#I also got a swiss army knife which has been really useful in unexpected ways like the tiny knife and scissors are such a help when sewing

[shoujofish]

I posted this to twitter but omg please look at this utena cd I got for christmas

[haberdashing]

Biting Your Own Neck (7/?)

Mid-season 2, Jon’s life is abruptly upended by the intrusion of two unexpected and eerily familiar visitors.

on AO3

Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6 / Chapter 7

Jon assumed it was either Tim or Martin sighing, though the sigh stopped before he could redirect his gaze to either of them to be certain; either way, though it appeared directed against Jon’s own words more than anything else, Jon couldn’t say he entirely disagreed with the sentiment. It had been a long day already, and it was still only the middle of the afternoon, with plenty of time for more surprises to lurk just around the corner.

“There’s got to be something that’ll prove what they’re saying is true.” Martin eventually said. “At least hypothetically, or else you’re just being paranoid for no reason.”

“Not like that’d be anything new.” Tim muttered under his breath.

Jon thought for a moment. Now that Martin mentioned it, he didn’t have any concrete ideas for how Jonny and Kay could prove that they really were versions of Jon and Martin rather than shapeshifters out to steal their identity or some such, but Jon could see the merit in Martin’s argument just the same. But if it was more evidence he needed...

“They left their bags with us. We could look at what’s in there, see if the contents make their true identity any clearer.”

Jon had expected Martin to jump at the idea, but instead he looked as uncomfortable as ever. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? Didn’t they say not to do that?”

“They didn’t, actually. All they said was that they thought their bags would be safe here.”

“While talking about us like we weren’t even here,” Tim added, “Which was really rather rude of them.”

Martin visibly deflated as he let out a long breath that fell just short of a proper sigh. “It’s still an invasion of privacy.”

“Can’t be as bad as stalking someone’s flat.” Tim said with a meaningful look at Jon; Jon, for his part, tried and failed to convince himself that Tim was referring to what Martin had been doing when he’d first encountered Jane Prentiss.

“And if it helps settle any suspicions, it’ll be well worth it.” Jon cleared his throat as he stood up and took a few steps towards the bags in question. “They probably won’t even know it happened so long as we’re careful about it.”

Martin still looked unconvinced, eyes wide and face pale, but after a moment of hesitation, he nodded. “Alright then. So long as you’re sure.”

“I don’t know that I’d go that far, but I’m willing to take the blame if if comes to that.”

“The least you could do.” Tim said in a voice low enough that Jon wasn’t actually sure he was meant to hear it.

Tim and Jon stood up almost in unison, with Martin only a step or two behind as the three of them approached Jonny and Kay’s bags, two stuffed and grimy-looking backpacks that both looked entirely unfamiliar to Jon. (If they really were from the future, well, Jon must not have bought that particular backpack yet.)

“Should we pick one to go through first? Either of you have a preference?”

Jon and Martin looked at one another for a moment before shaking their heads.

“I don’t recognize them, so I wouldn’t know which one was ‘mine’ to begin with.” Jon said.

“...yeah, same here. Guess we can just pick one at random.”

A moment of indecision, and then Tim grabbed the closer of the two, a backpack which looked to be a musty green underneath all of its grime. Just unzipping the thing was enough to send a bit of unpleasant-looking dust out into the rest of the Archives, and Jon had to stifle a cough.

“Oh, this has to be Jon’s- well, future Jon’s, anyway.”

“Jonny’s.” Jon corrected before shaking his head a bit as the words sank in. “What makes you say that?”

Tim shoved the backpack Jon’s way. “Just take a look.”

Jon did so, and he couldn’t help but laugh a little as the reason behind Tim’s certainty about the backpack’s ownership became clear. A tape recorder was sitting near the top, and about a dozen cassette tapes were crammed into the backpack, threatening to spill out if it were unzipped any further.

“You know, I still don’t exactly like tape recorders.”

“Doesn’t stop you from using them, though.”

Jon made a noncommittal grunt in response as he looked through the other contents of Jonny’s backpack. There were a handful of loose pieces of papers seemingly thrown in there at random; at a glance, Jon didn’t know what they were or what their purpose might be, but they might be worth a closer look later. The backpack also contained, among other things, a small torch, a roll of duct tape, matches, a whistle, and several safety pins scattered across the bottom.

“On to Mart- er, Kay’s now?”

A few nods of agreement, and they moved on.

Some of the contents of Kay’s backpack weren’t terribly surprising: a thin blanket, a handful of teabags, another whistle and torch. Some weren’t outrageous, but made Jonny wonder what spurred on their inclusion: a long thread of rope, a crowbar, several maps of what looked to be the entirety of Great Britain with an X in northern Scotland and London circled.

(There was one notebook that Martin grabbed immediately and refused to let the other two look at, even after Jon confessed that he’d read Martin’s poetry before, that it couldn’t have gotten much worse in the future.)

And then...

“Martin, why the hell do you have so many knives?”

“What?” Martin inched closer as Tim brought the offending knives out of Kay’s backpack. “Oh, that’s- the way you said that, I thought it’d be more than that.”

“What d’you mean? That’s a lot of knives for someone to carry around!”

“Three knives isn’t that many, really! And the one’s a Swiss army knife, a, a multitool, that barely even counts as a knife-”

Tim held up the knife in question, extending its blade, which was admittedly fairly small. “But it is still a knife, you know, legally speaking-”

“I didn’t think we were speaking legally, just look how thick that handle is, there’s got to be loads of other tools in there-”

Jon cleared his throat, mostly in order to get Tim and Martin’s attention and stop their argument in the making. “What do the other two knives look like, then?”

“Well, this one’s a bit bigger, and it’s clearly not a multitool-”

“...I think I recognize that one, actually. From when I carried around a knife for a bit. Looks like the same knife.”

Tim squinted at Martin. “Since when did you carry around a knife?”

“Since Prentiss attacked me! Thought it’d be good to get worms out, at least until I came up with the corkscrew idea. Never had to use it, thankfully, but...”

Tim let out an exaggerated shudder. “Lovely.”

“And I thought the corkscrew was bad...” It was only too easy for Jon to picture that knife being thrust into his skin, being stabbed to remove the worms burrowing their way inside of him, his flesh being cut up like a piece of meat... no, all things considered, the corkscrew was the lesser evil there.

“Don’t suppose you recognize the other one, then?”

This knife was big, even by non-portable knife standards, Jon was pretty sure. A butcher’s knife, perhaps? One that was big and sharp and didn’t lend itself as easily to uses beyond simple violence, cutting up meat dead or alive.

“I mean, I think it’s the one he- Kay was gonna use on that Not-Sasha thing, but other than that? No idea.”

“Why would Kay even need to carry around a knife like that?” Jon took a closer look at the knife, tried to determine whether the dirt on it was simply dust and debris from being carried around or something more sinister, but to no avail. “Did he... did he use it on someone?”

“He didn’t, no.”

Jon gulped as he heard his own voice calling out, fast footsteps approaching--how much had Jonny and Kay heard?

“Martin hasn’t had to hurt anyone with that knife. He’s certainly not a murderer. Unlike yours truly, that is.”

Kay protested with a quick “Jon!”, but it wasn’t enough to avert Jon’s attention from the implications of what Jonny had just admitted to. Jon’s throat suddenly felt like sandpaper.

“...are you going to kill us too, then?” Tim didn’t sound terribly afraid of the prospect--angry, perhaps, but not afraid--and his fingers wrapped themselves around the handle of Kay’s biggest knife as he looked up at the duo.

“Jon, you’re scaring them.”

“I have no intention of killing you, no. But since you went digging through our stuff, and probably found some confusing things in there...”

Jon’ stomach sank.

“...perhaps it’s time the two of us give the rest of you a proper explanation.”

[madstars-festival]

MEET KUMUDA RAO, INDIA’S CREATIVE MAGPIE

At AD STARS 2019, Leo Burnett India group ECD talked to Little Black Book’s Laura Swinton about the insatiable curiosity that drives her and the importance of feeding your creativity beyond the ad industry. This article is republished courtesy of Little Black Book.

"Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people."

As far as creative curiosity goes, few people embody that famous Leo Burnett quote as fully as Kumuda Rao does. She’s been a lawyer, a furniture upcycler, a director, an actor, a stagehand, a hotelier, a mum, a tech entrepreneur – and she’s got her eye on farming. And, appropriately enough, she’s a dyed-in-the-wool Burnetter, working as a group executive creative director, based in Mumbai.

It’s this compulsive inquisitiveness and willing to throw herself into new experiences, picking up a Swiss Army Knife of skills along the way, that led one college friend to predict that the young law student would end up not in the courtroom but in adland. While still at university, Kumuda ended up helping her friend from the college magazine with his new agency – setting her off on her career.

Kumuda’s first ‘proper’ agency job was at Mudra – now DDB Mudra – where she was one of only two women at the agency. It was the early ‘90s and the management had decided – shockingly – not to hire any women because they ‘might get pregnant’. Kumuda managed to slip in on the merit of her ‘wild and all over the place CV’ and the fact that the agency had just won a sanitary towel account and the men at the agency felt so out of their depth they could barely bring themselves to whisper, let alone say, the word ‘sanitary towel’.

“I thought it was odd because I come from a family where being a female never mattered,” recalls Kumuda. “My mum and grandmother were hardcore feminists. I never had that thing. You go there and you work.”

From there Kumuda went onto Ogilvy, which was like a ‘school’ for advertising. And in 1999, she ended up in Leo Burnett, an agency she describes as her ‘home’ and where she’s worked ever since aside from a short ‘glitch’ where she went to Y&R (an experience she describes as ‘totally traumatic’ as it coincided with her move from her native Bangalore to Mumbai and family illness) and a career break she took when she gave birth to her twins.

This being Kumuda, though, her maternity break also saw her try her hand at commercial directing and also launching and running a beach hut business in Goa with her actor husband. The directing was a callback to her love of the theatre. In Bangalore, where the commute was substantially less time-consuming than it is now in Mumbai, Kumuda had thrown herself into the local theatre scene, where she acted, worked as a stagehand and directed. Back then she found herself drawing on high school French for her acting roles – proof that there’s no such thing as useless education. As a commercial director, her childhood piano lessons came unexpectedly flooding back.

“I was seven months pregnant, with twins. The producer was like… please don’t deliver now! It was too funny. But all my theatre experience came back. When I was sitting with the music supervisor, all my music experience came back,” she recalls. “And I used to bring in all my theatre technique, I’d bring my talent down and talk to them how I would talk to my actors and plot the movements out. It was really good.”

As she started to go back to work with Leo Burnett, she faced a dilemma. To progress any more as a commercial director, she’d have to commit to it full time – in the end her magpie creative mind drew her back to agency life.

At Leo Burnett in Mumbai, Kumuda has worked on huge P&G accounts at a regional level, including ‘Whisper’ (the brand name for Always in Asia and Australia), where she has been striving to break down the same taboos that existed at the very beginning of her career.

“All these myths and misconceptions are very much there - India in some ways is a weird country. Tampons exist as well as all these other methods. Whisper is doing an excellent job trying to bust some of these myths,” says Kumuda. Times, though, are changing. Kumuda’s daughter will speak easily about periods with her dad, and her twin brother will comfortably involve himself in the conversation too.

It’s an account that has focused Kumuda’s mind on the ‘brand purpose’ debate. She’s no fan of disconnected ‘cause-vertising’ that sees a brand tack some cause or other onto its communication in a way that benefits neither the brand nor the purpose. However, India is home to some standout examples of brands zeroing in on difficult social issues that absolutely fit. BBDO’s work for Ariel, ‘Share the Load’, is one such exemplar Kumuda highlights, as well as the social harmony messaging that tea brand Red Label has been running with. At Whisper, the brand has been – ironically – pushing for girls to become more confident and empowered, with 2017’s ‘Sit Improper’ campaign a rallying cry against prim, restrictive expectations (see below).

The agency has also been working on a more proactive basis with its closest clients, leaning into innovation. In 2017 they created ‘Roads That Honk’ for HP Lubricant, a road safety solution. And there are some potentially exciting developments currently in development stage with P&G around changing the makeup of certain products in order to fight malaria. Kumuda talks enthusiastically about Leo Burnett’s Apollo 11 unit, comprising engineers and designers, tasked to come up with non-traditional solutions.

These new and constantly-changing challenges are mana for someone as open to new experiences and adventures as Kumuda. Even though her tapestry of expertise hasn’t been planned, she finds that her past detours still crop up and provide her with useful insights in the most unexpected ways. And she’s still learning. Recently, she started helping a friend of her husband with his tech start up, getting hands-on with the challenges of building a small business in the social age. 

Her kids want her to help them start a YouTube channel, though she’s (understandably) somewhat warier about starting down that path with a pair of aspiring influencers. She’s also just bought a piece of land about 160km from Mumbai where she hopes to start an organic farm and fulfil her long-held desire to get involved in architecture. She plans to build a house in the style of Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa and expose her urbanite children to the sort of rural, tree-clambering childhood she experienced in southern India.

Whatever Kumuda turns her hands and mind to next, it’s all fuel for her creativity. Driven by genuine curiosity and passion rather than cold-eyed calculation, she can’t quite predict how those experiences will help her down the line, but she knows that they will. “I think there’s always a reason that you go through whatever you do,” she muses. “All the pieces just fall into place much later.”

• Read the original article here via Little Black Book