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rosewood-multifandom-writer · 8 months ago

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Street Fighter 6 Roster Character Ages:

Because the game never made it clear how old certain characters are, these are my personal headcanons that are straight up just guesses. I’m going from who I think is the oldest to the youngest. I am also basing the ages around dialogue, behavior, and of course, the year the game takes place, which I’m gonna assume is either mid 2010’s or late 2010’s because of how the smartphones look, and a bit of appearance. I say a bit, because like in real life, characters can be much older than they look. The asterisk next to the ages has more to the guess. (I also project a lot towards the end)

My personal guesses:

Oldest Fighters (Oldest to Youngest)

JP: Mid 60’s

Dhalsim: Mid 60’s (dude has the bushiest and whitest beard imaginable and acts like a grandpa)

Akuma: Early 60’s (He’s not out yet, but that ain’t gonna stop me from guessing that he’s a demon grandpa)

Zangief: Mid to Late 50’s (think about the oldest wrestlers form any wrestling company who have retired and have aged like the finest wines)

Blanka: Mid 50’s (considering that he’s a beast that lived in the Brazilian forest for a very long time while hiding from tourists, I’d like to think that his DNA gave him the best genes that just barely age him)

E. Honda: Late 40’s*

Guile: Late 40’s*

Ryu and Ken: Late 40’s*

Chun-li: Mid 40’s

Deejay: Early 40’s

Youngest Fighters (Oldest to Youngest)

Cammy: Late 30’s to Early 40’s

Juri: Early 30’s (she calls Chun Li an old lady in different ways in World Tour mode, so I’d like to think that specifically, she’s 30-33)

Rashid: Late 20’s (the closest to being 30)

Marisa: Late 20’s*

Ed: Mid to late 20’s (I’d like to think that he is close to being 30, considering that he calls Luke a “Kid” despite looking like he’s in the same age range as him, not to mention that he is shown in the Fighting Ground selection screen very clearly drinking beer, so he’s above the legal drinking age)

Manon: Mid 20’s*

Luke and Jamie: Early 20’s*

A.K.I: Early 20’s (Specifically, she is the last character in the group of characters who are in their 20’s to turn 21)

Kimberly: 18 or 19 years old*

Lily: 18 years old*

Further explanations (The HCs with the asterisks):

Ryu, Ken, and Chun-Li: They’ve been fighting for a long time. Ken and Chun-Li are both parents with kids that are now in their late teens or early twenties now, and Ryu has witnessed both Ken and Chun-Li grow. Specific ages are 49 and 48 for Ryu and Ken and 45 for Chun-Li since it was officially stated that Ryu is 4 years older than her.

Guile: He gives me the vibes of a brother that is only one year older than him. 49 specifically. I ran into a lot more people with siblings who either have a one or two year age gap. I’ve yet to run into someone who’s age gap between their siblings is significantly larger than me and my sister’s (I’m eight years older than my sister)

Marisa: Again, just going off of vibes here, I’d like to think at her age (27-28) she would be seeking out relationships and wanting to have a life long partner, and seems like the type of woman that is into older men like Zangeif. Could be projection, who knows, but with how young she looks? Definitely late 20’s.

Manon: The fashion industry loves to mostly hire women who are 18-25, and considering how young Manon also looks, I’d say she’s 25. I mean, she’s already a master at her craft at her age considering she started judo and ballet training as a child.

Luke and Jamie: To me, they both act like typical college aged men in their early 20’s. Jamie is the frat boy who is a heavy drinker and gets into fights the most, and Luke is the laid back former soldier boy who gets into a fight with drunk frat boy. I can say this, I have heard many stories about college aged men that have personalities similar to Luke and Jamie (hence why I’m not attracted to either of them, sorry to anyone who simps for these two)

Kimberly and Lily: These two a lot of people speculated a lot. People have guessed that Lily is 14-16, for Kimberly, 17 to 19. My personal guess? I think they are in their late teenage years. I have four reasons for this. One, people can be older than they look, especially from Asian media. If you look up literally any Asian celebrity, they look younger than what their actual age is. Japan has depicted characters who are just as young lookin as Kimberly or Lily but they are much older in canon. Two, there are real life young adult women who have body types like Kimberly’s and Lily’s. ESPECIALLY Lily’s. I am 5”0, and I’m 25 years old. I’ve been told I looked 19 at a job I left, in High School, I was mistaken as a freshman when I was actually a senior, when I went with my sister to her middle school registration, there were middle school kids who were taller than I am, and I had to show a cashier my ID at a grocery store (I was looking after a shopping cart which had beer (which was my dad’s and he went to get something at the last minute) to verify that I am over 21 years old. And three, Kimberly and Lily’s outfits would not be age appropriate if they were underage. Finally four, Capcom is not that type of entertainment company that sexualizes underage characters (unless there were before and Capcom just did a good job hiding it) or puts them in revealing outfits despite being underage. Even back then, they never did that.

More explanation on Kimberly: Guile, Juri, and Cammy refer to her as a kid both directly and indirectly. Not to mention how she acts too. She acts like any 18-19 year old who are a little too curious about certain things to the point where they take so many risks. I mean, think about it. Even at 18 or 19, a teenager will still think they are invincible or super tough even though they’ve been through a few typical middle school and high school moments that you can think of. Kimberly went further into the rabbit hole about the death of her uncle and has fought JP in her story. So it’s safe to say that she is a late teenager who takes risks despite the fact that it puts her in danger. Chun-Li also jokingly says that Kimberly’s youth is somewhat “blinding” to her.

More explanation in Lily: She displays some curiosity most 18 year olds would show, especially since she travels the most out of everyone on the roster. Not to mention that most 18 year olds don’t just magically grow out of most their childlike behavior. Plus, there’s the whole mistaken-as-underage-because-of-her-height situation she has. And if she was underage, again, going back to Capcom not sexualizing underage characters or putting them in outfits that are too revealing, she wouldn’t have the booty shorts that show a peek of her buttcheeks. I have worn short shorts (not the ones with my big butt out). Then again, I could be projecting since I am petite like she is, except she has the petite body type and I’m a shortstack (because boobs and butt).

Edit: A weird edit because Tumblr needs to fix this issue with my comment being eaten every time I want to respond to a comment on here (like seriously Tumblr actually fix this). I was informed by @sunkern-plus (thank you very much for the information) that Cammy is younger than Chun-Li and is closer to Sakura’s age with Sakura being a few months (I’m guessing two to three months) older than Cammy, so possibly 38-40. Pretty much one of the very few times in any Capcom canon there has been a more clear answer on a character’s age.

Edit 2: I forgot to list Rashid, so he has been added.

#street fighter #street fighter 6 #sf6 #headcanons #age headcanons #street fighter headcanons

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bluegekk0 · 1 year ago

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Okay, so I have been reading through your other posts about Zote and find it kinda interesting he is younger than he actually seems. He sounds like an oldish man, he kinda looks oldish but he is maybe the same age range as Tiso or Bretta. Considering that he also has a rough backstory, he could have aged faster. It reminds me of the images of the WW2 soldier before and after the war from 1941 and 1945 and how much he aged. Did Zote simply age way quicker than he should, or is it just bad genes?

i imagine it's either bad genes, or his species just has this kind of appearance which has traits we usually associate with old people (like for example the mouth shape, or the wrinkle-like lines under the eyes). maybe a bit of both. of course, the stress of his childhood could've definitely played a part, but i'm definitely leaning towards that appearance being something common for his species

as for his voice, it's deep, yeah, though i wouldn't necessarily say it sounds like an old man. it just sounds like a regular grown man deep voice to me. i've meet some people who have voices way deeper than what you'd expect based on their age, so it could be a similar case for him. or perhaps he makes it deeper on purpose to sound more mature and experienced than he really is? would certainly fit him

i agree that he's probably in the same age range as bretta and tiso. hard to tell how old exactly since they probably age differently to humans. but i imagine him as in his early 20s

also, some character and worldbuilding ramble below because i'm in a rambling mood

ages are funky for the whole fpk family since they're a bunch of immortal beings, but i think it'd be fun to compare zote to the rest. i also want to talk a bit more about how aging would work in the au for non-immortal beings

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fpk - in actual years he's about 350 years old. so by mortal standards he's very old, but compared to how long wyrms would live on average before they died to starvation/other wyrms, he's very young and inexperienced. he was one of the last few wyrms that hatched before the species was declared extinct, likely the very last generation, so in wyrm years he would be in his early 30s. definitely not an old man if you look at him from that perspective. if i were to describe him in human years, possibly for the purposes of the modern au, then he would be in his early 40s

grimm - i haven't decided what his actual age is in years, i know he's been around for a bit longer than fpk, but he's also relatively young for a god since he's from a younger generation of higher beings. perhaps around 400 for an actual number? as for how that would translate to a more human like age, he would probably be in his early 40s. but again, it's very difficult to estimate that since he's a god and not a member of any species, so there's no point of reference to use. i suppose not having a specific age makes sense for him, with how much time passed and with all the replaced bodies, he would definitely stop counting at some point. also, i like the idea of him just making it up every time he's asked how old he is

hornet - in actual years, she's close to 50 years old. but since she's immortal just like her father, and because aging works differently in the universe, it means that she's not actually this age. in human years, i imagine her as someone who's 18 or 19. very young adult, barely scratched the surface. though i love to imagine the reactions of mortals when she says how old she is, since she would be considered an old person by most of them hahaha

holly - they're older than hornet, timeline wise they'd be about 60-65 years old. as for human years, 19-20 is how i view them

lewk - at the current point in the au he's about a year and a half old, though in human years that would translate to something like 4 or 5 years old

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it's all a bit over the place but that's the reality of working with beings that all stop aging at some point. compared to anyone else in dirtmouth they're definitely all very old

it's difficult to determine the age at which the mortals in the universe mature, mostly because i imagine it's different for each species. but i think in many cases it would be similar to how a lot of animals age, so they would reach maturity faster than humans do. as for the average lifespan? i don't think it's that short, in that case it would be similar to an average human lifespan, they just mature a lot faster (and so it takes them a longer time to reach "old man" age)

as for why that is. well, in nature having offspring is crucial, and so many species reach maturity relatively fast so that they can reproduce. so it makes sense that this would be the case for all the different species in the au, since they're descendants of small creatures that lived years ago among the giant extinct beasts (such as wyrms, as well as the giant insect like creatures from that one piece of concept art). but times have changed, many of them developed communities, the quality of life improved, and so i could absolutely see the average lifespan increasing drastically

now, there's a lot of suspension of disbelief here since that's not really something you see very often in nature, but for the sake of the au i like to think this is the case

so, in short. someone like zote would be considered an adult at around 8-10 years old in actual years. but since he's 20ish years old, it will be a while before he can be considered an old man. i imagine he would reach that status once he gets to 50+ years old, if he doesn't die to a wild animal or slips and falls off a cliff before then, that is. don't ask me how he managed to not get himself killed for 20 years, i have no clue either

so, ignoring differences between different species, i imagine the average lifespan for a mortal living in a safe community would be about 60, maybe 70 years old

of course this is all subject to change. there's bound to be a day where i think about this again and realize it makes no sense. but i still wanted to ramble and share some ideas i had

#ask stuff #feral pk au #au worldbuilding #save #modern fpk au #<- in case i decide to go with these ages #zote #fpk #grimm #hornet #holly #ages

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bandedbulbussnarfblat · 9 months ago

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In the books, Gabrielle was turned into a vampire around age 50ish. (Different vc sites say different things. But from my math she could be 49-52.)

However, in the show, Lestat was turned into a vampire in his 30s. 34 according to his character page. And from book knowledge (aka me surfing through the wikis) Gabrielle had Lestat in her late 20s. I think 28 was the number somewhere, but idk. Late 20s makes sense if she had 7 children, Lestat being the youngest. (though half of them died)

Which means in the show, Gabrielle would be older than in the books. (Unless they change the timeline around) So if Lestat was 34, Gabrielle would be approximately around 62 when he gave her the dark gift.

And I really hope they cast an actress somewhere in that age range. Like mid-50s through mid-60s. (Mid 50s, bc they'll probably show flashbacks to her in those years before Lestat made her. And bc the misogyny of it all, western media loves to cast women to play characters older than they are.)

There are many options out there, but my personal fave is Robin Wright, specifically with short hair. (She cuts it every night in my imagination.)

I'll post pics under the cut so this post doesn't get too long. (Feel free to add pics of your own Gabrielle fancasts)

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panlight · 2 years ago

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How can vampires be all but invisible to the human eye if they are only able to reach 100mph? I mean even if they were nearly invisible whiles running they would still be noticable from the wind they would create.

Also, how fast do you think are the shapeshifters or newborn vampires? - since they are faster.

I feel like this is one of those things that isn’t really internally consistent. It’s sort of like on cartoons when you have some superhero with vague superpowers and sometimes that means outrunning a car and sometimes it means running so fast they can go backward in time; the ‘super speed’ concept is always present but the way it actually works kind of depends on what the author/creator wants to use it for at any given time.

So I think fanfic writers have some freedom here, as long as they choose to be internally consistent with whatever approach they want to take to it (or not! maybe they and their readers are there for the romance or sexual tension and legit don’t care about the mechanics of vampire or werewolf speed! that’s fair!).

For me, the fastest animal is the cheetah, I think? At about 70mph. Human sprinters (like, the best in the world) can reach speeds of 25-30 mph but they obviously aren’t like, running for hours, they’re sprinting short distances. Humans can’t sustain that level of speed; I suppose vampires can. But vampires are still human shaped so them being able to run “in excess of 100 mph” just feels like too much to me. We’re still bound by earth physics here.

If I personally wanted to take a realistic approach to this, I might put vampires at that 25-30 mph range but they can do it indefinitely, not just for a short burst like a human Olympic sprinter. Carlisle, as a human, canonically caught up to a vampire; so to me that seems a human sprinting can be about as fast as a vampire but obviously humans get tired running that fast very quickly and vampires don’t. Then again, that vampire was weak and thirsty, so maybe 30 mph is what a weak vampire can do, but a well-fed one can get up to 40-50 mph. Edward being “the fastest” might be able to push 60 or 70 if we really want him to be special, but 100 just seems like overkill to me. Newborns might be up there too with their extra power in general.

Whereas the shifters, when they are in wolf form, are running on four legs rather than two, so I could see them more comparable to the cheetah. Real wolves are in the 30-40 mph range based on a quick google search, so I could imagine supernatural ones hitting those cheetah speeds and out-running vampires.

#asks

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gingerbreadart1 · 3 years ago

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Really loving the latest artwork and lore! You are so creative! Can't wait to see what's next! No rush though, I know the good stuff takes time.

Oh my gosh thank you!!!!! I'm having a bit of a writer's block when it comes to the actual story, so I've been kinda messing around and doing research about different things. Idk if it's obvious yet, but I'm a huge nerd. I especially love science and sci-fi(duh) as well as biology! I actually wanted to be a doctor with some kind of focus on congenital disorders when I was a kid. Weird kid, I know. Anyway, I love thinking about lore and nerdy shit, so I'm gonna take this opportunity to do just that! Beware under the cut is a very long essay about space, civilizations, rambles, and math. Lots of math.

So, I have no idea where I want to start, but I know what I want to talk about so I'm gonna pick something and roll with it. First thing's first, the Kardashev scale.

Because this isn't an English class and I don't have to re-word shit, I'm gonna copy and paste from wikipedia for this one: "The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy it is able to use. The measure was proposed by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964." Cool? Cool.

So yeah, basically it's an easy way to say how advanced a civilization is, and it's broken up into three types.

A Type I civilization, also called a planetary civilization—can use and store all of the energy available on its planet.

A Type II civilization, also called a stellar civilization—can use and control energy at the scale of its planetary system.

A Type III civilization, also called a galactic civilization—can control energy at the scale of its entire host galaxy.

Just to give you a grasp of what that means relative to us, humans are estimated to be a type 0.73 civilization. We're expected to get to type 1 in a few hundred years or so. Here's where math comes in. Note: I hate, and am not good at math. So, take all of this with a grain of salt.

So, a Type 1 civ. is usually defined as one that can harness all the energy that falls on a planet from its parent star (for Earth–Sun system, this value is close to 1.74×10^17 watts), which is about four orders of magnitude higher than the amount presently attained on Earth, with energy consumption at ≈2×10^13 watts.

Before I go any further, I want to ramble a bit about their star

For my own personal headcanon that the Irken planet is slightly dimmer than earth, I'm gonna make the Irken star a K0 type star. For reference, the sun is a G2V star, meaning it's a yellow dwarf. A K0 star is kind of inbetween red dwarfs and yellow dwarfs. Quick explanation on the letter-number thing, (as best as I understand it, disclaimer I am not an expert) The letter is the classification of a star based on heat and luminosity, going O, B, A, F, G, K, M, L. O being the brightest and hottest (and largest typically) and L being the opposite. The number is size. A higer positive number means a smaller star. A G2 yellow dwarf is smaller than a G-3 yellow dwarf.

Make sense? God I hope so. Anyway, I picked a K0 star for a couple reasons.

They live longer. Our sun has a lifespan of about 10 billion years, but a K type star has a lifespan of 18-34 billion years. Because of this some scientists think they're a prime place to look for life because of their long stability.

They emit less ultraviolet radiation, which can damage DNA, making the developement of life less likely to be hindered by this star

They're 3-4 times more common that G type stars, so it's literally more likely that the irken sun is a K type anyway

They're dimmer and cooler (but not by much) than G type, which fits into my own personal HC about a dimmer sun.

ANYWAY now to get back into the first topic, the Kardashev scale. The irken sun has a temperature of 5,240° Kelvin (8,900° F/4970° C), a radius of .85 (367,445 m/591,345km), a mass of .78 (3.42^30lbs/1.551^30kg), and a luminosity of .40 or 1.531^26 watts.

Compare all this to our sun (Temp of 5,780°K, radius 1, mass 1, and luminosity of 1, being 3.827^26 watts), basically the Irken sun is smaller and less powerful.

Back to the Kardashev scale. Modern day earth is .73, right? I imagine that Irkens are somewhere in the high 1's, like 1.7. The reason I'm not placing them in two is because I don't headcanon that they've built a dyson sphere or a matrioshka brain.

For those who don't know, a Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that completely encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its power output. These bad boys are imagined to look kindof like this

Cool as hell right? Also not something I think Irkens would be focused on. they're more about outward and conquering expansion rather than efficiant energy consumption and useage.

With that in mind, I'm going to say on the civilization range Kardashev scale Irkens are 2.000279. The reason for that tiny decimal amount is because a level 2 civ is one that has full control over their solar system, and a level 3 is one that has full control over their galaxy.

Galaxies are huge. Really huge. The Milky Way galaxy (In W&C Irkens are in the Milky Way as well) is on the smaller side, but it still has 100 billion stars, and 100-400 billion planets. Of those planets, an estimated 300 million to 50 billion may contain life, but most people stick it down at the low end of 300 million. So I'm going to use that number as well.

To figure out where they are on the scale, I have to figure out how large the Irken Empire actually is, so I looked at some other fictional empires.

In Star Wars, there are 1.5 million planets under the galactic empire, and an additional 60 million colonies (which can be as small as a space station or something idk)

But in Star Trek, there are only 150 planets in the federation.

In Dune, it's the whole Universe.

So there's a lot of variation here. Personally, I think under a thousand planets is a good number for a rapidly growing Empire that has unrealistic visions of grandeur, so I placed the amount of planets under their control to be 837 and called it a day.

Thus, 2.000279 on the scale.

Now with that number I'm gonna assign Irk a year. Physicist Michio Kaku suggested that it will take a few thousand years for humans to reach type two status, so I'm going to use that as a starting point to work on.

One might tack on a few thousand years to 2021 and call it a day, but I can't do that because the Gregorian calendar is religion based, and irkens probably don't have Jesus so it would be weird to base make a year for them based off of the Gregorian calendar. So instead I'm going to use the Holocene calendar. If you haven't heard of it, you're missing out! It's a very cool calendar that respresents and encompasses all of human history, and it's a very simple change: It adds 10,000 years to the current calendar, so for example, it is the year 12,021 on the holocene calendar. Cool right? The reason for this 10,000 year addition is 12,000 years ago is right around the time humans actually started settiling and building structures and beginning to farm. Thus, the birth of human civilization.

So I'm gonna be unrealistic and apply that 12,000 year first farm -> cell phone period to Irkens, and then tack on... idk let's say 2700 years. Cool beans, now we have a 15,700 year old Irken calendar. Except, 15,700 human years isn't equal to 15,700 Irken years. They're different planets, with different rotations, so they have different years. I have a previous post where I mention some basic statistics about the planet, go check it out! But for here, know that an irken year is 1.3 times longer than an earth year, so their calendar is actually going to be in the year 20,410 in the same amount of time. Let's say it's 20,417 just for funsies.

Hip hip hooray, Irk has a calendar! A year! Woohoo!

And with that, this post is long enough so I'm gonna end it here, but I plan on making a subsequent post that deals with evolution, speciation, and whatnot so stay tuned!

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thekillerssluts · 4 years ago

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Will Butler explains how his Harvard degree developed into his second solo album

“Yeah, it’s terrifying,” Will Butler says, pondering how it feels to be releasing music away from the umbrella of Arcade Fire.

“It’s the classic thing about all writers,” he continues. “The creative process makes them wanna puke the whole time they’re writing something, then they read something back and it makes them feel worse, then a year later they read it and think ‘yeah, it’s okay’. It’s a glorious experience, but it really makes your stomach hurt.”

On the one hand Will Butler is well accustomed to this writing process, being a multi-instrumentalist in the Canadian indie-rock band fronted by brother Win - Arcade Fire. But on his own terms, it’s an entirely new process. Butler’s second solo album Generations arrives five years after his debut Policy, a collection that rattled with a ramshackle charm and what he describes now as a ‘consciously very unproduced’ sound. Arcade Fire wound down from their Everything Now tour in September 2018, leaving Butler with the last two years of playtime. Most musicians, particularly those accustomed to big album cycles, set aside their downtime for family or other musical projects. Somehow Butler’s managed to do both while also completing a masters degree in Public Policy at Harvard.

“I went to school for a variety of reasons but there was an artistic side to it too,” he says. “I have always tried to let music and lyrics emerge from the world that I’m in; you fertilise the soil and see what grows. It was a way to better understand where we are, how we got here and what's going on. You know, ‘where am I from? What's going to happen?’” Both of these questions explored in his degree are used as fuel for Generations.

It’s easy to imagine an album by somebody who’s just pursued a Public Policy MSt to form in reams of political commentary, probably set to an acoustic guitar. However, Butler instead engages character portraits soundtracked by a broad range of thrilling sonics. Opener “Outta Here” is shrouded by a monstrous bass that lurks beneath the depths of the instrumentation before bursting out midway through. “Got enough things on my plate without you talking about my salvation,” he screams.

While the cage-rattling “Bethlehem” is mania underpinned by a thrashing guitar and bubbling synths that help lift the track to boiling point.While there’s no current world leaders namechecked or any on-the-nose political commentary across the LP, the angst of its contents is instantly tangible, backed by the intellect of somebody who’s spent the past few years studying the ins and outs of government processes. A perfect combination, you could say.

This fuel was partly discovered through Butler reconnecting with the music that defined his teenage years: namely Bjork, The Clash and Eurythmics. While these influences certainly slip into frame across Generations, they were paired with something of an unlikely muse: “I got into this habit of listening to every single song on the Spotify Top 50 every six weeks,” Butler explains. “So many of them are horrible, terrifying and just awful but there’s something inspiring about how god damn avant garde the shittiest pop music is now. Just completely divorced from any sense of reality - it’s just layers upon layers upon layers - it’s amazing. It’s like Marcel Duchamp making a pop hit every single song.”

We turn from current music to current events. Navigating Covid-19 with his wife and three kids in their home of Brooklyn, a majority of 2020 has been caught up in family time for Butler. “The summer’s been easier because everybody’s outside, whereas in spring it was like ‘it’s family time because we have to lock our doors as there's a plague outside.’” While being surrounded by the trappings of lockdown since his second solo album Generations was completed in March, the album itself wriggles with the spirit of live instrumentation, which at this point seems like some sort of relic from a bygone era."I think eventually rediscovering this album back in the live setting would be amazing - we’re a really great live band, it’s a shame to not be in front of people."

The source of this energy can be traced back to the way the songs came together; they were forged and finessed at a series of shows in the early stages of the project. “It just raises the stakes. You can tell how good or how dumb a lyric is when you sing it in front of a hundred people,” he reflects. “It’s like ‘are you embarrassed because what you’re saying is true?’ or ‘is it just embarrassing?’ It’s a good refiner for that stuff. I think eventually rediscovering this album back in the live setting would be amazing - we’re a really great live band, it’s a shame to not be in front of people.”

Like his day job in Arcade Fire, Butler’s solo live group is something of a family affair - both his wife and sister-in-law feature in the band, alongside Broadway's West Side Story star, and the student of the legendary Fela Kuti drummer, Tony Allen. Together this eclectic mix of musicians conjures an infectious spirit through the raw combination of thundering synths and pedal-to-the-metal instrumentation; an apt concoction indeed for lyrics that are attempting to unhatch the bamboozling questions that surround our current times.

The timing for Butler’s decision to study Public Policy couldn’t have been more perfect, with his course starting in the Fall of 2016. “I was at Harvard for the election which was a really bizarre time to be in a government school, but it was great to be in a space for unpacking questions like ‘my god, how did we get here?!’” he reflects, with a note of mockery in the bright voice.

“I had a course taught by a professor named Leah Wright Rigueur. The class was essentially on race in America but with an eye towards policy. The class explored what was going to happen in terms of race under the next president. The second to last week was about Hilary Clinton and the last week was about Donald Trump. We read riot reports - Ferguson in 2015, Baltimore in 2016, the Detroit uprisings in the ‘60s and Chicago in 1919 - it's certainly helping me understand the last 5 years, you know. Just to be in that context was very lucky.”

As we’ve seen with statues being toppled, privileges being checked and lyrics of national anthems being interrogated in recent months, history is a complex, labyrinthine subject to navigate requiring both ruthless self-scrutiny and a commitment to the long-haul in order to correct things. The concept of Generations shoots from the same hip employing character portraits to engage in the broader picture.

The writing, at times, is beamed from a place of disconnect (“had enough of bad news / had enough of your generation”), from a place of conscious disengagement (“I’m not talking because I don’t feel like lying / if you stay silent you can walk on in silence”) and from a place of honest self-assessment (“I was born rich / three quarters protestant / connections at Harvard and a wonderful work ethic”).

“I’m rooted in history to a fault,” he says. “My great grandfather was the last son of a Mormon pioneer who’d gone West after being kicked out of America by mob violence. He wanted to be a musician which was crazy - he got 6 months in a conservatory in Chicago before his first child was born. He always felt like he could have been a genius, he could of been writing operas but he was teaching music in like tiny western towns and he had all these kids and he made them be a family band and they were driving around the American west before there were roads in the deserts - literally just driving through the desert! He would go to these small towns and get arrested for trying to skip bills and just live this wild existence.”

Butler’s grandma, meanwhile, was just a child at this point. She went on to become a jazz singer with her sisters and married the guitar player Alvino Rey. “The fact that me and my brother are musicians is no coincidence,” he smiles. “It’s not like I decided to be a musician, it’s down to decisions that were made at the end of the 19th century that have very clearly impacted where I am today. The musical side of it is very beautiful, it is super uncomplicated and a total joy to have a tradition of music in our family...but also in the American context - which is the only context I know - it's also these very thorny inheritances from the 19th century and beyond that influence why my life is like it is.

“For me it’s like, ‘I made my money because my grandpa was a small business owner’ or ‘my grandpa was a boat builder and got a pretty good contract in WW2 and was able to send his kids to college’. Both of which are so unpoetic and unromantic but it is an important thing to talk about, that's a personal political thing to talk about; there's horrifying and beautiful aspects there.”

The lament of “I’m gonna die in a hospital surrounded by strangers who keep saying they’re my kids” on “Not Gonna Die” could well be croaked by somebody on the tail end of a life lived on the American Dream. At times, Butler plays the characters off against each other, like on “Surrender,” which chronicles two flawed characters going back and forth played by Butler’s lead vocals and his female backing singers that undermine his memory; “I remember we were walking” is cut up with the shrug of “I dunno” and “maybe so”. “I found having the backing voices there gave me something to play with,” he explains. “Either something threatening to the main character or something affirming to the main character, just providing another point of view.”

Elsewhere, “I Don’t Know What I Don’t Know” explores the feeling of being unsuitably equipped to unravel the complexities that surrounds us day-to-day. “The basic emotion of that song is very much ‘I don’t know what I can do’ which is an emotion we all have,” he ponders. “There’s also the notion that follows that, like ‘maybe don’t even tell me what to do because it’s going to be too overwhelming to even do anything’.”

Some of these portraits materialised in the aftershows Butler began hosting while on Arcade Fire’s Everything Now tour which found him instigating conversations and talks by local councilman, politicians and activists on local issues. “On some of the good nights of the aftershow town halls, you’d feel that switch away from despair and into action,” he says smiling. “The step between despair and action is possible, that sentiment isn’t spelled out lyrically on the record but it’s definitely there spiritually.”

“I learned anew what a treasure it is to have people in a room. Getting humans in a room can be absurd. And we were having from 5,000 to 15,000 people in a room every night, most of them local. I’m very comfortable with art for art’s sake; I think art is super important and it’s great people can like music that's not political. It was sort of like ‘well we’re here and I know a lot of you are thinking about the world and you’re thinking about what a shit show everything is. You want to know what we can do and I also want to know what we can do!’ So I put on these after shows.”"The dream lineup would be to have a local activist and a local politician talking about a local issue because that’s the easiest way to make concrete change."

Butler would find a suitable location near the Arcade Fire gig through venue owners who were often connected to the local music and comedy scenes to host these events. “The dream lineup would be to have a local activist and a local politician talking about a local issue because that’s the easiest way to make concrete change. Arguably, the most important way is through the city council and state government. The New York state government is in Albany, New York. The shit that happens in Albany is all super important so I wanted to highlight that and equip people with some concrete levers to pull.

“In Tampa we had people who were organizing against felon disenfranchisement, like if you’ve been convicted of a felon you couldn’t vote in Florida, and something absurd like 22% of black men in Florida couldn’t vote and there were people organising to change that - this was in 2018 - and you could just see people being like ‘holy shit, I didn't even know this was happening!’

“These were not topics I’m an expert in - it’s like these are things that are happening. The thought was trying to engage, I’m sad to not be doing something similar this Fall, I mean what a time it would have been to go around America.”

Understandably the looming 2020 election is on Butler’s radar. “It doesn't feel good,” he sighs. “I’ve never had any ability to predict, like 2 weeks from now the world could be completely different from what it is today. There was always a one-in-a-billion chance of the apocalypse and now it's like a one-in-a-million chance which is a thousand times more likely but also unlikely. It’s going to be a real slog in the next couple of years on a policy side, like getting to a place where people don’t die for stupid reasons, I’m not even talking about the coronavirus necessarily just like policy in general. Who knows, it could be great but it seems like it's going to be a slog.”

There’s a moment on the closing track “Fine”, a stream-of-consciousness, Randy Newman-style saloon waltz, where Butler hits the nail on the head. “George [Washington], he turned to camera 3, he looked right at me and said...I know that freedom falters when it’s built with human hands”. It’s one of the many lyrical gems that surface throughout the record but one that chimes with an undeniable truth. It’s the same eloquence that breaks through as he touches on the broad ranging subjects in our conversation, always with a bright cadence despite the gloom that hangs over some of the topics.

The live show is without a doubt Arcade Fire’s bread and butter. While Butler questions how realistic the notion of getting people in packed rooms in the near future is, he reveals the group are making movements on LP6. “Arcade Fire is constantly thinking about things and demoing, it's hard to work across the internet but at some point we’ll get together. It probably won’t be much longer than our usual album cycle,” he says.

You only have to pick out one random Arcade Fire performance on YouTube to see Butler’s innate passion bursting out, whether it’s early performances that found him and Richard Reed Parry adorning motorbike helmets annihilating each other with drumsticks to the 1-2-3 beat of “Neighbourhood #2 (Laika)” or the roaring “woah-ohs” that ascend in the anthem of “Wake Up” every night on tour. It’s an energy that burns bright throughout our conversation and across Generations.

https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/features/interviews/arcade-fires-will-butler-new-solo-record-generations

#Arcade Fire #generations #will butler #interview #hq

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rmichaelwahlquist · 4 years ago

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Juilliard is the tip of the iceberg. If Juilliard grads are struggling to find work – coming from one of the the most prestigious and well funded programs in the country, with some of the most high profile instructors – imagine the job prospects of all the state school grads. It's hard to imagine any scenarios where potential employers are going to take a ***** State University candidate over someone from Juilliard.

What follows may be my longest tumblr essay ever, buckle up for a ride through the perils of music education and a few ideas and solutions along the way!

And yet music programs around the country continue to expand the number of students in their programs – more students is after all in best interest of the institution (more students=more funding) – somehow without much regard to the hard numbers of how well these graduates will do in their careers.

Now, I work in music education and I readily acknowledge that changing this system is like changing the course of a glacier. For over two hundred years the higher education system in music has focused on a relatively narrow range of topics and techniques to train musicians. Berlioz's irreverent send-up of scholastic fugues during the finale of his 1830 Symphonie Fantastique is just one early example of students rankling at the limits of what was taught in school.

And for the first hundred or so years of the conservatory system (the 1800s), especially when it came to orchestral musicians, the product generally matched the demand - well trained musicians to play the music of the times.

On the other hand, I defend the traditional idea that not everything about a music education in a university has to be about job preparedness. For example, whether or not a musician teaches music history or theory for their career, I believe they should be well rounded and have a knowledge of those things. I tell my students: you want to be the whole package. And no matter what innovations come in music education, it would seem unquestionable that certainly the program should train musicians in excellent technique and performance.

I don't have the answers. I wish I did. I wish every person who wants to make music for a living could go to college and leave prepared to have an enjoyable, reliably profitable career in making the music that makes them happy. But right off the bat if you want to make pop (or any popular genre of) music or video game music or movie music – most university programs can hardly begin to help you with that. While some few specialized programs exist, you've really got to be the cream of the crop in the first place to even get your foot in those doors.

But where are the musicians making the money today? What skills do they have that enable them to make this living? And why does a music education have so little to do with either of those answers?

Many first year music students are surprised and disappointed to find that unless they want to be a band conductor, an orchestra musician, or a private instructor, being a music major may not be for them. And indeed it may not be! Many of the 20th century's and now 21st century's most wealthy and successful musicians became so without a formal music education behind them. Same for many of the ones who, while not wealthy, are working in studios and in live gigs with a steady income. Talent, work and creativity have always mattered a lot more in music than a piece of paper from an institution.

I have been wondering lately whether all of this really boils down to the fallout from the invention of recording technology over a century ago. Prior to the age of recordings, western musical notation had had a thousand years to develop and influence the way music was made, performed, and disseminated. Simply put, if you wanted to write, share, or perform music widely, then written music notation was pretty much the only way to do so. The accumulation of this tradition lead to the heights of late 19th century romanticism and the dawn of musical modernism. It's a staggering artistic achievement for humanity, no doubt about it, and it was all made possible because each generation could build on the written tradition of the previous one.

However, the advent of audio recordings abruptly interrupted (and/or accelerated) this progression/fragmentation. The need for creating and reading sheet music has gone from being universal to being niche - as long as the song can be performed, it can be recorded. The middle-man of notation no longer has a monopoly. This has led to the rise of new genres and commercial aspects of music that have fluctuated with the changing times and technology.

Jazz is an interesting case – an entirely new musical genre whose rise I would credit to recording and broadcast technology. Suddenly you didn't have to have tickets to an exclusive venue, training at a fancy school, or even the sheet music. You copied and learned from what you heard on the radio or recordings. You learned right from the best, right in the comfort of your home. You got playing experience doing live gigs. The genre evolved rapidly from Jelly Roll Morton to Louis Armstrong to Duke Ellington to Charlie Parker to Miles Davis to John Coltrane in just a few decades, becoming a well established and vibrant musical language – so well established that it can now retroactively enter higher music education. Those early jazzers would be quite amused, I think, that you can now (as I once did) get a degree in jazz.

Unfortunately, the same effect may be happening to Jazz education as happened to classical music education – the education becomes more about preserving the past than about keeping the music itself alive. (Have you heard some of the things the best jazz musicians are doing today? It is as far from even the wild jazz of the 60s as the earth is to the moon. Still recognizably jazz but not anything you'll learn in school!) Perhaps by its nature, a music education is only capable of teaching about the past. But I think that's an assumption worth challenging.

We may expect a trained jazz musician to be able to play big band styles and bebop with equal fluency, much the same way a violinist may be expected to play Bach and Brahms and Boulez. But is there a point at which a music education becomes too fixated on the past without adequately preparing for the right now, let alone the future, of life as a musician?

In fact, every non-notated music tradition is at risk of the same effect due to recordings. Say you recorded a native music maker from an endangered tradition in the early or mid 1900s. Now for all time, to make music in that tradition there is this temptation to calcification - hardening the whole style around a few interpretations just because they happen to be the earliest of which we have record. The reality is that no musical style ever stays the same forever. Those recorded in the 1900s were not even doing the music in the exact same as their parents, let alone 50 or a 100 years prior. The times changed, the people changed, the music changed.

It will always be that way. Music education may be a glacier set on its course but the flow of music increasingly is finding its way around and beyond it in terms of the art, the artists, the culture, and the money. Now, the times still change, the people still change, the music still changes, while the cultural and practical relevance of a formal music education wanes and wanes.

Man, I hate being so negative about this, but to fix things you have to first diagnose the problem. So let me propose a few solutions or at least work-arounds, especially for music majors.

- don't go into a music degree expecting it to do everything for you. Understand what it is and what it isn't. It will help you be a good musician. It may not prepare you for many other aspects of the career. You can do everything right in a music degree, pass with 'top marks', and still not be ready to go to work in your field.

- do look for opportunities to perform and make music outside the university. How do you expect to suddenly have music making be a money-making enterprise if you haven't already been practicing that? Why wait until you are a 'pro' to start a youtube channel, self release recordings on bandcamp or soundcloud, to self publish sheet music on sheetmusicplus.com? It takes time to build up a following and a reputation and it doesn't come automatically just when you get a diploma.

- do everything you can to learn about music business, copyright, contracts, recording, sound engineering, advertising, etc. whether or not it is required for a class. Learn what you need to know, not just the minimum for the grade or degree.

- be disciplined with your time. Give due diligence to your classes and practice but don't let those things take over the rest of your time. Balance your life and your art. If you don't learn to do that in school you'll have to learn it while trying to start your career...and why wait until that crucial period?

- you've got to be quite committed to make a music career work. It may involve participation in a combination of money-making streams - academia, private lessons, performances, recording, etc. You may even have to balance music making with other non-music income (I know of a successful composer who loves her second career as a yoga instructor). Carefully consider if all this is for you. You can have a lifelong, satisfying and fulfilling engagement with music making without ever making it the sole focus of your study or employment. There is no shame in seeking stability in a career, which music just can't promise.

- don't dismiss the value of the things in your college education that may not be "directly" relevant to the functioning of your music career. Modern college education has a foundation in the ideal that each person should have a well rounded grasp of some of the basics of the world. There's a reason all college grads are required to take classes like math or sociology or science. Practice finding that reason with each class and you'll have a happier time getting through those hoops. There can be relevance in pretty much any topic but don't expect college to spoon-feed you the application of that knowledge.

- Same goes for music topics that seem irrelevant. Just because the class is talking about music history, theory or repertoire that seems useless to you, it doesn't mean that you don't want to know those things as a musician. As I wrote above, you want to be the whole package: a well rounded musician who understands a thing or two about many aspects of life, the world, and music culture specifically.

- do take advantage of every resource that is available for your success. This may not be only within the university system. Look everywhere for mentors, professional contacts, grants, support, performance opportunities, learning opportunities and creative outlets. If you meet somebody who is making it work, pick their brain, ask for their help! If you aren't a voracious type of learner inside and outside of school, being a music major is going to be a tough road. Why suffer through four plus years just to eke out the degree that may not even lead you to a job?

- make the music of TODAY, of RIGHT NOW. Make music that matters to you and to your peers. Make music that is relevant and current and is more than a living museum. Don't be afraid of new music, be afraid of a world without new music!

- keep up with changes in the industry, especially paying attention to where the money is coming from and going. A music career doesn't have to be all about money but, you know, making a living matters unless you are 'of independent means'. Could be NFTs, could be grants, could be (as in the article above) playing your instrument with unusual ensembles. Be as creative with your income pursuits as you are in your art and I bet you can find a happy balance between making the music you like and making money in the process.

- don't give up hope that all the brokenness I mention above can be fixed. Total cultural change is possible and perhaps inevitable within a generation. Balance learning from the past with a push to make a difference in the directions you want to see.

I'll see you in a more vibrant and sonically rich world!

R. Michael Wahlquist | March 2021 | Rexburg, Idaho

#music major #music education #musicians on tumblr #juilliard #music degrees #music school

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timetocode · 4 years ago

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The Peeker’s Compromise: A Fair(er) Netcode Model

Many first person shooters are plagued by a netcode artifact known as the peeker’s advantage. I propose here a technique for correcting this bug, based around normalizing gameplay in such a way that human reflexes and skill decide the outcome of competition (as opposed to network latency or artifacts of varying netcode designs, discussed shortly).

When a player in a first person shooter is moving around the game world they exist in a position on their own game client that is slightly ahead of their position on the server. This is a solution/side-effect of clientside prediction which is ubiquitously used in first person shooters giving the player instantaneous movement and controls that feel like a single player game despite controlling a character that is moving around on a remote server.

If we were to visualize the difference between the clientside player position and the serverside player position it would look like two characters chasing each other. How far apart the two characters are depends (in descending order of usual importance) on how fast movement is in the game, the latency of the player, and the tickrate of the server. But how big are these differences in the actual games of the current era? Are the two states of characters practically overlapping? Or is one several meters behind the other? The answer -- which varies by game and by internet connection -- is that the desynchronization between these two positions is significant. Over amazing internet connections in games with slow moving characters the desynchronization is usually on the order of 1 player length. So imagine any fps game character (valorant, cs:go, apex, overwatch, fortnite, cod, etc) -- and then imagine them creeping or walking around slowly. In this scenario the desync between the two states is such that one could picture the character being followed by its clone, touching. If they move *really* slowly then they’ll be overlapping. However as the characters break into a run their clone will trail them by more -- maybe 2-8 player lengths depending how fast characters are in the game. If a player has a high latency the clone will be ever farther behind in all scenarios except holding still.

Now when a player shoots their gun in all of the above games, the game engines will calculate the shot based on where the player perceives themselves. That means that as you play the game what you see is pretty much what you get. You don’t have to manually correct for lag while aiming in modern shooters -- just aim for the head right where you see it. However this introduces the peeker’s advantage. A defender can hold a corner with their crosshair primed to shoot anything that appears, but an attacker (the peeker) who comes around that corner is ahead of their server position and thus they get to a bit of extra time to "peek” and shoot at the defender before they themselves are visible to the defender. Depending on the actual amount of lag and the game itself the defender perceives themselves as either having been shot insanely quickly right as the attacker appeared, or maybe if the lag is not as bad they perceive themselves as having gotten to trade shots with the attacker, but ultimately they lost. The attacker perceives nothing special -- they just walked around the corner and shot the defender b/c they were playing aggressively and have superior reflexes (or so they think).

How big is the actual peekers advantage? Well it varies by game, but an article put out by Riot Games about Valorant goes into detail about how much the peeker’s advantage affects gameplay, and how their engine attempts to minimize it. It’s a great read: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/peeking-valorants-netcode. But to summarize, using 128 tick servers (very fast) 35 ms of internet latency (fast) and monitor refresh rates of 60 hz (standard) they calculate an advantage of 100 milliseconds after extensive optimization. That’s fast, but is it fast enough? Well back in 2003 I used to be a competitive Counterstrike 1.6 player at around the same time that I was obtaining a psychology degree with a particular interest in human perception (reaction time, how our eyes work, perception of subluminal images that are shown very quickly). I tested the reflexes of myself and all of my teammates. Competitive gaming didn’t have the same structure back then as it does now (everything has a ladder now -- back then it was private leagues), but by modern standards we were probably top 3% ladder players or something like that. Generally speaking there isn’t much of a speed difference in the whole pool of pro-gamers, at least when compared to new players. They are all pretty fast. Response time for watching a corner and clicking as you see a player (already perfectly lined up) fall into the range of 150-190 ms. Tasks that involve moving the crosshair to react quickly (as opposed to having had perfect placement already) slow that down another 50-150 ms. But generally speaking the competition between two similarly fast players with good crosshair placement comes down to very tiny units of time with even 10 ms producing an advantage that is measurable (both Riot and I agree about this). This means that had the server allowed for a double K.O. (which these games do not) we would find that in fact both players were very good and would’ve killed the other just 20-50 milliseconds apart. Valorant and CS:GO don’t work like that however, and instead the game essentially deletes the bullets from one of the players and leaves the other alive. Unfortunately this difference in human reflexes amongst competitive gamers is entirely gobbled up by 100 ms of peeker’s advantage -- meaning that at high skill levels the peeker will very often win and the defender will very often lose. So while the Riot article celebrates the success of engineering that allowed Riot to reduce the peeker’s advantage as much as they did, if you read the fine print you’ll find that the peeker’s advantage remains huge.

I don’t mean to pick on Riot, far from it. They’ve clearly done an amazing job. The other games I mentioned earlier are presumably in the same approximate ballpark, though I can tell you from personal experience that some of them are a fair margin worse. Not all of the games I mentioned use a 128 tick server (only one does). They also have longer interpolation delays and other little engine details that slow things down further. Riot is also an insane company that literally owns/builds the internet just to reduce latency for its players -- so if we want to take away a general sense of how bad the peeker’s advantage is in most games we should assume it to be worse than the scenario described above regarding Valorant.

Now that I’ve discussed at length the peeker’s advantage, allow me to present a related netcode model that attempts to solve these problems: The Peeker’s Compromise. If we delay the time of death on the serverside by the timing difference between the attacker and the victim, then we can allow the defender an equal opportunity to shoot the attacker. The server can then determine the winner (and the remaining damage) based on the performance of the human (instead of using the ~100 ms of engine-related advantage and internet latency). So let’s use some numbers for a hypothetical situation. Let’s say our game has 128 tick server, the players have 35 ms of latency, and 60 hz screens (like the Valoran example from earlier). Right as a player peeks another player they essentially get to shoot 100.6 ms sooner than their victim. As their shots arrive at the server the server might calculate that the victim has died -- but rather than killing the player it will keep them alive for 100.6 ms PLUS their own latency, which in this scenario puts the total at 135.6 ms. If during these 135.6 milliseconds the server receives shots where the defender hits the peeker, it will enter a section of code that attempts to settle this discrepancy. First off, it is entirely possible that after compensating each shot for the difference between the players we find out that one truly was faster than the other -- the game could use this information to decide which one lives and which one dies. It also might make sense to allow damage to legitimately trade kills and to build double K.O. situation into more first person shooters.

Let’s talk about the artifacts of this new and proposed system. In low-latency games with a high tick rate this change would be subtle -- we would just have no more peeker’s advantage. As latency increases all way up to 200 ms we will have a new artifact. Instead of having a more severe peeker’s advantage we’ll end up with a scenario where it looks as if players are taking 1-3 extra bullets beyond what would normally kill them -- although if you stop shooting early they still end up dead a few milliseconds later. The Vandal in Valorant (similar to the AK in cs:go) fires 9.75 shots per second, which is one bullet per 103 ms. So in a best case scenario the player death is delayed by the time it takes to fire one extra shot at full auto, and in a worse case scenario we add 1 bullet per added ~100 ms of waiting done by the engine. It would also make sense to cut off certain shots from being counted from a laggy player (existing systems already do this in their own way).

Gameplay at lower skill levels wouldn’t really be affected one way or the other. It isn’t affected much by the peeker’s advantage either -- players have to know where to aim and thus be involved in legitimate reflex test before we’re down to something so close that milliseconds of delay have an effect. If players are oblivious to each other, or place their crosshairs incorrectly as they come around a corner then the added slow down of the human having to make a new visual-search-decision-plus-adjustment is too slow for any of this to matter. But at higher skill levels there would be some actual changes to gameplay. The most significant change is that players would be able to hold corners -- and if they’re truly faster than the peeker they would win. In such a design it really would make much more sense to allow two players who fire at essentially the same time to kill each other which if adopted would need to be addressed at a game design level. Also games that had an alternate method of very indirectly addressing peeker’s advantage, such as weapon instability during movement as a major element (arma, h1z1, pubg, tarkov, etc), would have more options, and may need to tune existing timings to get the same feeling back.

The underlying netcode behind the peeker’s advantage affects more than the classic peeking situation. It also affects two players picking up an item at the same time (it decides the winner here). And it also is present when you’re playing a game and you duck behind cover and take damage after you should already have been safe (the peeker and the victim are on slightly different timelines). Neither peeker’s advantage nor my proposed peeker’s compromise actually removes lag of the underlying systems of the network connection nor the game engine ticks, both simply *move* delays around such that the controls feel responsive and the latency is suffered elsewhere. There’s a certain physics to the realm of network programming. As I like to half-jokingly say: “Lag is neither created nor destroyed [by compensation techniques.]” So the same problems would still exist, though the Peeker’s Compromise is philosophically different. Where the peeker’s advantage says let the fastest internet and the more aggressive player win, the Peeker’s Compromise says let the more skillful (in terms of accuracy and speed) human win. Outside of a double K.O.esque duel however, this is subjective. Who should pick up an item when both players tried to pick it up at the same time? Well the old method says the one with the better internet gets it, the new method suggests perhaps that we should compensate the timing to remove the internet/engine delay and award it to whomever was faster. But what about getting shot after reaching cover? This is really up to the game designer -- is it more impressive to tag someone barely as they run off? Or more impressive to slide behind a barrier right as you get shot? It’s a design decision. It’s also possible via this proposed system to compromise. The engine design I propose has more data in its context with which to make decisions, courtesy of temporarily allowing ties to occur which get addressed after both players take an action. It could say well that was an amazing shot, AND it was an amazing dodge. After crunching the numbers the decision is to deal a hit but cut the damage in half as a compromise between the feats of the two players.

#netcode #network programming #peeker's advantage #Peeker's Compromise #multiplayer #first person shooter #Riot Games #Valorant #Valve #Counterstrike

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wetsteve3 · 4 years ago

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Ducati 250/350 Desmo The mono fortissimo In the early 70 s, at the time of sophisticated Japanese Japanese, what could push a biker to buy a 350 cylinder with dated aesthetics and a brief finish. A Ducati simply.

In the 60 s, the 250/350 s were the queen cylinder capacity. In this category, Italians had specialized in sports bikes such as the or Ducati. The latter were led by a 4-stroke vertical cylinder with a 4-stroke vertical single cylinder from the competition engines designed by Fabio Taglioni, the engineer engine of the old firm bolognese. A new range composed of the 250 Diana and then the 350 Sébring! Fast, Italian-style bikes (140 and 150 km / h) fine, Italian style, which covered a lot of 50 cc sports at the time. If it wasn't the volume of their cylinder, we could have imagined it was only 125 cc Around 1967, the appearance of Japanese women, including the Suzuki 250 T20 and Kawa Avanger, over 30 hp, brutally ridèrent the beautiful Italian. Tagiolini used its large single cylinder in the sense of robustness (large housing), which first made it possible to extrapolate a 450 cc version and then increase its power. To do this, he adopted a desmodromic, a technique which he had already used in racing in 1958. By delaying the panic of valves using cams and closing, this technology allowed engine and power power gain. This desmodromic distribution was first proposed on the 350 now announcing 29 hp, then extended to the 250 push to 23 hp. bolognese sauce Ducati were fine, low, narrow and light (130 kilos). Except for their engine, there wasn't much else on these pretty short bikes. In fact, a Ducati was mostly a mechanics whose original drawing attracted the eye of the aficionados. Strange cocktail of modernity and seniority due to its small external oil pipes linked to the big tube of the cams. Or by the round shape of its sharp head with the square cylinders of the Japanese, from which the tower-account cable is covered with the racing scent, all placed on a large to. Both definitely. It wasn't just the engine that used the oil, but the motorcycle was full from floor to ceiling. With its long and narrow tank tank, its bracelet handlebar from which an imposing mechanical tower with a imposing Compétizione white dial, which unfortunately disappeared in 1974, its tiny mud guard, short backsplash saddle, remote controls, a Desmo, was flying his nose in the T of the steering brake. Not exactly the perfect bike to go get bread! Every time his pilot climbed on it, he felt like he was starting a race. Delicate start because the engine was very tablets and not greedy in vicious returns of kick, omnipresent sound omnipresent especially in today's context with a real 4-stroke and serious 4-stroke sound, hard box with five long reports demanding to wax the clutch. Add the destructive vibes that devisaient the mirror and cisaillaient the mud guards after crossing his pilot's body. How many Ducatiste was driving, without knowing, without a license plate lost during the road!

"A rail" The rest was pure happiness. Thanks to its carrier engine, which played a significant role in the stiffness of the interrupted frame, Ducati was a rail. An enchantment. A surprisingly agile and rigid motorcycle with an amazing cap outfit. She was placed with a kidney and she wasn't moving. Starting at 5000 rpm, the needle of the towers will be well on the red line of the towers account. Not a Japanese, even bigger cylinder capacity, was able to hang it on winding roads. She was a queen!

One of my friends was running on the handlebar of a Ducati 250 customer competition that was characterised by an extraordinary road outfit due to a specific double crib frame that made it a not ridiculous machine despite its 27/28 hp to blow everything. provided the cams are well stuck because this operation was a ceremony. But the famous frame didn't do everything! He had hired her at the French GP 1967 in Charade. " I was full in the descent of Gravenoire, scared green, over 170 miles an hour at almost 8000 laps when I heard a serious explosion right in my ears. It was Mike Haywood passing me with his 6 Honda and at least 70 more miles followed by two more severe explosions. Read and Yvy Yamaha 4 were chasing him. Trust me, it leaves memories " In addition to being led by princes of the hustle, the Japanese will be more than twice as much as their little Ducati.

Strong coffee! In the early 70 s, the 250/350 Desmo received a more modern silver Café Racer style. In 74, they adopted a new delivered signed Tartarini in the form of a beautiful orange dress and only at the end of life, they would brake a front brake with a Bembo disc, more fashion than its old double drum with a diameter of 180 not so bad. They disappeared in 1975 from Italy but continued their career in Spain as Motrotans until 1981. The 250/350 Ducati who had made their time were not replaced because customers now preferred bigger -. Fortunately, the Ducati 750 Desmo at the twin in L that replaced them, kept their endearing personality which it passed on to the most recent Monster 1200. Legends of Legends

01 If it wasn't the size of its engine, the 350 Ducati was thinking more about a 125 cc

02 Born in 1964, the Diana 250 was the fastest motorcycle of its cylinder capacity with more than 140 km / h

03 The ultimate 350 Desmo 72/74 restyles by Tartarini in Café Racer _ the 160 km / h. They had a front disc brake for their final year of production in 1975

04 An engine? No, a sculpture with the cam tree mounted tube and the small external oil pipes

05 The Scrambler version, trail before the time, met a good commercial success.

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charliejrogers · 4 years ago

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I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Or, What Many Will Think About Midway Through This Movie)

You may be expecting a long review for this movie. I mean, let’s be honest, I dissected the shit out of Birds of Prey, to the point that it was almost inappropriate for the kind of movie it was. But this movie? The arthouse classic-to-be from the much-revered Charlie Kaufman (both writer and director here), I’m Thinking of Ending Things? A movie filled to the brim with symbolism and which refuses to commut itself to any one point of view or plane or reality? This guy’s gonna write about it for fucking eternity.

Well, no. It won’t be the case. Why? Because I don’t think I really got it. Sure, I could try to wax poetic about my thoughts on aging, time, whether there’s meaning in relationships, meaning to our lives (all themes the film raises and which serve as its central core) But it would just kinda sound bullshit coming from me.

So, yeah, this isn’t much of a plot movie. It starts with a young woman (Jessie Buckley) waiting in the street of a snowy quiet country town’s downtown for her boyfriend, Jake, (Jesse Plemons) of one month (or longer?) so that the two can join Jake’s parents for dinner. Despite taking this proverbial big step in her relationship, she’s wondering (evoking the film’s title) whether she should end things. Or is that really what the title is about. Like everything in this movie, every piece of dialogue every character, every suggestion of a chronology, things are laden with a second meaning. Part of your enjoyment from the film will derive from whether or not you enjoy being strung along for 135 minutes without ever really understanding what’s going on, what’s really being said, who these characters really are, or when/where the hell are we in the world?

Despite those tantalizing and exciting questions, I’m here to warn you now, nothing big or exciting happens in this film, at least by conventional movie standards. We watch the couple drive to the Jake’s parents’ house and that takes about 25 minutes of film time. We’re in the house with his parents for probably about 45 minutes. Then the drive home takes another 20-25 minutes. The scenes about driving are just that: two people in a car talking to one another without much event. It’s like the car ride scenes from your favorite buddy/road trip movie but with all the fun adventures taken out. Instead what we get are long, confusing conversations more akin to Matthew McConaughey’s time spent in a car on True Detective.

But one thing becomes exceedingly clear when we finally get to Jake’s parents’ house: the film’s banal settings (a country road, a farmhouse, a rural high school) belie a truth about the film. It is not set in our reality. Jake and the woman’s conversation on the car ride is full of reflections on the nature of time, aging, depression, and life. Jake is a slightly insufferable intellectual. He’s the kind of guy who says he doesn’t know a whole lot about musical theater and then proceed to list 15-20 musicals of various fame and obscurity. The whole scene feels as quirky and just-shy of overwritten, i.e. par for the course of a pretentious art house film such as this. But the mannerisms of Jake’s parents are more than can be attributed to a quirky film. His mother is a jealous, possessive neurotic played by Toni Collette in a way only she could and a twitchy, and his father is a lecherous rival obsessed with his girlfriend played by David Thewlis (a favorite actor of mine). And throughout the meal, the confident, know-it-all we knew from the drive regresses into the behavior of a weak, embarrassed child. These are caricatures taken word from word from a textbook on Freudian psychology more than they are believable humans. The film admits and confirms the Freudian aping rather explicitly.

But just when you think you understand what the film’s up to, it switches course. After dinner, the woman starts to explore their house and starts a journey through time (but, again, with none of the excitement that sentence would normally imply.) It’s my second favorite sequence in the film (the first being an interpretive dance that occurs towards the film’s end… yes, it’s THAT kind of film). It’s filmed and framed in the trappings of a horror movie, but there’s no jump scares or horrible truth to be found. It’s how I imagine someone would adapt the tone of the superb video game Gone Home (yes, I’m one of THOSE people). But yeah, there’s no horrible truth… except if you consider the inevitability of human decay and disease to be a terrible truth. Every room the woman stumbles upon finds Jake’s parents appear to be a different age and health than when she first got to the house, ranging from a mother decked out in 50s/60s apparel to old, feeble gentleman. From there the movie continues to refuse to stay in one place and becomes odder and odder. It’s then I realized to think of this movie of a totally abstract piece of art, like the dream sequences of The Sopranos or Buffy.

So what do I think is going on? Obviously spoilers for here on out. Despite getting the majority of the screen time, this is NOT a movie about the young woman. At the very beginning of the film we are introduced, briefly, to an older, portly gentleman in his late 70s, looking out a window. The film cuts back to that exact same room and window 30 seconds later, but in the old man’s place is Jesse Plemons’ Jake. From that I take it to mean the two are the same person, with Plemons representing the older Jake younger self (or imagined younger self). Alongside the main plot, we occasionally get images and short scenes of the older Jake, a janitor at a rural high school who lives alone. The intellect (or perhaps false sense of intellect) of his younger self is clearly not meeting its potential. He is mocked by students for his age and fragility. What I think we’re watching is this older Jake trying to make sense of what it means to be old and who is currently on the verge of suicide unable to see its meaning. Although I compared the film to a dream sequence, I don’t think it’s fair to reduce the whole thing to Jake’s dream. More I feel like we are seeing a manifestation of Jake’s subconscious thoughts on screen play out.

Who is the young woman then? I’m not sure. I doubt she represents any actual woman – she’s given a variety of names. She almost plays the part of our (and his) guide into Jake’s subconscious like Virgil to Dante, but she’s more than a void. I think she represents what Jake would want in a woman in his life, a confident woman who can see through Jake’s faults (but notably sees them and sees them clearly). She’s not overtly sexual like the women at the ice cream who clearly make Jake uncomfortable. But yet, it’s telling that even in his deepest, most private thoughts that I think we’re seeing, he cannot imagine that even his ideal woman would want to be with him.

We get lots of reasons for why Jake thinks things are like this. Clearly he holds resentment for his parents, even if he feels like it’s cliché to do so. But time is his true nemesis. For me the most telling scenes for my understanding of the movie comes at the end with the interpretive dance, which shows Jake and the young woman (or, at least, stand-ins for those two) engage in a beautiful display of courtship, love, and marriage, only for the young Jake stand-in to be violently by a representation of the older janitor Jake. Clearly Jake thinks of his current self as something wholly distinct from his younger self, and that the creature he is now, a creature created by time, has destroyed who he once was. Like many of us (or as many of us think), he peaked in high school, the last place where people gave him awards for being who he is. This detail adds a sadness to the fact that he works as a janitor at one now. And it is notable that the film’s journey ends there, at a high school, where inexplicably he is being awarded a lifetime achievement award. Achievement in what? It’s unclear. What is clear that the person receiving the award is not the janitor Jake, but the younger Jake (Jesse Plemons) with old-age make-up on. With his dying breath he is able to see the self he loves, his younger self, grow up and live the life he wanted. There’s no sense at all of his present circumstances or person. Then we cut to a shot of janitor Jake’s truck buried in snow, presumably (on my interpretation) with janitor Jake frozen inside, dead.

So ultimately whether or not you like this movie depends on your tolerance for head-up-its-butt dialogue about the grand questions of life combined with its purposefully obtuse presentation. As one of the biggest douchebags I know, I liked it, but didn’t fall head over heels for it. The only other associated Kaufmann production I’ve seen is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but from what I understand, this movie is Kaufmann at its Kaufmann-iest. I have a great respect for the planning and thought behind every second of the film and I can honestly say I was never not entertained. I loved the film’s mood and atmosphere and that I was always on my toes. It’s a movie that truly has gotten better as I’ve continued to think about it over the last three days. But still, I don’t think I always understood what was going on and it’s a little too obtuse/abstract for it to be an all-time classic. I respect that for some people this may be their favorite movie of all time, and for others it may be a crock of shit. I’m somewhere in the middle, and cautiously recommend this film to those of you who are open to some abstract art in film. If you are, definitely try it out, you won’t forget it. If you are not open to it, skip it; you will have no qualms about endings things early.

***1/4 (Three and one-fourth stars out of four)

#charlie kaufman #i'm thinking of ending things

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onisiondrama · 5 years ago

Photo

He’s still uploading. He’s at 21 videos right now. I’m gunna stop with the full pics and just upload a pic of the videos I’m summarizing.

BTW, you can find mirrors of the videos here.

PART 6 - Videos #11 & #12

one more

- He’s going to talk fast because he has to be somewhere. He needs to tell us things about Sarah so we could understand her more. This was protected by the NDA, but she broke it. She admitted to selling her own prescriptions. He told her if she continued he couldn’t have a relationship with her anymore. She said she tried cocaine. He thought that was crazy but looked past it. - They were in a weird zone where they were all together when she was an adult, then they weren’t because Kai didn’t want to. Sarah would get around it by having Greg lay next to her when they were in a room together and she would ask him to choke her. He says she would seem to get off on that. He keeps mentioning she was 18 1/2. - One time he and Sarah moved furniture together because she’s a strong woman. She got out of the passenger seat and sat in the middle where there was no seat. She put her head in his lap and faced his crotch. He says he didn’t know what to do and it was really weird. He has no idea why she did that. - He says she was acting like Greg was a bad person for not making out with her in the theater. He just wanted to watch Aladdin. That made him feel crappy and didn’t want to do things with her. - After they broke up, Greg slept in the garage because he was afraid she’d kill him because of her hostility. If you like her she’s you best buddy, but if you reject her she wants you dead. He says she told him she had BPD. She called her pills speed. She would be on and off the pills. He was scared for her condition. He was dead to her. Kai was happy they were on the same page. - He felt bad for rejecting Sarah so he offered to take her out to eat food. On the way home, Sarah accused Kai of smoking marijuana. He called Kai and Kai said he hotboxed, he was in the same room. Sarah unsuccessfully tried to ruin their relationship. - When he took Sarah to the airport she cried and they hugged. She got his shirt all moist. He said sorry it didn’t work out but I do love you. I’m sorry this can’t be a thing. She said she just wanted to know what it was like to have a boyfriend. That triggered him because she wasn’t supposed to be there for him. - He didn’t believe the person that told him Sarah said she would kill herself because she was in love with him, but things mashed up later on and it became a reality that she was only for Greg and only used Kai to get to him. - He says if Kai does go forward with leaving, he’s just going to be with a love doll. He plans on never dating or marrying again. Everyone who is mad at him right now, he broke up with them for lying, committing crimes and cheating. If they really had a problem with him they should have talked to him or dumped him. Nobody’s perfect. - People keep talking about kids, but there are no kids. There’s no crazy ring. All the events are encompassing and there are many witnesses. His family, their nanny, people he worked with. This because a crazy circus because he didn’t talk because Kai threatened to leave. The truth will set you free. - It’s not a crime to reject someone until they turn 18 1/2 and then not reject them anymore when they’re perusing you. He’s not legally related to this person in any way. - He’s been unfair to Kai and Kai is paying for his bad decision and he’s sorry.

just questions

- He has questions for Mr. Hansen. He tells Chris Hansen to answer these questions live. - “Where do you get your numbers?” He dated Billie when she was 19. He dated Sarah when she was 18 1/2. He dated Shiloh when she was 17 1/2 to 18 1/2. These were all legal. These are the only real relationships Chris covered on his show. Chris used to be someone who go after people who hurt children, like 12 year olds. With Greg, you’re talking about him dating a 17 1/2 year old when he was 24 (he was 25) and he broke up with her for cheating and having someone else’s baby. She was well within the legal range since she was Canadian and Greg was from Washington. She never crossed borders. When she was 18 they went to Washington. - “What crack are you smoking?” This is the most bizarre and dumb thing he’s ever seen in his life. A 60 year old man obsessing over someone online who did nothing wrong. - Chris Hansen thought it was appropriate to show up at Greg’s house. One of the most psychotic things Greg’s ever seen in his life. Chris and six grown men, one of which went to court last year for sexual assault. You can see this if you look up that man. Why is Chris working with that man? - “What are you doing with all this money?” Chris can’t be paying the victims because that’s a conflict of interest. Greg says according to the news Chris Hansen is over $60,000 in dept to American Express and he was evicted from his home last year from a million dollar house. Chris is dating a woman 30 or 20 years younger than him. Chris likes to pretend he’s against an older men taking advantage of younger women, yet according to the news that’s what he is. - “What is with your cameo?” Chris will tell anyone they’re a predator for $50. Where’s your integrity? You’re making a joke of your whole career. - Didn’t Chris lose his career because he showed up to someone’s house and they ended their life? Then he shows up at Greg’s house with his family inside “you disgusting freak.” According to the news, Chris’ show was sued and lost $100 million. What kind of nut job goes from one man ending his life and thinking he should still goes to people houses? Some people think Chris is a murderer. Who knows what that guy was going to do with what he was doing online. He didn’t show up at the house and he didn’t try to sleep with a minor of a young age, then he ended his life because of Chris. Instead of changing his career field to doing something where he doesn’t end people’s lives, he show up at Greg’s house and ignore three no trespassing signs. When you’re within 50 feet of those you’re trespassing. It’s a crime that could put you in jail for 90 days. “Didn’t think about that, did you?” Chris was in Greg’s driveway and the no trespassing signs were in the background. “What kind of moron ignored no trespassing signs?” - Says Chris is 60 years old and who knows why his wife left him. Chris isn’t an open book when he like to point fingers at everyone else. Chris got put in jail and there is a mugshot of him online. Chris told someone he’d pay them back and never did so they called the police. - Greg’s wondering all the money Chris Hansen is making off of victims is going. The victims are total frauds and clout chasers, he’s only ever dated three of them. Most of these people he’s never met. Chris is so stupid he never ran a background check to see if these people are clout chasers. What’s insane about Hansen is someone who is on his show who never met Greg is added to the list of accusers. - “What are people accusing me of? Sexual assault you said? When?” It makes no sense. Chris and his career are a joke. Chris is in dept up to his eyeballs and he’s using these people to make money to save whatever his career was. “Getting people to kill themselves job?” - Remember when Chris went to a state where entrapment wasn’t legal and he entrapped a bunch of people and they got to go free? Chris helped those people go free. Now they’re going to be super paranoid about being caught. Chris screwed up. Chris is the best friend of these guys perusing 12 year olds. You helped 20 people who are interested in children to get away with their crimes and he made someone end their own life. Greg can’t imagine what it’s like to be such a failure. - Greg is 34 so he has a good chance to get his life together. Chris is twice his age and this is his life? Chris is one of the biggest jokes Greg has ever seen in his life. - Greg didn’t answer the door for Chris because he has a family and when a creepy old man shows up to the house with a bunch of other creepy dudes dressed in dark colors, he doesn’t answer the door. He calls the police like a normal human being. - Chris would rather hang out with people who were taken to court for sex crimes. Chris fired Vince and Vince used Chris’ facebook and website to out him for allegedly paying someone to dox Greg. Chris seems like one of the most corrupt hypocritical people Greg has ever encountered. It’s amazing Chris is so old, you’d think he would have learned by now. - Greg offered Chris an opportunity to pay him $350,000 to go on his show. That fee is now $600,000 because Chris is the most pathetic disgrace of a journalist Greg has ever seen in his life. - The problem with Chris is he doesn’t know what journalistic integrity is. There is a thing called bias and leading questions. Greg was told that since Sarah was watching Greg since she was 12, that means she was somehow groomed since she was 12 when she was never groomed at all. - Chris doesn’t care about facts. Chris doesn’t care that Sarah tried to marry someone so they could get that green card, which isn’t legal, or that she admitted to doing cocaine or selling drugs. Chris doesn’t care Sarah repeatedly made statements about a laptop that make no sense because the laptop never belonged to Greg. The last person who it was used by doesn’t even live in this house. Additionally, the chain of command was the worst thing ever. It was allegedly sent to the police, then back to Sarah, then sent to Chris, then sent back to Sarah, and now it’s with the police again. That’s not even evidence. Wasn’t his laptop, last person who used it wasn’t Kai or himself, then it was sold to Sarah, then they passed it around. It’s bizarre Chris thinks something like that would hold up anywhere. Kai doesn’t even like porn. Greg never once caught Kai looking at anything. They base your whole case on a laptop that is dirtier and less credible than your career. - He doesn’t see where Chris is going with this. Chris can keep talking to people with no evidence, it’s a free country. He’s sitting here watching an old joke pretending to be a journalist and he’s watching people take him seriously and he’s wondering when the normal face will ware away and people will see the clown paint underneath. - If Chris could answer all those questions Greg would appreciate it. Greg thinks Chris should talk about how Chris’ whole life is in shambles and the only thing he has going for him is a bullshit case against a Youtuber and the worst thing Greg did was fuck an 18 year old. “Yikes bro.” - More videos coming. Wanted to give a shout out to the creepiest mother fucker to show up on his doorstep. How creepy is that for someone to fly across the country for someone to call the cops on you and the cops wait for you to leave? - We’ll see what happens with the no trespassing thing because Chris and his whole crew did and that’s illegal. All y'all might be going to jail. That a real crime. You get arrested for REAL crimes. Greg doesn’t get arrested because he’s a former US Air Force cop. - Greg doesn’t know what Chris is, but now you know who Greg is. He isn’t willing to lie down and take Chris’ horseshit so he could get more ad revenue and donations from people who have no clue what’s actually going on. - “Just a little heads up.” Billie: dumped her because she lied and did illegal drugs. Shiloh: dumped her because she cheated on him and got pregnant with someone else’s baby. Sarah: Kicked her out of his life because she went crazy on him and he was uncomfortable with the illegal activities she was taking part in. Asks if there’s anyone else. Says Chris said there was 12. Greg says that’s a shitty case. Three people he broke up with over 8 years. “The fuck?”

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worldcakecakecake · 4 years ago

Text

Feliciano and the King of Hearts

Chosen by the gods as the Queen of Hearts from the moment of birth, we follow Feliciano’s story as he grows into royal life, learns to rule, go against age old customs, and his relationship with his husband to be, the King of Hearts.

Chapter 1 I Chapter 2 I Chapter 3 I Chapter 4 I Chapter 5 I Chapter 6I Chapter 7 I Chapter 8 IChapter 9I Chapter 10I Chapter 11I Chapter 12 I Chapter 13 I Chapter 14 I Chapter 15 I Chapter 16 I Chapter 17 I Chapter 18 I Chapter 19I Chapter 20 I Chapter 21 I Chapter 22 I Chapter 23 I Chapter 24 I Chapter 25 I Chapter 26 I Chapter 27 I Chapter 28I Chapter 29 I Chapter 30 I Chapter 31 I Chapter 32 I Chapter 33 I Chapter 34 I Chapter 35 I Chapter 36 I Chapter 37I chapter 38 I Chapter 39 I Chapter 40 I Chapter 41 I Chapter 42 I Chapter 43 I Chapter 44 I Chapter 45 I Chapter 46I Chapter 47 I Chapter 48 I Chapter 49 I Chapter 50 I Chapter 51 I Chapter 52 I Chapter 53 I Chapter 54 I Chapter 55 I Chapter 56 I Chapter 57 I Chapter 58 I Chapter 59 I Chapter 60I Chapter 61 I Chapter 62 I Chapter 63 I Chapter 64 I Chapter 65 I Chapter 66 I Chapter 67 I Chapter 68 I Chapter 69 I Chapter 70 I Chapter 71 I Chapter 72 I Chapter 73

Chapter 74

It was the third day of Feliciano’s journey in the interludes, well-marked before all in large writings tall above the pool. Louis had made it to keep themselves counted, to make sure and not miss a single beat of this mission. They kept their watch on the body. It was never left unseen. There was a rhythm of turns they had already begun to get used to, all while others took their own turn attending to the war. The room was never quiet, someone was always running in and out, stomping, throwing items or shouting, making it almost impossible to take any sleep as they had hoped.

“-It is imminent! We need to guard even the Northern Heartian border. The Faroe Islands I’m sure have enough people to act,” Aldrich commanded with those slams on the table that had the sleepers startled away from whatever dream they tried to manage.

“They only have a population of fifty-thousand, and thirty-thousand of them have already been sent to aid the front with Destro!” Elizabeta joined in those hits.

“Then they have another ten-thousand to protect their own Kingdom from being attack by Khaos.”

“Many of those twenty-thousand left are children and caretakers!”

Aldrich groaned and growled into the palm of his hands, rocking in a way that almost looked like he was defeated in tears.

Kandake sighed, “I’ll send a messenger to see if there are more soldiers they can offer. If not, then we’ll have to call soldiers back to defend.” Kandake gazed to the latest numbers sent…it looked that perhaps she might have to send from her own people…it hurt and pained how less they had become by now.

“Tunisia in my kingdom is one of the closest provinces to them…I’ll see if they can send from their own to help,” Lili began, each time tiring, her eyes darkening and ready to fall to the pavement as she stood. Vincenzo, who had awoken and could not find it to rest again, stood and offered to give Lili the chance to sleep. She finished writing her message and headed off without a word.

Kiku, Louis, Arthur and Renata kept the current watch on Feliciano, close, Kiku at one point had even let himself rest on Renata’s shoulder, and she smiled and caressed his arm. Feliciano still floated just the same, nothing of difference.

“Tomorrow is the fourth day,” Renata reminded. “After, Feliciano should be heading to the second realm.”

Kiku yawned, “do you think he’s found something by now?”

A lulling silence, even Arthur and Louis beside them were struggling to keep their eyes open.

“I don’t know…we can’t really tell…”

“Forward! Forward!” Manuel shouted, many others spreading the message and thus the men and women, a mixture of Clubian and Diamond soldiers, stood before the strong winds Khaos blew in rage. At Manuel’s words, they extended their frontal leg forward and raised their hands in a defense posture for the spell. From the united magic and force of these thirty casters, long piercing pillars of emerald emerged from the ground to stand as a wall and hurt the large menace. Khaos was ready to fire with a demanding swish of his hand, but these walls did well to do nothing to the small creatures that laid behind.

“Now! Now! Now!” Antonio called, riding one of the long dragons that a Clubian infantry let him use. He raised a light in his hand and all ran and rode between the crevices of the pillars, Khaos before them clear to attack with many balls and rays of light that brought another shriek in this large plain.

“Fire!” A Diamond woman called from a distance, with a long line of Clubians with arrows, their ends with fire and magic, to add, targeted perfectly to blow with the light spells. In his anger, Khaos gained the energy he needed to completely crush the pillars. Many squashed horribly under him and their very own creations, yet still there were survivors who continued their light, the arrows joining in continuing to madden the Dark god.

Yong Soo could have met his end at the ground underneath him, but to his luck, Zuma came in his own St. Mark, catching him so he could ride as comfortably as he did. “Did you do it?”

“It’s good and ready!” Yong Soo smiled greatly as if there wasn’t blood dripping from the side of his head and they weren’t right before a nine-hundred meters monster.

“Get out of there, you two!” Lukas shout came through a small device, a recent creation in the mess that had done them well.

They hurriedly flew off, at whatever range could save them from the coming blow. To activate it, Lukas used every particle of energy in his being, such a drain that had him falling, gone. Matthias was there to catch him before he hit the ground, sending other casters to finish the last piece, but luckily it worked. It shimmered in different colors, quite beautiful before it teared and pained. Destro screamed and fought on with the soldiers on ground that tried to stall the pace of his walk how they could.

Yong Soo and Zuma landed on what they considered command grounds, where messengers came and every act began. “We got some time! Now the healing wards can move,” Zuma told and messengers moved to get it done.

From their far off distance, they could only watch as Destro continued to convulse in the bomb and spell, hoping indeed that he could do so for the mere minutes they needed.

The darkness remained, the blue light of the line the only divide, the only ground, the only thing that made him aware of the steps he took.

He had begun to get used to the bodies floating around him, only stumbling and whimpering at the sight of people who were mere citizens, those who couldn’t evacuate in time and were left in the crush. He tended to run past them, hurrying at a pace that still left him in the same nothingness.

It was hard to find an essence of time, but Feliciano knew that enough have had to pass. Perhaps two days?

He had walked on, not feeling any tiredness or drain in his legs. To spend some sort of time, he imagined and thought about the people he passed by, wondering their stories, remembering, hoping to find anybody he could give his condolences and help when he returned…if he ever did. No one else awoke, no other walking figure, it was only now that he reached some sort of difference.

Large chunks of buildings, teared, broken, from all kinds. Churches, schools, homes…stationary, their presence creating bigger glows that gave Feliciano ease. He came close, touching and feeling their smoothness, their crevices, their designs…he never though he would long so much to just touch something that didn’t shock him in pain. He smiled true, exploring where the lines of this window could take him, still in his frontal path, on and on until…big green open eyes, startled, a clear gasp, a figure…a moving figure…running away. Feliciano startled himself, moving back, trying to calm down how frantic he had gotten. When he relaxed…the sudden realization.

“Someone! There’s someone!” He shouted to himself, taking a run. “Wait! Wait! Wait!” He called and begged behind the rushing green figure, losing finally the single line he had made this entire journey, crossing and turning around all these different ruins as the figure continued to evade him and even try to hide.

“Please! Please! I need your help! It’s a matter of saving the four kingdoms!” He hoped could convince, but yet they were running, the debris now growing larger, entire courtyards and tall pillars surviving here. It made it easier for the other to hide, to lose himself between in clear knowledge of where he was, Feliciano easily losing sight of him.

No…no, he couldn’t loose a chance like this!

He stopped, a realization and then a groan at understanding the idea he had. How he hated it…but if it meant he could get this person to stop…

“Halt! I order you to stop and come to me in the name of the Queen of Hearts, Feliciano Valenti of Italy!” He shouted in strong command…just as Ludwig taught him.

Feliciano heard a distant gasp, the footsteps stopped…and they started again, coming close, the figure shy in showing itself, slowly peeking from the crumble of a wall. It just wasn’t his eyes that were green…the top of his head was green…his skin, his light, even the hands that slowly came up to hold themselves, pulling him slightly more up to reveal how even his body was in the same color. With the brightness of his shoulder length sleek hair, Feliciano imagined that in his life it must have been blond. He wore a long flourishing blouse, with a vest rich in floral sewing even to his boots, and fine jewelry. Clubian…as if the mere color wasn’t proof enough to show his kingdom.

“…your majesty…it’s you…it’s really you…” then he was confident enough to show himself completely, lithe, about Feliciano’s own height…he wasn’t resting…or producing light to offer to this realm…he was just as Feliciano that moment. “But you can’t be! If you’re here… then that must mean you’re-”

“I won’t be.”

Astounded eyes, riddled in question, already asking for the Queen to answer.

“I’m not actually supposed to be dead. My body is currently in a pool in the Berlin castle being watched. I’m here to look for the power of the universal alignment. Once I get it, my mother will release me from a spell, and I can go back and do the job I was prophesied to do!” He rushed and panicked.

The other looked perturbed and he shone on with more questions.

“I don’t have any time to loose. Please, just tell me what you know and anything that can help me!”

With the silence that came, Feliciano worried the man didn’t understand well the common language, but he was thinking, debating. “So…you’re not some spy trying to trick me?”

“No, no, no! Why would there even be spies here?!”

“Okay, yeah, maybe not spies, but there are some creepy stuff going on from time to time, I mean, just look at you!”

Did he have some extra appendage? No, he looked down to himself and only saw his usual. He was to comment on it, but then comparing, he realized that he still kept his own colors. His hair was still brown, his skin maintained its bronze cream, his boots black, his pants and simple blouse shirt in white. The only difference was his silhouetted red glow, and still it did not fill him in completely.

“From who I’ve met here, you’re only supposed to awaken once all your magic is drained in here.” His green outlook was the proof of all magic gone, the shell of a person’s spirit. “If you’re like this, then either your magic is still with you, which is just weird…or some other crazy crap I don’t know about,” he wailed his hands showing his frustration.

“I don’t know either! The book didn’t mention something like this and after-” he realized something in what he just said. “Wait! From who you’ve met? You mean there are others!”

“Oh yeah, tons! All of us who’ve woken up and are waiting for the second realm.”

“Please, take me to them! They might know something.”

“I doubt it. Most of them are as confused as I am. There’s really nothing out there helping or explaining anything to us. I came her actually trying to find someone who could or just someone who woke up and needs to calm down.”

“Then please, take me to them! Perhaps together we can work something out,” he neared already providing a warm comfort, one that made the other smile, already accepting.

“Well, come on then! We’re not too far, hopefully. We try to stay by recognizable stuff, so we won’t get lost.” He started a route that Feliciano happily followed behind. He didn’t know if this could actually lead to finding out something, but it was still very nice to just meet somebody else, talk and have company.

“Feliks Łukasiewicz. From Clubs if that isn’t obvious enough. Province of Poland,” he introduced.

“Feliciano Vale-”

“Yes, yes, you already introduced yourself all haughty and mighty. Everyone knows who you are, and you will give everyone quite the surprise once they see you. Man, how cool is that, meeting the Queen of Hearts here and on some special mission. I wish I could tell Toris that.”

It was a long walk, hours surely, much easier as they now had this debris around them to landmark. Feliks knew his way around, with ease, sometimes whistling or chatting on. Feliciano deeply appreciated it, even joining in song or talking of the lifestyle in the castle, something that Feliks constantly asked on.

“Eight cooks!”

“The main ones at least. Each one has around eight helpers.”

“And, like…do they make absolutely, everything you like?”

“Everything!” Feliciano smiled, already missing it…back before the war, before bearing, when Ludwig…he shouldn’t let himself wallow like that, not when he found this sudden happiness here.

“I bet you never had to go to the kitchen.”

“Actually, I do love cooking and sometimes went there myself to make my own food. Many times, I’ve actually fed all who were in my table.”

“Wow. If I had a team like that in my kitchen, you would never catch me there.”

Feliciano chuckled, “there was a time, back in my year of arising, where all I wanted to do was stay there…at the time I was avoiding my King.” The miss, the lessening of his spirit, holding his hands to himself as control to not fall so deep in that misery. Feliks now had to keep his glance on him, worried and wondering. “…but later,” he smiled again, the sweet of the memory giving his cheeks a pinkish glow that made Feliks slightly jealous on Feliciano’s kept colors. “…he would bake me the sweetest cakes…. he would try to make them tall, all because he remembered how as a child he used to say he would one day make them reach the ceiling for me, and well, it was just fun.”

Feliks didn’t know how to answer, brought into silence, only continuing his heading, that memory of the Queen bringing him to his own memories of the same nature. He sighed, “I guess I know the feeling. A…friend of mine lived pretty far from me, a good three-day coach ride further north. When we were young, we would only see each other once every three months and…we couldn’t stand being so long without the other. He did a short apprenticeship in Washington in Spades and when he came back, he brought this…contraption with him that could bring him way faster to me…only mere hours. I think it was called a…bicycle or whatever. Even if he did have something that made him come more often and quicker, it was still a hard route and many hours of peddling, but…he always came to see me no matter.” He didn’t need to blush in red, Feliciano could somehow see it glow on him with a beautiful green. It made him smile and ease, letting that moment one to appreciate sacrifices and devotions. He was to ask more on this man, but a diverse glow in the distance caught his attention. It was people…awake, moving, many of them, all shinning in different colors and huddled under the ruins of an old dome.

“That’s them! Come!” Feliks rushed them those last steps.

They weren’t paying attention to their approach, instead, they focused on the sleeping body of a young girl, a mere teenager, in her last descend down, slowly coming into their arms. Only her arm was left in her old colors, the rest of her now in blue. In one last small shock, the last of her magic was gone and she was completely drained. She fell into the arms of another young man, this one full in yellow. From what Feliciano could tell in his clothes, he was of the highest aristocracy in Diamonds.

“Be sure to be careful,” one woman in blue told him and he nodded, being gentle as she opened her eyes, gave small groans, looking how she could, trying to make sense. Not recognizing anybody, not understanding where she was, she instantly drew into a panic, sitting up, breathing again harsh and hurting. The man began to soothe, rubbing a hand on her back, calm, something that the rest showed, beginning to give space. Feliks and Feliciano did well to remain in the back. Feliks had seen this happen enough times to know, while Feliciano took the time to see it for the first time and understand.

“We wish you no harm, we only want to help. Please, tell us your name.”

She refused to, shaking her head, untrusting.

“I am Aaron Harbia of Diamonds. The province of Emirates. I am here because I got too close…too close to the furies of Khaos along with a large division of my men and women. I was wiped under him and now I’m here. Do you know where you are?”

The girl’s breathing slowly relaxed, yet she fretted and shook as if she was attacked by a big cold. “I-I’m…I’m…Sam! Sam Kimura of Spades. The island of Anguila in the Oralee. I….I don’t know. Where…where am I?”

“Do you not know?”

She couldn’t recognize anything, nothing of what she had known or knew.

“Darling,” the near blue woman came down, offering her comfort along Aaron’s, “you’re in the Interludes. You have begun a process of death…”

She stilled…so hurt, lost more than ever even when the answer was given to her.

“No…no…no, I can’t be!” She teared, having nothing to hold but to Aaron, taking a harsh grip of his jacket, the kind of force that would have torn if they were back in the living world. “My father would have found me…he wouldn’t have let me…he wouldn’t have let me alone…he didn’t know…he didn’t know…” she was wallowing now, in hardships that didn’t let her speak more. They all gave her that space, understanding well what she was going through.

“Most of us awake just like this,” Feliks told Feliciano in the lowest whisper he could manage. “At least she has us now…most are not so lucky.”

“You can tell us what happened. It might help,” a man in green neared.

They waited until she calmed down, until her breathing eased enough to the point she could speak coherently. “My…my father was called to fight. He…wasn’t so good at fighting…only sailing as all Oralee should and should only do. My family…we begged him not to go, that it was all under control, that we were sure the Kings, Queens and Jacks could manage on their own. But as things got worst, as news of a second monster came, as messengers arrived begging for new people to go and fight…my father wanted to obey to some…sense of calling and pride that I still don’t get.” She whimpered that moment, lost again. More they waited for her voice to come back. “He left with that group…and I couldn’t take it…so I followed after him, dressed to look older…they were so desperate and worried that they didn’t give me a second glance to know if I was age appropriate or not. I followed him the entire time, across the sea, across Spades, I think…I think we reached Clubs when…I saw him…I saw him…” she trembled now in utter fear, those who were there understanding, the very reminder making them sweat and shake, the air becoming somber. “They planned to do a surrounding on two of his sides, with Gegen spells, then fire the Sloan cannons…we were part of the huddle. I tried to stay close to him…and I did…but…I’m not old enough to do Gegen spells, I couldn’t do it. I was trying so hard to do one that I didn’t notice his closeness…it wasn’t until part of my armor disintegrated that I saw the darkness that came, eating and tearing apart everything in its path. My father called for me…he saw me…I know he tried to come for me…but…all I remember after that is pain and darkness…and…now I’m here…” The telling of her story helped to relax her…to come into acceptance of where she was, the ease she was currently in and the comfort of these strangers that surrounded her.

“I’m…so sorry this happened to you. If there is anything we can do, and it is within our reach, we’ll offer it,” the blue woman said.

She thought of something, debating if the answer would be to her liking or hurt, “…my father…have you seen my father here? His name is Justo Kimura. We look very similar, but he has very long dreadlocks and a scare on his chin…he-he'll tell you it was from a fishing accident as a kid.”

“I’m sorry, but we haven’t found anybody of that description yet,” Aaron told her.

“If he is not here, then take joy that he is still alive and well,” a diamond woman told.

“I…I really don’t think so. We were both under the same darkness.”

“If he is here, it could be that he is still asleep,” a Heartian man guessed.

“Not to worry, child. You will meet him, I’m sure of it. All who die must come here.”

That was a realization that widened Feliciano and brightened his eyes. “Of course…why didn’t I think of it sooner? Ludwig…it means …Ludwig has to be here!” He smiled large and loud, turning and hoping to see him that instant. His loud proclamation could not be ignored, all taking a glance to the back wondering.

Many gasped and fretted.

“It’s the Heartian Queen!”

“Wha-what?”

“You-you-your majesty!”

“No! No! You’re supposed to be in Berlin. You weren’t fighting in the war!”

“Don’t worry! I’m not really dead! But Ludwig! Ludwig! I have to find him! I just have to!”

“Wait! Wait! Your majesty!” A Spadian woman called and came near when Feliks couldn’t take a grasp of him.

Feliciano halted, lost again, not knowing where to look, where to go…for a moment he forgot that he was here to look for something else…not his King. He realized how fretful he was being, especially after what the girl went through, embarrassed to show himself.

“Sir, the King died many weeks ago,” the Spadian woman reminded, “…he shouldn’t be in the first realm anymore.”

Like being taken away from him again, Feliciano gripping, hating how easily he could still tear up at his fault.

“But…it is possible he could be in the second one,” Feliks came close and smiled up to him, a comforting hand on his shoulder, trying to pull him back, to their company…what he wanted…help and the presence of others.

Feliciano gave him a grin, taking a deep sigh, telling himself to be patient…and focus on what he came here to do. He turned to the rest, showing himself…the others transfixed at how he kept his own colors, shinning unique and truly queenly. Even Sam, in her curiosity and wonder, managed footing again, standing and joining the rest in their impression.

Feliciano came back, nervous and unsteady, but trying out a smile that was offering. “I apologize. It was very rude of me to cut in like that.”

“You are desperate to find someone you love…especially after you thought you’d never see them again…” Sam said, shy…she had never been before the presence of royalty. “I understand…and I guess, we should all help each other to achieve that.”

“That’s a plan I’ll gladly be a part of.”

“First of all, your majesty, I would love to understand what you’re doing here. You mentioned you’re not really dead. What is going on?” Aaron could stand again, his direction towards him like the rest.

“I…I don’t know what you were informed, but I was unable to get the power of the universal alignment. Ludwig was really worried about me…especially after finding out I was bearing…” He liked that he didn’t have them so obvious here, people’s gazes wouldn’t go so quickly to them, they could pay attention to him and what he had to say. “He trapped me at the bottom of the castle without any reach to the outside so I wouldn’t dare go back to the war and risk myself. But…afterwards, we…found a way to get it again…and it involved coming here to the Interludes.”

“So…you killed yourself to get it?” The Spadian woman questioned.

“Well…yeah, kind of, but, it was carefully planned in the suggested way. My body right now is being held under a spell in a place I can come back to once I get it. And when I do…I can face Khaos and Destro and put an end to all of this.”

Silence as they all gazed between themselves, taking the time to understand and realize.

“What do you need now?” Another Heartian woman came forward, ready to act and do what was needed.

“Information. What do you know of here? How is the second realm reached? The books mentioned that the arsenal of power is in a deep connection between the first and fourth realm. What does it mean?”

And they all thought and gathered in their minds all they have recently found out.

“Out of all of us, I have been the longest here.” Aaron offered himself, coming forward to answer. “As I’ve learned of my time here, when you arrive, you are in this deep sleep while your magic is drained. As soon as it’s done, you awaken in the state we are in and linger still in the first realm. I assume I’ve been here about five days. I did meet this lady from the White Kingdom…from those who had been fighting. She was the one who found me and helped me to calm down. After she reached about a week here…she suddenly…” They all came close, eager. “It was like she got frozen…her eyes were covered in light. I tried to speak to her, anything to get her off it, but she stayed…then the next moment, she had her arms spread open and she was swallowed down into the water.” He pointed to the very ground they stood on, all fearful as if it was ready engulf them that instant. “I haven’t seen her since.”

“It has to be…” One spadian woman worded what all had begun to make certain.

“But we can’t be sure…until it happens to us,” Feliks reminded that they were still intended to head on that very same faith.

“Anything else?” Feliciano hoped for. “Anybody else out of the ordinary…anything…that explained to you more of what’s in here…Angels…even an Ace...”

By the emptiness, Feliciano could already tell there was no such answer.

“It has only been us…” she then looked around…the ruins, some bodies floating by, yet the darkness, “…and this,” the Diamond woman replied, bringing dread to Feliciano, already feeling like he was back at the beginning, lost in nothing and alone.

“It will happen to all of us though…the second realm…perhaps there you can find the answers you need…” Sam tried to alight him, and although it raised his eyes and a smile…it was not closer to what he needed.

#Feliciano and the King of Hearts #fatkoh #f&tkoh #gerita #gerita fanfiction #gerita fanfic #gerita fic

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