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swedeandsour · 5 years

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Jonna Lee on Demystifying the Aura of Her Viral Fame; Finding Her Voice and Her Die-Hard Fanbase

In her videos Jonna Lee (ionnalee/iamamiwhoami), carries an imposing presence. Her talons drawn over the bloodied shriek of her piercing falsettos, Lee certainly echoes the sentiment of a mythical being where cryptic words of love and hope beckon wondrous melodies through striking iconoclasm. In reality, what we see with Jonna Lee the performer is quite different. Though her intensity apparent in the palpitations of her rave-driven melodies; analogous to what someone might see in the industrial nightlife of Central and Eastern Europe, ionnalee's stage presence carries a certain tenderness to it. A tireless worker for her often die-hard audiences, Lee's performances are vibrant and energetic. There in her live show, vigorous dance routines sandwich between the illuminating wings of "Chasing Lights" and we even see a Russian floating-step that sees her levitate off the ground on during her performance of "y". With her vocals honeyed and mellow despite their resonant carry, the smoke and mirrors of Lee's live element showcase Jonna in a different light. It’s a real joy of performance that we see with Jonna, one that shines a light on her oh-so-human vulnerability that we often forget when she’s draped in faux-fur and suited-up in character.

Speaking to Jonna before her show in Toronto in her co-headlining show with TR/ST, we tried to demystify the mythology behind Lee’s eccentric presence. Kind and soft-spoken, the fearless performer seemed somewhat reserved and humbled by the whole concept of even stepping out on a world tour. There speaking about influences and finding her artistic voice and without dredging into drawn-out cliché, Jonna made sure to highlight one very important aspect. Throughout the viral madness of her initial few videos and now a world tour, none of it would have been possible without the undying support of her fans.

Words + Photo: Peter Quincy Ng

Part of the interview has been edited for clarity

We’ve been slowly demystifying Jonna Lee. What’s it like being on tour so far and meeting your fans through your newly found infamy?

First of all, it’s amazing to fathom all of that; very surreal. It is kind of like you are in a little bubble working alone a lot, or with me and (producer) Claes (Björklund). We don’t have much connection with the music industry or just networks, so coming out seeing this many people and listening; seeing their response, it’s quite new to me. At this (crowd) size especially, it’s overwhelming but positive stuff obviously. It just takes a while just to process everything.

Tell me about your beginnings form Jonna Lee to iamamiwhoami to ionnalee again, and on how you found your artistic voice. You transitioned from largely acoustic singer-songwriter prose with sweet and mellow melodies to a more aggressively electronic and experimental style - striking and shrill.

I didn’t know I had in me, but in the beginning Claes believed in me a lot. In the beginning I tried to find my voice and sound more like this person or that person. I’ve been trying to sound British at first, because I had spent so much time in London in my earlier teens. At first I had also been afraid to do things out of the box as we recorded; because me and Claes, it’s the same team you know? We both kind of made our transition.

I remember at first, I was like, “No we need to strip back, no compressors”. I just wanted everything to be super natural and organic, and then when everything came out I was really dissatisfied and felt like I was invisible. We started playing around started to scrap everything. I mean we couldn’t because it was already out, but you know mentally start over. Then we did you know? No rules, let’s just do this.

Now I find we’re back again at it and I needed to connected to my personal point of view, because I’ve grown a lot musically as well. I’m also a better producer than I was ten years ago, so I wanted to see where I was ten years after this project. I don’t know if I am going continue as iam(amiwhoami) right now, but we’ll see. It’s a scary thing as well.

When you first started iamamiwhoami, there was a lot of mystery behind your origins and the mythologies of your persona. Were you worried about how you would be perceived or did you think you have convinced people you were Lady Gaga?

Uh no (laughs), I was not but I was hoping to maintain my anonymity because we were a group. I figured if they figured out our identity, then they’d judge the book and my previous work and everything. At the point of exposure (of my identity) though, we were all really disappointed but then again we never really tried to hide anything. We just took advantage that no one in Sweden really cared about iam(amiwhoami), so we were able to continue for quite a long time. When the whole thing happened though, it was just kind of surreal, you know (being mistaken for) Christina Aguilera, you can really plan that stuff ahead (laughs). I don’t think that sort of viral is happening anymore because everything has changed so much.

iamamiwhoami acquired viral fame, and one of the jokes on YouTube is that 90% of your views amounted from someone typing in one of the letters from b-o-u-n-t-y and the other 10% of fans are of the “COME TO BRAZIL!” trope. Was the concept of viral fame difficult to digest at first? Was there any pressure to keep the viral craze running?

Oh, it can’t be like that, I don’t think you can really do that, that whole thing with typing “y”, that’s just the internet doing its thing. Obviously, the other views are because it’s a great song and video. When that happens, you can’t (do anything to) affect it. You can try to force-feed it by doing the same thing repeatedly but if you look at the fifty-two something videos and continue to do quality things, then they those views will continue to be there. You see that in the shows, with a lot of those fans that have been there for ten years and that is so precious. The media coverage, that’s not connected to the actual work though. That’s connected to something else. It’s about what’s popular at the moment and I can’t compete with that and it has nothing to do with me.

In the age of instant celebrity, you managed to secure infamy without anyone really knowing who you were. For you is that an optimistic feeling?

That’s something that I’m proud of, but perhaps too proud of maybe. It’s rare that something is as pure as something like that, so I’m really happy that happened. Obviously I pointed a lot of people in a direction where if they weren’t interested they wouldn’t follow it, like with the whole identity when it wasn’t this supposed person or whatever, but it’s something that allowed me to tour all over the world.

You’ve recently assumed the persona ionnalee, a stylized spelling of your name. In a way, it has been hard to detach your previous effort iamamiwhoami from your current persona. How are the two similar yet different, and is that something you strive to change?

Mainly iam(amiwhoami) was about us (referring to Claes) internally, but it didn’t appear like it from the outside because I’m the frontperson and I created the project. It was always me and Claes. Claes is the main producer, I am the co-producer, we write all the music together and I write the lyrics and the melodies as well.

But for ionnalee, in iam(amiwhoami), I’ve never written from the point of “I”, from my perspective, my life and what concerns me. Also I produce everything myself but with some collaborations with Claes. He’s always like, “let’s do this!” playing some instruments. We love working together, we share a studio together. We have also had some of the same people working like (videographer) John Strandh and a few other ones were involved with iam(amiwhoami). So (the difference) it feels more like a project, not a person.

Both your projects have a very substantial audiovisual component to them and actually all you’re your singles follow up with a video. That’s quite a daunting task to say the least as music videos are huge commitments in time and in financial resources. How do you keep things fresh without blowing the budget?

Like financially, it’s always a bit of a struggle with how much time we can put in and with what gear we can produce with. We don’t have the funds to rent a lot of expensive stuff, so we relied a lot on what we could afford with our friends and stuff who want to help us create. For example, my brother Viktor (Kumlin) has always been John’s gaffer and cinematographer, even though he’s now a cinematographer himself. That’s one thing, but keeping the quality we will always make something because we feel like we have something to say and that’s easy then. You have the vision, you have the script, you have the song and everything’s together. If I would have continued making a video for every song like with iamamiwhoami that would be something that in the end would be something that wears out. I’m doing things differently now, to be more concentrated because I don’t want to being doing something just for the sake of format, like where I have to make a video.

Going back to the visual aspect, there is definitely the mythology; the mystique of “bounty” and “kin” but what really seems to be the underlying motif is the connection between the human connection to nature and the cosmos. Can you tell us how that inspires you, your imagery and music?

There are two sides to that; there’s creation in what we have done and the normative and traditional ways of doing things, then there’s creation, nature and how we connect to folklore. It’s what I grew up with and what my collaborators also did, so I guess it goes back to a question of visual aspect and it’s aesthetic. It’s a really hard question to answer.

Music is always a collaborative effor especially in the world of Jonna Lee, but what is most surprising is your connection to your fanbase. From the audiovisual aspect of in concert to your live shows, tell us how that has been? I suppose it has to be humbling but at the same time intimidating knowing that you have to deliver essentially for what they have paid for.

They are 50% of everything; they shaped the way the world tour acted. I didn’t think I would have toured (otherwise) because it would have been a hopeless thing. They’re communicating, live-chatting everything, I mean it’s sort of cliché but for ten years that’s really been the core of it all, otherwise it wouldn’t have been as interesting to create. They want to want to be part of it, that’s how I see it.

I know there have been many so-to-speak deeper questions being asked, but being the riddle and enigma you are, there is also an element to absurdity to all of this. Do you ever laugh at the all the toilet paper, cardboard boxes, glasses of milk, aluminum foil, morphsuits and fake fur you’ve used?

I mean that’s part of it; doing it in a different way. I mean I am laughing it all the time, like (the video) for “Some Body” that just came out today, editing it with all the common themes. It’s important to have that self-distance with yourself so that you don’t go in and become too self-absorbed. So humor is a good tool, because it also speaks to people and it’s nice and it makes you feel good and it’s not just (speaking mockingly) fashion! You know, it needs to have its human side.

You can check out ionnalee’s latest video for “Some Body” below:

youtube

#ionnalee #iamamiwhoami #jonna lee #swedish pop

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agirlandherfed · 7 years

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ISSUES: Coping Strategies

This is a short story I did for Geeky Giving, a charity working to promote research in “Parkinson’s, ALS, traumatic brain injuries, brain tumors, Alzheimer’s and more.” They were kind enough to let me do an AGAHF short story for the charity anthology, so I did Jenny and Shawn: Jenny because she’s the researcher, Shawn because he’s been hurt. The story’s copyright has reverted to me, so I’m posting it here for everyone.

The man on the other side of the bed was sweet and kind and completely insane.

She didn’t know how to feel about that. This uncertainty bothered her more than the act of sleeping with a crazed man. Five years ago, she would have been mortified with herself, with the idea of intimacy with someone such as Shawn. Even if he wasn’t her patient. Even if he was more than a friend. Today, he was just…Shawn.

She didn’t let herself think about it—she’d find fear down there, and maybe something else, something that could chase the fear away but leave them both forever changed.

Instead, she stared at the ceiling and pretended she couldn’t hear her machines call to her.

Shawn’s mental voice was strong, and ran as crisp as a winter river through her mind. “Go,” he said.

“I thought you were asleep,” she whispered aloud.

“You’re too noisy. You should go. Go be with them.”

She rolled over to face him. He had cut his hair himself last week and had done an awkward job of it. Someone had given him a buzz cut to tidy him up, but aggressive neurosurgery and skull-shorn hair paired poorly. She traced his scars with her fingertips, feeling the bumps and twists of the ridges of his scar tissue, and beneath that, his drowsy tangle of emotions.

“They miss you,” he said in her mind. He reached out and traced her own scars, hidden beneath her short brown hair. “I’ll miss you, too, but I want to sleep.”

“All right.” She kissed him on his shoulder, and felt him drop out of her senses as his implant went into passive mode. “I’ll be back soon.”

“Take your time,” he muttered into his pillow, his voice cut down to nothing from lack of use. “I remember having more energy after sex.”

“You remember sex when you were twenty,” she said. Their clothes were a single knot on the floor; she yanked on loose ends until she had reclaimed her pants. “We’re getting old.”

Gentle snoring.

The other members of the collective slept around them, rooms and buildings and miles away. She felt them around her, off-line but still present in the back of her head, four hundred souls who shared their thoughts with her during the day but kept their dreams to themselves.

She opened the door to the crash room and stepped into her lab. It was a medical suite in name only, stuck beneath a crumbling mansion in what once had been a wine cellar. Federal funding only went so far: the government could front the costs for the cutting-edge technology that had gone into their heads, but resources for infrastructure and development? Please.

She didn’t mind. She had built her own diagnostic laboratory by scavenging equipment from storage, or buying what she couldn’t borrow. The room served double-duty as an emergency ward, but the worst injuries she saw tended to be exercise-induced, and not too many of those.

It left her plenty of time for her own projects.

Her computers whirred to life around her. There was no need for clunky access codes; they recognized her and welcomed her home.

“HELLO, JENNY.”

Theirs was a woman’s voice, false and mechanical. Most days, she told herself that they couldn’t feel, that she was projecting her own eagerness to get back to work on her machines.

On nights like this, when the rest of the collective was sleeping and she was nearly alone in her own head, Jenny wasn’t so sure.

“Hello, ladies,” she said. “Ready to play?”

A human brain sprung up around her in reply.

It was lovingly rendered in greens, and enlarged ten times life-size for clarity; if she looked closely, she could see the bright flashes of synapses.

(Which was something of a comfort—it was her own brain, scanned and digitized, and independent confirmation that your own brain is active is always welcome.)

The implant rested against her parietal lobe, a small metallic sliver smaller than the head of a nail. At this resolution, she could make out the microscopic filaments connected to it; these ran throughout her brain, the majority twining into her brain stem. Heat regulation had been front and center on the developers’ own minds; without it, the cyborgs would have cooked themselves within their own skulls.

She ran her fingers through the hologram. The silvery filaments covered her holographic brain like cobwebs, shining brightly against the green.

“Ladies, overlay image JED-1 over master.”

A second brain appeared, the same general size and shape as the first but made from blues instead of greens. The opacity of the green brain diminished as the blue brain was positioned over it.

“File: Jenny Davis, late night ramblings,” she said aloud. Talking helped. Speaking directly to her computers through her implant was good for clinical analysis, but it was late, and she was tired, and it was time to purge her thoughts so she could, maybe, get some sleep.

“RECORDING.”

“Thank you, ladies. Subfile: Background, general.” She began to pace around and through the hologram, checking for oddities. The blue brain was hers, too—had been hers, once, nearly seven years and an entire lifetime ago. Before the surgery, and the collective, and the alien oddness of hiveminds had all had their way with it. “Image JED-1, brain of a healthy 22-year-old Caucasian female. Ladies, highlight parietal lobe.”

A section of the hologram began to glow.

“Side by side, magnify, compare and contrast.”

The hologram divided itself again, blue and green enlarging to fill the room. She wandered through the colors, talking to her machines as she went, tracing lines and shapes and twisting flashes of—

“What’s this?”

Jenny swore aloud as her concentration shattered. Shawn flinched away from her sudden frustration and dropped to his knees.

“Oh, honey!” She knelt beside him and reached out through the link. His consciousness scurried away from hers, looking for an escape but unable to find it. “I didn’t know you were there. I’m so sorry.”

She pressed her bare hands against his bare shoulders: she pushed positive emotions—calm, peace, belonging—across the bridge of their skin until he believed it.

He uncurled, looking up at her like a lost lamb.

“I thought you were asleep,” she explained. “You scared me.”

Shawn laughed at that.

She managed to coax him off of the ground, one arm around him to keep him steady. “Here,” she said aloud. “Look. Want to see something amazing?

“This is me,” she continued, pointing to the blue hologram. “You know those tests you hate so much?”

“The brain scans?” He shuddered, and the sensation of being trapped in a tight white chamber crushed against her. Of lying as still as death, of knowing the person on the other end of the monitor was looking for what was wrong about what the core of you…

“Easy,” she whispered. “Please.”

His fear let her go, slowly. It had managed to find the cracks in her own psyche and had set itself deep—What if these brain implants stimulate tumorigenesis? Or neurodegeneration, or arteriovenous malformation, or… An almost endless list of what could go wrong…

But there was the green hologram, brand-new and still perfect, and she told herself to put those fears aside.

“Well…” she began, “you remember during orientation, when we all had full medical diagnostics done? This is a composite image from my first MRI and CT scans.”

He stretched out a hand; it passed through the hologram, layering him in a blue the color of a summer sky.

“And this is me, too,” she said, pulling the green parietal lobe towards them. “From last week. Notice the differences?”

“This,” he said, as he pointed to the bright sliver of light on the green lobe. “Obviously.”

“What else?”

He grinned at her. A sense of pleasure at the challenge came back to her over their link, and she turned away on the pretense of gathering up some fallen papers. Too easy to forget that Shawn had once been in the FBI, that he had once been a brilliant up-and-coming forensic artist.

That experimenting with the human mind could have consequences.

Shawn didn’t seem to notice. He moved between the holograms, sorting and poking. His own digital renders began to appear as he worked; the holograms he created were more stylized than her own, freehand sketches hanging in the air beside her still images.

“Here,” he said, once done.

She wrapped her arms around him and stood on her toes so she could rest her chin on his shoulder. His sketches were playful, with arcs of white light moving across the lobes in quick streams. In some places, they caught what she hadn’t: Shawn’s sketches moved across regions that seemed no different than the others, with—

Jenny squinted, hard. “Are those bunnies?”

She stepped away from Shawn and moved into the holograms. A tiny cartoon rabbit popped out of a fold in her green parietal lobe and scampered across her brain. That first rabbit was followed by a second, then a third…more rabbits, an infinite number of rabbits, each scurrying with purpose towards different destinations.

Not just arcs of light, then.

“There are cheetahs somewhere,” he said. “And horses, too. They don’t show up as often. I used rabbits to show the most frequent movement.”

Sure enough, a streak of light emerged across the green expanse before her. A herd of wild mustangs, manes and tails flowing together as they ran, moved in a single stream.

“Damn,” she said softly. “Baby, this is really beautiful.”

She felt his cheeks flush. “It’s just a clip from a YouTube video,” he replied. “I didn’t have time to render each horse.”

“But you drew the bunnies?”

“One of them. The rest are a copy-paste job.”

“These are neural networks,” she said, reaching out to touch the mustangs with her mind. They blurred beneath her thoughts: she hastily moved her mind away, scared she had damaged them. The herd reformed and continued its journey. “Your bunnies are action potentials. The horses—” Out of the corner of her eye, a tiny feline body bunched and shot across the hologram at an incredible speed. “—and the cheetahs are electrochemical neurotransmissions.”

He laughed aloud, a wild, coughing sound. “I can’t remember freshman biology,” he said. “All I know is that the green brain has more wildlife than the blue one. A lot more wildlife.”

“That’s because the implant’s been changing us.”

White light in her head, so bright and sudden it took her a moment to realize her words had stunned him. Shawn stood, motionless, before he turned and fled to the comfortable darkness of the crash room.

“Oh, no, no, Shawn honey…” Jenny hurried after him. If he managed to make it under the bed, he’d be there for the rest of the week. She reached him in time to lay both hands flat on his back and pushed—calm, belonging, peace—across their joined skin.

He let her pull him away from the bed, but no further. They huddled on the floor in a sad, uncomfortable pile, and she felt a spot on the knee of her jeans grow damp.

Shawn was crying.

“There’s always some good that comes with change,” she said gently.

He looked up at her, eyes wide and desperate, before curling in on himself again.

“You didn’t break. You got a little bent, but… Here,” she said. “Come back to the lab. I want to show you something.”

Bad days turned him mulish, but this was a good day: she was able to coax him off the floor and as far as the doorway. They stood in the void between rooms, cold tile beneath their toes and warm carpet under their heels, as the holograms spun before them.

Jenny pointed. “You said you noticed how there was more wildlife in the green brain?”

“…yes…”

“That’s because our brains—this part of our brains, anyhow—is more active than it was before we got the implant. No, not just active—it’s thriving! Want to guess why?”

His attention was fixed on the holograms, but the easy scorn of an eyeroll passed between them.

“Humor me,” she said. “I’m going to have to explain this to people who aren’t in the collective at some point. Help me find the right words for this.”

“Because we’re using our brains in new ways,” Shawn replied, his mood pulling itself a little higher. “Talking via a link, or this—” he said, and pushed sensations at her.

Unseen fur, coarse but soft, surrounded her hands. Beneath that was the heat from a living body. With these came the memory of a beloved family dog, long dead but not forgotten.

“Exactly,” she said, blinking back her own tears at the loss of a pet she had never met. “We’re the first humans to have been augmented in this way. It’s causing us to think and act differently. We’ve got these new skills that we’re just beginning to put to use. We’re barely seven years into this experiment, and there’s already observable growth in the parietal lobe. Can you imagine what we’ll be able to do after—”

“Wait, Jenny, wait. Brains grow? Don’t we… I thought we started shedding brain mass once we turned eighteen.”

“That’s Hollywood science,” she said. “Outdated and chock full of errors, but it still fits the script. The reality is…”

—rabbits, horses, and giant cats, speeding over an expanse of green in endless knots of light—

“The reality is, we’re miracles,” she said to him. “Human beings weren’t meant to be networked together. We shouldn’t have the ability to survive as part of a collective, but we do. We change—we grow. We’ve barely begun to understand how we can do any of this, but the more we learn, the more we can use that to grow.”

Shawn broke away from her and stepped into the lab. Greens and blues moved around him, coloring him in a digital sea. He was still naked; the scars across his wrists were nearly as white as the glowing animals.

“What about me?”

“Hmm?”

“I’m not…” Shawn’s hands clenched uselessly. “I’m not who I used to be. Does this mean I can go back to how I was, or will I…”

He opened his hands and let his mind pour into hers.

Memories. All of them, from the moment that his own mind broke under the weight of a new reality to living in the fear of staying as he was, unable to change, unable to grow, a roller coaster of emotions that threatened to tip off of the rails—

Too much: she cried out. Shawn lost focus: the memories faded.

Her world rebuilt itself in pieces. The floor came first: she had fallen to her knees. She concentrated on the patterns in the tile until she found the walls. Where there was a floor and walls, there was a ceiling…

She stood.

Shawn hadn’t noticed. “Is this me?” he asked. “This?! From now on?”

She closed her eyes and thought about impossible conversations. Then: “Ladies?”

The holograms stopped spinning.

“Replace current images with new holographic display. Show SEF-1 and SEF-46, parietal lobes only. Side-by-side comparisons.”

Blues and greens vanished; blues and greens returned. To the untrained eye, nothing had changed; the wildlife was gone, but the silvery rectangle was still there on the green brain, and the same flashes of light chased itself in purposeful patterns across both.

“Here,” she said, as she joined Shawn in the center of the room. “This is you. Your earliest scans are blue, and the most recent scans are green.”

He stared up at the twisting holograms. She felt his attention dart across the details, focusing like a laser on anything distinctive or different…

“They look just like yours,” he finally admitted.

“That’s the problem, baby.” Jenny pulled him close. “If you had typical neurological damage, it’d show up on the scans. Whatever happened to you, it’s…harder to find.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “Mental illness can be caused by emotional, psychological, or physiological events, or a combination of these. We’re just beginning to scratch the surface of the causes of known disorders. Since your condition is almost unique, we’re flying blind.”

Sorrow. Loss. Anger—You’re a doctor! Why can’t you fix what’s wrong with me?!—and fear.

So much fear.

“We’ll get there,” she promised, as she pushed her own fear down below where she could feel it. “You’re responding well to medication and therapy. It’ll take time, and trial-and-error, and…and more tests, I’m sorry. None of this is easy, but we’ll make it work.

“You might never get back to who you used to be,” she admitted, as his heart hammered in her head. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t get to where you want to be, now.”

“I can do more tests,” he said quietly, even as the white chamber rose up again in his mind.

Together, they held their fears away.

#agahf #short stories #Shawn #Jenny #mental illness #mental health #mental health support

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abloodymess · 7 years

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Tobe Hooper made the best horror movie, he also made the best horror movie sequel (with all due respect to Don Coscarelli and the great Phantasm sequels), and he also made the best made for TV horror movie. Not only that but he made a ton of great idiosyncratic horror movies through his career, some better than others, but all certainly interesting and could not have been made by anyone else (can you believe Lifeforce was made at all!? Who makes a movie like that!?). A true oddball, with a unique vision, that changed the landscape of cinema, not just horror cinema, all cinema with the release of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. So with Tobe passing I thought I would share my favorite bit of writing on that particular film in its entirety.

Anecdotal: the concept of one’s own death loiters in the brain of a middle-aged man a lot more frequently than that of his twenty-something counterparts. Once you hit 40 there are, statistically speaking, more days behind you than in front of you, and as much as you try to run in the opposite direction, your mind will always eventually face front to dwell on the non-negotiable black nothingness of oblivion waiting for you at the end.

Not surprisingly, this mindset changes the way one watches the beloved horror classics of one’s youth. Moments of cinematic carnage take on a gravitas that the 18-year-old you couldn’t possibly have absorbed. When we’re young, death is scary but abstract; a dark unknown. In our 40s, death is a fact. It has by now reached out from the shadows and taken a few of our group. It surrounds us, moving toward us as we move toward it. In middle age, we’re always painfully aware that death is waiting, that it’s the one true certainty in life.

Death's inevitability is sitting right there in the title of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. There's no ambiguous "nightmare" or “legend” or "night of terror" in that title. Right there on your admission ticket, it’s printed in black and white: Death is coming. En masse. With that one title, you’ve been told the what, the where and the how. (An opening dateline provides the when; you will never get the why.) The film that follows is not an escapist, spooky funhouse ride. It’s a funeral dirge. And no one gets more existentially fucked up by a funeral than the middle-aged.

That’s an interesting wrinkle, as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is, through and through, a young people’s movie about death. It stars and was made by people mostly under 30, and was ingested primarily by a young audience who, in 1974, recognized it as the primal fairy tale it was. “What happened to them was all the more tragic in that they were young,” John Larroquette's voice tells us in the opening narration, and a young, draft-age audience nodded in agreement. Certainly that was my take on my first viewing, at age 12. In the VHS heyday of the early ‘80s, I found The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to be unnerving in its visual and aural assault, altogether different from the other movies in my rental pile. Of the many films that sparked an early interest in the craft of filmmaking, Tobe Hooper’s 1974 masterpiece was likely in my top three, though I struggled to articulate what was so special about it. It wasn’t exactly fun, or heightened, or overly stylized with the kind of polish that telegraphed “film production” to the viewer. It felt like you were seeing genuine homicidal insanity onscreen. There were no safe, cathartic thrills to be found. It made me feel small and helpless. That’s probably why it wasn’t on rotation in my VCR the way, say, the Friday the 13th movies were.

As the power (and appeal) of certain slasher franchises faded with my adolescence, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre continued to cast a spell. Time did not render any of its moments cheesy or hokey for me; the film’s unblinking lack of sentiment served it well in that regard. When more advanced moviemaking technology started to throw the rough edges of my other horror favorites into sharp relief, here was a film that never stopped feeling real. With each new video transfer, its deceptively primitive visual style was revealed to be more detailed and sophisticated than we realized, VHS “purists” be damned. Its soundscape never became dated because it is singular in the history of the genre; nothing has sounded like it before or since. The sound design is near-flawless, impregnating even the quiet moments with a droning sense of doom. It’s the heavy silence of a funeral director’s office, or an oncologist’s waiting room. It’s the noisy silence of blood pounding in your ears during a panic attack.

It's the one film that never became "just a movie" to me, but not for my lack of trying. I’ve attended multiple Q&As with the makers of the film. I’ve watched at least three documentaries, and read at least two books on its making. I’ve digested all the outtakes, and I’ve met every living principal cast member. I even once drove an hour to the relocated farmhouse, ate a meal in its dining room and wandered both floors. Despite my many attempts at demystification, its hold on me remains. In my 40s I now find the film resonates most powerfully in the moments leading up to the characters’ deaths. Pondering your own end, that terrible awareness that you’re rushing toward a point in the future where you will no longer exist. Unease, quiet dread, guilt, confusion, panic, abject terror: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has become, for me, a mosaic of the feelings the idea of oblivion stirs within me. These days, those feelings are where I experience true horror, and I find that the film still delivers on that front.

Make no mistake: the movie still offers plenty of straight-up terror for all age groups. Unpredictable, unknowable chaos reigns in Hooper’s film, a marked contrast from the subgenre it helped birth. Later slasher films would evolve into a rigid set of rules by which characters would live or die; abstinence was rewarded, vice and promiscuity were punished. In a way the slashers came to really epitomize the ‘80s mindset, nearly right-wing in their code of conformity. They reassure a status quo; they're downright comforting in their predictability. This is not the case with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. There are no ground rules as per Wes Craven’s Scream; no one is safe. Our heroes don’t fit the stereotypes of slasher victims, and aside from Franklin’s wheelchair-bound whining, the characters are fairly nondescript. But beyond that well-trod observation, even more unsettling is that these are good kids. They’ve heard reports of grave-robbing in the area, and they’ve gone out of their way to make sure their grandpa’s remains are undisturbed. They are checking on their dead grandpa. It’s a sweet, human, honorable goal. The film does not care. 84 minutes later, they’re all fodder for a saw that’s still swinging when the screen cuts to black.

This is a horrifying notion in more ways than one. These characters - good, bad, indifferent, pretty, fat, annoying, carefree - are all going into the sausage grinder. WE’RE all going into the sausage grinder. Like dumb cattle, oblivious to the signs all around us, one by one we willingly march toward our own screaming, bloody ends, slaughtered without ever understanding what’s happening to us. But part of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s enduring power is the horrible glimpse of omniscience it gives us, and in that clarity is revealed a universe prodding us down the cattle chute from day one. Right from the opening frames, the protagonists’ deaths have been set in motion. The Hitchhiker (Ed Neal) rattles those bones and displays that skeleton, and it’s a beacon. Relatives from miles away descend on the graveyard to check on their loved ones’ remains (who knows how many of these well-meaning people ended up as furniture in that house, their cars piled up under that tarp in the backyard). With his cemetery folk art, the Hitchhiker has summoned Sally (Marilyn Burns) and her friends to their doom, with neither side even aware of it. Later, Franklin (Paul Partain) tells the group that his and Sally’s grandpa sold cattle to the slaughterhouse where Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) and his family worked, and eventually we come to find out that the two families were essentially next door neighbors.

On recent viewings, that last detail chills me the most. The film is rife with omens - the astrology readings, the ramblings of the graveyard drunk, the radio station that broadcasts literally nothing but reports of carnage and mayhem. But more than anything I can't shake the weird angle of these characters dying horribly simply because of where their grandfather happened to live (and die). That vanload of victims had been tied to their cannibalistic murderers for decades before August 18, 1973. Whatever it is that’s gonna kill you, the film reminds us, has probably happened already, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You were always going to end up on that meat hook.

Movies, we like to tell ourselves, are a kind of immortality. Films last forever, and sequels and reboots keep things alive long after the end credits. In the world of cinema, we're seldom asked to confront the actual end of anything. But discarding all the sequels, the remakes, the sequels to remakes and remakes of sequels, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre remains one of the most confrontational films about death ever made. Forty years on, the film offers no comfort in its bleak message: you might live or die at any given moment, and when you finally take the dirt nap it will likely be an unsentimental, arbitrary bit of happenstance. But sooner or later you will end. Once you are dead you will no longer matter to the world at large, and odds are most people on Earth will never know about your experiences. Moreover, time will eventually claim not only you and everyone you love, but the entire planet. The whole of human existence will be nothing but an imperceptible blip on the universe’s radar as our tiny planet of cruelty and chaos is one day swallowed by the angry sun we see erupting in the film’s opening credits.

@PhilNobileJr

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trespeak · 7 years

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™ The wonderful @raytaku tagged me for a meme thign. U da bes, Ray!

5 things you’ll find in my bag:

my iPad Air 2

my journal

a pair of Finn and Jake Funko Pop keychains (technically on the bag but w/e)

a fortune cookie to read on my radio show (except when I fucKING FORGET TO PUT ONE IN THERE)

no writing utensils, infuriatingly

5 things you’ll find in my bedroom:

posters (the ones I had up in my dorm before I moved out were these)

Adventure Time (Finn riding on Jake’s back with a sword and shield in front of their house)

Bravest Warriors

Daft Punk on the cover of Rolling Stone

the album art for 4x4=12 by deadmau5

Destiny: The Taken King

an Iron Giant print made for an on-campus screening

a stylized version of the O2 Arena in London

Regular Show

a 70′s style version of the Enterprise for Star Trek Beyond

the teaser poster for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

a homemade Tiny and Big one

a promo poster for streaming the radio station I DJ on/volunteer at.

(I also want a Death Cab one and might end up printing myself a Scud the Disposable Assassin one and/or a Does It Offend You, Yeah? one. We’ll see.)

lots of old trash from food I haven’t bothered to clean up

an aging desktop rig and a Xbox One S

my fledgling collection of physical CDs, film and games:

Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories (first album I distinctly remember buying for myself)

Death Cab for Cutie’s Narrow Stairs (my favorite album ever, and a new addition)

Forza Horizon 3

Porter Robinson’s Worlds

Snakehips’s “All My Friends” single and remix EP

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (and the first two books in color and Seconds)

Sunset Overdrive

Turbo (that snail is fast)

White Sea’s In Cold Blood

Zedd’s Clarity (the Deluxe Edition)

a shit ton of cables and wires

5 things I’ve always wanted to do in life:

Git gud with a shit ton of music-related things (a more traditional DAW like Ableton or Logic, a MIDI controller like the Novation Launchpad or MIDI Fighter, turntables, etc.) and improve the quality of my production skills

Make a vidya gam! I have a license for GameMaker: Studio that’s kinda just lying around.

Start a podcast and streaming on Twitch/Beam/etc. Right now in the case of the former I actually do have a bit of a plan starting to come together (my working title is Late Night Game Night, and I’m gonna start with a six-episode season of fun little stories about games I love), but the latter has kind of hit a snag because I can’t get streaming to work on the networks in my dorm. We’ll see how it goes next year, I suppose.

Build myself a personal website that isn’t on Tumblr and doesn’t suck. (I’m actually kind of getting really close to this? I took a development class and it kind of lit the flame under my ass to teach myself how to get a site in working order.)

Go to E3, Coachella, Bonnaroo, Ultra Music Festival, Ibiza in general, Gamescom,

5 things that make me happy:

electronic music (holy CRAP yes, even beyond the stuff that’s gotten popular with the EDM revolution we’ve seen the past few years; a lot of my favorite artists are either kinda low-key or otherwise popular but without real mainstream success to speak of)

my Things (special interests) / characters in media that I end up heavily identifying with for whatever reason

when I scream about things I like on Twitter and actually get acknowledged by the creators of said things

my family and my friends, both here at home and in Kentucky

writing and being able to express myself through a variety of different means

5 things I’m currently into:

Scud: the Disposable Assassin (Drywall is my goddamn SON I love him so much y’all)

Pickle and Peanut (h8rs make me famous)

Gorillaz and Damon Albarn in general (Humanz has rekindled my love for Blur and Plastic Beach in a significant way)

Titanfall 2 (I’m loyal robot companion trash and I want to play it pretty badly even though I’ve spoiled myself on the plot)

Samurai Jack (I’mma get caught up real soon, I think)

5 things on my to do list:

get my finals done

read some comic books

apply for some jobs?

see how to go about getting college credit for an internship I’m doing over the summer

eat

5 things people may not know about me:

I have an off-the-wall universe of fictional stories focused around a really unusual place called Greyson City living in my head. The Stuck trilogy (which is 100% mine) and the Sparks spinoff series (created by my best friend, but developed with my help) are the core bits that really sorta serve as the foundation for it, but high school really pounded my ability to commit to because it was almost impossible to invest myself in it without having an adverse effect on my performance in classes. I’m slowly but surely coming around to the concept of coming back to it, though.

I make music. After the whole Stuck thing slowed down I needed a new creative outlet that I could still invest myself in without exhausting my ability to focus on my schoolwork when need be, and I found that music was much easier for me to do so with; I was still stimulating myself by getting into it, but it never ate into my time enough to have a negative effect on me the way my writing unintentionally did. I’d like to think I’ve gotten much better at it as time has gone by, too; my work has helped my personal projects stand out in college and is present throughout the near entirety of an indie film our film club made at school.

I was kind of an aggressive jerk when I was a kid; one time I punched a kid in the face in first grade for cutting me in line. (I feel like a fundamental change in personality happened with me between 1st and 2nd, and since then I’ve kind of just been a Soft Boy™ like most know me as today.)

In relation to the last point, I was bullied pretty ruthlessly in my earlier years, particularly during the second half of elementary school. I wouldn’t go so far as to say my experiences were something I’d choose to make happen if I had the option, but I do credit them for helping me develop a sense of empathy I probably wouldn’t have had (or at least been able to outwardly show) otherwise.

I’m tagging @rocketverliden, @ovisiphorus and @electro-bolt, and anyone else is welcome to do it too if they please

#treman's world #holy HIT this ballooned into a hell of a post #y'all can't say I don't talk about myself now >:3 #about me

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loadings-stuff · 7 years

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Unlucky Heart pt.1

So… A new story begins (I haven’t forgotten about Divine Addiction, don’t worry, just… Life happened and I had to delay it for now) I read a challenge on the amino app of Miraculous and… I really got interested in it, I suppose it’s a mermaid au, but this is how this story begun.

Master Fu tells Adrien that the only way to bring her mother back is to take off the heart of a mermaid and make a wish.

So with that idea, I was already thinking in so many possibilities! And then it came the part that totally sold me out

The part of the heart didn’t mean that he had to make her fall in love with her, no… It literally means to take her heart out! So… Yes, it won’t have a happily ever after ending, sorry… (Not sorry XD)

Pt 2, Pt 3, Pt 4

“You must steal the heart of a mermaid and make a wish if you want that what’s in your heart to come true... You can’t hesitate, Adrien, if you do, there will be serious consequences…”

With those words I woke up from my sleep, just a day have passed since I heard them and now I’m dreaming of them...

Great..

I walked out of my tent feeling heavy, sleeping out on the nature wasn’t bad, I’ll admit it, after all, I get to clear my head on my own with no distractions of any kind. The only times I woke up like this was when I went on training camps with Master Fu….

I stretched out, hearing my back popping and relaxing my entire body, I grabbed the small bag I brought to clean myself and headed to the river that was a kilometer away from my tent, remembering what my dream was about.

“A mermaid?! This is serious, master!! I’ve been training with you for the past four years so you could tell me the secrets to protect others! To not rub my bad luck on them!” a few hours ago I received an alarming call from my father, telling me my agonizing to death mother went critical since last night, that no one could do something for her, not even my father with all his money and resources could do something for her… gripping my blonde hair with the desire of rip it off in frustration I looked at my master in front of me “now my mom’s getting worse by the minute thanks to my bad luck and the only thing you can say is that I need the heart of a living mermaid?! What kind of joke is this?! Those things don’t even exist!”

Master Fu, a grown man in his late 190’s, but that looks of 50 or 60 was as passive as always, his posture straight and was holding a cane behind his back with both of his hands, looking at me with those same eyes that said he wasn’t joking. “I wonder if you yourself believe your own lies Adrien…or could it be that you really don’t remember it at all..?”

My hand went straight to my chest, touching over my clothes the spot where a scar in the shape of a cherry blossom flower carved and marked my skin 15 years ago… I looked away from my master, feeling the shape of the petals beneath my fingers “or maybe you don’t want to remember it...”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about master…” I denied it with all my might, I don’t want to remember it…I want it to stay the way it has until now…as just a dream…

After washing my body in the river together with my teeth, I put on my clothes that were hanging on a tree close to the river, as I put my black large shirt on, I grazed my fingers over the flower, as I get close to my destination I’ve felt the scar pulsing and even sting me…just over my heart, quite accurate to the task I’m doing…

I put on the rest of my clothes with a sigh and walked back to my tent, is just the dawn…but I have to start moving if I want to get there before it gets dark.

Putting my clothes in a backpack with my tent and all, I grabbed a bunch of berries and ate them as I started making my way again to my final destination… the beach house of the Agreste family and approximately half day from there on the shore…the last place where I saw an alive and real mermaid…

“Plagg, can you sense it?” I asked the kwami floating to my side as we walked through the shore, not a single soul around or any kind of civilization besides the Agreste mansion in more than 2 miles, luckily our resources were enough to last for another three days but it was almost the sunset now, if we didn’t have the sunlight to guide us, I was going to have to use my backup plan.

“Barely… Adrien, are you sure this is what you want to do?” it’s the first time after meeting Plagg 15 years ago that he’s been the quietest, I was sure he was going to be complaining during the whole journey since we started it but it was the opposite, he stayed quiet most of the time and also listened to everything I had to say.

“You heard Master Fu, this is our only option, and she’s my only option…. I can’t just choose some random mermaid...”

“The girl on your mind…is the only one that’s capable of saving your mother, the only heart powerful enough… your wish can save her life, save her from the dark destiny she’s bounded to suffer….” Master Fu told me while Plagg placed once of his paws over my hand on my chest, trying to ease the pain that was rising from the depth of my heart.

Because of me…

“What… What should I do...?” I asked before I could think about it, my mother needs me, my family needs me now… I can help her for the first time, help her and not cause pain....

“Look for the mermaid that put that mark on your chest…”

“Should I bring her to you…?”

“Yes… but if on your way you find it hard to bring her to me… you can do your wish no matter where you are with the condition that the heart is still beating once you take it off if it stops beating...you should face the consequences, your mother will face the destiny she’s meant to have…” Master Fu's expression was restless, he knows this isn’t the easiest task to ask and to ask me to do it is even harder….

Without a second thought, I packed the essentials in a large backpack, a tent, toothbrush, towel; clothes for at least a week of travel, a large and dented knife wrapped in a thick cloth and food enough for me and Plagg to eat during the trip. When I went back to the garden, I saw Master Fu in the eyes and asked the last thing about my task….

“Why her….?”

“Because where you’re the night, she’s the day, where you are anger, she’s love.. Where you’re bad luck... She’s good luck…. where you’re Yin... She’s Yang…”

“I really hate when you speak like that, why can’t you speak clear this time that I need clarity? I’m always up to hear riddles and puzzles master but I’d really appreciate if-“

“Where you got Plagg, she’s got Tikki…”

Tikki? The name of the Ladybug’s kwami, the opposite of Plagg, the one that should be my partner…

“The miraculous of luck…my partner…my opposite…” I frowned looking in disbelief at my master “you told me it got lost…long ago…that you couldn’t give it to me”

“A child that since born was meant to hold the miraculous of bad luck wasn’t going to be able to resist the amount of power that the miraculous of good luck has…only someone with the heart as pure as the miraculous itself can use it and keep it…”

“What do you mean with that? If I’d tried to be the holder of that miraculous…”

“You’d have died just in the attempt Adrien….”

“Died, uh…?” he said it so casual and with that serious expression of his, but what Master Fu probably doesn’t know is that I’ve died already… probably more than once… “So she’s the one with a heart so pure that can make her deserve to be the holder of my opposite…to be my partner….”

“What are you thinking Adrien…?” Plagg looked worried as I felt the first cold wind of the chilly night cursing through my entire body, I'm already tired and it's getting darker by the second…

I need to find her today, I can’t lose another night, I can’t afford it, not anymore….

“I’m thinking that we need to be able to see in the dark… to be able to sense her kwami…” I stopped and let my backpack fall in the sand before looking at Plagg “we need to be ready…in case she tries to resist...”

Plagg looked at me troubled, he hates the idea of us getting ready for her not cooperating, but he knows we have no choice, after all, Master Fu said it, where that girl is the day and good luck…

I’m the night and the cat of the bad luck….

“Plagg… claws out…” making a fist with my hand, Plagg went into the ring, our usual transformation began, we fusion into one and he gave me my powers, the first years my transformation was all flashy and was meant to look as a superhero, after going to Master Fu to train four years ago it changed, just as my job and my life did…

A mask covered my mouth and nose now, not my eyes, at will it could cover my whole face, making it useful for when I needed to use the night vision, pointy ears were still in its place but they were now also sticking out of a large hoodie that could cover my eyes if I had to pass unsuspicious at any job, I’d look like a simple guy in a weird hat passing by, my belt was still my tail but now I could tie it around my body, I learned to tie stuff to it too, the thing that changed the most was my weapon, the staff disappeared and instead a pair of large and stylized Tekko-Kagi appeared attached to my wrists that I was able to retract in case my job needed me to do it, in exchange, my abilities in jumping, escalating and running increased even more with the training I had with Master Fu, my leather catsuit became more rough in design, more normal looking for civilians, but also it was way more impenetrable than before.

“Feels just like home…why didn’t I transform earlier…?” I mumbled to myself with my mask on, with my hoodie still on, I picked up my backpack from the ground and kept walking.

Plagg was right, I can barely sense her… she’s getting away…how can I make her come close to the shore?

A sudden memory popped up in my mind, I can’t keep walking around in circles when I know she must be deep in the ocean…she’s somewhere around, hiding from humans….

I need her song…

I walked as close as I could to the shore, my knee length boots almost touching the water of the ocean. I closed my eyes and sighed, just five more minutes until the sunset passes. I walked into the water, not stopping until the water reached my hips, the cold water didn’t bother me at all thanks to Plagg...

‘Plagg…can you help me with the mask a little…?’

Plagg didn’t answer as usual on my mind; instead, he let my mask fall from my face, I caught it just before it fell into the ocean.

I looked forward, where the ocean turned deeper, I closed my eyes and tried to remember the lullaby I first used when I was little…the lullaby or more like… the weird and full of pain words that I as a lonely kid hummed to myself that made her risk her existence just to meet me…

‘A boy who seeks the soft touch of love…

‘Looks for someone to give that love to…

‘In search of that girl…

‘Whom my bad luck can clear…

15 years ago I sang and mumbled those words to myself close to the shore… my dad moments before almost drowned when we were playing together thanks to my bad luck, after that, I ran away as far as I could… but being only 6 at that time didn’t take me far, crying and desperate I started mumbling and saying dumb stuff to myself, hoping that like in a fairy tale, a fairy, a princess would hear me and come to save me from my living nightmare…

But I never expected something like her to ever appear…

Thanks to Plagg I felt a kwami getting closer to me; I put my mask on again covering my nose and mouth immediately as I saw a shadow under the sea getting closer at full speed.

Once the shadow was right in front of me I felt the scar on my chest pulsing and burning in the same way when it was done, I looked down as the thing that made the shadow in front of me emerged from the water, black bluish wet hair that reached just under her shoulders was the first thing that came out, her face now larger after 15 years, bluebell eyes that haunted my dreams occasionally watched me curious but with her guard up, her lips rosy were just as I remembered, her hands were nowhere to be seen, probably were helping her to stay on the surface, she stared cautious and curious at my clothes, once she stopped checking me out and reached my eyes, we stared at each other without saying a word for a minute, she was the first of us to break the silence.

“A-Adrien…?” her voice was soft, melodious and even more alluring than when we were kids.

But it wasn’t going to fool me, not this time.

Not after I’ve trained myself to keep calm and cold in front of an enemy for 4 years…

The last ray of light coming from the sunset shone between us for a second before everything around us turned into darkness, blue and green shining in the darkness as we stared at each other.

“Finally, I found you…mermaid…”

Ok! First Chapter! I have the rest already written, I’m just adding stuff and editing them, besides that... I think they’ll be posted during the course of the day, right now I’m tired and I need some sleep ^^

Let me know what you think of it, I’d really like to know what people thought of it or if someone liked it ^^

#mermaid au #chat noir x marinette #marinette #adrien #amino apps #mlb #miraculous ladybug #unlucky heart

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fictionerd · 6 years

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A New Story

Chapter One: Bard - Post 1

“I’m finally free to begin my TRUE adventure.” - Marilene Lavoie

---Last Seed, 16th, 4E 201--- Sing, Divines, of Marilene who from High Rock set out into the sea, Who across the haunted waves did fly to Solitude and Freedom, Sing now that all may learn of youthful spirit which in time may fade, But though the winds of fate may blow against your spirit sputtering Look to her tale and 'gainst that gale square up your back and shout attack, Defy the storm of wind and fate as did our hopeful heroine.

---Last Seed, 17th, 4E 201--- Good morning, Journal. This feels odd, but at the same time comforting. I've not kept a diary since I was a little girl.

Oops, that's right. Melodia say's that you're supposed to call it a "Journal" to feel more adult. Sorry about that. So, where should I begin? I seem to have made an entry last night, but for some reason it's in Cyrodiilic Hexameter.

To transcribe what was said there for those with no art in their soul and to expand upon it a bit: My name is Marilene Lavoie. I am a Breton from a not-quite noble family in High Rock. All my life I adored the tales great heroes and heroines. I longed to be like them. To adventure and make a name for myself. My fondest, most heartfelt dream is that one day a young girl will read stories of my deeds and find in me a friend as I have found in Alessia, Tiber Septim, The Nerevarine, and the Hero of Kvatch.

Unfortunately with the Empire still reeling from the Great War and conflict rife in the land my family wanted to keep me safe at home. So I set forth with a plan. I applied to study at the Bard's College in Solitude and with the help of my friend Melodia's help I was able to get accepted.

It took some convincing, but my parents eventually relented. So I set sail over the Sea of Ghosts and arrived in the city at the first of this year. I've mostly spent that time studying under the teachers at the college. After all, if I plan to make a break for it and seek my story I'll need a reliable way to earn coin. I doubt my family will send me an allowance after I leave the relative safety of Haafingar.

By the -N- Eight! I've just noticed how late in the morning it is. I ought to get to the college. Headmaster Viarmo said he wanted to see me this morning about something important.

By the Eight. I can't believe this. Any of this. I'm positively shaking with nervous energy. Melodia you little Daedra I'd forgotten all about the Tattoo! That's what I get for letting you take me out drinking.

"We need to celebrate your birthday!" she said.

Nevermind that my "Birthday" was months ago.

"I was away at the time! Let's do it now. You're old enough to drink, so drink!"

So I obliged her. She's probably my best friend in Skyrim. To be honest she's probably my best friend in all of Tamriel. I just wish it weren't so easy for her to convince me to do stupid, STUPID things.

I should explain: Yesterday Melodia returned to Solitude after months of being away in Cyrodiil visiting her family and touring the counties as a Bard. She found me first thing and practically dragged me by my twintails to The Winking Skeever to drink with her.

It was, a long night. Somewhere along the way she taught me this trick she'd learned using Alteration Magic. It let's you essentially apply a tattoo without the needles and ink and hassle. At her insistence I gave it a try with a tattoo on the back of my right hand. I was surprisingly good at it.

So what's the problem? Well we got pretty drunk as the night wore on with Melodia buying drinks from what seemed like a bottomless purse. When I woke not only had I forgotten about the tattoo I seem to have forgotten the trick to changing or removing them. Assuming Melodia even taught me that part.

I was fortunate. When Headmaster Viarmo spotted it he complemented the design. I swear the Altmer was grinning. He must have some guess as to who is behind it.

Still it was incredibly embarassing to just walk into the college with a new permanent fixture to my skin and not remember I even had it.

Should one transcribe a sigh in a journal? If I were writing stage direction for an actress I certainly would. I suppose for now this paragraph will suffice to inform you that a sigh belongs between last paragraph and the next. (Note: Revisit this thought later)

So, I suppose you're wondering (Is you the journal or some mysterious future reader?) what it was Viarmo wanted to see me about. Well that's the other half of why I'm physically shaking with nerves.

You see, normally the Bard's College requires a service of its applicants in return for admittance. In my case I had Melodia's recommendation and a humble donation from my family. I'd made it clear to the Headmaster that I would prefer if he found some task for me to accomplish at a later date, and today he's given me such a task.

Jarl Elisif has forbidden the Burning of King Olaf festival. Viarmo believes that if we can share with her "King Olaf's Verse" we may be able to convince her to lift the ban.

I can understand Elisif's feelings. If my love had died I wouldn't want people celebrating something that bears any similarity to their passing either. Perhaps King Olaf's Verse will put light to the situation and one way or another we'll be able to resolve matters.

As for me, I'm FINALLY going to go on an adventure! My first quest. The first labor of Marilene the Bard. I am to retrieve the last remaining copy of King Olaf's Verse from Dead Man's Respite. If, indeed, it still exists.

I must away. I'll need to arm myself if I inted to delve a Nordic tomb. Who knows what terrors one may face. In sunken halls where Nords of old did pace.

Skyrim is a beautiful land. Troubled beneath the surface like so many things of beauty, but this does not diminish its beaty in my eyes. For there is beauty in chaos as suredly as there is beauty in calm.

Since when does passing you on the road constitute "Interfering with official business"? Divines. Some Thalmor can be insufferable.

---Last Seed, 18th, 4E 201--- Oblivion the stories mentioned the smell on occasion, but I didn't think it'd be this bad.

I've undertaken my first heroic feat, though it wasn't the intended retrieval fo the verse. On my way to Dead Man's Respite I found a group of necromancers holed up in an old fort. I could not bring myself to overlook this travesty and so I set to cleansing the place of their vile conjurations. I'll admit that it was a near fight, but as righteousness was on my side there was no way I was going to lose to villains such as these.

I discovered a great many things within their library, but chief among them was a book outlining the art of the spellsword. This is an old Cyrodiilic martial skill that many thought lost in the last two centuries.

It allows one to cast magicka while still armed. I've grasped its most basic mechanics thusfar. This will make my future encounters with villainy much easier.

I've reached Dead Man's Respite. This place looks pretty old. I wonder what I will find within. I wonder if I'll find the verse within.

The Ghost of a Bard! Perhaps Svaknir? The one who penned King Olaf's Verse? I shall follow this spirit and see what it is he needs to show me.

I've been attacked! These things. Walking corpses. Perhaps the Draugr I've heard so much about? They jumped me when I lifted this strange jeweled claw from its pedastle to open the way forward.

I've come upon a sealed door. Either it has been barred to any who enter or the ghost of Svaknir needs me to look elsewhere. There is another path to the right. I shall look there for now. I do wonder, though, what magicks seal this portal. I also wonder if I could figure out how to use them on my bedroom door when Melodia is visiting.

I've found it! King Olaf's Verse! It's here. Parts are damaged, but I'm sure we'll be able to glean something from these ancient pages. Now to return to Viarmo with the good news!

What I put pen to paper to record in this moment is perhaps the most incredible thing to ever happen to me.

After retrieving King Olaf's Verse I followed the gost of Svaknir once more and he unsealed the door. Within was an assemblage of the creatures that jumped me at the entrance, and whom I've been fighting my way through to reach this point.

Svaknir called out to King Olaf to rise and face his vengeance, and one by one the creatures stood and came at us until finally the lid of the Grand Sarcophagus at the top of the tomb flew off and what I can only assume where the remains of King Olaf rose from within.

It was a harrowing battle, but finally we were able to put down the unliving king. I can scarcely believe this. I, Marilene, on her first real adventure have fought alongside the vengeful spirit of a bard put to death for his verse, and against the Undead remains of the very king who sentenced him.

This is the sort of thing stories are made of. It's always been my dream, but I scarcely expected to be involved with such a thing on my first quest.

After the battle with King Olaf I notced this strange wall at the back of his burial chamber. It has markings that almost seem to be stylized talon-scratches. Could these be a language of some sort? I'll make note of this. It could be important later.

---Last Seed, 19th, 4E 201---

As I sit and watch the effigy of King Olaf burn, I think back over the past few days. This is the first moment of clarity I've really had since I woke up on the seventeenth. Melodia. It had to have been her who set all this up. She shows up in town the night before Viarmo sends me out to collect King Olaf's Verse? She insists on celebrating my "birthday" which leads to me sleeping in the next day?

I left Solitude in college robes two days ago. Today I returned in armor. I've been tested by combat, actual combat, in only the brief time I was away from the college. Melodia knew. She must have known. Even now she eats a honey nut treat all the while eyeing me with that mischievous sparkle that tells me she's just gotten one over on me.

I've learned just how dangerous the roads and wilds of Skyrim can be, and am prepared now to travel them. She knew, and by extension Viarmo must have known my real reason for being here. After months of study and practice they've finally seen fit to loose me out into the province.

With the burning of King Olaf I've been officially named Bard by the college. I'm free to travel. Free to perform. Free to use the abilities I've been practicing since this plan first came to my mind.

I'm finally free to begin my TRUE adventure.

#Skyrim #Character Journal #Marilene #Marilene Lavoie #Take Notes Mod

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latestnews2018-blog · 6 years

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Obituary: Aretha Franklin, a genius of American song

New Post has been published on https://latestnews2018.com/obituary-aretha-franklin-a-genius-of-american-song/

Obituary: Aretha Franklin, a genius of American song

The glorious ‘Queen of Soul’, who died Thursday at her home in Detroit at the age of 76, ruled unchallenged as the greatest popular vocalist of her time

The clarity and the command. The daring and the discipline. The thrill of her voice and the truth of her emotions.

Like the best actors and poets, nothing came between how Aretha Franklin felt and what she could express, between what she expressed and how we responded. Blissful on (You Make Me Feel Like) a Natural Woman. Despairing on Ain’t No Way. Up front forever on her feminist and civil rights anthem Respect.

Franklin, the glorious ‘Queen of Soul’ and genius of American song, died Thursday morning at her home in Detroit of pancreatic cancer. She was 76.

Few performers were so universally idolised by peers and critics and so exalted and yet so familiar to their fans. As surely as Jimi Hendrix settled arguments over who was the No 1 rock guitarist, Franklin ruled unchallenged as the greatest popular vocalist of her time.

She was ‘Aretha’, a name set in the skies alongside ‘Jimi’ and ‘Elvis’ and ‘John and Paul’. A professional singer and pianist by her late teens, a superstar by her mid-20s, she recorded hundreds of songs that covered virtually every genre and she had dozens of hits. But her legacy was defined by an extraordinary run of top 10 soul smashes in the late 1960s that brought to the radio an overwhelming intensity and unprecedented maturity, from the wised-up Chain of Fools to the urgent warning to Think.

Acknowledging the obvious, Rolling Stone ranked her first on its list of the top 100 singers. Franklin was also named one of the 20 most important entertainers of the 20th century by Time magazine, which celebrated her “mezzo-soprano, the gospel growls, the throaty howls, the girlish vocal tickles, the swoops, the dives, the blue-sky high notes, the blue-sea low notes. Female vocalists don’t get the credit as innovators that male instrumentalists do. They should. Franklin has mastered her instrument as surely as John Coltrane mastered his sax.”

The music industry couldn’t honour her enough: Franklin won 18 Grammy awards and, in 1987, became the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But her status went beyond “artist” or “entertainer” to America’s first singer, as if her very presence at state occasions was a kind of benediction. She performed at the inaugural balls of Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, at the funeral for civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks and the dedication of Martin Luther King Jr’s memorial. Clinton gave Franklin the National Medal of Arts and President George W Bush awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Franklin’s best-known appearance with a president was in January 2009, when she sang My Country ‘tis of Thee at President Barack Obama’s first inauguration. She wore a gray felt hat with a huge, Swarovski rhinestone-bordered bow that became an internet sensation and even had its own website. In 2015, she brought Obama and many others to tears with a triumphant performance of Natural Woman at a Kennedy Center tribute for the song’s co-writer, Carole King.

Her voice transcended age, category and her own life. Franklin endured the exhausting grind of celebrity and personal troubles dating back to childhood. The mother of two boys by age 16 (she later had two more), she struggled with her weight, family problems and financial setbacks. Her strained marriage in the 1960s to then-manager Ted White was widely believed to have inspired her performances on several songs, including (Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You’ve Been Gone, Think and Ain’t No Way. Producer Jerry Wexler nicknamed her “Our Lady of Mysterious Sorrows.”

Despite growing up in Detroit, and having Smokey Robinson as a childhood friend, Franklin never recorded for Motown Records. Stints with Columbia and Arista were sandwiched around her prime years with Atlantic Records. But it was at Detroit’s New Bethel Baptist Church, where her father was pastor, that Franklin learned the gospel fundamentals that would make her a soul institution.

Aretha Louise Franklin was born March 25, 1942, in Memphis, Tennessee. The Rev CL Franklin soon moved his family to Buffalo, New York, then to Detroit, where the Franklins settled after the marriage of Aretha’s parents collapsed and her mother (and reputed sound-alike) Barbara returned to Buffalo.

CL Franklin was among the most prominent Baptist ministers of his time. He recorded dozens of albums of sermons and music and knew such gospel stars as Marion Williams and Clara Ward, who mentored Aretha and her sisters Carolyn and Erma. (Both sisters sang on Aretha’s records, and Carolyn also wrote Ain’t No Way and other songs for Aretha). Music was the family business and performers from Sam Cooke to Lou Rawls were guests at the Franklin house. In the living room, the shy young Aretha awed friends with her playing on the grand piano.

“A wonder child,” was how Robinson described her to Franklin biographer David Ritz.

Franklin was in her early teens when she began touring with her father, and in 1956 she released a gospel album through J-V-B Records. Four years later, she signed with Columbia Records producer John Hammond, who called Franklin the most exciting singer he had heard since a vocalist he promoted decades earlier, Billie Holiday. Franklin knew Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr and considered joining his label, but decided it was just a local company at the time.

Franklin recorded several albums for Columbia Records over the next six years. She had a handful of minor hits, including Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody and Runnin’ Out of Fools, but never quite caught on. The label tried to fit into her a hodgepodge of styles, from jazz and show songs to such pop numbers as Mockingbird, and Franklin struggled to develop the gifts for interpretation and improvisation that she later revealed so forcefully.

“But the years at Columbia also taught her several important things,” critic Russell Gersten later wrote. “She worked hard at controlling and modulating her phrasing, giving her a discipline that most other soul singers lacked. She also developed a versatility with mainstream music that gave her later albums a breadth that was lacking on Motown LPs from the same period.

“Most important, she learned what she didn’t like: to do what she was told to do.”

In 1966, her contract ran out and she jumped to Atlantic, home to such rhythm and blues giants as Ray Charles. Wexler highlighted her piano playing and teamed her with veteran R’n’B musicians from Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. The result rocked as hard as the Rolling Stones while returning her to her gospel roots.

Her breakthrough was so profound that Ebony Magazine called 1967 the year of ‘’Retha, Rap and Revolt’. At a time of protest and division, Franklin’s records were signposts to a distant American dream — a musical union of the church and the secular, man and woman, black and white, North and South, East and West. They were produced and engineered by New Yorkers Wexler and Tom Dowd, arranged by Turkish-born Arif Mardin and backed by an interracial gathering of top session musicians.

“In black neighborhoods and white universities, in the clubs and on the charts, her hits came like cannonballs, blowing holes in the stylized bouffant and chiffon Motown sound,” Gerri Hirshey wrote in Nowhere to Run, a history of soul music that was published in 1984. “Here was a voice with a sexual payload that made the doo-wop era, the girl groups, and the Motown years seem like a pimply adolescence.”

The difference between Franklin at Columbia and Franklin at Atlantic shows in a pair of songs first performed by Dionne Warwick: Walk On By and I Say a Little Prayer. On Walk On By, recorded at Columbia, the arrangement stays close to the cool pop and girl group chorus of the original. I Say a Little Prayer, an Atlantic release, was a gospel workout, from Franklin’s church-influenced piano to the call-and-response vocals. From her years at Atlantic and through the rest of her life, she would rarely stick to anyone else’s blueprint for a song, often revising her own hits when she performed them on stage.

One of her boldest transformation came on her signature record and first No 1 hit, Respect, a horn-led march with a chanting “sock-it-to-me” chorus and the spelled out demand for “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.” Franklin had decided she wanted to “embellish” the R’n’B song written by Otis Redding, whose version had been a modest hit in 1965.

“When she walked into the studio, it was already worked out in her head,” Wexler wrote in Rolling Stone magazine in 2004. “Otis came up to my office right before Respect was released, and I played him the tape. He said, ‘She done took my song.’ He said it benignly and ruefully. He knew the identity of the song was slipping away from him to her.”

In a 2004 interview with the St. Petersburg Times, Franklin was asked whether she sensed in the ‘60s that she was helping change popular music.

“Somewhat, certainly with Respect, that was a battle cry for freedom and many people of many ethnicities took pride in that word,” she answered. “It was meaningful to all of us.”

She was rarely off the charts in 1967 and 1968 and continued to click in the early 1970s with the funky Rock Steady and other singles and such acclaimed albums as the intimate Spirit in the Dark. Her popularity faded during the decade, but revived in 1980 with a cameo appearance in the smash movie The Blues Brothers and her switch to Arista Records, run by her close friend Clive Davis. Franklin collaborated with such pop and soul artists as Luther Vandross, Elton John, Whitney Houston and George Michael, with whom she recorded a No 1 single, I Knew You Were Waiting (for Me). Her 1985 album Who’s Zoomin’ Who received some of her best reviews and included such hits as the title track, a phrase she came up with herself, and Freeway of Love.

If she never quite recaptured the urgency and commercial success of the late ‘60s, she never relinquished her status as the singer among singers or lost her willingness to test herself, whether interpreting songs by Lauryn Hill and Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs on her acclaimed A Rose Is Still a Rose album or filling in at the 1998 Grammy ceremony for an ailing Luciano Pavarotti. She covered songs by Ray Charles, the Rolling Stones and Sam Cooke, but also music by Stephen Sondheim, Bread and the Doobie Brothers. At an early recording session at Columbia, she was asked to sing Over the Rainbow.

“If a song’s about something I’ve experienced or that could’ve happened to me, it’s good,” she told Time magazine in 1968. “But if it’s alien to me, I couldn’t lend anything to it. Because that’s what soul is about — just living and having to get along.”

Being ‘Aretha’ didn’t keep her from checking out the competition. Billing herself on social media as ‘The Undisputed Queen of Soul’, she lashed out at Beyonce for even suggesting that Tina Turner deserved the title and had sharp words for Mavis Staples and Gladys Knight, among others. She even threatened to sue Warwick in 2017.

Her albums over the past two decades included So Damn Happy, for which Franklin wrote the gratified title ballad, and Aretha Sings the Great Diva Classics, featuring covers of hits by Adele and Alicia Keys among others. Franklin’s autobiography, Aretha: From These Roots, came out in 1999. But she always made it clear that her story would continue, and that she would sing it.

“Music is my thing, it’s who I am. I’m in it for the long run,” she said in 2008. “I’ll be around, singing, What you want, baby I got it, having fun all the way.”

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technicolorfamiliar · 6 years

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The past, the future, and family vacations

Since before I was born, my family has been going to the same beach in the summertime. Same town, same condos, same time, year after year. We would go once a year, every year until I was out of high school. Since then, it’s been consistently every other year. On the in-between years, we plan some other trip, to a place a little less ordinary, at least for us. These other destinations are fun adventures outside our collective comfort zone, but these vacations at the beach where I spent my childhood summers somehow feel more significant.

Maybe it’s just that I’m a glutton for nostalgia, and maybe that’s all it needs to be. Getting to come back to something or somewhere familiar every so often is like a little window into the past. Every time we go back, my memories open up like a series of doors going back and back and back, through almost every summer of my life.

I’m there now, actually, writing this on location. Sometimes I get restless on these quiet vacations where there isn’t any kind of itinerary and the days pass slowly until the end of the week when we all wonder, “Where did the time go?” So I try to fill my time with things that feel semi-productive.

(Sidebar: This particular location comes up a lot in my dreams. It’s one of two regularly recurring places I revisit when I dream, the other being one of my childhood homes. These dreams have a lot to do with the ocean. Water levels rising, waves crashing against the buildings, massive flooding leaving me stranded on the top floor.)

These days, the group of us who go on these beach trips consists of myself, my dad, and my two brothers who I don’t get to see very often. Previously, it included my step mom, my grandparents, and occasionally one of my close friends. My grandparents came here for years before we would all go as a family. So I guess my connection to this place is mostly about them. They are both no longer with us, but there is no other place I feel their influence and am immersed in memories of them more than when I am on these beach trips.

When I was very little, my grandmother would walk with me through the complex of condos which are right on the water. There were these large, cement planters we would pass on our walks that had late-1960s stylized suns painted on them. The suns had faces, and for whatever reason, as a child I was absolutely terrified of things that had faces when they shouldn’t. But the suns with faces were an iconic visual touchstone of my childhood and time spent with my grandmother. They’ve long since been painted over, but I still go on that same walk, the one I would take with my grandmother along the long patio through the buildings.

There’s also something about coming here every other year that allows me to sense time and how it has affected me on a greater scale. Each time I come back here, I am a different person in very different time in my life. Of course I’m changing all the time, as is my dad, as are my brothers, because that’s what people do. But the physical and visual -- and in some sense, psychological -- landmark of this place helps me put things in perspective in ways I otherwise might not be able to. I’m able to see and understand the person I was the last time I was there and, whether I’m aware of it or not, compare that to where I am now.

And almost every time we come back now, since my early 20s, circumstances are such that I’m in the middle or or am about to begin some major life change. Every other year when we wind up back at the old family vacation spot, something is about to happen, or has just happened. In this place at these times, past and future are closer to one another in ways I can’t sense elsewhere. There is no other location or family tradition that gives me clarity and perspective in the same way. Not even holidays, because generally holidays happen every year and the memories aren’t always as specifically rooted to a year or to a phase in my life.

It’s an interesting personal phenomenon for me. And I hope that if I am in fact on the verge of some great change, that it is one for the better, one that will set me off on some previously unrealized path. I can count on one hand the instances when I’ve felt the most aware of some impending shift like this, and most of them occur at the ocean’s edge.

Photos by me, 2016

#travel #family #memory

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maestrosgame · 6 years

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DevLog 13 - Feedback & Clarity

Hello everyone! I am Michael along with Dru and we are developers on The Maestros. It’s an action-packed, multiplayer strategy game where you wage war with a Commander and their transforming units. Check us out on Steam to add it to your wishlist!

It's important to keep game clarity on your mind during development. Games can inadvertently become a busy mess. Colourful characters, vibrant VFX, enchanting environments, and even UI/HUD elements can cause confusion and frustration to players. Separating these elements into readable and easily notable groups can greatly improve the player experience.

After receiving feedback from our latest batch of public testing, clarity was something we needed to refocus our efforts on. 11.5% said they often felt unsure what was happening during gameplay with 42.3% feeling somewhat confused. After pooling all of the responses we grouped these issues, and focused in on graphical clarity.

Graphical Clarity

As the name suggests, issues that fell here are what the players saw on screen. Our visuals happened to blend a little too well for some players during intense gameplay.

One main graphical change took the form of what is called a “Sobel Edge”. Think of this as the stylized comic book black outlines you may find in highly stylized games or graphic novels. Applying a sobel edge was a non-destructive process that allowed us to customize the look and feel of The Maestros quickly and effectively.

First the scene is rendered in real time based on depth (distance from the camera) where white is up close and black is farther away. Then where high contrast occurs between these values a line is drawn.

Adding this sobel edge helped us show players what is important, like Commanders and Units, compared to less important things like the ground. This also added a level of polish to the overall art making The Maestros a little more glamorous in the process. Here’s the before and after, notice how much more characters stand out from the environment after.

Before

After

Another graphical update was the addition of damage flashing. Previously it was difficult to see if one of your units was taking damage. To solve this we added a coloured flash to the individual character mesh whenever they were hit.

This let players know who is being attacked. They could then react to move their army to safety and overall more strategically. We also added the ability to see when both enemies and allies are being damaged to show who you are dealing damage to and to help save a friend in need.

Lastly we improved some outstanding UI/HUD elements, namely icons and cursors. Icons on our minimaps now represent places such as a transform pad or an enemy camp. This also included icons for the Shrine and Dreadbeast. Our main cursor also received an upgrade to closer fit the scheme of our current HUD.

We hope these graphical additions will help players immediately understand their surroundings and play with confidence.

Movement & Player Input

Another area that we received feedback on was pathing. Over half our players found that unit movement got in their way at least some of the time. Pathfinding is a difficult problem even for the most veteran developers, but we want to carve out a solid, consistent-feeling movement experience.

Issues often group together to obscure a problem like this though, so we looked for low hanging fruit that might hinder our evaluation of unit movement. In particular, sometimes clicks and selections are only "generally" what a player wants in the heat of the moment. A great example is when you first encounter an enemy on your left, you might rapidly click to your right on some rocks. You know that the rock is unpathable, but you're in a rush. We had left this problem of "Move Towards" unsolved previously, resulting in behavior like this.

That made battles around obstacles very painful, and the cries of "PATHING" would ring out on voice chat just before round end. Now when you click on an obstacle near a path, we fire raycasts towards the point from various angles, and look for their collisions with the obstacle we ultimately landed in. The raycast closest to the obstacle is the one we pick, and we'll use that to find a spot nearby for your units to move. Now you only have yourself to blame for feeding ;)

Another skill that suffers under strain for us mortals is drag selection. Especially with units you want to arrange, like for a Conductor split, you might only be able to snag a corner of their frame when you're frantically setting it up. Anything less than a generous selection is going to feel bad, and bugs are going to magnify that feeling.

(dotted circle indicates Doughboy will be selected)

Not only was our selection incorrect, it was solving a much harder problem than necessary. Previously, we'd attempt to project the drag-select box on the screen into a 3D object on the ground and check if units overlapped that unit. If you want to do this right, you’d need a kind of 3D “trapezoid” to reflect the camera’s view frustum, and that is not as simple as generating a primitive cube. Instead, we now project the bounding box back into the screen, and do some 2D maths instead - easier and much less prone to programmer error.

(again, dotted circle indicates Doughboy will be selected)

Players expressed that The Maestros was overall a wonderful experience during our first beta weekend, and we hope to improve that further as we head closer to our Early Access launch. These changes were all made possible because of the valued feedback of our players. We hope you continue to follow us on this journey and further help shape The Maestros.

#strategy #gamedev #indiedev #maestros #rts

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