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catalists · 3 years ago

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Chrome’s shadowgast fic rec list, vol 1

Well, well, well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own obsession with wizards. I might make another one of these eventually if y’all keep churning out absolute bangers, but in the meantime, here is a list of my top Shadowgast fic recs.

One rule here: I’m limiting this to one fic per author--but many people on this list have a broader oeuvre you should definitely check out.

Your disclaimer: this is not a full literature review, but rather my personal favorites. Caveat lector!

* = fic is rated M or E

sleeping in the shadow of an other self by nonwal | @nonwal

Essek has a moment to consider that gravity-based trust exercises have never worked for him, and then the spell hits. He leans back into it, falls, falls.

(In which Essek is resurrected by the Mighty Nein and framed for innocence.)

Okay, listen. If you haven’t read it yet, you’re missing out. There’s a reason it’s at the top of the list. 30k of absolutely phenomenal characterization of not only Shadowgast but all the M9 and the coolest plot to ever plot. Not only a fantastic first read, but a phenomenal re-read as well.

multitudinous echoes awoke and died in the distance by mousecookie | @ariadne-mouse

Caleb takes a step forward and stumbles. As he catches himself he realizes something very odd. His hands are shadowy and translucent. His whole body is a shadow, in fact. If he holds his palm up to the sky, he can see the stars twinkling faintly through it.

Sharp talons of panic dig into his chest. He feels solid - if he grabs his own wrist, he has mass, but it is wrong. Everything is wrong. What is happening?

Prepare Fireball, commands a voice in his head.

The voice is familiar.

It takes him a moment to realize it’s familiar because it’s his.

An absolutely fabulous pre-relationship fic, written before the end of the show but you wouldn’t know it from how perfectly it nails the dynamic. Ariadne has written a ton of other fabulous Shadowgast fics and I encourage you to read them all--I’m just limiting this list to one fic per author to try and cover more ground.

Great Minds by bluebirdsongs

Essek uses more high-level dunamancy in battle, and Caleb tries to reverse-engineer it when he can't sleep. AKA What if we were both wizards and I cast Tether Essence on us to save your life?

This is a gorgeous fic, both for how it handles Caleb and Essek’s conversation--with profound deftness--and for the treatment of magic-as-math. A beautiful exploration of both dunamancy and Caleb and Essek.

to make a cradle of your palm* by renquise

Essek offers Caleb his spellbook, open to the page of a new spell.

As Caleb suspected, his adaptation of Essek's gravity spell was different in its conception, for all that the result was the same. The architecture of this similar spell speaks of a different thought process, a different set of basic assumptions. It is beautifully engineered, efficient in its use of components and energy: a simple spell requiring only a length of silk thread and yet capable of reaching over a great distance and causing great damage, if applied with intent to harm.

“If you would like, you can, ah. You may—" Essek gestures at his own throat, a quick, inelegant spread of fingers. "Test the application of pressure that the spell exerts."

It takes Caleb a moment to register what Essek is proposing. He is a delicate speaker, as always.

Oh man, this one just goes for the jugular (ha) in the most perfect way. The prose here, like everything renquise writes, is absolutely masterful, and the tension between Caleb and Essek is exquisitely rendered.

fist-fighting with fire just to get close to you by kaeda | @the-kaedageist

Caleb caught Essek’s eye across the dome, and Essek returned his small smile. “It would seem that it is trickier than expected to keep things on a…private channel,” Essek thought at him.

“Unfortunately,” Caleb replied.

“Unfortunately for all of us,” Fjord interjected.

(Spoilers for campaign 2, episode 138)

Kate has a fabulous gift for getting the Mighty Nein’s voices exactly right, and this fic is no exception. This takes the hive mind/telepathy of the eyes to its hilarious, heart-warming, logical conclusion and it’s an absolute joy to read.

(perhaps i may) elaborate by demonstration* by marsastronomica | @marsastronomica

After the second fight, they rest again. There’s still time left in the day, and they may as well push as far as they can. Essek and Caleb find time between action to talk. And negotiate.

This one is an absolute banger. The flirting! The tension! The incredible intense game of chicken that Essek and Caleb are playing this whole fic...it’s amazing, you can hear the dialogue in their voices, this is another one that I read and then had to tell everyone about. And now I’m telling you about. Go read it, it kicks ass.

I’ve been lost before (and I’m lost again, I guess)* by toneofjoy

Caleb has plans to take down his old coaches. Essek has secrets. They climb rocks, make new friends, explore professional boundaries, learn about consequences, and maybe even fall in love. It’s the Shadowgast climbing AU.

AUs can be a tough sell for me, but this one’s not. Half the joy in this is the fabulously vivid world that is built by the author who absolutely knows the ins and outs of competitive climbing and expertly shares it with the reader. The other half is the beautiful growing relationship between Caleb and Essek, which is a consistent joy to read. It’s still a WIP, but I promise it’s worth reading along.

the other things that make us* by saturday_sky | @saturdaysky

Essek returns, when he can, to the sanctuary of Caleb's home. The peace of it is a balm against the tedious peril of the road, which has more misery to share than Essek had ever thought. It's nice to have a place where he can lose himself: in a book, in arcane study, in the confusing allure of Caleb's smile.

It's nice. And the cats miss him, Caleb says.

[First chapter is a complete story. Second chapter will be a follow-up epilogue to it.]

This one hurts in the best possible way. I can’t highlight my favorite bits without giving it away, but the emotional beats of this absolutely beautiful post-canon fic are top-notch and the reveal of information is perfectly executed.

darkness to me is only water to the sea by treeviality

Essek knows how his story ends. There is a place in Rexxentrum where executions are carried out, wooden steps leading up to a wooden platform. There hangs a noose, swaying lightly in northern wind, while polished cobblestones shine bright in golden light.

There will be birds, Essek imagines, and when the lever is pulled and gravity takes hold of him one last time, he hopes they take flight.

This now-AU take on Essek being arrested is lyrical and beautiful and the author has a tremendous grasp of language and also how to rip your heart straight out of your chest and then gently replace it.

---

And, if you’re still looking for fic, I have a few, but one of my favorites is:

we never do go over (we always gotta go through) by Chrome

In the last fight with the Tombtakers, Essek Thelyss bends reality to keep them all alive and pays the price. As he copes with the aftereffects of his own magic and the party takes the long journey back to the surface, Essek and Caleb finally confront what they are to each other.

or,

Five times Essek woke up with level(s) of exhaustion and one time he didn't.

#shadowgast #essek thelyss #caleb widogast #critical role #cr fic #cr fic recs #fic recs #fic rec #cr

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tothedarkdarkseas · 3 years ago

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Ink, diary, backstory, carnegie, dickinson, and parchment for the ask meme. Love you too

Ink and Diary - see previous ask!

backstory: how did you come to love writing?

(*Thinks* Do I love writing...?) You know, this probably reflects quite poorly on me, but I'm not sure what the best answer here is. I wrote bits of fanfiction here and there when I was younger, and I also drew fanart-- until I realized I wasn't very good at either of those things. I hadn't written anything in at least 7 years when I started writing Gorillaz, mostly off the back of my inspiration from reading Yearz and obsessing over a scummier, more realistic universe for these characters. The truth is that it wasn't quite a childhood dream or lifelong passion, it was something I stopped when I became too embarrassed by my lack of skill, and picked up again simply because I felt compelled to do it-- and indeed, like any creative pursuit, you do get better the more you do it. I would absolutely say I've rediscovered a passion for writing and I do like to entertain certain ambitions of writing a collection of short stories, but I'm also not hard-nosed in dedication to that goal. I have always loved stories, but that wasn't strictly in regard to written stories, often it was more of a love for movies and music which inspired little imagined scenarios; I wasn't always a voracious reader nor did I frequently write anything to fruition, which seems like it disqualifies me from being an authority on those things.

carnegie: what authors and/or books/stories have inspired you to write or influenced your work?

As mentioned previously, I really wasn't a voracious reader. In fact, this was and is a source of some humiliation-- having not read the classics or other things that people know and respect can make you feel like the dimmest person in the room. The awkwardness of these conversations is honestly something that motivated me to read a bit more recently, but even that was more focused on poetry and essay collections. My go-to answer is generally Joey Comeau, probably most evident in his queer-punk stories Lockpick Pornography and We All Got It Coming, but also his more gentle lingering on grief Malagash and the offbeat and sporadically poignant collection Overqualified. (I really loved Overqualified at the time it came out, so it has a special place in my heart.) I've recently read two poetry collections which gave me a little boost to begin working: Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar and A Fortune for Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib. And I'd be remiss not to mention-- Yearz. Like, it surely embarrasses Danni for me to say that but it is the simple truth.

dickinson: what insecurities do you have about your own writing? what do you think you should improve on?

Sheesh, where to start? All of it, quite plainly, I don't think there is any element which could not be improved on. I always felt that I struggled with dialogue and making it sound natural, but if I were naming the damning culprit I would say my writing is more bogged down by the overwriting and underediting. I remember being younger and feeling a bit defensive of "purple prose" because subconsciously I knew I was very prone to it. To be frank, when I write a story more quickly and don't embellish much in the detail I always feel it is too sparse and not distinct, I fear it isn't saying anything that makes it unique to me-- but those stories seem to be the ones that have "performed" the best based on recent stats, which confirms that I definitely overthink this, haha. The problem as I see it is that these, er, lofty sentences are good on their own ("good" is subjective, some have definitely been Bad, but let's pretend we're just seeing the "good" examples) but when stacked together with hundreds, thousands of "lofty" sentences with similar structure, similar length and similar "impact," it can start to make the reading process tedious. I don't want to tire readers out or make them cringe at how hard I'm overcompensating for my lack of education or formal skill, and I do fear it comes across as exactly that when I write the way my brain tells me to. When I say underediting, I don't mean that I don't edit-- I edit to the brink of madness, I rewrite constantly, but I don't often have the heart to cut something out. I really don't edit things to make them more brief; I do think it's arguable to what extent brevity is good for a story, but... it's more important than my writing reflects, haha. There is some impact lost when you are too precious about unnecessary sentences, and I am unfortunately too precious about it. I don't think I'm particularly good at plotting either, as my fanfic writing has relied more on character studies than progressing actions and events, and I fear in longer form (ie: this current WIP) it will come across to the reader as meandering, aimless, and quite frankly boring. To be kinder, I know these are subjective things. I don't think all of my stories are bad, but I don't think all of them are good. I don't think any are great, and I don't think I'm at a skill level where I feel comfortable resting on my laurels or taking a swing at self-publishing. Writing is still challenging to me, and I suppose it's up to personal perception whether it is good to be challenged because it shows you're putting in effort, or whether it's a sign you don't have a natural talent for something, heh.

parchment: how often do you or your personal life influence your writing?

Fairly often, but it's generally in small, inconsequential ways. I don't try to put myself in the characters in any sort of comfort/projection way, but I also think it's unrealistic to expect nothing of yourself ends up in your writing, even if it's in the form of something opposing the character. A line of dialogue might be revised from real life, or a thought that a character has might be based on something I've thought before. Two examples come to mind-- in November Hasn't Come, the musing about Stu framing childing posters or torn up flyers to look artistic because you become self-conscious at a certain age about taping things on your wall is pulled right from my own life and my dozens of frames. I still have a hang-up about framing things I deem embarrassing without the frame. The other is a line in the WIP which may or may not end up in the final product, but I had certainly intended to use it from the very start-- a character quips to Stu about his casual pill usage that "They're not dinner mints," which is straight from a real story involving a loved one and painkiller abuse. I loved this quote because it's got that touch of grim humor about it that really suits my type of fiction, but it is in fact real. (Now that I've said it I'll try my best to keep that interaction in the final product.)

#long post #thank you for helping me burn part of my day

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izzythehutt · 5 years ago

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2, 7, 8 :)

7). Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

Career advice, Minerva McGonagall decides, neatly tucking the parchment with Mary McDonald's suggested classes away in her desk drawer, is one of the more tedious duties of a head of house at Hogwarts. In plain truth, the vast majority of her students—fond of them and proud as she may be of their achievements—are not bound for particularly interesting or profound careers. Most Hogwarts graduates' lives will be marked with small, personal accomplishment—marriages and children, modest promotions, occasional tragedy—all-in-all, in a word, ordinary.

Every wizard is important in his domestic sphere and among his friends, but few leave a large footprint in the road of history.

Of the hundreds of students she has advised in all her years as a teacher, there have been only a dozen or so whose upper-level course selections have really mattered.

Even fewer of those has she had an influence on, for the exceptionally gifted—usually, it follows, being uncommonly ambitious as well—are in the habit of knowing exactly what they intend to do when they graduate school, rendering the meeting a mere formality, and her presence, superfluous.

A sharp rap signals the beginning of her next appointment. She looks up at the door, mentally arming herself for battle.

That was all, of course, only usually the case. On rare occasion Minerva finds herself with an extremely gifted student who is in need of some direction. Or any direction.

Rarest of all is a magical prodigy barreling off the proverbial cliff.

I just think Escape Artist is objectively way better written than my other HP stuff, probably because it is shorter and relies more on character study than drama to carry it.

If you haven’t yet, please read this story.

#fanfic ask meme #minerva mcgonagall #harry potter #asks #icebluecyanide

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mediaeval-muse · 4 years ago

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Book Review

The Raven’s Tale. By Cat Winters. New York: Amulet Books, 2019.

Rating: 2.5/5 stars

Genre: YA historical fiction, supernatural

Part of a Series? No.

Summary: Seventeen-year-old Edgar Poe counts down the days until he can escape his foster family—the wealthy Allans of Richmond, Virginia. He hungers for his upcoming life as a student at the prestigious new university, almost as much as he longs to marry his beloved Elmira Royster. However, on the brink of his departure, all his plans go awry when a macabre Muse named Lenore appears to him. Muses are frightful creatures that lead Artists down a path of ruin and disgrace, and no respectable person could possibly understand or accept them. But Lenore steps out of the shadows with one request: “Let them see me!”

***Full review under the cut.***

Content Warnings: verbal/emotional/financial abuse, morbid thoughts

Overview: In the author’s note at the back of this book, Winters states that she tried to “offer reader’s a window into Poe’s teenage years” and “root the book in [Poe’s] reality while also immersing the story in scenes of Gothic fantasy that paid homage to his legendary macabre works.” Regarding the first bit, I don’t think the concept is itself a bad one - writing about the early life of a major cultural figure is a great way to get a YA audience (who may be teenagers themselves) to connect with them. Regarding the second bit, I don’t think this story came across as “Gothic” so much as it was more “magical realism.” I wouldn’t call this story “macabre” in any way, nor do I think Winters used any elements that were evocative of Gothic fantasy in the literary sense. Even if we abandon the idea that The Raven’s Tale is supposed to be “Gothic,” I do think Winters could have used the concepts she established to a greater effect than she did, such as using Poe’s muses more allegorically to talk about things that matter to modern-day readers (like the value of art, how darkness can be comforting and can help process emotions, etc). But as it stands, this book mostly reads like Poe stumbling around, trying to find his feet as the poetic genius that he’s destined to be - something I don’t think is as interesting.

Writing: Winters alternates between using her own prose style and mimicking Poe’s sense of meter and rhyme. In some cases, she does very well. I was impressed by the way she was able to use her vocabulary to mimic what she thought Poe’s young voice might sound like, and the intertextuality within this book shows how she was cognizant of Poe’s education and background.

I do think, however, that Winters misused repetition. There are some moments when a phrase, sentence, or group of sentences are repeated, perhaps in the attempt to create emphasis on a concept, but to me, they felt tedious. I can’t tell how many times we’re told that Poe is a swimmer, and in one scene, artistic inspiration is portrayed as the same phrases being repeated two or three times until the words are written down.

I also don’t think that, despite the rich vocabulary, Winters makes use of language to create evocative settings or convey emotion well. No matter how many turns of phrases I read, I didn’t quite connect with the characters or feel invested in their well-being.

Finally, I found the genre of this book to be a little strange, given the author’s intention to infuse the story with tributes to “Gothic fantasy.” In my opinion, the tone wasn’t sufficiently gloomy enough to warrant the book as a whole being characterized as “Gothic” or “dark fantasy,” nor were the defining characteristics of Gothic literature present. At most, you could say there was a tyrannical antagonist and some dark imagery, but I don’t think the atmosphere was pushed into the realm of Gothic or even horror. Rather, I think the story is more rooted in magical realism in that we get magical elements in a real-world setting without much explanation as to how or why muses are able to take physical form and everyone accepts that. I don’t think that magical realism is a bad choice or inferior genre, just that Winters’ intention doesn’t quite match up with her results.

Plot: The plot of this book follows a young Edgar Allan Poe as he leaves home to go to college, enduring abuse from his adoptive father as well as financial trouble. Along the way, he comes face-to-face with Lenore, his “dark muse,” who urges him to shrug off his foster father’s influence and embrace his destiny as a writer. I think the potential for something interesting was there - student loan debt is definitely something many young people grapple with, so in some ways, Poe could have been made more relatable to modern readers. I don’t think, however, that the plot itself as it stands was very engaging, primarily because the focus was entirely on cultivating Poe’s “literary genius.” If the story wasn’t talking about whether Poe should write macabre tales or satires, it was focused on Lenore’s desire to “be seen” and “evolve.” Artistic genius is something very few people possess, and the righteous struggle of embracing art no matter the real-world consequences doesn’t quite acknowledge how those real-world consequences have a real effect on a person’s well-being. True, this book does mention that Poe struggles financially and resorts to drinking and gambling and taking out enormous loans to cover his debts, but they felt like afterthoughts in that not much time is given to exploring them compared to Poe’s literary journey. I would have liked to see Poe’s story brought down to a level that more people could connect to, such as using Lenore as a sounding board for exploring more complex ideas like the value of art, how art is used to rebel against oppressive power structures, the cost of following one’s dreams in a world that doesn’t value them, or how darkness and morbid imagery can be a source of comfort (rather than wholly an indicator that something is wrong with someone).

Characters: This book is told in first person, alternating between Poe’s perspective and Lenore’s. Poe is supposedly a teenager obsessed with death yet afraid of dying, yet that defining characteristic comes up so few times that it’s easily forgettable. Poe is also a little hot-and-cold towards his muse, Lenore, sometimes caring for her and desiring her presence, other times pushing her away out of shame. I think the struggle to overcome internal shame could have been interesting if more was done to explore the concept, but as the book stands, it doesn’t seem like young Poe does much except react to the whims of his muses and lament his financial and family situations.

Lenore, Poe’s “Gothic muse,” is a strange figure in that’s she’s a concept made flesh. Representing Poe’s macabre side, she follows Poe around, demanding that she “be seen” so she can evolve into her final form, a dark-winged raven. As much as I liked having half the book narrated by a female character, I don’t think her perspective enhanced the story much. Her perspective demystified Lenore in ways that I think undercut the book’s intended mood, and even the scenes in which she delivers poetic inspiration aren’t very gripping or fantastical.

Poe does have a second muse named Garland O’Peale, who represents Poe’s satirical and witty side. The real Poe was a master literary critic in addition to horror-smith and poet, and it was great to see this part of the literary giant’s career explored in some capacity. Garland is frequently in conflict with Lenore, claiming that focusing on dark imagery and the macabre is “childish.” I think there was some potential here for a deeper dive into why certain literary genres are valued more than others, as well as a more complex rendering of Poe’s mental characteristics being externalized and turned into an allegory. However, because not much is done with this allegory, both Garland and Lenore read a little flat.

Supporting characters are likewise a little underdeveloped. I didn’t get the sense that Poe truly connected with any of his friends and classmates, and I didn’t see why he loved Elmira (other than he tells us so). His adoptive father is sufficiently evil for the purposes of this story, but again, John Allan’s obsession with snuffing out Poe’s literary impulses in favor of turning him towards “real work” could have been taken up as a central theme of the book and made more complex.

Recommendations: I would recommend this book if you’re interested in the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe, 19th century America, dark or Gothic literature, the concept of artistic inspiration, and magical realism.

#book reviews

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samsbookblog · 6 years ago

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Review: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (as read by Thandie Newton)

Of course my first book review on this, my book blog, has been inspired by righteous fury, rather than the great delight I’ve received from other books I’ve read so far this year.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (as read by Thandie Newton)

⭐️⚪️⚪️⚪️⚪️

I want to preface this entire rant by saying that Thandie Newton’s performance was spectacular. She humanized the characters, provided depth to the dialogue and interest to the sometimes cumbersome and tedious descriptions. The reason I finished this book so quickly was because I didn’t want to stop listening to Thandie, and I’m positive I would have given up if I were reading it on my own. Five stars to Thandie, please do more audiobooks!!!!

I understand this book was not written for 2019, but I am baffled that for 182 years, it has been lauded as a great work of feminist literature. It is a racist, classist, ableist, and yes, I’ll say it, sexist piece of trash that I hated beyond all expectation.

At first I loved it. The writing was beautiful, and lush, and descriptive. I was taken in by the complicated sentence structure and delicate prose, I adored how quintessentially gothic the book felt. The misery heaped upon young Jane was so perfect for this genre, which I generally enjoy greatly, I was almost giddy with it. It’s very enthralling and engrossing and I was absolutely in love. Rochester was a tortured, dichotomous douchebag, which i knew going in, and he and Jane had great chemistry.

Honestly I was digging it up until the blackface scene. The one where Rochester dresses up as an old “gypsy” woman, meaning he darkens his face to the point of being gruesome and horrifying, and forces an uneducated accent to harass all the women at his party, and specifically Jane, with “predictions”. There’s a lot of grossness to unpack in this scene (the weird and all-too-familiar pitting of the heroine against her female peers because the only way to be a strong woman is to show how inferior other women are, the super creepy connotations of Rochester conning his way into privacy of various young women, the extreme emotional manipulation of Jane which is unfortunately a recurring theme that I’ll get into later) but the overt racism is what really gave me pause.

Little did I know that scene was just the seedling of racism to come, and would bloom into a terrible, revolting bouquet of gross gross gross illusions to madness as equating to blackness, descriptions of Bertha Mason as grotesque and savage, many comparisons between this human woman and wild animals. The entire novel paints a correlation between darkness and sin, which I guess is a common enough motif in literature but when the central conflict of a novel comes in the form of a mixed-race woman of Creole decent who is described as having “pigmy intellect”, in my eyes that takes it to a different level. Especially considering the emphasis of Jane’s virtue being her primary strength, it’s a very telling choice to make the symbolic depiction of evil be in the form of a woman of color.

(Please read this article which was written by a black woman, because it’s all well and good as a white person to say this thing is racist, the idea of a little black girl feeling ashamed for her race because of this book should make us all furious and want to do better.)

Additionally, I feel that the character of Jane is boring and puritanical and too perfect. She was portrayed as plain and small to show how pious and good she was, but her childlike stature was also shown to be an object of desire for Rochester, which is a just another plop of gross on the seven-layer dip of grossness that is this book.

I hated the way Jane spoke of poverty, and European “urchins” and the uneducated, while still claiming to be a poor, unconnected orphan. I hated that none of Brocklehurst’s, Jane’s, nor StJohn’s religion seemed to have much correlation to actual morality, but was still portrayed as superior to Rochester’s relative agnosticism. I hated that StJohn’s treatment of Jane is not shown to be morally wrong and that he receives no narrative justice for manipulating her constantly, gaslighting her, and emotionally abusing her. I hated that the narrative justice for Rochester is in the form of two disabilities that should not be tokenized and trivialized, and also that his repentance allows him to be partially forgiven and absolved of these punishments. I hated that Jane spent the entire book being harassed, abused, railroaded, and manipulated first by nearly every man in her life, and that nearly all of them receive redemption, if their actions are even considered to be wrong. I hated that Jane’s happy ending is getting to spend her days in domestic and emotional servitude to Rochester, who arguably treats her the best of any of the men, but whose biggest transgressions against her are not given the attention I feel they deserve. Also, he’s a terrible racist monster who keeps his mentally ill wife chained like an animal in an attic and we as the reader are supposed to feel pity for him.

It is beautifully written and beautifully performed (Thandie saved my sanity during this book and I will love her forever. Please narrate more books!!!) but I hated the vast majority of this book. It is irredeemably racist, even for the time period, and far too frustrating besides. Not a feminist work, not worth reading, not deserving of any of the hype.

#jane eyre #charlotte bronte #book review #to-be-formatted

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aikainkauna · 6 years ago

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Fic mehm

This was shortish, so might as well post it here. Snurched from the lovely @trelobita .

-What is your total word count on AO3?

-1 421 808. That little?!? I thought I would've gone past the 2 million mark a long time ago. What with Connie whipping me on the way he does.

-How often do you write?

-When the right mood/inspiration comes, and when I'm healthy enough (both mentally and physically) to be in writing condition. Which is not often enough; I hate it when I do want to write, but brain fog and/or physical fatigue mean I can't keep my brain going or my body upright. That's mostly for fiction, though. I can type bloggity waffle like this, and could just about proofread a sex toy review today despite it being a brainfog/tireded day. The deadline for the review was today, so I did it under duress and must've left something out or fucked up some grammar as consequence. Finnish conjugations are hell when your memory is shot to pieces; English is much easier to write because you don't have to remember how to conjugate a word to denote it's in the past tense for a plural with a conditional towards place A, signifying inclusion. No, I'm not joking. Sauvallanikinkos? ("Also with my wand, too, maybe?")

-Do you have a routine for writing?

-My body isn't good with routines and schedules, so no. The only pattern I have is to try and get 1000 words done at least and then to email myself the latest draft after I've finished writing.

-What are your favourite tropes?

-Have you got a month? (This question foolishly asked about your favourite kinks and tropes and pairing types all in the same question, BTW, so I split it up into three questions, because... c'mon.)

Tropes:

-Flawed characters who are still somehow understandable and appealing; not the typical Asshole Protagonist or antihero thing so much but more of an... well, I guess it's just good characterisation I prefer, in the end. Not that kind of squickily obvious macho power fantasy sold as "grittiness" just for the sake of being an asshole (funnily enough, that kind of crap usually comes from the kinds of people who have too much privilege in the first place). So, yeah, good characterisation that's still got some shreds of humanity left is my jam.

-Telepathic lovers. Exactly because it hurts so much when the person who's supposed to love you the most and to understand you the best doesn't, and vice versa. So that's a big RL trauma and squick I prefer to fix, because in fic, I CAN.

-That's a major one, actually. Fix-its not so much on a plot level but on a human level. Especially sexism/gender bullshit-breaking fixes. Fix-its get a bad rap, but that kind of thing, just like the bashing of romance and fanfic, sets off my "ah, this wouldn't be the devaluing of something considered empathic and female/feminine again, now would it?" alarms.

-This overlaps with the pairing thingy, but the Depraved Bisexual is my favourite character type to write. All the Connies, Tennant!Peter Vincent, Captain Renault, Zainab, Laura, etc... YES.

-Male character gives up some masculine privilege he doesn't fancy anyway for the sake of love and empathy/female character gives up stereotypical female things she doesn't fancy anyway in order to be herself and free herself as much as she can from society's chains. Give Torsten all the pwetty dwezzez he wants and for Falcon!Yassamin to remain childfree, dammit!

-Man cuddles and medicates woman during her period and actually empathises/feels how awful it is. As I was saying about the fix-its...

-Funny banter, even if I can't write it as hilariously as I'd want to.

Favourite kinks?

-Poetic prose and Romanticism. It's word porn or nothing, baby.

-Historical detail, accuracy preferred but depends on how the story wants to go (the Barmakids DON'T get butchered horribly by Harun al-Rashid in 803, TYVM).

-Anal! That's almost too obvious to mention.

-Androgynous, genderbending, sex-bending, femme men. Why do you think Connie is the love of my life?

-Lots of arousal-drippage.

-Some way for the bottom to see themselves being banged. Mirrors or telepathy or magic or video camera projecting it before their eyes or whatever. Unfff.

-Orgasms. Always orgasms to complete satisfaction. Orgasm denying or writing it badly or so vaguely that characters/readers can't get any catharsis/release for the arousal is a huge squick. That's a hard limit. Fuck characters who tease and don't let someone get off.

-Psychological/emotional depth. That's such a no-brainer it shouldn't even be necessary to mention (although in these days, it seems to be, because apparently wanting that is now a repressed sexual minority instead of normal human, especially female, sexuality. Oh, fuck off). Yeah, these memes do bring out the pet peeves about internalised misogyny, don't they? Especially the sort that manifests itself in sputter-inducing ignorance. Even my medieval characters and their somewhat dated and essentialist ideas of sex and gender are ahead of Tumblr in the very basics, FFS.

-BDSM that's based very much on extreme care and healing, the sort that uses the intense sexual activities/sensory overload as a kind of way to heal the sub's anxieties and to help the sub let go, achieve catharsis and release. And for the top's love to be the guiding, ravishing, then healing and comforting force that contains the sub and the sub's anxieties in a fiercely loving and protective way and absolutely, so that not a drop spills over. So, yep, BDSM as therapy is my kink in both RL and in fic. Not so much a desire to humiliate or to be humiliated, but on the contrary, to value and to honour the other half. The top finds strength and validation through being the healer, through their power being able to do something good (instead of tearing someone down and having power over them through that). Yes, I know that's not everyone's idea of BDSM, but it's mine and that's what you'll get if it's a healthy relationship I'm trying to portray. (The Barrings and Zainab and Fadl don't have the healthiest ideas of sex, anyhow; Jaffar/Pwinzezz usually do.)

And I'm leaving out so many. You only have to look at my Ao3 pages to see the recurring themes:p

Favourite pairing types?

-Experienced Depraved Bisexual Character/Less Experienced and/or Repressed Character, GIMMIE. Fucking love that shit.

-Similar: Older, More Experienced Man/Younger, Horny Woman.

-Horny couple, usually M/F, seduce someone into a threesome. The Rosesverse and Devilry are full of this, so might as well admit it.

-Do you have a favourite fic of yours?

-I do have a soft spot for the first two fics in the Falconverse. As if you didn't all know that already! They do have some noticeable flaws here and there, especially the first one (I still insist that weird lube choice was HIS and not mine; I do know better and yelled at him at the time), but they still contain my deepest and most profound writing both erotically (and I mean that in the widest sense of the word, encompassing all things Love) and spiritually and character-wise. Defy Not The Stars also turned out better than I expected, considering I had never attempted so much plot and a traditional historical romance novel before. But I guess that Roses, what with its length, has allowed me to explore more aspects of the characters and their lives than anything else I've written. And of course, considering Devilry is my most-read saga ever, I do have a soft spot for that pile-up of a car crash. If only for the sheer intensity of the ride; I was just thinking yesterday how it really was aghori sadhana done through writing. Meditating in a graveyard is for wimps; try spending months in Torsten Barring's fragrant boypussy.

-Your fic with the most kudos?

To no one's surprise, Because The World Belongs To The Devil, at 234 kudos.

-Anything you don’t like about your writing?

-I suck at pacing sometimes. The sex scenes tend to run overlong if I write them in several sessions instead of just one go. It's not that the characters want to try different sex acts and shag more than once during a night, but more that the tension is spread out unevenly ("JFC, why did they change position again? I want them to just fucking come already, damnit!") This is obviously a result of how many things *I* see in my mind's eye during a wank; it's always more of a clipshow of different sex acts and pairings and orientations than one straightforward scenario. I'll be more mindful of that in the future and have been watching out for it in the past few fics already; I don't think the shags in The Guardians of Samarkand overran, for example.

-And sometimes my kinks get too obvious and repetitive for me, too, the way any porn gets tedious and repetitive. But on the other hand, I know very well that fanfic *is* about us imposing our kinks on our darlings, no matter how much we may go on about our dedication to characterisation and such. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: what's key is to get away with your kinks *but* in such a way that they can also engage the reader and that they become interesting and enjoyable not just for you, but for the readers, too. And you need good characterisation for that, and it's a really delicate balance to juggle your kinks and believable characterisation.

-Something you *do* like about your writing?

-I can write immersively and deeply and engage all the senses (sight, touch, scent...) in rich detail, as well as go deeply and profoundly into the emotions. And write some fucking hot porn ;) Those are the things I've had praise for, at least. Maybe my spiritual bits aren't as relatable or something, because people hardly ever remark on those (interestingly, my mum is the only one to have taken up those bits! But I skim over the sex scenes when I read the fics to her, so she only gets the gen). Or then it's the fact that most of the time it's Thief of Bagdad fic, and thus in an Islamic context, and most readers aren't familiar enough with, say, Sufism, to feel like they're qualified to comment without making arses out of themselves. But of course I like my spiritual bits; I'm an ex-religions major!

This had a taggity thing at the end, but I hate doing those because it always puts pressure on them even if you say they don't have to (come, now. The pressure is there, the moment you mention someone by name). I don't own the meme or you, so, as always: do what thou wilt.

#writing #meme #meta #personal #i guess #ao3 #fic

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m39 · 2 years ago

Text

Doom WADs’ Roulette (2002): 2002 A Doom Odyssey - Part 3

Nice job, mate!

You killed the Cyberdemon at the end of Total Disturbance. Now it’s time to go further and kill more demonic shit after a freshly revealed teleporter that was hidden in one of the marble columns.

That’s how much you gonna get for why you are in this episode because the WAD’s plot feels pretty pretentious, un-self aware and kind of filled with purple prose if you ask me.

EPISODE 3: The Evil Unleashed

We already know how the second episode was starting to be better and more insane with the WAD’s visuals. This episode goes even further beyond that. It looks even better than the first half of Odyssey. Insanely looking maps that (most of the time) offer something different. Truly a hellish spectacle for your eyes.

The music is also (almost) the best one in the entire WAD. The track from De-Moon Side quickly became my favorite track to listen to, followed by the one from System Central.

The only track I didn’t like, unfortunately, is from Obituary Written. Not because it’s bad, far from it, but because it has a moment where it has a jumpscary DOOT/cat-piano-banging played twice in a short amount of time. And I’m not gonna play with this shit listening to my ears.

Like the previous episodes, this one is, again, rather easy to understand where to go. And like the previous ones, it only had at worst, a few moments where I was stuck for a longer time than usual.

I’m sorry that I’m starting to repeat myself, but I feel like it’s like this for a whole MegaWAD.

The Lost Chord, the secret level of this episode, can be a little mind fucking since before getting the key to finish it, you might think you are going backwards when in reality you go further.

De-Moon Side might be about reaching the top of the tower of Babel (as I like to call the building with the colored doors).

Unfortunately, there is also some bullshit going on. Like Obituary Written constantly forcing you to go through long cases of damaging floors on a map that doesn’t even have Rad Suits (not even in secrets). Also, the creator of this map should get a reprimand for one teleporter teleporting directly to the square filled with slime.

De-Moon Side and Spider Temple have cases of painful backtracking (the former one with the two smaller buildings at the start, and the latter one making you go slightly forward before forcing you to go back to get another key).

System Central has this tedious moment where you have to go through a series of corridors to reach the switch that will let you get the blue key, and while the corridors are becoming shorter with each one, it’s the lifts that will make you want to shove a shovel up your arse.

At least I don’t have to deal with broken secret exits like with the previous episode.

As expected, this episode is harder than the first half of the WAD. There are now actual moments where it can get legitimately hard. The ending of Stronghold of Damnation with the well full of seemingly endless waves of Cacos is one of the things to come to mind, alongside the beginning of De-Moon Side if you don’t actively secret hunt.

If you know where the secrets are, it won’t be really as hard as you thought at first.

Like with the previous episodes, The Evil Unleashed has some cheap difficulty spikes, but this time I feel like these were the most severe ones. I got somewhat used to hitscanner traps what can you say about being trapped in a small room with the Cyberdemon? Noooo, that doesn’t feel cheap at all! Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo...

Slightly changing the subject here, but I feel like people who helped Paul with this WAD did better maps than he did, and he did most of these. Don’t want to favor other creators over one of them, I just feel like it.

And that’s basically all I have to say about The Evil Unleashed. Despite still having problems that haunt the other two episodes, this one progresses in an organic way, AKA it gets prettier and harder as you go further into it.

Only one episode left before we say goodbye to this MegaWAD. Will it continue the tradition of being prettier and harder than the previous ones? We will have to see.

Until then, see you next time.

Bye!

#doom #Doom WAD #review #doom mod #doom 1 #ultimate doom #doom 2002 #2002 #2002 a doom odyssey #part 3

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afoolforatook · 4 years ago

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7 and 20 for the writers meta post?

<3 <3 <3 <3

7. What do you think are the characteristics of your personal writing style? would others agree?

I really like to work poetic meter and phrasing into my prose. I like the flow of it, and using the significance of repetition and careful word choice in a very loose but verse-like way. I did a lot of personal poetry and songwriting growing up, but I always got too wordy, so mixing the aspects of poetic writing into my prose really helped me find my own voice. I think that’s something people would agree with? At least I’d hope so.

The other thing I’ve been told often by instructors and readers is how authentic my dialogue often is. Which I’ve always found flattering but a little surprising, because it’s never been something I’ve specifically tried to work on. I think it mostly comes from a lot of my writing and characters being outlets of personal ideas and feelings, and so conversations or dynamics end up often being strongly influenced by real relationships in my life. Also, I did a lot of conversational observing and scripting growing up, trying to make up for my own personal social struggles, so I kind of drilled into my head early on ways to tell if a conversation felt sincere or stilted.

20. Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or cues for future scenes?)

ohhhhh boy. So. I could get into this about a bunch of my FG stuff. Anthology, or Colors, or stuff I haven’t actually written beyond notes cough hockey au and musicians cough.

But the big one is Loving. Loving, especially the first four chapters of triple pov versions, has been some of the most intense meta planning I’ve ever done. Between making the versions each fit a different trigger warning level that is tonally consistent with the context of the pov, and laying framework for things I have planned for further on in the story (which, in itself is a bit of a thing, because Loving really has a veryyyyy loose ‘plot’ and is mostly just a bunch of strung together and connected character studies).

But with working on chapter two the past way too many months I’ve worked out even more about deeper meta stuff for *how* I write the povs. And specifically working with each narrative voices’ perspective and how the same events can symbolize very different things from different perspectives, and getting an understanding of how an individual perceives their own mental processes, as well as the people close to them.

I could rant about it even more here, but I don’t want to risk giving some stuff away for chapter 2. Again, not exactly, *what* happens, but *how* it is interpreted.

But in essence, Clover’s pov puts focus on his own insecurities, centering himself in a way, even as he tries to put the attention all on Qrow’s needs. Qrow’s pov is very aware of the fact that he is centering his own skewed understanding of things, but still is unable to stop. And the neutral, the omni, view, the one that the reader might assume is most ‘accurate’ and not clouded by personal perspective struggles, is missing things, it doesn’t have the full internal insight of the other two. So, in the end, while each version gives you the full ‘story’ with a slightly different view of events, all three are needed to be able to see the entire context of both Qrow and Clover’s reactions to things. Straight forward understanding is important to get the full picture, but so is biased emotion, so is changing perspective, and seeing that both of them are interpreting things in very different ways, that are both understandable but are missing huge parts of the other’s perspective because they haven’t developed this level of emotional understanding, even as they think they know each other so well.

It’s complicated, hence why it’s taking *forever*.

I’m also very deliberate with word choice and phrasing, both for laying in some seeds for future events and developing subtle thematic strings and characterizations. Then there’s also working in phrasing and wording that is a reference to certain lyrics from the soundtrack, or direct quotes. As well as very subtle continuity threads that probably no one but me will pick up on but I still check over and over.

So, there’s a lot going on, that I’m still really smoothing out the details of. I’m really excited to finally get it finished and show it to people, but it definitely is a lot of work and can be incredibly tedious and frustrating at times.

#my writing #my fic writing #Love Is Being Scared and Loving Anyway

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exile-wrath · 7 years ago

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Athanatosora told me that you (probably) took creative writing in college. Can you share your experiences with it?

@athanatosora you fucker how dare you make me remember this

uhhh oh boy where do I begin. kay, well for one, I go to community college, and creative writing courses are open to anyone, not just english majors. I took intro, fiction writing, and poetry writing. It’s probably a different experience than a proper uni

students I encountered:

people looking for easy humanities credits

this one lady that enrolled by mistake but was really talented at writing and had great skill with placing the reader in the setting. her descriptions style was just so good. needed to work on her dialogue but I loved her stuff I think I still have some.

Aspiring Hollywood Scriptwriter White Guys who had like. decent ideas. awful execution. a workshop piece that reeked of misogyny and got eviscerated for it by one of my friends.

this dude that had a lazy drawl and whose writing made me go ??? bc the main character of his workshop piece was all about exploring sexuality and I’m ace and literally everything about that piece went over my fucking head. it might have been the writing style. It was 50% the overwinded descriptions and 50% the completely unnecessary masturbation description. His writing reminded me of James Joyce and I hate James Joyce.

people like London and Casey who I both met in creative writing classes. AKA, serious writers that actually have sold their soul to the words. Their existence helped me get through. I still remember their workshop pieces because they were worth remembering.

People who were exploring writing as something new to do. Beginning baby writers whose work made me war flashback to when I first started writing. Their enthusiasm levels and talent levels varied per person but they weren’t terrible to be around bc they were honestly trying.

And then there was:

Me: passionate about writing as my future career and the one (1) thing I’m good at and like to do. At that point I’d been writing for 4-5 years.

Intro to Creative Writing spent half the time on poetry and half on prose. It was. boring. We covered really basic things like point of view, description exercises, and... nothing that really stuck out. It was definitely more catered to students that had spent all their life writing essays and never writing for fun. I snoozed a lot because I knew everything that was being covered bc I’d been writing longer than most people in that class. It was barely engaging. It focused a lot more on the technical aspects of writing, and I just... found it really boring.

About at some point in the semester, we started doing workshop pieces! Basically we would write a thing, pick a date to be workshopped, distribute copies to everyone the week before, and on the workshop day you got to sit quietly while people discussed your piece, what they liked, what stood out, what sort of meanings they picked up, critique they had, anything.

Workshop was uhhhh a doozy. We had to write up 1 page critiques each of them? And a lot of the time I was left reading a workshop piece and having nothing to say because I couldn’t think of anything nice or substantial to say. Oh god I think I still have the google doc with all my written critiques

some things from my critique document:

77 words on a bag is a bit... much

Don’t ‘list’ actions like a grocery list, it gets boring.

The last paragraph, which the narrator drives off into the sunset, I thought felt off. It feels rushed, and even though he says he’s relieved, there’s not much to indicate it in his thoughts? Mention how it felt good to finally blow off steam. How nice to finally stop giving a fuck. What’s the significance of the song that starts playing over the radio? Maybe give us the one-two lines that resonate with the narrator as he feels free again. I don’t know the song, so I didn’t get what sort of impact it was supposed to have.

W-what tense are you trying to use. The beginning paragraph is a confusing mess of past and present and like what. /overall the whole thing confuses me; why are they talking about things in a public setting where anyone could hear, why is this girl trying to indoctrinate this guy when she’s also trying to blackmail him, that doesn’t make sense, other than their clothing, what do they look like. I just have so many questions, and no answers??

Unfortunately the worldbuilding paragraph at the beginning felt almost like a crutch, explaining things rather than you trying to fit it into the story itself.

Okay. Lot’s of description about things, clothes and place and such, I do admit. But it feels a bit excessive and almost poetic in the way that I just. Flop. //flops out

The key thing that’s missing here is the lack of plot. No conflict, no purpose to the characters. They’re just walking and blandly commenting on strange things that they pass by. What’s... the point?? There is none. I see none. My eyes roll to the back of my head, my head turns upside-down, my body inverts, because WHERE IS THE PLOOOOT. So yeah. Add a plot. Will 100% help.

If I had to be honest, the cringe was a bit strong here. You try to use strong imagery in order to get it across to the reader, yet it somewhat backfires. It’s incredibly detail-heavy, simply swamping us with details to build the scene, yet it’s way too much sensory detail. The plot is completely halted in order to simply build the scene. It was quite tedious to read.

Ao probably neglected to tell you that I screamed about writing crits A LOT. These are some of the Bad bits from my crit though. There were definitely really good pieces, but there were also the really “what did I do to deserve this” pieces.

Okay this post is getting long but ANYWAY Creative Writing class is a doozy. Don’t go in expecting that everyone will be at the same skill level. It was somewhat fun because of the people I met, but it was a lot of reading and writing in a certain way that the teacher wanted us to. They’re good, I think, for learning technical skills, but will barely help otherwise. Trying to write creatively for a class can be killer on inspiration levels though, because the moment I had to write for an assignment rather than my own enjoyment I regretted taking it.

#asks #personal #god it was a trip. not necessarily a fun one either.#workshops were fun though #Anonymous

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quinnreadsbooks · 8 years ago

Text

Monthly Summaries - February and March

Ugh, I’m the worst at blogging.

I also haven’t been reading that much, because I’m moving to Montreal on the 5th and I have these French exams to study for. Plus I felt like doing a whole lot of rereading, and I don’t count those on Goodreads or when I blog.

February:

20. Charlie, Presumed Dead - Anne Heltzel

21. Right Behind You - Lisa Gardner

22. Spare and Found Parts - Sarah Maria Griffin *

23. The Loved Ones - Sonya Chung

24. A Separation - Katie Kitamura

25. The Chaos - Nalo Hopkinson

26. Enter Title Here - Rahul Kinakia

27. The Animators - Kayla Rae Whitaker *

28. Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout

29. I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism - Lee Maracle

30. Girl at War - Sara Novic *

31. The Wolf Wilder - Katharine Rundell

Charlie, Presumed Dead was terrible. I wanted something trashy for night shift number six of six, but it was less "trashy" and more "actual garbage". There's almost no characterization; no one's motives are particularly believable; and it did not have an emotionally satisfying ending. I guess the author planned to write a sequel, but I didn't care enough about the characters to have any interest in a sequel.

I hated The Loved Ones. And there’s a super creepy adult man/minor girl relationship in it that is not at all condemned by the narrative. Which is fucked up, given that she was pre-pubescent when they met and he helped her deal with her first period. I really don’t understand why this one came so highly recommended.

A Separation was incredibly dull. I don’t normally mind books that aren’t plot-driven, but this didn’t resonate emotionally and the prose is really spare, so it didn’t work for me on any level. I’m pretty sure the same three sites that recommended The Loved Ones recommended this.

Enter Title Here was just kind of poorly written. The book’s conceit (a teenage girl writing a “novel” about her life) got in its own way, the pacing was off, and Reshma’s unlikeable nature eventually went from unpleasant but interesting to just plain tedious.

I know it’s early, but The Animators might well end up being my favourite book of the year. Top three for sure. I don’t know if I can quite explain why I liked it so much, but I definitely recommend it.

Girl at War is another one that just worked for me. Recommend.

March:

32. The Hate U Give - Angie Thomas (quite good, but not star-worthy for me personally. It’s a young adult novel and it felt too young for me)

33. The Sun Is Also a Star - Nicola Yoon (see above)

34. The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood (my least favourite Atwood)

35. St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves - Karen Russell (did not meet expectations)

36. One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter - Scaachi Koul

Yeah, March was a bad month for reading, though at least I enjoyed my rereads.

2017 HFC Bingo Challenge Progress:

LGBTQ+ author/characters - Everything We Left Behind

Unread book on my shelf - The Folded Earth

Written by a POC - On Beauty

Recommended by the HFC

Indigenous/Native author/characters - I Am Woman

Comfort read/guiltless pleasure - We Were On a Break

Debut novel - The Admissions

Book you’re prejudiced against

Book with disabled character - The Chaos

Published in this year (2017) - Right Behind You

Graphic novel - Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

Blue cover - The Loved Ones

Local to you (setting or author) - Hag-Seed

Book for These Apocalyptic Times - The Hate U Give

Social justice inspiration

Set in a country you’d like to visit - Girl at War (I know, but Croatia is lovely now)

Everyone but me has read it - When Breath Becomes Air

Contributes to self-care

Put a bird on it (bird on the cover) - The One That Got Away by Bethany Chase (reread)

Second chances (book you gave up on)

Set during/including a holiday

Novella - The Middle Ground by Zoe Whittall (she’s usually great. This wasn’t)

Nobel winner/finalist - Sula

Non-traditional format - Love Slave

Set in the future - Spare and Found Parts

Short stories (single author) - The Unfinished World

“Girl” in the title - The Girl Who Was Saturday Night

One-word title - Eileen

Booker winner -The Blind Assassin

History/micro-history

Book about sisters

Anthology

Pulitzer winner/finalist - Olive Kitteridge

Readers Gonna Read (free space) - Difficult Women

Readers Gonna Read (free space) - The Animators

Readers Gonna Read (free space)

#100 Books #2017 HFC reader bingo #2017 challenges #the good ones get stars

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locatie · 5 years ago

Text

2019 Gaming Year in Review

This year I beat 21 games! Last year I beat 38, but this year was a little rough on me in many ways, and I had to go a few months without really committing to anything.

I’m going to go through my list of games and jot down a few thoughts I had about them! Spoilers ahead, naturally.

Rating System:

5⭐: An absolute favorite! A game that’s going to stick with me for a long time. Regardless of any flaws I found, I fell deeply in love with these games. 4⭐: A pretty good game! I really enjoyed my time with these ones. They’re not quite perfect, maybe a few story beats or mechanics I couldn’t jive with, but I did still love these as well. 3⭐: A decent game! I didn’t fall in love with these games and the good and bad felt fairly equal. I don’t regret playing these games, but they had a lot of room for improvement. 2⭐: A bleh game. Most of these games were very ‘miss’ rather than ‘hit’ for me. Good concepts are probably buried in these ones, but I struggled to get through them. 1⭐: A terrible game. There is very little about these games that I find redeeming. I probably played them wishing they’d be done already. That I finished them at all is a miracle.

In order of when I beat them, starting with the beginning of the year:

Gris by Nomada Studio

4⭐

A visually gorgeous game. The mechanics were satisfying and made puzzle solving enjoyable, and I adored ‘unlocking’ the colors of the world to restore it to its former beauty. The game only got more beautiful as time went on, and the level design was very memorable to me. Also the soundtrack is one of the best of all the games I played this year, and I keep it on repeat a lot.

Best Part: The art in general. A treat to look at, and it makes for the best desktop wallpapers. Worst Part: The ambiguity in narrative. It’s not too bad, I just wish there was a little more to it.

Pokemon Let’s Go Eevee by Game Freak

4⭐

Despite this feeling like the millionth time they’ve focused on the Kanto region, and the blatant baiting of nostalgia, I appreciated this game. I’m a sucker for having my Pokemon follow me or being able to ride them. Much more accessible than going back and replaying the original R/B/Y games, which I can’t seem to enjoy anymore due to the QOL features that newer games have, so if I ever have a craving for Kanto, this will satisfy me. Not the best Pokemon game though just because Kanto was a pretty boring region visually and they stayed true to that, haha.

Best Part: Pokemon following the player! Riding Arcanine was a blast. Worst Part: Being in Kanto again. Really wish it was Gold/Silver for the double Johto/Kanto region thing, because Kanto alone just isn’t worth it.

Kingdom Hearts Final Mix by Square Enix

3⭐

I liked this game a lot as a kid and was interested to see how I would feel about it as an adult. It’s... something. There’s something always very off when JRPG localized dialogue is voiced -- it’s extremely cheesy to listen to in English, and this game is no exception. Still, I enjoy the sheer absurdity that is mashing up Disney and Final Fantasy characters anyway. The platforming is not remotely fun at all and the story is ridiculous, sometimes not in a good way. Thank god for skippable cutscenes or I wouldn’t have survived the end of this game.

Best Part: The creativity of the worlds. It was such a unique and ambitious concept for its time. Worst Part: The dialogue/story. This might be the only JRPG where the whole ‘friendship makes us stronger’ angle makes me want to strangle a fictional child.

Dear Esther by The Chinese Room

2⭐

I do enjoy walking simulators, but apparently not ones by The Chinese Room. Not as bad as Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, but still...not very enjoyable. I couldn’t seem to process what was going on as it was narrated to me -- I liked how it was written, and I was interested in hearing it, but I dunno. It meant nothing to me. I might replay it and try to grasp it again, really focus on it, but as it was presented to me on the first playthrough, it didn’t grab me. This is what I get for expecting something really good of a game where I wander around aimlessly for a couple hours

Best Part: The writing style is really neat and I enjoyed reading along and being fascinated by the prose. Worst Part: The ambiguity of the narrative. what the fuck is happening. why am i in a cave. who was that i just saw

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey by Ubisoft

4⭐

Not the first AC game I’ve ever played, but the first I liked enough to beat! It’s essentially an action rpg more than ever -- stealth is completely unnecessary if you so choose. I loved Kassandra so, so much, and exploring Greece was extremely fun for me! It was gorgeous and I often found myself wandering around towns and cities, soaking in the sights and feeling pretty dang immersed. I haven’t played the DLC yet but hope to some day. Not a perfect game -- while a lot of side quests are fun, the charm wears off after a while because the gameplay loop of sneaking in and murdering everyone got stale finally after 50 hours. Still, I’d love to go back and replay it some time.

Best Part: Kassandra. Everything about her. I would die for her. Also Greece in its entirety. Worst Part: Every goddamn time Deimos opened his mouth.

Rose of Winter by Pillow Fight

3⭐

A pretty cute but simple visual novel! I liked the protagonist quite a bit and a couple of the romances, but I wished it was longer/more fleshed out. I liked the universe it took place in and the concepts it presented (time travel! Race relations/the variety in cultures!) and would’ve happily played a longer game about these things. The romances leaving me wanting more was a good and bad thing, in the end.

Best Part: The protag! I love this chubby pink-haired knight! She is SO cute and lovely. Worst Part: Lack of depth in the romances. I like drawn-out romances, and these take place over the course of a couple days, and that’s not my bag.

Celeste by Matt Makes Games Inc.

4⭐

My review on this game is a little skewed. I was very bad at it, in the end, and very tired of dying literally hundreds of times in some areas that I had to give myself extra dashes. I had to keep toggling them on and off after giving myself a certain number of tries, because I really wanted to see how this game would play out. The gameplay and design and soundtrack give it the score it has, but the writing it was knocks it down from being a 5 star game. The concept of the story is good! Madeline wanting to reach the top of the mountain for her personal reasons was really lovely but the delivery of it felt very flat. The writing itself didn’t do it justice for me! I only ever see people talk about the gameplay itself and not the story/writing and maybe that’s why.

Best Part: The fact that the developers added accessibility options to people who aren’t very skilled at games, like me, can enjoy a game like this, even if we’re not playing “as intended.” Worst Part: Madeline’s reflection. As a narrative device she’s good, but the dialogue between the two characters was kinda mehhh to me.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt by CD Projekt

5⭐

There’s nothing I can say about this game that a million other people haven’t already said. I loved dad!Geralt. I loved Geralt in general. I did enjoy the first two games but who he was as a character in this game was my favorite. Yennefer was also great, as was Ciri, and the family dynamics were The Best. Also probably the best side quests in any rpg I’ve ever played! None of that radiant quest bullshit or fetch quest nonsense that pad a lot of other WRPGs I’ve been into :/ I still need to finish Blood and Wine, but so far it’s incredible, as was Hearts of Stone. Ugh I have so much to say about how much I loved the music, and Skellige, and Novigrad (Novigrad is one of the best video game cities as a worldbuilding device, imo), but I’ll keep this all brief. Don’t like Gwent at all though!!

Best Part: The entire portion of the game where you have to be a Good Dad or else you get a bad ending. Worst Part: The fact that Iorveth and the entire Scoia’tael subplot was cut entirely yet Roche got to stick around. I hate Roche. Iorveth was way better. Bring back my boy.

Persona 5 by Atlus

5⭐

holy shit. I haven’t beaten a JRPG this good in so long. This game changed what I want out of a JRPG. The soundtrack is phenomenal, the design of everything is impossibly stylish and I never got sick of any of it in the 96 hours it took me to beat the game. I adore Joker, Yusuke, Haru, and Ryuji as characters!! I don’t really care for Akechi and Shido as villains, but the proper final battle was very tense for me and the cutscene that followed felt so good. BIG GUN. Sometimes the palaces were a little tedious, and it took me a really long time to actually finish the game from when I started, because I needed big breaks after chunks of the game, but once I got into the swing of it after Makoto’s introduction as a Phantom Thief and that palace, I was pretty sucked in.

I will never forget my desperate struggle to max my stats by aggressively eating giant burgers until the endgame.

Best Part: The entire ‘student daily life sim’ portion. Managing my time and my relationships was very fun and I loved getting closer to my friends and choosing where to go, how to spend my time. Worst Part: The occasional sexism and homophobia that I had to sit through. Giving Ann agency after the first palace, but then trying to convince her to get naked really sucked, and then those two predatory gay men. Ugh. Oh and Ryuji looking at Ann’s boobs all the time. Seriously? are you for real??

Nier: Automata by PlatinumGames

4⭐

I waffled between giving this 4 or 5 stars, but I think 4 is right. I adored this game to bits, but admittedly didn’t do everything in it that I wanted to. I loved the world, the music, most of the characters, the combat, and that fucking ending. I didn’t like Adam and Eve (their dialogue...was so dumb...), and I was a little eh on route B, since it’s a lot of the same as route A, just from 9S’s perspective. At first I thought it was asking a lot to make me essentially do all the same shit over again, but when everything started changing in the third route, that’s when I was getting really invested. I mean I was already loving it during the first route, I was just slightly skeptical about having to replay a lot of the same things.

Ending E fucked me up though. Hearing Weight of the World didn’t hurt me until that ending, after all I’d been through, and then accepting help and hearing the chorus of voices. Ugh. No ending has ever been like that in a game for me.

Best Part: Sacrificing my data to help some stranger out there, because people do want to help. Humanity can be good. The message that there is worth in having feelings and being alive and real and loving. Worst Part: we really out here sexualizing 2B and looking at her panties a lot, huh.

Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage (Reignited Trilogy) by Toys For Bob

4⭐

This is the Spyro game I played the most of as a kid, and this remaster is incredible. All of the Reignited Trilogy makes the Spyro games look the way that I felt they did when I was a child. Seriously, it’s gorgeous and I can’t believe how true to the originals it is. I had a blast playing this one; it doesn’t get 5 stars, though, because I wouldn’t say this is like a ‘favorite’ game or anything. It’s wonderful, but not mindblowing.

Best Part: Getting to run around the hub worlds and drinking them in -- they’re where I spent hours as a child, and that nostalgic really got to me. Worst Part: the fucking TIMED FLYING PORTIONS

Spyro 3: Year of the Dragon (Reignited Trilogy) by Toys For Bob

4⭐

I was really excited to play this one because I didn’t get to beat it as a kid, and it was impossible to emulate because every rom of it didn’t work. Not as good as Ripto’s Rage to me, personally, because I didn’t love the levels where I was the penguin or the monkey. There were a lot of gimmicks, so to speak, in this game that I could do without. Skateboarding didn’t add anything to the experience either, ehh. Still, 4 stars because what Toys For Bob did with the trilogy is amazing and it made me wish games there had been more Spyro games that were like this.

Best Part: I finally got to beat this game after so long and it felt like a childhood wish of mine came true. Worst Part: I never want to be that stupid monkey ever again. Most of these side characters do not feel like they belong in a Spyro game, even though I know they were just trying to innovate the formula.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses by Intelligent Systems and Koei Tecmo

5⭐

Ohhh my god. I was nervous about another mainline Fire Emblem game, ever since Fates burned me pretty badly with how much I hated that game. Three Houses gave me nearly everything I wanted out of a Fire Emblem game, thankfully. No stupid explanation for offspring, no wasted dialogue between characters that didn’t need to have supports! I fell in love with so many of the NPCs and while the story isn’t perfect, it was a blast to go through and see the multiple sides to the conflict.

I went Golden Deer first and watched most of Amy’s playthrough of Blue Lions. I was in the middle of a Black Eagles run when I got a little burnt out and put it down, but I’m super excited to eventually see what Edelgard’s side of the story is, seeing as I don’t like her in the other routes but I’m shrimpterested in what her possible justification for anything is. Can’t wait for more story DLC whenever it happens!

Best Part: The support dialogues between characters. Also Claude von Riegan, destroyer of racism. Worst Part: the fact that there’s barely any time between Dimitri finally being nice to Byleth and the end of the Blue Lions route. he’s such a growly ass for so long.

Genital Jousting by Free Lives

2⭐

Obviously this game is a self-aware joke and isn’t meant to be much. The reason it got 2 stars instead of 1 is because I played it at a time that I really needed a laugh. I streamed it for my friend and for a while I was happily distracted by the story mode, even if it mostly involves hopelessly sticking my dick head into butts. The narration gave me Stanley Parable vibes, which was amusing, but yeah. Obviously this wasn’t gonna be some game of the year shit

Best Part: Playing with friends and yelling “GET OUT OF MY BUTT” at the top of your lungs. Worst Part: You can only enjoy sticking your dick in butts for so long before you don’t wanna do it anymore

I Love You, Colonel Sanders! by Psyop

1⭐

Yes, I am ranking this game as worse than a game about wiggly dicks. I didn’t have any hopes or expectations for this game, as it was always obviously meant to be a giant advertisement for KFC food, but that’s not even the part that bothered me. I didn’t care or mind the blatant product placement, the millions of mentions of all their herbs and spices and their gross bowls of corn, potato, and whatever.

I was so damn disappointed because it just wasn’t a good visual novel. I spent the whole time comparing it to Hatoful Boyfriend, which is an actually good parody of the entire genre. ILYCS felt more like “ha ha see how fucking weird dating sims are?? See how stupid and absurd the things that happen in them are?” rather than any kind of remotely interesting subversion on the genre. I don’t know why I expected that ILYCS would bother to do that, but I figured if a pigeon dating sim could surprise me, maybe this would too. Bleh.

Best Part: I did succeed in making Colonel Sanders love me, at least. Worst Part: Literally everything else.

The Outer Worlds by Obsidian Entertainment

4⭐

I’m giving this 4 stars, but this game gives me conflicted feelings. I love the companions in this game a lot, but some of them do have slightly disappointing arcs -- Ellie comes to mind for that one. The writing for the dialogue is great, but some of the main quests are just OK. The flaw system is really cool in theory, but I definitely didn’t think of them were worth the perk points, though they’re great if you’re serious about roleplaying.

I did have a lot of fun, but the ending felt very abrupt to me. I got to Phineas and we spoke for a minute, and then the credits rolled. And capitalism sure was bad! That was very heavy-handed. I enjoyed my time with it a lot but I am not itching to replay it. If there’s a sequel, though, I will definitely be on board with it.

Best Part: The dialogue options. They’re so fucking funny. Obsidian is the champion of snarky/witty dialogue. Worst Part: The ending made me the leader when I didn’t really feel prepared for that, I didn’t feel like that was the narrative I built for my character. The ending came at me so fast, it felt wrong.

Tyranny by Obsidian Entertainment

4⭐

If nothing else, Outer Worlds made me crave more of Obsidian’s writing flavor. This is the first CRPG I’ve ever committed to and beaten, and I do not regret that choice. I had tried to play it before but stopped very early on because it’s a lot of reading -- the entire opening has you do so much reading to make choices to kind of build your character’s backstory.

I loved playing a bad guy and accumulating power. My character was so loyal to Tunon and I loved the active development I got to have as someone who was so devoted to being a cog in the machine to someone who realized that they are special, they can be a conqueror, they can shape the world however they want. I know it’s possible to undermine all the bad guys and use your power for good, but eh, this is a game about being bad! It’s wonderful! And it was just long/short enough that it was great for someone just getting into CRPGs.

But. Like Outer Worlds, the ending felt rushed in Tyranny, though in an even more egregious way. Just as the story starts truly kicking off -- you have all this power, I had succeeded in making my superiors bow to me -- the game ends. It seems as though they ran out of time or money to have you actually face off against Kyros, the obvious next step in your plan for domination of whatever flavor. Maybe it was always the plan that taking down the Overlord was sequel material, but the way they built it up, it doesn’t feel right. And the game didn’t do well enough, or so I’ve read, so there will never be a face-off against her. I had such a good time with this game, but the ending left a real sour taste in my mouth.

Best Part: Really feeling like I had earned the power I got by endgame, by ‘playing’ the system. Defeating Tunon by manipulating him into bowing to me had me on edge and I was terrified until I walked out of his room. Worst Part: Knowing I will probably never get a resolution for the fight against Kyros. Really felt like all the cool stuff I did meant nothing.

Pokemon Shield by Game Freak

3⭐

Biiig mixed feelings about this one. I know Pokemon games are not known for their storytelling prowess, but even this one felt insultingly stupid to me. I know they can be good and interesting and posit cool concepts based on the worlds they’ve built. I didn’t like the gameplay of Black/White but I guess since that one tackled the ethics of Pokemon, Game Freak doesn’t want to try making any more challenging storylines.

The world also felt so empty. I never really noticed it in older Pokemon games, but SwSh has all these houses and no one has anything interesting to say. The NPCs aren’t worth talking to except when they give you items. Problems like that are common in Pokemon but I really hoped that bringing it to a home console meant that the game could be bigger and more full of content. The post game is almost nonexistent. For the first time ever, I don’t feel compelled to play long enough to complete my dex.

Best Part: The Wild Area, and doing raid battles with Amy. Playing alongside her and battling together was fun, and it was nice to cut down on the time it would’ve normally taken us to grind. Worst Part: Hop, Leon, and Bede. Worst characters in any Pokemon game, hands down.

Pillars of Eternity by Obsidian Entertainment

5⭐

I had initially tried this game out last year or so, but couldn’t get into it. Beating Tyranny finally made me feel able to tackle this one, and I’m so glad I gave it another chance. For most of the game I was meticulous and did almost all of the side quests, and I felt extremely rewarded by the narrative for doing so. Most of the companions were a joy to be around, and the lore of the world really drew me in.

Thanks to PoE, I think a whole new world and genre of games has opened up to me! But I’ll always feel like this is the first one I really loved.

Best Part: Eder!!! Ok also the themes of the game, especially in White March. Almost a month later I’m still thinking about the meaning to some parts of the game. Worst Part: That part in White March part 2 with the debate I couldn’t win. I understand why it was like that, I didn’t hate it or anything. Just the prerequisites to get the good outcome are bananas and there’s NO way I could possibly get the “good” ending of that dlc without following a guide WAY ahead of time. Oh well!

Katamari Damacy Reroll by BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment

2⭐

I didn’t play the first game when it came out. Instead I played the sequel, and that’s the game I have fond memories of, so unfortunately I spent this remake wishing they’d remade that one instead. The controls are more frustrating than I remember, and the level design is kind of meh. I do like that the town gets bigger with (almost) every level, until you’re rolling up adjacent towns and cities, but it wasn’t as fun as the paper crane level or the flower level or the zoo level of We Love Katamari :/ I absolutely pushed myself through this one as fast as possible, no replaying levels for the fun of it.

Best Part: The creativity and absurdity of Katamari as a whole. Rolling around a little Japanese town and finding very Japanese items is fun. Worst Part: The controls. Trying to climb up things is a nightmare and I ran out of time during some levels purely because it was so difficult to climb sometimes.

A Plague Tale: Innocence by Asobo Studio

3⭐

I didn’t know a whole lot about this game going in. I didn’t think the narrative was as incredible and resonating as reviews led me to believe, but it was alright. The first half of the game was very interesting to me -- the perspective of children running away from the Inquisition during the plague was exciting and I feared for these children as they never seemed to be able to get a moment of rest. I did like that Amicia and Hugo needed to build their bond from scratch, and it was full of missteps that I could understand children would make.

However as soon as things got supernatural wrt Hugo’s blood, then I felt like it lost a little bit of the charm for me. I liked the ‘found family in an unforgiving world’ aspects, but then suddenly blood powers happened and the vibe of the narrative changed. Oh well.

Best Part: The progression of power in the game. At first I felt very nervous when sneaking was the only option I had, as I am bad at stealth, but then gradually being able to kill people with my sling and solve puzzles with fire and light and being nearly unstoppable was really cool. I felt like I had earned Amicia’s strength. Worst Part: Hugo’s RAT POWERS and that final boss. just. what.

Untitled Goose Game by House House

2⭐

I wanted to close out the year with something fun and short, but I didn’t expect just how short this game would be. Although, ngl, if it were any longer I think I might’ve gotten rather tired of it anyway. The memes and whatnot that Goose Game gave the internet were worth more to me than the game itself. $20 for roughly an hour of gameplay just feels... bleh. I don’t even normally believe in that whole “$1 per hour of gameplay” stuff that many gamers like to throw around, but this felt like a rip-off. Still, it’s kinda fun to be a wretched little goose.

Best Part: Being a naughty little goose is cute and amusing, and bullying that Griffin McElroy looking boy into the phone booth is the highlight of my experience. Worst Part: It’s a hilarious concept but I don’t feel like I got to harass people half as much as I expected I would. The objectives to find a series of items and dump them somewhere else is just boring.

#tekst

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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

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Jeh Johnson, Barack Obama’s second-term secretary of Homeland Security, quips in a recent Washington Post op-ed that “abolishing ICE is not a serious policy proposal; it’s about as serious as the claim that Mexico’s ‘gonna pay for the wall.’”

It’s a bit unfair. Both the idea of a Gulf-to-Pacific border wall and the idea of coercing Mexico into paying for it suffer from essentially insurmountable technical problems, whereas ICE in its current form only dates back to 2003 and clearly the bureaucratic org charts could be redrawn again to get rid of the agency.

But on another level, it’s a decent analogy. Building the wall and making Mexico pay was a potent campaign signal that marked Donald Trump as an advocate of unusually harsh border security measures and a confrontational attitude toward Latin American governments. It was a slogan that people understood and connected with — both supporters and opponents — on an emotional level, even as they almost certainly understood that the specific elements of the program were a little fanciful.

“Abolish ICE” is the progressive response. Democrats are adopting the line as a signal to voters that they reject Trump’s vision of a closed America, one that separates children from parents as they seek asylum. They aren’t offering a 17-point plan to restructure immigration enforcement.

ICE is operating exactly as designed when it rips screaming children from parents. That’s exactly why we must abolish it.

We MUST have the moral and political courage to #abolishICE.

Weak half-measures do nothing. This is a defining moment of our time – the time to act is now. pic.twitter.com/0viiQ4qdz8

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) June 19, 2018

Democrats are following in Trump’s footsteps by prioritizing emotionally resonant constructs over detailed, practical agendas for action. Other popular progressive rallying cries of the moment, from “Medicare-for-all” to “free college” to “guaranteed jobs,” are incredibly ambiguous as policies. The activists and elected officials promoting them often seem more focused on building support for the slogans than for a particular vision of what they mean. It’s striking, for example, that most “Medicare-for-all” proposals would enroll people in programs that are very different from existing Medicare.

This is an aspect in which Trump very much is normal. What’s abnormal was the fad for most of the Obama years for very literal campaigning. An old saying about American politics holds that you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. In the Trump era, it’s back to poetry. And all of us — perhaps especially the literal-minded among us — had better get used to it.

Once upon a time, of course, Barack Obama was the airy, sloganeering fantasist of American politics.

His 2008 health care plan was basically unworkable, which Clinton pointed out at the time. Obama implicitly acknowledged this in office by adopting her individual mandate proposal that he rejected as a candidate. As a first-term senator, he seemed underqualified for office. He vowed to violate traditional diplomatic protocols and norms of office by holding direct talks with the leaders of rogue states, and his most memorable campaign pledges were “hope” and “change you can believe in,” rather than actual policy promises.

It turned out, however, that the president can’t unilaterally change American political culture — especially when the opposition party in Congress has a vested interest in stymying him by turning everything under the sun unto a partisan food fight.

What he can try to do is make people’s lives better in concrete ways, which is what Obama did. He pivoted his political strategy to emphasize that fact.

Detail-oriented, policy-focused journalists like Michael Grunwald, Jonathan Chait, and a number of other writers who now work at Vox created a supportive online media environment for his approach.

Then Republicans drew the comically-inauthentic but plausibly-competent Mitt Romney as their nominee, and Obama’s reelection bid turned into a historically unusual wonk-off.

Obama attempted to pass the baton to Clinton, who had long been openly derisive of his more idealistic streak and whose approach across two primaries and one general election campaign might be characterized as featuring the audacity of hopelessness.

[embedded content]

I’ll confess that I, personally, always liked this about Clinton. Clinton was an open practitioner of Max Weber’s politics as a vocation in a world full of phonies preaching unworkable charismatic leadership models. At the end of the day, though, part of embracing an ethic of responsibility is recognizing that you need to win to do anything. And plodding literalism is not a great way to do that.

The important thing is to be ready to govern, not to spell it out in detail on the trail.

Bernie Sanders’s 2016 primary campaign annoyed a lot of establishment Democrats by being so obstinately, flagrantly unrealistic.

People who lived through bruising congressional debates that ended up killing even a weak public option and exempting auto dealers from Consumer Financial Protection Bureau oversight knew that there was simply no way Democrats were going to spend 2017 enacting a single-payer health care system and breaking up big banks.

But by detaching itself entirely from the practical realities of the legislative landscape, Sanders managed to get in touch with a much clearer set of values that animate people in progressive politics. The reason that Democrats fought for the Affordable Care Act is they didn’t think people should find themselves blocked from the ability to get medical care by lack of money. And while the ACA took large strides in that direction, various proposals to further tweak it did not speak to those values in the same way that a call to extend Medicare coverage to everyone did.

Since the election, most Democrats seeking national leadership have been trying to capture some of that magic. And that drive to articulate values more clearly has — even more than movement to the left on policy — been the main shift inside the party.

While endorsing the call to “abolish ICE,” for example, Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) didn’t really say anything different on policy than what Obama said in his second term. What she found was a more emotionally resonant way to say it.

I believe we need to protect families who need help, and ICE isn’t doing that. It has become a deportation force. We need to separate immigration issues from criminal justice. We need to abolish ICE, start over and build something that actually works. https://t.co/JtSN68k4Fd

— Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) June 29, 2018

What exactly starting over to build something that actually works entails is unclear, just as nobody has yet written a “Medicare-for-all bill that explains exactly where the revenue will come from. The point, however, is that most Americans believe that people should be able to get medical treatment they need regardless of ability to pay. For Democrats who want to own that brand, signaling that the party shares the public’s beliefs on health care, “Medicare for All” is a profound, important, and useful statement of values.

There’s no sense hectoring normal people for preferring comprehensible slogans and high-minded aspirations to tedious disquisitions on the art of the possible, and there’s certainly no sense in hectoring practical politicians for trying to give people what they want.

That said, it is always worth keeping in mind that governing is difficult. Republicans over the years have veered so far into the realm of sloganeering that they barely retain any capacity at all to develop policies that bear any resemblance to their campaign rhetoric. Years of promises to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act with something that would address some of people’s frustrations with the program turned out to be completely vacuous — which seemingly surprised even many GOP members of Congress.

Democrats should remember that even their more wonk-oriented party suffered from some serious failures of policy substance — most notably an underpowered stimulus bill, a health care law that wasn’t structured to support short-term economic recovery, a group of excessively timid and unimaginative Federal Reserve appointees, and an inability to grapple with the foreclosure crisis in a timely manner — that played a larger role in generating electoral defeats than any shortcomings of sloganeering.

It’s incumbent upon politicians embracing the new poetry of the activist left to spare some time for thinking about what, exactly, it is that they want to do if they take office.

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” is a classic of American oratory notwithstanding the fact that it was not, strictly speaking, accurate. But the New Deal itself became an iconic success story because Roosevelt married his rhetoric to policy initiatives that (mostly) worked on a technical level.

The tough question for Democrats on immigration isn’t really about whether or not to abolish ICE or even what exactly that means, it’s what should the entire progressive program on immigration look like in an era when the quest for a grand bargain is dead. But the trend toward putting the poetry back into politics ought to be seen as a welcome turn to normalcy, not some kind of objectionable left-wing flight of fancy.

Original Source -> Democrats are campaigning in poetry again

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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