#(screen caps are from today 19/10)

[dreamings-free]

so much love for Louis and his post to Liam ❤️‍🩹

[anonymouspuzzler]

my hourly comics from this year!! it ended up being an Extremely Eventful Day so there was a lot to cover, which was fun!

[Image IDs/transcripts under da cut!]

A collection of 19 three-panel comic strips done for Hourly Comics Day 2023. Each three-panel comic represents roughly an hour of the day. Two strips are contained in each image except the last, which contains only one strip, for a total of 10 images.

IMAGE 1 COMIC 1 (7AM) The first panel shows Puzz in bed, half-awake and drooling, with her hair everywhere. An alarm is going off on her phone, which is sitting on a floating shelf on the wall. The phone screen reads "UP!" and is blasting alarm music and vibrating loudly. The second panel shows a close-up of Puzz's face cropped by the bottom of the frame, looking agonized, while the alarm continues in the background. She thinks, "I wonder if I can ignore it long enough it shuts off". The final panel shows Puzz, in her pajamas and with her hair a mess, up and about holding a mug labeled "coffee". Her cat trails behind her with its mouth open, screaming "A". The panel is captioned "I could not." COMIC 2 (8AM) The first panel reads "TODAY'S FIT" followed by a bulleted list: "-big flannel -patched-up overalls -da boots -cap w/dinos all over LESBIANLY LOOKZ". Puzz is to the right of the list wearing the outfit in question, giving a thumbs-up. The second panel shows Puzz sitting in a desk chair in front of her laptop (helpfully labeled "LAP TOP"), smiling widely with sparkles all around her. The panel is captioned "check on gay people in my puter (girlfriend & friends on Discord). Word balloons from the laptop show a kitty, a boat, and the earth. The final panel shows a close-up of Puzz's face with a nervous grin, sweating profusely. The panel is captioned "have to send a project proposal". Puzz is thinking, "PLEASE LIKE IT PLEASE SEE IT AS A LOVE FOR THE WORK AND NOT A HUGE SELFISH IMPOSITION AAAAAAA". She has one shaking pointer finger raised, labeled "shaking over 'send'".

IMAGE 2 COMIC 3 (9AM (PT. 1)) The first panel shows a close-up of Puzz running and sweating with a grimace. Next to her is text reading "OK!! I'M LATE (as usual) BUT IF THIS PRINTS QUICK I CAN STILL CATCH THE CAMPUS SHUTTLE". The second panel shows Puzz with a backpack on, staring anxiously down at an office printer. The panel is captioned "6 full minutes of loading". The final panel shows Puzz, sweating and determined, sprinting away, with text above her reading "ACTUALLY FUCK THIS I WANNA LIVE". Next to her is text reading "(I barely made it to the shuttle.)" COMIC 4 (9AM (PT 2)) The first panel is captioned "on the shuttle..." and shows Puzz, now wearing a mask, looking out the window of said shuttle. Outside is a woman with shoulder-length hair wearing a simple coat and sunglasses, waving with one hand and holding A Single Banana Peel in the other. An arrow labels her "woman on a walk w/ a single banana peel??" Puzz has several question marks around her as she looks on in confusion. The second panel is captioned "targeted directly by the Double Fine official Twitter" and shows Puzz looking at her phone, visibly struggling not to laugh. A thought bubble coming from her reads "DON'T SCREAM LAUGH IN PUBLIC" repeatedly. The final panel shows Puzz off the shuttle, with a look of frantic realization, shouting "AH FUCK ME". An arrow pointing to her reads "forgot my tape measure AGAIN".

IMAGE 3 COMIC 5 (10AM) The first panel shows Puzz sitting at a table with her tablet and a keyboard, visibly smiling behind her mask, with text around her reading "CLASS TIME!" The second panel shows Puzz at the same table, now looking more distressed and concerned. Around her are multiple disconnected word balloons reading "CANCEL CULTURE", "CENSORSHIP", "SO THIS GUY ON YOUTUBE-", "WOKEISM", "KANYE", "TRIGGERED", "REVERSE-CULTURAL APPROPRIATION", "DAVE CHAPELLE", and "IT'S LIKE CAN I EVEN SAY ANYTHING". The final panel shows a close-up of Puzz looking exhausted, with text above and around her reading, "ah... yes... this is why I left the Fine Arts..." An arrow pointing to her reads "remembering". COMIC 6 (11AM) The first panel is captioned "STILL CLASS". Puzz is shown with a thoughtful expression, gesturing with both hands, saying in decorative text "Insightful observation". There are sparkles flying around everywhere. The second panel shows Puzz now kicking back at the table, leaning back in her chair, feet on the table, tablet in her lap. She holds her pen in one hand and gives a thumbs-up with the other. Text above her reads, "well, that's my Brain(TM) for today! I draw Loboto now thanks." The final panel shows an extreme close-up on Puzz's face, looking deeply annoyed. Text behind her spoken by someone offscreen reads "ANYWAY I GET SOOO TRIGGERED HAVING TO THINK ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE'S FEELINGS-" A thought balloon from Puzz reads "SETTING U ON FIRE W/ MY MIND".

IMAGE 4 COMIC 7 (12PM) The first panel is captioned "MEETING W/ MY PROF". A word bubble from said professor offscreen reads, "that observation was so insightful". Puzz, holding her tablet under one arm, pumps her fist, with text next to her reading "HELL YES". The second panel shows Puzz from behind talking to the professor, a nondescript woman with a shaggy bob haircut and dark shirt. The professor says, "don't worry too much! If you try, you'll pass! even if you just do a lecture over photos!" Puzz, with a smiling expression behind her mask, replies, "oh, good!" The final panel shows Puzz, still smiling behind her mask, holding up her tablet (which has a nondescript sketch of an installation proposal) and saying, "so here's my rough draft-" The offscreen professor interrupts, "ok so this proposal alone is what I'd assign as a whole semester's work". COMIC 8 (1PM) The first panel is captioned "CHECKING MESSAGES (NICE 2 ME...)" and shows Puzz checking her phone, which is emitting a word balloon with three exclamation points. Puzz is staring down at it with a big-eyed expression, crying tears of joy. The second panel is captioned "SENDING MAIL" and shows Puzz at a post office window, with a mail clerk with a ponytail and envelope earrings seen from behind holding a box. The clerk says "oh, you used the wrong label", and Puzz, expression blank, replies "ah". The final panel is captioned "5 minute Starbux sandwich". It shows Puzz frantically shoving said sandwich whole into her mouth with both hands, with a "HORF." sound effect.

IMAGE 5 COMIC 9 (2PM) The first panel is captioned "THERAPY TIME!" and under that, "3x EYE CONTACT COMBO". Puzz is in the center of the frame wearing a headset mic, smiling into the camera. Behind her to the right is her cat, staring directly into the camera atop a cat tree. Behind her to the left is a Spamton plush in a desk organizer, also looking directly into the camera. The second panel shows Puzz, looking mildly chastised, at her computer, through which her therapist speaks, saying "you're not gonna like hearing this. you might need to take things out of your schedule". Puzz replies simply "mm", but a caption above her reads "SHE WAS RIGHT". The final panel has the therapist offscreen saying, "let's roleplay that scenario! How are you feeling?" Puzz, grinning nervously with eyes wide and sweat pouring down her face, replies, "VERY ANXIOUS". COMIC 10 (3PM) The first panel shows Puzz from the knees down walking left. Her cat chases after her, looking up and meowing plaintively. The second panel shows Puzz staring down at her cat, comically wide-eyed and sobbing, with text behind her reading "oh NO... my sweet little baby ohhhhh I was gone so long and I have to leave again oh NOOOOO sweetie I'm so sorry I wish I could stayyy" The final panel shows Puzz from the knees down again. Her cat tackles her leg, grabbing and biting it, while she shouts "HEY".

IMAGE 6 COMIC 11 (4PM (CLASS... 2!!)) The first panel shows Puzz's professor, a bald Black man with glasses and a very thin goatee wearing a button-up, holding up a tupperware labeled "cookiez". He says, "so, these were here when I sat down..." Puzz, looking sheepish, raises her hand and says, "oh, I brought those for the class!" The second panel shows Puzz's professor taking a cookie, saying, "in that case, I will take two- hm, no, there's not that many. I'll be fair and take one." The final panel shows a nondescript male classmate of Puzz's on his laptop in the background, saying, "you could've just claimed them all since they were up front". Puzz's professor, in the foreground seen slightly from behind, replies "well considering this class is on Marxism..." COMIC 12 (5PM) The first panel is captioned "THIS CLASS IS 3 HOURS LONG AND THERE IS NO BREAK", and shows Puzz and her friend Oscar (helpfully labeled as such) fitting at a table, both staring slightly blankly ahead. Oscar is a slight man with curly hair and glasses, wearing a fluffy sweater over a dark shirt, as well as a black mask. Oscar is on a laptop (labeled "FRUIT!") while Puzz has her tablet keyboard out. A thought bubble coming from Puzz reads "LOADING..." The second panel is captioned "IT IS ALSO EXTREMELY INTELLECTUALLY INTENSE" and shows a close-up on Puzz, looking distressed. She thinks, "OH GOD I BARELY RETAINED THESE READINGS". The final panel shows an over-the shoulder-view of Puzz with her tablet in her lap, looking frantic as she repeatedly taps the screen with her pen. Text above her reads "I KEEP TRYING TO WORK ON THESE COMICS STEALTHILY BUT MY PEN KEEPS DISCONNECTING AAAAAAA"

IMAGE 7 COMIC 13 (6PM) The first panel is captioned "FINALLY HITTING MY GROOVE...?" Puzz, looking tired but thoughtful, gestures with both hands, saying, "the passage reminded me of - and forgive me for bringing this up - Elon Musk," The second Panel shows a classmate of Puzz's, a brunette woman with a flowing dress on, smiling and gesturing to her book, saying "see I put in my notes 'Jeff Bezos'". Puzz, looking to be barely holding back laughter, snickers, while her professor in the foreground doubles over and wheezes. The final panel shows another classmate of Puzz's, a woman in a dark v-neck shirt and black mask, gesturing with one pointer finger up. She says, "I have an addition". The professor, in the foreground looking over at her, says "Will it bring us back on topic to the reading?" The classmate hesitantly replies "yyyyyesss..." COMIC 14 (7PM) The first panel is captioned "A BUNCH OF US TEND TO LOITER OUTSIDE TALKING SHOP AFTER CLASS". It shows Puzz and Oscar, the brunette classmate (who is smiling and waving as she walks off), and two other classmates (one with dark curly hair and a bulky jacket, the other with light wavy hair and a lighter cardigan) all gesticulating and talking animatedly. The second panel shows Puzz, with a big cat grin, hugging Oscar. Puzz says "see ya tomorrow!" and Oscar replies, "can't wait for your hourlies!" The final panel is captioned "HEAR MY FRIEND PARKER SHOUT W/ DELIGHT FROM DOWN THE HALL". Puzz is crowded in the frame by an "AAAAA!!" word balloon surrounded by hearts and smiley faces. Puzz barely holds in a laugh as she walks by.

IMAGE 8 COMIC 15 (8PM) The first panel is captioned "REALLY GOOD NEWS & PRETTY SAD NEWS COME TO ME AT EXACT SAME TIME", and shows Puzz, now with mask and hat off, sitting at her laptop, looking down at her phone with surprise. The second panel shows Puzz sitting quietly at her desk, having set her phone face-down in front of her. She looks up with a thoughtful expression, tears in her eyes. The final panel is captioned "we'll focus on the good." It shows Puzz from behind sitting at her desk, beginning to draw. There are two monitors in front of her, a cup of pens to her right side, and a water bottle, lamp and fan to her left. COMIC 16 (9PM) The first panel shows Puzz, face mostly out of frame, leaning down with a cup of cat food in one hand. Her cat is sitting in front of her, staring up expectantly, surrounded by sparkles, with the elevated food dish next to her. The panel is captioned in decorative text "Kitty Dinner". The second panel shows Puzz, looking tired but determined, sitting in front of her tablet drawing. Small text next to her reads "CATCHUP HOURS..." The final panel is captioned "DISTRACTED BY TUMBLR A LOT..." and shows Puzz typing at her laptop, looking confused but entertained, saying "where did all these asks come from??"

IMAGE 9 COMIC 17 (10PM-11PM) The first panel is captioned "COMBINED BC MOST OF IT WAS EXTENSIVE PROJECT TALK" and shows Puzz typing furiously at her laptop with an expression of mischievous delight. The second panel is captioned "I CAN'T TALK ABOUT WHAT I'M WORKING ON FOR A BIT BUT I'M EXCITED AND GRATEFUL". It shows Puzz looking surprised and mock-offended as her cat steps on the laptop keyboard in front of her, causing random symbols to be typed. The final panel is captioned "ART IS COOL" and shows Puzz smiling serenely, having picked up her confused-looking cat with both arms, holding it against her. COMIC 18 (12PM) The first panel shows Puzz looking tired but triumphant, holding up her tablet pen with her tablet tucked against her other side, with text reading "CAUGHT UP...!!" and sparkles all around. The second panel shows Puzz typing at her laptop, smiling but still looking tired, thinking, "let's post these... how many more should I do...? Till bed, I guess..." The final panel shows Puzz, still at her laptop, yawning deeply.

IMAGE 10 COMIC 19 (...) This page shows two rows of three panels each. The first five panels are all empty. The final panel shows Puzz lying in bed asleep, covered in quilts and surrounded by plush toys, with her cat asleep at her feet.

[timextoxhajima]

Boundary [Dana’s 700 Special]

Track: Fever - Enhypen / TiO - Zayn / Close - Nick Jonas, Tove Lo

➣ Member: my og bias owo

➣ Genre: idol! ju x stylist! [fem] reader

➣ Warnings: swear words and if you squint, some smut

➣ Word Count: i’m like 100% sure it’ll be as long as accelerate [i was wrong it’s nowhere near but whatever]

➣ A/N: Thank you for 700 followers. You are all nothing but amazing ♡

➣ Taglist: @taesty-wander-lust​ @tbzzhoe​ @suzy-rainbow​ 

He’s going to be the absolute death of me.

The thought is loud in your head, and you were almost sure you would’ve blurted it out had the filming studio been empty. Breaking Dawn was blasting from the speakers behind the MV director, experimenting with some strange angles that you’ve never seen any other MV director try with the group before. 

If you thought Reveal was dangerous, this might be worse.

“Okay! Let’s do that hook into the chorus first and we’ll see how that angle goes!”

“Breaking Dawn, I see-”

“Cut! Juyeon-” The director snorts while staring at the monitor from the camera. “That was great but um, we’ll need to rate the video if we release this one.”

Never mind. It is worse.

“Yah, Juyeon!”

“Ahh... seriously?”

“You already have enough screen time, why are you so greedy?!”

The members crowd around Juyeon and shove him playfully as the director films that part from the monitor, and brings his cellphone over to the group to see. You can barely hear the music from the phone, given how far you were standing from the filming area. 

The group of 11 burst into loud yells and frustrated groans, with Younghoon and Chanhee giving their iconic ‘OoO’ faces to Juyeon. The main man chuckles, embarrassed, and shakes his head while waving it off.

“I didn’t intend to make it so suggestive, sorry!”

“It’s alright, that was great, really!” The director assures him. “It’s just that we can’t release that without rating the MV, and you guys don’t really have that kind of reputation yet so, we won’t do that for you guys now. But anyways, can we get a 10 minute break and we’ll pick up where we left off?”

The boys celebrate in unison, Eric immediately rushing off for the washroom, some members going to the staff to ask for their phones, others going for the monitor to check their progress and the remaining approaching their stylists for appearance maintenance.

So, when Juyeon approaches you with that sly-mixed-with-shame smile, you can’t help but to shake your head at him. 

“Really? He asks you to go all out and you look like you want to eat the camera,” Pulling open your little kit, you set it on the table next to you. You pull out the comb and hairspray and start adjusting his hair again - all that dancing’s pushed some strands out of its rightful position.

“Aw, so you agree that I looked good enough?”

“What?” The pitch is higher than expected, but you hope your feigned annoyance camouflages the pinch of jealousy. “Please! The director said it’ll be rated!”

Juyeon laughs, standing with his feet a little more apart than natural for you to have easier access to his hair. 

“Well, you’re the one who did my hair and makeup. If it’s anybody to blame, wouldn’t it be you?” 

His words halt the sharp end of your comb in his hair, and you poke it into his scalp for good measure while puffing out your cheeks. He chuckles it off. 

“Excuse you, sir, Cre.Ker gave me a color palette and a set of reference pics. Ever since they cracked the code with you with Reveal, they just won’t stop with this genre of style on you.”

“I mean... I definitely prefer my current style over what they did to me in Boy.”

The memory cooks up a bunch of images in your head, and you fail to stop the giggle that runs off your tongue when you return the comb to the kit. 

“Aw, come on, that was cute,” Picking up a brow pencil, you fill in the tiny fade-out. “You were, what? 19? No reason for you to look as raunchy as you do now.”

“It’s a pity you only met me just before I become ‘raunchy’.”

“Why? I mean, ‘Juyeon’s not a good boy’ though. Raunchy’s closer to that than what you did pre-Reveal.”

“I meant it!” Juyeon widens his eyes and his brows shift up his forehead just as the tip of the brow pencil lifts off his skin. “I’m happy Cre.Ker’s letting us show what we want to.”

“And I’m happy for you too,” You finish up on his foundation where it’s starting to wear off. “But one day, you’re gonna cross a line and break some hearts.”

Juyeon smiles as you cap on all your equipment and close your kit. Resting one hand on your hip, you quickly give his hair one last poke before he resumes his normal standing position.

“What if I only want to break specific hearts though?”

A frown befalls your face and you forge an ugly look by crooking your lips. “What? Was that an attempt to flirt? Please stop,” Waving him off, you turn and pick up your kit, walking away on your heels as Juyeon tails you.

He’s just practising flirting on me at this point. Best friends and best friends for what? Get MY heart broken? PLEASE.

“Flirt with Kevin if you want, he’ll give you better advice,” You turn to the film area and sure enough, Kevin was busy twerking into the camera and Changmin’s just face palming himself. 

“Oi Kevin! Stahb it!” You yell across the space and Changmin points to you, turning to yell at Kevin.

“Yah, even y/n’s telling you to stop!”

Chuckling, you turn into the dressing room as another hair stylist finishes with Sangyeon in the mirror. 

“Hello sir, you look kinda tired today, are you resting well?”

“Don’t get me started. Schedule’s packed into June,” Sangyeon subtly shakes his head, but his stylist holds his cheeks and shifts his face back to face the mirror.

“Sangyeon, please face the mirror. It’s not my fault if your hair gets messed up again,” The hair stylist grins as he picks up the hairspray.

“Sorry,” Sangyeon blinks at him and purses his lips. Juyeon crashes into the two seater-sofa in the corner of the dressing room and groans tiresomely, resting his head on the top surface of the headrest. 

“Well, you should get some rest before Kingdom kicks in,” You place the kit on the dressing table and sit down in the two-seater next to Juyeon. “It’s not going to be an easy fight, y’know.”

“Right! You used to be ATEEZ’s hairstylist!” Sangyeon’s eyes widen and you can see him struggling not to turn to you directly instead of trying to find you in the strangest angle of the reflection in the mirror. 

“Yeah. Those guys are intense, and I mean intense! Six out of eight are known for performance skills and the other two... one produces 99% of their tracks and the other belts out notes even I can’t reach.”

“You sound like you were sent from KQ to intimidate us-” Sunwoo struts in and waves an annoying finger in your face.

“I’m not-” Swatting his finger away, Juyeon leans forward and pulls Sunwoo’s hand. “I’m just saying for good measure- it’s not going to be easy. Stray Kids is also going to be great competition, not to mention iKON and-”

“AhHH, we get it!” Sunwoo shushes you, swinging his hand with Juyeon’s.

“No matter the outcome, you all need to know that you guys were stellar last year. I was new then, but it was absolutely stunning to watch you guys work and put so much effort into your performances.”

“Oh my God, yeah, you could not shut up about the Danger performance,” Sangyeon cooes, letting his stylist finally finishes and shifts to pack the hair equipment. 

“I’ll bet it’s cause your best friend over here got the most screen time,” Sunwoo perks up a mischievous brow and smirks at you.

Juyeon’s eyes widen and stares at the youngest, “I didn’t get the most screen time.”

“If not you then who?” Sangyeon butts in as he stands.

“Uh... Changmin?”

Sunwoo and Sangyeon go quiet. 

“Yah, you had a good amount of screen time too!” Sangyeon turns and blurts out at Sunwoo, playfully shoving him. 

“Y’all are being loud in here,” Kevin’s head pops out from beyond the door frame, one of his stylists tagging behind him and struggling to pat down his clothes. 

“No, tell me if Sunwoo had more screentime than Changmin in Danger from last year,” Sangyeon wraps an arm around Sunwoo and slowly walks him out. 

“What? I don’t know, Changmin had the opening and the dance break...”

Sangyeon’s hairstylist follows closely, and by instinct, he shuts the door behind him, leaving you with Juyeon in the dressing room. It’s humid, from all the lights turned on in the room, and the leather seat wasn’t the most comfortable thing to sit on.

Turning to Juyeon, his eyes are gently shut, and frankly, he looked like he was about to fall asleep. The backrest of the sofa sinks when you lean back, mimicking his position.

“You have like four minutes left so don’t even think of falling asleep.”

“I’m not sleeping,” He offers a tiny smile on his lips, eyes still shut. 

“Sure, you’re not.”

“Wake me up when the director needs me.”

“You wish,” The leather under your legs squeak when you push yourself off, but he sticks out an arm at your stomach and pushes you back down. Judging by the miniscule smirk on his face, he’s just messing with you. “What do you think you’re doing? I have a job to do and you have a music video to film.”

He remains quiet. Someone shouts at Eric outside.

“You’re being fucking weird today, sir,” You lift a hand and grab his arm to move it away, but he swiftly wraps his fingers around your wrist and yanks you forward instead. 

Using your palms to keep the distance between your faces, you’re hovering above him now, breath on his upper lip. The sweat’s begun to collect in the lines of your palms, stuck to the arm rest by his side and the cushion he’s leaning on. 

Your vision immediately darts to his face upon the bold move, and he’s got that slight smile prancing on his lips when he’s thinking of a joke or something funny and doesn’t want to say it. It’s been a good year of being Juyeon’s best friend (apart from the members), so you’ve definitely grown to know how to read him by his actions.

You sigh, rolling your eyes and removing your legs from next to his thighs.

“Juyeon-”

And then he cuts you off by holding you in position with his arm around his waist, challenging your knees to hold you up - because if they buckled, you’ll land right on top of him. 

“What the Hell do you think you’re doing?” 

Knock knock

“y/n, are you done with Juyeon’s hair? Filming’s resuming!”

There’s an awkward tension between you and Juyeon now, with his eyes wide open and staring into yours, arm still around your waist. But having his nose just inches away from yours and his breath breathing down on your philtrum feels so surreal. It feels like it’s a dream that you’ve failed to pull yourself out from.

He parts his lips, then purses them, and sighs through his nose. 

“Yeah, she’s done! I’ll be out in like, two seconds!”

Your gaze finds his and you’re panicking when he’s moving again. Within two seconds, you’re flat on your back on the length of the couch - and this time, he’s holding himself above you.

“What the- I-”

“We’ll continue this later back at the company, I promise,” Then he rounds your cheek and presses a kiss into your cheekbone instead.

He pulls back, offering you his kind smile and a ruffle into your hair for good measure. Nothing in your body is working when you hear him shuffle for the door, and it clicks shut behind him, with Breaking Dawn already blasting in the filming space.

Sucking in a deep breath, you don’t realise how hard your heart is thumping in your head until you hear your own shaky exhale. You don’t know where to look, you can still feel his grip on your waist and his breath on your upper lip, and everything’s just a mess right now.

What the Hell just happened?

“Eric - Dior Shirt Size M...” You mumble under your breath, fingers gripping the pen to the clipboard so hard, your writing would probably leave a mark in the sheet under. 

“I think this is the last luggage!” Younghoon’s stylist drags the black case in, lining it up with the last unopened one. “Need help?”

“Yeah, just open the luggage for me and separate Sangyeon’s clothes from Jacob’s, but otherwise I can handle it on my own.”

She nods, laying it down and unzipping it for the clothes to spew out. “How’s working here? It’s been over a year, right?”

“Mhm,” You glance at her, obviously tired. “It’s alright, but thanks to your advice since last year, I don’t think it could’ve been better.”

With a kind smile, she looks up at you, placing Sangyeon’s pants over his stack. “You’re experienced from ATEEZ, so it wouldn’t have been that hard anyway.”

She stands, resting her hands on her hips as you walk over, squatting to check Sangyeon and Jacob’s clothes. 

“So... what’s going on with you and Juyeon?”

I’d like to know too.

“Huh?” You look up at her, head tilted to the side with a sneaky cocked brow. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, please- All the stylists here know you and Juyeon are like- hanky panky nowadays. Pretty sure the boys know too, or at least have some idea.”

A cackle runs your throat dry as you graduate your attention to Jacob’s clothes. “Is that what they’re calling it? ‘Hanky-panky’? Cute.”

“Do you know why they’re still in a meeting this late?”

“No, why would I bother? As long as I don’t lose my job, it’s none of my concern.”

“They’re in meeting to be informed that their dating ban has been lifted.”

Your grip around the pen tightens, but halts abruptly. 

“Ah...” She sighs, contemplated with herself. “Cat got your tongue? Or should I say... Juyeon got your-”

Interrupted by the practise room door being pushed open, both of your attentions immediately flit to the new commotion. 

“Oh, Juyeon! Meeting’s over?”

“Yeah,” He turns and closes the door behind him. His hair was still waxed up from the day’s schedule, makeup still on but fading. Clothes snug around his shoulders with his belt tight around his hips. Those stupid jeans never did you any good since day 1. “Sangyeon said he left a ring in one of the luggages so he sent me to come get it while he counsels Kevin for twerking.”

“y/n’s just going through Sangyeon’s wardrobe, so she might find something,” Your colleague’s begun to take small, insignificant steps towards the door, and your anxiety begins to increase with every inch she places between the two of you.

“Which is why I’m here,” He stuffs his hands into his back pockets.

“Right, right,” Now, she’s already got her hand on the door knob, glancing past him and at you with wide, glistening eyes. “I gotta go check your wardrobe for tomorrow so... I’mma go now, and uh... security comes by around 12am. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“What-” You blurt out, receiving a sharp, surprised look from Juyeon.

“Bye! Bye Juyeon!”

“Bye,” He waves. 

“No, wait-” 

And so, the door clicks shut behind her, and her shadow behind the translucent material disappears down the corridor. 

The whir of the air-conditioner in the practice room fills all the awkward openings in the room, but all you can hear is the rapid thunk of your heart in your brain - as if that was even possible. 

Thunkthunkthunkthunkthunkthunkthunkthunkthunkthunkthunkthunkthunk

“About earlier today-”

“Give me a moment while I look for Sangyeon’s ring. What does it look like?” Standing up too fast, your vision goes white and a second of dizziness throws you off your balance.

So, of course, Juyeon rushes over and holds you by your waist before your ankles or knees give way. The incessant blinking makes you wish you could actually pass out right now, because your weight’s in his arms and you can’t bring yourself to look him in the eye.

“Iron deficiency much?” The corner of his lips curl up into his cheek before releasing you. “Do you need to sit down?”

Clearing your throat, you turn away first. “No, I-”

“Good, because I have some points to make and you’re gonna stop running away from them like you’re doing now.”

The change in tone runs chills down your spine and goosebumps erupt all over your skin - thank god you were wearing a blazer, safe from his observation. 

“How have you tolerated it so much?” He folds his arms across his chest, tilting his head innocently but his eyes say otherwise. It’s always his eyes that tell a whole different story from the person he’s known to be. 

“Y’know, being around me but you’re so calm and collected and I just...” He shakes his head, and to your dismay, takes a step forward - which drives you backwards. “How?”

His voice is too sing-songy. It’s too calm and collected for you because you’re about to barf up your dinner, which was a good 4 hours ago now. There’s nothing left in your stomach to barf up. 

He takes another intimidating step and you wince at your inability to look him in the eye.

Another step back. 

“Like, I know we’re friends but my God-” Shaking his head, he sinks his teeth into his bottom lip.

Another step forward. Another backward.

“It’s upsetting that I can look ‘raunchy’ and it doesn’t seem to do anything to you... But seeing you the way you are every other day makes me want to- just-”

Another step forward. 

One more one back.

And your breath halts.

Your back hits the wall, the rear of your skull lined with the pillar. 

Oh, no.

Gritting your teeth so tight, your jaw starts to ache and your temples are throbbing. 

“I’m not seeing things, right?” A flicker of curiosity sparkles in his eyes when you muster up the courage to look at him - only to regret it instantly. “It’s not in my head that you feel the same way I do, right?”

“I... Don’t know what you’re talking about- You’re an idol... and I’m- I’m just your stylist and I-”

“‘Just my stylist’?” The comment forces his brows into a slight frown, before he lifts his hand and covers the bottom half of his face with his palm. “Rethink what you just said.”

Sucking in a deep breath, your chest wells with a horrid mix of desire and self-discipline. Those two don’t go well together. 

“We can talk about this some other day,” You choose to say, dragging your body along the pillar in a bid to shift out from the wall-Juyeon sandwich like a fool. He lifts his arm and presses his palm into the pillar behind you, caging your poor, poor soul in this fateful corner of his stupid practice room.

“Juyeon, we need... boundaries in this industry. One scandal and it’ll destroy your career.”

“Boundaries?” He buckles his elbows, shrinking the gap between your noses. “Boundaries are for idols who still have a dating ban.”

Breathing down your nose, he’s too close for comfort. You can smell his cologne, the scent of his hair wax and see the bumps on his cheek under the faint layer of makeup. You don’t realise you’re trembling until he tilts his head ever so slightly, free hand reaching up to your chin to steady your face.

“Stop running from me,” Shaking his head painstakingly subtly, he whispers into your lips. “You were mine from the start and you know that.”

The adrenaline rush through your nerves sets off fireworks all over you when he slots his body against yours, lips fitted with yours like puzzle pieces; against the wall, with his palms on your cheeks. There was no care or consideration with how much strength he was channeling into this kiss - it feels so pent-up, so frustrated. Without warning, your body resigns as you circle your arms around his shoulders.

Gripping the rim of his collar in your hands, his hands drop to your waist and holds you closer, if it were even possible. A million thoughts race through your head - and at the same time, none. This moment was something you didn’t even know you needed. 

Juyeon’s hands roam the small of your back as he keeps you against the wall, relaxing into the kiss and sighing into it instead. 

This bliss comes in the form of him. Him who provides you all the sinful wants deep down inside you. 

But this bliss doesn’t last, for the practice room door swings open violently and tears Juyeon off you.

“I told you to find my ring, not hook up with your crush!”

[canary3d-obsessed]

Masterpost - Word of Honor

Here’s all of my Word of Honor original content

Costume Appreciation

Search tag “woh costumes” on this blog to find all of these together (on the days when tumblr’s search is working). Core family is at the top of the list, everyone else is alphabetical.

Wen Kexing   1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |15 

Zhou Zishu    1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |11| 12 13 |14 |15 |16| 17 |18 |19 | 20 (NEW)

Gu Xiang       1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 

Zhang Chenling        1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

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

Du Pusa (Scorpion Hottie) 1 | 2 

Gao Xiaolian   1 | 2

Gao Chong 1

Gu Miaomiao 1 | 2

Jing An (Noble Lady/Sister-In-Law)   1

Jing Beiyuan and Wu Xi    1 | 2 

Liu Qianquio (Beauty Ghost) 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 

Luo Fumeng (Aunty Ghost) 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 

Qiao Luohan (Stabby Scorpion) 1 

Qin Song (Scorpion Pipa Player) 1  

Qin Huaizhang  1

Qin Jiuxiao 1 

Rong Xuan   1 | 2 

Tao Hongpo  (Granny Watermelon) and Lu Liuweng     1

Xie Wang (Scorpion King) 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 

Ye Baiyi       1  | 2

Yue Feng’Er  1 | 2  

Zhao Jing     1 

Soldiers: Ghost Valley   1 

Soldiers: Window of Heaven   1  

Fanvids

Under the Sea

Pour Some Sugar

Gifs and Memes and Other Stuff

Wen Kexing Waking Up 

Cao Weining explaining romantic love to Gu Xiang

Zhou Zishu asks the wrong question 

Breathless 

Mouth Skills 

Wei Wuxian & Wen Kexing 

Fic Prompt

Professional Dumbasses

Unaltered Screen Cap

Reincarnation theory (spoiler!)

A Friend of the Bosom (clip from Rebecca)

Heather Has Two Daddies

WOH as Psychology Today Articles Part 1 | Part 2

Picrew Hug Maker

Happy Camp Pink Powder Antics 1 | 2 | 3 

Happy Camp Tongue Skills

Child actor Li Zhen Zhen 

How Did You Express the Pain...? (spoilers for NIF, WOH, CQL)

Thirst (Gong Jun)

Crueller than my Master

Thirst (ZZS)

Zhou Zishu in Other Stuff

Crossover AU Writing Prompt

Cosmetics 

Warning: Self-Whump

Hands of a Killer

Yawning and stretching

Shoulder blades

How did you discover that you were soulmates?

In-Show Advertising

Memorable Scene, Episode 28

Wolong Daily Nuts

The Jingshi makes an appearance

Pain in pubic region

Thoughts/Meta

Shaving + Fake Stubble 

Peak Intimacy

The Afterlife

[theevangelion]

Soulmates: Chapter XXVII

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26)

Months had passed.

The time did to her what it was always going to do. It got harder, everything and nothing, to catch her breath on the stairs, to find the energy to open the highlighter palette and care about those things. She did, but not because she cared all that much anymore. Cat went through the motions because it kept her entirely her own creature.

The cells were dividing uncontrollably, spreading, taking up the real estate of healthy tissue, but it couldn’t metastasise through the grit of who she felt to be as a person. Cat felt that so long as she painted her nails, kept moving her hair in certain ways, caring about things that no longer mattered, then she wasn’t losing any fights worth talking about.

Time at home became sporadic and rarer, but the room at the hospital had the view, and when she opened her eyes from sudden little bouts of sleep, the sight of the city took her with a certain fondness.

Catherine Grant had conquered something far bigger than this battle.

So what if she was losing?

If she felt grateful for anything then it was Kara’s lack of fuss and dramatics. Cat had imagined it, felt it to be a certainty, that the longer time went by doing what time was always going to do, Kara would somehow devolve and find herself in worser straits than she was this time last year.

Today Cat awoke to soft bristles on her cheeks.

“Lips,” Kara instructed as though it were nothing. “There we go. Figured I would save you a job.” She capped the lipstick and put it back in Cat’s purse.

“Thanks,” Cat rubbed her lips.

“Which dress?” Kara showed her a centre fold in a wedding brochure. “Well, not one of these specifically, but which neckline? Which style?”

“None of them.” Cat adjusted herself in the pillows and pushed up. She looked to the side, then the other side, patting around. A moment later, Kara handed her glasses almost automatically. Cat put them on and looked closer. “These are too much for you.”

“Not to be arrogant but I am marrying Lena Luthor,” Kara murmured.

“Not price.” Cat struck her arm with the magazine as though she were an idiot. “It’s too much lace, too much fabric. You don’t want to walk down the aisle on your wedding day feeling like the dress is wearing you—it needs to be simple.”

“Simple like…?” Kara waited for an example.

“Pass me my phone.” Kara did as she was told. It took a few moments, typing, scrolling, finding something that she had already looked at but didn’t want to tell Kara that part. “Here, something like this.”

When Kara took the phone and looked at the screen. Cat watched her expression, analysed it, hoping for something positive, unbothered if it was a frown. She knew her taste was the right taste. Whether Kara agreed was largely irrelevant. Her wedding day—her ugly dress.

“Cat this is beautiful,” Kara whispered.

The dress was vanilla silk, calf-length, quite plain with thin straps, but it had rouging—folds of fabric slightly off-centre at the waist—that drew in the shape and brought attention to the right dips, modest, yet showing off the curve of hips on the model.

In Cat’s mind she imagined Kara wearing the dress, with a very small and clean bouquet of pink flowers, rose gold simple bangle and matching earrings, with small drop diamonds—or maybe white flowers and dark sapphire earrings. Cat ran through different variations, different ideas of Kara on her wedding day, though none of them felt as though she were imagining herself at the alter too.

Cat was thinking about it purely because it mattered to Kara.

Her taste was the best taste when it came to such things.

“The designer has a store a few blocks from here.” Kara’s eyes went wide as she noticed. “I’ll have to call. See if I can get an appointment, what are you doing—” Cat was already pulling herself out of bed.

“What do you think I’m doing?” Cat quirked her brow and pulled out the canula. “Pick your dumb face up off the floor and pass me something to wear.”

Kara didn’t fight or argue, it felt as though they were passed all of that now. She just sighed and rolled her eyes, went along with it anyway, biting and annoyed yet still driving the car while Cat reeled off directions from her phone.

Lena Luthor’s fiancé or not, Kara would never get a priority appointment with a designer like this. Catherine Grant had keys to locked doors in the city. Cat knew it but didn’t say anything, partly because she was being nice, partly because…

She wanted to see Kara in the dress.

She was glad for it.

An hour later, Kara was wide-eyed and staring at herself in the mirror. She had the look on her face, the way Cat imagined she had the look on her face when she tried on that navy blue dress for the gala. Kara looked at herself as though she were beautiful, objectively, in a way she could believe, in a way she could see with her own two eyes.

Cat was inclined to agree.

In her heart, there were so many different versions of herself, and they were persistent but not constant. Cat looked at Kara, and in Cat’s heart there was a twenty-five-year-old version of herself feeling things and thinking thoughts that bore no sense in this reality. Cat didn’t force them away or shove them out this time. She just smiled, did the right thing, and told Kara how well it suited her.

“Can I—” Kara looked between the store assistants. “Can we put this on hold? I’ll call my fiancé and see what she thinks. We could come by this weekend and purchase it.”

Without meaning to, Kara showed herself to be the wrong kind of clientele. The assistants were polite and nice, agreeing, nodding, but they wouldn’t hold a dress like this. People who could afford to buy dresses like this didn’t need to convene and think it over.

“We’ll take it.” Cat produced her card.

“Cat don’t do that.”

“In wax paper, not a bag.” Cat made specifications and took over. “What shoes do you have in the shade? No. Those ones are closed toe—it’s a spring wedding.”

“Cat,” Kara bristled under her breath and looked uncomfortable. “It’s fourteen thousand dollars.”

“Mhm.”

“Cat!” Kara bristled.

“Shut up,” Cat said softly and signed the purchase. “Shut up. Stop, be quiet.”

It was something and it was nothing.

She had seen her soulmate in her wedding dress, one that she paid for.

She knew she wouldn't be there for the day.

[neocatharsis]

NCT Dream Is All Grown Up and Ready to Show What They Can Do

On a warm, late summer evening of 2016 in Seoul, South Korea, seven boys hoverboarded right into the most defining experience of their youth. Mark, Renjun, Jeno, Haechan, Jaemin, Chenle, and Jisung, then aged 17 to 14 years old, were making their debut as NCT Dream — a subunit focused on the youngest forces of SM Entertainment’s mega-group NCT. Their first title track, “Chewing Gum,” was as bubbly as its name, with choreography that required nimble maneuvers on the two-wheeled vehicle.

Fast forward nearly five years, and the Dreamies — as they are commonly known — are ready to cross another major threshold in their lives. Their highly-anticipated, 1.7 million-seller first studio album, Hot Sauce, is out today (May 10).

A few days before that, the members huddled together for a conversation with Teen Vogue via Zoom. Clad in black hoodies, face masks, and a few bucket hats, the initial impression is a striking contrast to the vivid atmosphere of their bright, cartoonish teasers for this promo cycle. Rather, this is NCT Dream in the blue hour, right at that moment of transition between the haze of preparations and the awakened reality of their most prominent comeback so far.

“We haven’t even started the actual promotions yet, but just from receiving this much love and support from our fans, we feel very touched, very, very inspired and supported,” says leader and eldest member Mark. Today, he’s wearing a pair of round glasses that complement his laidback, chill nature, while his expressive hands ruffle through his ocean blue hair, settling across his chest in an embrace. “We’re just focusing on how we can return the love that we received from them through our music.”

To say NCT Dream have grown — in all competencies — is not only obvious, but a meager understatement. Through their four EPs, the hoverboards became cardboard cars, then bikes, then motorcycles. Voices deepened, limbs grew longer, jawlines became sharper. And with all that, a number of accolades and records followed. Hot Sauce is currently the best-selling album among all releases from SM Entertainment. And out of all four current NCT units, the Dreamies were the first to receive a music show win, for 2017’s single “My First and Last,” and the first no. 1 on Korea’s largest music chart, Melon, with 2020’s “Ridin.” They received numerous prizes in Korean award shows, collaborated with English singer HRVY, released a single with American boy band Prettymuch, and also became global ambassadors of the World Scout Foundation in 2019 (an experience that culminated in viral mosh pits during the 24th World Scout Jamboree in West Virginia).

“When we debuted as teens, a lot of our music was very bright and cheerful, and that went with our age,” says the lavender-haired Jisung, who is the youngest of the group at 19. Although they are still the same endearing rascals off stage — the most chaotic footvolley game ever comes to mind — they have now “transitioned through all these phases, and with each of them we were able to show a higher level of maturity,” he adds.

In that way, Hot Sauce is their most seasoned effort yet. “We wanted to show NCT Dream’s charms through this ‘hot sauce’ vibe,” says the suave Jaemin, whose attentive eyes remain locked on the screen for most of the interview. “We have a showcase coming up where we plan to show a lot of our b-side tracks for the fans, so we’re very excited for that.” According to Haechan, the resident ray-of-sunshine of the group and owner of one of the most unique vocal colors of K-pop, they prepared a long time for this moment, and want to “show off that spicy side.”

Show off might be the best word choice indeed, as NCT Dream has dabbled with fire plenty of times before in their discography. Think of the rubbery, sticky synths of 2018’s “Drippin’” and its lyrics about a soaking wet love, or the dangerous atmosphere in 2019’s “119,” where they call themselves “twisted” and say “I like it like that.” In Hot Sauce, what was once un condimento is now a full course meal.

The album stimulates the eyes through the psychedelic TV ad-meets-taquería of the “Hot Sauce” music video, the nostalgic ‘90s photography of the teasers, the zany illustrations of the album packaging. For the ears, a 10-track collection of scorching pop with Latin and Afrobeat-inspired sounds (“Hot Sauce,” “Rocket”) and trap and hip hop — “Diggity”, “Countdown (3, 2, 1)”, “ANL” — but also soothing balms like the soft rock of “Dive Into You” and the crystalline vocals of “Rainbow,” a track co-written by Mark, Jeno, Jaemin, and Jisung, where they express “words we want to tell our fans,” according to Shanghai-born star Chenle.

That is because the Dreamies have a special reverence for Dreamzens, their fans. If it wasn’t for their support, the group’s fate could look much different now. Although it might seem counterintuitive in hindsight, the original concept for NCT Dream was to be a rotational unit. Members would “graduate” once they reached 20 years old in Korea (19 internationally), and younger, fresher faces would be added to the ensemble. It can be said that NCT Dream embodied the core concept of NCT as a whole: they held the promise of youth, its shifting nature, and the willingness to dream. But to come of age on screen and experience such foundational moments of life together begets a lingering bond — a transformation that can’t be nullified so easily.

In December 2018, Mark was the first to leave — and the last.

Dreamzens knew how special the original lineup (dubbed 7DREAM until today) was, and stood by his return and the establishment of a fixed unit. In 2020, they rejoiced as SM Entertainment finally decided to scrap the graduation concept altogether and announce Mark’s return. Hot Sauce is their first comeback since this news. “When I heard that I was coming back, I realized how big of an opportunity this could be,” says Mark. “And not only that, but to be able to be part of our first full-length album, I felt like I was lucking [out]. It all comes with the timing and everything, so, from all angles, I felt like the world helped out on this, and that our fans helped out a lot too.”

The members are thankful for his return, too. “I like the members the most!” exclaims Chenle when asked about his favorite part of the comeback. At one point in the conversation, Haechan grabs Mark’s hand and dramatically declares, in English: “Mark, you are very special. NCT Dream means Mark.” He looks at the screen to make sure this moment is being registered. Flustered, Mark quickly pulls away and laughs it off as Jisung chimes in. “All the members have their own uniqueness, their own specialties, that’s the charm of NCT Dream.”

Soft-spoken Renjun, whose half-platinum, half-black locks are hidden underneath a beige cap, explains that he and his bandmates didn’t think much about the impending graduation when they debuted. “Especially because it was the [original] system for NCT groups, we just accepted that fact,” Renjun says. “But now that NCT Dream is fixed, there’s a lot of enthusiasm to come up with new concepts and ideas, and we’re very excited to show them.”

Jeno, whose sweet-eyed smile contrasts with his commanding rap and dance skills, says that they went through a lot of lessons and experiences since debut, but that the greatest one was “learning what we’re able to do and show in our stages, and through that, finding ways to connect with our fans and make sure they enjoy it.” After all, as Chenle adds, NCT Dream means “being able to dream the same dreams with our members and our fans.”

For now, they are ready to bask in the flavorful glory of this era, and all the outcomes it will bring. “One of our goals when we debuted was to bring happiness and healing to people’s lives, and we do feel like we were able to achieve that,” says Renjun.

“Our fans witnessed it all from the start. We grew together, so now it’s time to show what it is like with NCT Dream being adults,” adds Mark. “We can be a perfect example of what growth and development look like.”

© Teen Vogue

[bangchanstudio]

my roommate is a ghost | han jisung (ch. 2)

pairing: han jisung x reader (fem)

genre: college;au, parallel universe??

tw: mild nudity, mild talk of death, ghosts, cursing

word count: 1,360

writer’s note: so i guess i was a little more inspired lol 2 chapters in one night! sorry if it’s still a little bland, its hard to get the bases down lol please let me know if you like it!

plot: you had a bad habit of seeing ghosts. sometimes they were scary, sometimes they were rude, but hardly were they ever cute. one day as you were getting ready for class you walked in on your roommate showering… except you didn’t have a roommate. and he wasn’t exactly a ghost. (loosely inspired by the webtoon Freaking Romance by Snailords)

[10:55pm]

ghost han jisung was sitting cross legged in the middle of your small couch while you paced back and forth nibbling on your thumb. this can’t be right, you insisted in your head mumbling mindlessly the thoughts running through your skull. if he was a ghost why didn’t he disappear when you slapped him? he didn’t even disappear the second time you slapped him when aelin left for hana’s either.. you stopped abruptly turning to face ghost han jisung, the sudden movement making his eyes go slightly wide as he flinched back. safe to say he wouldn’t be messing with you, though you did feel bad for slapping him... twice.

“how old are you?”

jisung tilted his head curiously before responding, “19, you?”

“19″ you mumbled before going back to pacing. “so, just to be clear, you’re not dead?”

“how many times are you going to ask me that? I am not dead. I’m sure i would have remembered such a traumatic life event”

you waved a hand dismissively, “you say that but explain how you disappeared this morning? I was waiting for you to come out of the bathroom but you never did. and when i went to go check on you, you were gone. just- vanished into thin air. like a ghost.”

“I don’t know how to explain it either. I woke up at 6:15am, got in the shower, washed my hair, scrubbed my body, brushed my teeth and that’s when you so rudely walked in on me. i never left my dorm.” he crossed his arms, his biceps distracting you a bit. pull yourself together, you can’t crush on a ghost, that’s all kinds of weird.

“okay, so let’s say you’re not dead. what year is it?” there has to be some logical explanation to all of this.

“2020″ jisung answered, “this is columbia university, weather today was partly cloudy 87 degrees, a small earthquake hit cali last week, lunch in the main cafe today was chicken pasta and ceasar salad,”

everything sounded right until he said, “President Clinton spoke today at-”

“Trump, you mean?” you clarified stopping dead in your tracks.

“No... Hillary Clinton.” both of you stared waiting for the other to say sike, but neither of you broke. you moved around the small coffee table sitting on it and leaning to face jisung eye to eye, the closeness making him flatten his back into the couch.

“who is the 45th president of the united states?”

“hil-hillary clinton,” jisung stuttered blinking as if to see you more clearly. “the first female president.”

“no...” you said quietly, “donald trump is president. the first cheeto.”

jisung bursted out laughing, “did you just call donald trump a cheeto? no, he lost the race. what are you even saying?”

“I’m dead serious!” you insisted, quickly pulling up trump’s wikipidea page on your phone before showing him. jisung looked at the phone screen intently reading it before pulling out his own phone and showing you his screen.

It was a news article with the exact same date as today,

tuesday, august 18, 2020 president clinton addresses the rumors of...

“there’s no way...” you trail off. a thought suddenly occurred to you. “can i use your phone?”

jisung handed it to you and you quickly went to dial your phone number from his phone, you placed the phone to your ear hearing it ring but your phone sat idle on your lap, the screen black.

“hello?” you hung up immediately as a deep male voice answered. definitely not you.

“Here,” you said shoving your phone into jisung’s hand, “call your phone.”

“why? if you want my number you could just say so.” he said wiggling his eyebrows.

“no you dummy, i just called my phone number from yours and someone else answered.”

he nodded and dialed his number placing the call on speaker. it rung for 20 seconds before going into, “you have reached the voicemail box of Doctor Sarah Ledwi-”

jisung ended the call before saying, “so, what exactly is this suppose to mean?”

what was this suppose to mean?

[6:30am]

the blaring alarm of your phone woke you up cutting through the dark fog of whatever dreamless sleep you were in. the room was dark but someone left the bathroom light on last night and by someone it was probably jisung. you hadn’t figured much out, the only things you two were able to gather through google searches and quizzing each other was that you seemed to live in different realities. you both were alive, just not in the same dimension. jisung admitted to seeing you in his bedroom mirror during move in day last week but it was only for a second, so he chalked it up to a trick of the eyes and a hang over. but that was the first day you were seeing him. eventually jisung got up to use the bathroom and never came back, that was around 4am.

luckily for you today was your late day, lecture wasn’t until 9am, though you set your alarm early to try and have some type of decent schedule or a routine but you couldn’t help giving into sleep just a little while longer.

a little while longer ended up costing you both of your lectures as you forgot to set another alarm to wake you up, instead you were awaken by a pounding at the door.

“what the hell?” you grumbled covering one eye with your hand and squinting with the other. you tapped around the night stand looking for your glasses but the insistent pounding made you get up blindly just to shut up whoever was at the door.

“who the hell are you?” you answered, not recognizing the prick at the door. he wasn’t much taller than you, sporting black on black and a baseball cap.

“oh sorry, i didn’t realize jisung had a girl over.” he said with an australian accent. “could you let him know i finished the beat we were working on?”

wait a second... did he say jisung? no, this can’t be happening.

“who’s the 45th president of the united states?” you asked,

the guy looked at you as if you were crazy, before chuckling, “uh- hillary clinton?”

you groaned telling him you’d let jisung know before closing the door and looking at your surroundings. this definitely wasn’t your room. there was take out left on the coffee table, men’s clothes laying in the bathroom floor. there was a clock by the tv that read 12:32pm and on the desk by the window was a calendar. it had, what you assumed, was jisung’s schedule.

“lecture 1: 9:30am-10:45am, lecture 2: 11:00am-12:15pm.. he should be back soon then,” you mumbled to yourself talking a look at the other things on his desk. a midi keyboard, studio monitors, a recording microphone. was this guy some kind of soundcloud rapper or what?

since you missed your morning lectures, you were free until the afternoon your last lecture of the day being 7pm. but... how exactly were you suppose to get back? jisung doesn’t even know how he was able to go back and forth twice. you caught a glimpse of yourself in the mirror realizing you were still only in a towel from last night. the both of you had been so caught up in the mystery of what was happening that it never occurred to you to put some clothes on, and fuck that’s how you answered the door just now.

*beep, beep, beep, beep, click*

you turned as jisung walked in with another guy trailing behind him. they were laughing about something but jisung gasped as he saw you standing there... in a towel.

“Sorry mate, but you can’t come in I- uh,” Jisung fumbled for an excuse as he shoved his friend out the door.

“Ohh, you didn’t tell me you had a girl over, now i know who caused those bags under your ey-” he shut the door on him mid sentence before turning back to you and running his hand through his hair.

you pulled at a black supreme tshirt he had in his closet, “mind if I borrow this?”

[thebiasrekkers]

Make It Right [BTS Mafia AU]

Plot: “It’s always darkest before the dawn…” It’s a dog-eat-dog world in Seoul, South Korea. One has to dwell in the shadows in order to reach for the light. What are you willing to sacrifice in order to feel the sunlight on your face? What will it take to drag you back into darkness? How long will the journey be to make it right?

Rating: NC-17 // NSFW

Genre: Series | Mafia!AU | Crime!AU | Angst | Romance/Fluff | Smut

Pairings: Jin x OC | Taehyung/Hoseok x OC | Yoongi/Jungkook x OC

Warnings: Graphic Violence (bloody violence), Heavy Language, Angst, Slow Burn, Smut

Previous Chapters: Prologue 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

Links: FAQ || BTS Masterlist || Admin E’s AO3 || Admin E’s WP || [ REQUESTS ARE OPEN ]

Word Count: 3,498

Tag List: @prisczero, @pinkpjmin, @btsaudge, @flowerwrites06, @unoriginal-username15432, @halussali, @shrimpmsg, @ggukkieland​

AN: I have nothing. Nothing except for...I’m sorry... T_T

Chapter 58: Killer

“I’m not Buddha but I’m a butcher. I’ll cut away your skin like a...”

© thebiasrekkers (Admin E). All rights reserved. Reposting/modifying our work is prohibited. Translations are not allowed. Plagiarism/stealing is not tolerated by any means. Legal action will be taken in instances of theft.

Namjoon slowly slid the black cotton mask from his mouth and nose, waiting in the shadows of an alcove outside of the building. The small group of men he had with him, former Golden Jackals, huddled in the darkness. They were able to overtake the side entrance hours ago, before the crack of dawn. He made sure that no one of merit within the Jade Fangs would approach the designated area. Even if they did, Namjoon would have made it a point to subdue them completely. He would leave their bodies for the crows out in the muddy fields if he had his way.

But no, this was the moment where they would turn the tides. This was the beginning of the end.

We finish this today…

Lifting a cigarette to his lips, the orange glow of the flame licked at the end of the stick as a light crackling sound emitted itself from the contact. A few hushed conversations were going on beside him, to which he vaguely tuned in. They were out to prove themselves to the fallen brothers and sisters still imprisoned in the world they were forced to live in when adventuring into the light. But it was a life they deserved; a life they fought so hard for. Whether they lived or died after today, it would all be relevant to their future.

Pulling out his watch, Namjoon immediately flipped open the latch that covered the face. He was old-fashioned, so to speak, and a bit of a sentimentalist. Jimin teased him once about still carrying a pocket watch in this day and age, but how could he let it go?

It was a graduation gift Jungkook bought for him just before he moved to attend University in Seoul.

Time seemingly crawled; all of them were prepared to launch their first assault against the Jade Fangs. Namjoon already planned to be the first to cause the strike. He would need to ensure that the blast counted for something, otherwise it was all just going to get mucked up in the end. He would not have any screw-ups. Not while he was in charge of the first wave. Their offense was cut in half with Jungkook and Jimin pulled from the equation.

Pulling his ball cap down further on his head, he slipped the watch back into his pocket. Namjoon took one final drag of his cigarette, the smoke cloud billowing in his face and partially clouding his vision. However, in the shadows it seemed as if he were a dragon on the verge of breathing out a tremendous vortex of flame. One of the men approached him, nodding quickly. Namjoon grinned, his eyes narrowing slightly.

The gas line had successfully been cut.

“It’s time,” he said, his voice deep and commanding.

In sync, all of them slipped their masks over their faces. The cigarette fell to his feet and sparked with the faint light of its embers before finally dying out altogether. They could hear the approaching footsteps growing in time and Namjoon pulled out his hunting knives. As soon as they were in the right position, he disappeared and then reappeared at the front of the room which was in full view of the four different ways that many of the others could enter what was now to be viewed as their battlefield.

Now he had to wait for the show to truly begin.

Yoongi and his team were situated near the back of the factory, hiding in the thick brushes and reeds that were in desperate need of attention and care. Changkyun felt it wasn’t time to tidy up the landscape and that allowed for the perfect amount of camouflage. Namjoon already texted him earlier, telling him that he was in position with his team. Taehyung and his group were hidden within the factory, away from prying eyes. Once all the pieces were lined up, it would be his job to tip the first domino.

He couldn’t fucking wait.

Yoongi felt a dark smirk pulling at the corners of his mouth. To think they’d spent the better part of three days planning this out. It almost seemed far fetched and he would never have gone along with something like this. Not until Namjoon convinced him just how solid this counterattack would be. Because they were using Changkyun’s ego against him. He may have broken them by taking their brothers from them and left them feeling demoralized from how thoroughly they’d been ruined. But what Changkyun failed to see was the very thing Hoseok kept hidden away from the Jade Fangs all these years. The thing that he made sure they all kept hidden from them.

Their very own malicious nature.

He felt a buzzing in his pocket and he pulled out his phone, eyeballing the screen. It was time for him to make his move. Slipping out from his hiding spot, he made a point to make as much noise as possible. He wanted to be found. He wanted his path impeded.

His men would remain hidden.

The shuffling of feet reached Yoongi and he was soon surrounded in a semi-circle by Jade Fang lackeys. Pushing his way through the small throng was Kihyun, a curious expression painted over his features. Yoongi pulled out a cigarette and lit the end, slipping the lighter into his pocket. He watched Kihyun place himself in front of him, his back to the window of the factory.

“You should really quit while you’re ahead, Yoongi-ah,” said Kihyun, a baseball bat draped over his shoulder, “those things’ll kill you.”

“My smoking habits should be the least of your concerns,” he replied, cigarette poking out from between his lips.

Kihyun laughed, shaking his dark chestnut bangs out of his eyes. “I thought the meeting agreement was for Hoseok to come. Why are you here?”

Yoongi scoffed. “Did you really think, after everything you guys have done, that we’d trust Hoseok to come here alone with just one of us?”

“And let me guess…” He watched Kihyun as he took a step forward. “…you’re watching the back in case we try to do something underhanded?”

“Nope.”

He tried not to relish in the frown that Kihyun gave him. The heavy thudding of his heartbeat only elevated the adrenaline pumping through his veins. Every square inch of him felt as cold as ice. But he could feel the fire pouring from his eyes.

Yoongi looked at Kihyun, his eyes shifting ever so slightly to the left. He saw the window slowly opening – silent. He would thank Taehyung later for oiling all the windows and doors on every side of the warehouse except for the front.

He pulled the cigarette from his lips, blowing smoke at Kihyun. Flashing his gummy smile, his eyes narrowed as he tilted his head back slightly.

“I’m in the back so I can blow it up.”

And with a quick flick of his wrist, Yoongi threw the cigarette through the open window.

The explosion that soon followed knocked them all back.

Taehyung’s back hurt.

He’d been perched in the rafters for hours – having arrived at the factory long before anyone else appeared. There was an almost methodical madness to how carefully he oiled all the door hinges and window panes that didn’t come from the front of the warehouse. He was wired from both adrenaline and caffeine, knowing full well that today would be the day that everything would end. He knew his brothers were on edge, both from the planning and from the unpredictable nature that he exuded constantly.

But he had to be. Taehyung knew that if they knew what truly ticked around in his mind, they would do everything in their power to keep him from coming along. They would have left him behind.

And he’d be damned if that happened.

There was a single skylight in the factory situated dead in the center of the roof. Taehyung’s team already made short work of the lackeys that tried to come to the roof earlier that morning. No upper tiered members of the Jade Fangs were on rooftop duty. Taehyung already made a mental note of where everyone else was.

Hyungwon and Jooheon were patrolling the left side of the building; the side where Namjoon and his team were. One of Taehyung’s team was already deep inside of the factory, following the blueprint that Namjoon gave him, taking him straight to where the main gas line was. Once he finished cutting the line, he was to head to the boiler room.

Kihyun and Minhyuk supervised the back side of the factory, in case they were flanked. Yoongi was there with his group. He was the “gunshot” that would start the race. He was the only one who would be able to catch them off guard. Besides, he knew that Yoongi was also a bit of a pyromaniac and wouldn’t have been satisfied if he wasn’t the one to set off the explosion.

Which left Shownu, Wonho and Changkyun on the inside. Hoseok and Seokjin were sent in not as bait, but as a distraction. Then it would be time to bring the entire building down on top of their heads. Blood would be spilt. Lives would be lost.

Taehyung would eviscerate them all.

The building shook violently, causing Taehyung to grip onto the metal rafters. He leaned forward; one knee pressed into the beam beneath him. Shouts of confusion were heard from below him and he flashed a manic grin where no one could have the pleasure to see. Screams of pain resounded as glass shattered from below, his eyes searching for Seokjin. He was already making his way around a set of crates, having swiftly dispatched several Jade Fang members during all the chaos.

More glass broke and metal doors were slammed wide open. Dozens of Golden Jackal members flooded the factory, tangling themselves in a fight. The glass covering from the skylight also shattered, raining down into the factory. Several ropes dropped from the ceiling and Taehyung stood to his full height as his team descended from the open hatch. Some dropped to the ground while others swung from their ropes, landing on top of unsuspecting lackeys. Blood spewed as knives plunged into bodies from both sides.

Taehyung ran, jumping out as far as he could and stretching his arms out. He grasped onto a rope, swinging around until his leather gloved hands allowed him to slide down. He shoved his body around, changing his trajectory in mid-air so he was heading straight for the manager’s office.

His legs extended out as he watched Shownu scrambling to his feet. Taehyung crashed his heels directly into Shownu’s chest, knocking him back. As he straddled the older man’s hips, he quickly unsheathed the large hunting knife from his back – aiming it straight for Shownu’s chest.

He grunted when Shownu used his arms to block the blow – their forearms crashing into one another. Taehyung’s arms shook violently as he tried to force them down, watching the blade getting closer and closer to Shownu’s throat. He could feel the capillaries in his eyes exploding, his vision blurring momentarily, before a scream erupted from his lungs.

Releasing one hand from the hilt of the knife, Taehyung punched furiously at Shownu’s rib cage. The older man attempted a counterattack, using his knee to slam into Taehyung’s back. The force of the blow caused him to fall forward and he felt Shownu’s fingers closing in around his throat. Taehyung continued to punch him even as he felt the air being choked from him.

He punched him one more time, using his fingers to dig into Shownu’s side. He buried them, like he was digging through mud for shells. He twisted his fingers and pulled, tearing through the fabric of the other man’s shirt.

Turning his head and leaning forward, Taehyung snapped his teeth into Shownu’s knuckles. He bit through the skin, blood spraying into his mouth. The older man screamed but he could barely hear it over the noise of battle being waged all around them. He pulled his hand from Shownu’s side, gripped his other hand, and put all his weight down.

The blade slowly buried itself into Shownu’s chest.

Hoseok’s knee crashed into the ground as Changkyun struggled to maintain his own footing. The two men glared at each other just as the noises from outside became more and more prevalent. Hoseok smirked as he saw Changkyun race to the window, peering out to the factory floor below. He managed to get back onto his feet just as the Jade Fang’s leader turned to glance over his shoulder at him. Hoseok took pleasure in seeing the snarl forming on the man’s face.

“You,” he snapped, turning around to face him again.

Hoseok dusted off the backs of his pants, his arms going up into a defensive stance as his hands curled into fists. “Yes. Me.”

Changkyun quickly raced to the other side of the room, his hand sliding under the table. Hoseok narrowed his eyes when he next turned around, a knife held in his hand. He scoffed. Maybe he would have been surprised if Taehyung hadn’t already told him what was hidden there.

“So, you expected me to come unarmed, but then have a knife hidden away?” Hoseok shook his head. “I’m so fuckin’ disappointed in you right now.”

“Shut-up!”

Changkyun ran at him, his arm striking out to slash at Hoseok’s neck. But he was faster because he was thinking clearly. He wasn’t about to let anyone stop him from accomplishing what he wanted to do on this day.

He dodged, side-stepping Changkyun at the last second. Reaching up to his lips, Hoseok pulled out the small razor he had hidden in his mouth. Ducking the next blow, he slung his arm upward and slashed over where Changkyun’s right eye was. A stream of blood sprayed and Changkyun moved to cover one hand over his eye as a trail of crimson leaked from beneath his palm.

Dropping the razor, he closed the distance between them as Changkyun attempted another assault. But with his depth-perception thrown off, he swung blindly. Hoseok slammed his elbow into his chest, aiming a backfist to his throat, and used his other hand to quickly disarm him. Before the knife could fall to the floor, Hoseok was already snatching it out of the air.

Spinning around on his back heel, he roughly slammed his back into Changkyun’s chest – forcing his body to bang against the door. Hoseok pulled his arms forward, then swung them back. A sickening squelch noise followed as he plunged the knife directly into Changkyun’s gut. He felt the younger man struggling against him, but he put all his weight backward – his shoulder blades pressing into his chest so that Changkyun wouldn’t be able to wriggle himself free.

“H-Hyung,” he heard Changkyun choke out, his hand reaching out to grasp onto Hoseok’s shoulder, “don’t do this. We…we can help each other…”

Taking a step back, Hoseok buried the knife further into Changkyun’s stomach – watching the blood forming a small puddle by his feet.

“…you can fucking die is what you can do.”

Seokjin swore under his breath, eyeballing the small cut on his leg. He hadn’t meant to get caught off guard, but there was so much happening around him. Things got less hairy when Namjoon’s team managed to make it inside. Even in the middle of all the craziness, Seokjin was glad they weren’t having to deal with guns. This would have ended bloodier than it needed to.

His eyes darted in every direction and he barked orders when he needed to as Taehyung’s team swept down from the ceiling. Namjoon was in the thick of it with his people and some of Yoongi’s squad managed to make it inside. There was a hint of worry when he hadn’t been able to locate Yoongi, but he knew he had to trust his brothers to be able to take care of themselves.

If he couldn’t at least do that, then what good was their bond?

The door to the manager’s office flew open, the loud bang rattling throughout all the noise of the fighting. Seokjin’s eyes followed the sound and he breathed a sigh of relief when he saw Hoseok stumbling out of the door. He nearly tripped on something, seeing Taehyung catching Hoseok at the last second before he could fall. The two of them exchanged words before Taehyung jumped from the catwalk, his arms grabbing for the ropes so he could swing down to the main floor to join the fight. From what Seokjin could tell, Hoseok hadn’t sustained any injuries.

There was movement in Hoseok’s blind spot. Seokjin wasn’t sure if it was one of their people or a Jade Fang member. Not until the very last second.

“HOSEOK-AH!”

Their eyes locked momentarily, but there wasn’t any time. Running from his hiding spot, Seokjin scooped up a discarded knife. He slid to the center of the bottom floor and flung his arm out and upward. Hoseok jumped out of the way just as the knife buried itself in Changkyun’s throat. They watched the Jade Fang’s leader fall backward, presuming that he would not be getting up a second time.

A grateful smile passed over Hoseok’s lips, but soon snapped to surprise as he looked back at Seokjin.

“HYUNG!”

Suddenly, Seokjin felt his body flung to the side. His head hit the ground and the rest of him followed suit. The pain erupted seconds afterwards, his hand reaching up to grasp at the area where his nerves were screaming at him. Fingers caressed something cold and slender. When he pulled, his pain receptors went off like alarms and he screamed, looking around at who was responsible for the assault. As he craned his neck around to see, he spied the rod-like object poking out from his side. Something dribbled from his mouth and he didn’t have to guess to know that it was his own blood.

When he searched around in desperation, his eyes locked with Minhyuk who was holding a crossbow – watching him already reloading the next bolt.

Bodies moved around him in a blur – all of them screaming and fighting for their own lives. They were distracted. None of them realized what was happening.

No one except Hoseok.

Seokjin grinned, crawling to his knees. He could hear Hoseok’s feet thudding along the metal stairs, but he knew he wouldn’t make it in time. He was ready to face this head on. However, what he hadn’t expected was Minhyuk to shift his aim.

To Hoseok.

Eyes wide, Seokjin quickly scrambled to his feet and lunged forward in Hoseok’s direction. He knew his brother wasn’t paying attention to what was going on around him. He was too focused on getting to Seokjin. But by doing so, he was putting himself in danger.

Seokjin knew he had to block his path.

It was like he could sense it. He jumped up and out to the left. Pain blossomed over his back and all feeling from his legs down seemed to disappear. He collapsed into the ground, dirt filling his nostrils, and he cried out in agony as he dug his fingers into the concrete. Soon, he could feel the texture of his own blood mixed with the dirt under his fingernails.

“HYUNG!”

Seokjin couldn’t see, but he knew it was Taehyung’s voice. He blindly reached out, grabbing for what he assumed was Taehyung’s ankle. “H-Hoseok-ah,” he choked out between coughing up blood, “…get him out of here.”

“B-But Hyung—”

“DO IT!”

He felt the ankle leaving his grasp and Seokjin prayed that Taehyung would listen to him. Hoseok had to get out of there. They all had to go. He wasn’t foolish enough to believe that he was going to make it. Not now; not when he was coughing up blood. Something was internally damaged. He was most likely hemorrhaging already.

Curling onto his side, he grasped at the bolt protruding from him and gripped onto it as hard as he could. As he pulled, visions of Anastasia flashed through his mind, giving him pause. For a moment, he forgot about the pain; he forgot about the world around him.

All he could see was the woman he loved standing in the far corner of the factory as she held their beautiful son. He stretched his arm out, reaching for them as if he could touch them. Tears leaked from his eyes as he smiled – the world blurring and getting just a little bit darker.

…I’m sorry, Ana, he thought, the weight of his arm starting to get heavier, …I’m not going to be able to keep this promise…I love you… He felt his elbow hit the concrete, followed by his head.

I’m going to see my brothers now. Forgive me…

Everything grew quiet around him.

[hovid19]

The Cops (Spencer Reid)

So I have a playlist I listen to when I’m super in my feelings and it’s a bunch of songs about love and broken hearts and all of that sappy shit. One of my personal favorite songs to listen to when I’m in the mood I’m in is The Cops by K.Flay. I suggest you give it a listen, because while it is the inspiration for this fic, it’s also just an incredible song!

This fic is very angsty and there’s like a teeny-tiny mention of smut, but nothing bad! I hope you all enjoy, because I had a lot of fun writing this one!

Word count: 2,236 words

You tried the best you could to blink away the tears forming in your eyes. Your head rested on your pillow, hands tucked under your cheek as you stared at the man sleeping next to you. He snored softly, his lips parted slightly, allowing some drool to slip down his cheek. You’d give everything to see this man like this every night and every morning and every hour in between. He was so beautiful. His hair was splayed out on the pillow below him, a mess of knots and tangles from the day before. He was lying on his back, though he was facing you, giving you the perfect angle to stare. Sure, it was creepy, but nothing you hadn’t done before. How do you not stare at something so pretty? You reached out to gingerly move a piece of his hair from his face, feeling him twitch ever-so-slightly under your soft touch. You sighed as you pulled your hand away, finally letting the tears fall down your cheeks. It would be eons before you found Spencer back in your bed again like this. Tomorrow, everything would change. The dynamic between the two of you was never going to be the same again, no matter what you tried to do or say to stop the shift. But, for now at least, he was here.

It had been 182 days since he had gotten down on one knee. The ring was absolutely gorgeous, a classic princess cut with a three carat diamond in the center. It was flawlessly crafted and you assumed it cost Spencer a fortune. Actually, you knew it cost Spencer a fortune. He’d complained to you on multiple occasions about how much money he had been spending recently, though you never presumed it had been on an engagement ring. You knew things were getting serious, but you never suspected marriage– and so soon. It had only been a year and a half. For Spencer, it was bold and daring and unlike him in so many ways. He was calculated and careful– everything planned meticulously down to the shoe laces that threaded into his Oxfords. He was never the type to jump the gun like this, but nonetheless, you were as happy as you could be given the circumstances.

You didn’t know love at first sight had existed until four years ago, when you met the man lying in blissful comatose in front of you. You had been anxious when Spencer– Dr. Reid as you knew him then– started asking you questions about one of your coworkers. You became increasingly more anxious when aforementioned coworker held a gun to your head when you were exiting the Virginia Beach Police Department. Spencer was the one to hold you while you cried that night.

But tonight, you held yourself in your own arms as you sobbed into the satin pillowcase, the cold fabric soft against your cheek. Your brain was on autopilot, shoving memories of Spencer to the forefront of your mind as you tried your hardest to just forget about him– forget about his hand on your neck as he held you close in a kiss and forget about his lips on your ear as he whispered secrets you and you only would ever hear. You took that as proof. Proof that somewhere deep down in his heart of hearts he saw you in the same way you saw him. There was intimacy in you and Spencer’s relationship you couldn’t find anywhere with anyone else. But it wasn’t blatant. No, for the two of you it was holding hands under the table and stolen glances at a friends party and make out sessions in an empty bathroom. He was risking too much for him to not feel the same fire in his heart you had whenever his contact flashed across your phone screen.

Two years ago, at 9:32PM, Spencer collapsed onto your couch in a messy, blissed-out heap. “You’ll never believe this girl, Y/N,” he had started, hands tugging at his hair in disbelief. “She’s unreal. I didn’t know a girl as perfect as her could exist.”

The sting in your chest was almost debilitating, your knuckles white from their grip on the granite counter in front of you. You were scared that if you let go, you’d collapse into a pile of tears and swears and cries for Spencer to hold you like he had done so many times before. “What’s her name?” You choked the question out, knowing the answer would puncture your heart.

“Natalie,” he sighed, his eyes staring up at the ceiling. You knew his daydreams were running wild with thoughts of her, and you could only hope you could be someone he would talk about to his friends. But you weren’t that girl. You weren’t Natalie, and you would never be. It took a lot to be good enough for Spencer. That big brain of his held only so much space for romantic feelings, and unfortunately, you hadn’t ended up as an object of his affection.

“Well, good,” you replied, finding something to keep you busy enough to stall the burn in your chest. It ached with every syllable he spoke about her. You settled on a bottle of Jameson that was hidden away in your pantry. “I’m just glad you’re happy.”

Six months after that, at 4:19 in the afternoon, Spencer texted you to tell you he had made things official with her. This pain was something new. It creeped into your throat and through your fingers, the pain coursing through every fiber in your body. You were accepting death as an inevitable outcome of this situation. You had heard of dying of a broken heart, and rolled your eyes every time at its mention. But now, sitting against the kitchen island and sobbing into your hands, you wished for the grim reaper to come take you any second and end the torture that your heart was receiving.

Three months later, at 10:47PM, Spencer had you pressed against your mattress, his lips pressing soft kisses to the exposed skin of your neck and collarbones for the first time, but definitely not the last. He had worked his way up to your ear, your legs squeezing tighter around his hips as he whispered, “we’re perfect for each other. Don’t believe anything else.” This was two hours after he had dropped Natalie off at her apartment.

It was an odd situation to catch yourself in. You felt dirty and confused and cheated, even though you weren’t really the one being cheated on. But every time Spencer slipped past the front door and into your bed, you forgot her name, as did he. But every time Spencer’s phone rang on the bedside table, you remembered, and so did he. It was one big mind game, but it was one you didn’t mind playing.

It took a couple of weeks to realize the reality of the relationship you’d found yourself in. It pained you to say that you were his back-up plan, especially when he was your first choice, but you had to face that fact early on or else your heart would split in two further than it had. At least you could have him, even if it was only part of him.

It was a Tuesday when he came over, throwing down his things quickly before pinning you to the kitchen counter. His hands grasped either side of your face, his lips attacking yours in a heated kiss. He knew you would never and could never say no to him. He used it to his advantage. “I want you,” he breathed out, lips moving to nibble the skin of your earlobe. “I want you so bad. Right here.”

You knew he had never truly wanted you. He just wanted your hunger for him, your desperation for him. He wanted you, but not all of you– not completely. You would never be wanted by him in the way you sought. “Take me, then, Spencer.”

That was how you ended up sitting on your kitchen floor, breath ragged and heavy as he zipped up his pants and left. Your lip trembled, tears escaping your eyes. You were his to use, whether you wanted to be or not. He had a way of getting in your head and knowing what to say. It was probably the profiler in him. He knew that no matter what you said, at the end of the day, you would always be his. And no matter how he made you feel and how much he used you, you would let him slip under your sheets whenever he wanted.

You could see the sun peer over the horizon as you stood at your kitchen counter, lips around a half empty bottle of Jim Beam. It was full this morning, but you needed as much distraction as you could get today. You had tried to run away from it all this time, hoping that it would go away on its own and you wouldn’t have to face the harsh, harsh truth of it all. You desperately wished you and Spencer could continue to live in the fantasy you had lived in for the past year that he had been playing both sides. Even though you both knew the casual sex would inevitably continue after today, there was just something so different about sleeping with the Spencer who had a fiancé than the Spencer who had a wife.

He came into the kitchen, arms slipping around your waist as he kissed your bare shoulder. His lips sucked on the skin and you were sure he was leaving a mark. A reminder that you were still his even if you couldn’t really be. “It’s eight thirty.” His voice was raspy.

“And?” you questioned, brining the bottle up to your lips again. “You’re getting married today.” It was a fact, a reminder and a reason. He seemed to hold onto you a bit tighter than before, just for a moment.

Silence enveloped the two of you as you stood there, getting drunker by the second. “I don’t know if I want to.”

You laughed, capping the bottle in your hands and setting in on the counter. You leaned back onto Spencer, feeling the warmth of his body around your frame. If only every morning could be like this. “Then don’t.”

“We can’t keep doing this.” At this, you turned in his arms, pressing your palm against his chest and pushing him away. He frowned, eyebrows furrowed. “What?”

“Decide what you want,” you spoke, voice quiet as your eyes flooded. “Decide exactly what you want. You know me, Spence. You know I’m going to be here no matter what. It’s up to you to choose. But either way, just know you’re hurting someone.”

He licked his lips, leaning onto the counter behind him while he thought. You were scared. Petrified, actually. God, you loved this man with everything in you. He could do absolutely no wrong in your eyes and that’s what made him so dangerous. You waited for his answer, nearly holding your breath in anticipation.

“Well?” you questioned after a moment, words biting into the air. “What do you want, Spencer?”

He sighed, dragging his hands down his face. “I want you.” The words were almost silent. “But I want her, too.”

You nodded, a tear falling down your cheek. With that, he turned and walked out of your front door. You slid down the cabinets, a sob escaping your lips. You told yourself when this started that no matter what you’d love him. Even if he didn’t choose you, even if he wrecked you, you’d never fault him for it.

By the time you had collected yourself off of the floor, Spencer was already getting dressed in the back room of the church. He stuck his hands in his pants pocket, fishing for the note you wrote him two and a half years ago, a mere months before he met Natalie. He unfolded it, reading the words as his eyes stung with fresh tears. You wrote it when he had gotten out of jail, a reminder for him to know that he always had someone on his side, even if no one else was.

Even if the cops come calling, I’ll never talk. I love you.

Maybe, he thought, he loved you too. Derek knocked on the door to the room, stepping in and looking at Spencer. He smiled sympathetically at his friend, eyes drifting to the note held in Spencer’s fingers.

“Ten minutes.”

Spencer nodded, reading the words scribbled on the paper one last time before folding it back into his pocket and wiping at his cheeks.

Maybe he loved you too. But he knew he also loved her just as much.

[newstfionline]

Wednesday, May 5, 2021

AP-NORC poll: Government should help Americans age at home (AP) A majority of Americans agree that government should help people fulfill a widely held aspiration to age in their own homes, not institutional settings, a new poll finds. There’s a surprising level of bipartisan agreement on some proposals that could help make that happen, according to the late March survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. For example, 63% favor more funding to help low-income people age at home, a policy reflected in President Joe Biden’s stimulus plan and his COVID-19 relief law. That includes about half of Republicans and about three-quarters of Democrats. Overall, only 10% are opposed. Behind it all is a deep desire among Americans to maintain their independence in an aging society.

Widespread Commodity Shortages Raise Inflation Fears (NYT) Commodity shortages are rippling across the United States economy as growing demand for housing, cars, electronics and other goods runs up against supply chain congestion and high tariffs left behind by former President Donald J. Trump. The shortages—and the price increases they are eliciting—are being watched closely by the Biden administration, which is under increasing pressure from industry groups and businesses to take steps to ease them. Automakers want the White House to help them get the semiconductors they need to make cars, while the housing industry is asking for tariff relief. Pressure to intervene could intensify as the administration pushes for a multitrillion-dollar infrastructure investment package that includes money for building roads, bridges and electric vehicle charging stations—all of which could become increasingly expensive if prices keep rising.

Heeding complaints, Biden lifts refugee cap to 62,500 (Reuters) U.S. President Joe Biden said on Monday he has resurrected a plan to raise refugee admissions this year to 62,500 after drawing a wave of criticism from supporters for initially keeping the refugee cap at a historically low level. Soon after taking office in January, Biden pledged to ramp up the program but then surprised allies when he opted to stick with the lower cap out of concern over bad optics, given the rising number of migrants crossing the U.S. southern border with Mexico, U.S. officials have said. But the refugee program is distinct from the asylum system for migrants. Refugees come from all over the world, many fleeing conflict. They undergo extensive vetting while still overseas to be cleared for entry to the United States, unlike migrants who arrive at a U.S. border and then request asylum.

New York Region to Accelerate Reopening (NYT) New York and its neighbors New Jersey and Connecticut announced on Monday that they were lifting almost all their pandemic restrictions, paving the way for a return to fuller offices and restaurants, a more vibrant nightlife and a richer array of cultural and religious gatherings for the first time in a year. The relaxation of rules starting May 19 is a testament to the fact that coronavirus cases are down and vaccination rates are rising. New York will also bring back 24-hour service to the subway on May 17, after a year of overnight closures, a move critical for night-shift workers.

Colombia protests (Foreign Policy) Mass protests in Colombia sparked by President Ivan Duque’s new tax proposals continued on Monday—a day after Duque withdrew the unpopular measures—and are expected to resume today. Finance Minister Alberto Carrasquilla tendered his resignation on Monday, saying in a statement that his presence in government would “complicate the quick and effective construction of the necessary consensus.” Although Carrasquilla’s connection with the tax reforms precipitated his fall, he had become a figure of ridicule after he failed to provide an accurate answer for the current price of a dozen eggs when questioned by local media last month.

A farmer moved the border between France and Belgium so his tractor could have more room (AP) The border between Belgium and France has been largely stable for 200 years. That is, until a Belgian farmer annoyed with the placement of one of the stones marking the storied territorial divide inadvertently shifted the border 7.5 feet so his tractor could move more easily. The Belgian village of Erquelinnes, which lies along the 390-mile border with France, had as a result grown by seven feet. The French town of Bousignies-sur-Roc in turn shed more than a few inches. The stone in question dates to 1819, one year before the signing of the Treaty of Kortrijk, which set the modern-day boundaries of the once-warring states, according to the BBC. Much has improved in relations between Belgium and France in the two centuries since Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. “We should be able to avoid a new border war,” Aurélie Welonek, the mayor of Bousignies-sur-Roc, told a French newspaper. Belgian authorities told the BBC that they will ask the farmer to move the border back. If he does not comply, they may need to seek help from the Franco-Belgian border commission, which has not been summoned since 1930.

Opposition chief calls for lockdown as India’s coronavirus cases cross 20 million (Reuters) Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi called for a nationwide lockdown as the country’s tally of coronavirus infections surged past 20 million on Tuesday, becoming the second nation after the United States to pass the grim milestone. India’s deadly second wave of infections, the world’s biggest surge in coronavirus infections, has seen it take just over four months to add 10 million cases, versus more than 10 months for its first 10 million. Currently, the country has 3.45 million active cases.

Day 1 of the End of the U.S. War in Afghanistan (NYT) KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, Afghanistan—A gray American transport plane taxied down the runway, carrying munitions, a giant flat screen television from a C.I.A. base, pallets of equipment and departing troops. It was one of several aircraft that night removing what remained of the American war from this sprawling military base in the country’s south. The United States and its NATO allies spent decades building Kandahar Airfield into a wartime city, filled with tents, operations centers, barracks, basketball courts, ammunition storage sites, aircraft hangars and at least one post office. The scenes over the weekend were almost as if a multitrillion-dollar war machine had morphed into a garage sale. At the airfield’s peak in 2010 and 2011, its famous and much derided boardwalk housed snack shops, chain restaurants, a hockey rink and trinket stores. Tens of thousands of U.S. and NATO troops were based here, and many more passed through as it became the main installation for the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan’s south. Now, half-demolished outdoor gyms and empty hangars were filled with nearly 20 years’ worth of matériel.

As Lebanese cry for justice, politics paralyzes the system (AP) Even after she was taken off an investigation into alleged financial crimes by a money transfer company, the defiant Lebanese prosecutor charged ahead. She showed up at the company’s offices outside of Beirut with a group of supporters and a metal worker, who broke open the locked gate. Ghada Aoun obtained data from Mecattaf Holding Company that she contends will reveal the identities of people who sneaked billions of dollars out of Lebanon amid the financial meltdown that has hit the country. The move was part of a public feud between Aoun and Lebanon’s state prosecutor Ghassan Oueidat, who had dismissed her from the case, saying she’d overstepped with two earlier raids. Their feud has turned into scuffles between their supporters in the street. That is the problem in Lebanon: The judiciary is so deeply politicized it paralyzes the wheels of justice, mirroring how factional rivalries have paralyzed politics. Political interference in the judiciary has for years thwarted investigations into corruption, violence and assassinations. But mistrust of the judiciary is thrown into even starker relief now, when Lebanese are crying out for politicians to be held accountable for the disastrous crises in their country—not only the financial collapse but also last August’s massive explosion in Beirut’s port that killed scores and wrecked much of the capital. The explosion has been blamed on incompetence and neglect. “Those who hold on to power have set up a judiciary that is loyal to them in order to fight their opponents and protect their interests,” retired state prosecutor Hatem Madi told The Associated Press.

Netanyahu misses deadline, political future in question (AP) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has missed a midnight deadline for putting together a new coalition government. His failure to reach an agreement late Tuesday raises the possibility that Netanyahu’s Likud party could be pushed into the opposition for the first time in 12 years. The turmoil does not mean that Netanyahu will immediately be forced out as prime minister. But he suddenly faces a serious threat to his lengthy rule. His opponents already have been holding informal talks in recent weeks to lay the groundwork for a power-sharing deal.

More than a dozen people killed by Islamist militants in northeast Nigeria (Reuters) More than a dozen people, including seven soldiers, were killed by Islamist militants in an attack in northeast Nigeria, four sources told Reuters. The militants arrived in the Ajiri community in the Mafa local government area of Borno state on motorcycles early on Sunday, killing an army commanding officer and six soldiers, the sources said. The assailants also killed six civilians, burned down nine housing blocks and carted away valuables, the sources told Reuters.

More veggies (WSJ) According to federal survey data, 76.6 percent of 51- to 70 year old women and 85.6 percent of 51- to 70-year-old men eat less than the recommended amount of vegetables. The thing is that’s actually pretty good compared to teenagers, who really need to eat some greens: fully 98.8 percent of 14- to 18-year-old girls and 98.5 percent of 14- to 18-year-old boys ate less than the recommended amount of vegetables, which is particularly bad developmentally speaking.

A good Samaritan (CNN) The 23-month-old girl who fell out of a car and into a bay Sunday after a multi-vehicle crash on a bridge in Ocean City, Maryland, is expected to make a full recovery thanks to a “humble hero” who jumped into the water to save the child, authorities said Monday. Eight people were taken to hospitals Sunday after the crash on the Route 90 bridge left a car dangling off the guardrail, authorities said. All eight were discharged from hospitals and are doing well, Ryan Whittington, firefighter and medic at Ocean City Fire Department, told CNN. Whittington said the man who saved the toddler is choosing to remain unnamed publicly. The fire department is calling him the “humble hero” for his rescue. The man was driving on the bridge, and his car was also involved in the crash, Whittington said. The drivers were pointing down to the Assawoman Bay, where he saw the girl lying in the water, face down. “He just jumped into action,” said Whittington, adding that the water in that area is about 5 feet deep, and the jump was more than 25 feet. “He saved a 23-month-old child. There’s no doubt in our mind that if he had not did what he did when he did it that we would be having a different headline to this story,” Whittington said.

[rhetorical-ink]

Rhetorical Ink Reviews: Cats 2019

Also known as, “The Movie That Nearly Broke Me.”

**PURRRRFECTLY PLACED SPOILERS BELOW**

Okay, so my best friend and I saw this film today on New Year’s Eve -- it was $5 movie day at the theater and we had heard it was bad. What a better way to cap off this year and decade, right?

To set the scene, the woman at the ticket counter commented, “I haven’t seen it, but I’ve heard mixed reviews.” Another employee said, as we were about to walk in the theater, “I heard it was pretty bad.” Votes of confidence all around, y’all. 

Little did I know what was about to happen. I could easily do a Top Twenty WTF moments of this movie....which is exactly what I’m going to do.

My Top TWENTY (because it’s needed) Thoughts on Cats the Movie: 

20. Meeting Victoria

The movie starts with a cat being dumped in an alley -- this is Victoria, a humanoid (more on that below) cat that is reluctantly approached by the rest of the alley cats. They question whether she will fit in as a “Jellicle Cat,” and we get an instant music number where they describe all of the traits of a Jellicle Cat, which we can assume is their “Group” or “Tribe.” The only point that is slightly odd is that their “traits” that define a Jellicle Cat...are basically traits of all cats. Is this group just unaware? Is this a cult? More. On. This. Be-Low.

19. Munkustrap 

So, my favorite cat in this whole thing is Munkustrap -- or rather, the actor playing Munkustrap. Seriously, this man is giving 10000% and after researching, you find out he is a Tony-nominated ballet dancer --- IT MAKES SENSE. If you can get a chance to watch this -- watch his movement and facial expressions in every scene. The man is clawing up the scenery and his intensity is terrifying. 

18. And Then...There’s Rebel Wilson.

Okay, speaking of terrifying. About 10 minutes into the movie, we’re introduced to Rebel Wilson. If you’ve watched the trailers and seen her -- those are the TAME scenes. Seriously, my friend and I were questioning whether this film was okay or bad, and then...Rebel Wilson is introduced. 

Her musical number made me say out loud, “WTF” about seven times. There is nothing I can do to prepare you for animated mice with children faces or cockroaches with female faces who are being eaten alive by a furry Rebel Wilson. If people walked out at this point, I would not have blamed them 1%. 

17. James Corden and Rebel Wilson Don’t Fit In This Movie.

In all fairness, much of the cast are ballet or dancers and Broadway voices -- which is great for a musical. James Corden and Rebel Wilson completely throw off the tone of the film. Their jokes are not humorous, and both characters rely on self-deprecation...their scenes are probably among the strangest in the film, and completely ruin the tone of the film as it goes.

16. Jason Derulo Had His Genitals Digitally Removed. 

So, I read a headline last week with that information leaked, and that clung to my mind the entire time Derulo sings as his character, Rum Tug Tugger...to be fair, he is a great voice and his song was catchy. But... once you know, you won’t get that image out of your mind as you watch. 

15. The Twins are Creepy...and Boring.

Victoria stumbles upon two twin calico cats that mischievously rummage around a house -- before stirring up the house dog and abandoning Victoria. Their song isn’t bad -- it’s almost catchy -- but the scene goes on sooooo long, that it’s probably the only music number that drags and just feels overly long. 

14. Proportions are....not a thing?

One thing you may notice in the gifs are that proportions for these cats are odd -- in the scene with the twins, Victoria holds up a gown, and it’s as big as her, but in the next shot, she is wearing a human ring as a bracelet. 

This happens throughout the movie, as the proportions are never proper. Sometimes the cats seem normal sized in comparison to the man-made props around them. And at other times, they seem the same size as humans or the size of the creepy human-faced mice. The inconsistency is instantly noticeable. 

13. Victoria doesn’t...talk...much.

I’m not sure if this is addressed in the actual Broadway production, but in the movie, Victoria rarely speaks. Perhaps she is just a voice for the audience, but most of her action in the movie is through expression and dancing alone. Which is fine, I suppose, but as a protagonist, her lack of voice creates a lack of agency, and so when she is integral to the plot of Grisabella (Jennifer Hudson’s character), it seems a little forced.

By this point, I’m sure I seem like this review is pretty tame...well, now let’s dive into the bonkers points that happen from here on out in this film, because it gets BONKERS. 

12. Judy Dench and those Toenails

As you have probably noticed in the trailer, these cats have very humanoid features -- what you probably miss is that their hands and feet are UNEDITED. Meaning, that while you’re looking at a digital cat on screen, these digital cats have HUMAN hands and feet. At one point, Judy Dench’s purple toenail polish is present -- Jennifer Hudson’s perfect plum manicure is noticeable, too -- and Judy’s wedding ring is visible in most shots. 

It really makes me question how in the WORLD these shots got into a final product -- or why they released this film if it wasn’t complete...was there a deadline to make it before the new year? This is SO distracting that it took up a lot of my time watching the film. 

11. Hands, all the human feet and hands...

Additionally, these are very humanoid cats -- I understand that the Musical on Broadway is just people in cat suits, but if you’re going to the extreme of creating entirely CGI characters --- why not make them literal cats? Instead of these weird alien-like creatures who sometimes wear clothing and sometimes are nude well, basically with a thin layer of fur on them? 

10. Ian McClellan

Similar to Munkustrap, Sir -- SIR -- Ian McClellan gives his small role 100%, even down to acting VERY cat-like throughout. He can’t sing well, though. Better than Russell Crowe, but no Judy Dench, who also hams up her performance, well, at least until the ending. 

9. Taylor Swift and the Musical Number that Actually Works

In all honesty, Taylor Swift’s musical number introducing the villain of the piece, whom we’ve seen throughout the entire production, so I’m not sure why we’re doing this, but here we are --

--ahem, anyway, her musical number is one of the best, but it’s still a mind trip, as she basically sprinkles catnip on the crew and they all start writhing on screen. 

Also, did they make her breasts larger? Is that a thing? Is it just me? 

8. MaCavity and Things I Can’t Unsee

Idris Elba plays the villainous MaCavity, who has been trying to one-by-one pick off the cats that could qualify as “chosen” by Judy Dench. His role is a basically hammy one, but it gets worse...

At the start of the movie, he has a cap and trench coat that make him look extra villainous, but as he’s revealed by Swift’s cat, he ditches these garments. 

It was hard to find a gif of this, but it’s basically a naked Idris Elba with a tail...and if you’re thinking to yourself, “Oh, that sounds hot!” No, no it is not. It was disturbing and I won’t ever be able to watch this actor without seeing him with a thin layer of fur all over him. 

7. The Magical Mr. Mistoffelees...

As you’ve probably noticed at this point, the “Plot” if it can be called that is practically non-existent in this movie. The only elements of action we get are that Macavity is trying to kidnap the other cats so he can be chosen by Judy Dench’s cat, Deuteronomy. 

Unfortunately, Dench vows not to choose him, so he kidnaps her...to...change...her mind? It doesn’t make sense, and he even threatens her life if she doesn’t pick him. If he kills her, how will that help him get picked? 

In any case, Mr. Mistoffelees, who has THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE MOVIE told everyone that he’s a “magical” cat and can do magic, is suddenly asked if he can bring Deuteronomy back through magic....and he’s NOT SURE IF HE IS CONFIDENT ENOUGH TO DO SO.

It’s such a cop out and leads to an overly long song about everyone telling him he can do magic, until he finally does the thing and brings Judy Dench back to the other Jellicle Cats. 

I don’t mind Mr. Mistoffelees’s character, but don’t tell us you’re one thing the entire movie and then “puss out” (pun absolutely intended at this point) on the very identity feature you’ve drilled into our brains. 

6. Suspension of Belief...and Physics...

In addition to the proportions being off in this entire movie, so is the suspension of physics and belief, especially after Mr. Mistoffelees brings back Deuteronomy.

You can see in the gif below that magic starts happening everywhere to celebrate (glad we’re confident of our abilities NOW) and later with Grisabella and the climax, there’s a huge shift from reality to fantasy. Movie, what ARE YOU?! 

5. Grisabella’s Plight? 

Jennifer Hudson’s cat, Grisabella, is portrayed as an outcast who comes crawling (literally) back to the Jellicle Cats...it’s not clear whether she is wanting the chance to be chosen or not. But the other cats hate her and shun her...except the newbie, Victoria. She convinces Grisabella to come back and sing to the other cats her story. Which she does, and this changes everyone’s mind, including Deuteronomy’s. 

My issue is...what did Grisabella do? Other than run off with Macavity, who never even addresses her in the movie, what did she do? Why do the cats hate her? We never really learn this, which makes it just seem like hollow bullying. And maybe that’s it, but if it is, there needed to be SOMETHING more to give us a reason to care about Grisabella and her plight in the film. 

4. “MEMMMMMORRRRIIIIEEEESSSS!!”

Okay, yes, J. Hud. can sing. REALLY, really well. And the climax of “Memories” is done well -- it’s just....not as good as Elaine Page. There. I said it -- I’ve only seen that number from the original Broadway show, but it’s true. Page knocks it out of the park. 

I think part of the problem is that the movie doesn’t let Hudson go all out -- she does that dramatic musical moment, but then her voice and the song is restrained and just peters off...you don’t hold Jennifer Hudson back in a solo, ya here?

3. Trading a Tire for a Hot Air Balloon

In the original musical, Grisabella is chosen to be reborn and rides away from the set on a tire -- which begs the question: Is this a representation that she was run over? Is that how she is “reborn?” It would be an interesting concept to think about, but here, they just fix up the chandelier (through magic, or whatever at this point) and it becomes a hot air balloon that carries her away. Any possible conversation that could be created in this moment is sacrificed for a magical deus ex machina...and I hate it.

2. Judy Dench Came For Our Souls, Y’All

The resolution of this film is what killed my brain. 

Judy Dench looks DIRECTLY into the camera,

DIRECTLY into our souls,

and proceeds to give a lengthy and unnecessary review of why cat names are important -- which really has been the thesis of this movie, hasn’t it?

There is an interjected chorus between her speaking, but seriously, this ending is longer than Return of the King -- and her looking right at us the audience only made me feel more and more uncomfortable -- to the point where I was laughing, and crying, and feeling like a puddle of mush. 

1. My Mouth During This Whole Film...

...Was agape. Seriously, this movie is not just bad; it’s unfinished, confused on its adaptation, and just bonkers. The only things that possibly work are the vocals, with the exception of McClellan, but the lyrics and premises are just so bizarre that good singing can’t save your brain being completely confused as to what it’s watching. 

If you can get a cheap seat, or go to a $5 cinema like I did, you could see this with a group of friends as a joke.

But otherwise, AVOID this. It’s the 2010′s version of The Room. 

Perhaps fun to watch as a cult film when it’s free on streaming later, but not worth the money now, sadly. 

[the-velveteen-victorian]

The Lizzie Borden Case: A List of Strange Occurrences And Happenings Worthy of Note (Part 1)

~ Tensions between Abby and Emma/Lizzie were high. Lizzie referred to Abby as a “mean good-for-nothing thing” in March of 1892.

~ The dispute between Emma/Lizzie and Abby when Andrew bought Abby’s half sister the property the sister and her husband were residing in (the sister owned half and her mother owned the other half and wanted to sell... the half-sister could not afford to buy her mother’s share), put it in Abby’s name, and allowed Abby’s half-sister and her husband to continue living there free of rent.

~ Emma promising her mother on her deathbed to take care of “Baby Lizzie”; possible grooming of Lizzie?

~ The robbery a year before the Bordens were found murdered: Money, gold, streetcar tickets, and items of sentimental value were taken in the middle of the day (none of the household members heard a sound)

~ There were food poisonings 2 nights before the murders.Swordfish left the elder Bordens with severe food poisoning and Lizzie/Bridget with mild symptoms (Emma being out of town). The night before the murders a dinner of mutton stew left the household- with the exception of Lizzie- ill again.

~ The night before the murders Lizzie visited old neighbor/friend Alice Russell and said she thought the milk was being poisoned… and felt that “somebody” was going to “do something”

~ There is also Lizzie’s alleged attempt to buy prussic acid the day before the Bordens were murdered (later there was reasonable doubt as an inspector’s wife had asked a different store for the same thing on the same date… and was said to resemble Lizzie).

~ Lizzie was supposed to be out of town during the time of the murders visiting friends. Instead she postponed it to fulfill supposed secretary-treasurer duties for the Christian Endeavor Society at a meeting on Sunday. She supposedly sent a letter explaining her decision to other members of the society… The recipient burned the letter after the murders so that Lizzie’s actions would not be misconstrued. When questioned the recipient said very little about the letter, and none of the other women in the society would talk to the police.

~ Lizzie’s relationship with her father is also on the table… She stated she sometimes had to ask 2-3 times for money or favors, but usually received what she wanted… She was dissatisfied with her lot in life (receiving a spinster’s sum of $4 a week from Andrew who in today’s world would have been worth $10 million). Lizzie attended a church higher in society with which Andrew had had a real estate dispute with years before (resulting in him renting a pew at a more “modest” church).

~ Lizzie’s frustration with not living better or being on The Hill while Andrew simply hoarded his money (neither for spending nor social recognition on his part)

~ Abby, a 5’ tall 200 lb. woman, fell upstairs when she was struck down with 19 blows. Bridget was outside washing the windows and speaking to a neighboring maid…. But why did Lizzie not hear her fall… or at the very least hear some sort of noise…?

~ Lizzie calls Dr. Seabury Bowen and ignores the fact that 2 other doctors (Dr. Kelly and Dr. Chagnon) lived on her street… This may have been due to the fact that these doctors were Catholics while the Bordens were Protestants (no previous friendliness etc.).

~ The fact that Lizzie was heard laughing as she descended the staircase when Bridget said something funny as Lizzie’s father returned to the Borden house right after Abby would have been murdered. Bridget’s testimony later lined up with Lizzie’s descent of the staircase which would have put her in the line of sight of Abby’s body in the bedroom… Lizzie initially denied being upstairs and changed her story later saying that she HAD gone upstairs but only for a “few minutes.”

~ Lizzie’s change of clothes from blue clothing to a pink dress after the murders

~ The fact that there was at least an hour between the murders of Abby and Andrew- meaning that an assassin outside the household would have had to hide during that time and find their way downstairs to murder Andrew without being seen.

~ Lizzie’s initial story that Abby was out of the house after having received a note from a sick friend

~ The fact that when Alice Russell and Adelaide Churchill were with Lizzie (after discovering Andrew and sending for Bowen), Lizzie stated that Abby might have come home early

~ No note was ever found, no one came forward to state that they had indeed sent a note to Abby, no delivery-boy stepped forward to say one had been delivered, and the fact that no one saw Abby return home after said trip out cast doubt on Lizzie’s claim. 

~ John V. Morse’s (Lizzie’s and Emma’s uncle) alibi was confirmed by a relative he was visiting and Dr. Bowen who was attending on said relative when Dr. Bowen was called back to the Borden house… It was strange that Morse was able to recall his streetcar number and the number on the streetcar conductor’s cap in such fine detail.

~ Even though Lizzie didn’t have food poisoning symptoms the night before the murders, she told Abby she wasn’t planning on having dinner the day of the murders… but during the murders she supposedly went to look for a sinker for fishing equipment in the barn (random?) and ate some pears up there that she gathered from the family’s fruit trees. She would have been in the one place that didn’t have a good view of the comings/goings of the household.

~ A convenient time for a crime as most of the police force was gone for their annual picnic near Providence, RI

~ Dr. Bowen’s protectiveness of Lizzie… even shutting the door in policemen’s faces to give her a moment to compose herself

~ Dr. Bowen’s strange burning of scraps of paper he seemed to be trying to piece back together… When asked about what he was doing he said it was a letter from his daughter. Officer Harrington, who caught a glimpse, said he saw Emma’s name on the burning paper… Dr. Bowen’s daughter’s name was Florence.

~ The pail of bloody rags that were found soaking in the wash cellar (Dr. Bowen provided a medical explanation for those)... Bridget had not noticed the pail until that day and that it could not have been there two days prior or she would have seen it as she put the contents in the wash that day.

~ Andrew Borden asked Emma to provide him with information on how she could be contacted by telegraph while she was visiting her friends… almost as if he had a sense something was going to happen.

~ Lizzie’s eerie statement after Adelaide ascended the stairs and glimpsed Abby: “O, I shall have to go to the cemetery by myself now.”

~ Lizzie’s lack of emotion while being questioned

~ Lizzie’s roundabout way of answering questions and often stating she did not understand simple questions

~ Lizzie’s last words under oath concerning a “shadowy” figure she saw lurking about the house a couple weeks before the murders; she was not able to provide specific dates or times for these sightings

~ Alice Russell said that initially Lizzie told her she went to the barn for some tin or lead to fix a window screen… not for sinkers

~ There was a testimony from a seamstress who stated that Lizzie, among other things, had said she and Emma did not usually eat with the elder Bordens... and would often wait until they were finished to go and eat themselves.

~ The warrant for Lizzie’s arrest only mentioned Andrew Borden

~ Lizzie received special treatment in her cell as her keeper was the mother of a childhood friend (Mrs. Wright).

~ The matron at the jail where Lizzie stayed prior to and during her trial overheard Emma and Lizzie talking… Lizzie allegedly said, “Emma, you’ve given me away.” Emma replied: “I only told Mr. Jennings [one of Lizzie’s lawyers] what I thought he ought to know.” Andrew Jennings finds out and tries to get the matron to sign a statement saying that she will not speak about the quarrel. She refuses and goes to City Marshall Hilliard… Hilliard advises her not to sign the statement and to wait to testify.

Andrew: Abby’s and Emma’s biological father

Abby: Emma and Lizzie’s step-mother

Emma: Lizzie’s biological sister

Bridget Sullivan (Emma and Lizzie called her Maggie): The house maid

Andrew Jennings: One of Lizzie’s lawyers

Alice Russell: An old friend and previous neighbor of the Bordens

Adelaide Churchill: Their current neighbor who first asked Lizzie after the murders: “Where were you?”

John V. Morse: Lizzie and Emma’s uncle (their deceased mother Sarah’s brother)

Dr. Seabury Bowen: A physician and neighbor of the Bordens

[daleisgreat]

15 Years of Xbox 360: Flashback Special!

I am usually timely with these, but the holidays has resulted in this 15th Anniversary of the North American launch of the Xbox 360 Flashback Special to be about a month late. The 360 was one of the first major consoles to have a near simultaneous global launch in the three major market territories. With the United States and Canada launching first on November 22, 2005, followed by Europe on December 2nd and finally Japan on December 10th with most other smaller markets over the following year. The 360 had an extraordinarily long life cycle, with it being eight years until Microsoft launched its successor, the Xbox One. I had major highs and lows with the 360 so get ready to take in my journey with the system. Like with past system specials here, I recorded podcasts based on RPG games and comic book games that released on the 360, PS3 and Wii and have embedded them at the bottom of this entry for supplementary material if you crave even more 360 games to learn about. Be forewarned, this is my lengthiest Flashback Special yet, so I have implemented bookmarks for ease of navigation you can click or press on below! With that out of the way, the last special I did here was on the PS2, and I want to begin the 360 Flashback Special the same way by expanding upon its unavoidable….. CHAPTERS Part 1 – The Hype Part 2 – The Launch Part 3 - Reinventing Dashboards with Blades & Achievements Part 4 - Revolutionizing Downloadable Games on Consoles Part 5 - An Awesome Debut Year of Games Part 6 - Upgrade to HD Part 7 - Three Red Lights Part 8 - Kinect + Avatars = Wii’s Userbase Part 9 - Backwards Compatibility & Indie Games…..not those Indie Games Part 10 - For the Love of Online Co-op Part 11 - Bringing on J-RPGs and Doubling Down on Western RPGs Part 12 - Becoming a Pinball Wizard Part 13 - Racing Away to One of the Best Eras for the Genre Part 14 - The Fad that was Plastic Instruments Part 15 - Non-Kinect Casual/Family Game Hits and the Failure that was NXE Part 16 - Wanna Wrassle? Part 17 - Sports-ball Forever! Part 18 - No Russian, No Cauldron Part 19 – Dubious Honors Part 20 - Lightning Round Quick Hits Part 21 - ”It’s an Ocean” (THE END!!!) Part 22 – You’re Still Here!? Well then…. (STINGER!!!) The Hype Microsoft garnered a lot of attention by pulling the plug on its original Xbox early because of the PS2 being an unstoppable global force, and was determined to launch its system a year before the PS3. The Dreamcast had huge success in North America for its first year by launching ahead of the PS2 a year early, so I could see where they were coming from. I covered E3 2005 for the long defunct gaming site, VGpub. I recall getting a closed door tour with a few other gaming press members for the Xbox 360 and was shuffled around to a few isolated booths that showed off the 360’s “blade” dashboard interface and went over some of the functions of the system. I recall being shown Kameo running side-by-side an unreleased build on the original Xbox to demonstrate the 360’s horsepower. 360 had a couple games playable on the show floor that year with Top Spin 2 and Need for Speed: Most Wanted. From my brief time with those two games what I took away the most was the much-improved controller being lighter, slightly more ergonomic, and the much appreciated inclusion of the shoulderbumper buttons to replace the peculiar white and black buttons from its predecessor. Of the several games I was shown and/or played from E3 2005, the one that impressed me the most was Saints Row. I walked out of that demonstration thinking it looked like the first viable open world contender to Grand Theft Auto after countless watered down GTA-clones were flooding the market. Sure enough, Saints Row did not disappoint the following year and would have three more successful sequels over the years.

Back when cable TV mattered before the dawn of streaming, this MTV reveal event delivered on building anticipation for the 360.

Microsoft’s E3 press conference, which happened in tandem with a much publicized MTV reveal event of the 360 filled with all kinds of celebrities made it impossible to avoid the 360 launch hype building up to its November launch. Then there was Microsoft’s truly extraordinary “Zero Hour” launch event in the Mojave desert to give people the opportunity to travel all the way there just to buy an Xbox. Then there was the Mountain Dew contest where they were giving away 360s every so minutes and you increased your chances to win by entering more codes on their website, and yes, I must have entered at least a 100 codes from weeks of gathering bottle caps from co-workers to no avail. All this blitz of marketing engagement made it impossible to not pay attention to the 360’s launch. I was a huge fan of the original Perfect Dark on N64, and thus was eagerly stoked for the prequel, Perfect Dark Zero which made it a day one buy for me. Amped 3 wound up as the second game I pre-ordered for launch day, and it was a solid snowboarding game, which got a significant boost from its irreverent narrative that pushed me through playing it. The Launch With my pair of launch games pre-ordered I went on to count down the days until the 360’s launch. I thought I had my launch system guaranteed on November 22nd, but last second shenanigans prevented me from buying it at the final hour, yet I was able to procure dibs on the first batch of second wave systems that hit retail three weeks later. Launch window systems came with a couple limited pack-ins in the form of a DVD remote control (yay?) and the downloadable XBLA puzzler game, Hexic HD. Hexic HD was a perfectly fine hexagonal based puzzler from Alexey Pajitnov, the same designer who invented Tetris, but I mostly played Perfect Dark Zero in those opening months of the 360. I only got about halfway through the campaign, but I played a ton of deathmatch with friends and/or solo against bots. Like the previous game, PDZ had a plethora of multiplayer options and maps and tided me by splendidly during the first months of the 360’s lifecycle.

Perfect Dark Zero and Amped 3 were my first two 360 games and both held me over nicely during those initial launch window months! Over the next few weeks I played a fair amount of launch games my friends brought over and picked up/rented a couple more. Top Spin 2 I played far more than I thought I would and wound up finishing its lengthy career mode. Call of Duty 2 was a local multiplayer hit that friends repeatedly brought over. A few years later I eventually picked up Need for Speed: Most Wanted and got immersed working my way through its “blacklist” of rival racers to vanquish. Launch title Condemned: Criminal Origins I did not start playing until recent years, and I am kicking myself for not starting it sooner as it is a trip of a suspense/thriller first person game consisting of intense hand-to-hand and melee weapon combat over traditional firearms FPS weaponry. The game is still fun to this day and I have made it a ritual to play it on Halloween for the past three or four years. Reinventing Dashboards with Blades & Achievements

Also worth highlighting here during the launch was familiarizing myself with the much-loved “blade” dashboard in the launch window. The four blades were filled with many options to separate game, videos, photos and music media. I made heavy use of custom soundtracks on the original Xbox, and loved how the 360 had support for it built into the user interface so they could be dropped into any game. Dashboard and online features on the original Xbox like friends list, voice chat, game invites and more carried over on the 360 and later evolved into so much more through system updates that introduced must-have features like Party Chat that made it so several users can voice chat together regardless of what game any of them are playing. It made catching up with family and friends on weekend game nights more manageable. The biggest hit of the UI during that launch window was Microsoft debuting achievements that were mandatory for all games. These became an instant sensation among any ardent game player when accomplishing the criteria for an achievement and hearing the endorphin-rush of a sound effect and accompanying on screen graphic that indicated you unlocked another achievement. Most of the launch window games had straightforward achievements like finishing campaign missions or getting X amount of wins in sports and racing games, but they eventually evolved and encouraged users to play games in new ways I never thought of (Crackdown was a great early example of this with its achievement design). Also the way the Blades made it easy and irresistible to compare what achievements you accomplished in a game against other people on your friends list that it only upped the friendly competition between friends to see who could unlock more achievements. It is gratifying to see Microsoft allowed each Gamertag’s linked Gamerscore to carryover from 360 to Xbox One and now Series S|X. While achievements are still around today, and I occasionally dive into going out of my way to unlock some if I am enjoying my time with a game, they do not compare to the early years of the 360 where achievement-mania was running wild. Revolutionizing Downloadable Games on Consoles

This was also the first time a major console had an online digital store implemented at launch. The original Xbox had a scaled-down store they experimented with late in its lifecycle with about a dozen smaller classic arcade hits and smaller sized web browser-esque “flash” games of its era that could be purchased, and the 360 expanded on this bigtime. Initially, the 360 digital game marketplace known as “Xbox Live Arcade” launched with games maxing out at 50meg download limits so the game could fit on a memory card, so all of the first year or so worth of XBLA games were mostly re-releases of smaller-sized arcade classics like Smash TV, Contra and Gauntlet along with similar simple browser-based flash game of its era like Bankshot Billiards 2. Over the 360’s lifecycle though they kept increasing the game size limits to the point where disc-based games were coming out digitally and were multiple gigs in size as memory card and hard drive storage options increased. During the first few months of the 360 after launch developers were not flocking to releasing XBLA games because they were unsure if they were going to take off like digital games were slowly starting to on PC at that point. The launch dozen or so XBLA games were met with success, but developers were not anticipating it so in those early months only one or two new XBLA games hit a month. The big breakout XBLA success was a straightforward adaptation of the card game, Uno that launched in May 2006. I can attest for many sessions of simple, pick up and play rounds of Uno while catching up with friends over voice chat online. Microsoft eventually patched in support for the 360’s first webcam, the “Vision” camera, which lead to some peculiar matchups with strangers online who wanted to make sure to demonstrate all their adult substances they were consuming that evening. Later throughout 2006 and 2007 XBLA grew to releasing a game every Tuesday, and Microsoft enforced every XBLA game have a demo/trial so it was an eager experience to see what game would be hitting that Tuesday, because most of the time Microsoft did not announce the game until maybe a day before at that time.

It took over 20 years, but it was worth it to relive the iconic X-Men arcade game with online co-op, and EA did a bang-up job bringing back NFL Blitz for two of my most played XBLA titles! There are so many success stories of XBLA games to go on about, but I want to highlight a few of my favorites. Seeing the re-release of many classic arcade, 8 and 16-bit titles with enhanced graphics and online support was a big win for XBLA in this department. I remember interviews with the XBLA executives from this time answering fans demands and going through the legal hoopla with Konami to bring back arcade favorite beat-em-ups like TMNT, X-Men and The Simpsons, and all with online play! This treatment went doubly so for fighting games. It started with Street Fighter II: Turbo receiving the XBLA treatment, and within years Capcom, SNK, Namco and other studios were porting over their greatest hits onto XBLA like the first two Marvel vs. Capcom and Soul Calibur titles, many King of Fighters re-releases. My personal favorite is the remake, Super Street Fighter II Turbo: HD Remix that saw all new gorgeous artwork and a new officially endorsed ReMix soundtrack from the fantastic ocremix.org community.

Non-fighting game wise I was surprised by EA Sports’ revival of NFL Blitz. It is one of the few games I somehow got addicted to online, and become somewhat legitimately good at too and was able to genuinely earn the 10 straight online wins achievement against random ranked opponents! Renegade Ops is an addicting twin-stick shooter in an mini-open world unleashing destruction as pint-sized vehicles with a gruff CO barking orders from the chaotic minds from the team that also made Just Cause. Valiant Hearts I originally played on 360, and loved the passion they showed on their unique adventure/action take on a World War I game. I 1000% related to Double Fine’s take on being a wide-eyed kid caught up in the whimsical spirit of Halloween in both of its RPG-lite Costume Quest titles. Fans of past Sega consoles like the Genesis, Saturn and Dreamcast were well treated, and new fans emerged after a plethora of XBLA re-releases of titles like Guardian Heroes, Radiant Silvergun, both Sonic Adventure games, Daytona USA, Ikaruga, Virtua Fighter 2, Nights, Jet Set Radio, Sega Bass Fishing, Space Channel 5, Crazy Taxi, Rez and others saw new life in XBLA form. The Genesis saw packs of three games re-released in bundles themed around best-sellers in the Streets of Rage and Golden Axe 16-bit entries. Although I would recommend skipping the XBLA Genesis packs in favor of the 360 disc release of Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection that has 40 Genesis games and bonus unlockable Arcade and Master System titles. Sega obviously treated its back catalog well on the 360, and I put in many hours revisiting these past favorites. I bought into the hype for Shadow Complex, and it became the first “MetroidVania” I ever finished. Hydro Thunder Hurricane perfectly captured the nature of the 1999 arcade boat racer, while successfully evolving its gameplay into the HD era. Adorable puzzle-platformer Ra-Skulls brought back pleasant memories of Mr. Driller! Twisted Pixel’s Comic Jumper made smart use of implementing FMV-video into its charming superhero platform-action title. Despite its stomach-turning title, Deathspank is a lighthearted action-RPG I saw through to the end with a twist ending I did not see coming. That same developer, Hothead Games, released the first two turn-based RPG Penny Arcade games I ate up that perfectly encapsulated the popular web comic in videogame form.

Two of my best-of-class XBLA recommendations are Trials HD and its sequel, Trials Evolution. It is an exemplary example of the adage, “easy to learn, tough to master.” Its quirky, bouncy motorbike and instant reloading spawns made it easy to succumb to endlessly retrying its inventive stages after each wipeout. It also had innovative use of implementing Friends List leaderboards with their ghost times appearing as you play, just teasing you more and more upon each crash when coming close to usurping their times! The sequel added online multiplayer that clicked and made perfect use of Trials unique gameplay. Microsoft I recall got a lot of flak for their curating policies for XBLA at the time because they would only allow one game to release each Tuesday, and there were many indie developers lashing out for being on the short end of the stick for not getting their game slotted for release on XBLA. Eventually Microsoft upped it two XBLA games a week, with usually a more anticipated game hitting on Tuesday and a lesser known title from a smaller studio hitting on Friday. Looking back on this the obvious downside is the lack of quantity of XBLA titles with only one or two releasing a week, but the curation process lead to the hit-to-miss ratio of them being significantly in favor of the hit range. Sure there were some stinkers that creeped in their like the disappointing Turtles in Time Re-Shelled remake, but the good outweighs the bad greatly in the XBLA market, especially compared today to the ridiculous amounts of low-rent DIY shovelware hitting every week on all consoles with there being seemingly no restrictions for any developer to get their game on a current console, for better or worse.

The digital store also made game demos more easily accessible instead of the traditional demo disc, and downloading demos in the early years of the 360 was kind of a big deal, especially when they had major opening acts of action and intriguing narratives like the Prey and Just Cause demos that made a huge impression on me and triggered me to rush out and buy them. This also worked against games, with the most egregious case being EA Sport’s planned reboot of its basketball series with NBA Elite ‘11’s demo being so plagued with bugs and glitches, that EA infamously flatout cancelled the game days before its street date release and forced retailers to return their copies of the game. That last minute recall tempted overzealous retail employees to snatch up precious copies to make it one of the rarest physical releases on the 360, with copies going on eBay for many thousands of dollars. An Awesome Debut Year of Games

I have no idea if it was happenstance, or intentionally planned, but it worked out pleasantly in the 360’s favor in its first year of next-gen exclusivity they had one or two AAA exclusive games launching per month. Noticing multiple users on my friends list playing the latest AAA game, and with the dawn of podcasts in 2005 featuring their affable hosts discussing the latest games in exhausting detail on launch week is what I feel created the horribly named sensation, “Fear of Missing Out.” I ate up gaming podcasts upon discovering them in 2005 with 1up Yours, The Hotspot, Broadcast Gamer and Team Fremont Live being early favorites of mine and influencing my gaming purchases with their genuine positivity on the latest games that made it difficult to ignore their top picks. They, along with traditional print and online gaming press made it easier to keep up with the latest must-have game of the month for the 360’s first year. A month after launch Dead or Alive 4 snuck in at the end of 2005. It was the first fighting game on the system, and with it having a Spartan character from Halo’s universe as a guest fighter, and an innovative-for-the-time pre-fight lobby system lead to me spending many hours in it online and offline. I was terrible at it, but still had countless hours of fun, even while legitimately earning the dubious zero point achievement for 25 straight online losses.

Oblivion’s Adoring Fan I loved seeing respawn every couple of in-game days to tag along on my adventures before quickly getting slaughtered, and Test Drive Unlimited was an unprecedented always-online open world racing title that laid the foundation for Forza Horizon and The Crew! A couple months later, the first big RPG hit on 360 with Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It was a huge improvement from Morrowind, and this Western open-world RPG was publisher Bethesda’s first mainstream console hit. It took me well over a hundred hours to finish that I spread out over the course of five years (just in time for Skyrim!). I had to resort to abusing the hell out of the dupe glitch for infinite invisibility potions to get past those dastardly Oblivion Gates, but it was an immensely gratifying experience to complete and fully 1000 gamerscore Oblivion! Pro tip, make sure to avoid a near freak-out experience like I had and have a bow in your inventory on the final Thieves Guild mission where you steal an actual Elder’s Scroll!

The string of big-release games kept rolling through 2006. Test Drive Unlimited broke new ground for the racing genre with its always connected open world! Before From Software had blockbuster success with their string of Souls games, they were known at this time for their niche mech games, and had their most success yet with the release of Chromehounds in 2006. The online-focused mech game was more accessible from their previous feature-extensive Armored Core titles. A pair of popular third-person Tom Clancy games hit in 2006 with the first Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter and Rainbow Six: Vegas titles. I rented both of these and was terrible at them online, but I do recall having fun as the decoy in Vegas to draw out enemy fire so my friends could pick off my assailants! My anticipation for Saints Row paid off, and it wound up being an awesome GTA-clone done right that year! The first Gears of War was the big 2006 holiday release from Epic Games, riding the success of several hit Unreal FPS games, but long before their current Fortnite fame. It lived up to the hype and delivered with its unapologetic brand of in-your-face gore, and smooth drop-in/drop-out online campaign play. It became one of my favorite franchises on the 360, and I would up playing through the campaign of every single game released to this day! The final big 2006 release I want to highlight is Dead Rising’s brand of campy, zombie mayhem from Capcom that became a huge new IP for Capcom and also the catalyst for many 360 owners to… Upgrade to HD Up through most of 2006 was when I used a traditional CRT (AKA “Tube TV”) as my main gaming television. HDTVs were first noticeable on the market during the PS2/Xbox/GCN era, and a fair number of games supported HD resolutions (especially on Xbox), but HD graphics were never a marquee bullet point of that gen. That all changed with Dead Rising. For the first several months I remained content with the CRT visuals of launch window 360 games, then when playing the Dead Rising demo, I could not help but notice the game’s text was rather tiny and kind of difficult to read. Upon listening to podcasts I learned I was not alone on this and it turned out the game’s text was optimized and quite readable for HD resolutions. Many more games would soon follow this trend in the following months. I noticed this even more when a friend brought over a smaller HDTV and we put them side-by-side running Rainbow Six: Vegas and I saw for myself the difference in the legibility of the in-game text. So yeah, the core graphics for all games where shinier and crisper in HD, but my primary reason for upgrading at the end of 2006 was just to read the damn text. History is repeating itself in recent years with text starting to look smaller and requiring more eye-squinting again to read in games like Wreckfest and MLB: The Show for me, when I later learned that is so because the visuals are optimized for 4KTVs (which I finally upgraded to several weeks ago).

Did you experience the ‘Look and Sound of Perfect’ with 360’s HD-DVD player, along with its killer app of a film in Tokyo Drift? HD movies also arrived to the 360 in 2006 with the release of the ill-fated HD-DVD add-on. Sony getting the better end of the stick in exclusivity deals with studios lead to it losing the physical HD format war against BluRay, and movies stopped releasing on HD-DVD by the end of 2008. I almost impulse-bought the add-on upon seeing it on the clearance rack for $50, but thankfully I held off. By that time however HD streaming was starting to take off with TV shows and movies available to rent and purchase from 360’s online marketplace, and the 360 nabbing a year exclusive on being the first non-PC device to offer streaming Netflix. Streaming movies and TV shows exploded in popularity and before I knew it, almost anytime I logged on nearly half of my Friends list was making use of one of many streaming apps that would become available on the 360. A couple years before the 360 got to this level of success, it had a couple major hurdles to overcome, especially the right-of-passage a vast majority of early 360 owners fatefully dubbed…. Three Red Lights There have been a fair number of platforms that have been notorious over the years for noteworthy faulty hardware ratios like the first three original PlayStations and the problematic powering on trickery required to boot NES games, but those all pale in comparison to the atrocity of the launch year 360 units. Within a few months after launch more frequent whispers started to become prominent of knowing someone who had a 360 that failed on them with the telltale indicator being three flashing red lights on the system. Users would then have to call Microsoft to set them up with a shipping container to mail to Microsoft to repair and mail back. I was the first among my local friends and peers to get the three lights of doom, and I have painful memories of it because my system was lost in UPS transit for three months before I finally got it back after visiting the local UPS center’s lost and found.

360 #2 only lasted several months before red-lighting in 2007, and the third met its expiration date in 2011. I will refrain from going into the nuts and bolts of the architecture problems, but in layman’s terms Microsoft was in such a rush to get that year head start on Sony, that a high amount of faulty chips made their way to manufacturing and resulted in the system’s high failure rate. To Microsoft’s credit, they gave all launch year 360 owners an extended three year warranty to get their system replaced free of charge, which I took advantage of twice. The third one died after the extended warranty, but by that point Microsoft had a slim version of the console on the market releasing alongside Gears of War 3 that I snatched up, and **fingers crossed** have had no issues yet with. Being the first to be hit with the three red lights amidst my immediate local circle of friends and co-workers made it interesting. Over the next year every couple of months another friend would call or text me, and/or another co-worker would catch up with me at work and relay to me their troubles of their 360 bricking and I would be their unofficial tech support on how to get ahold of Microsoft to the point where I still remember the phone number to this day (1-800-4MY-XBOX) to get set up with the replacement system. I wound up buying a hard drive transfer cable to transfer data to new hard drives when switching systems and I recall at least a handful of people borrowing it from me when they switched systems due to switching systems and/or upgrading hard drives. In a bizarre twist, I will put a curse on Hollywood Video for my first two 360s red-ringing! The first time it happened I was playing a rented copy of Chromehounds. The Hollywood Video curse struck again in 2007 when renting Shadowrun caused my 360 to crash!!! As ubiquitous as the three red rings became, Microsoft wanted to ensure a 360 makeover image with a marketing assault for the 2010 launch of… Kinect + Avatars = Wii’s Userbase Nintendo’s Wii launched Holiday 2006, and the motion-based console was an initial sales juggernaut, and it took over two years before it was commonly available on store shelves. Both Sony and Microsoft initially had meek responses to it with Sony essentially patching in motion controls in time for the PS3’s launch with the Six Axis controller that was not that well received or regarded for its precision, and the 360 had the aforementioned Vision Camera, which was essentially Microsoft’s take on an Eye Toy that only saw a handful of games support it for motion controls. Holiday 2010 saw both companies with a meaningful response with PlayStation Move on PS3, and Kinect on 360.

Microsoft pulled the same marketing strategies as Nintendo did years earlier intentionally marketing the Kinect towards families and advertising it heavily on daytime television. Most of Microsoft’s Kinect games were more-or-less their takes on the hit Wii versions. This is when Microsoft implement cartoony characters that could be implemented across games called “Avatars.” They were especially prominent in Kinect games, and one cool side effect for them was the many digital clothing items for them that could be either bought off the Avatar Marketplace, or unlocked for free by playing through games. I am especially proud of my You Don’t Know Jack dummy, and goofy oversized head ornament I unlocked from finishing Comic Jumper. A fair amount of late gen 360 titles supported Avatars in-game, which made for some interesting sights like having your Avatar onstage in Guitar Hero 5 jamming out next to Kurt Cobain. Microsoft’s gamel paid off, and for two-to-three years, the Microsoft moved millions of units of that camera. It is safe to sumrise that the 1-2-3 punch of Kinect, Move and smartphones all combined to steal the “casual gamer” userbase that the Wii was known for and the Wii’s console sales in America plummeted from 2011 onwards. The Kinect boosted 360 console sales so much from the Holiday 2010 period until the Xbox One and PS4 launches in Holiday 2013 that in that three year timeframe Microsoft sold the most systems in America for all but a handful of months. By the Holiday 2013 launch of the Xbox One/PS4, the 360 overcame the Wii’s sizable lead to become the best-selling console of the Wii/360/PS3 generation in America.

Only Kinect game I ever played was the river-rafting follies seen in Kinect Adventures, but surprise hit games like the Gunstringer seen above tempted me to almost get a Kinect on multiple occasions. I never bought a Kinect, but did play Kinect Adventures at a friend’s….yes, it was that damn river raft mini-game. I paid attention to the games releasing for it and supporting the peripheral, and a few looked like genuinely entertaining games and went on to have critical acclaim. Many traditional games added optional “Better with Kinect” features like zoom-in art gallery halls, or audio play-calling in sports games. Even though the ardent game player in me despised the change in direction Microsoft took with the Kinect, I cannot deny there were still several games I wanted to try on it after seeing the positive reactions for Harmonix’s trilogy of Dance Central games, Twisted Pixel’s The Gunstringer and even the limited on-rail experience that is Fable: The Journey. Backwards Compatibility & Indie Games…..not those Indie Games Hitting around the same time as Kinect was Microsoft patching in a new division of purchasable digital games initially called Community Games, but later rebranded Indie Games. Microsoft made its XNA development tools easily available for almost any level of experienced developer. This lead to a deluge of DIY games that looked like they were made as a semester long development school project flooding the Indie Games channel. Some developers embraced the campy nature of the amateur works that dominated the 360 Indie Games scene, with Silver Dollar Games especially unleashing a plethora of their…brand…of games like Try Not to Fart and the ironically titled, Why Did I Buy This?

The 360 Indie Games scene left a lot to be desired as seen above with the quality of games from infamous companies like Silver Dollar Games There were a few gems in the rough to be discovered in the Indie Games channel, and like XBLA games, Microsoft enforced a free trial on all games so you knew what you were getting yourself in for before throwing down some hard earned Microsoft Points, which are like regular points, but fun! There are two DLC Quest games that are fun quirky $1 platformers riffing on how gratuitous in-game DLC would become. Tribute Games gained notoriety on here with their adorable Breakout homage, Wizorb. Finally, I was a huge fan of Zeboyd Games that earned their reputation for their 360 Indie Games and I played through and devoured all four of their humorous takes on throwback pixel RPGs (Breath of Death VII, Cthulu Saves the World, Penny Arcade’s Rain Slick 3 & 4) that released as Indie Games. Zeboyd earned their development stripes on the 360 Indie Games platform, and I am happy with their continued success today! For every one of these hits that broke through however, there were at least a few dozen forgettable releases overshadowing them. Indie Games was Microsoft’s answer for their curation policy to XBLA, but as you can see it only went so far.

Zeboyd’s four 360 Indie Games are excellent retro-style RPGs well worth your time and can be found on Steam today to experience these gems! Microsoft had similar lukewarm success with their backwards compatibility efforts on the 360. There was a huge demand leading to the 360’s launch to be fully compatible with all original Xbox games. Microsoft only originally promised that the first two Halo games would be back-compat on 360, but after enough user outcry, Microsoft released several updates over the 360’s lifespan patching in support for what ended up being a little under half of the original Xbox’s library being supported on the 360, but the software-based emulation had a list of issues and bugs that accompanied each compatibility update. Aside from a fair amount of both Halo games, I played through Fable and Spider-Man 2 via 360 back-compat, and ran into intermittent bouts of slowdown with the former, and random little portions of graphic flickering with the latter. Still enjoyed my time with both, but not without these added issues. Speaking of Halo…. For the Love of Online Co-op

The 360 featured countless games that supported online co-op which made playing the latest big AAA title all that more fun. This primarily effected first and third-person shooters with the big example for this being the Halo titles on the 360 (3, 4, Reach, ODST, Halo Anniversary Remake). I played through all five of those games in online co-op and enjoyed them all tremendously. I will give props to Halo 3 and 4 having my favorite narratives, and I loved the final level of Halo 3 being an homage to the last level of the first game where you drive a warthog through a lengthy labyrinth of enemies and terrain to navigate before a time limit expires and everything explodes, MacGrueber-style! Halo 3 brought in four player online co-op, which I experiment with friends online by trying out the “Skull” modifiers which only upped the difficulty and lead to us finishing a good chunk of the game on the highest difficulty. Halo 4 I continue to this day to reference an ill-fated moment I had when playing with my friend Derek, where I was controlling the Scorpion tank whilst marching it up a lengthy incline, and he was walking alongside me and I misinterpreted the level’s geometry where I did not see a turn and nonchalantly drove the Scorpion tank off the edge of a level and plummeted it down to its awaiting death to the erupting laughter from Derek on the headset.

While I had a lot of fun with the Halo titles online, there were plenty of other worthy options, with the first Crackdown standing out among them. Getting lost in that open world with a friend and wreaking havoc with powered-up heroes whose jumping abilities had seemingly no limits was a blast, so was coming up with random challenges for each other like making a competition to see who could race up to the top of the mammoth Agent’s tower first. Saints Row 2 is another open world game that had online co-op, and made discovering some of the game’s secrets I had no idea about like its hidden mall worth going out of the way to show to friends. Dead Island’s online co-op stood out to me with its in-depth crafting system and emphasis on melee combat ala Condemned. The four Gears of War titles on the 360 all feature first-class online co-op. Gears of War 3 I have classic memories of bringing over to a friend’s the night it launched and we set up our TVs next to each other and played through the entire journey over two days. The survival-based Horde modes from the Gears titles created a new sensation for online co-op, and I played many hours of it online in the first three Gears. I even became invested into the “deep” lore of the Gears franchise to the point that I read a couple of the novels. Gears of War: Judgment switched developer to People Can Fly who tried to freshen up the controls and gameplay a bit. They also focused the narrative on Baird and Cole’s origins which did not go over well with the fanbase, and while it was the least popular of the four on the 360 I will still give Microsoft props for trying something different with it.

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance’s final boss battle with Galactus was made to experienced and conquered with someone in co-op, and while the Army of Two games weren’t perfect, I would be lying if I didn’t admit to having some fun times with all the games in online co-op If it was not for online co-op I would have not broken my curse to finally finish the first Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. I started and never finished that campaign on five, yes five, separate occasions with different sets of friends each time and stopped because we either lost interest and/or ran into logistic issues setting up times for everyone to meet together. A former co-worker Sean reached out to me to play with him online and I reluctantly agreed and started it the sixth time, but sure enough we stuck with it and completed it, and it was worth all the starts and stops because it remains years later one of my all-time favorite comic book games. That Galactus boss fight is a final boss fight that I will never forget and a truly epic final encounter to close the game! The second Ultimate Alliance game also featured online co-op and I finished that game on a much timelier basis because a lot of my co-workers also picked it up and we met up regularly for a couple weeks to finish it twice because it focused on the popular Civil War Marvel event that had two separate storylines. It had a more polished presentation, but the first Ultimate Alliance I easily rank as the superior game!

Some rapid-fire quick online co-op memories to wrap this segment up on: The first Kane & Lynch game was an interesting experience in co-op because I played it on this insanely huge HD projector. The first two Borderlands games were both huge hits with my friends and peers that won us all over with its loot-driven FPS gameplay. Credit to Derek for having patience with my crazy work hours and sticking with me for the better part of a year to pick away at and eventually finish Borderlands 2! To a lesser extent, another fun FPS co-op focused title were the Army of Two trilogy of titles. The games all had noticeable control issues, but the teamwork focused gameplay worked for us, and the franchise had a certain charisma to it with their many unlockable masks and charming fist bump animations to equip. Real time strategy games have historically been troublesome to pull off on consoles, but Ensemble Studios found the magic formula to make it work with Halo Wars, and somehow made online co-op viable with it too, and it was another game I found myself teaming up with Sean in a very enjoyable campaign that also featured some of the best CG cutscenes that remain stunning to this day. Finally, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand has likely the most ridiculous storyline of all these co-op titles where you play as 50 Cent himself to track down a prized skull across the middle east that made it a zany quest to just shake my head and go with to see where it took me next, and also for my friend Matt and I to jam out to its hip-hop flavored soundtrack to throughout. Bringing on J-RPGs and Doubling Down on Western RPGs In the console space, before this generation, role-playing games were dominant on the first two Nintendo and Sony platforms. That surprisingly changed this generation. Microsoft made pitches to Japanese developers in the early years of the 360 to release their games exclusively, or at least timed exclusively on the system. This lead to Square-Enix releasing exclusives like Infinite Undiscovery and Last Remnant on the 360, and porting its MMO, Final Fantasy XI onto the 360 in 2006 and making it cross-platform-online compatible with the PS2 and PC versions which meant it was the first game to share online user bases between consoles from different manufacturers. It took a little over a decade for this to happen again, so this was kind of a big deal. I still recall Square stunning gaming fans with their E3 announcement that Final Fantasy XIII would release day and date with the PS3 version (along with XIII’s two sequels later on), so it was surprising during this time to see Square open up its publishing portfolio on other platforms.

As twisted as its plot may be, I still got a lot out of Eternal Sonata with its highly entertaining battles. Blue Dragon was another early J-RPG that drew a lot of attention that Microsoft was serious about RPGs this gen. Other Japanese developers also released RPGs in the early 360 years with Blue Dragon, Enchanted Arms, Resonance of Fate, Eternal Sonata and Lost Odyssey all appearing. I purchased nearly all these games, but only one I played through of these was the bizarre Eternal Sonata, which is a traditional J-RPG set in the mind of dying legendary composer Federic Chopin. Its plot is as out there as its premise, and I will never forget its equally bizarre post-credits stinger, but I loved its engaging battle system that kept me glued in all the way through. I was also taking a music history class in college at the time, so the brief Chopin historical fact interludes between acts also did a lot for me. While Japanese RPGs took off on the 360, so did…. …. “Western RPGs” from companies on this side of the global hemisphere. Bethesda and BioWare are the two most prominent developers responsible for this slate of RPGs this generation after lighting the fire on the original Xbox. I already discussed my love for Oblivion, and Bethesda capitalized on that success with another blockbuster in the form of Fallout 3. Take the medieval fantasy world of Elder Scrolls and apply a retro-50s post-apocalypse skin to it and you have the formula for another Bethesda best-seller I once again put in over 100 hours in completing the main campaign and all of its DLC expansions. After that I needed a break from Bethesda’s games and have yet to play New Vegas. I did start up the Oblivion sequel, Skyrim and briefly made some headway into that, but got sidetracked by other holiday tent pole releases at that time and it regrettably succumbed to becoming lost in my backlog. I eventually picked up the remaster on Xbox One, and one day I will restart and finish that game!

Giant Bomb’s videos of their complete play-throughs of the Mass Effect trilogy is some of their best work that should not be missed! A series that did not get lost in my backlog was BioWare’s Mass Effect trilogy. The first game I initially got into as an awesome modern-day take on Star Trek, with an engrossing cast of crew mates on the Normandy. The first Mass Effect was a little rough around the edges, so I eventually fell off halfway through, but picked it up a couple years later and plowed right through it. The same thing happened with Mass Effect 2, but the advantage to finishing it in 2014 was that all the bonus story DLC add-ons were released and combined for a gratifying experience all together. ME2 delivered on hyping up being careful with pivotal story decisions that would have consequences in the infamous final “suicide mission” in the game. My initial run through of it saw three of my crew members not survive it through, and it gutted me so much I restarted that final mission and had to compromise with only two crew members passing away. Immediately after finishing ME2 I jumped right into ME3 and this time saw it all the way through within a couple months, luckily by this point the extended ending and all the story DLCs also just finished releasing and I was stunned with what Bioware held out of the core game and I can feel for players who initially played it and missed out on having a central character like Javic locked away behind DLC and missing out on essential storyline DLCs that dealt heavily with the origins of the Protheans and Reapers. The way I played it felt like a complete experience with all the DLC, but without it I sympathize for the critics who stated it felt unfinished upon first release.

There is also the fantastic “Citadel” DLC I want to give props to which is its own standalone swashbuckling adventure full of lighthearted campy jokes, and concludes with throwing a the party of all parties for all your friends! For people who have not played the initial Mass Effect trilogy, at least give a couple episodes of Giant Bomb’s Mass Alex play-through videos of all three games in their entirety a shot. I am almost wrapped up with them as of this writing, and it has been wonderful experiencing that trilogy all over again this way. Like Gears, I became so absorbed into the Mass Effect lore, that I have bought and read all of the novels, and almost all of them are good, even the Andromeda-based ones! I know the first Fable has been on the receiving end of a lot of criticism over the years for not delivering on all of its promises, but that does not take away from the final product on original Xbox still being a astounding action-RPG! I treasured my time with it, and the “Lost Chapters” expansion, and late in the 360’s life in 2014 it got the remastered treatment to bring the entire trilogy (and the spin-off Kinect game, The Journey) all on 360. Fable II from what I gathered has been the highpoint of the series from everyone I have talked to. I have only played through the prologue, and failed at getting back to it while covering other games in the gaming press at the time amidst another busy holiday release season. Fable III sounds like it did not win everyone over with its major storyline hook it marketed of overthrowing a corrupt sibling at the throne, and sadly the Kinect game, The Journey was the last major single player installment of the series as of this writing. Becoming a Pinball Wizard I have played various videogame pinball titles over the years, but for whatever reason the 360/PS3 gen is when it got ahold of me and never let go. It started with Crave’s Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection. Each real life table replica had their own set of goals to accomplish in order to unlock an achievement for each table, so I kept plugging away, and little-by-little I found hooked into addicting tables like Gorgar, Medieval Madness and No Good Gophers especially being my favorite. Later on Crave released an XBLA pay-per-table platform with tables from multiple companies called The Pinball Arcade. Every several months a new batch of tables were released and I found myself immediately downloading them and studying the in-game instructions for each table to thoroughly learn all of its intricacies and the addicting nature of filtered online Friends-list leaderboards had me plugged in to top the scoreboard for each table.

Well over 100 hours I invested into Pinball Arcade and Pinball FX on the 360. Two of my favorite tables are pictured above with No Good Gophers on the left, and Mars on the right. The same exact thing happened with Zen Studio’s XBLA title, Pinball FX. Their tables were not based on real tables, and as they gradually released more tables for download, they embraced their interactive nature and featured more computer animated toys that flew off of and around the table, and more dynamic special effects on the playfield that simply are not possible on real life tables. Despite them being not lifelike, and featuring more exaggerated pinball physics, I still embraced them when I was in the mood to switch up from the real tables in Pinball Arcade. Zen released a sequel a few years later in Pinball FX2 that had more dynamic community and hub-based features and integrated online friends leaderboards into actual gameplay with in-game pop-ups when your score was approaching a friend’s high-score which only intensified every attempt and kept me coming back more frequently. Some of my favorite tables from the first two PBFX games are the spooky mystery pin Paranormal, the Monty Python-influenced Epic Quest (with RPG stats and leveling that carries over in each attempt!) and the outer space themed Mars. Pinball FX3 on Xbox One/PS4 added even more community based features that keep me playing it weekly to this day, but that is a story for another time! Racing Away to One of the Best Eras for the Genre I believe Microsoft somehow found a way to publish one marquee AAA racing game each year for almost the entire 360 lifespan. They originally rotated between Bizarre Creation’s Project Gotham games, and Turn 10’s Forza Motorsport series each year. I never got into either of those series that much. Forza is the more serious sim, and I have tried out a couple installments over the years, but the intense sim mechanics are just not for me. If I would have put more time into PGR I feel I would have really got into that series, and I have some fleeting memories of getting into the second game for a brief moment on the original Xbox.

While I did not get reeled into Forza Motorsport, I fell hook, line and sinker into PGR’s replacement, Forza Horizon from the developer, Playground. It lightened up the sim-based controls and offered up enough assist options to procure that comfortable blend of sim and arcade racing. I also wound up in favor of its open world hub nature to either drive around to new races and take in the country side, or hang around the game’s central music festival. The first Horizon had such a fitting licensed soundtrack of rock and electronica-based songs that I sought out the entire soundtrack and it is its own separate running playlist for me. Since I did not upgrade into the Xbox One/PS4 gen until 2016, that meant I picked up Forza Horizon 2 on the 360 instead, and thankfully it was not all that downgraded from its Xbox One version. Both games I wound up completing all the races, challenges and finding all the hidden barnyard cars. Yes, I even played through all of the Fast and Furious licensed expansion for Forza Horizon 2 where Ludacris himself as Tej provided voiceovers to set up each race. Before Forza Horizon, another game attempted the same thing a couple years earlier with Test Drive Unlimited. It featured a sorta-GPS replication of the entirety of Oahu as its open world hub and I absolutely ate it up and was white-knuckling the final race which was a one-on-one endurance race against the top ranked AI around the entire outer highway of the island. The sequel was fun too and added another island, but I think one Alex Navarro’s reaction to the opening cutscene in his Quick Look video will be my main takeaway of it. I have mentioned in previous console flashbacks how I love demo-derby racing games, and on 360 Flatout: Ultimate Carnage was king! It is a fantastic follow-up to the PS2/Xbox games, and my brother and I played it online regularly for years, I can go on about it forever, but instead I will embed below a special three-part video where my brother and I raved about why it was one of our favorites….

Many years ago my brother and I made this three-part YouTube series on our fandom for Flatout: Ultimate Carnage The summer of 2010 saw two new arcade racing games debut that both should have been successful new IPs with sequels to this day, but since the two released within a month of each other they presumably took up each other’s player base and both Activision and THQ did not pick them up for sequels. Activision invested in Bizarre for an all new racing IP in Blur, which is essentially conflating the power-ups of Mario Kart with underground street racing, and it was indeed as awesome as that pitch sounds. I played hours of it in the main career mode and online as well. On the other end THQ invested in Black Rock Studios with their innovative racer, Split/Second, a reality show-based driving game where studio directors would triggers obstacles and destructible environments to activate and provided an all-new gripping racing experience. It too was also a riot to endure and 100% finish, but it sadly never received a sequel either.

I loved the Burnout series the previous gen, and EA delivered with an upgraded port of Burnout Revenge that remains my favorite entry in the series to this day. I got into its open world follow-up, Burnout Paradise and developer Criterion were aces with their long-term support of free updates that kept me coming back to it. EA’s other flagship racing series, Need for Speed had a few entries I put serious time into. The 360 launch title, Most Wanted had an intriguing concept of working your way up the “Blacklist” of the most wanted street racers to compete against. When Criterion did an all new reboot of Most Wanted several years later, it combined that concept with the blazing fast gameplay from the Burnout series to my approval. Finally, I will give head-nods of recommendation to both of Sega’s Sonic kart-racers on the 360. They are the top Mario Kart-clones out there, and ooze with Sega fan service. The second game, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed successfully innovated with evolving stages that switched up from racing in karts, then into mini-bi-planes and then onto water-based hovercraft. I completed the careers for both games and put in a fair amount of online play with both entries too. The Fad that was the Plastic Instruments My gut told me the original PS2 Guitar Hero was going to be big within minutes of trying out the original demo in the fabled Kentia Hall at E3 2005. Adored the first game, but the second game was when it went mainstream, and was thrilled with the second game’s HD 360 release in 2007. 2005-2009 was the apex of the genre for my friends and me. There were countless nights of my friends and family passing the guitar around trying to best each other’s scores, and when 360 introduced online leaderboards for each song it upped the competition level even higher. Local city clubs and bars did Guitar Hero tournament nights and my favorite memory from these was on a Guitar Hero III tourney night when it was my turn to go up on stage to pick a random song out of a hat I was the lucky soul to draw one of the hardest songs in the game in the form of Slayer’s “Raining Blood.” I suffered on stage, and barely managed to finish, yet it remains a memory I shall cherish! In fall of 2007, Harmonix splintered away from Red Octane and teamed up with MTV Games to unleash the revolutionary Rock Band that brought in drums and karaoke to the fold for four player co-op play!

I will forever love the countless Rock Band nights I had in the first two Rock Band games that hit in 2007 & 2008, especially the nights I played with my old podcast co-hosts Chris and Scott. I downloaded well over a hundred extra DLC songs over a few years for it, and we would routinely meet up one or two nights a month for Rock Band nights for two years. Almost always, our last song to finish off a session was the final song in the first Rock Band’s career mode that was filled with many wrist-suffering solos, yes I am talking about Outlaws’ “Green Grass and High Tides”. Our Rock Band addiction culminated with the “Bladder of Steel” achievement which we procured when playing every song straight without a fail over the course of several hours! I was almost always the drummer on Rock Band nights. At first no one else wanted to do them, but eventually I got into them and kind of became somewhat decent at it on medium difficulty. One night at an Alice Cooper concert I became entranced at watching the drummer wail away all night that I convinced myself after the show to lay down a $200 pre-order for the premium ION Drum Set for Rock Band….though after a few months something about that bulky set did not gel with me and I did not prefer the way the drumsticks clanked off the pads and I never developed a rhythm for them and eventually gave them away to free up space.

The forgotten gem Rock Band title no one talks about, LEGO Rock Band! Behold one of its awesome boss stages with the Ghostbusters theme song! The plastic instrument genre quickly became oversaturated with numerous entries a year from Activision and EA. At first it was kind of interesting to dive into some of the band focused entries of the series like how Harmonix did a wonderful tribute to The Beatles with reliving their career and its groovy “Dreamscape” stages in The Beatles: Rock Band. The Metallica nut in me feasted on forcing carpal tunnel upon myself with the painfully intricate, yet entrancing solos from almost every track in Guitar Hero: Metallica. By the time Green Day: Rock Band and Guitar Hero: Van Halen rolled around though and other offshoots that I completely skipped like Band Hero and Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits, it was clear the writing was on the wall for the genre. I did manage to sneak in some last doses of fun with a couple other off-the-beaten-path entries though before this genre faded away from its zenith.

The head-bopping mash-ups of DJ Hero with its uniquely intuitive turntable controller and feeding my karaoke addiction with Lips were breaths of fresh air for the genre late in the 360’s life.

Microsoft’s karaoke series on 360, Lips, supplied a fair amount of fun with its unique glow-in-the-dark microphones and four volumes of songs released before Microsoft eventually morphed it into a karaoke pay-per-song app late in the 360’s lifecycle. My buddy Matt introduced me to LEGO Rock Band, which Matt got for free with any Black Friday purchase one year at Kohl’s and we were both nearly burnt out on the genre by this point, but thought we would at least give this graphically unique version a shot. The adorably twee nature of the LEGO visuals with its complementing soundtrack were irresistible, and it instantly won us over. We stuck with it all the way through, and were fans of its music video-esque “boss” levels, with the Ghostbusters theme song stage being one we replayed far too frequently. Another refreshing take on the genre was through DJ Hero and its sequel, DJ Hero II. I loved that turntable controller, and it flawlessly placed me into the DJ world with its mash-up stylings soundtrack and fitting club visuals. Both games were unsung heroes of the genre when they released because they both came out a year or two removed from the apex of the genre’s success, but the DJ & LEGO games brought in some much needed fresh air in that scene. Non-Kinect Casual/Family Game Hits and the Failure that was NXE Now while I almost entirely avoided the Kinect, there still remained deluge of non-Kinect casual party games that were a hit with the family on holidays and friends on game nights. The two Microsoft published Scene It games that came bundled with their user-friendly big button wireless controllers were family favorites for a few years and successful adaptations of the hit movie trivia DVD-board game. A guilty pleasure of mine is legacy licensed trivia/board games/game shows on consoles, and the 360 had plenty of them with solid editions of Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, Apples to Apples, Risk and Family Feud 2012. Doritos Crash Course seemed initially like a forgettable promotional game that was free on XBLA that only offered avatars racing each other on a variety of obstacle courses, but somehow its simple gameplay was addicting and far more entertaining than it had any right to be at family and friend gatherings.

You Don’t Know Jack was a fun revival of the hit PC irreverent trivia series that was dormant for nearly a decade before THQ brought it back on consoles in 2011. Friends and I played through every episode on the disc and its DLC packs, and I revisited it for several years because of one dumb habit where the adorably jerk-of-a-host, Cookie Masterson, would have a unique greeting to open the game if you played on a holiday. The success from this You Don’t Know Jack revival got the developers at then-Jellyvision to revitalize the brand and include a bunch of other party games in the popular yearly Jackbox games that are still going strong as of this writing. I also wanted to squeeze into this chapter of the flashback Microsoft’s polarizing decision to appeal the UI of the 360 to a more family/casual audience and changed the fan favorite “blades” UI into the detested “New Xbox Experience” (NXE) in 2008. Microsoft was trying to synergize with the equally detested UI of its latest PC operating system, Vista. Tablets were starting to become trendy at this point, and Microsoft was resilient on forcing a tablet-esque UI across all its devices and the results were a total system failure. I was among the many who made their outcry heard over how ugly the many rows of diagonally aligned boxes filled with ads were a visual nightmare on the eyes. I was use to some minor ad implementation in the Blades UI before promoting other 360 games available, but the NXE mixed in all sorts of commercials, movie trailers and other assorted promotions that hit the same wrong nerves as those eye-blasting web browser ads.

Microsoft eventually updated and tweaked the NXE into a much more aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly UI that remains on the 360 boot-up today. With the 360 user base understandably a modicum from what it was in its prime today, it is refreshing to see Microsoft lay off as of this writing with a complete absence of ads on the UI. I will also use this space to shout out the premium theme backgrounds that I have used for many years being the pumpkin patch and winter wonder land themes that are always a delight to see when I boot up the 360. Yes, the Xbox Live 360 servers are surprisingly still online in 2020, 15 years after the 360 launch. Most 360 online multiplayer supported games support peer-to-peer multiplayer so as long as Microsoft keeps the lights on, you will still be able to play 360 games online. Microsoft only kept the original Xbox Live servers up for seven and a half years, so to see them more than double that for 360’s servers as of today is…astonishing. Worth noting is some games like Chromehounds, Final Fantasy XI and all EA-published games utilized their own private servers which the publishers have shutdown long ago, so those games are unplayable online, but a vast majority still support the option. Wanna Wrassle? For several years on the 360, one of my yearly holiday season traditions was to buy the latest WWE Smackdown vs. RAW game and complete the career/season story mode and unlock all of the hidden wrestlers and features over the course of a few months. I did this from WWE Smackdown vs. RAW 2007 through 2011. For one of the yearly installments I was so close to unlocking all the achievements to get 1000 gamerscore, but the last one I needed required a grind to complete the main single player career mode five times. I decided at the time this was a perfect opportunity to catch up on past seasons of 24 and brought a second, smaller TV next to my living room TV and absentmindedly button mashed my way through those extra career mode playthroughs, and it took almost the entirety of the second season of 24 to accomplish that feat and earn that final achievement. No regrets!

WWE's yearly Smackdown vs. RAW games featured zombies in their storylines, while All-Stars shifted the gameplay to more arcadey fun for all! The story modes in those yearly WWE games were worth playing through because the writers in some cases got creative and did things that were not possible on TV like having the Undertaker cast mind control spells for example. They added and experimented with a plethora of new modes and options, with the WWE Universe mode being a prime example of going all out creating dream cards and custom storylines. The creation options became incredibly in-depth each year too, in the later installments the developers added a Create-a-Storyline feature that had a surprising level of customization full of custom text entries for dialogue and branching cutscenes. One infamous online community, Video Game Championship Wrestling, became famous for its machinima they created with this system that contained intricate storylines with created wrestlers in its league consisting of video game character icons, developers, comic book & anime characters, fabled movie legends and yes even sprinkling in a few wrestlers. I dabbled in creating a couple simple storylines, but it was too much for me to invest into, but thankfully users could upload and download storylines from the community which added seemingly infinite replay value.

You have not lived until you witnessed an episode of the acclaimed wrestling videogame machinima that is Video Game Championship Wrestling. Will it be Gabe Newell or Dr. Wily who will emerge here as VGCW champion? WWE released a couple spinoff games that were not as feature-dense, and contained more accessible, arcade-like controls. They were on the right path with Legends of Wrestlemania, which highlighted the 80s success of the then-WWF, but absolutely nailed it with WWE All-Stars which featured a hybrid of past legends and current stars, and all of them were intentionally designed to look like roided-out action figures capable of larger-than-life moves like hurling opponents 30 feet into the air in addition to juggling, fighting game-like air combos. This all combined for fun multiplayer sessions with friends and family members who usually are not fans of wrestling games, but genuinely got into the gameplay to my surprise. I rampaged through everything All-Stars had to offer within a couple months after the latest Smackdown vs. RAW game, and was kind of burnt out on wrestling games after this for a while and skipped all future WWE games for several years starting when they changed the branding with WWE ‘12.

TNA iMpact! was from the same people who made All-Stars and had super-fun Ultimate X match as seen above! FirePro Wrestling on the other hand features only controllable Avatars and none of the trademark legacy 2D gameplay the brand is usually known for. There were a few other non-WWE games I tried out before I took a 360 wrestling game sabbatical. Rumble Roses XX was the first 360 wrestling game and the second all-women wrestler game in America after its PS2 predecessor. Never put as much time into it as I meant to, so I cannot leave any lasting impressions on it other than it gave Dead or Alive a lot of competition with its variety of costumes. I did put a lot of time into TNA iMpact! however, which was the game the All-Stars developers worked on before. At the time it hit, I was into the TNA promotion, and the game was a pretty good representation of that product with a fun Ultimate X mode, and a story mode circled around a fictional costumed wrestler named Suicide who went on to become an actual wrestler in the promotion in 2008, and the character has remained there off-and-on to this day. Lucha Libre AAA Heroes del Ring introduced the high-flying luchadores from Mexico with their own exclusive game and featured some familiar past WCW/WWE/TNA stars, but had problematic controls to prevent it from having any lasting appeal. I never played the Kinect motion-based wrestling game, Hulk Hogan’s Main Event, but I have seen clips online to witness it in its near-broken state that lives up to one of my favorite reviews on Game Informer where it became one of their worst rated games ever. There are a couple of low budget Avatar Wrestling games on the Indie Games channel on 360 that are basic affairs, but there is one Avatar-based grappler that somehow got a full fledge XBLA release with the much-respected, best-in-class FirePro Wrestling branding. Those games have been a decades-long line of some of the best 2D wrestling games of all time, and somehow Microsoft was able to secure that branding for an admittedly decent and accessible Avatar wrestling game, but a game that should in no way be worthy of that elite branding. That would be like Phillips securing the Zelda and Mario licenses for their own low-rent made games on their CDi system….oh wait. Sports-ball Forever! Time to highlight some of my favorite go-to sports games on the system. Starting off with football, there I got use to buying Madden every two or three years. I only rented the 360 launch title, Madden NFL 06, which wounded up being one of the worst debut Madden titles on a console ever. This is because of EA’s overblown “Target Gameplay” video they debuted at a previous E3 where the final game, while still graphically a leap above Xbox/PS2, was far from what they teased. To make it worse, that was the same year they debuted the doomed “vision cone” gameplay feature in the earlier PS2/Xbox versions that went over so poorly that they had to disable it as a default option for the 360 version and hide it in the options. This was also the first lead Madden game to remove John Madden himself (and co-commentator Al Michaels) from commentary in favor of a nameless afterthought of a radio-style announcer. Madden NFL ‘06 is easily the all-time worst lead-platform version of Madden!

This video encapsulates why Madden 06 was an atrocity of a debut on the platform…at least it had easy achievements.

EA stepped it up with later entries, with Madden ‘10 remaining a favorite of mine for the brand this gen. I still recall that edition was when EA initially introduced their cash cow microtransaction-focused “Ultimate Team” feature as a free DLC a few months after its release. How foolish I seem now for at first dismissing it as an interesting curiosity I could not bother to invest a dime into ever, but only to see it blow up in DLC sales for EA and become integrated across all of EA’s sports titles and other publisher’s sports games within a few years. I only picked up one college EA effort this gen via NCAA Football ‘12 which was technically free with a six-month subscription to Sports Illustrated, but I got the most out of that game, and was huge into its “Road to Glory” mode. Road to Glory had my created player play out his final year of high school, and then go through a full college season. EA were absolute pros at this point with their college game, perfectly capturing the college game pageantry by jam-packing the it full of college anthems, cheerleaders, mascots and first-class commentary from the old College Gameday crew of Kirk Herbstreit and Brad Nessler. EA was also surprisingly generous with a community create-a-school option where users could create and upload teams and stadiums, and sure enough someone created my middle-of-nowhere Midwest FCS school and high school teams. It remains a heartbreaker (for good reason though) that EA pulled out of college sports games after the NCAA student athlete class action lawsuit, with NCAA Football ‘14 being their final installment. I do not feel that much love for EA though because of how they squashed 2K’s attempt at returning to football videogames with All-Pro Football 2K8. 2K signed on a couple hundred retired legends for their game, and players could pick a handful of legends to be the standout stars on their otherwise auto-generated teams. It was a fun, different approach, which EA quickly put the kibosh on by signing many of those legends away to appear in throwaway historical features in future Madden games. As I mentioned earlier though, EA did win back some favor with me by resurrecting the Blitz franchise with their excellent XBLA version of NFL Blitz.

There were a few other non-NFL games on the 360 I gave an honest try to, with Midway releasing an unlicensed, M-rated version of Blitz before they went bankrupt with Blitz: The League II. It showcases M-rated behind-the-scenes drama storylines, and more brutal and violent hits that bestow it the M-rating, and if you can handle that, then it is worth checking out. Finally, Backbreaker was an ahead-of-its-time pigskin game that debuted an all new physics engine that EA would eventually incorporate into Madden games. While the tech was not quite all the way there, the thing I associate most with that game is it playing P.O.D.’s “Here Comes the Boom” on every…single…kickoff. It was a huge detraction in my review, and I was surprised to see a few weeks later an email from my editor at the time passing along a note from the developers to revisit the game after an update addressing reviewer feedback, which did address a multitude of things, but at the top of the list was reducing the amount of times P.O.D.’s jam played to only twice a game, thank god! On the basketball side of things, I remained a huge fan of the NBA 2K series. The 360 carried over the awesome 24/7 mode I adored from PS2/Xbox era, which was an in-depth career mode for a single created baller, doing a global tour of the street hoops circuit. The 2K games struck gold in NBA 2K11 when Michael Jordan graced the cover and the game added a new historical Jordan mode where he relived his most monumental games with historically accurate rosters, and vintage 90s telecast presentation and commentary. The Jordan mode was a success, and integration of NBA legends became a big selling point on the 2K games going forward with future installments having a theme around the Jordan/Magic/Bird NBA breakout success of the 80s and the iconic ’92 Olympic Dream Team.

EA had a downward spiral with their sim hoops games, and I only tried out a couple demos of the earlier NBA Live titles this gen that did not win me over, including the attempted re-branding of the series with NBA Elite ‘11. That doomed demo was so glitch-laden that it got EA to cancel and recall the game from retailers mere days before its street date, and took them three years to launch another proper console NBA sim. I did love EA’s re-launch of NBA Jam however, along with the XBLA sequel, On Fire Edition. They hit all the right notes on re-introducing the classic arcade gameplay to a new generation. No idea why they have not done another NBA Jam since however, but at least On Fire Edition is back-compat on Xbox One and Series S|X. The PS3 consumed the bulk of my baseball playing time with their awesome MLB: The Show games of that era. However, I do have one chuckle-worthy memory of staying up late playing a lot of 2K’s arcade take on baseball, The Bigs, at a friend’s place one night. We played several games and I recall being impressed at how fast each game breezed by. I skipped all hockey sims this generation too, with the only time I digitally hit the ice this gen being EA’s killer NHL game on XBLA, 3-on-3 NHL Arcade, which delivered the hat trick of arcade fun gameplay, creative power-ups and intuitive controls.

For alternative and single player sports games, I already raved about Top Spin 2 during the 360 launch window. I could never get into EA’s thumb-stick controls for its Fight Night games, but I did enjoy 2K’s Don King’s Prize Fighter, which came from the same team that made the Rocky games on the previous gen I preferred more. Of all the MMA games, I briefly got into THQ’s UFC 2010, but the game always became a chore when gameplay transitioned into ground submissions. I enjoyed Tony Hawk’s Project 8 when it launched, but that series also had a fall from grace with several failed experimental games once EA stepped up the competition with Skate. One of the greatest mysteries in gaming history to me will always be Skate 3’s staying power in sales seeing it on sale for so many years that eventually EA repackaged the game in an Xbox One case with a sticker on it saying it is playable on both the 360 and through back-compat on Xbox One because there were no longer any other 360 retail games on store shelves. I tried a few times to get into Skate, but like the Fight Night games, the thumb-stick focused controls never gelled with me and I could never adapt. No Russian, No Cauldron

For several years straight, from the 360 launch in 2005 through 2012 I played every yearly installment from Activision’s flagship brand, Call of Duty. The first couple of years it was not that much though. Call of Duty 2 I only played several times in local couch multiplayer battles when friends brought over a copy. I always regretted never renting or buying it cheap to play through the single player campaign which I heard is excellent. Ditto that for the original CoD which eventually got a re-release on XBLA as Call of Duty Classic. However, I played through the entire campaigns for the next six games. CoD3 I rented from GameFly and breezed through in a weekend in split-screen co-op with my brother and did not think much of it at the time, but came to learn later that when playing in co-op it removes a few levels that proved to be too daunting to be handled in split screen. Then in 2007 Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare released and first person shooters as we knew it changed. 13 years later it still has two of the most powerful moments in a FPS campaign in the form of the nuclear blast and its immediate fallout in the failed helicopter escape, and THE sniping level of all sniping levels in the flashback mission which immerses the player so well into the sniper role at its apex moment, that few other games since have managed to achieve. It overall was an incredibly gratifying campaign, which was equaled with a revolutionary online multiplayer experience that popularized persistent online multiplayer unlocks with a seemingly endless barrage of weapon and character customization unlocks to keep players reeled in. I was never “hooked” into the multiplayer on a regular basis, but starting with CoD4 and for the next few games I would occasionally pop on and play with colleagues who did play all the time, and had a blast catching up while apologizing for not carrying my own with my less-than-ideal kill/death/ratio.

World at War was an interesting revisit back to World War II and I enjoyed Keifer Sutherland’s voiceover talents as a superior barking orders at me throughout. It also debuted its survival variant in Zombies mode that was a hit that year and frequently played with co-workers on game nights. While that mode would become a bigger focus and more expanded with each successive CoD game, for whatever reason it never became as popular or played as much then as in World at War. 2009’s Modern Warfare 2 somehow met the high bar for the quality of campaign that the first game set, and its “No Russian” level I will never forget and I was bug-eyed throughout it as I never experienced anything like it before or since while my character attempted to keep his cover. As good as Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare titles were, Treyarch stepped it up with 2010’s Black Ops and its Vietnam War setting. It remains my favorite single player campaign from this stretch of CoD games. The meaning of the “numbers” touched on throughout the campaign had a meaningful payoff, and I loved how Treyarch sprinkled in their own unique gameplay intricacies like “diving to prone” and my love for the RC Car killstreak bonus in multiplayer. No matter how much of a weak link I was for my coworkers in online multiplayer, as long as I got just one set of three kills straight to get that fun RC Car perk, then I considered that a successful multiplayer session! Infinity Ward had a satisfying conclusion to the Modern Warfare trilogy with MW3 in 2011, but 2012’s Black Ops II was surprisingly underwhelming to me. It felt like they tried to do too much with the campaign, and sprinkled in optional bonus missions I felt obligated to do, but broke up the narrative for me. Of course, it could have been CoD burnout by this point, and I have never played another CoD game since. If I were to play the campaign of just one CoD game after this from 2013 on, what would you recommend?

For five years I anticipated the low budget FPS efforts from Cauldron that had me reliving past historical battles and as a DC Secret Service agent seen above. Interestingly, while Treyarch and Infinity Ward took turns each year this gen delivering Activision’s big holiday FPS hit, quietly another studio, Cauldron, yearly released five budget-tiered FPS titles under the Activision Value banner. These little publicized releases always caught my eye, and I had no idea if it was the case, but Cauldron’s games felt like where Activision would send freshly recruited developers to get their feet wet before getting promoted to the CoD teams. Three of Cauldron’s five games were History Channel licensed games themed around recreating and reliving both sides of war in two installments based around the Civil War, and another in the Japanese theater of World War II. The history nut in me appreciated the History Channel-produced intro video for each level, and it was a budget-friendly alternative come down FPS game to breeze through in a weekend after the latest blockbuster CoD game. Cauldron also did a DC-terrorist themed FPS in Secret Service, and Jurassic Park-inspired FPS titled, Jurassic: The Hunted. I imagine all of these play horribly outdated now, but I still will appreciate them for what they brought to the plate. Dubious Honors

Hulk Hogan’s Main Event and NBA Elite 11 top the dubious honors list for reasons I already ranted on above, but wanted to make sure to at least notate here. Moving on to other bad games, here are a handful that I was not a fan of: Rogue Warrior was a super-short and barebones functioning FPS published from Bethesda, but bizarrely got AAA buzz and marketing. It did have a catchy closing credits song though. Turning Point was an FPS from Codemasters with an interesting concept of a post-WWII shooter if the Nazis won the war, but poorly executed and reason why Codemasters has primarily stuck with racing games since (although they did attempt one more FPS with Bodycount which I did not play, but understand is just as atrocious). One game that went on to have a misrepresented history I reviewed at the time was Bullet Witch. It was a middle-tier single player action game published by Atari, and while it had some problems I made sure to point out in my six out of ten review, I received serious flak from a few friends for overrating the game. While I addressed the game’s issues and marked it down appropriately so, I did have a fair amount of fun with the boss battles and messing around with some of the more powerful spells. Over the years I have seen many bill this game with the label that it is among the worst on the 360 with the same kind of tone and vitriol as ET received on the 2600. Even Mr. Microsoft Larry Hyrb poked fun at the game in an online video long ago. Again it is not a great game by any means, but it is far better than what a lot of people make it out to be.

An XBLA game that got one of their marketed themed event releases (‘Summer of Arcade’, ‘Fall Feast,’ etc.) was TMNT: Out of the Shadows. It looked to be a cannot-miss 3D brawler TMNT game, and with that level of hype how could it go wrong? Very much so in fact, and with some of the worst camera controls in gaming I could not put it down fast enough. Another painfully disappointing TMNT game was the aforementioned XBLA remake of Turtles in Time. It played well enough like the original, but the redone visuals did not capture the spirit of the affable 80s/90s cartoon like the original did, and it stripped out the SNES bonus levels and had poorly substituted voiceovers. Stay away! There were a couple of semi-decent 360/PS3 era Turtles games. Nickelodeon TMNT was a perfectly serviceable brawler that did a better job of bringing back the good memories of the arcade classics than Re-Shelled did. Ubisoft released a single player platformer/action game to coincide with the 2007 CG film, TMNT. It too was pretty straightforward, and not earth-shattering, but at least hit some TMNT fan service marks good enough to be a worthwhile entry. Danger of the Ooze is one that slipped through the cracks that I rarely hear talked about likely because it released late in the 360/PS3 lifecycle in 2014. This should be played by any Turtles fan because this is the standout Turtles game this gen from the platforming masters at Wayforward with their take on a pretty fun MetroidVania-style game the TMNT license seemed destined for all this time. Lightning Round Quick Hits

Microsoft did not release 360’s successor, the Xbox One until 2013, so with eight years between the 360 and Xbox One, a boatload of games hit that system and I played far too many of them which is why this is going on far longer than it should have. There remains a hearty amount of AAA, mid-tier, XBLA and other noteworthy games that I want to give their due, so bear with me as I attempt to rapid fire through these… -I got wrapped in too many open world games this gen, and I want to first give props to RockStar Games for managing to finish two of their behemoths in the form of Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption. GTAIV is the only GTA I finished the storyline for, and Niko Belic will be one of my favorite protagonists. The cell phone activities were initially a chore to retain friendship ratings, but eventually I came around to bowling, cab rides, comedy clubs and rounds of pool. RDR was the ultimate Wild West open world game. Neversoft’s 360 launch title, Gun, was in my backlog still and I blitzed through that in the weeks leading up to RDR’s launch because I just knew it would blow it away. Gun was a decent effort from Neverseft, but quickly became obsolete when starting up RDR, which did not disappoint, and delivered a remarkably atmospheric experience for its time in 2010. I loved getting lost on adventures out in the wild, and that original score is masterful and could not be have been better crafted. That final several hours of gameplay based around the family ranch is an incredibly bold choice of gameplay that will always have a special place with me. Kudos to RockStar with their spooky-themed story expansion, Undead Nightmare, which is a hell of a side story to RDR that is well worth your time all these years later!

GTA IV put a lot of attention on its mini-games that were entertaining shoulder content, and Red Dead Redemption introduced a drop-dead gorgeous wild-west open world I would crave getting lost in and exploring for adventures. -Another one of my top 10 favorites on the 360 released on the same day as RDR, and I am talking about sci-fi third person thriller that is Alan Wake. I got completely absorbed into Alan’s quest to find his wife, and Remedy had a five star presentation to keep me on my seat. Some people criticized its style of combat, but it worked for me, and I believe it will go down as the only game where its deadliest weapon in its arsenal is a flare gun! Easily the spookiest T-rated game I have played. Do not skip out on the DLC episodes that put a nice bow on the story, and the XBLA sort-of time loop sequel, American Nightmare

-Two open world games that I shamefully have resting in my backlog to this day are GTAV and Bully. I picked up both on 360, and eventually picked up the Xbox One version of GTAV. You know what open world games I did play through though? The first two Just Cause titles. This satirical take on the James Bond-super agent was right up my alley, and Rico’s unique gadgetry like hookshots, parachutes, and wide variety of instant vehicle drops innovated in new ways to traverse its gigantic open world. The chaos and destruction those games both were capable of raised the bar with how creative one could be to lay waste to their surroundings. -I already commented above how the first Saints Row lived up to its potential from its E3 demonstration I saw a year before its release. The sequels surprisingly kept getting better and better. The first two games were essentially damn good GTA-clones, but with both games having more zany activities and side missions than in GTA. Saints Row the Third upped the outrageous quotient for its plot and side missions, and was groundbreaking for how far it pushed the boundaries with its whacked out style of storytelling.

-It did not feel right to include it with the racing games above, but another recommended open world title from this era is Driver: San Francisco. Ubisoft and Reflections nailed making an open world driving game without races being the focal point. The spirit-car-swapping feature against all odds is cleverly explained, and actually works! -Despite its popularity I could never get into the Assassin’s Creed games which debuted in this generation. A friend borrowed me the first game and at first I was into its setting and gameplay, but that first game was notoriously rough around the edges and I believe I got hung up on a glitch that prevented me from making progress roughly halfway through, and I have inadvertently been done with the series since. I picked up a few other entries over the years and have been wanting to at least try them, especially hearing how the latest ones keep getting better and better. One day! -I finished my first Resident Evil game on the 360 with Resident Evil 5. That game also featured online co-op, but I ventured fourth and played it solo and still had an impeccable time with it. It put more of an emphasis on action to the dismay of critics, but having not played too much of prior entries that did not bother me, and there were still plenty of intense thrills had throughout.

This is easily my favorite arcade stick ever, and the exquisite 2011 Mortal Kombat reboot made its tall asking price worth it! -This generation saw collector’s editions become out of control, with games packed with all kinds of statures, Master Chief helmets, night-vision cameras and other gadgets for well over $100. The only one of these I invested in was 2011’s Mortal Kombat. I originally was not too hyped for that game because I had my fill of the series at that point after the three good entries on PS2/Xbox, and felt the series had nothing else to offer. My brother however is a big MK-fan and told me how he ordered the $200 edition that came with premium arcade-replica fighter stick. I went to his place to drop something off one day when he wasn’t home, and he told me had the game and stick hooked up and to give it a try while I was there. Within minutes of starting the story mode and realizing how they were reimagining the original trilogy and how they switched up the gameplay for that generation, I became immediately entranced with it and could not think of any other way to play it without that stick and could not rush home fast enough to pluck down a $200 order. I made sure to get a lot of use out of that stick, and is was absolutely worth it!

-Sniper: Ghost Warrior is an unorthodox FPS focused entirely on sniping, and for being a low-budget game at the time I had way more fun than I should have with it. Also loved how it did a 180 from games like CoD, where instead of one sniping mission to mix up the campaign gameplay, here there is one run ‘n gun mission for a break from all that sniping throughout the campaign! I am glad this game had a ton of success and City Interactive has released a few sequels that I hope to emerge from my backlog of doom. -I already elucidated on my Borderland 2 experience earlier. The first Borderlands was a surprise out of nowhere hit that I loved my first few days with it and could not get enough plowing through the campaign online with friends. Unfortunately I went on vacation a few days after it released for a week, and when I got back, sure enough, most of my friends were many levels higher than me and already vanquished the game, so I soldiered on the final third of the game on my own. It was a challenge and a half to beat the final gi-normous tentacle-laden boss, but I managed to squeak by it after gradually picking away from it behind a boulder for nearly an hour!

-I had a unique experience with the Portal games. The first one I initially played for about 15 minutes, quickly became frustrated with the teleporting mechanics and had to step away from it. A couple years later, an old co-worker Rick was one of many by that point stating why those games were some of the best games out there. I told him my case, and he offered to come over and bestow his Portal wisdom upon me. Many thanks to Rick, who did not straight-up spoil and told me what to do to get past Portal’s many puzzle rooms, but instead kind of nudged me into gradually easing into a feel for the core mechanics of the game and it helped greatly! I would not have been able to get into it without him. He had a surprise for me when he left, and left me his copy of Portal 2 to borrow and told me not to give it back to him until I finished it. I knew he was moving in a couple months at that point, and that compelled me to put all my attention into the Portal games. I am glad I did because both games are spectacular, especially the sequel which had a noticeably bigger budget to go all out with a AAA experience and narrative that came together to be one of my favorite games of that generation. -Bulletstorm was another innovative FPS with its implementation of a whip, and combining it with melee strikes and gunplay for a refreshing take on FPSs. It kind of came and went though, and I rarely hear people talk about it anymore, except for briefly last year when it got a re-release on Xbox One/PS4, with an extra DLC to have Duke Nukem replace the original protagonist’s voiceovers for the game. I will also associate the original Bulletstorm release for having one of the worst box arts of all time. It is just a no-frills footprint. If you played Bulletstorm before, sure, it will kind of make sense since kicking is a core melee attack, but if you were a potential consumer browsing games and had no clue about Bulletstorm then I would not blame you for not giving that cover more than half a second’s worth of thought.

-The trilogy of BioShock titles were all high ranking in my top 10 game of the year lists for their appropriate years. The first game immersed me into its aquatic utopia gone haywire, and it stood out from standard FPSs of the time with its heavy emphasis on its narrative and hunting down those audio tapes to get every nook and cranny of the story. Its “twist” was something else for its time, and remains one of my favorites to this day. The sequel had a lot of polarization because it was from a different studio, but I felt they mixed it up by playing as a Big Daddy for the whole game and I could not get enough of freezing Splicers and then doing a drill rush attack that shattered them into pieces. BioShock Infinite was an astounding way to wrap the trilogy with its mesmerizing city-in-the-sky setting, and one of my favorite storylines from this gen. Its two storyline DLC episodes that released around a year later are worth checking out if you missed out, especially the second episode that changed the gameplay into more stealth-based by playing as Elizabeth. It felt like a whole new game, and developer Irrational absolutely perfected the change-up! -Spec Ops: The Line will not light the world on fire for its stick-to-fundamentals third person action gameplay, but what appears to start off as just another rah-rah military shooter, eventually morphs into a far deeper and complex plot than what I thought it was going to be. A book eventually came out thoroughly breaking down its exposition because it stormed up that much of a discussion around it.

-Shmup fans had several worthy entries to play on the 360. Raiden IV and Deathsmiles were landmark new entries for the genre in their time. On XBLA, there were re-releases of a pair of renowned shmups from Treasure: Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun. A pair of original shooters also stood out among the XBLA crop with the free of charge student developed game, Aegis Wing and also the beloved Sine Mora that captured the pilot play-by-play stylings of Star Fox and successfully merging it into a shmup. There were also a fair amount of Japan-exclusive shmups for the 360, most notably from respected shooter developer, Cave. Many of them are region-free and can be played on American 360s, so please keep that in mind! -I already told some tales above about my favorite comic book games, and embedded below is a video where I and my friend Matt painstakingly dissect a ton of comic book games that hit the 360. Highlights include the shockingly good movie licensed games, X-Men Origins: Wolverine & Captain America. Not-so-good highlights include the movie licensed Watchmen, Fantastic Four and Hellraiser games. Matt also had a lot more hands on time with the acclaimed Batman: Arkham and Spider-Man games on 360, and I have always respected his expertise in the genre so please give his takes a listen below! -The Telltale adventure/choose-your-own path story-driven games originally started off on PC, but became more and more popular with their console releases. I was 100% into the first two seasons of their Walking Dead games like everyone else. Loved the first one more, but my favorite Telltale episodic game is still Back to the Future. The Wolf Among Us was a fascinating twist on a mature dystopian fairy tale world. I was not impressed by their take on Game of Thrones, but I surprisingly enjoyed all eight episodes of Minecraft. I originally got that for my nephew who was huge into Minecraft at the time to play with, but he was not all that into this genre and I found myself getting into it instead. Telltale was pumping out so many of these episodic series that I could not keep up, and still one day want to go back and play through both Batman seasons they released, and their Borderlands series too which I hear is their best work.

Back to the Future remains my favorite Telltale episodic game, but the event-like nature of the first season of Walking Dead was an undeniable zeitgeist while it transpired. -The LEGO co-op games we know today based off nearly every license imaginable became ubiquitous this gen. Only one I put serious time into and was able to finish was LEGO Marvel Superheroes. This one is special to me because it was the first game that I got my nephew Carter really into right when he was old enough to start grasping modern controller-based games. Had to help him out in quite a few parts, but we got threw it, and now several years later his gaming skills have greatly improved, and I will gladly give him a humble brag on his conquest of finishing the tough-as-nails Cuphead.

-I subscribed to the Official Xbox Magazine for several years, until around 2009-ish, and I was surprised that they stuck with including demo discs for another year or two after that since downloading demos quickly made the discs obsolete. OXM did attempt a few exclusive disc goodies though, and one I always came back to was their own take on an episodic game called OXM Universe that lasted for about a couple years. The disc itself awarded up to 1000 “OXM” points based on checking out all the demos and videos on the disc. Those points could be used in the space ship station game, OXM Universe, which was entirely menu-driven to build space station tech and explore a galaxy. It did lead up to a decent conclusion if you stuck with it all the way to the demo disc that came with issue 100 and upon completing all the final tasks you are rewarded with a lengthy video filled with OXM staff past and present thanking everyone. THAT IS MIGHTY COOL OF THEM TO GO TO ALL THAT WORK FOR A DEMO DISC EXTRA!!! -I think one thing we take for granted in today’s console space is the ridiculous amount of weekly sales and specials on digital games across all platforms. It was not always that way. In the early years of the 360 digital marketplace, for a couple years all that was available was one weekly game on sale and one piece of DLC on sale each week and that was it for a couple years. Luckily, Steam was catching fire with their acclaimed Fall and Winter sales with their monster savings, and that eventually rubbed off on 360 and PS3 and by the end of those system’s lifecycles both started offering a surplus of weekly deals and flash sales. -Digital game preservation is something that is brought up more and more lately, and one thing that periodically ruminates in my mind is how the 360 handles patches/updates. For the longest time, most games had limits of 4mb patches until the later years in the system’s life where they started to change into the larger file sizes we associate with them today. However, the 360 has a nasty habit of auto-purging a game’s update on the 360 after several different games get played on the 360. So if you were to revisit an older comfort food game many years down the line long after the 360 online servers got shut down, any updates for that game were likely auto-deleted and cannot be re-downloaded. This could be huge for a lot of games whose patches likely helped patch out game breaking bugs and other issues that can no longer be downloaded whenever the 360 servers go offline. Just food for thought.

-Final random item I want to bring up is something you saw in the header image to this special. Yes, that is a leaning gallery of 360 faceplates! Remember those? They were kind of a thing for the first couple years of the 360 when Microsoft was flexing the customization options of the 360 so anyone can snap on or off a variety of 360 faceplates to make their system stand out in their own way. I never bought a single faceplate, and only procured them if they were pre-order bonuses, or part of some promotional giveaway. The only highlight of this was how I got my Madden NFL 08 faceplate, and that was when I participated in my Gamestop’s yearly Madden tournament where no more than four people showed up for the few years I participated. The year I won, was when I got the Madden NFL 08 faceplate, which sure as hell beats my Madden NFL 07 plastic beverage cup from the previous tourney! It will forever remain in my drawer with my faceplates for Full Auto, Eternal Sonata and Deathsmiles. It is not like there is some uber-popular YouTuber who has a unique fandom for that particular version of Madden who could benefit from it in any certain way. To the drawer the faceplate remains! ”It’s an Ocean” (THE END!!!) OMG, this took me a whole month to gradually pick away at. I did not come close at all to releasing this in time for the 360’s 15th anniversary of its launch. I feel that I could have made this into a mini-eBook and charged six cents for this!!! As you can tell from my many memories I have shared thus far, the 360 is a platform I hold in high regard. I waited three years to upgrade to the Xbox One and PS4 in 2016, so from late 2005 until late 2016, the 360 was one of my primary go to consoles. Which is why I had so many memories, good and bad, to get out of my system. If you want to catch up on one of about a dozen other flashback specials I have crafted like this (which are thankfully significantly shorter) over the years check out the links below. In the meantime, I will close this off with two embedded videos of episodes of my old podcast I recently un-vaulted circled around the 360. They are the final installments of our history of comic book games and RPG games series. Both episodes focus on the games that hit for those genres up until the point the episode was recorded for 360, PS3 and Wii. Many thanks once again if you have stuck with me for these near-18,000 words of garbled memories of mine, I sincerely appreciate it and I will see you all next time if I can somehow muster enough energy after this beast of an entry for yet another anniversary flashback special!

Listen to us break down almost all the RPGs that his this gen released through 2008

And here we dissect all the comic book games released on these platforms through April of 2011 My Other Gaming Flashbacks Dreamcast 20th Anniversary GameBoy 30th Anniversary Genesis 30th Anniversary NES 35th Anniversary PSone 25th Anniversary PS2 20th Anniversary PSP 15th Anniversary and Neo-Geo 30th Anniversary Saturn and Virtual Boy 25th Anniversaries TurboGrafX-16 30th Anniversary and 32-X 25th Anniversary

If you made it this far and have yet to experience the THING that is Rogue Warrior’s end credits theme song, then I dare you to click it above and not have Mickey Rourke’s lyrical lashings remain forever stuck in your head!

Enjoy this montage of the many creative demises of the worst sidekick in the history of videogames! You’re Still Here!? Well Then, Let Me Tell You Another Story About the Shephard….Not That Shepard

It is not my tale to tell of “another story about the Shephard.” Hopefully, EA and BioWare will right that ship as they teased at the recent Game Awards a few weeks ago. I am talking about the other Shepard on Xbox 360, that being Lost: Via Domus’s Jack Shephard. Jack and most (not all) of the cast from the first season of Lost are in that game, but are not playable. Instead, a new offscreen Oceanic survivor is introduced as the playable character, Elliot. The game was an average licensed adventure-lite game affair (find out all about by click or pressing here for my original review), but at the time when it released Lost was in its fourth of six TV seasons, and I was eating up every bit of fan service that game offered. It did have a couple minor things never seen in the TV show like the Dharma magnet, and I loved its ending which got my mind reeling with it possibly tying into new fan theories from the latest episodes of the show at the time. One in particular being my favorite episode of the series, “The Constant.” Not a great game, but loved how it treated the license. That said, this hit a few years before Telltale hit big with its Walking Dead games, and I can only imagine if they were the ones to give their episodic adventure game treatment to Lost instead. Now that is another story about the Shepard I would be all-in for day one!

[seagreen-meets-grey]

When Lightning Strikes Ch. 6

When your life is nothing but a cloudless sky, lightning can come and strike you so unexpectedly, you won’t even know what hit you.

Or: When Hiccup and Astrid meet, it is as if lightning strikes.

[Chapter 1] [Chapter 2] [Chapter 3] [Chapter 4] [Chapter 5] [Chapter 7] [Chapter 8] [Chapter 9] [Chapter 10] [Chapter 11] [Chapter 12] [Chapter 13] [Chapter 14] [Chapter 15] [Chapter 16] [Chapter 17] [Chapter 18] [Chapter 19] [Chapter 20]

Crossposted on ao3 and ff.net

_______________

“Alright,” Eret said, put his empty pizza plate on the couch table and turned his body so he was facing Astrid.

“What?” she looked up from her cold, half-eaten food and frowned.

Eret gestured at her plate. “You usually love tuna.”

“I’m not that hungry,” she shrugged, turning her attention back to the TV screen. A CGI man was advertising a toilet cleaner.

Eret followed her eyes. “What are we watching?”

“Ads.”

“And what have we been watching before?”

She scowled at him. “Is this an interrogation?”

He sighed and put his arm on the backrest of the couch, shuffling closer. “Love, you’ve been kind of distracted lately. Do you want to tell me what’s bothering you?”

She averted her face, afraid that, if he looked into her eyes right now, he would see everything, read every thought and emotion she’d battled in the past few months. “I’m fine.”

His fingertips lightly grazed her shoulder as he whispered her name. “You know you can tell me anything.”

She knew that. She trusted him. Otherwise she wouldn’t have agreed to marry him. And she had been entertaining the thought of spilling everything to Eret, but every time she opened her mouth, it closed all on its own before she could get out a single word. Telling him she’d been drawn to another man for a while now didn’t seem like something to share with your fiancé, especially this close to the wedding.

She was sure that she could deal with it herself. There was no need to further complicate things by getting Eret involved; it would only create unnecessary drama between them. Besides, the moment she said yes in front of the officiator and a whole lot of witnesses, this little problem of hers wouldn’t matter anymore anyway.

“It’s just…” She put her plate away and crossed her arms. “I’m just worried that something will go wrong, that something will get messed up and our perfect day is ruined.” She convinced herself that she wasn’t essentially lying to Eret. What she’d just said was the truth, after all; it just wasn’t the main reason why she’d been distracted.

He laid an arm around her shoulders, pulling her against him. “Everything will be fine. And do you know how I know that?”

“Enlighten me.”

“Because I know you, and I know that you won’t let it come that far. Because you’re a force to be reckoned with. And dare I say, even more so than myself.”

She shrugged with one shoulder and nodded. “True. But it only needs one moron to drop the cake or break the camera. And what if the officiator drops out or someone loses the rings, or what if one of us gets sick? A perfect day would be ruined.”

“I think everyone’s too afraid of you to mess anything up.” When Eret’s smile met her unamused expression, he kissed the top of her head and looked at her softly and earnestly. “Even if something should go differently than how we’d planned it, it will still be magical. No spoiled cake or dirty dress could keep me from marrying you, because as long as I’m with you, nothing else matters.”

He had a point. The whole purpose of the event was for them to tie the knot, to commit to their love, and everything else came second. It didn’t keep her from worrying, but it soothed her concerns a little. She turned her head to kiss him. “Love you.” As his smile widened, she poked his chest with a stern finger. “But I’ll still make everyone’s lives hell so that everything goes as planned!”

Eret chuckled. “I’m sure you will, love.” He turned back to the TV show they’d been watching, but Astrid still wasn’t able to concentrate on TV cops and their precinct shenanigans. Her thoughts kept circling back to her wedding and everything that could go wrong, and that included distractions from certain green-eyed heart snatchers.

At least Eret had dropped the subject.

_______________

Astrid counted each stroke of her arms as she cut through the water. She pushed herself to swim faster, tasted chlorine on her tongue as her breaths cut shorter and her lungs started to burn. Pushing off of the end of the pool, she started on her last lap. As her remaining bit of energy began to subside, the rhythm of her strokes became messier and when her hand touched the tiles, she was a few feet off of her lane.

Breathing heavily, she pushed her swimming goggles on top of her cap and swam over to where her mother had been timing her.

“How– how was it?” she panted, brushing her wet bangs out of her face, scowling when one strand of hair kept sticking to her skin.

Wilma Hofferson squinted at the timer in her hand. “Ten seconds slower than before. And twelve slower than last week.”

Astrid huffed. Ten seconds?! She was slacking off. “Great…” she mumbled, lungs still burning, and went to swim a lazy lap. How could that have happened? She’d not been this bad since she’d broken her arm in her last year of school.

Her mother came up beside her and silently swam with her, once in a while casting sideway glances at her daughter. They passed an old couple and their grandchildren treading water in the middle of their lane. Astrid shot them annoyed looks they didn’t notice, her frustration incompatible with the kids’ jolly laughter. One of them had green eyes. She swam faster.

“Astrid,” her mother called after her but Astrid didn’t stop before she reached the edge of the pool. She put her arms on the tiles and placed her head on top, listening to the slurping sound of water sloshing over the edge and disappearing down the drain, until her mother caught up with her.

Wilma set her eagle eyes on her. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Astrid huffed again. “About what, my abysmal times?”

“I mean the reason for why you’re so tense and unconcentrated. Are you stressed?”

“Of course I’m stressed, the wedding’s only a week away and my veil is still at the cleaner, the band cancelled on us and none of the other available ones have called us back.”

“Hm.”

Astrid met her mother’s thoughtful gaze. “What?”

“That’s not it.”

“What do you mean, that’s not it?”

“Those are reasons to be stressed about, yes, but not for you. At least not to this extent.”

She tilted her head at her mother with raised eyebrows. “It’s my wedding, mom. I want it to be perfect.”

Wilma wasn’t convinced. “But is it the real reason why you’re so distracted?”

“Oh please, don’t you start with this as well.” Eret still kept reassuring her that everything would be fine, each time throwing another rock on the pile on top of her chest. “It’s like I said, I want everything to be perfect, and so far, it doesn’t look perfect.”

She turned away from her mother’s eyes scanning her like an ultrasound and swam another lap on her back, staring at the ceiling, water in her ears drowning out the screams and shouts echoing around the swimming hall.

She relished the weightless feeling of floating on water. It took away the suffocating heaviness of the rocks on her chest. She needed to get rid of them. They wouldn’t look pretty on her wedding dress.

Her mom was waiting for her when she returned, face of concern still in place. “Astrid…” she started again and Astrid sensed at the tone that a motherly lecture was coming. But what she asked was the same question Astrid had already found stupid the first time she’d heard it. “Are you happy, dear?”

“Mom–“

“And don’t brush me off, I know my own child.”

Astrid resisted to ask why they were having this conversation then. Instead, she pointed at the diving pool. “Look, the three meter is open. I want to jump.” She hefted herself out of the water and ignored her mom’s calls. She climbed the tower and did a perfect dive. At least one achievement today.

It was when she was blow-drying her hair later that her mother tried again. She waved her over to the swimming hall’s coffee area and Astrid knew she wouldn’t get out of this one. She bit her lip in hesitation. When she was young, her mother had always been stern, always pushing her to be better, to achieve the next best level. Astrid had inherited her stubbornness, her persistence and ambition, but there had been times when all she’d wanted was to go out with her friends or spend a lazy afternoon on the couch instead of doing rigorous training.

That had put a strain on their relationship and when Astrid had moved out after school, it had taken them a few years of awkward talks, hardheaded fights and rocky reconciliations to grow closer again. Now, she felt like she could understand her mother better, seeing a lot of herself in her. But that exactly meant that she still hesitated to talk to her about emotional matters, knowing full well about both their usually direct and practical nature.

She dried and combed her hair, taking her time putting it in a neat braid over her shoulder, before she grabbed her back and sauntered over. Sitting down at the table, she found her mother had already ordered for her. One black coffee, one shot of milk, no sugar. The same order as her mom’s.

“Astrid,” she started again and Astrid looked to the side, through the glass wall providing her a panorama view over the entire swimming hall. The line at the waterslide was growing. A group of kids was being reprimanded by a pool attendant. A water aerobics class was beginning in a corner.

“You can talk to me.”

The eyes that met her own wanted nothing but to help her, to see her happy, a deep attachment that could only exist between mother and child encouraging her to open up, to let herself fall into her arms and be protected.

“You want this wedding to be perfect but whatever you do, it doesn’t meet your standards. I think that maybe it’s because it’s not what you want.”

Astrid stared at her, struggling with the gate in her protective wall.

“What do you want?” The soft tone of her voice and the honest concern in her eyes conflated into the key that finally fit. It turned and the gate swung open.

“I’m having doubts, mom,” she confessed, voice almost a whisper, and the first boulder rolled off her chest, back to the pool, into the water, sinking to the ground. She gulped, but when her mother’s eyes were nothing but encouraging, she told her everything.

She told her about Hiccup, about the first time she saw him, about the way her heart was still beating when she thought back to that night. About how he was with her in almost every thought and dream. How drawn she was to him. But she also talked about her feelings for Eret. There was still love and a connection, a deep friendship, a bond. A passion, different to the one she felt for Hiccup. She told her about how she’d been so sure of herself and what she wanted her whole life, but now? There was a new variable in the equation and she didn’t know what to do with it. She’d never been particularly good at math.

When she finished, her mother considered her silently for a few minutes in which Astrid sipped her lukewarm coffee and fiddled with a sugar pack, awaiting the judgement. She stared at a point on the water’s surface close to the edge of the pool right behind the glass, watched tiny wave after tiny wave climb the tiles and crash back down.

Wilma took a deep breath, catching her daughter’s attention. “I feel like I’m repeating myself here, but I want you to be happy, my dear. I know that this situation is not easy for you, but your decision should be quite simple.” She placed a gentle hand over Astrid’s on the table. “Do what makes you happy, and only you. This is your life. Don’t fit it to someone else’s feelings, because if you only do that, you will keep coming up short.”

“I know,” Astrid whispered, “but I don’t know what to do.”

“And I can’t make that decision for you. Getting married is a big step, and an impactful one at that. Do what’s right for you. Do what feels right. And don’t let others influence what it is you want. You mold your own life.”

Astrid nodded absently. She couldn’t control what she felt for Hiccup. But she could control her own life, with Eret. With him, she had certainty, security, a promise – even if she was missing that certain something that her heart sought from Hiccup. That something that kept her on her toes, that made her feel like a thousand volts whenever she was near him.

“No matter what you decide,” her mother said, “I’ll be there to support your decision.”

Astrid reached over the table and pulled her mother into a hug, whispering “thank you” into her ear and both of them knew that she meant it.

She closed her eyes and pictured her future. Her life, her image of herself, the people who were by her side, through thick and thin.

And she made a decision.

________________

When Hiccup woke in the morning, the air around him tasted stale and heavy, like darkness before a murder. Something was sitting on his chest, something weighing him down. He blinked his eyes open and found only his blanket where he’d assumed a coffin stacked with the remnants of the Library of Alexandria.

He moved to stretch his arms and something clattered to the floor, something sounding suspiciously like the book he was supposed to start illustrating. Perhaps he should stop reading shortly before going to bed. But last night he’d found himself unable to fall asleep, thoughts of the next day plaguing his mind until early in the morning. Reading had been the only distraction that had worked.

Now that he remembered why he’d needed a distraction in the first place, the wolves in his mind started howling, clouds covering the moon, while his mood sunk deeper and deeper into the ocean, pulling him down into the abyss. He reached out to the sirens hunting above him, hoping they would dive down and add him to their meal, alongside the unlucky survivors of a fatal storm, wood and debris floating in tandem with the pale, blue bodies. Their eyes were black and dead, their mouths open in a never-ending silent scream.

But the sirens didn’t see him and he couldn’t make a sound, water filling his lungs, his ears, his heart, like the sad tune of a pirate folk song. Funeral chants had never spoken to him more. He watched the light at the surface disappear behind miles and miles of impending darkness.

His back landed softly on the bottom of the ocean, rousing millions of tiny glowing particles. They performed a dance with the waves in front of his eyes before coming together in the shape of mighty trees. Their gnarly limbs, rich with green and the sound of chirping, embraced him, shielded him from the black gravity holding him in its grasp.

He took a cautious breath and the trees fragmented to ash, glittering in the vast space around him. Inhaling thick dust, his entire body contracted, his left leg went numb. A piercing howl shot through his ears, reverberating in his skull. The wolves were back, fiery giants under the dead moon. One of them came closer. He tried to run but found that he couldn’t move. His left leg was gone. The wolf spread his jaws wide, revealing razor-sharp fangs that it sunk into his neck.

Hiccup flinched and opened his eyes. He was lying on the ground next to his bed, wrapped in his blanket. His left leg was asleep. Groaning, he freed his arms from his little cocoon and rubbed his face. No more reading before bed, for sure.

Craning his neck to check the time on his alarm clock, he slowly pushed himself off the ground, only to fall back on his bed when he saw it was almost twelve. Had he really slept so long after the first few minutes he’d been awake in the morning?

“Apparently,” he mumbled to himself and closed his eyes, willing the day to pass by just as fast as the morning. But it didn’t do him that favor, and what felt like an hour turned out to be barely five minutes.

He could check if his alarm clock was broken. Maybe it was so messed up it would take him all day. One look at the time on his phone and his hope dwindled. The clock was working just fine. It was him who wasn’t right.

Because today was the day.

His stomach cramped at the thought. But he couldn’t do anything, couldn’t start a new game, couldn’t program himself a mod, couldn’t take a rubber to erase the fact that today, the girl he lo– the girl he liked was getting married.

Following a grumbling stomach, he heaved himself out of bed and shuffled into the kitchen. He opened the fridge and peered inside for several minutes, lack of appetite making a decision impossible. Grabbing a slice of cheese, he returned to his bedroom and flopped back down. Chewing was arduous with his face buried in the pillow.

Not bothering to change out of his pajamas, he eventually managed to move to the living room, sitting down on the couch with a dramatic sigh. One of his butt cheeks landed on the corner of a book and he winced. He could read, flee into a different world. But when every other word got lost between his thoughts about Astrid, he flung the book to the other end of the couch and switched on the TV.

Every channel seemed to have it out for him. There was a show about a wedding planner, rom-coms about true love, even the news was covering some minor celebrity’s big day. Only the last channel he tried was a bit more up his alley right now; reality TV about people getting divorced, with a lot of drama and even more bad acting.

Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore and grabbed his controller, changing the input source on the TV screen with the other hand. Shooting a bunch of mercenaries trying to get to the treasure before him, or playing a card game against a poor villager in danger who urgently wanted him to kill a monster would surely hold his attention for a while.

It didn’t.

After switching between ten different games for an hour, he gave up and leaned his head back. Dark clouds were covering the sky outside. It looked like it was going to pour soon. He didn’t care. If anything, it fit his mood perfectly.

Staring at the ceiling for a good twenty minutes, his legs fidgeting, he waited for the telltale sound of raindrops drumming against glass, but nothing happened.

There were a few spots on the ceiling. Tiny flies, tiny flies’ poop, other squashed insects, maybe splatter of some kind. When he squinted, the spots took the shape of her eyes when she laughed, until one of them moved and the image distorted.

His fingers tapped against the rayon surface of the couch. In his mind, she was sitting in a room with her mom and maid of honor, maybe a stylist, an aunt or more friends, and she was giddy. They were doing her hair and makeup and she had a blinding smile on her face, lighting up the whole room. Her deep blue eyes were bright, rivaling the sun that would surely show in her honor as soon as she started to walk down the aisle. She was happy, she was laughing, she was practicing her vows. This Astrid was beautiful, but she was moving further away from him than she had ever been.

His stomach hurt and every breath was hard, so many needles piercing their way through his heart and lungs and skin that he was certain he had to go to the doctor to have all these hedgehogs removed from his body. Would he have to go to a vet or a general practitioner? Were there specialists on animals living inside a person?

The theme from his favorite movie franchise tore him out of his thoughts. It came from his bedroom and he tried to remember where he had thrown his phone this time. He leapt at the chance of a distraction and sprinted into the other room, grabbing the source of the music and eagerly accepting the call. His secret hope that it was Astrid evaporated the second he heard his dad’s voice.

“Hello, son,” his deep voice came booming through the speaker. “I’m just calling to ask if my screwdriver set is still at yours.”

“Dad, hey!” Hiccup answered enthusiastically. “How– how are you? How’s it going? We never talk anymore. How’s… um, how– how’s work? How’s the wife?” He mentally facepalmed immediately after he said that. He could hear his mother laughing in the background.

“I’m fine, work is fine, your mother’s fine, too. You sound chipper.” Hiccup could see his dad’s frown through the phone, if that was possible.

“Am I not supposed to? I’m just very delighted to hear your voice!” Or any voice, for that matter. “Soo… What’cha doin’?”

“Um… Reading the newspaper. Mom’s making coffee.”

Hiccup was pacing through his apartment like a headless chicken, gesturing at everything and nothing. “Oh, coffee, yeah, that’s– that’s cool. I’m–” he looked at the general mess that was his living space, “I’m also thinking about making coffee.”

Stoick’s voice was dry. “Are you sure you need caffeine right now?”

“What, me? Why? I’m totally fine, I love coffee. I’m– I’m chill.” He hit his hand on a windowsill while talking.

There was an unconvinced silence in which Hiccup grimaced and rubbed his hurting hand on his pajama shirt.

Finally, Stoick coughed slightly. “Clearly. So… Screwdrivers?”

“Right!” Hiccup did a quick one-eighty in the middle of his kitchen and sprinted to the next moving crate, rummaging through it without really looking for anything. He knew the small box his dad was talking about was on the shelf over his coat rack. “I can’t seem to find it right now, dad, so sorry. But come on, tell me something, anything. Any…” he gulped, “any childhood stories I might like to hear again?”

“Bored much, son?” For the first time in this conversation, Hiccup could hear something like amusement in his dad’s voice.

“Who, me? Naah, I’ve got a ton of work, not bored at all.”

“Alright, then I won’t keep you from that any longer.”

“I actually meant–“

“Good talking to you.”

“No, wait, dad–” But it was too late. Stoick had already hung up. At once, the apartment was silent, in such a suffocating way that Hiccup opened all the windows and shivered as soon as the cold November air gusted inside.

His fingers dialed a number before he could think twice. His mom answered after the third ring.

“Hiccup?”

“Mom! So good to hear you! Tell me about– about your… your coffee. How’s dad?”

“Still fine, honey. Dad had you on speaker.”

Hiccup scratched his head. “Sure, yeah. Speaker.”

His mother chuckled softly. “Stop procrastinating and get to work, son. You can call again when you’re done, okay?”

With a deep sigh, Hiccup waited for her to end the call. Maybe he should just do his work.

He threw himself on the couch and hummed a few flat tunes, tapping his fingers in an uneven rhythm against his legs. If only it would start raining already. The sound had always been able to soothe him when nothing else could. And if it rained long enough, he could make some quip about the length of November Rain.

Eyeing the handful of boxes that still littered his apartment, he decided that actually having something to do might be good. With the motivation of someone who desperately needed to forget about his tragic love life, he emptied the boxes and sorted through everything. When the loneliness of his apartment kept breathing down his neck, he turned on his mini stereo and listened to November Rain on repeat to compensate the lack of actual rain – fully aware that the song wouldn’t leave his head for at least a few days now. By the time he was done, he’d managed to make the place even messier than before, and on top of that his stomach was complaining uproariously about its empty existence.

Now that he didn’t have anything that occupied his thoughts anymore, Astrid settled back in, as if she’d never left. He was still hoping, like the loser he was, that she was suddenly standing in front of his door, telling him she blew off the wedding to come to him.

He felt like he was supposed to be with her, like the world wasn’t right if they weren’t together. But he couldn’t force his feelings onto her. And who was he, even? Some random dude she’d met at a party and crossed paths with twice after that? It wasn’t like she knew what she’d done to him, what she was still doing. And above all else, he doubted that he meant much to her, if anything at all. He was an acquaintance, at best.

His eyes fell on his disorganized pile of video games. If only there was a guide somewhere on what he had to do and which decisions would influence which outcome, like a video game with 36 different possible endings. He’d seen it happen. Just not for a game that wasn’t finished yet and that wasn’t even a game to begin with. Maybe he could create one, one in which the main character got the girl of his dreams, like star-crossed lovers with a happy ending.

When the doorbell rang, his heart started hammering against his ribcage and his breath caught in his lungs, frozen in place, like a strange scarecrow in the middle of his living room. A few eternal seconds later, he remembered the pizza he had ordered and went to open the door, heart still beating madly, but in a rhythm that spoke of tragedy.

Hiccup opened the door and his eyes went wide when they settled on blonde hair.

“Pizza?”

Her hair only went down to her shoulders, split ends dyed pink. Her eyes were brown and she had a nose ring.

Unable to speak, he nodded and paid the bored-looking teenager. He could spot the purple bubblegum between her teeth.

He’d already known it couldn’t have been her, but a lump still formed in his throat. It stayed there when he poured himself a glass of water, after he drained it, when he sat down with his pizza. It was still there when he finished his food.

The apartment was silent, apart from the ticking of his clock on the kitchen wall. It was driving him insane, and the doorbell didn’t ring again.

Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore. Throwing the empty pizza carton to the side, not caring if any of the grease leaked out, he grabbed his jacket and keys. He was already half out in the hallway when he looked at his dragon-patterned slippers and pajama-clad limbs.

Putting on the next best jeans and sweater, he fumbled with his mismatched socks and took the time to roughly clean his shoes with a wet wipe before he gave up. The state of his shoes wouldn’t matter much now anyway. He brushed his teeth in record speed and didn’t bother with his hair; brushing was of no use since the wind would mess it up again the second it was exposed to the weather.

Hiccup barely remembered to turn off the lights before the door fell closed behind him when he left to the venue, a storm brewing in the distance.

_______________

If we could take the time To lay it on the line I could rest my head Just knowin' that you were mine All mine So if you want to love me Then darlin' don't refrain Or I'll just end up walkin' In the cold November rain.

[laughing-at-the-night]

Tagged by @midnightanddiamonds and boy was this fun!! Don’t look at the questions just state the ten ships and then go for it!! Thank you v. Much for tagging me!!! I had lots of fun doing this tag!!

1- Thirteenth Doctor and Dhawan!Master

2- Barney Stinson and Robin Scherbatsky

3- Ross Poldark and Demelza

4- Miranda Blake and Max Winter

5- Merlin and Arthur

6- Steve and Tony

7- Kaz and Inej

8- Dean and Castiel

9- Tenth Doctor and Rose

10- Brienne and Jaime

1. Do you remember the episode/scene/chapter that you first started shipping 6?

- YES!! I was watching Avengers Assemble for the billionth time and thought heh Cap and Tony... looks good to me!!

2. Have you ever read a FanFiction about 2?

- a few yes! Not many because I didn’t get obsessed with this pairing but it was like a guilty pleasure fic for me!

3. Has a picture of 4 ever been your screen saver/profile picture/tumblr?

- sadly not!! But I do have a few of their quotes all over my Instagram and on my light box! “Compañeros, right?”

4. If 7 were to suddenly break-up today, what would your reaction be?

- No mourners, no funerals

5. Why is 1 so important?

- because it was the first time I ever considered The Doctor and The Master to be a ship! plus Jodie and Sacha have SUCH good chemistry!!!

6. Is 9 a funny ship or a serious ship?

- this was my first ship ship. It broke my heart went Rose went to live in the parallel world. It’s serious and funny because it was love. The first love I saw on screen that I attached to with all that my 9 year old self had!

7. Out of all of the ships listed, which ship has the most chemistry?

- Max and Miranda. Purely because they have a will they won’t they relationship going on and she’s so headstrong and clear in her affections for him it honestly kills me when she has to hide that part of herself because she wants Max to come to the conclusion on his own.

8. Out of all of your ships listed, which ship has the strongest bond?

- damn, I mean Merlin and Arthur are two sides of the same coin so there’s that. Castiel pulled Dean out of hell. Max and Miranda just KNOW each other without words. They have each other’s back. But Brienne and Jaime?? I mean, he lost his hand to defend her, a woman who hours before had been his captor. They fought at the battle of winterfell and he knighted her. Those two for sure have the strongest bond!!

9. How many times have you read/watched 8’s fandom?

- Not so much now, but I used to watch it a lot back in High School! I even got to meet Misha and have a hug! I was obsessed but that died away quick because I got super into Marvel so this was defo 2012😂😂

10. Which ship has lasted the longest?

- Tenth Doctor and Rose. 14 years and going strong!! Those two are an OTP!! And also because he’s a time lord sooo they can last for a looong time. And have technically been together since War Doctor/ idk late days of Nine??

11. How many times, if ever, has 2 broken up?

- uhhha few. I mean I don’t count the finale episode so in my head they’re still married but canon wise it’s anyone’s guess!

12. If the world was suddenly thrust into a zombie apocalypse, which ship would make it out alive, 2 or 8?

-Dean and Castiel because they actually have fought in an apocalypse and won so 🤷🏼‍♀️🤷🏼‍♀️🤷🏼‍♀️

13. Did 5 ever have to hide their relationship for any reason?

- they’ve never been in a relationship but Merlin spent all five series hiding his magic so there’s that??

14. Is 4 still together?

- they’re not actually together together in the show but they are a Detective duo soooo yes in that sense and not yet in the romantic sense!

15. Is 3 canon?

- yes!!! A relationship spanning over 12 books and five series!!!

16. If all 10 ships were put into a couple’s Hunger Games, which couple would win?

- uhhhhh, maybe dean and Cas because he’s an angel? But 1 has the Master and he’s a genocidal maniac so he’d be down to kill but just not for Thirteen 😂😂

17. Has anybody ever tried to sabotage 10’s ship?

- Cersei fucking Lannister has.

18. Which ship would you defend to the death and beyond?

- Max and Miranda. Purely because it’s the first ship that actually is going somewhere that probably won’t end in heartache and is going to be happy and hopefully won’t be a will they won’t they Naa situation.

19. Do you spend hours a day going through 1’s tumblr page?

- nope. I used to be religiously on tumblr back in 2012 but I worked out it wasn’t for me pretty quickly and just decided to go on it occasionally!

20. If an evil witch descended from the sky and told you that you had to pick one of the ten ships to break up forever or else she´d break them all forever, which ship would you sink?

- no doubt, Thirteen and Dhawan! Master because she hella mad at him right now so they could do with a bit of a break up 😂😂

[hcmj]

HCMJ’s Favorite Albums of 2019!

Listen to a mix featuring these albums here: HCMJ’s 2019 End Of Year Mix

Other Favorites:

David Bruce - The North Wind Was a Woman

galen tipton - fake meat

upusen - Highland Ave.

BLACKPINK - Kill This Love

Starkey - Earth EP

Lamp - ‘A Distant Shore’ Asia Tour 2018

AWITW - Ｓｈｅ Ｗａｌｋ Ａｌｏｎｅ う者姻

Seaketa - Gion ぎおん

SNJO - Diamond

BONNEVILLE - AFFORDABLE LUXURY

20) Gareth Davis & Scanner - Footfalls

I first found the experimental composition/clarinet music of Gareth Davis in the early 2010′s during my initial dive into the Miasmah catalog. Teamed up here with another electronic musician/clarinetist, Footfalls uses long, poetic waves of deep woodwinds and synth improv to describe hauntingly desolate environments. It only seems fitting to start the list with one of many bookends on a decade in the grim, cold grey of Philadelphia.

BANDCAMP | APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY

19) Barker - Utility

Arp and delay-driven rhythmic expression that recalls late-era Kraftwerk, building a pristine sci-fi future with ear-pleasing, rich, and laser-sharp production. Like disembodied trance or house music searching for a strong beat that never comes, Utility is absolute, skillfully-stated synth pleasure.

BANDCAMP | APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY

18) Sean McCann/Seth Graham w/Kymatic Ensemble  - Split Series Vol. IV

Seth Graham’s Gasp was a big favorite in 2018, here condensed and re-imagined for chamber ensemble. Sean McCann’s “Vilon” finds a blissful middle-ground between electronic ambient music and traditional western instrumentation, like a poignant hymn sung somewhere far away, while the new “Gasp” arrangements are full of expressiveness and surprises.

BANDCAMP

17) 猫 シ Corp. & t e l e p a t h - Building a Better World

Deep bass pulses and distant rain welcome us to a familiar comfortable place, but as the unmistakable sound and melodic freedom of telepath’s original synth work bends its way over rolling toms in the reverb-soaked hifi opener, it becomes clear that this album is something new and special. Full-on new age drenched in an endless downpour, it’s a huge and beautiful world that’s blissful to be lost in.

BANDCAMP | APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY

16) Various Artists - Oneironaut

Another rare case of a compilation that is actually worth listening to, Japanese indie powerhouse Local Visions assembles the best talent from the sax-loving, jazz-infused, post-vaporwave electronic underworld of Japan and beyond in the indomitable Oneironaut comp. Notable contributions from Utsuro Spark, upusen, Tsudio Studio, tamao ninomiya, and countless others deliver a hazy daydream.

BANDCAMP

15) wai wai music resort - WWMR 1

Also from Local Visions comes this special collection of tracks caught somewhere between “lost LP found in a record crate” and “bedroom 4-track” - two distinct lofi flavors that mysteriously meld seamlessly on WWMR 1. It sounds new and old, youthful and mature, and full of affection for love and the music it references.

BANDCAMP | SPOTIFY

14) EXID - Me & You

There’s something about this mini-album, a Christmas time snowy nostalgia as the sun sets on another chapter of life (and era of kpop) in tracks like “나의밤” and “WE ARE..,” the Jamiroquai funk of “내일해 (Urban Mix),” or club igniting title track - EXID may never exist in this form or at this level again, and like so many of my favorites this year it reflects the recent history of its genre brilliantly.

APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY

13) Fire-Toolz - Field Whispers (Into the Crystal Palace)

Field Whispers is the stunning next step in the evolution of Fire-Toolz that feels completely at home on the finely-curated Orange Milk. Extended sax-soaked dreams collide with splinters of music jumbled and broken, elegant and disjointed, all bouncing off each other while still leaving room for moments of soaring guitar and dreamy synth pads.

BANDCAMP | APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY

12) Hakobune - The Last of Our Time Together

With over 50 releases (4 just this year!), Hakobune’s discography can seem like an impenetrable wall of ambience, but like classics Seamless and Here and Love Knows Where, The Last of Our Time Together stands out - monumental and multi-dimensional - a slow dance skidding along the frozen surface of an endlessly deep, rich sea of emotion.

BANDCAMP | APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY

11) FM Skyline - Advanced Memory Suite

As nostalgic electronic music continues to evolve and find itself elevated in the hands of increasingly-focused musicians, FM Skyline delivers a joyful retrospective on a decade that gave new life to so many old sounds. Exploring the inner recesses of our memory and delusion, Advanced Memory Suite turns the page on a decade of chillwave/synthwave/vaporwave/whateverwave. It’s a hypnotic monument to the modern renaissance.  

BANDCAMP | APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY

10) emamouse - Black place on the edge

It was a huge year from the prolific Tokyo-based visual artist and musician emamouse, whose non-stop creative output continues to challenge the very nature of reality. Black place on the edge was a standout favorite this year, layered and mysterious - incidental music for the surreal dreamworld described in mou’s most unnerving illustrations. Like waking up and finding yourself trapped inside Quest 64.

BANDCAMP

09) Koeosaeme - Obanikeshi

My favorite Orange Milk release of the year, Koeosaeme delivers another absolute hurricane of hyper-detailed, sensory-extreme, buckshot-to-the-face arrangements. The sheer amount of data on this album is staggering, with more musical information packed into a few minutes of its blissful chaos than most full length albums combined.

BANDCAMP | APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY

08) Jaeho Hwang - Non-self 비자아

I was super fortunate to play a show with Jaeho Hwang in Tokyo during this year’s Neo Gaia Phantasy tour - his immense set started so intensely it’s as if the entire room was cast under a shamanistic spell, hypnotized by percussive expressionism, drawn to the light of digitally melting faces and occult rituals playing out on the screen behind him. Non-self 비자아 is without mercy and full of powerful and primal energy.

BANDCAMP | APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY

07) Weyes Blood - Titanic Rising

Natalie Mering’s subtly expressive, velvety voice on its own is enough to make anything she touches turn to gold, but her songwriting is so masterfully dialed in on Titanic Rising it’s as if Harry Nilsson came back from the dead to write a new volume of pop rock ballads to get us through the next 50 years. It’s an album dripping with love for all the best parts of the 1970′s (Stardust-era Willie Nelson, early ELO, “Lost Weekend” Lennon and friends, etc), but also showcases the compositional chops to match and sometimes surpass its musical lineage (e.g. “Picture Me Better”).

BANDCAMP | APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY

06) Monari Wakita - RIGHT HERE

Off the heals of last year’s jaw-dropping Ahead!, ex-Especia Monari Wakita continues to defy modern conventions while asserting herself as one of the most powerful female voices in jpop. “エスパドリーユでつかまえて” sounds like Hitomitoi when she was a rising star, FRIEND IN NEED continues the new jack swing flirting, “やさしい嘘” sounds like it’s begging to be sampled by a future funk artist, and the lead-off single “Just a Crush for Today” is somewhere in a stop-and-go freefall between Billy Joel and Sonic R.

VIDEO 1 | VIDEO 2

05) Yeule - Serotonin II

Beneath the subtle power and diffusion of a voice like an extra-dimensional Julee Cruise, Serotonin II’s beautifully bleak paintings of the world it carefully constructs are reflective of Yeule’s transcendence into the artist’s next form. Crumbling brutalism under a blinding white sky, aliens in a graveyard - the romance of eternal torment in the spiral - all in dark room illuminated by a computer monitor sometime in the 00′s.

BANDCAMP | APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY

04) The Caretaker - Everywhere at the End of Time - Stage 6

The final release for this multi-year project, capturing a mind being lost to dementia, also marks the end of Leyland Kirby’s multi-decade spanning Caretaker project - a project that has had an immense impact on my perception of the limitlessness of music. Now completed, Everywhere at the End of Time towers as a 50 track, 6.5 hour journey from dreamy lucidity to terrifying confusion and darkness.

BANDCAMP

03) Tsudio Studio - Soda Resort Journey

Tsudio Studio brings a contemporary frame to leisure fantasy. Instant classics “Kiss in KIX,” “Asian Coke Light,” and “Like a Ruin” expand on the electro-bossa pop of Port Island, while surprises like “Beijing Cat” expand and explore new worlds of sound. One perfect chord after another, from start to finish, Soda Resort Journey is bubbly and delicious to listen to. Play it looped, close your eyes, be where you’d rather be.

BANDCAMP | APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY

02) Minuano - Butterfly Dream

Lamp vocalist Kaori Sakakibara’s side project Minuano is like some mutant variant of Lamp - equally complex while slightly less disorienting arrangements (although there are a few re-worked Lamp classics on here), tighter pop sound, stunningly immaculate vocal production - all while maintaining the unique orchestral jazz pop that makes both bands such a euphoric joy to listen to. “Memory of Soda Pop” was my favorite track released by anyone this year.

BANDCAMP

01) EQUIP - CURSEBREAKER X

This was the year of EQUIP. No better story for this year, no better sound than CURSEBREAKER X - the songs from this album will always bring back a thousand memories of smoke-filled clubs, dark forests, and snow-capped mountains from across Japan - the building promise of absolute freedom and a happier tomorrow as we all lived the Neo Gaia Phantasy.. But even without my personal connection to the music, the hardware-driven “perfect sound” VGM and EQUIP’s signature cassette tape destruction has never been better balanced than it is here - it’s loud, and filled with unforgettable melodies and unknown lands. It’s monumental and iconic and will stand the test of time and it was my favorite album of 2019!

BANDCAMP | APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY