “Natacha, Pierre, e o Grande Cometa de 1812”, the Brazilian version of Dave Malloy’s “Great Comet” which opened last Friday August 24th in São Paulo. In this post I will detail how this version differs from the Broadway one (keeping in mind that all I know from it comes from the YouTube bootleg), make some analyses and from time to time bring up War & Peace, because I can’t help myself. So of course, SPOILERS (for W&P, I won’t go beyond the part where tgc ends).

The Main Differences:

1- In this version, Pierre/Natasha was even more canon than in the book. I will explore the details in chronological order, but keep this in mind;

2- There were, of course, changes to the lyrics, driving it further away from the novel, and also making use of more explicit language;

3- Characters had more defining good/evil characteristics, so I think some of the subtlety was lost, but at the same time it helped to draw out more clearly some of the themes.

Because of my sitting position, I sometimes couldn’t see what was going on in the right, but had a privileged view of the actors walking around the tables to go up the central stage.

Once you arrive, there’s folk Russian music playing, waiters are bringing people food, and for the countdown, you hear ras, ras dva, and finally ras dva tri.

Act 1

Prologue

The Prologue is on YouTube, so I won’t go over it in detail, but a few observations: before the music begins, you see some soldiers fighting. The one in the center is Andrei, who seems to have been wounded – was that a reference to the novel, where Andrei is treating himself from the wound he received in Austerlitz? Also, Nikolai’s name (Natasha’s brother and Sonya’s fiancé) appears in the cast list, so I imagine one of the soldiers must have been him, as he doesn’t appear in any other moment.

When the chords started playing, I looked around and Pierre was standing right next to me. Status: choked by tears of joy.

During the stanza “And this is all in your program…” dancers come singing and playing instruments, walking around the tables, looking people in the eye to make sure they understand.

Pierre

Also on YouTube, so the only note I’ll make is: throughout the song, Helene is there laid back on the stairs next to Dolokhov, flirting openly with him and laughing at Pierre.

Moscow

The Akhrosimov residence is on the left stage, while the Bolkonskys live on the right.

The impression I got of Marya was that this version of her was nicer, less strict than Grace McLean’s. Yes, she worries a lot about the family’s name and cares for decency, but she’s not only old-school, she’s also out of fashion. During Prologue, the word they use for her is “careta”, which has this double meaning, and it shows. Her style is different from everyone else’s, brighter and floral, and during Moscow she shows off some dance moves and you just know that she’s doing it to embarrass Natasha and Sonya. She can be endearing and didn’t seem to hate Sonya that much.

Private and Intimate Life

So, turning entirely to the right stage now, we see Old Bolkonsky sitting on his chair and Mlle Bourienne dancing gaily to his right. He drools, and she cleans it from the floor. Instead of “a young suitor” or “some cheap French thing”, Old B. says he’ll look for a whore. He turns to the audience, asking if there are any whores there, and then turns to Mlle Bourienne. The whole show in general is quite explicit, which I will detail further.

Natasha and the Bolkonskys

Natasha arrives and the awkwardness of the moment is shown by Mary going down the stage and getting lost as she wanders through the right-side tables trying to reach the central stage. Once they meet, they say their famous greetings and Mary just looks back at Old Bolkonsky and shakes her head, like saying “err... this girl is CANCELLED”. They keep silent, just smiling a lot in the fakest way possible, and they walk a bit around the central stage, one getting in the way of the other, before Mary starts “AND FROM THE FIRST GLAAAANCE”. There’s no sitting at the table, as it wouldn’t work, once only the people on the right would be able to see it.

About Mary’s character: she’s self-assumedly plain, but her costume is quite glittery. The Mary we meet here is haughty, I sensed in her more pride than in the book or in Gelsey Bell’s version. The audience stands on Natasha’s side, and her quick escape from the house seems more rightful than childish.

No One Else

Also on YouTube, so everyone can go there and see how beautiful it is, with the blue lighting and Andrei coming to dance with Natasha and lift her up in the air to fly away. An important detail about the translation: instead of “The Mooooooonnn….”, right in the beginning, Natasha sings “The Bluuuueeeee…”. The Moon is still very much present during this song, but this change connects with the deep significance blue lighting has in the play in general, and even more in this version specifically. On Broadway, blue lighting appears during No One Else and by the end of Dust and Ashes. For me it always seemed an indicator of purity, honesty, real love, as it was put in contrast with the dominating red and yellow lights, the two-faced and ill-meaning aristocratic society. Now this view was enhanced, for when Natasha acknowledges the colour, it becomes something else: the sky. Those who have read War & Peace or at least watched BBC’s 2016 miniseries, will remember the deep connection there’s between Andrei and the “lofty, infinite heavens”. Throughout the novel, the sky is a symbol of God, joy, eternal love that knows no bounds, love for the world, for our fellow men, for those who have done us wrong. Natasha lives this sky, lives the blue. She’s already found what Pierre is looking for, and from now on we will watch as she loses touch with it and attempts to regain it.

The Opera

Sonya began singing and detailing everything and I didn’t even remember that it wasn’t in the original language. It was so good. Now, a few book characters appear in the cast list, such as Vera, Berg, Julie, Boris, Anna Mikhailovna, Anna Pavlovna, Prince Vasili, Denisov… I think they were all just named extras in The Opera. No references to them at any other moment.

After Helene talks to Marya and the girls, Marya turns to them and says Helene is a snake, followed by hissing sounds. Beautiful. I think Helene was also wearing a snake-shaped necklace but I’m not 100% sure.

The ballet and the actual opera were everything you could expect.

Something that happens in the translation all throughout the play is that most of the time in Portuguese, you can’t say as much as in English with the same amount of syllables. An example is “tickle”, which in Portuguese is “fazer cócegas”. I’m mentioning it because I was very curious about this translation, and so “I’d tickle you all if I could” became “I’d like to dance with you all”, because a literal translation would never work. For me, it became less dream-like, and so that’s an example of how translation can get in the way.

Anatole’s entrance was not as remarkable, as in the stage there is no door, and so he just walked up the stairs, but he walked up-stage just as he should (no contact with the audience, however). Instead of “good-looking”, Helene calls him “gostoso”, which is a more explicit form of “hot”.

Natasha and Anatole

This one, even the interactions, were very similar to Broadway. But the impression this Anatole gives is quite different from Lucas’. Watching the Broadway version, I can never get very angry at Anatole, simply because Lucas Steele is too charismatic and has this “good guy” aura around him. I would call him ignorant, cocky, selfish, but not evil. One can even believe he’s in love with Natasha (in a shallow way). Now, someone would have to really distort everything to defend Brazil’s Anatole. It’s impossible not to realize that he’s only seeing Natasha as an object, he’s very vulgar in his gestures, and yet you can also understand why she is being fooled, what she sees in him is not what he’s showing the audience. Of course, I can’t speak of it universally, but I watched the play with some family members who didn’t know anything about the story, and they all felt pity for Natasha, none of them accused her of being “dumb”. Maybe it was to their own credit, maybe to the actors’. I personally liked this version of Anatole a lot, as it better suited my Pierre/Natasha/Andrei sensibilities, and was in a way still able to redeem Natasha’s actions – the trap throughout the play was just too well set.

Natasha didn’t sing the part that isn’t in the album (“nothing, it was nothing…”), which made me a bit sad.

The Duel

Let’s talk a bit about Pierre. Most of the time he’s sitting down in the middle circle, he has a drowsy, drunk look, as if almost falling asleep. In “Pierre” and “The Duel”, people don’t call him “old-man”, but refer to him rather as “imbecile” and “buffoon”. It makes him all the more pathetic in the club, dancing and drinking, pretending he belongs in the group, when deep down he very well knows everyone there is just laughing at him. And because at first glance he does look blind to the insults, people just find him more and more pathetic. In a way, this version of Pierre reminded me of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, but I will talk more about this in “Pierre and Anatole”. Also: “Oh, dear Andrei’s betrothed?” was ON POINT.

So, more examples of how this production was more explicit. Anatole says “I’ll possess her”, instead of “I’ll make love to her”. For contemporary audiences, the second one is an euphemism for the same action, but in the 19th century it’d be understood as “courting”. There’s an ambiguity in English which is lost in the Portuguese translation, and in this case it further condemns Anatole. The same happens in “Pierre”, for “he’s charming, he has no sex”, would have meant that Pierre had no gender, but in Portuguese they translated it clearly to mean that he no longer practices the action of having sex. I’m detailing this because I find translation fascinating and all in all, I think all these little changes helped set up Natasha and Pierre as a more obvious pairing than they originally are (genderless old-man vs sad buffoon... I mean, there is a different feel to it, isn’t there?).

A bit now about Helene. She wore tights, black boots, a bathing suit and an army’s jacket for all the “party” scenes. She was literally all out there. And while this contributes to making her more “slutty”, her reactions during the actual duel were quite redeeming. Before realizing that he had not been shot, Pierre crumbles into a semi-fetal-position, and so, adding to a very long cry when Dolokhov shoots, Helene also rushes to Pierre to make sure he’s okay. So yes, Helene is full of malice and loves tricking people so she can have things her own way, but she doesn’t want anyone to die. Not for her. When Anatole says that she “brings out the beast in men” and she replies with “what can I say, it’s a gift”, she seemed tired, to me. Like she has to keep this evil reputation and has maintained it for so long that at this point doesn’t even know how to act any other way, but is still capable of some regret. I don’t know, I like to think this about her.

When the duel is over, one of the extras gets out of the stage helping Dolokhov. They came right past me and couldn’t move through, it was too narrow for two guys at once, so the one carrying Dolokhov told me “excuse me, he’s badly wounded”. I moved out the chair, they passed, Dolokhov in pain, and this one interaction that I got made me extremely happy.

Talking to Pierre, Anatole says “be glad, YOU live to love one more time”. I’m telling you this show has a Pierretasha agenda.

Dust and Ashes

The beginning of the song was very good, more than ever I felt Pierre’s tiredness of living in ridicule, but I didn’t think the ending was as impactful as in English. My favorite line, “did I squander my divinity, was happiness within me this whole time?” didn’t make it into it, they translated to something I can’t quite remember. Now, Pierre sang “They say we are asleep until we LOVE”. Yes, this happened so it could fit into the syllables, but I really like this shift from romantic love to a more general love, maybe the same pure love I talked about in “No One Else”. And of course, by the end of the song, lights shifted to blue.

Sunday morning

I don’t have much to say, except that the three remained in the left stage, with Sonya holding two mirrors and Natasha a candle. We don’t see them going to church, it’s just mentioned.

Charming

There was no change of clothes nor Helene giving Natasha her necklace, but Helene’s actress gave a complete show. She was there using the entirety of the of the central stage, lights turned green and were flickering by the end, it was hypnotical and the song people applauded the most. There was this very funny moment when Helene starts raising her skirt and Natasha is blushing and thinking “wait, is she really doing it”, and then just rushes to her and puts her skirt down, embarrassed and smiling.

The Ball

During the ball, Natasha wore a white and red gown, which matched perfectly with Anatole’s suit. You just really want Natasha to escape from Anatole’s clutches (I’m not going solely by my biased views. That’s the impression my aunt who had no idea of the story got. She really hated Anatole and really shipped Pierretasha). Throughout the song, Natasha is saying that she must leave him and other similar things. Then, in the end, after they kiss, Natasha says something in the lines of “I don’t leave him”, and so when they rush to leave the stage there’s this feeling I didn’t get before that maybe something more would happen between them. We know it isn’t the case, but for someone who was seeing it for the first time, it could have been ambiguous. The play had certainly been so far explicit enough for it to be a possibility.

Act 2

Letters

This one was very nice. Pierre was in the central upper stage, Natasha in the left, and Mary in the right. There were extras around them holding paper and a plume, writing the letters as the characters dictated. Pierre says he’s found the number of Beelzebub (which is me second favourite name for Satan after Mephistopheles) and actually says “six-hundred and sixty-six”, which brought some peace to my soul. When the Golden Trio sings together (Natasha, Pierre and Mary are a golden trio, hear me out), they’re not meeting round the circle and looking at each other in the eye, something I always loved about the Broadway version, but each in their own corner, the holophotes shining bright upon them. In a way, it intensified how lonely they were at that moment, while also hinting that they would come to cross paths in their parallel journeys.

While the Golden Trio is singing, Anatole and Dolokhov climb up the stage, and you see Dolokhov composing the loooooove letter. The letter then makes its way to Natasha, going through the hands of the people sitting nearer the upper part of the stages, and only gets to her when it’s time for her to reply. So, during the entire “Natalie, Natalie” thing, Anatole is in the central stage making sexual gestures. You really don’t want Natasha to fall for it. And then she does. Nothing new under the sun. Natasha and Anatole didn’t share the stage, Anatole remained in the central and Natasha in the left, glancing at each other voluptuously across the room. This happened a lot in the play in general, there’s much less people crossing one another when they are not next to each other physically.

Natasha and Sonya

Not much to say, it was heart-breaking and similar to Broadway.

Sonya Alone

It was beautifully sung and there was a sad purple lighting, but I think this song suffered a bit from translation. Instead of “I’ll stand in the dark for you”, Sonya would say “I’ll guide you through the darkness”, which for me is something less Sonya-like. I don’t think she believes she’s capable of guiding anyone, she herself is afraid of the dark, but even so she’ll stay there for her cousin, and for me that’s what makes the song so powerful.

Preparations

The translation was surprisingly good, like in The Opera, it took me a while to remember it wasn’t in English. Dolokhov’s actor did an incredible job overall, and this song had one of the funniest scenes: instead of Natasha appearing to Anatole in a ghostly light and almost making it seem like he might care for her, Anatole sings that part to Dolokhov as if he were Natasha. He hugs him from behind and points out his “traits” suggestively (quel pied, quel regard!) while Dolokhov is just like “hey man, no homo now, I’m mad at you”. It was a great scene.

Balaga

I must say that “Balaga” was the most well translated song, because just like in the original, I couldn’t understand a word of what was being said.

The Abduction

“Adeus meus bons ciganos, a festa agora é outra; adeus Matryosha, deixa eu te beijar; lembra de mim, Steshka, adeus, adeus, adeus; au revoir, meus bons ciganoooos, agora adeus, adeus, adeus”. I might have been the only one singing along to Anatole’s goodbye, but it was lovely. Then, everyone started dancing and they were so energetic and there was this violent orgy and one of the dancers was dressed up as a bear… yeah, we got some chaos. But I was sad that it wasn’t The Chaos we get on Broadway, once the other main characters didn’t join up. Marya was there, dancing by herself and having the time of her life around the left-side tables, while Helene, Anatole and Dolokhov were in the central stage doing what they are best at. Unfortunately though, at no moment did Helene come down to meet up with Marya, something I was actually hoping would happen. Now, I imagine there was someone dancing in the right-side as well, but I couldn’t see who they were. By the show’s logic, it’d have been Mary. If anyone knows, please share this info, I appreciate it, thanks a lot.

In My House

“Não entra no meu LAAARR, VermEeee”. “Verme” means worm. Another word they used at some point referring to Anatole was “crápula”, and I’ll adopt it from now on.

Anatole runs from the left stage, where he had been face to face with Marya, and goes to the central one, where he’s still able to see Natasha, grab her hands and try to pull her, but a servant stops him. Anatole escapes leaving Natasha with the fur-cloak (which was actually just a mantle, because “casaco de pele” is too long).

This song was not as scary as when Grace McLean sings it, but still amazing, and Natasha’s acting was heart-breaking, all of her a wounded bird.

A Call to Pierre

Pierre’s “Whaaaaaaat” was very funny, he had been asleep when the servant called him and was probably facing now a hangover, so it sounded a lot more like someone who had been awoken in the middle of their sleep cycle and is still trying to decide whether they care enough about what is going on in real life, rather than sheer surprise. But then he goes to Marya and by then is fully energized and ready for the job.

The “Natasha, and ANATOOOOLE KURAAAAGIINN” part was more sung than said with anger and disgust.

Instead of “so I’m not the only man chained to a bad woman”, Pierre said “so I’m not the only one suffering in the hands of the Kuragin”, which I thought was a nice change. Pierre loves his Natasha and it’s counter-nature for him to vilify her.

Find Anatole

When Pierre meets Anatole and Helene, he calls them “bad blood”. As you can see from the changes I’ve mentioned so far, the Kuragins were really set up as a team of vulgar evil incest-ish siblings.

Pierre and Anatole

During the discussion, Pierre and Anatole stand on opposite sides of the main circle, just like in the duel. Pierre chocked Anatole Darth-Vader-style, and also holds an imaginary object to “smash his head like this”.

So, in “The Duel” I mentioned that Pierre reminded me of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. In a nutshell, The Idiot is someone so good and pure that society can’t help but see him as pathetic and stupid. Before, Pierre was a bad kind of idiot, fooling around with people who despised him, but now he’s a good kind of idiot. When Pierre takes back his words and asks Anatole for forgiveness, the latter feels completely superior, like he’s just made a complete fool of Pierre, but the more arrogance he shows, the lower he gets. Anatole, in his small-mindedness, is incapable of perceiving the magnanimity of Pierre’s actions, and more than ever I felt how out-of-place Pierre was in this society. People will always see him as a buffoon, but at least now he can recognize in himself that it isn’t the case.

“Para PETERSBUUURGO” was great. Anatole’s actor in general did a wonderful job, he could hold very high notes and sometimes really sounded like Lucas musically.

Natasha didn’t appear taking poison, we only hear about it later through Sonya.

Natasha Very Ill

Natasha, indeed, was very ill.

Pierre and Andrei

This was a very emotional song. Maybe it was just me, but you could really see how heartbroken and shattered to pieces Andrei was. We don’t see him taking his father’s chair; instead, when he tells Pierre goodbye, in the upper part of the main circle, Natasha is there in the lower one, glancing at him. Their eyes meet. I died.

Pierre and Natasha

Amazing, brilliant. My heart stopped during Pierre’s speech, it was so special to hear it word by word, in the language I had read the book. They’re standing next to each other and Pierre actually kneels down. He kisses Natasha’s hands, and she softly touches his face. Natasha cries “tears of gratitude, tears of tenderness, tears of LOVE” (romantically, or the “infinite heavens” type of love?). When Natasha leaves the room smiling, Pierre tries to get up, but stumbles and almost falls. He takes a long while trying to put on his cloak, but no one in the audience laughed. We just had silly smiles on our faces. It was magical to be so close to Natasha and Pierre that you could actually see their tears. I feel like my crops have been forever blessed.

The Great Comet of 1812

Oh wow. So, the lightning. The lights don’t go fully out, as on Broadway. Instead, there’s this opaque white light and the comet is reflecting on the light-bulbs of the central “chandelier-complex”, turning everything silver. The sky Pierre describes, is not only starry, but the moon is also there, Natasha’s symbol, shining alongside the comet. And then guess what. The lights turned blue and Natasha was there across the main circle. Pierre and her look at each other and at the “chandeliers”, which are now lighting up yellow, bursting with new life… only, instead of “into a new life”, guess again what was it that Pierre said? “I. Woke. Up”. That was the final line. Pierre woke up to the sky, the sky Natasha used to live so vividly, and is now regaining the capacity to do so. Andrei’s sky, which he now couldn’t be further away from. This show really broke me.

During the applauses, they all sing goodbye my gipsy lovers. I was singing along with them, even though I had no voice left from emotion. I looked around to see the faces and I don’t think anyone had cried, I hadn’t either, but people’s eyes were shining and we all smiled.

10/10, because I will never give anything tgc-related a grade lower than that.

PS: sorry about grammar mistakes, I know my prepositions are a bit messed up.

#natasha pierre and the great comet of 1812 #natasha pierre e o grande cometa de 1812 #war and peace #natasha rostova #pierre bezukhov #andrei bolkonsky #anatole kuragin #helene bezukhova #marya dmitryevna akhrosimova #sonya rostova #fedya dolokhov #mary bolkonskaya #são paulo #brazil #broadway #great comet #tgc

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viktorbezic · 6 years ago

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Double Dribbble: Losing Out To Homogenous Design

I’m not deliberately trying to single out dribbble here. Dribbble is typically used as the poster child and a culprit for homogenous design. Not gonna lie. I wanted to use the title Double Dribbble, while also highlighting what happens when we all use the same sources of online inspiration. IE. The sea of sameness effect. After the demise of FFFFound where I’d uncover all sorts of new visuals, there were no platforms that provided serendipitous discovery until Are.na came along. But getting offline, going through old books, traveling, making trips to galleries, looking at things from different disciplines helps. If your only source of inspiration are the most popular Dribbble shots, or the top UI Pinterest boards, algorithmically served, of course, it’s very likely you’ll come up with something that looks just like the sum total of what you’ve consumed. Ideas come from different recombinations of existing ideas and knowledge. This is true of all creative disciplines. The more unique the combination, the higher the chance of leading to a significant breakthrough (1).

There are many culprits from an over-reliance on data, a focus on utilitarianism, the re-use of the same frameworks, and designing templates without a feel for the content. Why am I writing about this? Hasn’t this piece been done before? Sure it has. But every now again I get bored to tears by digital and UI design and go on the hunt for folks who are pushing the boundary. It’s also a good exercise to re-ignite my own interest in a design discipline that I’ve been involved some, way shape or form over the past decade. I share a similar sentiment to Marc Kremers, “Too many sites are just exercises in good, generically appealing taste. Anyone can do that. It’s super boring.” (2)

I’ve reflected on how we got here not only to push myself but to also highlight some of the pieces I go back to and re-read. Disclaimer: I’ve been guilty of going the templated approach on side projects I’ve launched. I also use a bought template on Tumblr. I’m in the process of rolling my own. So I’m part of the problem as well.

How we got here.

Clean, workable, well-designed interfaces are the baseline. When you get to this point, you’re not finished. There’s still more to be done. I’ve re-read Yaaron Schoen’s piece “In Defense of Homogenous Design” and do agree with some of Schoen’s points. There are some learned behaviors and existing digital design paradigms. Examples include, pull to refresh, swipe to dismiss, underlined hyperlinks, etc. The argument as Schoen presents them go something like this: “This is great. We’re teaching people how to use digital products and if your digital product looks similar, all good. Jackets look the same, we know where the pockets are.” It makes sense, but my gut feeling is this line of thinking can stop us from really evolving a design (3). I know some restraint needs to be exercised so care needs to be taken as you select the right opportunities to level up on. There needs to be some expressive elements and a human touch. If all we did were the basics we wouldn’t need designers. All we would need are the UI frameworks to paint by numbers with.

We can’t always stick to existing paradigms.

There are instances when we can’t always stick to existing paradigms. One example was highlighted in a designer news thread by Renee P. that goes something like this: a decade ago people hadn’t heard of “pull to refresh” or “swipe to dismiss.” These new paradigms had to be invented (4). But with every new platform, the paradigms will need to be created or advance as the technology evolves. When I was working at a large holding company owned digital agency, I remember a VR commerce project we made for the high-end retailer. We’d demo it to our clients and teach them an entirely new paradigm for VR navigation (5). Staring at a diamond for a certain amount of time to advance the experience. Once folks learned it, it became second nature. I’m not big on VR but thought it was a good example from first-hand experience. There’s a host of new technologies we are still defining interfaces for. Some that have no UIs at all as with conversational interfaces and multiple dimensions when it comes to AR and mixed reality, etc. In the context of new platforms, screen-based interfaces may need to be recontextualized as people learn new behaviors and paradigms.

The other reason to break an existing paradigm is to infuse some sort of character into the product and put a unique spin on it. The question goes something like this, back to Schoen’s Jacket Principle, what if I don’t want to wear the same jacket as someone else, or design one like someone else? If I had a to design one, I might put extra pockets someplace else. Maybe there’s an act of discovery there. It’s about a point of view and bringing something unique to the table. As Alan Kay stated, “Point of View is worth 80 IQ points”. Which leads me to my next point.

An over-reliance on utilitarianism creates forgettable products.

Brett Bergeron, Creative Director at the digital product design studio This Also, presents an argument in his piece on “Good Enough Design” that we no longer have major constraints that bind us to just focusing on utilitarianism. And by not injecting personality into a digital product you fail to keep people’s attention. “More than ever, we are at a place in technology where interfaces can be utilitarian and emotionally expressive at the same time.” Bergeron uses This Also’s Google Dots case study as one of the examples. Injecting the search giant’s digital ecosystem with personality with the use of playful animations. Through an expressive logomark people understood when Google was doing something magical for them. He goes on to note that by not going beyond functional design a lot of products fall into the usable but forgettable category. A reason needs to be given to keep a product installed and opened again. As Bergeron notes, It’s worthwhile infusing the product with character so it’s differentiated. As a result, it protects the initial investment in building it (6).

Solely relying on web metrics discounts the team’s intuition and experience.

It’s been shown time an and again that a lot of digital metrics are bullshit. Especially with the increasing levels of bot traffic and fraudulent media buys. If you don’t have a core community of people using your product and you are heavily relying on media buys you may have a harder time trusting your metrics. Numerous studies are out with numbers showcasing billions of lost ad dollars to bots and click farms. The former CEO of Reddit came out confirming how bad the problem has become. Even Facebook isn’t able to identify genuine numbers.

You can’t do without metrics. We need them but it’s a single data point that needs to be paired with feedback from your community, user tests, research and any information to help set the appropriate context. Unfortunately, too many times I’ve seen clients afraid to make calls or provide their own point of view and instead fall back on metrics as a cover your ass tactic. “The numbers said so.” Also, let’s hypothetically say web metrics were accurate and bots didn’t exist. To use them exclusively to design anything results in sterile outcomes.

When folks do A/B or multivariate tests it’s typically done as a best effort approach. We question the design more than we do the science behind the testing and the reliability of the tests. It’s the combination of data (from multiple sources) and intuition together. Not taking the design team’s years of intuition and experience in coming up with a solution is a miss. Lastly, metrics are used to optimize for the local maximum. To make incremental improvements to an existing design. They can’t tell you whether or not you need a whole new design altogether.

Doing what you know will work.

There are many reasons why we fall into this trap. The independent digital designer and author Paul Jarvis attributes it to being victims of our own success. “Sometimes successful work can lead to less innovation, and then the real making stops. You become more like a factory production line than a meaningful creator.” We fall back on what works because it’s comfortable. Not only that, but we’d like to re-use as much work from the last time to get to the finish line faster. Do that enough you stunt your skills and growth, and start to lose touch. Boredom slowly sets in. This doesn’t mean we can’t leverage design patterns. It’s about determining how best to apply them (7).

Lack of diversity in thinking and experiences.

The digital artist and game designer, Morgane Santos not only points out that we are making more or less the same thing, but there’s also a cultural element here at play as well. IE. “The Designer Daves” of the world. Male, black wardrobe, 5-panel cap. The lack of people diversity in the digital design world produces one point of view. Diversity matters in producing work that’s different. Numerous studies show this. As Santos notes, “So, this whole designing with empathy thing? It literally cannot happen if all designers have the same background, the same look, the same style.” (8)

Marc Kremers echoed a similar sentiment and also related it back to the culture of being a designer, “I think designers naturally just want to fit in, have a nice, cute life, do nice, cute things. Work hard, be nice to people. Read Kinfolk. Raw denim. Beards. Flat Whites. Nice fonts, nice illustrations, nice design. Go with the flow. Just good, tasteful things, experiences, and activities. And before you know it, your life is an Instagram feed, literally indistinguishable to any other designer’s nice Instagram feed. You melted into the digital soup. I don’t know if this rant makes any sense, but I guess my awareness or fear of this singularity is just naturally percolating in my work. I’m a nice guy though.” (9)

This is an excellent reminder to collaborate with folks who aren’t exactly like you or at least to reach out for feedback and perspectives from more diverse groups. It takes effort. It’s way too easy to talk to folks that are just like you.

Disregarding Content

Another issue is not taking a holistic view of what we are designing for. Especially when it comes to content. I’ve listened to an Executive Creative Director once tell a team, “We’re great at making beautiful boxes without anything to put in them.” Very organized and thoughtful experience design without any regard for a greater concept, narrative or developing a paradigm that the best suits the content. Travis Gertz in ”Design Machines: How to Survive the Digital Apocalypse”, highlights the perils of not taking content and it’s unique needs to into consideration.

Gertz compares digital design to editorial design and highlights the emotive qualities editorial design historically has. The divergence between the disciplines is in the following areas: How systems are designed, How content is treated, and how we collaborate. In digital design, we nerd out on our CSS responsive grid frameworks, design systems and obsess over style guides and pattern libraries. The goal is typically to design for maximum template efficiency and component reuse. Unfortunately, this is where things end. In editorial design, the philosophy was slightly different. Editorial design systems are made for variation, not prescription.

Gertz also elaborates on how content is treated in the process. It’s not about content first or content last. It’s about the content’s connection to the design. In editorial design its standard practice for content creators and editors to work hand in hand while designing the system. Content development doesn’t come at a later stage to be plugged in once the design is done. It’s just as important as design and engineering. When digital products are built in an assembly line fashion and the boxes are built before the content exists we’ve missed an opportunity.

With the added complexity in digital design over editorial design, other design disciplines were created. User experience design was needed so that the flow of a site, application or product worked. As Gertz alludes to, this is another step in the assembly line where content isn’t carefully considered as there’s not enough collaboration between the creative disciplines. In digital design, a heavy emphasis is placed on dividing up roles by the stages of a project to gain efficiencies from each of the design disciplines. Unfortunately, this created more silos. As compared to editorial design. Where editorial designers knew the design stack from a system-level and how it laddered up to the expression of each piece of content.

Gertz boils down the problem to poor collaboration and a disregard for content. I know this type of tighter collaboration would be harder to scale, but a more editorial lens on things would help guide teams on what should be produced. There’s no need to create a component library of 30 components as a “just in case measure” if the current content only needs 5 of them (10).

Have a concept.

This is critical in other design disciplines. In digital design sometimes we can get away with not having a concept because if the thing works, no matter how basic or boring, you can check the box and tell everyone it works. Or you can fool yourself and everyone else with the cop-out that it’s an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). I remember being part of a large scale multi-brand platform redesign team. We had our very intelligent, engineering-minded UX team present the designs by nerding out on how flexible the components were and how great they looked across breakpoints. The clients were bored but did wind up asking some great questions, “How will our X product look in this thing?” and “What about X visuals that were unique to the brand? Will we have those?” Shame on me, shame on us. Making a site responsive or adding parallax scrolling isn’t a concept. A concept should give the team a guidepost when it comes to selecting grids, type, illustration and interaction paradigms. Developing a concept requires research and mining for an insight to ensure you’re in fact solving the right problem.

References

1. Batey, Mark. “How to Have Breakthrough Ideas.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 20 July 2017, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/working-creativity/201707/how-have-breakthrough-ideas.

2. “Exploring Digital Design | Marc Kremers, London.” Exploring Digital Design | Marc Kremers, London, Represent UK, digitaldesign.represent.uk.com/index.php/marc-kremers.

3. Schoen, Yaron. “In Defense of Homogeneous Design — Yaron Schoen — Medium.” Medium.com, Medium, 16 Mar. 2016, medium.com/@yarcom/in-defense-of-homogeneous-design-b27f79f4bb87.

4. Schiff, Eli. “In Defense of Homogeneous Design — Designer News.” Open Sans and Baskerville (Libre… — If You Had to Choose 1 Font Pair to Use for the Rest of Your Life –, Developer News, 21 Mar. 2016, www.designernews.co/stories/65889-in-defense-of-homogeneous-design.

5. Publicis Sapient North America. “‘The Apartment — Virtual Reality Retail Experience’ for Retail and E-Commerce (by Publicis Sapient North America).” The Best and Largest Global Advertising Agency Directory & Creative Library — AdForum, Adforum, www.adforum.com/agency/6644039/creative-work/34520718/the-apartment-virtual-reality-retail-experience/sapientnitro-retail-and-e-commerce.

6. Bergeron, Brett. “Good Enough Design — Brett Bergeron — Medium.” Medium.com, Medium, 20 Sept. 2016, medium.com/this-also/good-enough-design-29ab5132f3a3.

7. “Everything I Know.” Everything I Know, by Paul Jarvis, Paul Jarvis, 2013, p. 102.

8. Santos, Morgane. “The Unbearable Homogeneity of Design — Morgane Santos — Medium.” Medium.com, Medium, 10 Mar. 2016, medium.com/@morgane/the-unbearable-homogeneity-of-design-fe1a44d48f3d.

9. “Exploring Digital Design | Marc Kremers, London.” Exploring Digital Design | Marc Kremers, London, Represent UK, digitaldesign.represent.uk.com/index.php/marc-kremers.

10. Gertz, Travis. “Design Machines.” Louder Than Ten, 18 Sept. 2018, louderthanten.com/coax/design-machines.

#my writing #long reads #ux #uxdesign #ui #digital design

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kellyinboston · 6 years ago

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Life so far...

Look at me, two posts in a week. Exciting stuff people.

I struggled with how to talk about the last three months, because I want it to be somewhat condensed because you guys don’t want a novel but I also want to be extremely comprehensive because I want to remember everything. See my dilemma? I also realized I haven’t shown you a photo of Dominic yet…that will change!

The easiest thing for me would to break down the last few months into categories of sorts, just to keep a somewhat coherent train of thought. My brain seems to have lost some brain cells.

Update on Snoop

Let’s get the most important “person” out of the way first. How is Snoop doing with Dominic. Very good. She has accepted that this little creature is here to stay. She likes to give him LOTS of kisses. We try to keep it to a minimum but she is quick about it so we don’t always catch her. She is very interested in the noises he makes and seems somewhat protective, although that could just be me making things up. She is jealous, but not in an aggressive way. If Neil and I are both focusing on Dominic she will run over and throw a stuffed animal at us requiring us to pay some attention to her. I cannot wait until Dominic gets older (I mean I can wait because I don’t want time to go by too fast) so they can be best buds.

Update on the parents

So, we are managing to keep Dominic alive, so points for us there. We are tired, but a functional tired, we enjoy the little guy and get a kick out of him. I have been with Dominic A LOT more than Neil but that is about to change.

I am happy Neil will be able to spend time with Dominic but a little jealous because Dominic is starting to become more engage, interactive and really just a little human the last few weeks. I exclusively pump which is nice because other people can feed Dominic (i.e. Neil) but pumping can be a bit annoying as well. I have been very fortunate with my milk supply (A LOT!) and I pump 4x a day (totaling about 1hr50min) and I produce about 35 ounces a day (more or less). Dominic drinks about 25 ounces a day (I’ll get more into that below). So needless to say, I am freezing a decent amount of milk. Pumping can get old and sometimes it hurts (not normally) but I will do it for as long as a can (but not beyond a year). I recovered fine from the c-section. I gained around 35 pounds and have about 5-8 more pounds to lose. My clothes fit, but many of my pants do not fit well. My stomach is just a bit weird from the surgery. I haven’t really made much of an effort to lose the weight to be honest. But these last pounds are not going to come off without significant effort on my part, which is annoying. But I want to fit into my old pants so I need to get started doing something…probably eating healthier (my mac and cheese + ice cream last night isn’t helping) and moving my body more. I have ran maybe 3 times since Dominic arrived and that is about it…so I just need to do something, it is hard to find the time and when I do have the time I am tired. Excuses, excuses…I know. Neil is the relax/chill parent while I am the nervous/uptight parent. Any surprise there?

Update on Dominic

This is the good stuff folks! Dominic is almost 4 months, which is crazy. The time has gone fast but slow at the same time. Hard to explain! I had an easy pregnancy (at least I think I did…), the birth didn’t go as planned but we got Dominic so that’s okay and we have a pretty easy baby. However, Dominic has not been without his issues. First thing is that Dominic isn’t super interested in eating. Does NOT take after his parents in this regard. He has struggled to gain the appropriate amount of weight. He is gaining, just at a slow pace, which (to put it mildly) has caused us some stress. I know you are not supposed to compare your baby to what other babies are doing but it is hard when so many of my friends/co-workers have had babies all within a few weeks of each other. So, I won’t compare...Dominic drinks about 25 ounces a day…sometimes these ounces come easy sometimes not. This is the minimum number he should be getting, ideally, he would be drinking between 28-32 ounces. So…it can be a bit frustrating when it is time for bed and he is at 22/23 ounces. He has gotten better in the past couple weeks, fingers crossed this continues. The doctor had some blood work done to see if they could figure out why he wasn’t gaining enough and we found out his thyroid was borderline high. I won’t get into the specifics because I don’t really know too much about it myself, but a “normal” thyroid (TSH and Free t-4) level for someone his age is 1-9, his tested at a 10…so the doctors are being extra cautious and prescribed Dominic medicine he needs to take daily. This could be something he has to take his whole life or something he outgrows. We won’t really know until 3 years…so it seems like we are in it for the next 3 years at least. He may have hypothyroidism. But this isn’t the reason he isn’t gaining a lot of weight. I was hoping he would get on the medication (which he has been taking over 2 months now) and then his appetite would increase but nope! This was stressful news to get and obviously it is not ideal that he could have a chronic “condition” but hypothyroidism is completely treatable with a daily pill so in the grand scheme of things it is not that bad. Not ideal but what can you do!

In addition to his slow weight gain and hypothyroidism – Dominic had a severe diaper rash for almost 2 months. By diaper rash I mean sores on his little bum. It was bad and very stressful because I felt like I couldn’t go anywhere because the second he pooped his diaper had to be changed because you don’t want that acid to sit too long on his butt. And we have all these creams that we use…it was just a lot. The diaper rash didn’t seem to bother him too much except towards the end. It seems to have gone away now…but we still put cream on after every change just to keep it at bay because we think he has sensitive skin on the bum. We have started calling Dominic “Dominic the Difficult”

Okay…now that I got all that out of the way, have I mentioned that he is just the perfect baby and we love him so much? Have I mentioned that he is such a calm, content baby who smiles and makes the cutest faces in the world?

Have I mentioned that he sleeps great? Have I mentioned that he doesn’t cry really at all, he has a “witching hour” between 4-7pm where he tends to get fussy (not the whole time, just during that timeframe) but even then, he is so cute that it is okay. Have I mentioned that he is starting to touch the books when I read them or spins his own rattle? Pretty much a genius. He loves music (the ABC phonics song in particular), loves weird noises that come from our mouth, farts and poops really loud, has discovered his hands (so they are in his mouth all the time), loves the changing table and pooping mid-diaper change, likes baths, loves opening his mouth really wide, is on the verge of a laugh, can roll from his stomach to back and back to stomach. Burps loud. He does not like the camera. His hair is turning red. He makes the cutest noises.

I could go on and on. I never expected to love him so quickly and so intensely. That sounds cliché but it’s true. He is our son and he is perfect.

I know that everything I just said about him can change tomorrow (the rate at which he changes from week to week is crazy) but I will take this all in and embrace the changes that come along (unless it means he becomes a bad sleeper, I won’t embrace that change…but I will have to accept it).

I think that is it for now!

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howtogetsteamgamesforfree06-blog · 5 years ago

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lyricanalysis · 8 years ago

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the start of vices & virtues

hi. back at it again with an analysis nobody asked for. so today, folks, we’re doing it on ballad of mona lisa and this one was a lot of fun, but so are all of them. whatever.

now, chronologically, this one is known to be the first song written for all of v&v. this song, according to wiki, was written after pretty. odd. was released but before they had toured so it’s old. now, that’s just important to how i’m phrasing all of this, knowing the timeline. (aka, this is before whatever happened in cape town).

before we start, we’re going to talk about the title right quick. so the definition of ballad is: a poem or song narrating a story in short stanzas. so really, this if just a fancy way of saying that this song is a story about mona lisa. now, the thing that stumped me and my sister for a long time was why mona lisa? why her in particular? songs are very meaningful in the way that things as big as that aren’t an accident. it’s not a name you pull out of your ass as a placeholder. she has some sort of meaning to this song (especially since she shows up in the lyrics later in this song (also in another song, hmmm). so we looked into the meaning of mona lisa and there’s a lot of different things but a lot of what we found was mysterious person. nobody knows who she was, they have guesses but we’ll never know for sure. she’s this person that we all know what she looks like but we don’t know who beyond that. hmmm, how can i tie THAT into a song?

anyway, if you didn’t get it, mona lisa is ryan. she, in this song, is ryan, and he is brendon.

She paints her fingers with a close precision

He starts to notice empty bottles of gin

And takes a moment to assess the sins she’s paid for

so first off, brendon was talking about this lyric in an interview. he said that this is about someone dolling themselves up. but like, honestly, if you watch any of panic, that’s not really brendon’s thing tbh. like, sure, he wears high heels sometimes but makeup isn’t really a brendon thing. (even in early panic days, he wasn’t all that emo until he met ryan). with that, it was very much ryans thing to do the emo makeup and such, not brendon’s. so with that in mind, this is about someone dolling themselves up which could also be a reference to putting on a facade, lying about who someone is. cough cough mona lisa?

then, these other two lyrics, it was kinda hard to figure out what they meant so here’s our idea. so, early panic days, even up to pretty odd, they were kinda wild. they drank a lot and did a lot of drugs, tbh. i think that when ryden first started, it was a thing like opportunity? they were both drunk so why not. now where the lyric comes in, i think that the relationship between ryan and brendon started with a lot of drinking but brendon fell in love with ryan, ryan never loved brendon. so when brendon developed feelings, he didn’t need to be drunk or high to be able to sleep with ryan. but for ryan, that never changed. this song, as you’ll see, is a lot about brendon sort of realizing that maybe ryan didn’t love him the way he wanted him to. ryan still had to be drunk in order to sleep with brendon and this is brendon realizing that. he’s looking around and seeing all these alcohol bottles and other things and realizing that ‘hey, maybe things aren’t what they should be’. the last lyric of that chunk ties into all of that. he pauses from what he’s doing, whatever brendon was doing, and looked over things. he was looking at all the signs, things ryan had said, things he’d seen and realized that, again, maybe things weren’t what they should be.

A lonely speaker in a conversation

Her words were swimming through his ears again

There's nothing wrong with just a taste of what you've paid for

so, this one took us a little while to get but hear me out. so we said that brendon was the only one who fell in love, right? just, for now, say that this ‘conversation’ is actually just a metaphor for sex. so, with brendon being the only one in love, he was the only one really contributing in a sense. sure, ryan could get his dick hard and you know, have the sex stuff but, there wasn’t any feelings. ryan was just doing it, there wasn’t anything more to it then that. kind of a shitty feeling for brendon and this song is him realizing that.

then, i posted an analysis for northern downpour that you can read here. basically, if you’re gonna be too lazy to read then, here’s a very short synopsis. ryan was basically saying that he doesn’t feel the same and it’s this long, very extra way to tell brendon that he’s delusional if he thinks that ryan will love him. ANYWAY, this song is a lot about brendon starting to doubt the truth that he seems to have conjured up and so he’s thinking over the songs off pretty odd that ryan wrote, thinking about them and trying to see them from ryans perspective almost. he heard northern downpour as a love song and he’s starting to think about it as what it really was, a song that said i will never love you.

this line comes up again at the end so there’s some significance but this is still the beginning, brendon is still on the fence about what he believes. he’s not wanting to let go of the man he loves yet so he’s saying here that ‘hey ryan, it’s not that hard to show me a little bit of love’. it’s kinda sad, really. he’s saying that he’s not that hard to leave.

He senses something, call it desperation

Another dollar, another day

And if she had the proper words to say,

She would tell him

But she'd have nothing left to sell him

so remember at the beginning how i said that he was brendon? it still is, fam. anyway, brendon is sensing desperation in himself. he’s watching this relationship fall apart in front of him and he’s not sure what he’s desperate for but it’s something. he wants to either have ryan say he’s in love or say that he isn’t. he needs one of the two before it starts to ruin him (hint: it already has). anyway, another dollar another day, is just a fancy way of saying that he’s going through the motions. we say with the bottles of gin that brendon was starting to realize that things weren’t right and that’s starting to play in the front of his mind. he’s not ready yet to give up so seeing ryan and trying to be with him is starting to feel robotic. he’s just walking along and he isn’t quite sure what to do yet, he doesn’t know.

so i’m definitely taking this proper words thing, again, as i love you. this song is a lot, to me, about brendon desperately trying to hold onto whatever he thinks that him and ryan have. this was written when ryan was still in the band and i’ve hinted/mentioned at it before. i think their relationship was very one-sided. even their stage gay was very one-sided. i think that their relationship was brendon falling hard and fast for ryan but ryan didn’t see him romantically. i think to ryan, their relationship was purely sexual and brendon just tried to see past it all. i think this song was brendon questioning a lot of things and finally, maybe, seeing that ryan wasn’t truthful. (i’m totally rolling with that through the duration of their relationship he hinted at feelings to keep brendon saited but didn’t mean it). so if ryan had the words to tell brendon that he didn’t actually care romantically (without losing the sex) then he would have. he would tell brendon if he could keep their friends with benefits thing. if he did though, he wouldn’t have any other lies to feed to brendon to keep him around (and keep the sex).

Mona Lisa wear me out

Pleased to please ya

Mona Lisa wear me out

so first off, let’s go back to mona lisa. in this song, mona lisa is ryan. now we’re bringing up again the meaning behind her and the fact that nobody knows who she is. and we’re going to take ryan as a catfish, of sorts. he’s been lying to brendon this whole time. sure, it was fun and games to fuck for them at the beginning but once brendon fell in love, he had to lie to keep brendon around. he never loved brendon but brendon has loved him for a long time. so with that, nobody knows the real ryan anymore which is why he’s mona lisa. he’s been lying for so long that they feel he’s just a fake, they can’t believe anything that leaves his mouth.

so then to the rest of the lyrics. brendon is asking ryan to wear him out (which I’m going with sexually cause everyone gets worn out after a sexual encounter, yeah?) wear me out, tire me out, make me sweat, yadda yadda. then he says ‘pleased to please ya’ which is very ,,, i wanna say cringey. this is why i said that brendon is beginning to think that ryan wasn’t so truthful. it’s almost like he doesn’t want to believe but he can’t outright deny the possibility. he’s saying that it makes him happy to please ryan. he puts out sexually because he thinks that that’s what’s keeping ryan around. he doesn’t want ryan to leave so he’ll do anything (sexually) to keep him interested in brendon. which, is really fucked up but, ya know. then he goes back to asking to be worn out (sexxxxxxx).

ALSO i would just like to point out that the music video is different just slightly. my sister came to me with almost tears in her eyes like ‘MANDELA AFFECT’ and it was trippy. in the music video he drops the ‘pleased to please ya’ and the second mona lisa which i don’t think was an accident. it’s HIS music video, why does he need to cut those like 5 seconds to make it shorter. that would have been done when originally recording the song. now, it’s already a single and it’s already popular. bands are more likely to lengthen a music video to add things in (talking, extra things that aren’t a song thing) rather than shorten it. so why? my only thought on that is since this came in v&v, after he’s already gone through the breakup, he feels ashamed at his actions. a slut? (no slutshaming, please don’t hurt me)

also, speaking of music videos, i wanna talk about how mona lisa in the video is portrayed as a child. this is something that i’ll talk about later too when mona lisa comes up in a different song (side eye emoji). but anyway, why? mona lisa in this song is portrayed as a love interest, why is she suddenly a child? kinda rape-y ya know? but this is my thought. we’re going with ryan has been lying, right? he’s been lying to brendon about his feelings and honestly, let’s talk about how literally everyone and their dog sees ryan as innocent. he’s got this little babyface and he smiles and everyone is like ‘awwww’. so that’s what brendon saw too, ya know? he sees this innocent man and he probably, when he first started doubting things was like, ‘come on, ryan wouldn’t lie, he’s too innocent’. and come on guys, children represent innocence through and through.

so i’ve saved the pre chorus and the chorus for last cause it always seems to flow better for me that way ?? i dunno. also it’s typically one of the last things you hear in a song so it just makes sense. heres the pre chorus

Say what you mean

Tell me I'm right

And let the sun rain down on me

Give me a sign

I want to believe

now this is really blunt. like i said, brendon is questioning things and i think this song is him expressing that he wants to know if his doubts are true or not. maybe he’s giving into the doubts a little more now, getting a little harder to ignore. he’s blunt. tell me what you want, is first. say what you mean, say the truth, tell him that he’s correct in thinking that it’s not real. and i know this can be taken as “tell me i’m right that you love me” but this song is really negative, honestly. it’s not a love song, he’s not asking for a confession of feelings. at first we took the point of ‘say i love you’ and my sister was talking about how the sun raining down on him is a sign of happiness. which, yes, i totally get that but like i said, this is not a love song. when we changed our thoughts on this to ‘tell me you never loved me’ i looked at it as a sign of freedom. he’s finally being proven right, his doubts are at ease because they’ve been proven. yes, brendon is sad because heartbreak fucking sucks but he doesn’t need to worry anymore which is also a relieving feeling. the light is positivity in a dark time. this is looking on the bright side when everything else sucks. but like i said, brendon was very much in love with ryan. while he’s starting to see that he’d been lied to, he doesn’t want to believe it. he wants to believe that ryan loved him and he’s fighting desperately to hold onto a rope that is frankly falling apart right before his eyes.

Whoa, Mona Lisa,

You're guaranteed to run this town

Whoa, Mona Lisa,

I'd pay to see you frown

so, as i said before, this is a callout to ryan. hey ryan, you’ve been running my feelings and this band. which is totally fucking true. pretty. odd. was not brendon’s choice in music, it was ryan’s. even fever was ryans idea. (even the lyrics my dudes. though not all of the lyrics are 100% ryans so fuck off with that shit). he was the one that wanted more of the beattle's aesthetic because guess who, after leaving panic, went on to write MORE music that was beattle’s ish. ryan fucking ross. brendon went back to his steampunk, heavy bass (thanks dallon) music. he’s always been a little more into that. (also pop and frank sinatra but ya know, whatever). then again, hey ryan, i want to see you frown. this line i am analyzing last because i think it’s meant to come last. the chorus is supposed to be the main thing in this song which would only make sense to have it come last. the verse’s lead up to it, you’d read them first but song structure and such. ALSO, EACH TIME, THIS COMES AFTER THE PRECHORUS AFTER HE’S ASKED TO BE PROVEN RIGHT, THANKS. each time, he’s saying he’d love to see ryan frown after ryan (hypothetically) had the chance to admit that he never loved brendon. i’m also going with that since ryan didn’t love brendon, his heart wasn’t in this. their little breakup won’t hurt ryan the way it tore brendon up. ryan could have shrugged this off and been unaffected by it. brendon wants to see him hurt the way he did.

There's nothing wrong with just a taste of what you've paid for

and then this line comes up a second time. it’s the actual end of the song, this is after brendon is realizing that ryan was full of shit. it’s revenge. he wants ryan to feel the pain that brendon did. he wants ryan’s heart to get torn out. it’s very angry, honestly but deserving almost? he’s already asked ryan to show him a little love and that probably didn’t go so well (cape town?) so now brendon is asking for ryan to get hurt.

savage.

#Panic at the Disco #patd #Panic! at the Disco #brendon #brendon urie #the ballad of mona lisa #ryan ross #ryan #dallon #dallon weekes #vices and virtues #vices & virtues #ryden #brallon #lyric analysis #analysis

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shalna816games-blog · 5 years ago

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Exactly how To Abandon UP FOR Throughout 5 Days

Tabletop Gaming Weblog

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itsfreshbelievercollectorblr · 6 years ago

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lifestyle podcasts

On the off chance that you don't tune in to the way of lifestyle podcasts, you are passing up extraordinary assets devoted to helping you structure a way of life you needn't bother with a get-away from.

One of the greatest contrast that separates high achievers from fair individuals is their devotion to personal growth. The best, motivating and beneficial individuals I know read each day, watch courses and tune in to digital broadcasts among different propensities for fruitful individuals to learn, advance beyond the challenge

In the event that you begin tuning in to a web recording and end up exhausted in the initial five minutes, stop and begin another. You would prefer not to take time from the web recordings you will appreciate. You don't need to complete on the off chance that you abhor it.

Here is the list of best lifestyle podcast:

1. The Art of Adventure

The Art of Adventure Podcast with Derek Loudermilk is the story that looks the most ideal approach to achieve something that has never been done in an overall examination, human execution, and business.

2.Analysis

Consistently, Analysis from BBC Radio 4 conveys 30 minutes on intriguing issues on themes over the range of legislative issues, science, financial matters, and past. Ongoing scenes have seen what could cause the following monetary accident, how present-day tyrant rulers pulverize majority rule governments and whether death is compelling as an instrument of outside strategy.

3. Youpreneur FM

Chris Ducker is a glad British business person, a top-rated creator and worldwide keynote speaker, who through Youpreneur FM expedites you his very own take being an individual brand business person in the 21st century.

4. Believed

This as of late finished up 8-section arrangement from NPR recounts to the awful story of Larry Nassar, the US Olympic acrobatic specialist who figured out how to pull off explicitly mishandling many young ladies more than a very long while under the front of "restorative" systems.

5. Mixergy

Andrew Warner makes awkward inquiries to dive profound into the achievement and disappointments of the best business organizers and thought pioneers.

6.Without Fail

Another web recording from the people at Gimlet Media, Without Fail, is a meeting digital broadcast where have Alex Blumberg interviews individuals from the universes of business, game, and culture. As the name recommends, it has a specific spotlight on how they fizzled and what they realized while doing it. The opening two scenes are an interesting discussion with Andrew Mason who established and was then terminated from, Groupon.

7. This Is Your Life

This Is Your Life with Michael Hyatt is a week by week web recording committed to purposeful administration. The objective is to enable you to live with more energy, work with more prominent concentration and lead with uncommon impact.

8. The Illusionist

Language is wonderful however astounding. In The Illusionist, Helen Zaltzman jumps into a portion of the peculiarities of the English language. From tech language to emoticon to the account of the once-regular English road name, Gropecunt Lane. Get ready to be edified.

9. Tropical MBA

Dan Andrews and Ian Schoen share the tales of business people who are building organizations and are in it for more than primary concern benefits.

10. 99% Invisible

Everything around us in the non-characteristic world has been structured and formed by individuals. From the city, seats worked to be purposely awkward to stop unpleasant sleepers, to the genuine plan blemishes that mean governments are failing parkways, 99% Invisible recounts to the intriguing stories behind the pieces of our reality we don't generally give much consideration to. If that wasn't already enough, have Roman Mars has one of the smoothest voices in podcasting.

11. Good Life Project

Helpful, private and disarmingly-unfiltered discussions about living a completely drew in, wildly associated and significance soaked life. Great Life Project highlights rousing stories and top to bottom, real to life discussions with acclaimed authors, producers, specialists, and world-shakers.

12. Hey, Cool Job!

Ever met a LEGO planner or a scuba jumper teacher and thought, "Hello, cool employment!"? This web recording is one for those of us who are interested in the working existence of individuals who have sought after professions that emerge. Facilitated by American author Mary H.K. Choi, it reveals the regular day to day existences of a war journalist or an inventive chief, of a pornography star or of a gold organizer. Enough to influence you to consider a midlife vocation emergency.

14. Zero To Travel

Jason Moore and his visitors share madly significant counsel and key assets, taking care of business on subjects like a beginning and maintaining an online business from anyplace, travel and work openings, gutsy spending travel systems, astounding approaches to acquire free travel, the advanced wanderer life and everything in the middle.

15.The Art of Charm

The Art of Charm digital broadcast is the place self-inspired folks and ladies, come to gain from a various blend of experienced guides, including the world's best proficient and scholarly personalities, researchers, trend-setters, mentors, relationship specialists, business visionaries, top-rated creators, and other splendid personalities.

16. Impact Theory

Continuously anxious to really gain from his visitors, Tom Bilyeu burrows profound and conveys the earnestness of somebody hungry to put what he's figuring out how to quickly utilize.

17. The Sean Kim Show

Sean Kim is a business person, financial specialist, and speaker. As of now, he's the CEO of Type, one of the world's driving language learning stages on the web. Consistently Sean expedites world-class brains to share clever exercises and stories to enable you to turn into the best form of yourself.

19. Most Useful Podcast Ever

A webcast for completing things. Prominent Mechanics Editor Jacqueline Detwiler has a pivoting cast of characters who answer intense inquiries and give tips to being shrewd about existence.

20.Extra Pack of Peanuts Travel Podcast

This digital recording will show you all that you have to know to travel more and spend less. From meetings with a portion of the world's most renowned travel names, like Chris Guillebeau, Bruce Poon Tip, AJ Jacobs, Chris Christensen and others to explicit travel exhortation on the best way to utilize preferred customer credits, score shabby lodgings, pack like an ace, and travel on a financial plan.

21. Making It

Making It is a week by week sound digital broadcast facilitated by Jimmy Diresta, Bob Clagett and David Picciuto. Three distinct creators with various foundations discussing imagination, plan and making things with your uncovered hands.

21.The Daily Boost

The Daily Boost is the world's most prevalent day by day inspiration program. Scott Smith conveys an interesting, straight talking, genuine, clever, and very successful procedures that will give you astounding outcomes.

22.Optimal Daily Living

Consider Optimal Living Daily as an audio blog or blogcast where the best online journals are described for you for nothing.

23. Achieve Your Goals

On the off chance that you are searching for help with accomplishing your objectives in any aspect of your life, Hal Elrod will give you the motivation, inspiration, and move intend to make yourself and your life to the following dimension.

24. Get Busy Living

A show for the individuals who feel stuck, need to accomplish objectives or need to figure out how to make life energizing once more. It's self-awareness and self-improvement from somebody you can identify with.

25. AskPat

AskPat is an everyday podcast by Pat Flynn. Each episode is a solution to a specific problem regarding online business, startups, virtual assistants, entrepreneurship, passive income, blogging and so much more.

26. The Tim Ferriss Show

Tim Ferriss is a self-experimenter and top of the line creator, best known for The 4-Hour Workweek, which has been converted into 40 other languages. In this show, Tim Ferriss deconstructs world-class entertainers from diverse territories burrowing profound to discover the instruments, strategies, and traps that audience members can utilize.

27. Extreme Productivity

Kevin Kruse is a smash hit creator and sequential business visionary sharing time the board tips, instruments and significant exhortation from business people, independent moguls, Olympic competitors, straight-An understudies, and other ultra-gainful individuals.

28. The GaryVee Audio Experience

On this digital recording, you'll discover a blend of #AskGaryVee show scenes, keynote discourses on showcasing and business, portions from DailyVee video arrangement, meetings and fireside talks just as his new and current musings for this sound involvement.

29. The James Altucher Show

James Altucher is a fruitful business visionary, financial specialist, board part and the writer of 11 books. He has begun and sold a few organizations for eight-figure exits. He discusses his encounters on the webcast.

30. Project Life Mastery Podcast

Stefan James from the Project Life Mastery blog uncovers his absolute best methodologies to acing and living completely. Everything from how to be spurred, his insider facts to progress, how to profit web-based, making automated revenue on the web, how to change your convictions and outlook, being solid and physically fit, being glad and gainful and considerably more.

31. Noah Kagan Presents

The world's best procedures to begin and develop your business, improve your profitability and live a more joyful and increasingly effective life.

32. Unconventional Life

Jules Schroeder interviews effective millennial business visionaries, craftsmen, creatives and thought pioneers on how they gain their living in nontraditional ways.

33.The Marie Forleo Podcast

Named by Oprah as a suspected pioneer for the people to come and one of Inc's. 500 quickest developing organizations, Marie's Forleo will likely enable you to turn into the individual you most need to be.

34.Operation Self Reset

Changing your life is a struggle, however in the event that you truly need to transform you can just by finding and squeezing your reset catch.

35.Happier

Gretchen Rubin, the main top rated creator of The Happiness Project and Better Than Before gets more close to home than any time in recent memory as she brings her viable, sensible exhortation about satisfaction and great propensities to this energetic, provocative web recording.

36. Growth Everywhere

Learn noteworthy techniques and strategies on how you can commit your business to develop and errors to abstain from amid your adventure. Gain from people who have established billion dollar organizations to top of the line creators.

37. Side Hustle School

Side Hustle School is facilitated by Chris Guillebeau, the New York Times top of the line writer of The $100 Startup, The Happiness of Pursuit and different books. Side Hustle School by Chris Guillebeau is a day by day appear for everybody who works a customary activity and needs to begin a pay acquiring venture as an afterthought.

38.It Will Come Show: Fireside

Meetings with network pioneers, influencers and experts who have discovered their own specific manner in business or life through tolerance, perseverance or energy.

39. The Tony Robbins Podcast

Tony Robbins and his group lead profoundly sagacious meetings with the most unmistakable driving forces and specialists on the worldwide stage.

40. The 5 AM Miracle

The 5 AM Miracle is a week by week web recording devoted to commanding your prior day breakfast. The objective is to enable you to ricochet up with eagerness, make amazing long lasting propensities and handle your most excellent objectives with uncommon vitality.

41. The Side Hustle Project

The Side Hustle Project is a webcast investigating the low down subtleties behind the stuff to begin and grow a productive side hustle. It's conveyed to you by Ryan Robinson, a business visionary, author and substance showcasing advisor.

42. The Minimalists Podcast

Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus talk about carrying on with a significant existence with less. The Minimalists Podcast is frequently the main wellbeing webcast on iTunes and it every so often outlines in the Top 10 all things considered.

43. The Grey Ave Podcast

The Gray Ave Podcast is the place inquisitive personalities, business visionaries, thrill seekers, hawkers, and issue solvers combine. Every scene includes a visitor from an alternate social status and industry.

44. The Smart Passive Income Online Business Podcast

Pat Flynn from The Smart Passive Income Blog covers the majority of his online business and blogging methodologies, salary sources and executioner showcasing tips and traps so you can be on top of things with your online business or blog.

45. The School of Greatness

Lewis Howes is a top rated creator, a way of life business person, previous ace competitor and world record holder in football. The objective of the School of Greatness is to share rousing stories from the most splendid business minds, world-class competitors and compelling famous people on the planet.

46. The Fizzle Show

A week after week bits of knowledge for entrepreneurs who need to acquire a living accomplishing something they care about. An exceedingly looked into and engaging show including 3 has Corbett Barr, Chase Reeves, and Steph Crowder.

47. Online Marketing Made Easy

Find why a huge number of online entrepreneurs swing to Amy Porterfield to create more benefits and to comprehend the internet advertising space, execute the techniques that truly get results and transform that side hustle into a business that keeps going.

48. Lovett or Leave It

With Barack Obama's previous speech specialist Jon Lovett as the moderator, you can't anticipate not exactly painstakingly picked words for the best level of expert articulation. Lovett or Leave It gathers together what merits recollecting from the week's top news, and is normally punctuated with visitor appearances from entertainers, on-screen characters and columnists.

49. Eventual Millionaire

Business mentor Jaime Masters interviews mogul business visionaries to become familiar with their disappointments, guidance, tips, and stories.

50. Natalie Sisson’s Quest for Freedom

Natalie Sisson is leaving on a Quest for Freedom, intended to support her, and you, find what opportunity truly implies. She's taking a business holiday, and putting every one of her year's experience of training others to assemble opportunity organizations, under the control of her little yet capable group, her frameworks and deals pipes, to check whether they will stand the trial of time.

#IFTTT #Blogger #technicolormoments #blog #blog post

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kendrixtermina · 8 years ago

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Extra Typology Vol #3 - Part 9, A: The Leisurely Style (Basics)

This would be the quintessential “Type B” individual - sure, they’ll fulfill their obligations & put in whatever share of work is needed to have a solid living, but once that is done, they feel that they have the right to their personal pursuit of hapiness & see that as the area of life where the “worthwhile” stuff happens - That this is where life is & that the other part is the drudgery you do for the sake of your life.

They feel that they have a right to their “me time” and while they might fill it with anything from plain chillaxing to hobbies to creative pursuits, it’s important to them that they are guranteed this opportunity, and though they are generally easygoing, they will vigorously defend their right to do their own thing & have their time & space.

This seems to be vaguely 9w8, the Phlegmatic Temperament or the Ne-Si axis.

(Funnily enough I never thought of this as any sort of distinct trait, perhaps because it’s the most common one in my makeup - I always just assumed this is simply “everyone to some degre/default/common sense/normal people” which, in hindsight, seems to hold the implicit assumption that type A people are “weird” Sorry. ^^° Well, at least I am now less stupid than I was before reading this book so yay for this book. Guess this just shows how we’re all vulnerable to & should be on the lookout for that type of thinking, as we’re all ordinary or unusual in some ways.)

The Six Domains

Self

The first priority for the Leisurely style is the inviolable independence of the self - The implicit idea that they have the intrinsic right to be who they are, to feel good, and to pursue their own pleasures and concepts in their own way - and that no person or institution has any business “meddling” or taking those rights away from then - They can be said to have a more fluent connection to the basic, default value of human existence.

If a Conscientious person will define themselves & others through their work, Leisurely people are more likely to see their indentity as related to their hobbies and, as a corollary, will tend to ask others “What are you into?” instead and believe in their inalienable right to use their personal time however they choose.

Unlike some of the more emotional “scattered” types they can operate quite well within systems such as the family, the workplace, the community... indeed those outer complexes are necessary to fulfill their needs, but they do not identify with or feel a need to cater to any outer authorities and generally don’t have a pronounced superego or any of the associated heavy self-critical burdens. - They’re aware of their obligations, but after meeting them - including those to their family - the Leisurely person will turn to what they see as “the things that really matter”: The pursuit of their private pleasure in life, be it sports, art, contemplating nature or watching TV with a beer in hand.

Unlike, say, Self-Confident types who feel that they are inherently special, better and closer to the center of the universe than most others, Leisurely people perceive that, along with everybody else, they are small cogs in the cosmic wheel - and that’s okay with them. Leisurely folks are usually comfortable with themselves - but even small cogs are entitled to lucky breaks - which is how Leisurely people perceive the diference between the have and the have-nots.

Most of all, they feel entitled to be happy and claim this right vigorously - Leisurely individuals will not enslave themselves to anyone or anything, or substitute anybody else’s values for their own - they might have a role to play, a job to do, services to perform etc. but they are individual and separate, subject to their own dictates - they’re willing to do their part, but beyond that, they reserve the right to feel good privately.

Relationships

This same central attitude extends not just to work but also to their relationships, with the result that these can only work under a premise of “You don’t own me.” or contain a certain ambivalence - Don’t misunderstand: People who have this as their dominant style are deeply entwined with other people - they’re family oriented and comfortable in groups. They like or even need to be taken care of and enter into relationships easily.

At the same time, they are, like Vigilant types, vaguely suspicious of others, especially people in authority - Leisurely types lowkey expect others to ask too much of them. But while Vigilant people stand emotionally clear of people until they are certain their autonomy is assured, Leisurely individuals have a much greater immediate need of companionship - as well as a foolproof defense against being ill-used: If anyone asks them to sacrifice their self-determination, they’ll simply refuse - they are frequently skilled at saying no and will always be protective of their individual freedom.

They’re not the sort to change themselves or a lifestyle they are satisfied with for the sake of a relationship, and if that means the relationship has to stop, they can generally accept that, seeing little sense in trying to win back an ex-partner who has clearly proven incompatible with their life an not likely to be happy with them - that said, they do care about their relationships & are likely to experience emotional pain when their desires conflict with those of their loved ones - they’ll usually go their own way in the endbut not without a lot of soul-searching in the end.

It’s not uncommon for people with this style to be read as lazy by those who don’t share their values, but that’s a misunderstanding: Not too different from archiever-types they’re dividing up their time according to what they want but what they want isn’t recognition or fancy stuff but to have a significant portion of their time to use as they please without outside encumbrance - they’re generally not rebels, mavericks, angrily defiant indvidals or anything of the sort: They won’t yell or argue when asked to do something they consider far beyond their duties - they’ll simply refuse.

They might simply not want or value the same things as their type A friends/partners & not find it as important that this or that is done - sometimes with the result that the other person feels obliged to do it & ends up comlaining about having to do all the work when the Leisurely person never asked or expected them to.

Work

To a Leisurely person, work and moneymaking are generally a means, not the end. They’re the sort to look at their employment as “just a job” rather than a career or vocation.

Because they generally work not for fame or sucess, but simply to pay bills, get a pension, finance their pursuit of pleasure and maybe have fun, they generally won’t take work home, don’t worry about it after hours, won’t do work that they see as outside their responsibility & won’t do more than what is asked of them to please the boss or feel better about themselves - they feel just fine.

They can be good, cooperative workers & are quite capable of fulfilling the requirements and taking pride in what they do, but they don’t find the meaning of their life in their work and won’t let themselves be pushed around by someone who does - However, they might not necessarily see how their apparent lack of ambition might account for receiving less approval, encouragement or reward that their coworkers who do go the extra mile and may resent another person’s success as unjustified.

That said, individuals with a mixed pattern containing traits like Conscientious or Self-Conscious do manage to find pleasure somewhere in the workplace - some may be able to mix pleasure and business, which is probably the easiest to accomplish in creative work - others may enjoy some aspects of their work and procrastinate on others, or find something incidental to their work that they actually enjoy (such as the office sports team) - they can do very good work and stand a lot of tedium but the job is rarely going to be the central focus of their lives. They work slowly & comfortably and won’t rush to beat the clock, or to make an unreasonable deadline.

This may annoy the occasional supervisor or boss because people in authority generally expect their employees and subordinates to share their values & dedication to the project even though they ‘ll be getting a smaller share of the rewards, but the Leisurely person may reply that they’re not paid to photocopy bills or work past five, in short, that whatever extra stuff is being demanded is “not their job”, and they will certainly resist being exploited -

Leisurely types are at least mildly suspicious of authority in the workplace - they expect that the boss will want more than they are willing to give - which often proves true, especially when the job has no precise description, or when the boss is highly Conscientious, Self-Confident, Agressive or Serious. Leisurely individuals attempt to fulfill their obligations, but might feel ill-used if their supervisors or colleagues do not accept this as sufficient - if the boss asks them to do more or to work faster, they might begin to feel that they are being treated unfairly - in general, Leisurely individuals are very aware of their rights. Fair is fair, and anything else is exploitation - as such, they won’t hesitate to make use of such rights (like take off all the days they’re allowed to) and, for that, may be

While the promise of extra pay is usually not enough to tempt them to stay longer, being compensated with extra free time later on might actually do the trick - and if a Leisurely person happens to be self-employed, they’ll have much the same attitude toward authority and won’t let their clients make unreasonable demands of them.

Emotions

In terms of emotional dynamics, Leisurely individuals often fall into the phlegmatic temperament (or possibly SanPhleg if extroverted), or, as Oldham puts it, reminiscent of Lizards basking in the sun: They’re placid, patient, slow-moving, mellow and not likely to get upset.

Even when they’re angry, (usually because of real or perceived unfairness) they tend to be indirect about it and avoid head-on confrontation - instead they’ll sulk, assign blame elsewhere, act grouchy & sullen and half-heartedly neglect the tasks others want them to do, or act all scattered & procrastinatey until... ooops! The deadline has passed, basically doing a bad job so that they won’t be asked to do it again.

Self-Control

As a side effect of the above orientation toward chill, they tend to avoid things that might disrupt their “flow” - which might lead them to put off onerous tasks such as word deadlines, taxes, bill paying, christmas shopping etc. to the last minute.

Apart from that though, their self-control is actually fairly good (just used for their piorities) - a halfway healthy individual is not driven to excesses, though many little indulgences can backfire by adding up, leading one to damage their health out of sheer habit from too much sugar, booze etc.

Worldview

To people in which this style is predominant, the world is a fairly straightforward place, if populated with a lot of folks who claim authority over others and would have you working all the time on unimportant tasks - Leisurely individuals have a built-in immunity to these claims because they can see that work is only a part of what there is in life.

They protect their identities by keeping a low profile, fulfilling only those obligations to the system that they must, wishing for a stroke of good luck (to which they feel as entitled as the next guy) and then concentrating on what they really want to do with their time, or, as they call it, the real life.

Life Choices

Leadership

Predominantly Leisurely types are rarely found above mid-management, because they’re not that ambitious in their careers - they don’t want to devote themselves to getting ahead, don’t care about working hard enough to make tons of money and are very reluctant to make the kinds of sacrifices on their personal time that the fast track demands.

Since Leisurely individuals often work for the same company, agency or military branch, they may rise to mid-management levels over the years - as managers, they expect of their subordinates what they expect of themselves: A day’s work for a day’s pay. They don’t push anybody too hard, but they do expect their staffs to follow the rules and not make life difficult for them. They’re not particularly creative or motivating managers, but in the beaurocracies that they find themselves in, they fit right in & allow the wheels to keep turning without rocking the boat.

Job Recomendations

If this is your primary style (and you were unlucky enough not to be born rich), im for a good ‘ol 9-to-5 job in which you know exactly what is expected of you - Since people of your style like their challenges primarily outside the workplace, look for a secure job that offers good pensions & benefits (teacher, city hall clerk, civil service, union shops etc.) and avoid jbs where a lot of initiaive is required (eg. lawyer)

Be aware, however, that those more interested & invested in the job may receive more encouragement and rewards. While you might see self-employment as a way to ensure that you have sufficient time to yourself flexible working conditions, it might be a bit of a trap if you can’t muster the necessary self-discipline or switch from work to play - You might have better chances if you have traits of a more ‘disciplined’ style, but it can also be hard to reconcile those two sides of yourself, as such traits can be in conflict inside a single individual as much as in society at large - A solution might be to become a consultant or freelancer, to combine pleasure & work by finding a job you enjoy (eg. creative work), or, you can try to focus on archievement while you’re young & kick back later once you’ve secured a foundation of cash and ressources.

Stress Sources

Perhaps as a result of maing their lives very comfortable, they’re rarely ever tense & generally don’t end up with stress or anxiety related problems - they tend to be emotionally even, but with one important exception: When they’re pushed to do more than they think is fair, or when someone pressures them to change their priorities - such situations would represent the primary souces of stress for a Leisurely individual.

In response they feel drawn to do things the other person’s way, but then react by resisting in a more demonstrative way, which can go from guiltily going along with it for a while to lowkey hostile, complainy passive-agressive behavior. If others keep insisting, the Leisurely person will indignantly justify their behavior and even try to rally others to their side.

If left alone to do their thing, it doesn’t take much for them to find emotional comfort - they don’t really need any great things to be satisfied, just a little bit of chill time - ultimately this is a slow, easy, pleasure-seeking style. Hapiness can come just from sitting in front of the TV with a bag of chips - but if their relationships with mates and supervisors are constantly strained by arguments, sourness may become their primary attitude.

Parenting

Generally speaking, Leisurely parents make for responsible breadwinners who are concerned with their children’s basic needs - their family life is an important source of pleasure for them and generally very important - they have a gift for enjoying themselves and can share in their children’s lives more memorably when they are all having a plain old wonderful time.

However, there can be a tendency t believe that what is best for them is also generally best for their children & they do not generally go out of their way to adapt to their children’s needs and wants if those are different from their own - they can be sort of old-fashioned. That said, they are usually not inflexible and will bend if someone can get through to them that they must.

In the maladaptive extremes, though, such a parent may refuse to comprehend that their children may have different needs than the one they assume and end up being remebered as a stubborn & selfish person more comcerned with their own comfort than the child’s welfare.

Romantic Compatibility

Strongly Leisurely people need mates who are accepting, understanding and giving nd are content to orbit around them - they won’t put the needs of the relationship first and will only go so far to please others, except when it comes to brief acts of contrition - that said, they do value their relationships, like being cared for and all will be well if their partners don’t mind the responsibility of keeping the relationship together and doing a little more of the chores. Then, they will prove to be responsive, appreciative, loyal and loving mates.

(A/N: Alternatively, try someone who gives just as little fucks about excessive neatfreakery as you do - worked just fine for me on 2 separate occasions. Or, have some arrangement along the lines of “the living room stays clear but my desk my rules”. I personally prefer not to burden or embarass another person with my dirty dishes - can we agree that neither partner should have to twist themselves into a pretzel?)

A strong degree of either the Devoted or Self-Sacrificing style might be conductive to a harmonic match as those will usually be able to tolerate the Leisurely person’s fundamental self-interest while providing a warm & caring quality

Those with with pronounced Conscientious traits should look elsewhere though - Chances are they’ll have a hard time understanding or accepting each other’s approach to life. While they might get together due to the Leisurely type’s appreciation for the Conscientious ability to take care of things, this pairing very often turns very sour in the long run - Neither style is good at compromizing and both wants stuff done their way.

For similar reasons, the Self-Confident style is probably out - their “high standards”/”ongoing archievements” approach tends to clash with the Leisurely style’s “work until content & then chill” MO, and the Self-Confident partner will tend to expect concessions that Leisurely types are unwilling to give

They often feel comfortable with Vigilant types as they both mistrust authority - the Vigilant person will typically be responsible and make fallback plans in case the Leisurely person mucks it up.

Two Leisurely people will generally respect & understand each others’ rights, but as they like to be taken care of it might help if one of them had a tad of Devoted or Self-Sacrificing style in them - also, someone needs to step forward & take charge when less desirable things need doing so it would depend on the exact “trait coctail” of the people involved.

Serious mates may provide a sense of resigned responsibility that can keep the relationship together - even if the Serious partner feels put upon, they don’t necessarily expect life to be all fun & games. They will likely support a highly Leisurely person’s belief that those who have it better ust got lucky, as well as their passive wishfulness and sourish attitude - they might not necessarily be able to share in the Leisurely person’t pleasures, but they certainly won’t keep them from pursuing them.

They will generally not be comfortable with emotionally demanding styles such as Dramatic or Mercurial

Relationships with Sensitive types might well work, but the Leisurely type should take care to be there for the Sensitive when they need suppor with personal challenges

Like the Leisurely style, the Adventurous style is pleasure seeking, but they tend to break the rules rather than stay within them & play ball, so forget this match

Specific Issues

The Leisurely Style vs. Housework

Since their free time is their main source of joy in their lives, Leisurely people need a lot of time to themselves - Even if they’re the local homemakers. In that case the house will be presentable enough, the meals good if not elaborate (unless cooking is one of their hobbies), but nothing will be particularly well kept, prepared or organized.

Taking care of a home & family is one of the more demanding jobs out there so it may be a good thing if the Leisurely individual knows how to set their limits, but they may run into problems if their mate doesn’t think of housework as “real” work & sees their need to have a break from it and entertain themselves as self-indulgent.

On the other hand, if the Leisurely mate is the one who works outside the home, they may mistakenly assume that their at-home partner didn’t have much to do all day & not be inclined to pitch in after they “did their due” on a long day of work (it’s easy to see how being raised with certain cultural expectation of what one’s “share” of the work constitutes can be unhelpful here ^^°)

In general, they treasure their non-work hours too much to give up too much of them for chores, especially if there’s other family members whom they feel could and/or should take care of it.

Success isn’t Everything

Leisurely-style people can be found in virtually all manner of careers, including, say, Chemistry professors, but rarely on top of any, which is fine by them - Since their overall comfort in life comes from how they enjoy themselves away from work, they rarely devote the time or push that hard.

A pitfall of the Leisurely type may be that some for whom the trait is very pronounced may drift off course or lose direction in their life, but this needn’t happen - generally they can and do make good lifes for themselves (according to their own priorities) even if others may say that they haven’t done as well as they “should” have. For example, they might pass up a prestigious job for one that is secure and easy-going & be happy with their life as it is, doing the things they do, and will prefer doing activities they actually like (be it at work or at home) rather than squeezing the maximum potential out of everything.

#typology #extraTypology #oldham #oldham personality #personality #Leisurely

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